circling

My kids are away. In just a day, I went to a Feldenkrais workshop, sat and talked to two women I met there, taught a yoga class, drank wine with a friend on a creekside patio, painted one wall of my son’s room, explored talks and articles online. I feel expanded, whole, peaceful.

The thought creeps in – it sometimes does:  What would life be like if I didn’t have kids? Time to meditate and read, unfolding into quiet and focus. I could backbend more deeply, quote from more books, eat more cleanly. It’s easy to imagine myself as a much calmer, less stretch-marked, serene and learned woman. And yet is that who I’d be?

This week someone I encountered through work was rather ungracious in a meeting. “She needs to have kids,” was my first reaction — which was an ungracious thought on multiple levels. Really, it was  shorthand for:  This woman needs to have her schedule revolve around someone else for a few days – or weeks, or years. She  needs to answer two questions at once while tying a shoe and trying to open a jam jar. She needs to keep a dog she doesn’t entirely want – and walk him and feed him and pay for his bills – because others have fallen in love with him. Give of yourself … let your hearten soften and your expectations both rise and fall in dramatically important ways.

Spiritual Mama part beams proudly at this thought. Exhausted Mama part wonders: But isn’t that exact giving — of time, energy, emotion —  what leaves you feeling malnourished?

——

“Why am I doing this?” I remember asking a friend when I was pregnant?
“What do you want?” he asked. 

“Enlightenment,” I half joked.

“You could climb Mt. Everest,” he said. “Or you could do this.” He gestured to my belly.

——

I get this. Hugely. Not a day goes by that I don’t wonder at my children. Even in their foulest moods – or mine! – there is at least a moment of recognition of their roles as teachers in my life – reminders of beauty, awakeners of compassion. This part of me has been awake for twelve years. Less available has been time for me to sit with own mind and heart, exploring their contours not in snatched moments but in expansive reverie. …Reverie that is only available to me through motherhood.

gratitude

Tonight I sat in an old theatre and listened to a singer who I’ve heard play dozens of times over more than two decades. His songs are more soulful now. Old tunes have been slowed down, less bounce and more wry reminiscence. Gone are the passionate love affairs and idyllic Midwestern stories of earlier years; in their places are songs of old bones and leaving the party – literally.

Sweeter than the music was being sandwiched between my daughter, Bella, and my love and partner, Chris. His arm hugged around me, and her head rested on my shoulder. When he reached past me to  stroke her hair, she leaned back to beam at him. I could not have been more content. Except perhaps when a song about old age and love prompted Chris to draw the crown of my head toward him for a kiss. Except perhaps when my almost-12-year-old daughter and I walked up the aisle (of the same theatre where I watched Grease six times the summer I was 12) and she interlaced our fingers and said, “I’m so glad I’m not embarrassed to hold hands in public.” Me too, my darling.

So thankful for the love tonight.

—–

Wash My Eyes

Wash my eyes that I may see
Yellow return to the willow tree
Open my ears that I may hear
The river running swift and clear
And please
Wash my eyes
And please
Open my ears

Wash this world that is one place
And wears a mad and fearful face
Let the cruel raging cease
Let these children sleep in peace
And please
Wash this world
And please
Let these children
Sleep in peace

- Greg Brown

typewriters and station wagons – ode to the swim moms

I remember Jane’s sleeveless, floral dresses, and her heavy arms and legs popping out either end of the billowy material. She wore flat sandals and heavy glasses. She was smart and gentle – a bit dry and on the quiet side. Her husband was much smaller. Even then I remember finding them oddly matched, not just physically but in demeanor. I wondered what Jane might be like if she’d married a different man. Her daughter was the best butterflyer on our team. Her name is still up on the scoreboard at the high school pool

I remember Margie, her mouth drawn at the sides, eyes scrinched, like she was always in the midst of trying to figure out a difficult math problem. She smoked a lot – there was a lot more smoking at swim meets in the 70s than there is today. Her blonde hair had a dyed yellow tint, and her husband was the head of a hospital. He was neither handsome nor very friendly, but even as a kid I could tell he was an alpha dog .

I remember Kay, small and efficient. She wore her official’s whites at all of the meets, peering out from a sun visor as she whistled swimmers to attention. She disqualified me once. I couldn’t believe it — one of my best friend’s moms. And yet best friend wasn’t quite right because Kara scared me. She beat me again and again in Monopoly, not to mention the IM and the backstroke – always quite happy at her victories.

