mysterious now

Today my 9:40 appointment didn't show, so I texted Heather to ask how Mike was. I had been so worried. He went back to New York yesterday, without me, for a procedure today and then treatment tomorrow.

She told me he had just come out, that he was fine, it went well. She described the waiting area, the hospital. She gave me the doctor's report.

I was sitting at my desk in a small windowless office in Pennsylvania, hunched over my phone. That moment happened. But as I read and reread Heather's text, other moments happened too.

All the long minutes in waiting rooms; all the strange, too-bright hospital spaces. The port, biopsies, PET scans, radiation. The waiting. The white/gray palette, the fluorescent lighting. A doctor walking at a clip across the rows of chairs to give his report. Me, suspended in molasses, an odd mix of breathless anxiety and leaden limbs, struggling to find a breath. His manner is particular to certain kinds of specialists and surgeons; it somehow combines excellent eye contact and intensity with a clear message: please allow me to manage this exchange so that we can complete it within about six minutes. Don't ask too many questions. Good? Good.

Oh, how could it be Heather there, and Mike there, and not me?  I know that moment. It's in my bones. It's a combination of moments, just beneath the surface, ready to bubble up and break into my right now with a simple glance at my phone.

We got our Christmas tree about a week ago, and spent Sunday afternoon pulling out decorations. Some of you may remember that last Christmas Mike was just completing what we thought was his one and only awful treatment, a chemo-radiation-chemo sandwich that made for the most challenging fall this family had ever known. We were living in a rented house with many borrowed things, and didn't have access to our holiday decorations.

So friends and family sent us ornaments: beautiful angels, stars, Santas, snowflakes, woodland creatures, elegant glass spheres.

Boy, was that overwhelmingly generous and kind and Christmas-miracley. We opened so many little packages last year. I labeled each ornament with the friend's name who sent it. The children loved it. Our tree was so beautiful.

And those are the ornaments we unwrapped last week. Usually a dig into the box of ornaments is a sweet journey through so many times and places: my second grade class, Frances's preschool, Mike's first Christmas, the year Gabriel was born. But this year we traveled to just one time, one place: a year ago. A gentle, worn-out time. We thought we'd made it through the worst of it. We knew we were laid low; we knew our friends and family were with us. We were looking ahead with full hearts to a time of recovery and healing.

We didn't know what was coming. It's been a hard year.

Those ornaments exacerbate the absurdity of living another cancer Christmas. How has it been an entire year? How can the way we were, the way we are, the way this year has unfolded, all be true? How can we endure it, surrounded by these achingly poignant symbols of hope and love and healing in the living room?

Early in the decorating process, Beatrice pulled out the popsicle stick ornament pictured above and gently unwrapped it, laying it on the rug. She looked up at me.

This ornament makes me cry, she said.

Why? I asked.

Because. It's so beautiful.

Then I kneeled down with her. I turned it over. 'Annie' was written on the back in black marker. She's a teenager at our church in Annapolis. Every Monday night we used to go to church and the kids would practice acolyting or singing and often a craft project would be going on in between activities. We had been the occasion for a craft project last Christmas. Annie and others had made popsicle stick and glitter snowflakes and sent them to us in a big box.

I sat admiring it with Beatrice. Mike sat down in the chair next to me and rested a hand on my back. I leaned my head on his knee and cried. She asked me why I was crying.

Well, duh, Beatrice.

Because it's so beautiful!

So many nows are achingly vivid as my family enters a second turn of the seasons living with a terrifying disease. The children's faces are exceedingly beautiful. Their bickering, too, is unbearable. The shape of branches against the evening sky is so stark. The yellow leaping fire in the fireplace is extra compelling. The Christmas music is more heartrending than ever.

These saturated moments linger, slide together, overlap, and make time into something else. Something more mysterious. How can it be that that was yesterday, a week ago, a year ago? I cannot begin to fathom it.

I finished reading Little House in the Big Woods with Beatrice tonight. We've shared those beloved chapters with various listeners over the past few nights: Frances and Gabriel, Tessa and Annika next door, the dogs, Kate the babysitter. Everything grows still. Part of the magic of the book is the slow, immersive quality that marks Laura's experience of time; reading it aloud is a way to participate in that alert, attuned stillness.

She intuitively understands something about the way time feels sometimes: a moment can be so full of itself. It overflows with realness. That kind of vivid experience can invite you further in, and somehow also make you notice it, linking you to moments like it that have happened before and will happen again.

Laura is inside and outside time. The immersive moment can be so extraordinary that it invites her to stand back and marvel.

The book begins in the fall, and ends in the next fall, just as winter is approaching. Just like now.

Pa plays his fiddle as Laura and Mary fall asleep. In the last passage of the book, he plays Auld Lang Syne. Laura asks him what the days of auld lang syne are, and he tells her they are the days of long ago, and then tells her to go to sleep.

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on his honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting. 

She thought to herself, "This is now."

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

living the dream

When we first arrived in Lancaster last summer - disoriented and tangled in a number of secondary crises, all set in motion by Mike's rare cancer diagnosis that had just hit us like a truck, throwing every part of our lives into terrifying, uncertain disarray - the sky was too blue.

The squirrels chattered too frenetically. The sun shone in my eyes. A car alarm would vibrate inside my skull. Black telephone poles were ominously stark against white clouds. The world was saturated in such a way that perceiving it with my senses hurt.

And now, over a year later, as I come to the end of a time of relative stability that the clinical trial Mike is currently on has afforded us, the world has become more vibrant again. But not in an aggressive, harsh, more-disaster-shall-rain-upon-you-momentarily kind of way. More like golden autumn sunshine at four in the afternoon, illuminating everything and making it so beautiful you could cry. Every day, dry leaves skitter and scrape across pavement, damp wind chills my fingers gripped around the handlebars of my bike, heavy gray clouds let shafts of light through in a fast-moving sky, faces of strangers brighten in shy welcome as we pass on the street, and all of it is beckoning to me: notice, notice, notice. See this world. See this abundance.

Moving through one's days with so little protection can hurt, but not like it did when I was in shock last summer. It's the hurt of a full heart, the ache of loving a lot. 

This fall we settled into a new living situation in my mom's home, and Mike settled into a new treatment protocol, going back and forth to New York every two weeks. I started working again, doing what I love. We found a sweet babysitter. Dear friends have come to visit. We have neighbors with whom it is a joy to share everyday life. The kids got involved in school and activities and friends.

And compared to past chemotherapy regimens, this trial has been blessedly easy on Mike. His hair has grown back, he's put on weight. He has energy for things like taking Gabriel to basketball and going out on a date with me and telling the kids to pick up their toys. In short, for the first time in many many months, our lives have felt predictable, full, connected to others. Normal.

But the goal of this treatment is to get his cancer into remission so that he can have a stem cell transplant. Right back into battle. Soon he will have a PET scan to see if he's ready for that step.

So December, with its scans and treatment decisions and transitions, has been looming. This autumn idyll cannot last. In that sense, life isn't normal at all. It's a respite. We all know that things will get really hard and scary again.

But this not-normal normal life, this moment bookended by a very hard past and a very hard future? It tastes so good. Over the top good. Exquisite!

Maybe it takes knowing that everything really can turn upside down in an instant to fully appreciate the miraculous right side up quality that most days quietly offer.

The feel of Mike's warm back moving gently in sleep next to me before I get out of bed. The smell of coffee. The way Beatrice says good morning Mama and smiles and reaches for me before she even opens her eyes. The letter from a friend unfolded on the desk, asking to be reread. An emoji-laden text exchange with the babysitter about piano lessons today. Right side up, right side up, everywhere I look.

I recently added one extra day of work a week, back at Franklin & Marshall. Last Monday was my first day seeing students again. As I was locking up my bike before heading in that morning, one of the psychologists on staff crossed the parking lot and called out to me.

