motherprayer

August 13, 2010

one thing: be safe

and so, like that, hair still wet from the shower, white t-shirt tight enough to catch each plane and shadow of the rower’s top-half topography, the babe i once rocked in my arms, the boy who never much took to tricycles, the now-man with newly-minted license in his tight-squeeze pocket, he did something i’d never seen before: he swiped the keys to the old blue wagon off the ring where they’ve dangled since the day we moved into this old house, and he ran for the door, for the driver’s seat, for the road and whatever lay beyond.

mid-stride, and without ceremony, he glanced back to check the clock, nervously (only because he was late not because he had an ounce of apprehension about the road ahead), as i tried to slow the exit, calling out, wait, where exactly are you going? and when will you be home?

as he tossed back words, perfectly sensible replies, and made one final lope through the door and down the steps, disappearing behind the crab apple that nearly blocks the path, i called out: “be safe.”

and the words hung there.

each crisp syllable so wholly capturing what i wished and prayed for with all my being.

be safe.

what more is there?

what deeper prayer does a mother’s heart hold?

above all, be safe.

come home whole. come home without a gash. never mind the fender or the tail lights. just be safe, my sweet beloved child.

and so for the next few hours, i went about my business. few noticed, i’m certain, that i was turning blue around the mouth. i held my breath. only half expanding lungs, i do believe, as i watched the clock hand glide towards ten.

till at last i heard the rumble, saw the headlights illuminating garbage cans as they pointed down the alley, came round the final bend into where we sometimes park the car, two bright eyeballs, blinking “we’re home” to me, as they clicked off, and the 6-foot-3 first-time-alone-ever driver slid from the old wagon as if he’d been out unencumbered a million times before and this was nothing, nothing really to have interrupted anyone’s lung-work for the eve.

i find myself employing those two words–be safe–often in these past few weeks.

both my boys, it seems, are pushing out the boundaries, laying new tracks, expanding their orbits beyond me. out of reach. into that terrain where we hold on only through the silky thread of prayer, the whispered murmurings of petition to the great protectors all around, or up on clouds, wherever is the place from where they keep their watch.

the little one now bounds up the stairs to his piggy bank, grabs a crumpled dollar bill, and tells me he is walking to the little not-so-far-away grocery where all the kids buy chips and candy. or to the comic book store. or, just the other day, over train tracks, across the big street, the one with five lanes of traffic, to get to the store where baseballs called to his friend, and my little one didn’t think to say, um, no, i can’t come with you without checking first at home.

and as he sweetly told the story–confessed, really–i could only gulp and think of safe again, that word that captures unbroken wholeness, the white light of safety shield that we hope and pray and beg surrounds our children, no matter what they throw against it: diving boards or busy streets or trucks with 18 wheels and drivers half-dozing at the steering wheel.

not one to rely on hope alone, and having grown up with rosary beads dangling from my bed post, at the bottom of my white straw pocketbook (the one with starched-cotton cornflowers and poppies on the lid, the one i carried each sunday into church), and, yes, amid the pens and pencils and assorted detritus in the pit of my high school backpack besides, i wasted little time before enlisting st. christopher to my back-up squad.

i ordered up a medallion, a dangly disc, of dear saintly chris, the one who carried baby jesus (i do believe) on his shoulders across a raging river, and who, along with st. babs, my namesake, got unceremoniously dumped from the heavenly chorus back in the revolutionary 1960s when the catholic church decided their miracles weren’t quite of the saintly stature, so they were stripped of rank, left to be mere lieutenants of goodness in the hierarchy’s eyes. which, of course, is all it took for me to promptly and fiercely promote them ever higher, in my book now patron saints of all of us who have ever suffered the indignities of being shoved to the back of the pack.

yo, chris, for you we have assignment.

and thus, in a white envelope left waiting on my keyboard (thanks be to my own personal patron saint of procuring–my holy blessed mama), there is the half-inch metal oval of mid-stream chris that will forever dangle from my brand-new driver’s key ring.

be safe, it will whisper, will send off vapors, will infuse the air my firstborn breathes when he is far, far beyond my clutch.

be safe, the holy mantra of the mamas, as we stand back and let our babies reach and stretch and take to the highways. st. chris, right there in that front pocket, where we can’t ever fit.

the photo up above is reality journalism, taken the very moment my firstborn cruised to the end of the alley, clicked on the blinker, headed north into the rest of his driving life. it was mere hours after the driving czars deemed him worthy of a certifiable driver’s license. and i was left, with quivering fingers on the camera clicker, having captured the stunning truth: my boy was driving now. i heard the snap of the scissors as yet another cord was cut.
whose safety have you prayed for of late? and what long nights’ vigil have you kept, waiting for the headlights at last to come to park?

