Wonder twin powers, activate!

September 9th, 2010 MusingsTags: friendship, poetry, T.S. Eliot

The first day I met Angela Hallstrom, I got lost.

Well, kind of. She’d just moved from Minnesota to SLC, and on this given morning she was following my van up I-15 en route to Sugarhouse Park, where we and a mutual friend planned to entertain our various preschoolers. All I knew about her was that she had an MFA, a finished novel manuscript, and an elegant name. Impressed by all three, I determined to impress her in return, starting with my caravan-leading skills. But on the freeway, while talking a manic streak with the aforementioned friend, Darlene, who was riding shotgun in the van, I missed the exits to I-215 and I-80, and had to backtrack to the park by taking 21st South. Road construction clogged the way, causing a near standstill. Five minutes passed. Ten. Embarrassed, I checked my rearview mirror and spotted Angela behind me, looking vaguely amused. Five more minutes. Angela’s son was squirming. I feared for my fledgling reputation, then reminded myself that a midwesterner would likely have no clue that we’d taken a maddening detour. Half an hour later, when we finally parked by the geese-laden duck pond, I apologized just in case. Angela smiled benignly and didn’t mention that she’d grown up in the valley. This is one reason to like her.

There are many others. In fact, over the 3+ years since the park debacle, Angela has become one of my most-decorated friends. She’ll kill me if I wax rhapsodic, so I won’t, but there are a few things I must mention: her heart is as expansive as her mind, and that’s saying something.  Her exceedingly good nature charms everyone, including, notably, my misanthropic husband. And she’s one of the few people who can tell me hard things in a way I can hear them; one of the few people who can cue me that, for a minute there, I lost myself. Read more »

Doors of perception

July 9th, 2010 Musings, Spirituality

Mormons are familiar with this concept of a greater reality being blocked for certain purposes. We believe that our minds are extensively veiled, unable to access the vast majority of what we know (i.e. everything we learned and experienced during our premortal eons of existence). Brigham Young even taught that the spirit world–the intermediary sphere of postmortal existence–exists right here, as part of the boundaries of this earth. We just can’t see it, because it’s veiled.

That elusive expanded reality has been haunting me for months now, especially this week, as my probability drive implodes. I needed the right music to breathe–after a long stretch of raw, scrappy Pixies it was time for something more contemplative. We Shall All Be Healed was on continuous loop for several days early on, John Darnielle being the ideal frontman for resigned, matter-of-fact states of pain, but then I was at a loss. Louder Than Bombs filled the gap until I hit upon the perfect dark horse: Ride’s album nowhere, the melodic wall of dream-noise that dominated the summer of 1991, when Reed was working at DV8 and I’d sit at the bar for hours, amused by various men trying their luck with me, while Reed hauled kegs and tried not to fume. Wonder what we would’ve said if someone gave us a quick peek into our lives 19 years down the line. Now playing, as I sit in the dentist’s reception room while the kids get manhandled by hygienists: Seagull.

You gave me things I'd never seen
You made my life a waking dream
But we are dead
Falling like ashes to the floor
Falling like ashes to the floor.
Definitions confine thoughts, they are a myth
Words are clumsy, language doesn't fit
But we know there's no limit to thought
We know there's no limits.
Now it's your turn to see me rise
You burned my wings, but watch me fly
Above your head
Looking down I see you far below,
Looking up you see my spirit glow.

I don’t know what to make of it all, and at this point I’m not even going to try. I’m realizing more and more that my distress comes from wanting to define the undefinable, pin down what can’t be pinned, decide what can’t be decided, and understand what can’t be understood. Two mutually exclusive realities coexist, and choosing in harmony with one tends to disrupt the other, and no certainty exists except the certainty that both are essential. I’m learning, the hard way, that simultaneously navigating both requires the strictest integrity—the two planes intersect along the thinnest of lines, and even one step out of place lands you in exile. And right steps require right thoughts and right intents and right desires, and while I know and love the taste of rightness, it’s not always what I’m drawn to and drawn by. So the price of living in an expanded realm, of inhabiting and exploring a cube instead of a square, is rigid resistance of the most compelling and magnetic distractions. It’s all yours, God says, iff you play by the rules. Iff, the philosopher’s abbreviation for if and only if.  What I’m so slow to accept is that the rules aren’t arbitrary lines to toe, but incontrovertible laws, determined through the physics which govern the evolution of souls. There are no loopholes. God doesn’t wink from the corner. Consequence is embedded in my choices, and my choices often suck.