Biking to work!! Meagan, you're living the dream!

I looked up at her and smiled.

Yep, I said. Pretty much.

everything nice

I hail from a family of performers and artists, people who are pretty comfortable in the spotlight. Me? Not so much. I held my mediocre own in a handful of elementary school plays and dance recitals, but honestly, I am the kind of person who begins to sweat when in a new class or group and the leader invites everyone to go around the circle and say her name. Worse, where she's from. Worse still, what she wants to get out of this class.

Seriously. Just waiting for my turn to say my name out loud puts me on edge.

What if I forget how it's pronounced?

My one and only true starring role was in a production written and directed by my dad and his friend Richard called Moby Duck. I was roughly Beatrice's age, about three. My sister Rachel was a baby. I played Captain Ahab outfitted in a souvenir Sea World cap, a dress with an untied sash, and tights whose crotch had succumbed to gravity and settled around my knees. I carried a harpoon made from a toy broom with a triangle of cardboard taped to its handle. The Pequod was constructed from a cardboard box.

Queequeg was a yellow crocheted duck, voiced by my dad. Hence the title.

I don't think the directors really explained the story to me. Mostly I think they enjoyed each other's company and the wild silliness of making an absurdist home movie in our Providence living room. I was basically a prop, and a good reason for two adult friends to make a cardboard boat.

However. They didn't take my deep aversion to conflict, violence, and scary stuff into account. At one point my dad covers himself in a white sheet, gets down on his hands and knees, and enters the camera's field bellowing thar she blows! while sort of scooting towards me and parachuting the sheet up and down. Richard directs me from behind the camera: that's the whale, Captain Ahab! Get it, get it with your harpoon!

I scream in terror, throw the harpoon overboard in the general direction of the whale/dad, and run to the back of the boat to cower.

After a couple of takes, the adults realize things are not going so well. My dad takes off the sheet to negotiate with his actor. I begin pacing around, trying to explain why this whole whale hunting thing is seriously not working for me. I suggest another story: a baby fish and a baby whale get to be friends. And then the baby fish and the baby whale get to be friends with me. 

Uh huh, nods my dad, staying in his Hollywood director persona. He repeats the plot. I nod emphatically. He ponders my treacle, then tries to convince me again of the merits of the Moby Duck idea. He suggests compromises. Maybe it could be less scary. Maybe Captain Ahab could...

Daddy, Daddy. Daddy. No, Daddy.

I interrupt, fretfully raising and lowering my hands, patting the air in front of me in a calm-down gesture, as if trying to settle an unruly mob.

Daddy. I want it nice. Everything nice. 

So there you have it. Everything nice. Everyone in my family cracks up watching this. I always blush. These days, when I urge peace and harmony in an overbearing kind of way, periodically one of my kids will smile at me and say, okay Mama. We know. Everything nice.

For the longest time I felt ashamed about what I thought Moby Duck revealed about me. Cowardice, fearfulness, a strangely overblown aversion to conflict. Baby whales only, please. At various times in my life I have noticed how my reluctance to be honest out of fear of the inevitable interpersonal conflict that would follow has hampered my ability to love more fully. Sometimes it's been hard on my relationships. There's that little girl, pleading with her dad to please take it down a notch and do my story instead.

Since the election, the everything nice part of me has been hollering for my attention. Kindness, connection, attunement, care - these are the values I am holding close. And I am coming to recognize, nearly forty years into my tenure on this earth, that there is nothing shameful about the way I handled the role of Captain Ahab. My particular yearning for peaceful relationship (as well as my desire to be in charge of the story) is, like everything about us, double edged. It makes me me. It can be a great strength, and a great vulnerability too. It seems like accepting and even embracing my fear of conflict is the only way to grow more courageous, and to be able to risk conflict when honesty and love demand it.

There's a lot of upset and hurt and anger all around us right now. My Facebook feed is a steady stream of people looking to reduce their isolation by sharing their agitation and fear, people offering various ideas for what we can do with this moment, people casting about in a terrifying time for some way to essentially increase safety. 

I went to a training on Friday about using mindfulness and yoga in psychotherapy, especially with clients who have been through trauma. We spent some time talking about our basic human emotional motivations. We can understand these as falling into three 'centers' of motivation: fear/threat, affiliation/connection, and mastery/achievement. In other words, we are motivated by a desire for safety, a desire for interpersonal connection, and a desire to achieve. The only problem is, when the fear center becomes activated - by actual or perceived threats to our safety - it dominates. It colors everything else. Which makes sense: animals, including humans, are created in such a way that every other priority must be pushed aside when their lives are in danger.

But living life under threat is painful and exhausting. It makes it very hard to learn and grow, it endangers our relationships, it takes a toll on our health. It can lead to violence, or substance abuse, or a whole slew of other coping behaviors that are ultimately self-harming.

I see so much hurt and fear around me these days. I feel those things too. But 'everything nice' is telling me: breathe into that fear, acknowledge it, and then gently set it down. Help others feel safe. Help your children feel safe. Help your neighbors feel safe. Then we can remember the fullness of who we are, and allow our relationships and our work to assume their proper place in our lives.

In therapy I often talk with clients about how anger is a secondary emotion. We usually feel it because there is a more painful, primary emotion underneath that seems impossible to tolerate. Fear and sadness are so hard - cover it over with anger instead.

Not that anger isn't useful. I think protests and pins and efforts to figure out what the heck is happening to us are positive. I honor the people in my world who are making more noise than I am right now. What I have to give in this moment is quieter: my own grief. Gentleness and kindness. A desire to help others feel cared for. A kind of vigilance, a quiet waiting.

I brought my family and some friends to see the student African drumming ensemble perform at Franklin & Marshall College yesterday, down the street from where we live. We sat in the back, near other friends. The students were dressed in brilliant colors. They come from every part of the world, and played with wild playful energy, putting their whole bodies into the music with irrepressible smiles on their faces. The vibrations were palpable in the auditorium, and so was the joy of the musicians, who were sharing a great gift and knew it, just by looking out at their audience, smiling along with them.

Afterwards I walked our kids and our dear neighbor's kids home through the park. The sun was setting. The children were full of music and energy and ran ahead of me, tackling each other, playing tag, throwing leaves. They were so free. 

You have to be safe - in body, mind, and spirit - to feel that kind of expansive, joyful freedom. Watching them made me very happy.

So this is my 'everything nice' wish for you and yours today: to share music and singing, nurturing warm meals, time amidst golden leafy trees, snuggles with pets, affectionate greetings with neighbors, dance parties in the kitchen, eye contact and smiles with strangers. That you might be a presence that invites healing and safety in this world. Restoration. And if our neighbors are threatened or our democratic traditions are flouted, and we are called upon to brave conflict, discomfort, civil disobedience? Well, then we will be ready to act, not just from anger or fear, but from a place of love, with our whole, marvelous, human selves intact.

letting go of ladysplaining

Last week I returned to the clinic where I first put on my professional helper hat, four months after graduating from social work school and three months after having our first child. Frances! What a tiny magnetic force she was, the center of my world. I would race home on my bike at lunch time, my breasts tingling and aching and letting down milk about three blocks before I arrived at our house (I swear I could hear her crying from that far away), where Mike would be pacing and bouncing our frantic hungry baby and looking at me with grim desperation as I took off my helmet and dropped my bag on the kitchen counter. How could you have taken so long? 

She never did take a bottle. So I nursed during my lunch break, and then again as soon as I came home, and somehow she kept on growing and growing and eventually ate solids. But those first weeks working full time were harrowing for our little family.

