hibernation day

Pictures of the snow never seem to capture the beauty one experiences firsthand. I think it's because the blanketing hush of the scene is missing. You can't hear silence in a photograph. 

But I couldn't resist trying. We don't get many big snows around here and this is our second dramatic, heavy snowfall of the season. After Beatrice went down for a nap I went outside to shovel, and it was breathtaking. Everything still, everything white.

Then I came in, and sat down.

I'm so accustomed to maximizing every spare minute - perhaps you know about this? - that spending time gazing out the window is utterly unsettling. Disorienting. Beatrice is sleeping, Mike is reading upstairs, there are 41 more minutes before pick up time: I'm alone. Normally I would be responding to email, calling a medical billing office (there seems to be one of those calls on the to do list every day), carting laundry upstairs, arranging kid stuff. 

This is insanity, this staring at the snow business! But I can't seem to move.  

Downshifting is harder than it seems. After months spent in high-alert mode, I am only just now regaining the ability to embody slowness. To let go of a sense of urgency crackling beneath the surface, all the time. I didn't choose this; rather time accumulated, the seasons shifted, and now the snow invites me to feel a quiet heaviness in my limbs. 

Winter! Who knew? I thought you were a dreary mess to endure, to tolerate, just for the payoff of spring. Yet this year I am grateful for your white stillness, your peaceful hush. 

more life and less worry: an ode to la nube

Beatrice was painting some rocks. Gabriel and Annika had more elaborate plans for their rocks, but after awhile they forgot about them and watched Beatrice loading more and more paint on her rocks. Then she carefully tore what was left of her pumpkin muffin into stone-like pieces and lined them up next to her rocks. She contemplated them for a moment, then began dabbing blue paint on them. Then she burst out laughing.

I'm painting my muffins. 

Laugh, laugh, guffaw: I'm painting my muffins!!

We all started laughing. Then Gabriel and Annika, exchanging looks, laughing, told her not to eat her painted muffins. She preceded to hold one drippy blue piece up to her mouth, watching their alarmed faces with delight, hesitating, laughing. I'm going to eat it!

DON'T EAT IT! exclaimed the now worried second and third grader. They looked at me, silently pleading for an intervention.

Oh, go ahead, I said. Enjoy.

That's how I roll these days. Do you want to eat a painted blue muffin? Go for it. Sit on your kid when he is complaining in the hopes of muffling his voice? Yes! Sing the song stuck in your head as you walk down the street? Why not? Tell someone when they hurt your feelings? Absolutely.

I finished the first Neapolitan novel, My Brilliant Friend, this morning before the kids woke up. Wow. Wow wow wow. Typically I would put the next volume on hold at the library and wait, or ask around if anyone has a copy I might borrow. But instead I bought the next one in the series. All before 7 am!

There's something about mortality being particularly present just now, something about this strange time we're living. All I have energy for is what matters most, and that has loosened the grip of what-one-does and what-one-should-do over me. Don't get me wrong. I still worry about stupid things like what to do with my gray hair and what people think of me at the grocery store when Beatrice has streaks of dried snot on her cheeks from wiping her nose on her sleeve.

But maybe I worry a little less. It's possible that I put up with less bullshit, less negativity, less falsity. On a very good day, I like to think that I am freer to delight in the strangeness and beauty of everyday life.

When I studied abroad in Spain, I lived with a host couple who were in their 70s. Neither was even close to five feet tall. Surely they were stunted by the deprivations of their childhoods spent in Franco-era southern Spain, but even so their diminutive stature always struck me as funny. Hilarious, actually. They were two round graying elves who spoke with strong accents. I know they found me equally absurd. Dolores had a bad leg that she dragged through the narrow streets on her way to do the daily errands. Her two year old granddaughter, known by all charmingly and simply as La Nina,  did an extraordinary dramatic impression of her limp. Again: you just had to laugh. Santiago wore a purple rubber apron around the house and prided himself in his careful, energetic laundering. He worried a lot, talked a lot, made fantastic gazpacho, and doted on La Nina. His pride and joy though, moreso even than his granddaughter, was his dog. La Nube.

Oh, La Nube! A less cloud-like creature has never walked this earth. She was a pudgy, greying little mutt whose belly grazed the ground. She yipped at strangers. She waddled. She eyed me with watchful suspicion every day of the nine months I lived with her. Her bed, kept tidy by Santiago, was topped with an olive green velveteen coverlet, edged in gold tassels. It was just outside my bedroom door. Around eleven every night, I would be reading or journaling in bed, and I'd hear Santiago shuffle into the passageway outside, cooing: Ah, la Nube, mira la Nube, mi princesa. Look at you, la Nube, so cozy in your bed, my dear heart, la Nube! Are you warm enough, are you going to have sweet dreams? Buenas noches, mi carina.

