Buddy, on field day. (After a very thorough warm up stretch. Gotta have your competetive edge, after all. These relays are VERY important.)
Bub, at her California Pizza Kitchen dinner--she won their box decorating contest this spring! Dinner for six! You go, girl!The door clicks, followed by the soft footfalls of six-year-old bare feet on the hardwood floor in the hall. There is a pause, then more shuffling. Another click. The quiet clamor back up the ladder to the top bunk. All is quiet. I can return to my book in peace.
I no sooner reconnect with the words on the page when a soft wail rises from my son's room. As my niece and nephew are spending the might, I get up immediately to both see who it is and to keep that one from waking the other. Another wail rises as I make my way into the darkness, trusting my ears, not my eyes, to lead me. They lead me to the top bunk.
It is, as I expected, my son who is quietly sobbing atop his loft. "Whatsa matter, Buddy?" I ask. "I don't know, I'm just sad," he sobs. I sweep him down out of his bunk so as to not awaken the one I know I will be less easily able to comfort, and I take him out into the hallway. We sit, his head in my neck, and I ask him why he's sad. He sniffles, wiping tears from his big, brown eyes. "I dunno," he chokes out. "I'm just sad. I'm really sad."
This is what I'm talking about.
So, why does this innocent, cheerful, albeit slightly sensitive child's tiny bright red apple fall so close to his mother's tree? Is it genetics? Learned behavior? Generational cursing? Self-pity? Lack of contentment? Poor nutrition?
I don't know, but I sure wish I did. For him. For me. For others.
What causes a child who has everything—loving (albeit imperfect) parents, a room full of toys, food in his belly, friends who seek him out, a roof over his head, a knowledge and certainty that he is loved—to go to bed, night after night, feeling sad to the point of tears?
What causes his mother to do the same?
Buddy, after Poppa knocked out his two front teeth last night! (In his defense, they were hanging by a thread anyway...)The car was quiet, save for the patter of rain on the windshield and the swooshing of wet tires speeding over wet roads. Quiet is not a normal occurrence in my life, especially not with both children in the car, and one having been caffeinated on an afternoon play date to boot. But today, it was eerily quiet, and it didn't take much to determine why. Bub was getting her pins out this afternoon, and both children were more than a little apprehensive.
For as brave as my daughter is in some areas, she is as proportionately a spaz in others. When people ask me why we've still not pierced her ears, I tell them the story of getting her five-year shots prior to entering kindergarten. I describe how the nurse put numbing cream on both arms, assuring her she wouldn't feel a thing. I tell them about how this same nurse (who, I might add, should be fired, or better yet, shot), gave her the worst shot first, which, coincidentally, cannot be administered through said numbing cream. Then, I describe how it took three nurses and forty-five minutes to get the last three shots into my daughter's arms. No, we'll not be piercing her ears anytime soon.
So, this same child went today to have her pins removed, after hearing war stories from every child in her fourth grade class about what it feels like to have pins pulled out. "It feels like someone twisting a door knob," Chloe explained. Domenic warned her, "There will be a lot of blood." Every child had a story, and each story was worse than the one before. I began to think perhaps I should have kept her home for a month.
When we were at the hospital, at the beginning of this little adventure, I chalked her hysterics and irrationality up to adrenaline and shock, mixed with a little morphine and the lack of anything to eat for the last several hours. I didn't expect to see that response from her again. I don't know what I was thinking.
