Frozen

January 21st, 2008
Musings

It’s snowing here today. I woke up to six inches of white covering the landscape, softening its angles, blurring its lines. More snow is falling, down and sideways, blown by frigid air.

Today, we’re staying in. It’s a holiday, and my husband and kids are home. Seven of the nine of us are sick. We’ll drink Lemon Zinger herbal tea and eat saltines. We’ll sip ginger ale and eat Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. We’ll watch movies, curled up on the couches with our blankets, and be glad we’re not out in the cold. Maybe if we weren’t sick we’d pull on our gloves and hats and boots and build a family of snowmen in our backyard. There’s enough snow to make nine, one for each of us, a frozen version of our family. Or maybe we’d grab our snow saucers and head for the park with the big hill, where dozens of kids are probably gathered right now, bright-colored caps making streaks of color as they fly down the slope, gasping and laughing. Before we did that, though, we’d put on our suits and dresses and heavy coats and head for church, van wheels sliding on the ice, for the funeral.

Harrison was nineteen, maybe twenty. Very handsome. Quick, strong, vibrant–until leukemia sapped life from the very marrow of his bones. They gave him new marrow, liquid hope. But it was not enough.

My kids prayed for him, fasted for him. They didn’t really know him, but they knew his mother, and they knew cancer was something serious enough to go hungry for. Saturday night, right after family prayer, I told them he had died. I didn’t want to. They were already weak, feverish, vulnerable. But they needed to know.

“I prayed for him,” Christine said. “I thought he would get better.”

It was a risk, involving my kids in Harrison’s illness. From the start I wondered how it would end, and what I would say if it ended in death. And there are things to say to Christine–that her prayers were pure, and loving, and good. That her prayers helped comfort him.

There are things to say to Harrison’s parents, too. That their son was pure, and loving, and good. That we will do all we can to comfort them. Hundreds of people are gathering, even as I type, even as the pan of potato casserole for the wake browns in my oven, to comfort them.

Even so, they must stand in the frigid air today, and commit their son’s cold body to the earth. Nobody can save them from that. And afterward, all the people surrounding them will join them for a meal, breaking bread together in shared loss, and then get in their cars and go home, to their own lives. They’ll sit on the couch and turn on the TV, curled up in a blanket. Or they’ll pull out their sleds and snowballing gloves. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It will not do Harrison any good for his neighbors to live less.

But his parents will live less, for a time. And they will live differently, for the rest of their days.

It’s snowing here today.

Fleshy Tablets

July 23rd, 2007
Spirituality

I have a tattoo on my left ankle.

A crucifix, blue-black, one inch long. A punk crucifix, anti-religious, if anything. Homemade, in 1988. President Hinckley hadn’t yet made his pronouncement against tattooing, but even if he had, it wouldn’t have stopped me. In fact, I would have been all the more eager to grab a needle.

My kids hate the tattoo. They’ve had a dozen or more lessons on bodies-as-temples, and they’re pretty freaked about the “graffiti” on mine. Every few months or so, they notice the ink on my ankle and remind me that tattooing is wrong. And whenever we pass the Laser Tattoo Removal billboard on I-15, one of the kids inevitably comments, “That’s for you, Mom.” They don’t like their mother wearing a mark of disobedience.

I can sympathize. Once I escaped the misery that spawned the tattoo, I hated it myself. It was a token of a time I wanted to forget, a time of deep unhappiness, self-destruction, shame. A time when I happily punctured my own skin with a needle rapid as a woodpecker, driving ink below the surface in an attempt to impress my peers, and myself.

I’ve spent many years hiding the mark with socks and band-aids. I’ve made a point to cross my ankles right-over-left, especially at church, to keep it out of easy view. I’ve wished I had the cash to get the thing lasered off, to burn the dark skin and darker memories into oblivion. Even when tattoos became hip, I still wanted mine gone. It’s hardly a nifty little butterfly.

But a few weeks ago, as I drove past that I-15 billboard, I realized things have changed, in more ways than one. These days I can afford a few hundred dollars for a little skin scorching. But I don’t want to do it.

I like my tattoo.

