Tired too, Mom

Remy doesn't like going to bed.  I can't blame him, his life is pretty good. But tonight, as I sat in the green rocking chair in the corner of his room, his blue light stars glowing on the ceiling, he asked me for one more song and I said, "Remy, I'm just going to sit here, I'm too tired." and then I heard him take a big suck of milk from his Nemo cup and say to me from his firetruck bed, "Tired too, Mom." I've never heard Remy admit he was tired, but we sat there in the stillness between waking and sleeping and listened to the little slurps of Thea nursing, and then, without another word, he was asleep.

I may have been frazzled 70% of this day, maybe even a little woebegone enough so to leave the vacuum out with the cord lazily snaking its way across the living room floor hours after I vacuumed, but for that small moment Remy and I understood each other in the most gratifying way. Not so much as son and mother, but just as humans beings tumbling forward across a wild existence and doing our best to be good.  I thought about the moment when Remy got dressed up in his Superman costume and ran out to play this afternoon, but none of the big kids wanted to play, and I thought about how hard it can be to bumble and broil, and feel terribly proud and lost and then in love in a washy sunset of emotions every day.

I am tired.  New babies are better by a million than the best Christmas present you ever received, but they make you tired, and there a a myriad of things in this world that make us tired. I guess that is also the most lovely part about what we do: the fact that we've done it until it makes us so tired that all we can do is rock and be quiet for a few minutes at the end of the day.  Thank goodness for friends like Remy who are wise enough to understand and simply say, "me too, Mom, me too."
 

New as Moths

Ever since Thea was born, the air outside my front door blinks with hundreds of tiny moths.  In the right sunlight, their wings silhouette open and close like a colony of beating hearts hung from the tree branches.  Remy has a miniature net and whenever I can't find him in the house, I spy him through the screen door working silently with his net casting wildly through the air.  Sometimes he actually catches the flickering bugs and sometimes he just squishes them and smears their soft, brown dust across his pudgy hands. He doesn't yet know the difference between ending something and simply capturing it.

Gentle, little Thea Harper has been with us just a little over three weeks now, and I find myself already feeling nostalgic for the tiny, soft body she hasn't yet even begun to grow out of.   There is something magical in newness.  The kind of magic I thought I'd given up on when I was 25.  Not 25 for any particular reason, I just thought that I'd made up in my head the notion that the feeling really existed and that at 25, I'd finally grown up.

Today though, for a fleeting moment in particular, I was reminded that I was wrong to ever believe that life isn't full of quick, perfect moments, like the wings that spring open and closed before we can even stop to recognize what they are doing.  We were at a park, Remy was running through the grass and clover patches waving a stick in front of him and I was holding Thea who had just woken up.  She opened her eyes wide and slowly moved her rosebud lips into a little 'o'.  She spent a long time just looking up and after a time, I realized that the tree we were under, with its thousands of rustling leaves and lacy bits of sunshine coming through was just as new to her as she is new to me.  I thought to myself about how she is grasping the world, just a little bit at time, like the silent movement of moth wings, or the momentary snippets of sunlight through the leaves.  And though this world won't make sense to her for some time, there is no harm in letting its newness wrap itself around her.

I guess what really got to me this afternoon is the way these small things have always been around me, rustling in the wind or living out their short, moth lives, and I don't think I even noticed them until I saw tiny people grasping at them as if there was nothing else more important or magical in all the world.  So yes, there is beauty in newness, but that doesn't necessarily mean we have to obtain something new to take part in the magic that has been there all along.