They were at my first social work job, too. I liked some of the doctors and nurse practitioners and nurses, but other people terrified me. Like the BFFs who ruled medical records and spoke rapid slangy Spanish to each other peppered with explosive laughs (over jokes I never understood) and turned their steel trap-style minds to any problem they felt inclined to address. It reminded me a little of my one and only summer waitressing. I was timid and usually confused; I'd go back into the kitchen and repeat a question four times before someone heard me and made fun of me and then sent me away empty handed. I'd wander back to my table, demoralized. Um, I guess we're all out of salsa, sorry. I was never quite sure who to ask when I needed help, nor how to ask for it. I had no bluster to speak of. I could barely make eye contact with anyone on the crazy wild kitchen staff. I wished then that there was a way to do my job and disappear simultaneously.

The clinic was full of gutsy funny smart people who knew how to do everything. I was a hesitant, slow-on-my-feet, earnest 28-year-old with no experience, a newborn, and busted Spanish language skills. I felt so white and prissy and bumbling. I didn't have an office then; I floated between rooms. The front desk person in dental was supposed to check in the patients who were there to see me. Sometimes she didn't tell me when someone was waiting. I was so intimidated; I never confronted her. I'm pretty sure she liked it that way.

But over time, the staff at SouthEast accepted me. I began to like wandering into medical records, watching Confy and Enerys tease and laugh in the endless aisles of actual paper files. Confy had every single record number memorized. Eventually people were willing to work with me; they trusted both my good intentions and capabilities. And I loved the patients. I had a million ideas for them and for the clinic, a scant handful of which actually came to fruition.

Then we moved, for Mike's new job. I cried.

And now, unexpectedly, I'm back at SouthEast. The reason we're here is Mike's cancer. That almost impossible-to-accept reality colors everything we do in Lancaster with a strange, uncomfortable light. But even so. I am profoundly glad to be back.

I was hired by a big mental health agency with whom SouthEast now has a contract to provide integrated behavioral health services to patients on site. On my first day, I set up at a desk in the provider's office, tackling technical challenges while I waited for a patient to show up on my schedule. One by one, nurses and doctors and front desk staff and even Enerys came by and greeted me with enormous smiles and hugs. She told me Confy had just retired.

What?? No Confy?

Oh my goodness. It was delightful. We asked about each other's kids and jobs. I exclaimed over how fabulous everyone looked. They really did. Just gorgeous. My jaw began to hurt from smiling.

Every once in awhile I'd stride into the nurses's station and introduce myself to the new (i.e. hired at some point over the past eight years) providers and nurses, asking if anyone had any People with Problems to send my way.

Eventually I snagged two. Success.

The next day I was at a different site, a beautiful space built after I left, where more happy reunions awaited. I got to meet with another couple of patients, but still had a lot of down time. I decided to tackle an online training I needed to check off my list.

While I did it, I listened to an interview with Glennon Doyle Melton. She said she had recently trained herself to refrain from asking for advice from 38 friends every time she had to make a decision. She said that now she just makes decisions. Her new hurdle? Learning to refrain from explaining herself.

That one caught my attention. She said women are always feeling compelled to explain their decisions.

Oh yes. She called it. Soy yo: la mujer who explains. 

It's as if we feel the need to justify our very presence, our particularity. Oh, this? I had to wear this. I'm backed up on laundry. Oh, my kid's school? See, we debated public vs. private endlessly and I really thought hard about it and though I do support public school I knew my kid was struggling...and money? Oh yes, I know, it's expensive and we can't really afford it but we applied for financial aid. And probably we won't stay there anyway. And I can understand how you feel about it, too.

I explain myself to myself. Meagan, it does seem like a bit much to have Beatrice in school full time when you don't need it every day. I know, Meagan, but I was so worn down by the summer and really needed a little time to deal. And what if Mike gets really sick again soon? That's hard for Bea. And he has to go back and forth to New York so often. So it really is okay that I'm not working and not scrambling to take care of Mike for a few hours while she's at school.

Why don't I just say: she's fine. It's fine to take some time for myself. 

Probably because taking time for oneself isn't really perceived as fine. As women especially, we're supposed to lean in and take care and maximize and multi-task and account for our activities every waking moment. We're to justify every bite we eat, every time we volunteer or don't volunteer at our kids' school, every job we take or don't take, every two minutes spent meditating or flossing or frosting a birthday cake (post the evidence online, further justification) - basically every choice we make.

So it's hard to do the work of living one's life: to assert's one acceptability and lovability through making decisions and showing up and proceeding. But when we do, I think that helps others do the same.

In the middle of that first marvelous series of happy reunions at SouthEast, a woman walked past my desk who looked vaguely familiar. I moved towards her, smiling. She smiled back. Hi! I said, meeting her bright eyes. Meagan! she said. I gave her a big hug. Then we started chatting and I realized I had met her for the first time briefly in the hall of the mental health agency that I work for the previous week. She sees patients for therapy at the clinic part-time.

It was a new work acquaintance, the sort that normally doesn't merit a huge goofy smile and hug in greeting. But it worked out just fine. She was so warm; we sat down and had a good collaborative talk about a client.

It made me think: what if I greeted everyone that way, with genuine delight? What if we approached every meeting as a happy, unexpected reunion?
 
What if I walked into every new space the way I walked back into my old clinic, with the simple confidence that it was good to be there? That I had something worthwhile to give, and to receive?

I didn't explain away my exuberant hug to my new colleague. In a rare moment, warmed through by so many reignited connections, I didn't feel the need to. The majority of the people I met at the new clinic were strangers to me, but I walked into each encounter with neither hesitation nor fear.

To give others the gift of your face, your open gaze, you have to assume the space you occupy. You have to first know that your presence is good; then you can give it away.

Maybe it's just age, or experience, or the fact that I have a positive history at SouthEast. But I think it's something more. Because wow wow wow did I feel grateful for the change that eleven years has wrought in me. Feeling loved and valued has emboldened me to take up my role and my choices - to live inside my skin - more fully, more peacefully, and with fewer explanations. So that I can love and value and embolden in turn.

Please believe me, dear readers, when I tell you this true thing: it is very, very good that you're here.

make it beautiful

Sometimes the realizing-one's-youngest-child-is-growing-up sadness hits me. Hard. I have to reckon with the fact that there will be no more babies, that I am much older now, that we are well into another time in life marked by soccer games, math homework, pleas for phones, shifting boundaries. 

But I breathe a sigh of relief when I think that Beatrice's recent confrontation with the terrible inevitability of death marks the last time I will walk closely with a three year old through that singular developmental milestone's anguish. (Also, thank heavens there will be no more potty training, or worry over weaning a toddler). But back to death. I went through it with Frances and Gabriel at this age, and it broke my heart into a million pieces then too. Not that the process is over - not that it's ever really over. But the initial realization has hit.

I can't in good conscience tell you about the conversation that came about and then escalated at the dinner table in such a way that all of our hearts broke together. With Mike and especially my older children involved, I can't really tell the story of something so intimate - I think it is theirs to tell. I have to make space to allow my growing dear ones to articulate these sacred, saturated moments for themselves. 

In the On Being interview with Marie Howe that I referenced recently, she said that art is a kind of safe container for the brute, painful knowledge we all live with, which is that all our earthly relationships will end. Death will take us away from our children, from the ones we most adore. It's the separation, I think, that evokes the anticipatory grief and terror. But art can hold those feelings for us, rendering them tolerable, even beautiful, even transcendent. 

Children especially love to tap-dance around death. They are drawn to the ghoulish: Halloween, ghosts, skeletons, mummies. I'm going to kill you! they holler at one another in the heat of play (and argument). They love games with names like Murder. I don't know why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she'll die! All these songs and games are ways to get close to the finality of death while keeping it wrapped safely in melody and story.

And then I think of Beatrice's anguish last night, sitting in my lap, asking over and over again: will I die? do people die? without the aid of art, nor any armor at all - with her bare defenseless soul exposed. She experienced a kind of agony that merited the rending of garments, the tearing of hair. For real. 

