all in

When Frances and Gabriel were much younger, Beatrice was but a twinkle, and Mike was a new faculty member working all the time, I felt weighed down with the responsibility of having to manage kids and a house and a life. It was lonely. Mike was often away, and I was often at home. If there was a domestic problem, chances were I would have to be the one to solve it.

Gross bug in the bathroom? Mama will get it. Sick with a fever? Mama will take you to the doctor. Empty toilet paper roll hanging sadly in the bathroom? Mama will get a new one. Pile of toys on the step that Mama put there in the hopes that the owner of the toys would notice it and take it upstairs to her room but forgot to explicitly tell the owner to do so? Mama will sigh upon stepping over the pile for the seventh time and take them up herself at 11 o'clock that night.

There is something so terrible and isolating - so adult - about knowing that no one else will do it. If you want a clean counter, you have to wipe up the spill. Or you have to stand over your four year old and instruct him on how to properly wipe up the spill, which is in fact harder. Sometimes that spill is no big deal; sometimes it feels weighty and awful. Sometimes a fairy godmother would be nice.

All these years later, living with cancer has taught me that in fact I have a fairy godmother. I have about ten fairy godmothers. There may be more waiting in the wings that I don't even know about.

About two weeks ago I told a couple of friends at a school event that I was tired of managing everything. I wished I could make like a fragile Victorian flower and collapse onto a fainting couch and let other stronger people take care of our impending move. We can help with that! they said, and right before my eyes, they waved their magic wands (i.e. whipped out their phones) and arranged to borrow a truck and have a friend drive it the next week. Emboldened, that night I emailed a few friends and asked for help. They came and transformed the daunting process of moving furniture from Annapolis to Lancaster into a piece of cake.

After Mike's diagnosis and our emergency move to Lancaster, we needed so much help. I was terrified for my kids. I knew I couldn't do it all alone. So I let it be known, and we were indeed showered with loving support. But I was plagued by an uncomfortable, slightly nauseated sensation in the pit of my stomach much of the time because I knew there was no way I could repay it all. Not in my lifetime. Some part of me worried about the debt we were incurring. Not just material help style debt, but friendship debt, kindness debt, spiritual debt. I could never make enough dinners to repay all those meals; I could never send out enough hugs and poems and homemade gifts to balance the scales. I would be in debtor's prison forever, aware that I had simply taken too much.

Can you believe how long it has taken me to finally understand that love is not an economical arrangement?

Nearly two years later, something about our friend Teb instantly agreeing to take a day off work, pick up a truck, drive it 100 miles away, load it with furniture, and drive it 100 miles back - and my own easy acceptance of this gift - made me stand back and really get it. When it hit me, I cried and cried.

I didn't feel anxious receiving his generosity because I knew that we are in this together. We're all of us all in. His actions said: you have a problem? Then I do too. Let's solve it together. And eat burritos and hang out and laugh with other friends who are in it together with us.

I will never feel alone in the way I used to, because I have learned that I'm not alone. I wish it didn't take a life-threatening illness to teach me that. But I'm grateful to know it all the same.

Visit the sick and the imprisoned. Give to the poor. We might go to church, and think of these good works as something we should schedule in on a Tuesday afternoon. And indeed we should. But. I've been thinking a lot about this. Aren't we are all sick, trapped, and poor - to different degrees, in different ways, sometimes varying over the course of a single day? By accepting our suffering, sharing it, extending our love to others from that hurting place - might that be one way to understand what it means to take up our cross?

And by asking for help, are we not inviting those around us to step into a way of being that calls forth their best selves? And encouraging others to do the same?

Sometimes friends try to reassure me when I express discomfort with receiving their support by reminding me how many times in the past I have helped someone else, and that someday, when this difficult time is over, I will again be able to help others in need. That is true, and there is some comfort in it for me. But it isn't the most important truth. I might need a lot of help for a very long time. I can't hang my hat on the hopes of someday being able to properly pay it forward and right the scales.

Because when you're in it together, it doesn't matter. If our burdens belong to all of us, debtor's prison no longer makes any sense. We carry neither our sorrows nor our joys alone.

Consider Gabriel, who when given some kind of treat - ice cream, Halloween candy - will insist on sharing it with you. Usually I am happy to accept, but recently I said no thanks. He urged more insistently. I explained I just wasn't hungry. Please, Mama! Just try a little, he said.

Gabriel, why do you want me to eat this so much? I asked.

Because, he explained, it makes it tastes better when you eat something special together.

Dear friends, if you are lonely - if you need help - consider telling someone you love about it. I wish I had called a friend all those years ago when I was home with little kids and just said: there's a really gross bug in the bathroom and I can't bear to deal with it alone.

Would you come over?

can-be attitude

This morning I reluctantly said goodbye to my very sick husband, then an excellent friend came and collected my children to take them to an early church service, and by eight I was driving to my social work alma mater, Bryn Mawr, to take an all day licensure prep course.

On the way, I discovered If You're Feeling Sinister was in the CD player and so had the distinctive pleasure of singing along to every song. I first encountered that album nearly twenty years ago (it's shocking, I know! - but do the math, you'll see); it's tied up with the first months of my relationship with Mike, an essential part of the soundtrack to a string of dizzy, romantic, on-the-cusp-of-adulthood hours passed together in his tiny Williamsburg apartment on Metropolitan Avenue at the tail end of the twentieth century.

That's one of the benefits of falling in love with one's partner relatively early in life: so much of the music that moves me is somehow tied to us. Even the things we each loved in high school, before we met, seem to have been folded in - at this point I have embraced (at least in theory) countless obscure 90s hip hop lyrics as my own.

Anyway. I was driving through the lush spring green of Bryn Mawr (I had forgotten how beautiful it was) intermittently singing and crying and praying and worrying. When I hit the last track I could not help but belt out:

The best looking boys are taken

The best looking girls are staying inside

So Judy where does that leave you?

Walking the streets from morning to night

Judy! I heard your song about the dream of horses in a new way this morning. Sometimes there are simply no good choices to be had. Sometimes you feel sad and restless; unmoored.

I do things all day long. I make breakfast, and brush little rows of teeth, and bike to work, and take kids to baseball games and piano lessons, and chat with friends at the fair down the street. All those things happen, and often even go well, but a part of my heart is nearly always pacing. Like Judy. My heart is walking the streets from morning till night.

Having choices, solving problems, putting a can-do attitude to work - it's basically our birthright as Americans. Right? I love to make things happen. But our fragile bodies (and families and communities and planet) trouble that comforting approach to the problems of life. In the face of my own true love's suffering these past days, the limits of action - the poverty of options - are rough stone walls hemming me in. It seems all I can do now is suffer with. And pace, and feel afraid, and press my forehead against the cold stone.

And tell you guys about it.

Mike was admitted to the hospital while I was learning test-taking strategies this afternoon. His dad took him through the emergency department. I feared that would happen today, while I was away. He's there now, I hope resting well, and I am here at home, in between many loads of laundry, elbow-deep in a bag of tortilla chips.

I just remembered the next part of the song:

With a star above your shoulder lighting up the path that you walk

With a parrot on your shoulder, singing everything when you talk

Starlight, yes! It's soft and hazy, but gentle too. Dear friends, maybe - oh maybe - this moment of limits and uncertainty will prove more illuminating and more beautiful than we could ever now comprehend.