No, I don’t like the way it looks. As I’ve aged the lines of the crucifix have fuzzed a bit, making it appear especially crude; purple spider veins have crawled their way around it, like bloody vines. It’s undeniably ugly. But I no longer want to forget the ugliness in my past. By remembering, I also remember how God grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and lifted me out of that hell. I remember the saviors God sent to me, wearing all kinds of unlikely disguises. And I remember One in particular.

Funny, that I’ve embraced the sole Christian religion that doesn’t embrace the crucifix as a visual symbol of their faith. In their focus on the living Christ, Mormons don’t wear crosses around their necks. But I’m not sorry that I have one engraved on my body. And I will teach my children why. I will teach them that redemption must be remembered, and not only on Sunday. Every day.

Like yesterday. I was visiting teaching Amy, a single mother, a grandmother, and a heroin addict fresh out of rehab. We wrote letters to each other while she was in her treatment program and began face-to-face visits last month, when she finished. She’s an amazing woman–bright, candid, real. During our visits she describes, sober-faced, the depraved state of being she lived in for two decades, and how God is leading her out.

She just received her patriarchal blessing. “I don’t remember much of what was said,” she told me yesterday, “except for this: ‘You are forgiven.’”

I looked down at my ankles, crossed left-over-right. And I nodded, and wept.

O Captain My Captain

July 5th, 2007
Down syndrome, Thomas

Sitting in the driver’s seat of my van yesterday, I turned around and saw something amazing: Thomas, so big he filled his toddler car seat. He weighs about 24 lbs now. That’s nearly six times his birth weight of 4 lbs, 3 oz.

The day he was discharged from the hospital after a 6 week NICU stay he weighed about 5 lbs. He was swamped by the straps and buckles of his infant car seat. We shoved rolled-up blankets around his tiny limbs, arranged his oxygen tubing just so, and drove him home.

For weeks I fed him by resting him on a pillow on my lap, parallel with my thighs. The soft support enabled him to relax enough to drink from the bottle. Not once did I hoist him onto my shoulder, the way I did with my other newborns. I held him only in the crook of my arm, gingerly.

Twenty months later, it’s hard to reconcile that memory with the strapping toddler before me. His body is solid with muscle. He pulls to a stand with confidence. He smacks his toy piano like an impassioned virtuoso. I feed him in his highchair now, spooning heaping loads of oatmeal into his hollering-hungry mouth. I carry him on my left hip, his knees firmly clenching my middle.

These changes all mirror the evolution of my feelings as Thomas’s mother. How fragile I felt during those early weeks. How scared I was, how vulnerable to the twisting fear of the unknown. I held my son the way I beheld my future: with uncertainty.

Not so now. These days I stride forward with eagerness, with my son heavy on my hip, his arm reaching forward, his fingers pointing the way. I will follow wherever he leads me.

Legacy

June 17th, 2007
Family, Marriage

My wedding band is special. It’s gold, of course–yellow gold, about 8 mm wide. No stones–I wasn’t interested starting a marriage in debt. (My roommate’s ring came with monthly payments, which struck me as ridiculous. Reed claims this is one reason why he married me.) I like its plainness, its classy simplicity. But I love my ring for this reason: it was made from the gold of my father’s wedding band.

My parents divorced when I was five; each of them remarried a year or so later. I’m not sure why my mother ended up with her ex-husband’s wedding ring–I imagine my father had no interest in this token of their unhappy union. But she saved it, along with the white gold bands of her wedding set. And when I became engaged, she offered these mementos to me.

Reed was thrilled by the economy of it all (he paid less than $100 to have the precious metal melted down and recast: yellow gold for my ring, white gold for his.) And I was thrilled by the symbolism. I did not want to repeat the disaster that was my parents’ marriage, of course, but I was hopeful that I could take the raw materials of my past and make something new, something good.

Fifteen years have passed. For Reed and I they’ve been difficult years, in some ways. Even though both of us have been committed to marriage since our wedding day, it took us a dozen years to figure out that we really, really wanted to be married to each other (big difference). But we know this now, and life is sweet.