I remember Gina, also in large dresses but over Mediterranean skin and with an east coast air that pronounced her not from Iowa. One hot July night when she was driving home a station wagon full of us kids from a swim meet in another town –  she must have volunteered to drive us all back because surely there’d been other parents around that day – she stopped and picked up a hitchhiker. We’d all been belting out “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the radio turned up higher than it ever was in my parents’ car. Her son Seth, who would spend most of high school smoking pot and winning debate tournaments, was in the front seat inching the volume up to match Freddy Mercury’s falsetto. When we stopped on the side of the highway, all of us backseat passengers fell silent, and the radio was turned down to a murmur:  I’m just a poor boy from a poor family. The hitchhiker got in, hugging his backpack to his belly because there was no room to spare – kids and wet towels everywhere. “Where’re you from?” asked Gina, shifting the wagon back on to the road as though this was the most natural conversation she’d had all day. Just as natural as exchanging 100 free times or asking the coach when warms up would be the next tomorrow.

I remember Cheryl – the Mormon. She was hands down the most approachable of the swim moms.  One summer, I had a crush on her son. I remember my mom getting all teary when they moved to Utah, and I was surprised:  Moms cried about other moms leaving?

I remember my mom, only in her early 30s then. Hair tied back. Smoking. A concentrated look as she typed.

They all typed. All of these women would come and set up on our screened porch or in another person’s living room, lugging typewriters and sharing bottles of white out. There were cans of pop and iced tea sweating on the vinyl tops of the card tables. I don’t remember music, just the clatter and bells of the typewriters And the talk – gossip, joking, conferring.

All of this to get a swim meet ready. To make a program. For a bunch of permanently wet kids, who would check it only to transfer its most vital information to the backs of their hands in permanent  marker. For coaches – almost all of them men – to grip, jot times in, and use as a megaphone while hollering at kids coming down Lane 8 who would never be Mark Spitz.

Now I’m at the pool a lot of days and many weekends. Meets are different places – parents and kids alike huddled over iPads instead of card games and upper-level swimmers (or even just those who aspire to be upper-level) spending hundreds of dollars on a skimpy swim suit. But there’s still a group of parents getting it all done – including many more dads. Some of the work is the same – selling doughnuts doesn’t really change. Putting a program together, though, is now a relatively pain-free job that takes one person. Creating the cover is the hardest part. The bulk of it – pages and pages of kids’ names, lane and heat assignments, club abbreviations, and times is completed by computer.

But in 1976 it was done by a group of women who came from different places and would go their own ways — Jane moved to New Mexico, Gina came out of the closet and switched from mumus to bib overalls. When I was about ten and eleven years old, though, these women were invincible and there only for us. I had the tiniest hint of an idea that they might have lives beyond their kids, their husbands and the pool –  but mainly I was pretty convinced that they’d always be there typing up names, collating times, and driving station wagons.

a million mornings

I couldn’t even see Tobey in his bed this morning, he was so snuggled down into the blankets, buffeted against the crisp breeze. We’d propped open the window in yesterday’s warmth – not even a screen on it yet – and now the curtain was billowing in and out, breathing in the cool air. I could hear birds outside and the occasional car passing, the spokes of a bike, a dog in a neighbor’s yard barking to be let back inside. I knew that in less than a half hour my son would be downstairs eating breakfast, gathering his backpack, finding his skateboard, asking about his afternoon schedule, heading toward his  nearly 10-year old self, the one who says things like he did last night:  ”It’s not yet a very evolved idea…” The one who  has drawing wars and wonders about Osama bin Laden and the stock market. The one who is eager to do better at math and yet forgets his homework many days.

But just now he was this small creature, saturated in morning’s deepest sleep, spring’s wind on his  hair, and an echo of much younger days clinging to him. Days when I would wake him and we’d explore. Days when the arrival of the street sweeper or some work guys cleaning out the sewers was excitement. Days when I’d pack him up and we’d go hiking through the just greening woods. Days when peanut butter and jelly was always enough.

When he was about three, I took him to get a pair of shoes. The clerk, a college-aged man, was watching my son as though he was an exotic or slightly distasteful animal. “Will he even remember this?” he asked. It was a more existential question than I’d expected and I wasn’t entirely certain of his meaning. “You mean  now…this moment…buying shoes?” I tried to clarify. Though my daughter says she remembers her birth, I did  not think that this exact shoe purchase would probably rate in my son’s memory bank, so I told the young man as much – “Seems doubtful.”

The clerk frowned as my son stomped around in the new sandals, looking at his tiny rounded feet; “What’s it all worth then? I mean taking them places and reading to them…. they don’t even remember it.”

