oh how lovely

I have become an expert distracter and entertainer in our bathroom. Sitting on the little plastic Ikea footstool facing Beatrice, my hands resting on her bare knees, I sing songs and make up stories and often I close my eyes and pretend that I am listening very, very closely for the sound of her pee hitting the water. And when I do hear it, my eyelids fly open in astonishment and she is grinning at me. Like - oh yes, Mama - it worked. Again. We did it.

Tonight we were back in the bathroom, before bedtime, and nothing was happening. I stood up and looked at Beatrice and I sang

oh how lovely is the evening, is the evening
when the bells are sweetly ringing, sweetly ringing

and truth be told, I was kind of enjoying the sound of my own voice, and the feeling of singing so fully, and just beginning to think about how much I appreciated this particular perk of parenthood - that you can sing all you like and they will tolerate and even enjoy it - when Beatrice interrupted me.

"That makes me cry."

"The song makes you cry? Why?"

"Because that song is a sad song. It makes me cry when you sing it."

I looked at her. I told her music made my heart swell up with lots of feelings, too. I was just beginning to tell her that it's okay to feel sad, that sometimes sad is one of the feelings a song makes you have, when she said, with her I'm-putting-on-my-best-bright-eyes-and-sweet-smile-to-persuade-you-otherwise expression:

"...how about Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree? That is a not-sad song!"

So we sang that one instead. And eventually she peed.

The bathroom is one of the few places Beatrice, at two and a half, can exert some serious control over her world. So lately, as many important things continue to go in a direction she would not choose, she has been resisting, refusing, avoiding. I cannot tell you how many days passed before she finally pooped on Tuesday.

(Am I talking about constipation on my blog? Oh gracious. It was only a matter of time. I am totally, completely going for it.)

With each passing day, she became more irritable and irritating. She started yelling instead of talking. And with all that holding it, and mounting fear of the bathroom, she peed in her pants. Twice in a row! Cancer is one thing. A toddler who refuses to use the bathroom and pees on the rug as a result is something else.

She is my youngest child, my last baby, and she was potty trained in June. I simply could not take it. I could not bear going backwards and I had to take to my bed.

I don't mean that in a funny, exaggerated way. I really did. I think Tuesday was the absolute worst day I've had in recent memory. Beatrice was blazing with a harsh, irrational toddler light, melting down left and right, and I could do nothing but join her. At one point I told her that if she needed to keep crying, she had to go do it in her room. I would go to my room. And when she was finished crying, she could come in and get me.

I got into bed and cried. I listened to her wail a few feet away. It made me cry harder. We were the saddest two people in the whole world. Finally I couldn't stay away another minute. I walked in, so very tired, and climbed into Frances's bed (which we moved into Beatrice's room not too long ago). She ran to me, still crying, crying a bit harder because she could see that I had been crying, and said, "I looked and looked everywhere for you, and I couldn't see you."

Oh. My dear, dear girl. She got into bed with me and we snuggled and cried some more and snuggled for a long time peacefully after that. My heart had to grow in love so that it wouldn't break. I love them all so much.

A couple of hours later she pooped. We were all SO relieved. The clouds parted and our Beatrice returned. It was that simple! Everything has been going as well as it could since then, though the bathroom continues to exert a repelling force on her. Hence the games and songs and eyes-closed trick. It's fine, I'll take it, I'll sing Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree all day. After that dark afternoon, I am determined to stay firmly within view.

armor of light

We five went to church this morning. Today is the first Sunday of Advent, and in the collect we prayed that God might help us cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light. 

Oh, that I had a suit of armor, wrought of darkness-blasting light, hanging in my closet! Or casually slung on a hook in the mud room, waiting to be donned for the walk to school or tomorrow's long visit to the cancer institute. I like the idea of an armor of light because it is something you wear - rather than something your heart naturally produces, that shines forth from within. 

Because sadly I haven't felt very shiny this Thanksgiving weekend. The days are short. It's rained, and I've felt the tug of weight and gloom. Tomorrow Mike begins chemotherapy again. We all feel the dread of that inescapable, necessary reality waiting for him, and for all of us. 

Yesterday, Beatrice and I were walking Gabriel to his grandmother's for a special sleepover. It was only 4:30 but the sun was nowhere in sight. Everything was wet and gray, and as we crossed North West End Avenue she looked up at me and said, "I am thinking all the time about what would make Papa better. Mama, I am thinking about it every day."

She was actually in a pretty cheerful mood. She and her brother had been chasing each other during the walk, and now she was engaging in what we like to call 'dancing-walking' as she talked, shaking her curls and lifting her knees high and weaving a bit on the sidewalk. She looked up at me with her wide eyes and said "maybe you can give him a new special medicine, Mama!" Pause. Grin. "That will make him better!" 