As soon as the nurse began unknotting the sling, my daughter began to tremble, shaking from head to toe. They hadn't even touched her yet. When the nurse began to take off the bandages in order to take her back for x-rays, Bub began rocking and crying, telling her she didn't want to see it or take it out. Worried this trembling child was going to throw up on her, the nurse kicked the caretaking up a notch, talking her through each step and checking how she was doing with every new movement. Once assured that my daughter was not nauseous, just panicked, she began moving her toward the x-rays. "What are they gonna do, Momma? Is it going to hurt? What is it going to feel like? I don't want them to touch it, Momma." And then there was my Buddy, right behind me, reminding me, "Momma, I think we should pray…"
How my daughter managed to be so like me yet so unlike me is completely beyond my comprehension. I wouldn't have been caught dead at the top of a rope ladder, let alone climbing down it head first. That is her father's gene pool, through and through. Adventurous, athletic, and a little bit of a dare devil—they are two peas in the same pod. Fear doesn't really enter the equation, or at least it hasn't up until this point. But then there is my genetic contribution—the active imagination, the rapid-cycling what-ifs, the quiet, pent-up worry that is unable to be silenced with logic or rational thought, not to mention the powerful, insurmountable instinct to avoid pain at all possible costs. This is where my influence can be found.
My mom will readily tell you, nodding her head in my direction, "She was the same way." And she will tell you with an amused, slightly condescending smirk on her face, because I don't get it from my mother. My father is the worrier of the two, and she teases us both, though he gets the worst of it. And so it goes that my daughter, in this predicament because of the Rees genes, freaks out about it as a result of the Kaufman genes.
When it was all said and done, she confessed, over sundaes at Max and Erma's, "I don't know what I got so upset about. That really wasn't that big of a deal."
"You let your worried thoughts get the best of you," I responded, thumping her forehead, and she nodded, embarrassed and slightly amused with herself.
We will continue to work, in the days and months and years to come, on pushing back these thoughts. Fighting back with truth. Staying present in the moment. But for today, we're just glad it's over. I tucked her in to bed with the same prayer I've prayed every night since Palm Sunday—that the lessons learned here will stick. Obedience. Good judgment. Taking our thoughts captive. Trusting those who are caring for you. May they guide her actions in the years to come.
She's sleeping soundly now, spent after our two hour ordeal. She's propped the pillows back around her unsplinted arm, feeling vulnerable and uncertain. Her breath is full and deep, and her face is peaceful, all traces of worry erased. We've come full circle, and now, finally, all is quiet again.
I have fought this battle in my head, hidden in darkness, for far too long. I must bring it out into the open, into the light of truth, for the lies within to be exposed. But this openness, this fully exposing how wide and long and high and deep these issues run within me, is not something that comes easily. It is one thing to do it once I'm through it and on the other side, back "together" again. It is another to do it from the trenches—muddy and messy and up to my waist in the mire…
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She is not my oldest, longest friend, but she is perhaps my dearest. Ours was a friendship forged out of coming of age together—struggling together (as we still do now, come to think of it) to discover who we are, what is important, and where we fit into God's greater plan.Hol and I met the weekend of freshman orientation, as did my husband and I, and we have all been friends ever since. We schlepped through the valley together, ate smuggled-in homemade meals by candlelight in the Haven, sang in the Chorale, toilet papered upper classmen. We took long, meandering walks, stayed up 'till all hours of the night rearranging our dorm room (again), suffered through mandatory chapel (made more interesting by my creation of the "official" chapel poll), created "Primal Whine Therapy."
I carried her books when she burnt her foot with the hot pot, she listened to hours of debate over whether or not I wanted to date that geeky tenor with the big glasses and annoying sense of humor. I helped her pick out the dress for her senior recital, she suffered through my daily alarm clock ritual and still continues to speak to me, twenty-some years later. (Though she still knows better than to expect much out of me in the morning.)
We have been key players in "the best days of our lives." We went through all four years of college together, lived together for two of them. We weighed in on each others' prospective husbands. We stood up in each others weddings. We sang trios and duets at each other's churches. Our six-year-olds were born four days apart (funny how neither one of us could figure out why we didn't feel well that weekend we hiked Clifton Gorge). Despite three hours and a world of difference between our lives (but not our hearts), there is always a sense when we get together, whether here or there, of finally coming home. We had an all too brief time of homecoming this weekend, and now, as I make my way across I-70 toward the east, toward the place I call "home," I find myself desperately and heartbreakingly homesick.
