motherlove | pull up a chair

May 8, 2026

the comings-and-goings house: a mother’s prayer come tumbling true

the census at this old house shifts daily of late. a sliding scale of up to four, oft measured in half-drained glasses on the counter, beds unmade and sorta made. pantry shelves are raided in the middle night. and late-night laughter rises, swirls, up the stairs and round the bend, certain as the steam from a pasta pot. that laughter lands, every time, right where it belongs: tap-tapping on the chambers of my heart—no matter how deep i am in my very own dreamland. no dream comes sweeter than the bellow of boys, brotherly boys, from down below.

this old house is playing out its second act in way-station ways. boys come, boys go. one gets a fever and the aches; we scoop him up and bring him here: gingerale and saltines are best doled out by good ol’ mama. the other boy, the professorial one, is in the thick of putting down midwestern roots, back in the heartland after so, so many years away. and this old house is just the place to plop your duffle down whilst you re-acclimate to the city of your birth (and shop for your own places to call home).

in real-time, i hear just how the date unfolded, how the phone call went, and who makes whom laugh aloud. and i am there to wake someone with a kiss instead of a phone call when i’ve been asked to be sure that someone is awake by 9 a.m.

just this week, with my bespectacled fellow off and faraway, i’d thought i just might find myself amid a stretch of days where i alone dwelled here. where i might slather my face with goo, and not feel the urge to hide. or serve a mixing bowl of lettuce leaves and call it “dinner.” or plug in the vacuum at dawn cuz that’s when the spirit stirred me. but then one boy got sick, and the other snared a date. so the arithmetic this week never equalled one, and now is back to three. with four soon on his way.

i couldn’t wish it any other way.

random glasses, messy rooms, be damned!

two januaries ago, when i was feeling especially afraid, and on the brink of highly fragile ice, i prayed with all my heart for one more birthday candle to extinguish with my semi-feeble lungs. and what i really meant, and what i really wished, was the deepest prayer i know: dear God, let me be around to catch a few more episodes of Growing Boys: The Sequels.

in a rapids-rush the likes of which would make the colorado river run green with envy, that wish (plus one more candle since) has come oh-so-surely true. i get dizzy thinking all that’s come and gone since that cold, cold winter’s day. the fear of losing me, truth be told, prompted boy one (the professor) to pick up the phone and plot his way back chicago way. (think not that it was anything short of soul-testing and against plenty odds to earn a full-time tenure track slot as a law professor at a pretty darn-good law school within a two-hour drive of home sweet home.) and boy two has more or less called on me to join him in the journalism trenches, as he plies his gift for seeing to the pulsing heart of every story but finds himself in need of chief copy editor and fixer of misplaced commas.

not a day, not a phone call, not a late-night dash downtown, passes by without me praising the holy heavens, dumb luck, or pure fat chance for bequeathing me these moments to slip like precious beads on the rosary string i call my life.

if we’re here on earth to learn to love, to love in the holiest, humblest way possible, the way that makes our life just one little tool trying to turn the crank toward a universe of radiance, then for me there’s no tougher school, no steeper curriculum than to be in the very trenches of life with the lives i’ve labored through and birthed. they demand more of me than i ever knew was in me. they look to me to put my hoity-toi teachings into real-life practice. and should i slip up, should i prove to be a preacher of empty aspirations and hypocrisies, they’d be the first to know. and i’d be rightly crumpled.

my boys keep me honest. my boys keep me true. my boys, my boys . . .

i fall to my knees in eternal forever thanks. i know full well the due, the bliss, the wonder—the flat-out miracle—of the two who call me mama. and with all my soul, i know: the gift this mothering day is mine.

my mama, bless her, is very much here. and, truth be told, yearning to go “home.” when i miss her, which is often, i motor over to where she lives (a mere nine minutes away), and—truth again—i often don’t find her there. she is off “at programs,” the curiosities and delights that animate her day. or populate it anyway. she might be listening to a book, or sunning herself in the adirondack chairs out front, or out on one of her circumnavigations around the acreage. if i can’t track her down, i leave her notes. i leave her ice creams in her freezer, and the short litany of things she hungers for: cheese and crackers, clementines, the tall bottle she keeps under the kitchen sink.

but so many i know miss their mamas. and lucille clifton, a poet i hold close to my heart (in keeping with the lines below, i should say i hold her close to my bosom, but i don’t have much of that, so the term is rather lost on me; it’s aspirational at best. and once upon a time i must have wished for a bosom, the sort my grandma had, though those days now are long gone and far away). i love that God here is “antic.” i love that the mama lucille yearns for is the one from half her life ago. i love the whole sensual tableau into which lucille invites us. her song, her scent, the scratch of her wild hair. it’s a moment still in reach. how wild, the human mind, the capacity to reach deep into the long-ago, to bring it near to life. no AI robot will ever ever do that for us. score one for humanity. in all its messy glories.

here is lucille clifton for all of us, but especially for the ones who miss their mama on this mother’s day upon us…..

“oh antic God”

oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties
leaned across the front porch
the huge pillow of her breasts
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.

I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.

