kitchen re-do

On Thursday night, as I lingered over the goodnight routine with Gabriel, stretched out next to him on the bottom bunk in his cozy third floor bedroom as I am wont to do, we reviewed the events of the following day. I would drop him off at school in the morning, at which point we would say goodbye until tomorrow. He would go home with his friend after school for a sleepover, get dropped off in the morning at his basketball game, and then play with other friends. I would drive after work to meet a friend to enact a radical plan we had cooked up over the past month: a little overnight adventure in the wilds of Bel Air, Maryland, a site chosen for no reason other than it's convenient location midway between Lancaster, where I live, and Annapolis, where she lives and where we once lived, before the cancer came. So tomorrow night Gabriel would be here, and I would be there. Until lunchtime on Saturday.

But I'll miss you. Don't go.

You'll be having so much fun, I don't think you'll miss me much.

Don't go anyway, Mama.

Just think, you'll be at James's house! It's so nice there...and they have that great big kitchen...and didn't you say James loves cookies so they always make big batches of homemade cookies to have on hand? It's just that kind of house.

Yes. But when our kitchen is done, we'll always have cookies too, you know.

An aside: we've been working on choosing new flooring and paint colors for our kitchen. I want a brilliant green marmoleum floor and bright white cabinets. We have a fantastic helper on this project and are slowly and steadily moving towards execution of the vision. Even the kids have gotten into the selecting and planning.

It's the first time I've been able to feel simple excitement about something to do with this improbable house where my husband never lived. Every time a close friend visits us here I faux-casually ask if it feels like a place Mike Brogan would live. A place Mike Brogan would like to live. Does he fit here? Is there plenty of room for him to sprawl on the couch and read? They always say yes, of course, but I feel uneasy all the same. I do think he'd like my kitchen plans. Maybe that's why I can feel confident and happy about pursuing them.

But anyway. Back to our program:

Oh yes. Once the kitchen is just right, it will always be clean, and we'll always have cookies.

It will be magic, said Gabriel. When we have the new, nice kitchen, everything will be just right. The kittens will never scatter litter all over the floor or knock over the recycling. You won't ever find knives that aren't all the way clean in the silverware drawer.

There was a pause while he gazed up at the slats supporting the mattress above us, feeling around for the thread, in order to keep following. Then he picked it up and it slid quickly through his fingers.

Papa will still be alive. All our friends from Annapolis will move down the street. They can work at F&M.

Uncle Noel will buy Wendy Jo's just like we wanted him to, and they'll all move here too, and whenever he comes home from Market he'll drop off cookies on the front stoop. Like, you know there used to be a milk man, and a spot for him to leave the milk? Uncle Noel will be the cookie man. We'll have a box on the front porch. And we'll still live here but in a bigger house - not too big, not too big that you get lost, but big enough to really play in.

I felt so peaceful and close to my boy, envisioning a world that made perfect sense, watching it unfold from the bunk bed.

This sounds so good, Gabriel.

Yes, and Robert will actually live in our house. In some wing on the third floor that we never really use. And sometimes when you come down to the kitchen in the morning, he'll be sitting there in his bathrobe, drinking coffee and reading the paper.

I love that idea. He will be twirling the end of his moustache, quiet as a mouse, just waiting to say good morning.

And what else? Gabriel's old teacher will still be his teacher; his principal that retired will still be the principal. Many other far-away friends will move right to our block. Gabriel will no longer be a beginning guitar player; he'll be a guitar god, and we'll play music all the time. We'll host poker games and make big dinners and have a dog.

Everything lost will be restored. Everything distant will be close. The counters will gleam, and there will always be cookies.

Papa will still be alive. 

I think we were describing heaven.

hope and loss on a monday morning

Mondays are my day off.

On Monday mornings, I wake up, stretch, and in the still darkness of my bedroom I submit quite willingly to the day ahead with nary a protest: it's my day, after all, and all I've to do is get the kids up and ready for school before I can sink in and enjoy it. Even if it's a day of dentist appointments and grocery shopping and bill paying, I absolutely love it, because I get to do all those things alone.  I roam the house, pleasantly spinning my wheels, doing a chore here, opening a piece of mail there, skimming the two-day-old paper left on the kitchen table for a spell. I talk to Mike. I talk to the cats. I take a run. I take a long shower. And before I know it, it's 2:56 and time to rush out the door to pick up the children.