Objectively, she was an unpleasant smelly old dog, but with his devotion Santiago transformed her into a queen.

One night I was just falling asleep when I heard Santiago coming to visit la Nube before bed. He was chuckling and murmuring to her, something about what a mysterious, dark Moorish lady she was. I couldn't resist. I crept into the hallway, right into Santiago's game. He was stooped over, holding the green and gold coverlet over la Nube's nose so that only her catarct-cloudy eyes were visible. It did make for an exotic veil. Santiago was cracking up, delighted by his princess doggie, tousling her ears. Ah, la Nube, my beautiful moor! I didn't recognize you like that! He kept looking over at me, laughing. Can you believe this dog of mine?

Santiago wasn't embarrassed that I caught him playing dress up with his dog. He was just glad that I too could see la Nube looking so fine.

It was so very weird, the little scene in the narrow dark hallway. That was a hard time in my life, shortly after my dad died and in the midst of a long, drawn-out breakup. I was looking around, grasping for people and experiences to anchor me, to confirm who I was - whomever that was. I had no idea. But Santiago had been there and done that. Now that I am no longer 19, I think I could enjoy his oddball company with far less reservation and a lot more pleasure. It makes me sad to think he has likely died by now.

In his honor, I say yes to weirdness. Yes to play, to dress up, to purple aprons, to beloved smelly dogs. Yes to all of it.

I am sure I have shared this poem with you before. But why not once more? The dead tell us: say yes to joy, to more life and less worry. Yes to creative adventures, to emotional bravery, to going out onto all kinds of limbs. Don't worry. The paint was non-toxic. Carry on, you wild artists!

body language

In the days after Mike's diagnosis, I was spending most of my time either on the phone or accompanying him to various medical appointments. I was arranging child care, trying to communicate with our insurance, coordinating care between four different medical institutions, looking for a house to live in, looking for a school for the children to attend.

(Wait. Did that really happen? Did I actually live through those days? I am incredulous.)

Every time I paused to push a warm, narrow back on a swing or rest my head against a cool countertop, why I was scrambling like this overwhelmed my mind. Those were the times I would notice that every part of my body hurt. I hurt in a way I never had before, from the inside out and the outside in. It was something I registered, attempted a deep breath, and then placed at #37 of my priority list.

I remember unexpectedly walking into Mike inside the sun-filled dining room of our friend's home, where we were staying. I fell into his hug. (Where, always, I am home.) All was exposed and raw then. I started crying and heard myself blurt out, I hurt so much. He was the one with cancer, he was the one going through horrifying staging procedures. The ache I felt was terrible, disorienting.

Later, when friends said that I was looking skinny, I chalked it up to chemo couvade. In those first weeks I too felt nauseous, sometimes put off by food - previously unheard of for this lover of cooking and eating.

This has happened with my kids too, especially as tiny babies, when the boundaries blur and fade. We were hungry, we were tired, we needed each other's touch. Whether I wanted to or not, I felt what they felt.

I would have liked to turn off the empathy switch during radiation treatments. The inside of my mouth felt burnt, raw. Nothing like Mike's suffering, and as I watched his ability to eat and drink decline, I wasn't about to complain. One night I went out with my mom for fancy cocktails and ordered a drink that sounded like something I would normally love, laced with lime and ginger. But then sitting there at the bar, I took a sip, and alongside the ambivalence about being out, the acidity burned against my raw skin. Ouch. (It is, by the way, tragic to order the wrong thing when you are out for the first time in months.)

Despite the inconvenience, sympathy pains offer me a kind of comfort. When I am afraid, when I doubt all, my body tells me something true. My being is responding, mirroring, holding my beloved so deeply. Even when on the surface I think things like: I am so mad at him. I am so sick of this cancer. I am so fed up with taking care of everything and everyone. - even then, my feelings and thoughts cannot disrupt the holy bond we share. I can't trick myself. My body reminds me of our love, in its own language.

I have a newfound ability to cough up and spit out phlegm, with all the glorious noise and drama that I used to admire in my dad and sister. They both were amazing. (Rachel still is). I've been watching Mike spit out secretions for months now. That's what I needed, I guess. Now I hock up goo and spit it into the snow like nobody's business, like my libertarian Texan who-gives-a-shit great-grandpa Diddy (much to my children's horror, and fascination).

Did you just spit?

Mike's ongoing struggles make us worry about lymphoma. Did the treatment work? Is it really gone? We have to wait. In the meantime, yesterday I noticed that I have a swollen lymph node just under my chin, which is the very one they removed from Mike during the biopsy back in July.