I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams
at night. return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother’s calling,
her young voice humming my name.
—Lucille Clifton

inspired by lucille, here’s my mama from long-ago and not so long-ago. as my mama adds numbers to her years, her strength, her immutable strength is what looms at the fore. i love how deeply deeply present she has always been for me and my boys. my boys who love her so….

love you, mama. xoxo

p.s. i got a peek just yesterday at what will be the cover of my next book, a book whose title is Broken Open. i wish i could show you the two choices, but they’re under wraps till one makes the final cut. it all makes the book very, very real feeling. and i was duly blown away by the two choices. one made me cry. i am guessing that will be the one we pick.

who are the blessed mothers in your life, and what indelible lessons or stories are you remembering this mama day….??

12 Comments

February 13, 2026

love is . . .

i am sitting on a velvet couch, by a great stone hearth, looking out onto a city still cloaked in darkness. dawn comes late on the western edge of the eastern time zone, and that’s where i am. not a mirrored sliver of light is yet igniting the river that flows just beyond, where yesterday swans glided by.

i seem to have landed in a stanza of poetry here in a professor’s house on the banks of the st. joe river. upstairs sleeps another professor, the one who is renting this house for a semester. and what a thing it is to step into a home appointed by someone you’ve never met, someone you suddenly wish more than anything you could sit down beside, curled on this velveteen couch with steaming mugs of darjeeling, unreeling a bounty of stories.

this house is that of a professor from mauritius, a professor who has lived all around the world. it is filled with tropical, faraway touches, remnants of home on the island nation in the indian sea. draperies are silk; paint colors, rose and persimmon and a blue as blue as a tidal pool. the hoosier wood floors, covered with rugs so persian you can almost hear the cacophonies of the shuk where they might have been traded.

i’m here, instead of home where on the fourteenth of february long, long ago construction-paper hearts would be sprinkled from bedside to breakfast table, and where today my beloved is there all alone, because here is where love drew me.

love is what draws you to places you hadn’t intended to be. because love is the something that comes when it’s called. love sits in silence. love is the sound of footfalls in another room, the simple reminder that love is nearby, is filling the spaces between you. and nothing need be spoken.

love is the ineffable force that lies at the heart of that vessel within, that one we call “the heart” for we’ve no other word, really, for that rising tide inside us, the one that washes through us sometimes, the one that breaks us out in tingles. the one that makes our knees go weak. the one that makes us weep.

i don’t think love lives in the heart, actually. i think it lives in the whole of who we are. i know it lives in our fingertips because i’ve felt my fingertips melt when entwined with anyone i love. it certainly takes up occupancy in our knees because they’re the first to wobble whenever we’re overcome—by joy, by heartbreak, by grief. and i know it lives in our eyes, because i’ve seen it. and once you’ve seen it, you know it.

i’ll concede that that place mid-chest and slightly off to the left, the one that thumps and races and slows, love shares a room in there too, but it surely isn’t confined. can’t be. though we seem to have pinned it onto the heart in our flimsy imaginations.

i’m thinking much about love this week—how it shapes and colors our hours, and how it pulls us beyond ourselves—because this is a week where it’s made itself so vividly known.

love is the arrow that plunges the bayonet into your heart when someone you love has died. because the heart, schooled by life, knows the measure.

this week a someone i loved beyond measure breathed her last, and i, along with legions of others, am stricken. i only knew her for maybe a year and a half, but oh we loved deep right away. she was a fellow traveler on cancer’s road, and in that way that cancer works, she was more alive than just about anyone i’ve ever bumped into. once you know you have cancer, time is condensed. you can trek miles in minutes. so we did, she and i, mostly in letters.

her mind was brilliant, was curious; her writing took my breath away. my laptop is filled with her shimmering letters. she asked the most profound questions of life, of God, of whatever comes next. she found joy just about anywhere. quite certainly in books. during the months as she grew sicker and sicker, she was deadset on one final task: filling the shelves of the library her magnificent husband had just built for her, a whole room, wall to wall to wall. heaven on earth for my friend.

in the best of us, these are the trademarks of living with cancer, wringing every last droplet of life, with little room for regret. urgency underscores all of it. and filters are all stripped away. her name was annie, a name i’ve always adored, a name that makes me think ragdoll but in the most beloved way. i wasn’t going to write about her because her mama—one of the loveliest, funniest, fiercest someones i’ve ever met (this apple didn’t fall far from its tree)—often pulls up a chair, and i didn’t want to tread on her pain, or speak out of turn. but here i am saying simply that annie was love, was incandescent, and inextinguishable. and i will never ever let go of her spark. and i will carry her with me forever. i love her.

love defies death. it refuses to go. carries on into the all-that’s-to-come. shifts form, and does not grow thin.

that’s not all that broke my heart this week. i am keeping vigil as another someone i’ve loved is breathing her last. she’s in montana now, living with her brother who is at her bedside as i type this. he squeezes syringes of morphine between her lips, and sends me updates by text.

for years, she was a constant here in our leafy little neighborhood. she’d moved back to the big family house to care for her aging mama and papa, both of whom have since died, and the house was sold, and the money ran dry. and it was a heartache, all of it.

but she, like every other someone i’ve ever loved, taught me so very much on the subject. sarah is her name, and she made us her tight-knit family, all of us who live along the alley that runs behind our houses: she baked by the hour, tended a tomato garden, filled baskets with juicy peaches at the farmer’s market, and delivered her goods door-to-door in bulging bags she’d hang on the doorknobs. she sent kids off to college with care packages filled with just about anything under the sun (first aid kits, mini blenders, packets of pedialyte). and, most of all, she adopted feral cats, cats so afraid of humans it took her months to get them to curl up beside her. but night after night she sat out there in the alley with her still-warm roasted chicken, and her cans of albacore tuna, and piles of blankets (all for the cats who knew where to find her, every evening at 7). some nights, she’d sit there till midnight, sarah and one or two of her cats. maybe they counted the stars.

the sun is up now. and i hear footsteps above. another day to learn about love. and mostly to live it as deeply as i am able.

here’s a beauty found this week….