When it became unbearable, and also late, I told her it was time to read some stories. Frances and Gabriel sat with us, all exhausted by sadness, all gathered around picture books. They were a balm. And then Beatrice requested four songs, instead of our usual two, at bedtime: The Dock (which I figured out a few days ago means the Doxology) and Amazing Grace, please, then Red River Valley and Wild Mountain Thyme. As I sang I felt how these beloved songs are about the same things: God's grace and love, the pain of endings and goodbyes, the inevitable changes life brings, the joy of connection. They make beautiful, hold-able, the truths that define our lives together.

Do not hasten to bid me adieu.

After all the tearful children were put to bed, I stretched out on the couch and read and read until it was very late and I had finished Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson. I could not put it down; I barely breathed. I hesitated before picking it up, because I knew it would not offer distraction to my weary heart (unlike Narcos, my first choice, but Mike wouldn't watch it with me - it was already too late). Rather it would take me down further into its brokenness.

Which was true. But it rendered the pain of loss just-bearable, and exquisitely beautiful too. Reading that book was like being in someone else's dream, mixing memory and fear, the immersive sensations of childhood, the words we say and don't say, into a narrative that flowed with a logic all its own.

August, the narrator, is grappling with overwhelming loss. Of her intimate friendship with three other girls she says we opened our mouths and let the stories that had burned nearly to ash in our bellies finally live outside of us.

The phrase stayed with me. I started a new job this week, one in which I will have the honor of listening to the burning stories of others, and the ashen stories too, that live dry and bitter deep in the gut. I think it is the work I am meant to do. But without art, it would be impossible.

why the debate made me cry

In sixth grade, my reading teacher was named Mrs. Gillis. She was stern, ancient, given to bouts of yelling, possessed of an impossibly straight spine. She also occasionally stepped out of the classroom and left us, 30 eleven and twelve year olds, to work independently for excruciatingly long minutes at a time. Because of her prison warden approach to teaching, students were especially tempted to raise hell every time she turned her back. Often, I braced myself for chaos. 

One day early in the school year, and thus early in my tenure at a rough urban middle school, a boy who shall remain unnamed took advantage of one of those unmonitored moments to jump out of his seat, scurry over and squat down next to mine, grab the bottom of my wide-hemmed blouse, pull it out, and look right up it. 

I remember the shirt. It was Espirit. It was turquoise and sleeveless and had buttons up the back. Despite my weird shy white girl status, I felt very cool wearing it. But it turns out that fashion cannot save you from meanness. That boy nearly put his whole head up inside my new name brand shirt, then pulled back, looked up at me and said: Girl! You ain't got no bra on! You need a bra! 

And then, booming, to the class at large: She don't wear no bra.

A week or two after that, I was in reading, bent over my work. The classroom, organized into long rows of desks, was full and quiet. Mrs. Gillis was writing on the board. Suddenly I felt a sharp yank on my hair from behind. The same boy had grabbed my ponytail and pulled. He pulled so hard that my desk slammed backwards into the two empty desks behind me, sending all three desks, in their cold metal feet, squealing and scraping across the linoleum floor. What an awful sound.

It echoed in the quiet class. Mrs. Gillis' back was turned when it happened. She yelled at us for being disruptive.

Again, I only remember my stunned silence. Fight, flight, or freeze. (I think freezing is my specialty.) But the thing is, I knew I was powerless. Mrs. Gillis was old and pissed; she didn't want the details. My tormentor, a boy who for reasons unknown spent a few awful weeks picking on me in terrible ways, was a fast-talking, skinny, tough, charismatic kid with not a lot of capacity for self-control. That school was a place where violence was commonplace and normalized. Other kids thought he was funny. Hell, sometimes I thought he was funny. He had a kind of social smarts and influence that emboldened him to push boundaries all the time. 

In those awful moments, it seemed there was nothing I could do to regain any power or sense of safety. There was no comeback I could invent to reestablish a shred of social standing; there was no gesture I could make to protect myself; there was no adult to appeal to for help. 

Maybe in the end he was caught, or suffered some consequence. Honestly, I don't remember the aftermath of either episode. I mostly remember the feeling of silent helplessness and shame, unable to secure help, unable to even find words to defend myself with. And I know I never went to school training bra-less again.

I had forgotten about that kid. Until last night, in the middle of a conversation with Mike about the debate, he came back. 

Watching Trump stalk around Clinton, listening to him make assertions and bluster and interrupt and throw up his hands, was profoundly uncomfortable. I loved Hillary more than I ever have as I watched, because she kept her calm in the face of that menace. At one point I was afraid he was going to push her. How does she do it? How does she stand there, just a few feet away, and smile calmly?

I know I'm not alone when I say the debates are tough for me to watch. 

Afterwards, we talked about how it doesn't seem to matter what Trump says. His support doesn't seem linked to the content of his speech. That's why he can say anything he wants. It seems to be more about the assertion of power. As long as he appears powerful and confident, it just doesn't matter. So coming back at him with information, or policy details, or TRUTH, means very little - at least in terms of "winning" in the crudest sense.

I felt increasingly despairing as we talked. How can it be that so many people admire the worst kind of man? I wondered: what would a noble and effective response be? What could Hillary honorably do in these debates that would somehow make him less appealing, less valid? Because truly, I told Mike, he is just like a blustering mean boy in school. He is the kind of enraging person that it can feel impossible to win against. He is a person that makes you fear there is no justice.

I started crying. I felt a kind of helplessness, unable to imagine what another woman could do in the face of this charismatic, shameless meanness, with TV cameras running and millions of people watching her every blink in order to tweet about it.

And then I remembered that boy announcing to the class, after a careful, forced investigation, that I was not wearing a bra. 

Hilary handles Trump way better than I handled that bully. But the very idea that a presidential candidate could stir up that memory makes me want to cry all over again. 

We let Frances watch the beginning of the debate. I regret it. How can a mother protect her girls (and boys) from the worst kind of men, when PBS broadcasts one of them stalking the floor of a presidential debate? And what more would that lost boy in the sixth grade have been tempted to try, if he had been emboldened by the example set in 2016? 

welcoming

 

Every afternoon my heart beats just a little faster as I approach the long benches where the children in the primary classes are seated, waiting to be picked up. I scan the small faces, looking for Beatrice. I love to see her before she sees me, and I love to surprise her. She lights up. 

I get the best hug, and then a flood of words about the things she did in school, and then, inevitably, she turns to her friend You Jie. And the two of them turn to me and plead, usually while jumping up and down, to have a play date. A very very very long playdate. A sleeping over playdate. Which bed can I sleep in at your house, anyway?

But I don't know You Jie's parents. So every day I tell them that as soon as I talk to You Jie's mama or papa we will plan a time to play. But honestly, I haven't been trying very hard. 

One of the hardest parts about Mike's illness, especially for the children, has been our compromised ability to host. Kids are loud and unpredictable and there have been times over the past 15 months that I've wanted to muzzle our three so that Mike could feel sick or sleep in relative peace. At those times adding more kids would be a set up for disaster: I'd be driving myself crazy trying to contain the mess, and they'd be wondering why Frances and Gabriel's mom is such a stressed out nag. 

Last fall was especially hard. The children were all starting at a new school, and at the same time Mike was very, very sick on chemo and radiation. I found myself meeting other parents and awkwardly inviting my children over to their houses. Socially weird, yes, but my kids' loneliness and disorientation was breaking my heart. I knew they needed time to solidify new friendships and also knew the last thing Mike needed was more children running up and down the stairs. 

So I'd ask: could our kids get together to play? And could you deal with them? At your house? I was so raw and vulnerable then, and I would try not to cry over our helplessness, and try not to focus too much on the fact that this other person had smiled politely and said hello, how are you? and my response was that my husband has cancer and because of that we moved abruptly and we are feeling lost and uncertain about the future and can my kids come play at your house? Oh, and it's nice to meet you too. And please know I'm normally not this needy and weepy and you don't have to be afraid of me or my children. We're not like this. Not usually. We won't make you uncomfortable, at least we'll try not to. And please don't judge me too much. But anyway, when would be good for you?