But I wouldn’t be where I am, wouldn’t have these doors open, if I were incapable of walking aright.

A perfect waking

July 5th, 2010 Family, Musings

Light breezes from the open window and the ceiling fan, air completely dry and silken-gentle. Beneath and on top of the sheet, room temperature resting at the pitch where skin fully relaxes. Sunlight glowing bright, too thin to be hot. Reed got Andrew off to camp at 6 and changed T’s poopy diaper at 7; I opened my eyes and stretched my legs and rolled over and dozed off again. Made that kind of love that only unfolds in the morning hours, still half-dreaming, when pleasure lies right next to you, there for the taking, and the taking is easy, unencumbered by heavy layers of the rational and the daily. Barely escaped the veto of Thomas pounding on the locked door with dismay; we laughed at his victorious chuckles upon admission to the inner sanctum. I might’ve been disappointed at finding myself fully awake if it weren’t for the air on my legs–just a touch too cool–as I walked out of my bedroom, and the half-slice of lemon-sour cream pound cake leftover from last night, and the lingering delight of driving I-215 at sunset with the boys belting out “Fortunate Son,” having just seen my husband in the company of his closest friends, his happiness unfurled like the colors lining our neighborhood streets, tethered to flagpoles so they won’t dissolve into light.

Delighting in Fatness

January 21st, 2010 Musings

A few days ago I wrenched my skinny shirts from their hangers, folded them into a neat pile, and set it on my dresser.

This triumphant act was months–no, years–in the making. Seriously. I cannot overstate my emotional attachment to my skinny shirts, meaning those shirts that only fit properly when I’m eating sparingly and well, and exercising vigorously and often. In other words, those shirts I never wear. Or wear happily, at least. The collection includes a fitted denim button-down, a black Old Navy criss-cross jersey, two shirt-under-sweater v-necks, and a stretchy dark red number that convinced me I was still hot at a critical moment.

I vividly remember the moment of decision I faced that red-shirt year. After having weathered six pregnancies, I was just about ready to forfeit any and all further attempts at hotness. Staring at my young-yet-not face in the mirror, I seriously considered chucking my cosmetic bag, cutting my hair in a short, sensible style, and buying some stretch pants and sneakers. Going unisex, I thought, would be a huge relief.

Then all of a sudden I realized I was only thirty-two. At some future date, hotness would be taken from me whether I liked it or not, so I might as well capitalize on my remaining years of choice. And so, instead of chopping my hair off, I went out and bought a highlighting kit. And instead of buying stretch pants I bought a deep red stretchy jersey top with a v-neck.

I’m wearing that shirt in my facebook profile photo. Notice the look of triumph.

But here’s the deal. I’m now thirty-eight, and counting. A combination of factors have made it difficult for me to properly enjoy that shirt, as well as the other members of the skinny collection. Age, for one: with every passing year it takes more and more effort to maintain my weight, and I’m just not willing to spend more than an hour a day exercising, and I’m just not willing to forfeit refined carbohydrates because they’re one of my chief joys in life. Medication, for another: when I switched antidepressants last spring I gained 20 lbs within 6 months. And check this out: recently I had my first-ever custom bra fitting, wherein I learned that my bra was three (3) sizes too small. Now that “the girls” are properly supported, there’s a lot less room in all of my shirts, and the skinny ones look downright scandalous.