This world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others… abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.

—Elif Shafak, Turkish novelist

what did you learn about love this week?

9 Comments

November 14, 2025

the ol’ ticker still ticks. and then some.

a rare peek inside this ol’ house, where three of us nestled by the fire, catching a moment that no one saw coming…

because of the way my heart leapt midafternoon yesterday as i bumbled into the house, hands all muddy from tossing out the ferns that had frozen in the snow snap, i can claim with absolute certainty that i’m nowhere near dead yet.

what might i mean by such a rash—you might say “obvious”—pronouncement?

well, quite simply, my oft-tired ol’ ticker fired off a triple flip the likes of which simone biles would be proud soon as i glanced down at my phone, that indispensable appendage i always forget to keep indispensably by my side, and noticed a smattering of words that seemed to be spelling out something about “the trip to Chicago” followed by “keep the drive daylight” followed by “i will just hit the road,“ all walloped with “on the off chance that you guys aren’t busy tonight.”

and thus i discovered the manchild who’s been heavy on my heart all week, as i worried about the car that was stuck in the tow lot, and the miracle that he’d not been slammed into metal or glass when his car fishtailed on a slick, dark country road, i discovered there’d be three not two at our dinner table last night. and how perfect that i’d just made a triple-size batch of one of my autumnal mostly vegetable stews.

never mind that he’s 32, and a law professor these days. never mind that i’ve been at this mama gig for rather a while now (well, 32 years plus the duration of mammalian gestation), it’ll never get old. it’s pretty much an indelible truth that until my last breath on this planet the number one zone in my heart will forever be the can’t-get-enough-of-my-boys zone.

and so, in less time than it takes to spell indefatigably up to the task, i had fresh flannel sheets on the bed, a basket of farmer’s market apples on the bedside table along with a mason jar of my fresh-made granola, and if i’d had time to string up holiday lights in the room where he grew up, i’d have done that too. along with a chorus of night-crooning angels.

why the back-flipping joy?

well, living as i am in a personal epoch of carpe diem, in which nearly every dawn i flutter open my eyes and unfurl a big fat gratitude prayer for making it to the sheer marvel of watching sunlight stream in, while simultaneously existing in this moment in history when good news is as infrequent as a meadow of daisies in november, the sheer joy of surprise, especially in the category guess-who’s-coming-to-dinner, is of the highest order.

and sometimes it’s just plain rejuvenating to remember your heart still knows the steps to the happy dance, and can leap into it on a moment’s notice.

my zeal for making each moment count is not a dynamic that’s waning. it only gets more and more intense as the chapters of living press in from all sides.

i seem to have been catapulted full time into that real-life equivalent of frank lloyd wright’s architectural jujitsu compress-and-release, in which the master architect squeezed in the walls of an anteroom so that once you stepped into the chamber beyond you felt the whoosh of expansiveness as the walls and the ceiling let soar. so too with life and its tough spots. in time, they finally relent and release. and you breathe deeper than you remember breathing in days.

our lives are undulations of breath, on both a grand and an intimate scale. the pattern set soon as the umbilical cord is cut—the lungs, the diaphragm, the ribs rise and fall, empty and fill accordingly. and so it is with our lives on a larger scale, as life seems to toss us into the vise, only to at last let us out. let us breathe.

i am breathing today. i am breathing as my house fills with people i love to celebrate the birthday of a woman we love, the matriarch of us all. my mama, who’s shown us grace, resilience, and who these days unendingly charms. we’re not marking the date of her birth, she tells us, but we are marking our love. and we are doing it the best we know: we are gathering in joy, and in love, from corners hither and yon.

and in this old house, when the three of us sat down to stew, we got an extra dollop of breath out of the deal. it was—and is—delicious.

a bit of social action here at the chair, for anyone who might be so inclined. here in chicago, and even here in the leafy burbs we’ve been shattered by the roving bands of federal agents decked out in the camo gear, faces covered in masks, as they’ve rough-armed and thrown to the ground dozens and dozens and dozens of those whose skin might be brown. contrary to federal messaging, these are good folk earning meager livings the hard way: cutting grass, raking leaves, tending to kids in strollers or buggies, pounding shingles to roofs. and for the sin of trying to live unnoticed lives in a country meant to be safe harbor from thugs and militias, they’ve been plucked from the streets, or their cars, or their classrooms, and sent to a hellhole, leaving behind families to fend for themselves. a little band of us here where i live have armed ourselves with whistles and courage, to stand up to the thugs. and to help in any meager way we can. one among our little band offered this possibility to help stock the grocery shelves at a free market in chicago’s mostly hispanic little village neighborhood, where the fear is rampant and the streets have been swept of their usual buzz. it felt mighty good to send off a grocery cart of simple sustenance. and, indeed, i felt the breath fill my lungs.

here’s what my neighbor wrote….