And the scary part is that neither do I. Millions of tiny moments like this morning in bed – millions of hugs and smiles and expressions of pleasure, funny laughs, unexpected words of wisdom, running in the rain, running on beaches, running from me, running to me; firsts of every ilk – first teeth, first steps, first eggs cooked alone, first cell phone text, first slow dance, first days and first nights – so many a blur. And yet they all come together and form some beautiful, pointilist whole. Each spring morning is more precious because of the eight that went before. Each first day of school more incredible because of the others. Each more fleeting and yet also more felt. Good morning, Tobey Michael, you who will conquer the world and also feel its pain; good morning,  my darling. Seize the day.

spiders

by Odilon Redon

My son looks up at the courthouse flag. “It’s halfway down. Someone died…”

He stares out the rain-splattered window as I concentrate on parallel parking. “Oh, I know. It’s for Boston. They’ll leave it down one day for each person who died.”

He’s certain of this, as he is of so many things these days. His questions have largely gone beyond me – the intricacies of the stock market, the distance of new planets.  In their places are statements.

“They did that with Colorado, too.”

How odd, I think, to be nine-years old and already have multiple mass shootings and acts of terror as a point of common reference. I try not to think:  how awful. I try to be curious, to touch in with my own murky and yet emotion-laden memories of Watergate and Uganda and the Munich Olympics.

I wonder how “Boston” is settling in him and remember  a conversation with a friend that morning in which she told me about everyone in their church writing down their fears and then burning them. She was surprised by some of her kids’ fears.

“What are you afraid of?” I ask him – again, curious, not fearful of what he might say.

His answer is unhesitant:  ”Spiders.”

“Anything else?” He names some more bugs. “Anything human made?”

He thinks and thinks. Then shrugs. “No. There’s really nothing as scary as spiders.” He gives me a look to say duh.

“Do you think everyone is afraid of something?” I ask – and this time I do have agenda.

He is unsure. So I come in with my grown up answer.  Yes,  I think everyone is. A lot of people are afraid to be alone – and for many of us this may be the greatest fear of all.

His face gets wide with surprise, his eyebrows arch up as though I just told him the salary of a professional athlete or the amount of space trash orbiting earth.

“How could anyone be alone?” he asks. He cannot fathom being totally unattached, floating alone in the world without connections.

This is when it occurs to me that all of the adults in his life have done an admirable job. That my son is brave and sweet, albeit with his 9-year old sass. That “spiders” may be about the happiest answer one could have.

And some day he might hold a spider on his fingertip with wonder.

finding the groove

We all have some mental stutter – right? – that pattern that comes up and comes up – the scratch in our vinyl surface where the needle gets caught. It gives us an authentic sound – it’s better than Memorex – even if that sticking spot can be annoying as hell. Sometimes we don’t even see them – our tendencies, our habits, our repetitions – while others we face again and again. Exhausting and yet rife with possibility.

At a therapeutic yoga training last week with a group of yogis, nurses, and physical therapists I put my hands on the shoulders of an Ashtangi/musician, cradled the head  of a mom who had just gotten some hard news about her son, and rubbed the brow of a strong young woman who had a perpetual smile on her face. In each person, I could feel and hear some of their bumps and cracks, the places where they repeat-repeat-repeat their energy; the narrow spots where it gets stuck and the spaces that widen up and make room for relaxation.

So why at 3:00 AM do I get this “holy fuck why am I so alone?” feeling? It’s my skipping spot, learned early in childhood – a ding from being an only child, perhaps, or some other ancient wound. It doesn’t really matter how it happened, just a gentle reminder that it’s there, this deep groove on my vinyl.

And then I recall that I can place a warm palm on this place and breathe into it just as all of those people melted under my touch – each of us just yearning for that point of connection. It’s not always easy, but in the murky gauze of late night, I remind myself that I am that physical therapist in Minneapolis on the juice detox. I am the 3rd grade teacher giving little carved animals to her class that she bought for them on her trip to Mexico. I am the yogi-healer from Santa Barbara who has had three bouts of cancer and yet glows with optimism. I am my golden-eyed dog asleep downstairs, and the cherry tree out in the yard that’s yearning to blossom despite this long, cold spring.

Holy fuck, we are all one is a lot harder for my linear, pragmatically Midwestern brain to grasp. But my heart knows it and longs for this groove. C’mon needle, skip on over.

icy patch

Remember kissing madly in the kitchen in the first month of our love? Even then, I’m sure both of us would  have said there would be hard times.