It wasn't easy, but for the most part it kind of worked. Ask and you shall receive. Seriously, it's good advice. People have been marvelously kind and generous with my children (and, by extension, me).

But getting back to hosting: I really hate the feeling of hesitating before I ask someone in. Hospitality is a virtue that I hold dear. Feeding people feels so good. So, when Mike came home from his first treatment on this clinical trial and it became clear that it was not going to knock him out like previous treatments have...? I still hesitate - is it okay? is Mike sleeping? - and then I remind myself, it is okay. 

Last night, on a whim, I implored Tessa to bring her family over to eat some pasta in the twenty minutes we had left before she and Gabriel had to go to soccer practice. And they came! And brought green beans. It feels almost unreal to me, that I can spontaneously bring four friends into the kitchen and pass around the parmesan and watch our families eat together without any internal twisting up over whether we are too loud or if I should make everyone go onto the porch because so many people might be stressful. But Mike was right there, one of the people eating pasta. 

And so yesterday, I mustered up my courage and waited for You Jie's mom at pick up. I introduced myself and did something I haven't been able to do with a new small friend in a long time: I asked if You Jie could come over to play. 

We all ended up walking home together. The little girls held hands, looking back at us and grinning, almost disbelieving their good luck: the dream was finally becoming reality. On the way home, I ended up telling You Jie's mom about cancer and living in my mom's house and all of it in response to her innocent get-to-know-you questions, but I felt okay. So many of those tears that pushed up against my words last year, every time I had to meet someone new, were about the difficulty of perceiving myself (or imagining others' perceptions of me) as needy and messy and broken. 

Church people like to talk about radical hospitality. More than just greeting people at the door: a much deeper kind of welcome. The way Beatrice encounters her friends outside her classroom in the morning, running to greet them, yelling out their names, grinning uncontrollably - talk about radical welcome. The children hang their jackets on the hooks outside and then run into the class, straight up to their teacher Jane, greeting her with enthusiastic delight. It makes me melt every time I see it. When they say good morning, eyes a-sparkling, what they are really saying is: you are wonderful, Jane! You are precious, and we absolutely love to be here with you! 

Welcoming people with that kind of boundless acceptance - opening wide the doors without hesitation - feels really, really good, as any of the kids in Beatrice's class would tell you. 

I fumbled a bit talking to You Jie's mom but I didn't feel like crying or protecting myself, and this too seems like a hospitable gesture. It's the kind I've been practicing for many months now. I haven't always been able to share my home and my kitchen, but I have tried to share my experience with you, to welcome you in to my brokenness. 

Once Katie told me she and another friend joked about how they might try hosting Meagan-style. What style is that? Oh you know, she said, making the salad as people come in, and asking them to help chop or stir, having a messy art project underway all over the kitchen table. 

I guess that is my hosting style. Even under the healthiest of circumstances, guests in my home see how I make the sausage. In fact, I ask them to help me make it. 

Which is maybe like this blog. Come in, come in! Let me welcome you to this messy interior space! Would you like some moments of grace, and moments of terror? While you're here, could you help me make sense of this heartbreaking, beautiful, broken world?

To be radically hospitable, maybe one is obligated to bring her own vulnerability and raggedness to the encounter. Otherwise it doesn't hold the potential to heal; it isn't an authentic connection. When you offer someone a glass of water and look him in the eyes, it's impossible to hide. You're exposed. This is why being around the primary classroom is so profoundly joyful: they all look you in the eye, and invite you to do the same. They are so comfortable seeing and being seen, just as we are.

This ambition to open the doors of my unpolished self for strangers and friends - any of whom might be angels - is essentially self-motived. It feels amazing, when I am strong enough. I am welcomed when I welcome. And I like to think that the more I can share myself fully with all kinds of people - especially annoying people, and needy people, and unsuccessful people (the kind of person I am afraid that I actually am) - the more I can offer radical hospitality to the weirdest and most neglected among us, the more comfortable I will become with that gesture, and the more I might offer the same radical hospitality to myself. Weirdo that I am. 

What would it be like, to offer that kind of delighted acceptance to oneself? To what depths might a generosity and a gracious receiving, circling back in one continuous internal gesture, fortify our spirits for all the tragedy and joy inevitably coming our way?

Welcome, me. You are wonderful. 

and it burns burns burns

At Hope Lodge, where we stayed in New York, Healing Touch is on offer every Thursday for cancer patients and caregivers. If we had stayed that long, I would have signed up. My only experience prior to our stay was when I had a nasty pinched nerve just beneath my right shoulder blade a couple of years ago. I went to work that morning holding myself rigid; every time I sneezed or laughed it hurt something awful. My colleague Bernadette, a psychotherapist and Healing Touch practitioner, noticed I was moving strangely and asked what was wrong.

Now, I must tell you, I'm sort of a funny case. I'm a chronic hanger-around-the-fringes of yoga communities and other places where people talk with conviction about chakras and energy fields. I'm genuinely fascinated by all kinds of work that integrates touch, movement and breath into holistic healing. I believe in the importance of quiet, intentional laying on of hands. I crave it when I am hurt - actually I yearn for hugs and physical contact most of the time - see twelve a day. But I've never really been a Believer. I'm more of a Dabbler, a Willing Participant. I always maintain a bit of distance; I want the freedom to make a joke about wacky mystical bullshit. Especially when people start getting preachy.

Bernadette asked me to show her the place that hurt. I pointed. She placed her hand gently on my back and we were quiet together for maybe a minute (this was while other clinicians trickled into the room for a staff meeting about to begin). She took her hand off my back and looked at me quietly. I thought: that's it? It still hurts, lady. You were supposed to fix me up in the two minutes we had between our last client and this meeting. What about that healing mojo?

Honey, she finally said, you're holding your breath so that you can avoid feeling the pain, but that's making it worse. When we feel pain, something is calling for our attention. You can't avoid it. You have to breathe right into the place that hurts.

Oh. Right. Despite its obvious appeal, avoiding pain isn't usually a good strategy. I depend on the wisdom of other people to help me remember.

She was totally right and after a few excruciating breaths my back felt better. The pain was completely resolved by the afternoon.

This morning Beatrice was dragging her feet and telling all of us that she didn't want to go to school. She flopped onto the floor and cried when I tried to help her get dressed. She refused to open her mouth when she saw the toothbrush approach.

Finally she mentioned a fire drill. She didn't want to do the fire drill today. It might be scary. Aha. So Gabriel patiently told her all about fire drills. Mike told her there would be no fire as I slid her arms into her rain jacket - even though it's called a fire drill.

She was only slightly reassured, and kept crying on and off all the way to the car. We said goodbye to Frances and Gabriel and with mounting irritation (enough with the fire drill business, good lord) I sighed and looked back at buckled up Beatrice in the mirror. And when I saw her face, I felt my heart, of its own accord, drop heavily in my chest, freighted with love for her.

We watched an old episode of Mr. Rogers recently, during which I listened to the dialogue between two characters in the world of make believe with near-bewilderment. Lady Aviland articulated Daniel Tiger's worry, whatever it was, again and again, mirroring it slowly back to him, giving language to his fear with a kind of patience normally associated with sainthood. Maybe kids need a long time to transfer a worry from the inside to the outside, from feelings to words.

Would you like to snuggle and talk about your worries? I asked. She said yes. We settled in to hang out in the back of the minivan with the doors open to the cool rainy air.

Okay. What are you worried might happen today?

I am worried that my body will be in flames. I am worried that my friends will have burns. I am afraid of a fire truck being pretend but then turning real and coming to my school and there being a fire. I am afraid we won't be able to leave without touching the flames and getting burned. I am afraid firemen will have a truck that makes loud noises and I think someone will be hurt.