For those that are looking for an option to offer concrete support to Little Village families impacted by ICE…one of my [neighbor’s] dearest friends (Keri Krupp) is a school social worker at Little Village’s Zapata Academy, which serves 500 kids from pre-k to 8th grade and is in need of support for their free “store” Mercado Zapatista. The Mercado is completely reliant on donations and has become a source of support for many of Zapata’s families — while typically focused on winter apparel and toiletries, it is now also distributing food to families that have been hit by both the loss of income due to ICE and the disruption to SNAP benefits. Her stories are heartbreaking. You can quickly donate through by selecting items from this Amazon wishlist or by sending an Amazon gift card to her work email (kbkrupp@cps.edu).

https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/291BEA7WRUHZ9?ref_=wl_share

At a time when it can be hard to know where to best focus donations, [my neighbor] can personally vouch for Keri’s commitment to the Little Village community and prudent stewardship of Mercado Zapatista, which she began in 2024. Any donations, big or small, will make an immediate difference to Little Village children and their families!

and thank you for considering.

bless you all. what filled your lungs this week?

10 Comments

August 15, 2025

prodigal professor

i poured myself out of bed minutes before three last night, as i seem to do like an old swiss clock. and in the murk of the dark, as i stumbled toward the bathroom, a thought crept forth reminding me this wasn’t any old middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom, this was a night in which the professor was in the house. sleeping under this old roof. back in the room where he grew up.

it’s been 13 years, and a whole lot of law school, and bar exams, and zigzagging across the country. there’ve been trips to the ER that scared the behoozies out of me, and weeks that were hard, and hours that were glorious, but the kid with the dream, the kid who with all his heart was hoping to get back to this middle-of-america, one-of-a-kind american city, that happens to be “home,” is back. for at least a year, an equation my mind is still trying to absorb. any time he’s been here in all these years, it’s only been for a day or two, a week at the most. there was always an end date, a date he’d be leaving, and we’d be back to texting and calling. and missing.

he drove 12 hours to get here. he and a car stuffed to the gills with law tomes and professorial garb. and he’s here now, a truth i witnessed just now with my very own eyes as i tiptoed in the dawn’s thin light past the old room where he’s slumbering. i saw the lump in the bed: proof!

truth is, what prompted him most to want to come home, is that he, like the rest of us, had the behoozies shaken out of him by whatever it is that lurked/lurks in my lungs. we all know the grains of time are gliding from one end of the dial to the other. it’s a subtraction, no matter how you cut it. and so we are hellbent on making addition of it. in the best ways possible. in filling the vessel of time with pure unfiltered joy. pushing our hearts to our sleeves. living a life of heart-thumping gratitude. that’s a word so over-spun it’s lost what it means, but when you get to the heart of it, it’s living a life where the thin veil is lifted, the veil between heaven and earth, and the presence of God, of love, is palpable, is visible in the form of the wonders in which we’re immersed: the soft morning sounds, the laughter of knowing each other by heart, the hand reached across a table and squeezed.

so happens the kid got an invite to teach for a year at a law school not too far away. south bend, indiana, a destination i could reach by lunchtime if i decided at 10 in the morning to head there. he’s moving into an old farmhouse tomorrow, a house out in the country, where apples and peaches hang from the limbs in the orchard out back, and raspberries grow fat on the brambles. it’s a genius invention called a sabbatical home, where one professor hopscotches away, leaving behind a fully-furnished, fully-equipped home (straight down to the pioneer-grade hearth in the hoosier kitchen), and another professor on the visitor’s wheel moves in. keeps the place running, the lights on, till the semester ends.

it’s not lost on me how hard he worked to get here, nor the one or two strokes of pure chance that propelled this along. in these months when i’ve whittled my life to those rare few things that truly matter, being the four of us—mom, dad, and two kids, together, rolled in a ball—is at the tippy top of the list. i’ve imagined the hour when i take my last breath, and what i know is that the last faces i want to see in this life are the three of them, circling round me. i’ll promise to haunt them. and, so help me, i’ll do it. the friendliest ghost there ever was.

for now, though, i’m here and i’m kicking. we all are. and we’re holding on. and i am ever so grateful to the university of notre dame for bringing my beautiful beautiful boy, the professor, back home where we all belong.

radon update, for anyone who wondered: we’re not out of the darn woods yet. in fact, the trail is only more twisted. the little disc i bought on the internet, the one reputed to be so accurate, it’s still flashing bright red, a color that signals far more than caution. it’s readings are high, scary high. but the actual professional radon tester is now on the third round of testing, and each time we’ve passed with enough room to breathe. she’s now as curious as i am as to why the disparity in readings, and we’re about to be stuck in the balance of deciding what to do. it’s no small feat to remediate for radon, though i don’t think it entails knocking out the basement out from under us. my date with the pulmonologist has been moved up from november to next month, and maybe they’ll know from looking into my lungs if there’s any sign of radon’s wreaked havoc. once again: uncertainty, the state of existence i dwell in.

that’s the news from here at the house that might be glowing.

love, babs

do you have a prodigal story?

13 Comments

June 13, 2025

Big Gulps

I shan’t often begin with an image de moi but this is not usual time. This is unusual. As in extraordinary. As in pinch-me, this-could-be-heaven time.

Bliss would be a word for it. Bliss defined as when all variables in an equation perfectly align: three boys + one mama + Dublin, capital of the Land of 40 Shades of Green = Bliss. Then square it. And square it again. Getting close.