Song: Featherstone by Paper Kites

Back to Words

For the past months I've told myself that when my little girl is born, I'd get back to words.  I'm not sure why I wanted to wait until she was here with me before I started to write again, except that it has to do with making her proud.  A while ago a friend went to hear a wise woman speak at a conference.  This friend told me that the thing she took away from thewoman's speech was the call and need for women to tell their stories, and not just tell them, but write them. A tangible history: one we can hold between our fingers and read the words aloud to. Hear our own histories and those of others.Many years ago I was involved in an art project that took me to Portland, Provo and New York City with a tape recorder, a polaroid camera and a request:  tell me about your name.  Everyone had something to say because everyone had a name.  The request wasn't exclusive to sociality, money, appearance or anything else, just, tell me about your name.  I found myself on more than a few occasions getting choked up as we talked to strangers on the steps of the MOMA, at the farmer's market in Portland, in the parks, and while we sat in restaurants eating our lunch.  I think I was moved by the fact that every person not only had a story, but had a story full of depth and fiber that wanted to be told and listened to. I think I've told myself that I'll tell my stories again now that baby Thea Harper is here because I want very much for her to tell her own, and I love that I can be at the beginning of it.

Letting Be Strong.

Last summer I went on the longest hike of my life.  Not because it was hard, but because I thought we were going on a short hike, and we didn't bring water, and it was swampy summer, and it turned out, the hike wasn't all that pretty.  A lot of tromping through dusty trails in a burned out forest.  However, this day and this hike meant a lot to me.  It was just Carl, Remy and I.  I put Remy in a carrier on my chest.  Carl helped me adjust the straps and buckle the clasp firmly against my back.  Remy cried, I bounced him and we kept walking, finally he fell asleep and his sweaty blonde head rested against my chest.  I was hot as ever.  I was so hot, and Remy was heavy.  His sleepy weight pulled against the tops of my shoulders and his soft, heater body pressed against mine.  We passed a wooden sign with an archaic '3.5 miles' carved into it with an arrow pointing the way we were hiking.  A horse passed us on the trail and I covered Remy's head as powdery dust wafted over us.

'This is not fun,' I thought.  But we kept walking because we had no choice. As we wound through the meadows and blackened trees, I remember I stopped hearing what Carl was talking to me about and had a distinct glow of gratitude.  Not gratitude for nature, or for family vacations, but gratitude because Carl was allowing me to be strong.  He had just spent weeks in the Nevada mountains literally climbing up and down mountains gathering rock samples for his research.  He is a good hiker, and full of stamina.  I don't know if it was a conscious decision he made to let me carry Remy in the heat, or even if it was something I insisted on,  (which is more likely the case), but either way, Carl did not object to, nor interfere with my sacred moment of both suffering and total joy at doing something hard by taking Remy from me.  

I didn't mention the moment then, and I don't know that I have since, but I think about it often.  It has become a useful metaphor for me.  I remember in that moment having access to greater empathy and understanding of people I had previously not. It was brief, and still incomparable, but real for me.   If you know me, you know that I mention pioneer women often, because I think about them at least a few times a week.  How did pregnant women walk across the plains?!  with other children!? lots of other children!?  without toothpaste?! or good shoes?! etc....it blows my mind, and then I usually conclude that I either feel terrible for them and/or I would never be able to do something like that myself.
In that moment on our hot, dusty hike though, I did have a small glimpse of what they might have felt, or what all sufferers might feel in some way.  Hard things are hard, and not fun, but they connect us to each other, and to ourselves.  Terryl Givens says, "There is solace in the solidarity of the desolate." The hot hike liberated my sense of belonging and built my confidence so that I felt I might have greater capacity to connect to people i want to understand and love.  I am grateful that Carl believed in my ability to be strong.

Relative to 98% of the world, I know so little about suffering, and so I don't want to downplay or make light of what it is for other individuals, but I do know that in my own minute bouts of suffering, I am not left to simply suffer for very long.  I find the weight of suffering to be woven with rich threads of the sacred.