Did you catch that first worry? That her body will be in flames?

We had to go right to the source of fear. I had to stop trying to shake off her worry, and rather breathe into the pain with her. We talked about why schools have fire drills, how fires very rarely happen but it's good to know how to be safe just in case, how no one will have a burn today or have to touch flames. She had to keep telling me about the images in her mind that were truly terror-inducing, over and over.

Sometimes clients tell me they don't want to talk about their depression, because that will only make it worse. If they pay attention to it, it will probably get bigger and bigger and become overwhelming.

It is counter-intuitive, really, that the opposite is almost always the case.

Beatrice agreed, after our talk, to walk into school with me. She had a perceptibly lighter step. She  ran right into her classroom and greeted her friends with contagious enthusiasm. Magic.

I left thinking about her, about the hugeness of her worries and how she was able to let them go.

I remember the midwife's face hovering over mine during Frances's birth, how she firmly and humorlessly informed me that it was time to stop shrieking, Meagan. Stop avoiding. Vocalize much deeper. Prepare to go through the Ring of Fire.

Mike just barely managed to stop himself from singing the little horn riff from Johnny Cash's song of the same title. It wasn't the time, he says.

I doubt I would have noticed anyway. Sometimes shrieking and hesitating seems so much better than heading into the fire. Oh Beatrice! Maybe sometimes we do have to enter flames, in order to pass through and out of our pain.

After I dropped her off I went to a yoga class with a teacher I admire. She was teaching a series of classes on the different chakra centers and today's was, what do you know, the yellow-hued, fire-associated third chakra.

When I left class, all cleansed by the heat of yoga practice, I walked to my car, parked further down the street. Just as I was getting in I heard sirens approach. I slid in quickly and shut the door to be sure I was out of their way. My heart racing, I counted three fire trucks and then three more fire vehicles scream past me.

I couldn't help myself. Frightened, I drove by the New School, steeling myself to leap through flames to save my kids. Just in case the firefighters needed some help.

But all was quiet, cool, and rainy: a perfect day for a fire drill.

every moment

Enjoy every moment. Savor it all. Carpe diem!!

Thus were we exhorted when I shared that Mike and I had decided to take the kids out of school and head off to a nearby state park for a midweek mini family vacation. We wanted to go away together before Mike begins a new clinical trial in New York next Monday. This treatment's goal is to get his cancer into remission so that he can safely have a stem cell transplant (read: many potentially harrowing months ahead for my family). His cancer has the worst timing, and we've had to cancel woodsy mountain idylls over two consecutive summers. So this was the first time we'd had a real family vacation in well over two years.

But just two days? Well then, squeeze as much delight and family love and adventure in as you can! 

The problem with "enjoy every moment" is that we are still ourselves and, related to this, life simply isn't enjoyable all the time, even on vacation, even when you really appreciate being able to go at all. It's a bit of pressure, isn't it? Enjoy every minute! 

Now, I know that everyone who expressed this sentiment did it with a loving heart and sincere happiness that we were finally going to get a goddamn break. I recently read an Anne Lamott essay about a family with whom she is very close. Their two year old has cystic fibrosis. She describes the time before and after diagnosis, when they made the irreversible journey from the universe of normal, sometimes-pleasant-sometimes-stressful family life to the Land of the Fucked. 

Boy did that make me laugh. Ah, yes. The Land of the Fucked! I know it well.  

And people who love us can see us bumbling around in this uncertain, treacherous territory from out there, where most of them live, in the more predictable world of work and kids and family and vacations. So when we shared that we had found a temporary exit door and were going to return to where families take vacations (the midweek, September nature of it belied our continued alien status, but still), our friends and family celebrated this triumph with us. And they wanted us to have some Serious Fun, to take the edge off life in the valley of the shadow of death and squeeze all the pleasures there were to be had out of forty eight hours in French Creek State Park.

Let me make a confession. Within the past week I've told not one but two friends to enjoy every minute of their upcoming adventuresome international vacations. I know now that when I said it, some meanness and aggression were behind the sentiment. I think I felt resentful and small and stuck in the Land of the Fucked. You know about Mike's cancer, right? You know that we can't plan more than three days in advance ever, right? So enjoy your trip. Some of us don't go on trips. But you do, like, all the time, and if you waste it with fights over where to go for dinner or space out and forget to appreciate all the amazing architecture, it will be a moral failing and an offense to every last denizen who shares my new address.  

Anyway. I'm a little ashamed about that. I'm sorry. My heart shrinks sometimes. 

So back to our trip: people I love are telling me to savor savor savor, and I'm making a packing list and looking for sheets that will fit the cabin bunk beds and a bigger cooler and glancing at the confusing directions and the time is growing short and I might not get to run before we pick up the kids at school and go, not to mention it's still raining, and I'm wondering why I have to do everything around here anyway, and I am feeling very irritable. 

Enjoy every minute. Right. So far, not so much. But we made it there, and despite the drippy weather the children were all delighted by the cabin and proceeded to leap off the bunk beds over and over, to break the place in. It was too wet to make a campfire so the older kids held marshmallows over matches to set them on fire, and Beatrice and I snuck into the cabin and used the microwave to blow up our marshmallows and make them squishy. Mike sighed in disappointment at our quickness to turn to modern conveniences in the middle of the woods. Voila! S'mores! We're on vacation!

Beatrice, who has moved too many times and faced too much uncertainty for a three year old to comfortably process, began to melt down right and left, every time she asked for something (a book, a snack, a toy) that I hadn't brought with us. I finally figured out that she thought we were moving to this little cabin in a state park permanently. New house #5. The bunk beds are nice and all Mama, but you didn't even bring a box of crackers! We are lost!

We all reassured her, we all sympathized, and we all got annoyed, too. We suggested she retreat into the bunk bed room to cry, so we could properly enjoy our microwaved marshmallows and the peace of the woods. That didn't really fly.

The next day the rain had stopped and we went hiking. Beatrice protested wildly. Initially Frances and I took turns giving her piggy back rides and reminding her not to choke us. Mike felt tired. We discovered that the Boone Trail I had chosen was actually 6 miles, not .6 miles.

I remembered that I get annoyed at my husband when we travel. I remembered that hiking with a three year old is pretty touch-and-go. I tried to accept these things, take a deep breath, and notice the riotous beauty everywhere I turned instead.

And I did. And you would have seen it too. The woods in September in Pennsylvania, if you can put your own enjoyment-shortcomings aside, are spectacular. Yellow leaves drifted down continuously through the stands of trees, and the smell of earthy wet decomposition was pervasive, an additional transparent color layered over everything. We were present on the brilliant cusp of autumn, when the summer is at its wettest, richest, greenest height, just beginning the tip and slide into a time of warm autumn colors, of greater stillness, of death.  

Beatrice decided she wasn't too scared or tired after all, and that she'd rather walk. It was fun, because there was so much to see on the forest floor, including little adorable toads. Gabriel is our most gifted observer of the natural world, and he led the effort to spot these charming little guys. By the end, it was a thirteen toad hike.

And things continued from there. We were still our anxiety-riddled raw-edged selves, but we began to relax into this new space with greater harmony. We skipped (and hurled) rocks at the lake. We ate a lot of sweets. We played cards, and drew pictures, and some of us spent hours futilely working on a campfire, watching it spark to life momentarily only to hear the wood begin to hiss, a harbinger of fire failure. Too wet. But such heroic efforts! Mike and Gabriel definitely made some smoke, and eventually humor, the absurd and ticklish kind that sometimes, thanks to grace, comes with big disappointments. We giggled helplessly about the doomed campfire. We lit paper plates. We sang songs around the ashy firepit in awful rounds and I snuck back to the microwave to make another squishy marshmallow for Bea.