I could spend a week of Mondays like that, no problem.

But for the kids, Monday mornings are something else entirely. The agony is real. It's partly my fault, especially in Beatrice's case, because I often let her stay up too late on Sundays (we always seem to be sharing dinner with friends or doing something else that is worth pretending that she isn't due under the covers by eight o'clock for). Yesterday was no different. We had been to a raucous singalong/performance called Hamiltunes (everything you're imagining right now is spot on) the night before and the girl didn't even get home until ten.

I woke her up and she uttered a groan. She begged me to come back later. I turned on the light. She asked if I could bring her breakfast in her bed. I said how about I make your breakfast, and then let you know when it's ready? Which I did, and when I returned six minutes later to her room she was sound asleep again, drooling. Doesn't seem possible, but she was. When I woke her up again she cried helplessly. I knew I only had myself to blame.

After finally coaxing her to the kitchen and feeding her, she begged to have just a little snuggle time before she got dressed. The clock was ticking. My Monday awaited me. Feeling not a little ambivalent, I said okay.

We climbed on top of my bed, where she performed her customary snuggle voodoo with gentle nose digging and perfect cheek-to-shoulder fitting; her marvelous warm skin and her loopy yet astute conversation are like a siren's call. I should have strapped myself to the mast of the morning getting-ready-for-school routine, but I was beaten down by all that early morning wailing. She must know I fall under her spell and regularly stay in a snuggle longer than planned, even consider skipping whatever we're supposed to be doing next. Just a little snuggle time. Sure. 

So yesterday, after a few moments of settled quiet, Beatrice, who had been moaning with fatigue and the prospect of going to school moments before, pondered the ceiling for awhile before asking me a series of pointed questions: how did Jewishness and Christian-ness get started, anyway? Did someone invent being Christian? Who were the first people to be Jewish? Did they just decide to be that religion one day?

What an opening. I reminded her of the story of Abraham and Sarah, and we talked about how God called to Abraham, who just picked up and followed where God led, off to a new country. We talked about how God promised Abraham and Sarah countless descendants, as many as the stars in the sky, even though they were old at the time and had no children. Those stars would be the Jewish people. It was a miracle that Sarah had a baby when she was so old, but she did.

I was totally getting into the story. As you can imagine. It's such a good story! And I was kind of waiting for Beatrice to chime in with something awesome like, Mama, Grandma and you and we are those stars that God pointed out to Abraham! We are part of the story!

But she didn't say that. As I was telling her that Sarah was ninety years old when she had her baby Isaac, Beatrice interrupted.

Mama. That means you can have a baby!!

(Yep. Her takeaway was that her mother, an old wizened woman like Sarah, might also be singled out by God for such an honor. It happened once! You never know.)

Oh, but Beatrice. Even if getting older wasn't an issue, I don't have a husband anymore to have a baby with. 

So ... just get a new one!

Gabriel had wandered into the room and was sitting on the other side of my bed during the Abraham and Sarah story. Her suggestion snapped him out of his reverie.

Beatrice. Do you actually want Mama to remarry?

I started laughing and blurted out: and to have some ... some... man live in our house??

Gabriel layered on: some weird guy who sleeps here?

And then Beatrice caught the absurdity of it all, and started giggling and snorting as she took it even further: a guy with hairy armpits!!

That really cracked us up.

There has been so much press around Robert Alter's new translation of the Hebrew Bible that even I, on my scanty media diet, have encountered a handful of reviews and profiles and found reading about it to be completely compelling. One in the New York Times Magazine not too long ago used the language Alter chose around the episode of Sarah's laughter as an example of his translation process. I had always thought that her laughter was in response to the outrageousness of God's promise. A baby, me? Ha ha ha! Somehow her laughter seemed to speak of the improbable, surprising joy that would ripple out from her to her baby and her community.

But Alter's words suggest something else: Laughter has God made me,/Whoever hears will laugh at me.

Ever since I read that, which was before Beatrice asked me who decided to be the first Jew, I have been thinking about Sarah - a Sarah who might have been the object of laughter. I have been thinking about how her life must have looked as she approached the end of it, a woman whose worth in her time and place (as in most times and places) was measured in terms her fertility, especially her ability to birth a boy who would carry her family's legacy into the future.