Great idea! I'll try that! Because, as you children often suggest, I have magical powers! In the meantime, could you please stop breaking my heart with your two-year-old tenderness and worry?

On Thanksgiving we made a tree, festooned with everything we are grateful for. The children enjoyed it, and I'm the one who spied the perfect branch and asked Gabriel to bring it in, but I confess - the whole exercise struck an obligatory note to me. 

It felt like something we would do in our normal life. But nothing is normal now. Why bother twisting pipe cleaners to affix little scraps of paper to a dead branch? Does it make any sense when Mike will be so sick again, so soon?

Then yesterday I led the children in collecting greens for an advent wreath. They are convinced I will be arrested at any minute for clipping holly and pine from our neighbors' yards. I told them no one will mind enough to call the cops. I told them we HAVE to find all the prettiest greenery for the weird-looking wreath I fashioned from a brick of floral foam and a wire frame. Again, the gloom tugged at me from all sides, trying to undermine this regular life sort of thing I was insisting the children create with me. I weirdly persist in these gestures of care, these rituals that mark the seasons, albeit often with heavy limbs and heart. 

Is this one way to understand the armor of light? The things we do, the choices we make, even when dark voices whisper doubt within? Our bishop in Maryland preached a sermon once at our old church about how the old chestnut isn't 'feel unto others as you would have them feel unto you' for a reason. We do unto others. He said you don't have to feel your heart swell with love all the dang day long. But you do have to do love. You act lovingly.  You put on the armor of light, even if you don't feel like it.

Thank goodness I do feel like it, much of the time. Thanksgiving, though small and quiet, still felt like Thanksgiving. I still get a kick out of singing and dancing and embarrassing my children whenever possible. The light in the trees is still a blessing, my children's laughter in the pews during the most solemn liturgical moments still brings a sense of irreverent, gratitude-filled delight. 

I have to go walk my mom's dog. I don't really want to, out there in the damp and cold - but I will. 

Love to all of you dear people. Wear your armor well. 

the embarrassing elevator

Years ago, I took Frances and Gabriel to swimming lessons with a relentlessly encouraging teacher in the too-warm waters of an indoor hotel swimming pool. She herself was ah-MAY-zing, a delight to watch in action, and ceremoniously presented each and every child, no matter their performance, with a personalized gummy candy prize after each lesson.

...And for the person who did the best dolphin kicks and put her face under the water and was so, so brave? A DOLPHIN GUMMY!!

And all the kids, criers included, just freakin' loved it.

Every week we'd trudge through the lobby, or rather I would trudge - laden with towels and goggles and dry clothes - while the children would dash ahead, past the clear plastic case of sad-looking Otis Spunkmeyer cookies on the front desk (having already asked about them and already heard they're just for hotel guests countless times), in a race to the elevator to be the first to press the button.

I don't know how it started, but around that time I taught them how to sing/chant hey Frances, it's your birthday, not for real though, just for play play and it tickled them to no end. Somehow the goal became to sing it with as many of our names as we could in the time it took the elevator to descend from the lobby to the pool level. And sometimes I would do the running man or the roger rabbit for them while we sang. Or a kind of hip hop Axl Rose impersonation. And then they would join me, doing their own crazy dances.

So we called it The Embarrassing Elevator. As soon as the doors closed, we broke out into wild song and dance, acting like joyful lunatics, but the moment the doors parted to open, we had to compose ourselves. Quick! Return to normal. Because it would be really embarrassing if anyone else saw us. Our behavior was strictly for the hermetically sealed world of the elevator.

But it was really, really fun. They cracked me up. We let something wild and real loose in that little container.

Over the past few weeks I've had occasion to listen to Terry Gross interview Mary Karr and Lena Dunham. She asked them both about oversharing. When does a person cross that line? Both of them talked about protecting the privacy of other people. Well, sure. That part is easy. (Lena Dunham also observed the gendered nature of the "TMI" accusation. Men are brave for sharing something difficult and personal; women are just oversharing. I thought that was  pretty astute.)

But neither person really got to the heart of it. Is there a problem with writing about oneself in a personal way? I want to say absolutely not, especially given the nature of my blog...but. But why do we roll our eyes? Why does the memoir as genre seem so annoying sometimes?

I have childhood memories of feeling frustrated, downright furious, about the impossibility of making the sentences I formed in my journal match up to the intensity and confusion of whatever it was I was feeling at the time. Nine year old Meagan simply could not do justice, at least not via the written word, to the emotional realities of fourth grade. But I really, really wanted to. I wanted my language to link up and firmly connect to my inner world. Yet it always seemed to fall short.