We knew about the invisible icy patch on the sidewalk, the cancerous mole masquerading as a freckle, the burning hot handle grabbed unmindfully.

Delirious with love but clear eyed, we vowed to stay awake, to throw narratives out the window.

 

The worst thing about an icy patch, it turns out, is not the painful bruise it leaves but the surprise of falling. And then the way you walk too gingerly, fearing a repetition.

 

The ground was solid. Our footing was sure.

To trip and feel it all go out from under -

Every kiss, the meals shared, the curled up Saturday nights,

everything that had seemed so certain -

has taken some breath out of me.

I wake up  now and know how tenuous it all is. Your eyes. My hands.

****

Sitting in the hospice room of a dear friend, listening as she ruminated about late night television,

the girl who had helped her up at 3 AM,

the refreshing coldness from her open window.

Her blue, artist eyes wandered and then focused again, seeing every pattern.

She spoke about her husband of decades and his failing  memory, though she was loathe to say “Alzheimer’s” into the sterile nursing home room.

As if on queue, he arrived. Standing in his winter parka, he filled the small room with his rugged, big frame; even at his age, he looked like the hiker he’d long been.

I could not help but to watch and feed my own heart when he sat on the bed and kissed her.

“I love you” he said; “I love you,” she said.

Then they slowly unwound what had occurred since they’d seen each other last – comparing notes of what they’d each eaten, with whom they’d each spoken.

Over the years, they must have grown tired of that exchange. How many lunches had been described, how many daily tallies shared.

Surely, there had been icy patches.

But what comfort there was in the spare simplicity of that kiss, sweeter and deeper than any exchanged in love’s earliest, sunniest days.

***

You play songs from your rollerskating youth:   ”I want to hold you ’til the fear in me subsides.”

Some days I fear you losing your memory, or my body failing. So much to fear.

But more so, I fear not having that kiss made up of a hundred thousand I love you’s and a thousand sliced apples and a hundred dog walks.

I love you, I want to say with wane light in my eyes. Tell me about your day.

master teacher

Some realizations I’ve had while working with chronic pain.

1.  An ‘aha’ moment during the 21-day meditation series I’ve been doing:  Can you see whatever part of you is in pain as a dear friend, not as something that is ‘wrong’ or needs to be fixed, but as a part that deserves love and is there next to you on this journey?

2.  When you are in ongoing, daily pain, you are vulnerable, grasping at straws for teachers and healers. This is how people find the madman in the desert and become his disciple. This is how people punch in their credit card number in the middle of the night to buy the exorbitant, untested elixir that glows on the computer screen.  You hope that the teachers you find have integrity; you try to improve your barometer so that you can tell when they do not.

3.  “You have permission to create, to speak up, and stand up. You have permission to be generous, to fail, and to be vulnerable. You have permission to own your words, to matter and to help. No need to wait.” – Seth Godin

4.  After a session with a fellow yoga teacher who also guides Pilates:  “What would it be like not to do yoga for awhile? Maybe a month?” I remember a therapist who once asked me what it would be like not to write. I realize how much self-identity is wrapped up in yoga; how much daily habit of the body is involved. This awareness is my present yoga.

5.  Sitting on the floor of the studio of a longtime teacher, I talk about a polarity that resides in me. On one hand, a part that wants an Answer. She is seeking someone who can lay hands on this pain and make it better. She’s a very young part who wants to be taken care of, who wants to believe it can all be fixed, and she works opposite – yin/yang like – a more teenaged part who rolls her eyes and picks at her nails and shrugs, “There are no answers. No one is that good.”

My friend and teacher nods, her eyes kind with recognition. She reminds me that I’ve been doing this – this being yoga and meditation and movement and going inside to listen to my body/mind – for more than 20 years. “You are a master teacher,” she says simply. This undoes me. Part of me squirms, hoping that this is not true because if it is true then I can no longer seek the Wizard. If it is true, I am here with me. But firmly, my friend-teacher is telling me that I have the answers I need. Firmly, she offers me my Self.

6.  “It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.” – Wendell Barry.

authentically weird

Last night I was at the school carnival. It was my daughter’s last cake walk as a student there. No more duck ponds; we’re even bored by the 5th-6th grade dance room. She and the other 6th graders now tramp through the building like giants in Munchkinland. When she was in preschool and I was so excited for her to start Kindergarten that I took her and her even littler brother to the carnival, only to be overwhelmed by posses of 10 and 11-year old boys rough-housing through the hallways, and gaggles of girls in make up laughing their way hysterically up and down the stairways. Insiders with a secret.