There is a joy in the visiting, but always a sadness that lingers in the leaving. Would that I could coral all the people I love into a tight, tidy little area within arm's reach and keep them there forever. I know this is part of life. Sometimes we get to love people up close, sometimes we have to love them from afar. We take the moments we can steal and we savor them, hoping the flavor will linger on our tongue for a good, long while. Those moments are sometimes few and far between, but the commitment to maintain them remains. And should I ever be so fortunate as to have all the people I love all in the same place, you'll know where to find Holly. She'll be right next door, and I'll be in her kitchen watching her knead dough.
Yesterday, the streets were lined with skeletons—tall and bare and brown. Today, the same bodies are enfleshed with green leaf-lings, bones no longer visible. In an act of divine mystery sometime between the dark and the light, life burst forth into my neighborhood, catapulting us from winter into spring in one lone 24 hour period.
I lay on my bed, waiting for teeth to be brushed, and gaze out the open window, taking in the sights and sounds and smells and sensations of spring. Birds titter and call, fledgling leaves rustle in the gentle breeze. The setting sun casts a golden glow across the expanse, while the scent of crabapple blossoms drifts upward on the same sweet wind. A lover of green, I soak it all in.
Yesterday, the grand trees that dominate the landscape outside my window were still bare. Today, they are suddenly clothed. Just like that. Were that all transitions so sudden. Or perhaps at least a few. Perhaps.
The shower runs in the background, my six-year-old's soprano voice cutting through the buzz of the spray. No, it is a good thing not all transitions happen that quickly. Though should you ask me in another twelve years, I'm sure I'll tell you it happened overnight.
The light is fading, the twilight songs moving toward their finales. The breeze settles, and all is calm outside the bedroom window. The rich blue of the sky deepens, and, tonight, for the first time since last summer, there is green against its royal background. Bodies grow restless beyond the bedroom door, and the rites and passages of bedtime await less than patiently. I cast one last glance across the roof tops and tree tops, marveling at the difference one day makes. I leave my pen and paper, my twilight serenade, my moment of quiet reverie, and I go take advantage of this night, before it, too, has passed and become something new.
I'm convinced his entire goal is to make us cry. He always succeeds. Were it not for the fact that he is so likeable, I would really hate that about him.
He greeted us all with high fives as my kindergartener stepped off the bus this morning with 14 other similarly nervous-looking six-year-olds and quickly came and grabbed my hand. Despite the fact we've been in the elementary school every day of the last four school years, Buddy was now suddenly nervous. What seemed downright blasé this morning was now unnerving him in his quiet little way, and I allowed him to cling for a moment as we were ushered into our classroom.
The visit to first grade is an important rite of passage at our school, for both children and parents alike. Because the kindergarten is housed separately from the elementary school, the visit is intended to calm any fears that may arise as fall approaches by making known the big unknown, both for the little and the big in attendance. Introductions were made, buddies were assigned, and the exploration began as the parents were whisked off to meet with the principal in order to allow the children time to spread their wings and move toward the edge of their safe little kindergarten nests. Or at least that's what they'd have you believe. But I know better.
Because this is the point at which he always makes us cry.
Get the emotion out of the way now, and next fall won't be so hard. Perhaps that is his philosophy. But I know enough from the tears in his own eyes as he talks about his oldest son to know that he knows better. There will be tears now, and there will be tears later, and that's okay. But it's still not nice to deliberately make us cry.
He begins, as he always does, by cutting right to the truest, deepest question within our hearts. "Your child will be cared for here," he tells us. Four years ago, it was these words that dissolved me, as that was, indeed, my greatest fear. Would my quirky little bundle of energy and excitement be received and appreciated for the joy she could be, or would that spirit within her be squelched and drained? The answer, I learned very quickly, was the prior. So now, four years later, these questions are a moot point for this mother. I know my son will be cared for here. I don't worry about that at all. I'm just not ready for him to BE here yet.