She's so mean to Hagar. Were others mean to her? Did she miscarry, perhaps many times over? Was she lonely, isolated? Did she feel herself to exist on the periphery of her social world? Could she feel any safety, any power, in the role she inhabited before Isaac? Did her family and friends laugh at her?

Was it so bad that when God told her she would get the thing she had wanted for decades, the thing she must have given up for lost and mourned long ago, the thing that would have earned her the smiles of others rather than their laughter, bitterness surged because to hope after so much pain would be unbearable? Or did she simply brace herself for more laughter to come? A pregnant ninety year old woman is, after all, so improbable as to be laughable.

Sarah had never worn the easy mantle of a cisfamilied woman. She had always lived outside the norm.

Cisfamilied. Could it be a word? It describes the state I once enjoyed and never will again. I was a wife and mother in a mom-dad-kids 'normal' family, thoughtlessly partaking of all the privileges cisfamily-ness entails. Even messed up cisfamilies get to reap the social rewards of being 'normal.' Now I am a single widowed mom in a not-normal family. We have no dad to trot out at school and sports events. I can't ask my husband to stay home with the kids while I go out with friends. I can't ask him to consider a crazy late-in-life fourth baby. I am the lone single adult at the social gatherings I attend; everyone else is part of a couple. I take stock of wedding rings now: everyone in line at the grocery store, the people on either side of me in yoga class, my coworkers in a staff meeting. I notice my naked finger resting on the conference table.  I didn't know I was cisfamilied until my status changed.

But Sarah was never cisfamilied. She was a non-mother, and then she was a freak super-old mother. Maybe our foremother suffered terrible sadness, loss, doubt. She got her baby, and with him all those stars in the sky, but maybe it wasn't simple or easy to accept that gift. A lot happened at the end of her life. We haven't even mentioned the part where Abraham takes Isaac off with the intention of sacrificing him! Or when Sarah cruelly sends Hagar and Ishmael away. Or the heartbreaking joy that must have filled her as she held her tiny baby. At eighty-nine, could she have predicted any of it?

So obviously I'm not in a place to even consider loving another man someday. A strange man with hairy armpits walking around my house sounds about as improbable to me as a having a baby at ninety. Or forty-one. The preposterous and downright distasteful idea, there on my bed yesterday morning with Beatrice and Gabriel, made me laugh. Hard.

And yet, and yet, holding Sarah in my heart, the Sarah of before Isaac and the Sarah of after, I cannot help but wonder with just the tiniest flicker of hope: what impossible love might God have in store for me, for all of us? Right now it's a scorched field for as far as I can see; years upon years of dried-up barrenness, in every sense. We will never be 'normal' again, but I suspect there are a lot of rich, unexpected, creative ways to live out a not normal family life that we might discover. Extended travel? Creative endeavors? New friends? An adorable rescue dog named Arlo that I came way too close to bringing home from the pet store on Saturday?

Maybe, just maybe, the distant future holds a reality that is defined less by loss and pain, and more by abundant and generative love.

Hoping hurts. I do it anyway.

this is mean mama

Can there be a sound more threatening to whatever shreds of inner peace a mother manages to shelter in her fragile heart, a noise more deeply irritating, a noise more deeply saddening, than the escalating tit-for-tat music of her children bickering?

It's been harrowing around here. Beatrice, so much younger than her brother and sister and thus far less adept in the sophisticated eye-rolling and sarcasm department, has resorted to screaming the brutally direct phrase STOP IT the moment the tone shifts to a tiny bit combative, or worse, a tiny bit dismissive of the importance of her day to day activities and feelings. I would argue that this is a natural response to being objectified - treated explicitly as "cute" in a way ultimately intended to demean the cute person in question - though my older children would probably disagree. In any case, now the problem is so entrenched that I seem to hear Beatrice screaming at her brother and sister many, many times a day.

She screams at me, too.

On Sunday night I took Gabriel and Beatrice to the contemplative evening service at our church. Oh, what a very bad idea that was. Beatrice wriggled and whispered and pushed at her brother who insisted on claiming the lone meditation cushion (she periodically whined in a very audible stage whisper to me: he won't let me sit on the whoopee cushion, Mama!). He smiled triumphantly at her, chin high, wriggling himself more decidedly onto the cushion, while she was left with one of the boring meditation benches.