Still, while I haven’t comfortably worn my skinny shirts for a good long while now, I haven’t wanted to let them go. A while back I gathered them up and moved them to the far end of the closet, not the hidden end, but the end I can easily see. There they hung, daily reminding me of an impossible ideal belonging to a bygone era. The sight wasn’t discouraging. Rather, it enabled me to live in a fluffy pink cloud of denial: “Someday soon I’ll wear those again.” In fact, I was so convinced that this would happen that I didn’t worry much about my actual body size or how I would get from here to there. In my mind, being skinny was a present-day reality.

But the other day, the pink cloud parted. Not dramatically or traumatically, which I’m grateful for. But gently and wisely. I just looked at those shirts and thought, “I’m not going to wear those again. Time to give them to someone who will.”

So, yesterday I brought the pile over to one of my close friends who I deeply care about despite the fact that she weighs 50 pounds less than me. I laid it on her kitchen counter without hesitation, and smiled as I thought about how cute she would look in the black-and-white sweater-shirt thing. I drove home in my supersized bra with my muffin top oozing over my denim waistband, and was warmly greeted by a man who, apparently, thinks middle-aged fleshiness is hot.

I’m inclined to agree.

p.s. I kept the red shirt. It might still work, with a jacket.

Deliberate Surrender

January 18th, 2009 Musings

There’s a woman in my neighborhood named Joanne. She’s probably sixty-ish, but her smooth, rosy cheeks make her look much younger. Although stalwart in the gospel she rarely comes to church these days because of the effects of severe Type 1 diabetes. But once in a while I see her shuffling a slow course around our cul-de-sac, getting the exercise she needs to help the circulation in her swollen, pain-wracked legs. It takes her about fifteen minutes to complete the circle.

One morning I was outside with my preschoolers when she made her way past our yard, leaning on her husband for support. I told her I missed seeing her at church, and asked her how she was. She responded with one of her typical upbeat replies (the woman has the most positive attitude I’ve ever encountered). But then she paused for a moment. “You know,” she said, “this isn’t how I envisioned spending the rest of my life.”

I almost started to cry right there. Her words were so candid and poignant, so void of self-pity. And so evocative of the human condition. How many of us get exactly what we expect? How many of us come within spitting distance? How many of us find ourselves in a territory so foreign from what we envisioned, we sometimes wonder what force carried us hither and set us down to live, completely surprised, sometimes traumatized, and usually at least a little bit bewildered?

Joanne’s words made me think about the unexpected course of my own life. As is the case for all of us, the surprises have come through a mix of choice and circumstance. When I got married, I never thought I’d end up with seven children–but an unexpected, near-constant desire for children gripped me for a dozen years, and I chose to follow it, and mother nature cooperated, so here I am in a household of nine. When I was a child old enough to be self-aware, I never expected to live a life complicated by chronic depression, but I do (and so do two of my children). When I was a young adult and envisioned my future offspring, I didn’t see a child with Down syndrome. There have been dozens of surprises, large and small, positive and negative and neutral. And no matter how often I counsel myself to expect the unexpected, it always takes me off-guard. I can’t trump the unpredictable and the unseen, although I’ve tried.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the surprises of life. About how to cope with the stark reality of the unexpected. I wonder how I can plan for life, knowing it very well may shred my plans–and that I might be better off as a result. I wonder how to walk the fine line between deliberate living and surrender.

Maybe deliberate surrender is an important part of the answer.

Nothing quite like

January 16th, 2009 Mothering, Musings

Wednesday was Elizabeth’s dance recital, the “Winter Showcase” featuring the various dance classes at the high school. Twelve performances on the program. Elizabeth’s was scheduled about a third of the way through. When the number started I leaned forward in my seat, eyes scanning the stream of dancers running onstage. Faces and bodies and faces and bodies and faces and–there! There she is, Reed and I exclaimed simultaneously, like the cheesy parents we are. There’s nothing quite like picking your child out of a crowd.

