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

Tag: motherlove

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
March 1, 2007

all through the night

let’s see, doctors in med school do it. fire fighters do it. airplane pilots, if they’re flying ’round the world, do it. but, no, i think they get breaks. i’m pretty sure some federal regulator decided it’s not a good idea to fly a locomotive with wings on two winks of sleep.

but mamas do do it. papas too, plenty of times. work through the night. forgo the pillow they so long for because someone who’s little is crying, is whimpering, is making bold proclamations such as the one that bounced into my ear at 4:38 this morning: “mama, my tummy is gurgling. should we go to the bathroom? because i may throw up.”

that was merely crescendo to what had been building for hours. started with a hot body, hot like a rock left in the oven, tucked in the sheets beside me, a true furnace for my always-cold toes. the hot body needed bubble-gum fever-killer. the hot body needed cold washcloth, pressed to head, just like my mama used to press to my own. the hot body left his bed, was airlifted by papa, to our bed. that was at 1 something. the hours between are a blur. sort of like the type on this screen through my eyes with no sleep. (you’ll understand, you’ll forgive, if verbs they are missing this morning; they would be found, i assure you, under the pillow i did not get to use during the night of the hot body beside me.)

it’s certainly a scene i’ve played before. not a one of us who signs up for this gig, this parenting gig, gets a free ride, an escape-from-the-night-on-the-bathroom-floor clause. but lying there, counting the sides of the hexagon tiles, over and over and over again–snapping just the one picture above because this is photojournalism, darn it, and my bathroom floor was a war zone and we wanted you to have a feel for the mood there in the trenches–lying there in between gurgles i had plenty of time to ponder.

to ponder the infinite power of the pull between mother and child as you groggily push away sleep, push away every note in your brain calling you back to the bed, because you are ministering to a sick little child, one who in the dark and the black of the night calls out your name, not anyone else’s name, because you are the one chance he’s got to make it all better. the child has powers invested in you. he believes in you. and you, darn it, had better come through.

so lying there together, we fumble. we try rubbing that tummy. re-wetting the cloth. we sing lullabies. and we both moan together. it’s all voodoo really. but it’s the voodoo of love. i know there’s a virus in there running amok. took enough physiology to know a silly old washcloth will not make a dent. but i grab that cloth anyway, crank the faucet to cold, but not too cold, drape it over his brow. i wonder if my mother’s mother did the same. i wonder if the cold cloth on the head is buried deep within my maternal wiring. or if it’s deep in all mothers, all women, all humans.

i lie there on the floor ’til the whimpering stops, ’til the gurgle stops gurgling. then slowly we rise, grope through the dark back to the bed. the light out the window is shifting. not far away it is dawn. the hot body, still hot, climbs in first; i climb beside him, entwine.

slowly his body goes still, his breathing is steady and soft. i, too, drift off for maybe a quarter of an hour. then, blaring, the alarm tells me nighttime is over. it’s time to get up and get moving. it’s morning, and i, like the doctor, the firefighter, but not the pilot who’s federally regulated, i am on 24/24ths of the day. unlike the doctor, the firefighter, all of whom get to go home, i am 24/7. this is home. this is my job that won’t stop.

yup, it’s a job that leaves you, me, all of us, plenty exhausted. but not for the life of me would i not want to be the one counting the tiles at 4:38 in the morning.

i close my eyes and still feel my mama’s thick hand on my brow, bracing my shoulders as my little gut wrenches. forty-some years down the road, my little guy might close his eyes; i want my hand on his brow to be the thing he remembers. it’s my prize for endlessly counting the tiles.

and your tales of mothering all through the night? you, or your very own mama?

3 Comments
January 16, 2007

little legs under the covers

some time in the thick of the darkness, those little legs climbed into our bed. he was sneezing, he told us, in his own bed. too much cat curled on his covers.

he was warm. he was soft. he was tender.

all night his sweet little self rolled up against me. we draped over each other, limb over limb, arm around middle.

it is like incubating all through the night. it is, i pray, seeping the best of us into each other.

my little boy, by day, can be, um, a bit of a handful. he’s the youngest by far of anyone around. so he makes up for it with whatever plot he can imagine. we want a dinner conversation. he takes to under the table. we say turn off the tv. he darts down to the basement where he thinks we’ve forgotten there’s yet another tiny screen lurking.

but, by night, the boy is a cuddler. the boy is soft. the boy is utterly tender.

he said something in his sleep last night. something about God. i haven’t a clue of the rest of the story. but i know for a moment he was talking to God.

as i lay there beside him, drinking in the tender side of the boy, of the night, i marveled at how it was that he knew that this particular night, more than many, i needed the gift of the boy with the legs under the covers.

there won’t be many more nights when our bed is his refuge. little legs get big, forget the way in the dark into the room with the extra-thick covers.

but for now, there’s a boy, there’s a bed, there’s a mother. and she is softer this morning for the long night with the soft roll beside her.

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