I just called my father to wish him a happy Father’s Day. We don’t speak very often–a few times a year, usually, unless there’s some crisis afoot in the family. Like my marriage relationship, my past relationship with my father has been difficult in some respects. His personal weaknesses have hurt me, at times a great deal. But I love him. Perhaps the greatest evidence of this is that I married someone very much like him.

On this Father’s Day I am grateful for the love of my husband and father. I’m grateful that I have learned to love them without reservation. And I am grateful to wear a constant reminder of them both, shining with soft luster on my ring finger.

First time

May 13th, 2007
Mothering, Spirituality

I was twenty years old the first time I saw a newborn baby.

Reed and I were living in a student four-plex adjacent to Brigham Young University, happy to have taken the basement apartment next to our friends, Luis and Eva. Eva was nearly due with their firstborn. Pink-cheeked, with long honey-brown hair and straight white teeth and gentle curves everywhere, she exuded life and health. I had never before kept company with a pregnant woman. When the four of us gathered in the late-lit summer evenings, I studied her bulging middle with fascination, wondering how she could withstand transformation so gracefully. I doubted I ever could.

I did want children, someday. Motherhood, as a concept, held a sense of destiny for me, although vague. And the Mormon culture I belonged to revolved around family life, promising spiritual progression and social acceptance to those who married and multiplied at young age. Young adult women were assumed to desire children above all else. Baby hungry—the knowing tease echoed from my community as soon as I became engaged, making me all the more determined to choose a different path: graduate school, a college-level teaching position, a ladder of publication and promotion that led to university tenure. Children would come later—two, or three at the most; perhaps in my far-distant thirties. Maybe by that time I’d like kids. As a teenaged babysitter I had ordered my charges to bed as soon as their parents pulled out of the driveway, no matter how early the hour.

Yet as distant as I felt from my own maternity, I felt drawn to Eva’s. When she brought her daughter home one morning in the dry burn of August, I fidgeted behind the wall that separated our living rooms, waiting for the right moment to pay a visit. In mid-afternoon I finally took the small step from my doormat to hers, and raised my fist for the knock. The door opened to Eva’s face. Fatigue had bleached her cheeks and shadowed her eyes; her hair was limp, her curves sagged. But she smiled, quick and sure, as she glanced backwards, over her shoulder. Behind her, I saw a pink blanket smoothed over the worn brown carpet, and on the blanket, a child, asleep. My legs moved forward as my eyes took in the sight: flesh and blood and bone, impossibly small, impossibly alive.

Chelsey, Eva said.

I knelt at the edge of the blanket. Eva followed, gingerly, still sore from the rigors of creation. Time slowed as we watched the gentle rise and fall of Chelsey’s chest, the short jerks of her limbs as she startled in her sleep. Dressed lightly for the summer heat, her pink skin glowed with a sheen that filled the room, washing the dullness from the worn furniture and yellowed linoleum and dark-paneled doors. The light touched me and sent me spinning.

I don’t remember how long I sat on that brown carpet, transfixed, as Eva lifted her waking daughter, cradled her, brought her to breast. But as the afternoon sun slanted into evening, something gently broke open within me. I knew, more than I had known anything before, that I wanted a child. More than that—I needed one, like I needed food and water. Baby hungry. I didn’t know why I had changed, or how. All I knew was that when I returned to my apartment, I felt strangely bereft. And when Eva’s door opened the next day, and the next day, and the next, I felt like I was coming home.

***

One year later.

I was lazing in half-sleep, my lower half cocooned in tingling warmth, when the squeezing began, deep and strong. It spread across my abdomen and wrapped around my back, then clamped hard like a tourniquet, forcing my belly upward in a tight swell of muscle and nerve and tissue. The anesthesia had sunken my pelvis into a circle of dark, blessed numbness. But now, bright pain flared around the edges, like the crown of a solar eclipse.

I rang for the nurse. “I think my epidural is wearing off,” I said.

She appeared quickly, pulled on a glove and reached in. After a few seconds, she looked at me with a knowing smile. “You’re complete,” she said. “Ten centimeters. You can start pushing now.”