The next day was even better. The morning hike was glorious, peaceful. We didn't see another soul on the trail - just us, walking a carpet of soggy leaves with those elegant trees overhead, the smooth  lichen-covered rocks, some caterpillars and spindly daddy long legs, brilliant springy moss, a toad or two, occasional splashes of sunshine. You had to give in. You just couldn't help but enjoy it.

It was a good vacation.

 

And I've been thinking about this. It isn't reasonable to expect a family of human beings (especially the one you are a part of) to enjoy every moment. But you might aspire to accept every moment. 

To try to be present for at least most of the moments. To resist running away from the moments, even when the little one lies down on the trail and wails, or when the almost-teenager shrieks about the lack of privacy. 

Don't run away from the moments when you feel yourself shaking with anger or heavy with unbearable sadness. Because those too are gifts. Take it from me, a citizen of the Land of the Fucked, a stark place where everything gets stripped away. See through this rawness. In my post-vacation, heart-healed state, I now speak not with judgement but rather gentleness: if you can, set aside the expectation. Instead accept every moment, that your heart might open wider and wider still, that love might scour you out, and fill you up.

everything shared is better

Yesterday was the first day of Sunday School. Frances shrugged me off on her way to the middle school group. I walked Gabriel downstairs to his new classroom where he shot me one of his heavy-lidded, evil eye looks as I lingered in the doorway. It meant get out of here Mama, it's bad enough as it is without you embarrassing me. As I headed back towards the hallway with Beatrice, we passed an open doorway and a very nice woman called out to us. 

Are you coming to Sunday School, Beatrice? 

I hadn't realized she was old enough this year. We peeked in and saw a bunch of blonde heads bent over pieces of white paper at a small table, chunky broken crayons in use. I helped Beatrice pull up a chair and find some supplies, then leaned over to hug her from behind. 

She knew my intentions. She turned around in her plastic chair and clung to my neck like her life depended on it. 

You can't go, Mama! You have to stay with me! 

[Incidentally, I really do feel as if my kids are either pissed at me for staying or pissed at me for going most of the time; sometimes the same kid is harboring both feelings simultaneously. An impossible position.]

She could tolerate detaching herself physically but would not allow me to inch more than a foot or two away. So I stayed. A little boy who had a tiny row of stitches visible within a yellowing bruise along his hairline also refused to let his dad leave the room. We were two parents, two teachers, and six children between the ages of three and five in a basement classroom. There were shelves with simple storytelling props (wooden sheep, figures, pieces of colorful felt), and a model of Jerusalem that you weren't supposed to play with because the city walls were not staying together very well anymore, and a bulletin board with a single child's art on it. Someone named Bella. 

I knew I had to go home to pick up Mike before church started. I really wanted a cup of coffee in the parish hall. 

When everyone had gathered on the red rug in the center of the room, the kind, bright-eyed teacher greeted each child one at a time. She told them what they would be learning about and playing with and making in their class. Then she said, Did you all have a good summer? Did you have any adventures?

I hate this moment. A well-meaning adult smiles at one of my kids and says, "did you have a great summer?"

That suggests the norm is to have a great summer. Kids are supposed to have fun over the summer, and come September they are supposed to be happy to share with their teachers and friends all about their fun summers. Kids aren't supposed to have moved houses twice, to have sent their papa off to the hospital for a week at a time, to watch his hair fall out, to cancel vacation plans and visits with friends, to worry about their parents. And while our big kids did squeeze in some classic summer fun off with friends and grandparents, Beatrice is too young to be away from us. Her summer was, unavoidably, dominated by cancer and its repercussions. 

So when all the other children had shared about their favorite rides at Dutch Wonderland and how their daddy can jump higher than the biggest wave (how I wanted to muzzle that sweet boy), the teacher turned to Beatrice. 

Did you have a vacation this summer too?

Beatrice was quiet for a moment, knees to her chest, holding onto her shoes. I studied the shiny linoleum framing the carpet, harsh and bright where the fluorescent lights above were reflected. I bit my lip. Then I watched her dear face. 

Well...we are going to go to Massachusetts for a summer vacation, I think.

Massachusetts! exclaimed the teacher. Do you know where you went in Massachusetts?

Well, I know they have swimming holes there. And trails in some big forests. And mountains called the Berkshires are in Massachusetts.

The Berkshires! Beatrice. That's a big word.

It took all I had not to cry, and then a little bit more not to snatch her up and run out of there. Does she think we still haven't had our summer vacation? She knows Frances and Gabriel went with Gramma for a short version of it, while we stayed home. Or did she know that there were no vacations this summer, and why, and she was just trying to please the teacher with an acceptable response? Or be like the other kids with mommies and daddies and trips to the beach?

I wish we had gone to the Berkshires. I wish when adults asked my kids about their summers, they didn't have to hesitate and wonder what to say.

About a week ago, sitting on another red patterned rug, I told Heather and Mike about how when I read the Little House books aloud to Frances and Gabriel years ago, I would marvel at Ma. How she kept track of the days, how she and Pa would drag in ice to melt over the wood stove in a metal washtub to bathe their girls all the long winter, how she would enforce quiet and study on Sundays. What a drag it must have been sometimes. What a ceaseless effort, creating civilization for her family, beating back the chaos and dirt and lassitude that must have always threatened to destroy their tenuous stability. To my ears some of it sounded downright crazy. Ma! Did you really grate carrots and squeeze the juice into your cream so that your butter would cast a pleasing yellow glow? Wouldn't you have liked to sit down for just one minute instead?

But she really couldn't have. She had to do those things. Her family depended on her to insist upon the importance of doing more than just survive - to rather create beauty and peace and discipline, way out in the wilderness.

I feel like her now. I make them practice the piano, and speak to me respectfully, and brush their teeth, and clear the table. I chop onions and wipe down the counters and change their sheets and do their bedtime routines. In the context of Mike's illness, frequent moves, and the uncertainty of our future, it does feel at times as if we are in the wilderness. 

I labor to make our family's center hold. Pete, the chaplain at the cancer institute, told me once that none of it is wasted. That made me cry. I listened to an old interview with Marie Howe last week and she talked about being a teenager and taking St. Theresa's advice to heart while she submitted to her father's harsh punishment, picking up cigarette butts in the yard: make every task a prayer. Do everything as if it were a prayer, offered up. Wash this dish, tie this shoe, replace this roll of toilet paper: carefully, intentionally, with love.  

I think it is possible, and even probable, that these daily labors are holy acts and that I can understand them as such. I want to hold that truth close, while also acknowledging that just because it is holy and never-wasted does not mean it isn't Hard As Heck. Holy usually travels with hard, I guess.

Back to Beatrice, on the rug. I didn't cry; I didn't run. I didn't correct her and tell the teachers that she never went to the Berkshires. I let her tell her own story, and I stayed as long as I could. Then I apologized and said we had to go, and she and I went to go pick up Mike, meet up with the kids, and go in to the service. 

This too is a kind of very hard, very holy work that I do that tests me far more than any greasy stovetop (though I despise cleaning a greasy stovetop): the quiet, constant emotional work of being present and steady for my family. 

I used to joke that my feelings get a workout every time I do my job. Being a therapist involves a lot of holding of other people's intense emotions, a lot of feeling-with.

But this? This mothering-in-the-presence-of-cancer is like Olympic training for my feelings. I stay with everyone through the fear, worry, anger, anxiety, grief. My heart breaks with them, for them, alongside them. To be a mother, at least for me, is in part to hold the suffering of my husband and children. (Like a sea turtle holding up the world, or Atlas holding up the sky. Somebody has to do it. It's the unacknowledged, quiet work we all expect women to do.)

And it is also to share myself with them fully: to sing along, to laugh too loud, to make them wait while I talk with friends, to do a little dance, to cook a weird meal, to make things with acorns or write messages to neighbors in chalk on the sidewalk. To embarrass them. Being myself with them is a constant that they can depend on. 