Because for whatever reason, authenticity was (and is) a value, and I thought I might embody it by sharing the brilliant mess of my feelings and thoughts with others. Only connect, says Mr. Emerson in A Room with a View. And how to connect? Through some kind of honest expression of, and receptivity to, what matters.

I've been keeping family and friends abreast of Mike's experience with his cancer treatment online, and I've written about how crappy it is to deal with cancer here. I love to post photos of the kids on Facebook. Is it oversharing? Is it too much? Should I cultivate just a little bit of good old fashioned restraint? Sometimes I wonder, and I don't have an answer - though deep down my intuition says it's fine. It's hard to write about what is happening to my family, but it helps me bridge the gulf between this strange reality and the rest of my world.

This blog is my embarrassing elevator. I want to dance and sing, exuberantly. I want to tell you about all of the things that a person waiting for the elevator doors to open on the pool level would never, ever see: the arc of drips left on the carpet from when I whisked a peeing Beatrice up the stairs last night, my voice off key, singing along with Hank Williams in the car, the crazy dance I do while Gabriel practices the piano to make Bea laugh, my tendency to anxiously eat Halloween candy after the children are in bed, the heartbreak I feel looking at the jewel-like red maple leaves littering my front lawn.

I want to share my singular weirdness with you, so that you might do the same with me. And so that there might be just a little more truth and beauty in the world, some clarity in all this muddle. Only connect.

rooted

We live on the leafiest street I've ever seen. The sycamores are knobby and enormous and meet overhead above the middle of the street. The sidewalk curves to accommodate their trunks. 

I used to say the one thing Lancaster was lacking was natural beauty. The city is relatively flat and surrounded by lots of farmland. But how could I have missed what was right in front of me? This brilliant fall, walking the city streets with my kids, I have been floored by the trees. So many streets are lined with old, established beauties, which are now just past the peak of their blazing color.

We moved here in 1990, on my thirteenth birthday. Then I found the heavy, established quality that the trees seem to communicate downright oppressive. All those Millers and Weavers and Stolzfuses! Everyone is related, everyone stops to talk, communal memory stretches back and back and back. There was a story behind every corner, and I was not in any of them. This felt like a place where we would surely always be newcomers. 

But the weight of this town, over years, ceased to be a burden and became instead an anchor. Twenty-five years later, I feel like myself here; I feel at home. I love it. The way my memory infuses its geography is extraordinary, like the canopy of a tall tree, layers upon layers of leafy branches through which the same ray of sunlight shines. I run with Beatrice in the jogger down the same street in School Lane Hills that I once ambled late, late at night with Melissa when we were fifteen and had snuck out of my house. I walked past our old house this morning after dropping the big kids at school, first remembering bringing newborn Frances here to visit Bob and Cathy (its current owners), then remembering raking leaves in the front yard with my family. I almost conjured my dad's shoulder to lean on as I passed. 

Time and place make a tiny bit more sense here. Continuity offers a kind of peaceful entry into those mysteries. There is more space for the dead in a town like this. 

The circumstances that brought us here in August were - are - the stuff of nightmares. I never could have guessed that cancer would bring us back to Lancaster. But I cannot imagine a better place to fall apart. People my children meet at birthday parties tell them about their grandfather. A teacher remembers me as a teenager. They discover that a friend's favorite babysitter was, at age two, my babysitting charge. So many want to reach out to all of us and care for us in this harrowing time. Gabriel asks: do you think you and Grandma know everyone in Lancaster??

Education, class, and a host of other things contributed to my sense, growing up, that to stay in the place one comes from is to fail. Growing up meant leaving. Ambitious, successful adults follow their own independent passions. Relationships should rank below career - especially for someone who identifies as a feminist (which I did and do) - right? 

This now strikes me as a counterfeit, hollow notion of freedom and an impoverished idea of success. It's a set up; it denies the truth of our embodied, particular, interconnected selves. I first questioned it all when slammed with the vulnerability of parenthood - loving a tiny helpless baby more than myself. A tiny helpless baby does not need or even want a parent with a fancy job or big city real estate. A tiny baby wants a lot of people to love and care for her, and to support one another in loving and caring for her. 

Just so a young family going through a catastrophic illness needs family and friends. We are known and loved here, which is what we need and want. I am watching the rings grow and grow on my family tree, newly aware of the ways in which its roots tunnel through a singular patch of rich soil. It's a desperately difficult part of the story, and I have awful days. But even then, the solidity of this tree holds me up.