Seven carnivals later, I felt just as much an outsider last night. I took up my role as a door checker in one of the classroom activities and remained there all night, thankful for a niche but still feeling like the oddball who wasn’t laughing, the mom who hadn’t donned lipstick, the introvert stuck in the Fun House.

“In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.” – Ram Dass

Everyone else seemed happy, in line, of a sort, part of the crowd. Everyone else seemed comfortable with the kids’ high energy. Everyone else seemed ok with the sideways glancing, cell phone-clutching pre-teen set.

This morning I woke up to a text written from a friend at 1:20 AM. She apologized for not finding me at the carnival. She explained that she’d planted herself in the gym and hadn’t moved because she’d been too “overwhelmed.” I was so thankful to know that someone in another part of the building had been experiencing this too that I exclaimed thank you over my morning mug of tea.

We forget that we are not alone in our feelings of oddness, loneliness, awkwardness, shame, sadness, shyness, quietness. (Name your -ness.) We are all weird. We tell our kids that it’s ok to feel what they’re feeling in part because someone else is surely feeling it, too. But then we isolate ourselves; we forget this is still true when we’re 30 or 40 or 50. I remember my grandmother telling me about the dining room in her the independent living center where she has an apartment, and the dynamics sounded like nothing so much as junior high. There are still cliques when you’re 80.

How many times have I interviewed someone and after I admitted to something potentially shameful in my life – a transgression, a darkness – they’ve suddenly admitted to the same? Yes, I had an affair, a cocaine addiction, a suicidal brother, dropped out of college, hid from my kid, thought I was going crazy and googled “panic attack,” abused my ADD meds, had an abortion, drank too much, threw up too often.

I love the scene in Silver Lining Playbook when the two main characters – both awkward and angry and outcast – meet at a dinner party where they’re supposed to be “good,” then much to their hosts’ discomfort start animatedly comparing medications. Most of my closest friends are people with whom I have had a similar exchange – a moment when things transport from the pleasant and the accepted to the out-loud acknowledgement of, yes, me too!  Part of it is recognizing a fellow traveler; part of it is recognizing someone else who is brave enough to put their stuff out there. And I totally remember those moments of trust and openness – where we stood on the side road near the duck pond when she told me this or the moment on the playground when she told me that.

Authenticity is the sticky place where friendships are made and trust built. We feel alive there. And though it’s scary, it’s also surprisingly safe – a space where others are honest builds more honesty with ourselves.

Two examples of this from recent life. My partner and I have been tiptoeing around each other a bit lately. Or just as bad – throwing clumsy boulders. We’re too raw and exhausted to sit down with the necessary silence to ground ourselves and to be present for one another. But this weekend he was away and we used chat and email – the mediums of our first days. Nothing long or dramatic, but in that simple space of type on screen we were able to put down honest words. I could feel more truth than we’d had in some time. Each of us breathed into the recognition and acceptance and, yes, the safety of knowing that the other was fully there. I know I felt renewed connection to his authentic heart and voice.

And this:  I wrote a paragraph about who I am as a writer the other day. It was work-related and the kind of thing that I’d usually craft with a bit of gloss and an eye toward appearing professional. I was surprised when this sentence landed on the page: Representing the authentic voice is a guiding goal.  I was equally surprised when I thought, “Heck yeah!” and kept it there. Daring to let the mala beads or the tattoo or the scar show under shirt collar. Daring to be.

——–

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

 

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

 

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

 

is too small for you.

 

~ David Whyte 

dream higher

The only reason you’re not the real deal is because you don’t believe you’re the real deal. – A thought that came to me while walking the dog.

Dream higher. – A thought that came to me while writing my annual job review.

For someone who doesn’t dream very much – my nights are dark patches that start when I turn out the light and end when morning peels back my eyelids – higher isn’t really all that much. It’s the high dive versus the flat board that hovers right over the water. It’s a crop duster versus a trampoline.

But what if I went all the way to the top, to the platform that seems to hover just beneath the ceiling, the one where you have to point your toes on the way down so the soles of your feet don’t burn. What if I took the shuttle out of the stratosphere?

When my daughter was very young and I’d lost a bunch of weight, I treated myself with a yellow eyelet summer dress. It was different than most of my clothes – more feminine and form fitting, more expensive. The dress disappeared after a few years. I don’t even have a photo of myself in it – it’s just gone. Only I could lose a dress, I tell myself. You lost it, part of me says, because you didn’t deserve it.

But then another part of me speaks up:  You’ll find a better dress.