Truly, it was torture. The two of them could not break their bickering rhythm and most of the hour-long service was spent in either complete silence or silence while one person quietly spoke. But of course since we were there it was never silent. The children were pushing each other, taunting each other, leaning on me, pulling on my arms, softly groaning. In fits of frustration, I would occasionally stare at them and hiss STOP IT.

Wherever did Bea pick that up?

Anyhoo. Church finally ended, and we basically ran out of that chapel, into the welcoming embrace of the cold fresh air and evening street sounds. I was feeling brittle. Desperate. Mad at myself for thinking that that service was a good idea, mad at Gabriel for quietly taunting his sister, mad at Beatrice for being unable to sit still for more than thirty seconds. (I just can't stop moving my body right now, Mama!).

We drove back home and I tried to explain to Beatrice why she can't continually scream at her siblings and at me - incidentally have I ever mentioned that explaining ANYTHING of this sort to a five year old is usually a bad idea? - including the concept of being respectful to adults, and not talking back, and knowing that I, her mama, am most definitely in charge ALL the TIME. This went over as you'd expect. Talk about escalation. Our absurd conversation, if transcribed, would make you laugh. Heck, it might even make me laugh. But in the moment I was holding back tears and rage and had no perspective whatsoever. It was awful. I sent my black ship past her little gray rowboat in the dead of night again and again through gritted teeth to absolutely no effect, and in the end only worsened our fraying dynamic.

At home, we pulled up to the curb and I said, I need a minute.

Gabriel, who had been quiet the entire ride home, said, yes you do. C'mon, Beatrice.

So he and Beatrice got out and walked around the corner to my mom's house, where we were due for dinner. And as soon as the automatic minivan door slid shut I let loose a keen like no other, an ongoing rage/grief scream of epic proportions. Man, did it hurt. Like there was an alien lizard-like creature inside of me, and it was on fire, and it had to come out. The hard way.

Mike, Mike, Mike! Take these children. Tell them to stop it. Give me a break already. Exert some fucking authority, please, because apparently I have none. I need you here, being their papa, being my partner, the one person with whom I can wade through all this muck.

Finally I pulled it together - barely - and stiffly got out of the car. Just then I saw Frances coming down the dark street. At my mom's, Beatrice had started yelling at her (something about the wrong take out order, a miscommuncation on Frances's part that had struck Beatrice as a personal affront) and so she decided to leave. I can't take it. 

I know the feeling. But I convinced Frances to come back with me. Grandma had ordered us pizza! That was nice. It would be delicious. We can take it. Let's go.

We walked in, and the tension in the kitchen was worse than it was in the car. Things were looking more and more grim. Various people volunteered to leave, or rather escape, Beatrice began to cry and scream all over again, and louder still, because everyone was acting like she is too horrible to eat dinner with, and just as my mom poured me a glass of wine I took stock and decided to send Frances, Gabriel, and my mom to my house with a box of pizza. I told Beatrice she and I will stay, because it is time to Take a Break.

The dreaded time out! She protests. I put her on the couch. I pull up a stool in the open kitchen a few feet away, get my glass of wine, and open an old Martha Stewart Living magazine that is on the counter. Breath, breath, breath. Beatrice continues to bellow and writhe. This is a torment she cannot endure quietly. I continue to breath and look at the pretty pictures. The magazine is open to a little section showing Martha's calendar with her daily items listed in each square of the month.

Polish the silver.

I hate you, I hate you!

Make a delivery to a local food pantry.

You don't understand me at all!

Organize the wine cellar.

She slithers desperately off the couch and onto the floor. Why is everyone so mean???

Deadhead the roses, take dogs to be groomed, horseback ride.

I clung to Martha's orderly, waspy domestic dreamlife as tightly as I did the stem of my wineglass. Oh, to have but a single item on the daily to do list, and to have that item be wrap Japanese boxwoods with burlap.

I told Beatrice we wouldn't talk until her time out was over. My heart was pretty cold at that point; my eyes stayed fixed on the glossy paper shining beneath the yellow kitchen lights while my little girl wept and screamed in a manner not unlike my partial grief-demon exorcism in the car thirty minutes earlier. But my earth had been salted, nothing could live in there. In that moment, in my mom's kitchen, my highest hope was to endure the next few minutes. And then the next few after that.