It’s only been a wee few days but oh what we’ve all squeezed in. Joyce (of course; we’re here for Bloomsday it turns out, and the city is teeming with folks dressed as if they’ve just stepped out of Ulysses, June 16, 1904) and O. Wilde, whom I bumped into on a city bench.

Add to that pair, a stunning afternoon absorbing epigraphs at the Museum of Literature Ireland, miles and miles of strolls through greenswards like this:

And hilarities that come every other syllable in a land that flows with wit and gab.

It’s the gift of living in the crucible of time. You’re compelled by holy ordinance and keen attentiveness to squeeze each succulence from every blessed morsel.

And so I gulp and gulp. I whisper undying thanks and memorize the moment, pressing all this wonder, all this love, into the cockles of my heart.

Before I dive into another Dublin day, a short picture reel:

A word heard in abundance. I’m importing this new derivation.

A peoples not averse to poking fun wherever possibility lies.

And I don’t even mention Evensong in St. Patrick Cathedral, nor the intoxicating tour of the Guinness Storehouse, nor fish and chips in Dublin’s most ancient pub (1198), nor the coterie of cabdrivers we now count among our friends.

But when I gulp the most—voraciously and with all my soul—is nothing more astounding than sitting round a table, or strolling hand in hand along a winding path with the boys who grew my heart as big as big could be.

May your day too be blessed in big big gulps or the sweetest sips to ever wet your lips.

Love from Dublin 2.

Your Babs.

21 Comments

November 22, 2024

countdown. . .

i clambered up from the basement yesterday morn, and found myself face-to-face with a whiteout. snow falling in thickets. snow whirling wildly. snow, snow, and more snow for hours and hours and hours.

it was all the currier & ives i needed to supercharge my countdown clock. the one that’s percolating at quicker and quicker clip as the days turn closer to wednesday a week, the eve of thanksgiving itself, when not just one but both of the boys i so love will––for the first time in almost a year––unfurl their dreams on the pillows of their long-ago boyhood beds, all nestled cozily under this mostly dependable, nearly centenarian roof.

and i will savor the joy of kissing both on the forehead as i trundle off to bed hours before my wide-eyed night owls, or should we all stay up till the same insensible hour i will give it my best waltons’ bedtime holler, and call out from under my bedsheets and across the hall and down a few stairs, “good night, will. good night, Bear. good night, old house. sweet dreams, my beautiful boys.”

it’s been a long hard autumn, held in the vise of worries and fear the likes of which i’d not recommend. and so this coming thanksgiving is the emotional equivalent of frank lloyd wright’s trademark compress-and-release, in which the great architect intentionally magnified the vast spaciousness of a room by first pressing in the walls and the ceiling of the space leading into the room, so that upon stepping through the tight corridor and into the vaulted chamber the sense of openness would be perceived as vaster than ever.

and so it is with the human dynamic of fear, grace, and gratitude: to walk through unbearable days, days that stretch into weeks, and weeks that stretch into more than a month, and then to find yourself falling into the arms of the human beings you most long to hold onto; it’s the pinnacle of paradise on earth, to be released from the vise and enwrapped in a love without end.

cancer sharpens that point. cancer sometimes brings on seasons of uncertainty that are quickly populated with ghosts and demons that defy containment. i’m learning the undulations of cancer that are colored in shades of gray. interminable shades of gray. questions that come without answers. doctors who call with unwelcome news. and barely stay on the line long enough to answer a single question. and then you hang up and feel the floor drop out from under you. sometimes––if you’re me––you take the short road to doom. because that’s what worriers do. we worry. we pray for holy release.

in time, we get a grip. regain our bearings. hold our chin high, dry our tears, practice at being brave. whistle into the in-blowing winds. hold tight to the hands of the one or two who know how dark it’s become, and we fall to our knees, or fold to the ground and enter the depths of divine meditation. i’ve spent more hours with eyes closed, palms open, sitting in silence, beckoning the perpetual God-flame within, than ever before. i’ve been tempted to beg, “more time, please.” but i don’t any longer believe i can––or hold any special claim to––change God’s equation, so what i pray for is grace. is heightened attention. what i pray for is an emphatic aliveness that infuses each turn of the day with unbarred acceptance. i don’t want to blink and miss something holy.

those prayers––for grace, for keen attention, for seeing deeper than ever day in and day out, for pausing to savor––are answered, blessedly. and my own season of unending thanks coincides with that of this nation founded on pillars of moral perpetude, and the hope of equal justice for all.

the essence of my life’s gratitude has always been the improbable miracle that i became a mother. that i birthed not one but two glorious humans, and devoted the best of my heart, my soul, my breath, my being, to carving out for them a space in which they’d be cocooned in the purest love i could imagine, could muster. along the way, i’ve tossed every life line i could whenever they needed, and now, lo and behold, they’re the lifelines and i’m the one needing.

and so all these past 45 days, i have longed for only one thing: hours more to sit side-by-side the ones i so fervently sumptuously love. to giggle at their antics. to marvel at their wild-eyed wonder tales. to feel their hands squeeze mine, to be wrapped in their arms, my ear pressed to their chest, absorbing the heartbeat i’ve loved since the very first ultrasound when that echoing lub-dub-dub poured over and through me like the holiest chrism.

this is a countdown like never before. and my heart is more than open for business. the business of loving my boys. in real time. under one shared and sheltering roof.

here’s a poem, fittingly, a prayer poem by the great madeleine l’engle, who lived by words but found herself wordless in prayer. which, indeed, is sometimes the way to our deepest depths…

Word

I, who live by words, am wordless when
I try my words in prayer. All language turns
To silence. Prayer will take my words and then
Reveal their emptiness. The stilled voice learns
To hold its peace, to listen with the heart
To silence that is joy, is adoration.
The self is shattered, all words torn apart
In this strange patterned time of contemplation
That, in time, breaks time, breaks word, breaks me,
And then, in silence, leaves me healed and mended.
I leave, returned to language, for I see
Through words, even when all words are ended.
I, who live by words, am wordless when
I turn me to the Word to pray. Amen.