The words crackled with positive charge. Positive—the word spoken on the long-ago morning of my pregnancy test. The word that ushered in nine months of changing. Nine months of swelling and stretching, of tasting bile and stomach acid. My blood flow doubled, darkening the network of veins across my chest. Sharp little elbows jabbed my bladder and ribs. Red streaks ribboned my stomach skin, like claw marks. Nine months of savage blessings. All along, the force that had shaped Eva into a mother, the grace that had formed her daughter and given her breath, ran through me like a current, carrying me to this moment.

The nurse helped me roll from my side to my back, raised the head of the bed, removed the towels from between my legs. “Hold your knees,” she said. Reed stepped close to help, looking dazed. The supercharged air must have drugged him. He cracked stupid jokes, the kind that are funny only at the very end of a long night, or a long pregnancy. As my stomach muscles shook with laughter, the pressure began to build again, gathering and rising and arching to a keen crest, splitting me in two. One of me hunched forward on the bed, straining with the push, and the hold, and the push. The other bobbed along the pockmarked ceiling tiles, ready to slip through their tiny holes like a sprite.

The nurse’s words tugged me back, grounding me again. “Look—there’s her head! Look at all that hair!”
Still pushing outward, I pushed myself upward with my elbows and peered at the wall mirror, needing to see. Flesh red and pink—mine—split by a thin oval of blackness. A scalp, slick with damp dark hair. Hers.

My muscles relaxed into smoothness, releasing me back onto the bed, releasing her back into the womb. I was weak with surprise. There was a person inside of me, pushing through my curtain-body, ready to claim the stage.

The squeezing began again. I moved with it, moved in and out of time and sanity until the parting was complete. Emptied, I stared at my daughter as she wriggled on the sterile blue sheeting, her skin bright and fresh and full of light, the same pink light that had filled Eva’s apartment, only much stronger. The naked force of a life.

This was not the soft, hearts-and-flowers love scene that I had expected. None of the birth stories I’d heard prepared me for the truth: this baby was alive. Without batteries, without wires or plugs. The shock grabbed me by the hair, slapped my face, then set me back on the bed, reeling.

In the meantime the nurse was wiping the waxy white vernix off my daughter’s chest and wrapping her in a striped flannel receiving blanket. She was ready to be held. I fit her capped head into the crook of my elbow and tucked her covering a bit tighter across her chest. I didn’t know what to do next. I had figured that when the baby came I would know how to feed and clothe and clean her; the fabled maternal instinct would take care of that. It didn’t.

But instinct did tell me this: If anyone tried to harm this child, I would, without hesitation, rip out the offender’s throat with my teeth, spit his blood, and go about my business.

And this: The light in my daughter was a compass to follow, a key to life.

Touchstone

May 12th, 2007
Family, Mothering

It was the first warm day of the season. We drove to the neighborhood park and piled eagerly out of the van, lifting our faces to the sky with relief. After months of bumping into dark walls and dark moods, the four of us–Matt, Sam, Thomas, and I–swallowed the light and air in great gulps.

I found the perfect place to roost–a flat section of the play structure that was sunlit without glare. Matt and Sam ran for the slides while Thomas perched next to me on the landing, poking his stubby fingers into the drainage holes. I breathed in and out, in and out, inhaling spring, exhaling winter.

After a few turns down the slides, Matt and Sam were ready to explore. They left me behind and headed for the barely-green field adjacent to the play structure, which stretches nearly as long as a city block. As soon as Matt hit the new grass, he began to run. Sam looked at me to see if I approved, and when I nodded and smiled, he took off in pursuit. I watched them go, almost able to feel the muscle fibers in their legs lengthening with each stride.

I wondered how far they would run before they looked back.

Sam didn’t last long. After twenty paces he glanced over his shoulder, making sure I was still there. As if I might have disappeared when he moved away from me. I waved him on. He ran another twenty paces, then stopped. He looked at Matt far ahead of him, then back at me, deliberating. Then he started running back to me.

Matt made it most of the way to the far side of the field before he noticed. He paused for a moment, calling to Sam to come back, to finish the journey. But when he realized he was the lone traveler he ran again, quickly covering the remaining yards between him and the stone wall which marked the edge of the field. He touched the wall, turned, and began to run back.