And then, as faithful readers of this blog have probably already guessed, something good happened. Grace or a love demon or something moved me to the couch when her minutes were up, where I picked up my limp, red-faced girl, and found the strength to work things out with her. It wasn't easy. The talking was tough, and there were many more ships-in-the-night moments, but our vessels were slowly and surely cutting through waves towards a common point on the horizon. We did the work, together.

A friend in grad school taught me the phrase 'stay in the boat.' She learned it from a marriage counselor, who used it with clients to describe the goal of getting through times of conflict in a marriage. (It is such a useful concept that I feel certain I must have mentioned it here before). You can't step out of the boat and push it downstream and wave with a resentful frozen grin at your partner when the going gets painful. You have to stay in the boat together, tolerate the awfulness, until you find your way back to connection, to love. There's no hope of reconciliation for people who refuse to stay in the boat. When I was gazing at waspy fantasy chores and walling off my broken heart, feeling pushed past the capacity to empathize, I was sitting right on the teetering edge of the boat. It would have been so easy to slide off, wade through the water, and climb onto shore. See ya, Beatrice. Have a nice trip.

Instead, I fell back in. We got to the point where Beatrice told me that when she screams deep down she feels afraid. And sad. And that she would like it if I could speak quietly and nicely to her instead of being a mean mama in those moments, because she could feel better and probably calm down if I did.

And when I asked what to do about her siblings, who were feeling so hurt and angry, Beatrice said, remember the day that Papa died, how you and me and Gabriel and Didi got into Grandma's bed together and had a family snuggle for a long time? I would like to do that.

I think about Mike's death every day. I think about the hospital, and everything that happened before, during, and after he died. I think about it whether I choose to or not - my mind is compelled. My heart just barely tolerates the pain of it. But the very worst thing I've ever lived through happened a little later, and that was telling the kids. I can barely write that sentence. It is unbearable, unrevisitable. I cannot think about it at all.

Beatrice remembers though, and brought something beautiful from that pain right into an evening that I had thought was unredeemable. My girl wants to stay in the boat. So do I.

Love is real. Family snuggle it is.

trigger finger

Sometimes one part of one of my fingers - like, the little section from one knuckle to the next, or one knuckle down to the base - will spontaneously bruise. It turns purple and gets tender, then after a couple of days resolves. It started happening the first year that Mike was sick. I mentioned it once to my nurse practitioner, who shrugged. She and I were pretty much on the same page during Mike's aggressive and often symptomatic illness: it was natural that I had various unusual body ailments while coping with chronic acute stress, and it was natural that I worried about them, and it was worth investigating some even though stress was a far more likely cause than cancer for my skin problems, hair loss, and back pain.

It's annoying that my hands bruise, but I had relegated it to a low and rarely considered area in my anxiety cabinetry, the weird-body-stuff-that-isn't-dangerous-and-you're-supposed-to-quietly-endure-now-that-you're-in-your-forties drawer. Open it occasionally, toss something else in, maybe consider the other items in there briefly, and shut it again. Moving on. But a couple of nights ago I was snuggling up with Beatrice before saying goodnight, and when I stood up I noticed I could barely bend my middle right finger. It was swollen and starting to turn purple. Both sections, from my hand to my main knuckle and up to the second knuckle, were mottled and numb.

My fingers had never swollen before. I walked down the hall, concerned. What the heck?

I came downstairs where the older kids were reading in the living room. I sat at the foot of the stairs and asked my phone to tell me about spontaneous finger bruising and swelling. Gabriel drifted over to me and rested his chin on my shoulder, looking down at the phone.

What are you doing?

Just looking up why my finger might be so swollen and bruised like this.

Of course Google produces a number of questions when one enters medical symptoms in the search bar, such as what are the signs of cancer? when does spontaneous bruising mean cancer? and what are the symptoms of leukemia?

It might as well have topped the list with an article designed to squeeze all the peace out of my boy's heart: Your Mother Has A Bruised Finger; She Probably Has Cancer Too. Say Your Goodbyes Now While You Still Can.