But it sure does wear a person out. Hence the paramount importance of doing what I can to keep filling this fragile teapot. There's time alone, and time with friends, and running, and reading. But there's also the solace and courage I take from the millions of mothers who have walked this path before me, in the face of challenges I can only imagine, in every time and place. Caroline Ingalls, a Syrian mother in a refugee camp, Mary mother of Jesus, my mother, a mother standing on the sidelines down the soccer field from me, looking gorgeous and together and feeling a wreck inside. Marie Howe told a story about the first time she replied to her daughter, who asked why she had to make her bed, because I said so. She suddenly felt the room fill with millions who had gone before her and uttered those same words. They were applauding. Because we said so.

Everything shared, she said, is better.

I think so too.

and then i saw a darkness

I've been longing to write a letter to you, here in this languishing neglected blog, a place where I can be nothing more or less than honest. I am compelled to articulate some part of my recent experience frankly; I fear doing so, too. I don't think I've been ready until today.

I also haven't had a spare moment until this morning. It's gorgeous outside. My two big kids are with my mom at an amusement park for one last blow out before school, Beatrice is at the playground with a babysitter, Mike is feeling better and is thus more independent, and I am sitting outside at a favorite local spot with a laptop and a latte. It's too luxurious; it barely computes.

Something happened to me recently. It only lasted a few days, but I'm going to call it what it was: depression. I didn't exactly meet the diagnostic criteria but for the first time in my life, I was really inside depression. I've seen it from the outside countless times as a clinician and friend and family member, but I'd never known it firsthand. 

You guys. It's really, really bad. Like, crushing. Here's how my stress-induced version unfolded: Mike went inpatient for six days to begin his second round of grueling chemotherapy. During that time I endeavored to move our family out of a friend's house, where we'd been for about five weeks, and into my mom's house. [Quick background for those who don't know: Mike's cancer came back. We found out in July - on my birthday, honestly - and after much deliberation decided to stay in Lancaster while he has more chemotherapy to prepare him for an eventual stem cell transplant.]

That time of countless trips back and forth (with the immense help of friends and family) was overfull with managing my kids' disorientation and anxiety, visiting Mike in the hospital whenever I could, cleaning like a madwoman in the bedroom and bathroom in anticipation of a possibly neutropenic Mike's return. In the midst of so many logistics relevant to moving homes again, I began to notice my head was really, really hurting. After we arrived at my mom's, I kept popping Advil and unpacking boxes and despairingly looking around, trying to figure out where exactly five people's things could fit in her relatively full house. Where to put backpacks? Clothes? Books? I wanted to solve every problem at once. I didn't want Mike to come home to chaos. I stayed up too late doing things like reorganizing books in order to find space on the shelves.

Other things started to go wrong. My contacts on my phone mysteriously disappeared.* Mike went through a terrifying, difficult fourth chemo day in the hospital (which we now know is part of the deal with this regimen) and I wasn't with him and thought I'd break with worry. I went through every box and realized I could not find the file with all my CEUs that I needed to renew my social work license in Maryland anywhere.** My head and whole face hurt so much. More Advil. I hadn't gone running in two weeks. I had started looking for a job and remembered that, oh yeah, job hunting while under duress totally sucks. The children were increasingly upset that mama was crying often and in a foul mood; I seemed to be failing to provide them with emotional steadiness at every turn. I feared I would not be able to coordinate Mike's staging procedures that he needed arranged in New York during a narrow window of time. I tried to register Gabriel for soccer and learned the U10 boys registration was already closed. 

What?? No soccer? We can't even have fall soccer?! How could cancer take that, too?***

I felt shaky and woozy and after Mike came home I finally realized I was really, really sick. I had been for a few days, and but for that raging sinus headache, the whole-body-sickness had been thinly covered over with a layer of adrenaline and urgency. Until my body said enough already. Stop it. 

Kind grandparents helped with the kids and I took to my bed when I could. It was hard to stop working on the move. But when I could actually settle, this is what I did in bed: cry. I wept with a despondency and fear that I could not shake. The specter of hopelessness kept emerging before my eyes and threatening to take away every shred of high functioning and cheerful mojo I had left. I stayed sick; the kind of sick in which climbing a flight of stairs is a real challenge. 

What would happen to us? If I can't continue to carry my family at the level of an Olympic gold medalist, I thought, we will be lost. 

It sounds dramatic. It was. 

I knew that something was really wrong, and that depression was settling like a cloud over my vision, because I wanted to hide away from everyone I love. I wanted a cave in which to disappear. I couldn't bear to have any loving eyes on me; it would amplify the reality of the disaster I found myself in. And also make me cry more. [Did you call/email/text me during that time? I am so sorry. I simply could not make myself respond.] 

I couldn't bear to see anyone from the regular world, in which people casually believe in the dependability of their own futures. Facebook, full of summer vacation pictures and anniversary shout outs and beautiful healthy athletic people, was an instrument of torment (that I finally put aside). 

I've never felt that way before, not in thirty-nine years on this planet. And wow, today I am profoundly grateful for the normally sunny temperament that I just happen to have been born with. When times get tough, it is my wont to reach out. The whole desire to isolate thing was so disorienting. I noticed it, could not recognize myself, and felt worse still. 

But after a couple of days of this, I called my friend and former colleague Kirsten and asked if I could see her and possibly get a prescription for some antibiotics. I couldn't stand to be sick and sad anymore.**** I met her on her front porch after our kids were (mostly) in bed and told her that everything was a mess and that I was really, really sick and not getting better. She listened, offered some gentle advice, sent a prescription to CVS. I made it home, exhausted and relieved.

That was the first turning towards a restored sense of self and hope. Someone else took care of me. Exhale. Then I wrote an email to Edith and told her how bad everything was. I cried while writing it but knew in my heart it was a good thing to do. I was sick for a few more days, but not in my heart. I knew it was getting better; the cloud lifted. I no longer felt the need to hide. 

From start to finish, the slide into whole-being illness and the emergence into recovery was probably about five days. But it was real. As with all traumatic, terrifying experiences, I think one has to speak it. Tell the story. That's the only way I know to tame it, to domesticate it into a regular old memory that can't jump out and scare me. [Related: I know this post has been a very long description with scant poetry or wisdom on offer. Are you still reading? Your loyalty and stamina are admirable!]

I have to keep trying to make sense of it all. So far, I've come up with a few things: 

Last week confirmed my intuitive and clinically-informed sense that our bodies and moods/spirits are entwined in complicated and unknowable ways. To take care of one is to take care of the other. 

Also, chronic stress really messes with one's well-being. Duh, right? But we all need reminders. 

My tedious, near obsessive prioritization of creating time to exercise is, it turns out, good and completely necessary.

Reaching out for help is a profoundly healing act.

And finally: I was afraid to let anyone know how deeply I was struggling. I felt ashamed because in that moment I saw myself as ineffective, weak, helpless. Honestly, I feel a little afraid right now, telling you about it. 

But I think it's a good thing to do. My vulnerability is the raw and powerful real thing that I have to give you. I feel brave today. 

What our family is going through is immensely fucking hard. I know I'm not the only woman out there who has run herself ragged taking care of her family in the midst of mountain-sized challenges. Our numbers are legion. So I say this most especially to all of my sisters-in-heroics out there: taking care of ourselves is always, always worth it.

*I got my contacts back, eventually, in the form of an Excel document. And after three trips to the genius bar and many hours on hold with my carrier, I now have a new shiny phone. Happy ending.

**I'm putting the pressure on the PA State Board of Social Work to send me a photocopy of my file, which contains all my CEUs. They exist! I just need to convince someone there to send them to me. Week two of trying...

***I played the cancer card and they opened up a spot for Gabriel. His first practice is this Tuesday.

****I had a good talk with a big-hearted therapist first thing today. Went for a run yesterday. I'm on it!