I watched them come, two little boys returning to mother. The sight of them bobbing across the field was as delicious as the sun on my cheeks, the breeze lifting my hair.

And I thought about my own mother. How my life is a series of circles that begin and end with her. How, no matter how wide my orbits become, how far my universe expands, I always return to earth, needing to touch stone.

Hungry

May 6th, 2007
Spirituality

Today is Fast Sunday.

On the first Sunday of every month, able-bodied Mormons go without food and drink for 2 meals (in our family, children 8 and older miss breakfast on Sunday, and those of us age 12 and older miss breakfast and lunch). The reasons are many: to show obedience to the law of the fast, to give thanks to God for sustaining life, to increase awareness of the need for spiritual sustenance, to bring the physical body into submission to the spirit. And, most importantly, to help others. Self-imposed hunger brings the reminder that others are hungry, and also brings the motivation to help. As part of the fast, church members donate money to the poor and needy among them–at minimum, the money saved by missing two meals.

This state of being closes the distance between man and God, and enables more powerful and effective prayers. It’s a time of cleansing, both literally and figuratively. It’s a time for self-examination and rededication. It’s a time to hunger and thirst after righteousness.

This Fast Sunday I’m mindful of how delightful my days are right now. In my house we’re all healthy, happy, enjoying a beautiful spring. All our wants and needs are met. But other people in my life are suffering, struggling daily to keep their heads above water. One friend is striving valiantly to overcome substance addiction. Another is trying to save a crumbling marriage. Another, a single parent of five, has a teenage daughter about to give birth and a preschool daughter who is very ill–every day she walks a tightrope of physical and emotional survival.

This contrast hurts. I am grateful for the ease in my life right now, this beautiful year–the best I’ve ever had–which came on the heels of great crisis and difficulty. I know it’s only a matter of time before difficult days come again. But I wish I could share this fulness I’m enjoying. I wish that I could fast from peace and contentment, health and stability, for these 24 hours of Fast Sunday, gather up what I saved, and give it to my friends in need. They are hungry.

Reset

December 28th, 2006
Loss, Mothering, Spirituality

Christine got a Tamagotchi pet for Christmas. (For the unenlightened, these are digital creatures that live in a plastic keychain-sized disc.) She had her pet in hand all morning. Apparently the thing needs regular feeding, interaction, and even cleaning. When she neglected her pet for too long, it made a mess on the floor (hooray for virtual poop.)

At one point she flipped the disc over and showed me a tiny button lodged deep into the plastic casing–the kind you’d need a very thin screwdriver to push. “If my pet dies, we can push this reset button,” she explained.

Reset??

I was about to launch into a tirade about how we’ve been ruined as a society if we think that life, even digital life, can be revived so easily. (Thank you, Tom and Jerry. And Roadrunner. And… oh, never mind, the list is too long.) What about responsibility? And accountability? And grief?

But then a tear-stained Elizabeth approached me. She had just discovered her hamster, Rocket, curled into a cold, furry ball in the corner of his cage. I went downstairs to see the evidence. Oh dear.
“Why did he have to die on Christmas?” she sobbed. I hugged her and murmered sympathetic words for a while. Then my wise-counselor streak took over.

“You know, in a way it was good timing,” I said.

She asked why.

“Because today we’re celebrating the birth of Jesus. And that reminds us that Rocket is still alive–his spirit is scampering around somewhere up there. And his little furry body will come alive again, someday.”

She sniffed and nodded, and sniffed some more. I thought for a while about Christ’s power to throw tragedy into reverse. Errors, sins, even death. All we harm, all that harms us, all that perishes in any of a hundred different ways, will be repaired and revived through love.

Thank God the universe has a reset button.

Lucky

December 18th, 2006
Mothering, Thomas

There’s nothing like a trip to the ER to give you some perspective on life.

On Saturday night Thomas woke up in deep distress–couldn’t breathe. As I held him on my chest I could feel his muscles heaving in and out, trying to force his diaphragm into action. I was proud of myself: I calmly called the pediatrician, then woke Reed up to tell him I was leaving for the hospital. “Have fun,” he said.