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May 7, 2010

the labor pains that never really end

back in the day when my belly was on the rise, and my doctor gave me choices, i signed up for the labor plan in which no drugs were involved.

i wanted to take it head on, surge through, make like the rest of the mammals and feel the pain.

i imagined it pure, somehow. undiluted.

didn’t realize, quite, that i’d signed onto that plan for life.

oh, i weathered it all right back in that birthing room, rode the tidal waves of contraction to the point that i imagined myself on a ledge, and wondered if at any second i might teeter off, go plunging to the lanes of traffic far below.

ah, but then the end came. the part where squeezing stops and pushing takes over, the part where the doctor aptly diagnosed, “looks like an irish head,” and my jewish husband asked, “whaddoes that mean?”

and before the first push, at the brink of discovery, i hollered out, “it means it’s gonna HURT!”

and, i suppose it did.

but that hurt like no other hurt gave way to miracle. gave way to pool-blue eyes that looked at me, studied me, as if to say, oh, so you’re the one.

gave way to thighs, rich and pudgy and layered with hallelujah fat. (i’d convinced myself, somehow, that i would grow a babe of merely flesh and bones. ahem. not that i’ve cooked up a stewpot of worries ever since conception…)

i remember my arms reaching out to take that just-born child, my fingers hungry, reaching as they’d never reached before, to pull him in, to harbor him against my chest, against my heart, to seal forever the envelope that would keep us one heart against the other, that would surround him forever in a cocoon of infinite love. love that always was and always will be.

i remember being wheeled from the room where he was born, down the hall and up one floor, to the room where i would come to know him, to study him, to memorize the dips and planes of his whole blessed body. to baptize him in the tears that came that night, that did not end, not until i had anointed him, bald head to baby toe, in the salty wash of a mother’s hope-give-way-to-ever-after-love.

back then, no one explained to me how those labor pains don’t really end. oh they subside, retrench, slither back into the corners.

but, your whole life long, when you’re a mother, you’re at risk of nearly writhing again. that ledge, where once you teetered, you remember it.

when you sign on–or at least when i did–you sign an everlasting contract.

you are, for the rest of your life, right there in the trenches, one step ahead of your child’s heart. it’s you–your flesh, your blood, your bones–that stands between you and the tip of the sword that flails toward your child.
or at least that’s the way it is for me.

all week this week, i’ve ached and held my breath. watched the boy i love so very much weather curves and setbacks.

the other night, when the clock ticking on the kitchen wall, ticked straight up to 1 a.m., all i yearned for was a bed. but right beside me sat a boy who ached from head to toe, whose body nearly flopped onto the keyboard where he typed, whose brain gears were getting stuck, but whose sentences needed words.

all he wanted from me was to stay right by his side. he did not want to face the night alone, the dark, the hollow.
i tried to make my braincells kick in gear, to back up his, but mine too were stuck in midnight quicksand.

except for this one thought, the thought that kept me upright, shoulder-to-shoulder beside my aching tired boy: remember when the labor wouldn’t stop, i asked myself, remember when it hurt so much and there was no escaping? well, this too is labor, flashed-forward, labor of another kind: yes, it hurts; stick with it.

this child, now nearly 10 inches taller, and 50 pounds heavier than his mother, he’s in a dark hole now, i told myself. he is trying to make sense of sentences for a teacher who demands the very most–razor-sharp thought, construction without yield, lump-free logic.

you do not leave a child when it hurts, when it gets too hard. at least not in the book of motherhood that i took off the shelf.

i’m not alone.

i see it all around me all the time. the mother whose son’s leg was crushed in the elevator door–after the other leg was broken in the shower. the mother whose sweet girl has tumors in her liver, for the second time now. the mother whose baby was born blind in one eye. the mother whose third-grader doesn’t learn like all the rest, who twirls in circles, even when the teacher says to stop, even when the other parents pretend to look away, but you hear them if you listen, tsk, tsk, they pretend not to say.

mothers do not escape the pains of birth once birth is ended.

mothers sign on, through thick and thin. marriage vows pale, put up against the promises of motherhood.

there is no mountain i will not climb. no shark-infested waters i won’t swim.

if i need to be up at 5 to stir the oatmeal in the morning, watch me stagger down the stairs. need to run to the grocery store at 10 p.m., to buy roadfood for the hungry rowers, well then grab the keys, find the clogs, and point the car where it must go.

there is no shortcut when the subject is a mother’s love. no cliffs notes on how to raise a kid. you take what you’re given, you swerve, you duck, you swing. you give it all you’ve got, and then a dollop that you never knew you had.

show me a kid in trouble, and a mama whose heart is not weighted down, as if sagging from a bag of rocks strung and tied around that sorry muscle.