My lymphatic system is calling to my husband's lymphatic system.

That is so romantic.

It's not quite accurate though, to describe my body as a discreet entity. I am struggling to articulate that noticing the precision with which my body empathizes with Mike - experiencing those layers of my imagination and emotions that just escape conscious comprehension in my limbs, in my muscles, in my mouth - it is shining a light, albeit feeble, on the wholeness of my being. The battery is almost dead in this flashlight, but its faint glow suggests something beautiful and hard to understand, let alone speak about: my body, mind, and spirit are entwined. Like yours.

To love someone is an integrated, being-wide gesture that you make over and over again.

It's Sunday so I have to mention that today we heard Corinthians in church. It sounded new to my ears: [Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends.

saturday

This morning I went to pick up Frances from a slumber party. 

She wants everyone to call her Frankie now. When she corrects me, I explain to her that a habit of ten and a half years is not easily broken. Also that we picked her name, and it is absolutely perfect for her. Despite this, she has convinced most of the people in her life to switch it up.

I found a modest-sized gap along the curb and began parallel parking our minivan. My entry was atrocious and I had to inch back and forth. Once parked, I climbed into the back to unbuckle Beatrice and then ducked out with her on the street side, as we were parked so close to a hedge on the driver/sidewalk side that we would have had to climb under it to escape. 

Maybe I should embrace my limited parallel parking skill as something unique and wonderful about me. Right? My trouble with spatial relationships is a gift. It allows me to empathize with a certain kind of artist, poet, space cadet. Or I might at least accept it, and try not to get too embarrassed when I see another parent nearby on the sidewalk, also on his way to pick up, watching me wrench the wheel all the way this way, and then all the way that way, an expression comprising equal parts wince and smile frozen on his face. 

His look mirrored my own it's-just-too-much feeling when, after all that, I climbed out the opposite back door. I said hi. I mentioned that I feel like a disaster. Ha ha. I started walking down the slumber party street, carrying Beatrice who refused to walk, and then realized I had no idea which door to knock on. 

I had to call back to him. What's the house number??

(I have to ask for help even when I feel like I shouldn't have to ask for help. I have to ask for help all the time. I am meeting people this year, and becoming part of their lives, and this is the only me they know.)

I walked into a marvelously chaotic scene, a jumble of shoes that seemed far too big for Frances and her friends, bags and stuffed animals and pillows piled by the door, lots of gangly funny girls joking about how they are simply unable to go home. The birthday girl's mother asked me, innocently, what we were doing this weekend.

My mind went blank. What is the proper response to that question again? I thought. I thought about Mike, so sick at home. I thought about how I didn't know if we should call the on-call oncologist about his symptoms. After a too-long pause, I replied, in upspeak, as if I were a nervous twenty year old on my first interview: I think we're going ... to the library?

Readers, I refer you to my last post for more on how treacherous the waters of casual social interaction have become. 

Holy moly. Then another parent, a friend, walked in. We chatted for a little while just inside the door while the girls reported on how late they'd stayed up. He asked about Mike. I said he was really sick. I explained a little. Radiation recall. My friend looked at me with genuine care in his eyes and said, please give him a hug from me.

And then, shamelessly, I began tearing up (as I am wont to do), lurched over a sleeping bag, and went right in for my own hug. He wasn't really offering me one, but he rolled with it. 

See? I have to ask for help all the time. I ask for help without even asking. In the beginning I thought maybe this humbling practice, having to be aware of my own vulnerability and dependence on others, would be spiritually transformative. Or something. Now I'm not sure. 

Everything feels hard in part because I expected our burdens to lighten this month, but so far they only seem heavier. We were ready to turn a corner, but despite the inclination of our hearts, Mike's body seems to be drawn backwards, towards the radiation nightmare that we thought was behind us. 

It's interesting that despite their capacity to drive me bonkers, and despite my occasionally feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for them every dang day, right now the children offer me a kind of paradoxical respite. Safety, normalcy. Sleepovers, whining, piano practice, stories. I can't make Mike's throat heal, but I do make a mean peanut butter sandwich. Kissing a bumped head is a simple gesture that I can approach with satisfaction and pleasure and confidence.

So I leave you with this series of photos from bedtime tonight. Beatrice sang me a storytelling song about Baltimore, and falling down, and gold digging (a little Kanye in the car this morning), and some other stuff in a language only she understands. It was so dramatic, so big and bright and hilarious, I had to let her go on and on, straight into wired overexhaustion. It was just so fun.  

p.s. Her camera antics reminded me of a similar series from a little over a year ago. Broadway bound, I tell you!