––Madeleine L’Engle

and here, because i love to imagine ladling steaming bowls of soup to people i love, is my new favorite stoup recipe, lemony chicken-feta meatball with spinach from my friends at NYT Cooking (you will be licking the bowl; it’s that good):

Lemony Chicken-Feta Meatball Soup With Spinach
By Yasmin Fahr
Yield: 4 servings
Total Time: 30 minutes
Note from NYT: Some might be suspicious of the rolled oats called for in this recipe, but used in place of breadcrumbs, they help create a light and tender chicken meatball. A half-cup more is simmered in the broth, which thickens it and provides a pleasant texture. The meatballs, made with ground chicken, feta and fresh dill, swim in a lemony, spinach-filled broth that’s comforting and light, perfect for lunch or dinner. Serve any leftovers with a fresh squeeze of lemon juice to brighten the soup.

INGREDIENTS
1 pound ground chicken or turkey, preferably dark meat (i use white meat)
½ cup crumbled feta
¾ cup old-fashioned rolled oats
1 small red onion, halved (½ diced, and ½ grated, then squeezed with a paper towel to remove excess liquid)
⅓ packed cup fresh dill leaves and fine stems, finely chopped
1 tablespoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon plus 1 tablespoon ground turmeric
Kosher salt and black pepper
3 tablespoons olive oil
½ teaspoon red-pepper flakes, plus more for serving
4 cups low-sodium chicken broth
4 packed cups baby spinach (about 5 ounces)
2 lemons (1 juiced and 1 cut into wedges for serving)

PREPARATION
Step 1
In a medium bowl, add the chicken, feta, ¼ cup oats, the grated onion, most of the dill (reserve about 2 tablespoons for garnish), the cumin, ½ teaspoon turmeric and 1 teaspoon salt. Gently combine without squeezing too hard or overworking the meat. Lightly wet your palms and shape the meat into small balls, a little smaller than the size of a golf ball, about 1½ inches. (You will have approximately 25 balls.)

Step 2
Heat the oil in a large Dutch oven or wide pot over medium until shimmering. Add the diced onion, season with salt, and cook until it begins to soften, about 2 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon turmeric and the red-pepper flakes, and stir until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Push the onions to the sides as best you can, then add the meatballs. (They will be close together, and that’s OK.) Cook until browned on two sides, 5 to 7 minutes total.

Step 3
Pour in the broth and remaining ½ cup oats, then gently tilt the pot to the right and left to distribute the oats and broth without disturbing the meatballs. Bring to a gentle boil, then immediately reduce the heat to maintain an active simmer. Season with salt. Cook, gently stirring occasionally to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom, until the oats have softened and the meatballs are cooked through, about 4 minutes more.

Step 4
Stir in the spinach and lemon juice until the spinach is wilted, about 2 minutes more. Adjust the seasoning to taste. Spoon into bowls, top with pepper and the remaining dill. Serve with lemon wedges.

what is your heart longing for this season of through-and-through thanks?

17 Comments

June 7, 2024

that inextinguishable instinct

post-tonsillectomy children’s memorial, january 2000

dispatch from 20037. . .

two dozen years ago, a little guy I loved, a little guy of six, was wheeled down a long hallway to have his tonsils plucked. i walked the whole long way beside his gurney, straight into the OR, where they let me hold his hand till they were ready to send him off to dreamless land. and then, back I walked to wait, eyes awash with tears.

just now, that same kid was wheeled away again. and I, the nurse who flew in from chicago because I couldn’t imagine being even a mile away, was by his side. This time, though, I skipped the long walk, and no tears.

I seem to have been born hardwired to not stay far away, not when someone I love is being wheeled down long hallways, and the day begins at 4:45 a.m.

It’s an urge as irrepressible as anything I know. So much of mothering comes to me instinctively, without the synaptic pause that populates most thought. I leap before I think—leap into the fire, into the deep end, into wherever is the urgency. I don’t know how not to. And, yes, maybe sometimes I’m too much. And maybe I’m unnecessary. Or redundant. But where is there room for redundancy or un-necessity in the chambers of the heart?

Among the breaths of my life that I relish most, being by the side of the ones I birthed will always, always, be my most precious, most savored.

And so, in living my days with all I’ve got, this blessed day, being plopped in this hard chair, in this cacophonous waiting room in downtown DC, is one I will always hold so close to my heart. Truth is, I pray for as many of these sorts of days as time will give me. And as long as I can be there to plant one last kiss on the forehead I have loved since the hour of his birth, I am going to board all the planes, trains, and automobiles to get me here.

And now I’m signing off to keep my holy vigil.

xox

No need for any worries; all will be well here in the nation’s capital. Trust me on that.