I once hurt a friend by my actions, and not just a friend, but a very close friend, probably the closest friend I've ever had.  I hurt her in a way that she didn't want to talk to me or see me, and yet, I felt this intense need to fix things, to mend her myself.  I spent a lot of time praying about what I should do, and each time I felt so strongly that she was taken care of and that it wasn't my place to take away the sacredness of her personal strife.  I sensed that although maybe I could have found a way to fix things in a jiffy, I would be robbing her of something far more important by doing so.   I would have robbed her of the opportunity to become stronger.   And the same went for me.  It was a terrible, crushing time for me.  I lived with a knot in my stomach. I literally thought I would be crushed under the weight of a new life in the which things would not be the same as they were before.  But I did live through it, and I  recognize distinct ways in which I am a better person for having been allowed to suffer as well.   I don't think this is the right response in every situation, but I've learned over the years that not all difficulty is bad, some is, and we should do what we can to help, but I suppose I'm thinking more of the quotidian difficulties.  I'm grateful that a super mom hero does not swoop down into my house every time I think I can't handle being a mom anymore.  I'm grateful that Remy doesn't go away, but continues to be right next to me (literally, my house is small), and allows me to work through things, his presence asks me to be strong. It seems then, that an important part of being allowed to be strong, is the opportunity to acknowledge that something is hard. In Mormon Culture, we are an optimistic and faith-filled people, and it is sometimes easy to say that a trial is a 'blessing' or that there 'must be something we need to learn.' I don't doubt those things, and I think they are true, but I believe we also need space to say that something is hard, because how can we know we are strong, if we don't acknowledge its difficulty?

I used to try and be a fixer of everything and everyone.  I wanted to make everything right always, no matter the cost.  As I've grown older, and I hope not less loving, I've made peace with allowing people to be strong out of a love for them. I've also come to realize this is not easy, but still, I'd want them to do the same for me.  

Risk

I've taken a break from writing.  Not purposely.  I think I just got to sweeping the kitchen floor, stuffing unfolded laundry into drawers, and reading Remy Animalia dozens of times a day, and then I forgot that writing is a comrade I have.  I've missed it.  I've missed the little door in my brain that opens up when I write.  I'm also pregnant, and terrible at announcing things, so I'll just slip that in there just the way I slipped it into casual conversation with my family.  I've been sick and tired, which does not cancel out so happy and so excited, but does make one less productive.

The other night I told Carl that I was turning into someone who just wants to watch an episode of the Colbert Report and be in bed by 9:30 every night, and this proclamation was not without a heavy note of despair.  "What's so wrong with that?" he said.  To which I responded in my head, "nothing." but in a way, a lot of things.  I, along with every other mother of young kids, or person responsible for things other than your dreams, worry that I am watching all the grand ideas I thought I would do, slip away.  And not necessarily in the way that they are slipping through my fingers and there's nothing for me to do about it, but some in the way that I am simply waving them on with the explanation that now is not the time.  Sometimes it seems like they dance away in bright colors and turn to ask me, "are you sure you don't want to join?" and then I look at Remy, and I say to them "no thank you, I'm working on something else."  This is a both a refining and sanctifying process.

I went to a lecture by Terryl Givens and his wife this week.  Near the end of his lecture he said, "Good questions require risk.  Every question, every reach for discovery becomes an act of faith." That line hit me like a bursting star inside my chest.  It seemed so true, and also requiring much bravery.  I thought about the inherent risk in asking the question, "What am I supposed to do with my time right now?"  That is a hard question, and carries perhaps the most risk, because the answer might not be perfect and it might not be to pursue the dreams I thought were vital to hold on to. But I'm certain it is a good answer, probably one far better than I could have come up with.

From David Foster Wallace's commencement speech at Kenyon University in 2005:  

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship... And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you...

 The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self...

  But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. 

I am grateful for the inherent risks my simple life asks me to take.  Bringing another baby to our family is a risk in many ways.  Probably for that baby, and for us.  I know my life will change, and maybe more of the things I thought of as important to accomplish will dance further away.  But in between that balance of certainty and the unknown lies a very vibrant, sometimes ethereal string of moments where all seems perfect, and maybe it doesn't just seem that way.  I find my life in this place often.  Between the moments of chaos and mess, trouble and worry, I find this place where Remy runs around with chocolate on his cheeks, and Carl dings his bike bell when he rides around our corner, and I even make a good dinner sometimes. This place is quotidian, almost unmentionable, but I am finding that many dreams worth pursuing are.  More and more I am happier to ask the difficult questions, because they teach me who I am.