As the music pumped out of the PA I flashed back to the only other dance recital Elizabeth has been part of: the performance of the “Super Star Strutters” at the Independence Day parade in Spanish Fork. She was four years old then, dressed in a hot pink t-shirt and denim shorts, jumping and wiggling in time with the Beach Boys. Now she was clad in a skin-tight brilliant turquoise camisole and black leggings, limbs moving in sharp yet graceful precision to a pumping hip-hop rhythm.  When she turned I studied her back and shoulders, fair skin and tight muscle defined in light and shadow.  There’s nothing quite like realizing your preschooler has (really and truly) become a woman.

The dancers were an intriguing bunch. Some moved with near-painful hesitation, as if they weren’t sure their arms and legs would obey neural commands. Some were languid, like bored teenagers at Grandma’s Sunday dinner. Some danced as if they really meant it. Elizabeth was one of them. I watched her in fascination, being someone who’s never been fully at ease in her own skin–not in public, at least. Certainly not on stage.

As I absorbed the contrast between the fluid dancers and the stiff ones, I remembered something wise my friend Darlene once told me: All you’ll have at the end of your life, all you’ll take with you, is eighty-something years of being Kathy Soper. That took me by surprise. I don’t know why, but it did. I guess I’ve spent so much time and effort trying to change myself that I’ve rarely relaxed and just enjoyed being myself.

Applauding loudly at the end of the number, I reminded myself that I want to live the way Elizabeth dances. From what I’ve seen, there’s nothing quite like it.

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.

ER

August 4th, 2005 Musings

For me, having heart palpitations during pregnancy is normal. But having heart pain is not. The OB nurse recommended that I go to the ER to get my oxygen levels checked, and get an EKG.

Knowing how things can go in the ER, I figured it would take a couple of hours to get my tests done. No problem. Kids were home with Grandma (good timing on that visit, Mom).

At first I enjoyed (?) the full attention of the staff. Chest pain + obvious pregnancy = brisk concern. Half reclined on my narrow “bed,” I had three people working on me at once–one inserted an IV and drew blood, one stuck approximately three dozen sticky lead attachments all over my body (yes, several of them looked like stri-dex pads), one peppered me with questions (Who’s here with me today? Nobody. Was I short of breath? was I nauseated? Of course, I’m pregnant). Thankfully the EKG was normal. The air of crisis departed, along with the nurses. And the waiting began.

It went something like this: nurse announces that attending physician would be in shortly. Wait 40 minutes. Attending physician comes in for five minutes, announces that nurse would be in to do x,y, or z. Wait forty minutes. Repeat.

I was fine for a while. I read my two People magazines, and tried not to think about my aching IV arm (the needle was at an odd angle), my filling bladder, and my rumbling stomach. But after a couple of hours I began to wilt. I couldn’t get off the bed because of the tangle of leads. There was no call button, so if I wanted to get someone’s attention I had wait, or call out into the hall when I saw shoes passing by beneath the door curtain. Normally I don’t mind being alone; in fact, I count it a singular treat. But there was something about the surroundings, the occasion, the multiple discomforts, that resulted in acute loneliness. I felt like I had entered some alternate reality–that the entire universe consisted of my little ER cubby. I got weak and dizzy from hunger (couldn’t eat until they knew I wouldn’t be having surgery). During the fourth hour, I actually cried.

At the start of the sixth hour, after analyzing the monitor readouts, the lab results, and the chest CT scan, they couldn’t find anything wrong with me. Of course I was grateful. After I ripped off all the adhesive pads and some of my skin, I was also grateful to perch on the edge of my bed and eat my hospital dinner. I even turned on the TV, which I could finally reach, as I shoveled in my cheeseburger.
CNN was showing footage of starvation in Niger.

Later that night as I tried to settle into sleep on my comfy bed at home, I felt something sharp and scratchy poking a tender spot on my side. It was one of the square lead attachments I had overlooked. I ripped it off and tried to rub away the remaining adhesive. But I could use one on my soul somewhere, a nagging, poking token to remind me how little I know of hunger, pain, and loneliness.