PSS my uppers and lowers are a jumble today because I’m typing in my wee phone and can’t stop the gremlins from insisting on at least some proper capitalization.

18 Comments

May 24, 2024

sometimes, joy makes you wait. . .

A year ago, I was crushed. Four of us were supposed to be in Paris, but one of us never made it on a plane. Passport tangles tangled him. We tried every option known to humankind, but after days of holding our breath, we faced the cold hard inevitability: there would be no four of us in Paris. No four of us encircling the cafe table, as I’d pictured it, prayed for it, since the day the doctor told me the thing in my lung was cancer. And all I wanted in the world was to be held tight, held together, by my boys. My beautiful beautiful beautiful boys.

We were determined to try again. This year: Roma. We made the law professor with the failed passport get in line early, and expeditedly, for a new-spangled one. He complied.

I held my breath anyway. The closer we got to takeoff, the harder I held all the breath in my chest.

But Monday night, two planes, carrying four people, were crossing the globe, flying through the night, pointed toward Rome.

Ever since, I’ve been inhaling in double time, breathing as deep as a girl with 1.5 lungs can possibly breathe. Because this is the stuff that makes my life hum like a mezzosoprano, like a nightingale, like the merriest mama that ever there was. We are, the four of us, entangled as one, under the blue blue of Italy’s sky.

Sometimes the unthinkable happens. And you stumble and bumble, and shed tear upon tear. But then you pick up the pieces. You make the most of what’s there in your midst, and try to not ache for what’s missing.

And life, every once in a while, gives you a rare second chance. And you realize the heartache of the past has only hollowed more space in your heart, so that when the rushing in comes in, you’ve all the more capacity for unparalleled joy.

I am giddy and dizzy and pulsing with joy. It’s the sweetest sonata that I’ve ever sung.

It’s the song of my deepest prayer answered: dear God, give me sumptuous sumptuous time with my most blessed and beautiful beautiful boys.

Amen.

A perfect poem for this moment:

Mary Oliver’s “Mindful”

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

What are the somethings for which you’ve had to wait for what felt an unbearable wait?

22 Comments

March 22, 2024

when springtime lives up to its billing: equal parts shadow and light

according to celestial alignments, the shadow now is equal, light and dark. the sun has crossed the equator, and here on the northern half of the orb, spring is upon us. except that as i type, snow is blanketing my tender spring tendrils, and the walk is slick, and, well, tis the very picture of springtime here in the heartlands, where you’re wise not to count your blooms before the ides of may.

my heart too is heavy, beating in time with that of a mother i know who is off in the mountains of northern california searching for her blessed daughter who went hiking from the tassajara zen mountain center on monday, and five days and cold dark nights later still has not been found. i ask for prayers for caroline.

motherhearts are a communal collective. we cannot pause the pounding against our own chest wall, we cannot sleep soundly, when we know profoundly of another mother in unimaginable distress. be it the mothers of syria, or gaza, or israel’s kibbutzim, or my long-ago newsroom compatriot now strapped into her hiking boots, hearing only the echo of her own cry as she walks the remote yet exquisite topography where, somewhere, her firstborn is lost, is lying, is awaiting her mama’s arms and a wrapping in blankets.

my prayers have been looping nonstop, clouding out most other thoughts, since i first heard word. caroline’s mama is a woman of incredible, unbreakable faith. the notes she is sending back home, here in chicago, bolster my faltering. “my gratitude and hope outweigh my fears,” she wrote in her last short update, teaching me a thing or two about how to be strong in the face of the unbearable.

because the promise of springtime is, indeed, equal parts shadow and light, i turn to the poets for a dappling of light. and we begin with emily, the belle of amherst, and quickly turn to the little-known artist who inspired her:

“to be a flower,” emily dickinson wrote in her 1865 poem, “bloom,” considered a pre-ecological work, “is profound responsibility.”

a passionate lifelong gardener, emily D (“a keen observer of the house of life who made of it a temple of beauty,” as cultural critic maria popova once put it) had fallen under the spell of wildflowers as a teenager while composing her herbarium of 424 blooms native to new england. but, writes popova, it was an “uncommonly beautiful” book her father gave her just before she turned thirty that rocket-blasted her poetic passion for nature’s own garden: wild flowers drawn and colored from nature by the botanical artist and poet clarissa munger badger (may 20, 1806–december 14, 1889).

published in 1859, the same year charles darwin’s on the origin of species shook science, badger’s book “contained twenty-two exquisite scientifically accurate paintings of common new england wildflower species — violets and harebells, the rhododendron and the honeysuckle — each paired with a poem bridging the botanical and the existential: some by titans like percival and longfellow, some by long-forgotten poets of her time and place, some by badger herself,” writes popova.

seven years later, badger brought her brush to the beauty of wildflowers’ domestic counterparts, the blooms of greenhouse and garden: the pansy and the lily, the day-blazing geranium and the night-blooming cactus, the tulip and the rose, and once again pairing her paintings with poems, she celebrated garden flowers as “brilliant hopes, all woven in gorgeous tissues,” as “stars… wherein we read our history.”

another poet, one i dream of sitting down to dinner with, or more in keeping with her ilk, plopping on a porch swing, she with cigarette burning orange against the black of night, me, merely pumping my merry little legs. dorianne laux is her name, and you’ve seen me write of her here. she has a brand new craft book, companion of sorts to her earlier the poet’s companion, and the new book, finger exercises for poets, is “an engaging invitation to practice poetry alongside a master,” and it’ll be out this july from w.w. norton & company. (they still send me advance reader copies; bless them.)

here’s a passage i knew i needed to share, from glorious, glorious dorianne’s introduction:

“My instrument is the immensity of language, the techniques and effect of crafting images, shaping sound and rhythm, creating new combinations with the single notes of words, each colliding or coming together, meshing or crashing, standing firm or tumbling. There are eighty-eight keys on a piano, six hundred thousand words in the English language. The patterns, the sequences, and permutations of both are endless. For me, language is another kind of music.