Turquoise

A woman in Tonapah, Nevada gave me a raw chunk of turquoise on a Sunday.  She asked me if I liked the light or dark, the green or blue and then she dug around the rubble of plastery rocks in an old plastic bag until she found the perfect piece. Deep, lake green with a rift of steamy blue.  The shape an upside-down house with stark inlets and points. A fracture near the bottom cracks outward toward the back where regular, grey rocks cover the colors like a dusty mask.  The turquoise, half the size of a plum seed, is the most opaque thing I've ever held.  I could never look through it, even if the brightest light were shining on the other side. Like every unknown thing could burrow itself inside that creamy color.  It is solid, and real and every bit tangible. Without a word, the woman from Tonapah with a husband who works the mines, sealed the lone rock in a cellophane bag and accepted our thanks, but no more.  I kept it in a special compartment in the glove box for the rest of the car trip home, and I pulled it out in Lee Vining, in Mammoth Lakes, in Yosemite, and in Modesto when it was almost too dark to see and we'd just cleaned throw up from Remy and the carseat for the sixth time that day.  Every time, I couldn't help but feel that the soft-armed woman living in the middle of the barren desert, would have made anyone feel so special.

A friend told me recently that in Cantonese, to spell or describe the word crisis one uses two different characters: danger and opportunity.  Just like she said she had, I thought about the possibilities for truth and for change in that statement over and over.   Because suddenly, the few things I could have pinned the word crisis to in my life no longer had endings in the word 'crisis', but move past a finality and open up into giant meadows I did not see were there through the thicket of trees I had my eyes so pressed to.

Another friend, who always has the right thing to say, wrote me an email in the which she ended with this: I know that to Remy and to Carl yours is the godliest face...Stand on the mount, proud.  

I have a perfect piece of turquoise that came from a rubble of ugly rocks, it is as smooth as the skin on the back of Remy's neck.  I know that the things I doubt or do not understand are not faulterings of my character, but something that happens to humans everywhere. A 'crisis' can be an opening up to an understanding even more beautiful and complex, and so there is no need to put all aside and only despair.  I remember now, that at least in moments, my face is the most godly to someone else.  And that is to celebrate!  I remembered tonight, even in writing, and re-writing that this world is a whole lot bigger than I ever anticipated, and it is not meant to be understood all at once.  Quick bits of thickest greens and blues sometimes make their way to my palm like omens.  I hold tightly to those.

I remembered a few things.

I used to be the cool older sister who took cool younger sister to small, hip music shows where I knew everyone and everyone knew me.  This past Friday night I was nervous as I drove to a familiar gathering spot of yesteryear for a show with a band I've been listening to for nearly a decade.  Bayley, my younger, and incredibly cool sister, was with me.  I was terrified I would show up and not only would it be totally apparent that I was mommed out, but I was worried I wouldn't know anyone, that all coolness had been packed away a few years ago, and Bayley would witness it all.  As soon as I walked up to the house and saw endeared, comfortable faces gathered in circles on the grass and on the front porch steps, I was at home.  I knew most of the people there and it was surprising to me to realize that a lot of us had the look of "I can't stay out too late, my baby is at home with a sitter."  We were all five years older and it was okay.

All through high school and college I hated when people called me "woman" or "lady".  I always corrected them.  "Girl", I would say.  "I'm just a girl."  I also avoided anything that would connote "woman": purses, lipstick, high heels, matching clothes.  The idea of growing up has perpetually scared me.  I can't quite put my finger on it. The thing about it that scares me.  Maybe it's the imagined inevitable.  The perceived notion that I will fall further from adventure and the glory of activist college days and just become another in the rank of mom, or mormon, or lady.  When I sit down and explain this, and then look at the evidence of good people around me, I realize my case is pretty weak.  Nonetheless, it is an internal swoshing that unsteadies me at times.