"The umbilical cord was cut six years ago," he reminds us. This is the line that kills me this year. "They're not ours—they're merely entrusted to us for just a short time." I know this. I KNOW this. But that doesn't mean I LIKE it.
My baby is not a baby any longer, and despite my desperate longing for full days of being BY MY SELF, I am just not yet ready to let go. I don't want the years to keep moving on. I don't want to think about my baby going to school all day. I don't want to think about approaching Bub's last year in this building, about middle school, about being home alone, about outgrowing the sweet one on one hand-holding dates to the zoo, the conservatory, to COSI that I have loved for the last ten years. I know the next stage will be good and will have its own unique joys. I know this. But I liked THIS stage. And this stage is almost over.
He knows this. And rather than dance around it and pretend it doesn't exist, he brings it right out in the open for us to acknowledge and even bond over, knowing that it may mean tears for some. For many, even. I suppose that is a good thing. I suppose. But I sure am glad I won't have to do it again…
Not until fall, at least.
"There's nothing you can say, he told me with a shrug, looking intently into my tear-filled eyes with his own. "There's nothing you can say." And so I hugged him tightly, adding my tears to those already blended on the shoulder of his jacket, and I didn't say anything at all.
It was Good Friday. He had just lost his twelve year old daughter after a long, hard fight against the insidious evil that is cancer. There are no words for these moments. Only tears.
Tim was a friend and colleague. We had gone through grad school together, and despite a mutual disdain for one another at the very beginning, by the time we worked together there had grown a deep respect and an amusing fondness between us. Though I had moved away a year or so earlier, while Lin was in remission, I had kept abreast of Lin's recurrence through Tim's email updates, maintaining that connection within my heart. That Friday, my heart was aching with the need to speak something that could not be articulated, but only felt.
There is something about the silence of grief—the void created by loss—that compels those of us around to fill that space with well-meaning words. I felt it then, I feel it now. That helpless, I-want-to-make-it-all-better feeling that drives so much of what I write and say and do. But despite my clinical training and my carefully-crafted prose and even my very best intentions, I can't make anything better. And I can't quite come to peace with that.
I re-read my attempt to process another Good Friday funeral, and I find myself wanting to delete my words. "No, no, no—I said it all wrong," I think to myself. I remember Jill at women's group, this past week, graciously dodging our often mis-aimed attempts to say the right thing, and I wish I'd just never said anything at all.
I have to step back and remember who these words were really written for. Often the words we speak are often the words we ourselves need to hear. This was certainly the case with this post. As I wrestled with my own questions of faith, brought too close to the surface by David's death, I spoke, unaware, to the reassurances I, myself, needed to hear. Perhaps they will bless others, perhaps not. But my heart was more at peace for having written them.
Sometimes it is best to keep quiet. To listen, to cry, to hold. To not attempt to speak what is truly not speak-able. But sometimes our own hearts must grapple to put words to that which alludes words, no matter how clumsily we may do so. For me, it is this process within which God speaks the perfect Word, and that is, after all, what we're all longing to hear.
Bub and her new rad board. "Totally wicked."
Buddy's "spring" music program was tonight. Picked the suit out himself. And no, the pants aren't really that short.
Another meet on Sunday... Three blue ribbons and one red, including the blue for this event. Almost a clean sweep!
Snippets of converstations. Writing prompts. Half-finished poems. Book outlines. Amassed on sticky notes. Napkins. Torn off corners of church bulletins, school papers, scraps off the floor of the car. Entire notebooks, one-word reminders. I spent part of my weekend sorting these bits and pieces of paper into an organized format. At this point, I could take an idea a day and never write them all, and that doesn't even take into account their computerized counterparts stored in files on my hard drive. It is half exciting, half depressing. What if I can't bring life to it all?
How is this possible? How can it be that the child who couldn’t be still enough to lure the cat who couldn’t stand movement is now the one that the cat who won’t lay still for anyone lays quietly upon? Huh??? Who is this child? And who is this cat?