“I practice poetry. This book invites you to practice along with me.”

and i close, this snowy spring morning, with yet another master of language, and truth-telling: james baldwin. (this comes to me from a french monk whose writing i follow; laurence freeman is his name, and here’s a bit of what he sent this week from the bonnevaux centre for peace, in the southwest of france): “toward the end of his life, baldwin gave a television interview in which he was asked to reflect on the essential subject of his classic, groundbreaking novel, giovanni’s room. baldwin’s answer is an extraordinary meditation on love, and in particular, how it can serve a kind of educational purpose in our lives.” here’s what baldwin said, laid out as a poem.

Q: What’s the novel, Giovanni’s Room, about?

Baldwin’s answer:

It’s about what happens to you
if you can’t love anybody.
It doesn’t make any difference
whether you can’t love a woman,
or can’t love a man —
if you can’t love anybody,
you’re dangerous.
Because you’ve no way
of learning humility.
No way of learning
that other people suffer.
No way of learning
how to use your suffering,
and theirs, to get from one place
to another.

In short, you fail the human
responsibility, which is
to love each other.

+ James Baldwin

what are the lessons of love you learned in this week of shadow and light?

p.s. illustration at the top is indeed one of clarissa munger badger’s beauties. and i will ask once again, please please offer up prayers for rescue for blessed, blessed caroline, her mama, her papa, and all who are holding their most sacred breath…..

14 Comments

March 15, 2024

saved by the dust bunnies

dear reader, fear not. at last writing, as i bemoaned the absence of progeny in this old house, and awoke to the relative quietude of life as empty nester, i might have seeded worry. what will she do, that poor blithering mama, you might have wondered. will she clock her time staring out the window, awaiting the return of said progeny galloping in from distant plains, in need of laundry, grilled cheese, or any other assorted task for which a mother is distinctly schooled?

worry not: purpose has arrived.

yes, indeedy. in the form of unknown possibly invisible creatures lurking in the chamber where the recently departed (from this house, that is) now attempts to sleep. these invisible and invincible forces seem intent on making the boy rub his nose and eyes and sneeze. all night long. and well into the daylight.

and so, the call has come. i am (somewhat) needed. or, at least my vacuum is. and i, taking no such task lightly, i’ve equipped myself with a whole battery of dust-bunny-battling weaponry. just last night my friends at amazon delivered the air purifier deemed best in class by the folks at wirecutter, that band of trusty testers at the new york times. and i’ve a gallon jug of vinegar, a mop, and microfiber dust cloths, enough to wipe out legions of pesky mites.

dust buster am i.

dust bunny under microscope: what we’re up against in the dust bunny challenge

all of which points to the foregone conclusion that ol’ mothers never ever pass their expiration dates. we are not sent off to distant pastures. our aprons and our mops, never really set out to dry. we do not wither on the vine. we are, if not invincible, indelibly anchored in the domestic equation.

why, just this week the kid who mostly dashed in and out of the house whilst he was living here, has seen fit to call me for instructions on: a.) how to work a wet mop; b.) what to take for allergies; c.) what else to take for allergies; and d.) all of the above.

it’s a reassuring thing to know the worry chambers of my mama brain need not turn off. i can still muster up a storm in there, scheming up the options, imagining the worst. and, then, as i’ve done since the first note of first pregnancy, i leap into action. if i can slay one dragon––be it lost mitten in the long ago, or dust mites under the bed today––i sidle one inch nearer to indispensability. or so i pretend.

the truth, as i’ve long known, is that love––in any form––does not subscribe to geographical or chronological bounds. i can love as fiercely and devotedly whether you’re under my roof or far far from here. ours is a world in which distance is a given. we are no longer a people of the shtetl or the lane. i only wish those i love lived nearby enough to rap at the door and sidle in for tea. or late night storytelling.

be it by the powers of imagination or a polished knack for empathy, the human heart is the inexplicable muscle with unbound capacity to stretch from here to eternity. and in so doing, we can fiercely and fine-grainedly love the ones too far away or the ones who are no longer, for their essence burns on and on as long as we are breathing. and, sometimes, in the uncanniest of ways: in reaching for my mother-in-law’s signature-red coffee mug on any morning, i can suddenly hear her singsong way of telling me her faith in me has never dulled. and she’s been gone now for nearly three years.

the resurrective powers of love are without rhyme or reason. and, indeed, they save us.

i’ve thought plenty in recent months about the muscularity of love. how it has propelled me up steep inclines, ones i might not have found the nerve to climb had i not felt some forcefield behind me. i’ve a never-ending fascination with this ineffability we know as love, not as valentine ephemera, but love as true physical force, love as divinely inspired. with the power to heal. the power to quell. and, sometimes, the power to slay a bunny made of dust.

your thoughts on the mystical powers of love welcome here:

8 Comments

Tag: motherlove