The show started and I sat against a wall and felt everything with ease.  The dim lights, the wood floor, so many pairs of skinny jeans, shoulder bags and self haircuts.  For a half hour I felt a return to what motivates me to create, to be a part of something.  For some time I haven't felt this at church, or at home on my own when I sit with my art supplies, or with my new friends in California.  It's not that I'm unhappy, I'm not.  I just haven't been able to stir myself to vigor, to staying up late to work on projects.  This little show, with an old friend singing new songs, and another old friend playing the bass, and two dozen old friends listening with me reminded me that we need spaces in which we create and appreciate each other.  In the same house, I had had two different art shows in years past.  I had taken my group of high school writing group girls to this place to talk about words and poetry when it was a letterpress studio.  I had worked, planned, sold my art at farmer's markets and even failed at projects with people in that room.  I felt a spirit there that night.  One that reminded me of things I already knew, but had forgotten:  that experiences with God and his goodness are not limited to religious contexts; that creating is worth the difficulties it proposes and that our creations don't have to be our magnum opus to be shared; that sharing the things we create (including our children) is meant to be done together, with old and new friends.

Nobody and Somebody.

For me, being a mother is becoming nobody and somebody at the same time.  Sometimes I step back from my life and see myself pushing Remy on a swing in a quiet courtyard.  In that moment, I simultaneously fill both roles.  I am insignificant in a lot of ways, but I am somebody to Remy.  More of a somebody than I've ever been for anyone.  The further I step back and watch the two of us, squinting a little in the sun, wondering what we will make for dinner, the more I realize that in the world, I am nobody.  I'm not nobody in a sad way, it's just the truth, and it is the truth for so many good folks. Perhaps this internal questioning is aggrandized partly because we reside on one of the most prestigious college campuses in the country and almost daily I find need to proffer up what I do, most often to myself, but sometimes to others as well.

A handful of people know what I do in a day, and only a couple of people know what I will ending up making for dinner, one of whom will most likely throw part of it on the floor.  In so many ways lately, I am stepping back and becoming a nobody in the world. This is both heartbreaking and wonderful to me.  I am charting waters I never thought I would sail.  I am navigating my understanding of my own importance in new ways.

I honestly spent a good part of my life believing that by the time I was thirty, I would be famous, or at least a little bit famous.  I thought I would have had dozens of art shows in big galleries and poems published in top journals.  I thought  I would be teaching at a university and living on fellowships.  Those things haven't happened in such big ways yet.  I haven't ruled them out, and I'm not discontent with the things I have done, but I am slowly taking steps back because I am working on becoming somebody in another world. I believe we all have people that need us to be somebody for them.

In this other world, the one in which I am a mom, I do many, many things that don't matter to anyone else except the person I do them for.  To Remy, and to Carl, I am somebody, and every day I am becoming more of a somebody to them.  I don't believe that following dreams/careers and being a mother are mutually exclusive.  I plan on integrating my worlds, but for now I can't be a somebody in both worlds.  I don't know how.


I sat down to draw today.  I laid out a piece of brown Neddegen paper on the floor, which is crisp, fibrous and perfect for thin lines.  I drew a little boy with blonde, wild hair in striped pajamas.  He was kneeling down and his hands were full of trinkets.  Then I heard Remy wake up from his nap, and drawing time ended.  Remy came downstairs and after gobbling a slice of honeydew, picked up my pencil with sticky hands and drew big wide circles on my paper.  Later, when I looked closer at what he'd done, I noticed that he had carefully drawn tiny, looping lines directly around and on top of my own little drawing of a boy.  It was as if he were trying to follow my hand, as if he knew his mother had been there working.  The world will never see that drawing because it is crumply, and sticky and drawn over.  But here I am, learning to be joyous in being the best nobody and the kindest somebody I know how to be.