Geez. I hadn't even thought it was cancer. Maybe some rare neurological disease that would leave me twitching and drooling within the year. Possibly a bleeding disorder that will drain me of all color and make it very ill-advised for me to use the mandolin/spiralizer I just bought myself as a present for making it through the holidays. But cancer? Naw.

But now that we had both already seen the cancer references, I felt we should keep looking until we found a more reasonable cause for my sausage-like digit in order to assuage our fears. Finally we hit on something called Achenbach's Syndrome that occurs most often in women over forty. It is benign and merely annoying, though patients usually get freaked out and will relax if you (the doctor) tell them the condition has a name. Achenbach's. Ah. Toss it back in the middle age irritations bin.

I could feel Gabriel's whole body relax next to me. Mine probably did, too. It's not cancer! Whew.

After Mike died, the kids slept in my room with me for about six months, until we moved to this new house. We rotated who slept in my bed and who slept on mattresses on the floor. We all had a lot of fears (still do), which were especially insistent at night (same) but one the kids held that I didn't always fully recognize (which is silly because I had and have the same worry) was that something terrible would happen to me and they would be left without any parents at all. I would die in the night. A heart attack maybe, or a deranged murderer would climb in the window. A freak fall out of bed in which I landed exactly wrong. They had to stay close to ensure my safety. Because as we all now know - and as I have known since my dad was diagnosed with cancer when I was seventeen - anything can happen at any time. Sometimes one must monitor the remaining parent out of sheer self-preservation.

They're still afraid. Nightmares abound. There is a heavy fear-door that one very bad thing happening to you will pry open, and afterwards it is always left ajar. You can't shut it again. It's not supposed to open up when you're only five years old; you're supposed to enjoy your childhood without knowing in your bones, beneath language and logic, that the people you love best can and will die.

When Mike and I would linger in a hug, Beatrice would laughingly squeeze herself between us and push us apart. Mike called her The Hugbuster. It was a little joke that developed a life of its own, as she would occasionally laugh and hugbust other people and absolutely loved to get squished inside the hug, whereupon she would always announce it's dark in here!! So funny.

But we were always her favorite huggers to bust.

When I cry these days, Beatrice will go to great lengths to make it stop. On December 23rd, we spent the night at Mike's parents' house. As she was getting over pneumonia, Beatrice slept in bed with me to spare everyone else her nighttime cough. I was snuggling with her at bedtime, and after a busy day, in the quiet and dark, I felt the sadness pushing on me from all sides. I must have made a sound or gesture that tipped her off before any tears actually appeared because suddenly she sat up, turned towards me, and said in a voice set comically deep, Meagan, this is Michael. It IS! This is Mike. Can you get me a peanut butter sandwich? Anyway, Meagan, there's no crying allowed on Christmas. NO CRYING! 

Mike, you know I cry a lot. Can't I cry now at Christmastime? I'm so sad that you're not here.

Nope! No, not at all. This is Mike. Meagan, no crying at Christmas. Only being happy. I'm being funny right now! So you should be laughing!

I could only converse with my dead husband via our five year old daughter's heartbreaking imitation for about a minute before I really did start crying, despite the strict prohibition, and then Beatrice dropped the whole thing and pleaded with me to stop. I pulled it together eventually. I tried to tell her it was okay to be sad because her papa wasn't here at Chrismas, but she wasn't buying it. No crying on Christmas. (Funny, I can easily imagine Mike saying that with gusto and exagerrated authority, though more in response to a tantrum over a broken toy or general holiday overload).

I'd always thought that her strongly expressed objections or seeking after distraction in the face of my sadness was just about her general discomfort with my powerful grief. I've had vague worries about her intolerance of negative emotions. But the more I think about it, a puffy purple finger and my tears and even my lingering hugs with her Papa in which we would relax and some of our many feelings would begin to seep out in that island of quiet safety all amounted to the same thing: an awful, undeniable vulnerability that she is powerless to stopper. It's terrifying. It threatens her very survival. All my cracks, physical and emotional and spiritual, point - albeit, at times, circuitously - to my mortality. I won't be here forever. I think for my youngest, it is better to try and paper over them with some crazy song and dance number rather than confront that reality.

Who among us can unblinkingly consider the impermanence of those we love best for more than a moment or two anyway?