but then the morning comes. the kid looks up, stares straight into your eyes, deep through and out the other side, into the eyes of the one he knows loves him through and through and through, rough spots and zits, a mother’s eyes don’t see those things. or if they do, they forgive and forgive.

all a mama wants is for that kid to grow and thrive and capture all his dreams.

and if it takes the labor pains that do not end to make those dreams come true, well then i’ll be the mama who takes it head on, full throttle.

because, in my book, that’s what births the miracle, the love that’s like no other.

that magnificent creation up above, the garden of wonder? it’s from my little one, and i am crazy mad for it. intend to frame it, hang it on my bedroom wall. so i can wake up each morning, and rise and shine and face the world that so benevolently gave me not one but two dreams come true.

happy mother’s day to each and all of you who mother in one magnificent form or another….

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May 29, 2008

it is what we do on days like this.

we worry, yes. we scramble eggs. we pack lunches, thick with steak. we check on bedroom lights late into the night. make sure they’re off, and tousled heads are sleeping. we drive. deliver children to the schoolhouse door. and all day long, we keep an eye on clocks.

short of picking up a pencil, and rambling on with no idea whatsoever just what it is we’re trying to convince, to whomever is the teacher who dropped the year-end exam onto our quaking desk, we really haven’t many worldly options.

and so, we surrender.

we employ the mothertongue as ancient as any known. since first birth (and i mean at the dawn of time), i’d wager, there’ve been mothers who turn their words, their breaths, their whispered vespers over to on high.

we pray.

we fill in blanks with words that wash out from deep inside of us, and over us, and far into beyond.

we pray for hours if we have to, keeping on with all the rest we do. not letting on that deep inside there is prayer at work.

we drop to knees. we sprinkle holy water, head and chest and shoulders. we turn to east. we genuflect. we lay down and stretch our arms as high as we can reach. we venerate. we call on saints, and ones we love who are no longer, but might well come to the holy blessed rescue.

oh, yes.

i’ve seen heavy-hearted mothers, on their knees, crawl up great stone church steps, and down a long, long aisle that ripped their flesh but not their spirit, dead-set they were on laying down their knotted bundled prayers at the foot of a bare and marbled altar.

i’ve heard mothers ululate, sending untamed sounds to a place that understands, even if we’ve no idea just where that someplace is.

we pray, us mothers all, in many creeds and faiths and dialects, but always in one united tongue: we pray for our children.

we pray for what they need. we pray for what’s beyond our reach, but so help us, we’ll provide–if prayer can make it be.

there is an alchemy to prayer. a mysticism that cannot be explained. it is holy pleading raised to the nth power.

motherprayer needn’t be explained. we needn’t pass a test. we can pray that children make it ’cross the stage without tripping on their laces. and we can pray — just watch — that the blood test comes back clear.

this ordinary thursday i was pulled, like lunar moth to lamplight, into the great stone church i always pass. only, this morning, my footsteps fell into the dim-lit chamber, empty at that early hour. only dawn’s light poured through stained-glass windows, washed the floor in many-colored jigsaw puzzle. but that’s not why i came.

i came, because deep inside my ever-catholic heart, i knew i’d find a tall wax column, one with wick poking from the top. for all the quarters in my pocket, and all the ardor in my soul, it was mine to spark with light. and let burn through all the day, and into night.

it is motherprayer kindled. it is bathing, i am certain, the boy i love with all there is that i can’t solely muster.

i scrambled eggs. i nestled steak between the onion bun. i squeezed his hand. and kissed him on the head.

and then i watched him lope into the classroom, where three last exams stack up like hurdles, the only thing between one long hard year and summer.

i knew, as i watched him go, that he wasn’t all alone. i could see a bright light shining. incandescence lit his way.

never mind that its flame was back at church, miles and miles away.

that candle wraps him, shields him. that candle gives him might, of the sort he needs today.

i know. i lit it with a motherprayer. and motherprayer is infinite and lasts forever.

motherprayer picks up, where earthly mother cannot reach.

motherprayer is wholly holy. and Holiness has ears, i’ve learned, for all that’s spilled in never-ending prayer of mother.

even if She whispers not her sure reply, i always know the Holy Answers echo back to me, and mine.

that’s how it is with motherprayer. and that is why, on days like this, i pray with all my motherheart.

prayer is many things. it is words. it is wordless. it is surging from the soul. it is, sometimes, practicing God’s presence. it is invoking all the angels and powers most supreme. no one religion holds a lock on prayer. it is hardwired into who we are. mothers surely aren’t the only ones who pray, it’s simply that our prayer–coming from a naked place that knows so wholly those who once leaned on us for breath and beating heart–is absolute and unbreakable. what motherprayer have you prayed? who motherprayed for you?

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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.

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