I didn’t get weird until we were halfway there. It was snowing like mad, and the van was slipping, and from his carseat a few feet behind me, Thomas was trying to cry. I suddenly thought of the scene in A Civil Action where the kid with cancer dies in the backseat of his parents’ car, en route to the ER, during a terrible rainstorm. “Please don’t die. Please don’t die,” I said, although the more likely scenario was that we would both die under the cast-iron bumper of a skidding semi.

When we arrived intact, I wrapped him up in quilts and carried him into the ER. First thing I saw was a blood-covered guy covering his left eye with his mangled-looking hand. “Wine glass to the eye,” I heard the triage nurse explain to an orderly. “Wine glass in the eye.”

Eeeew. And that goes for the injury, the all-too-imaginable scenario that caused it, and the guy’s girlfriend, who was wearing a cheap cocktail dress and flip-flops. For a minute, I almost forgot why we had come.

Thomas had a fun few hours of being suctioned out, x-rayed, poked and prodded, and sprayed with nebulized steroids. Every time they whipped out a new drug or monitor or tube, I couldn’t help but think about how glad I was that I could bring him here, as awful as it was for him. I lay on the hospital bed for hours after the nebulizer treatment. Thomas eventually fell asleep on my chest, and his breathing had eased beautifully. I was so grateful I didn’t have to suffer through this terrible night alone, at home. There’s nothing worse than feeling helpless. And while the omnipotence of modern medicine is a complete farce, in this case at least there were things that could be done, things that helped. All for a measly $75 copay.

My feelings are too complex for me to wrestle cleanly into words right now. All I can say is I can’t believe how lucky I am. I walked that edge where you face a verdict–will it get better, or won’t it?–and got a quick and easy yes. Once upon a time, I thought yes was a given, but these days I know better.

We drove home at 3 a.m. The snow had gathered in the perfect image of Wenceslas’s vision: deep and crisp and even. The whole surface of the world glittered.

Mein Bruder

December 18th, 2006
Family, Loss

My mom called me this evening to tell me that my brother has disappeared.

On Thursday he got a call from his lawyer telling him that his appeal was denied, so he has to serve his full prison sentence (40 years, of which he’s served four) starting now. On Friday he ran.
How long has it been–seven years, maybe? Eight? A while back, he was in a car accident. Two people–an older married couple–died. My brother, a chronic drug user, was convicted under a brand-new Nevada law that carried mandatory jail time for DUI. A lot of it. And it wasn’t necessary to prove that he was under the influence at the time of the accident–certain blood chemistry levels were all that was needed for the conviction. (He tested positive for marijuana use.)

People have asked me how I feel about strict DUI laws. Yes, I’m all for them, in theory. If my parents had been killed in that car accident, I’d be livid if the other driver, a proven drug user, was let off with a slap on the wrist. But I don’t like the way this particular law was designed. And no, I’m not happy about what happened to my brother. I don’t think he deserves to be in jail for the rest of his life. I don’t think it’s clear that his drug use caused the deaths. And as he has pointed out repeatedly, convicted rapists got out of jail after serving far less time. I think rotting in jail for 4 or 5 years, and being denied the opportunity to ever drive a car again, is enough. I don’t think society is better off with him locked away.

This whole incident is part of a long and convoluted history that I won’t detail here. The bottom line is that my brother was finally beginning to improve himself and his life. He’s been clean and sober (according to the random tests he’s been required to take) and working hard these last eighteen months. I don’t see what good will come of locking him up again. He’s 37 now; if he started serving his remaining time right away, he’d be 73 at the end.

He’s made many stupid choices in the past, and I don’t want to excuse him from reasonable consequences. But it pains me to know how desperate he must feel right now. It makes me feel sick. I feel especially ill on my mother’s behalf. She doesn’t know when or if she’ll ever hear from him again. I’m furious, of course, that my brother is putting her through this. Not to mention the fact that as soon as a warrant is issued for his arrest (which may be as soon as tomorrow), my mother loses the 20K she posted for bail.

But I’m worried that if his escape plan (which he’s surely been concocting over time) doesn’t pan out, he might take his own life.

Mein bruder.