the sweetness of sick

When Beatrice meekly and politely and a little pathetically asked me for a straw for her commuter coffee mug full of water at dinner Thursday night, I told her I didn't think a straw would fit in the lid's opening. She then looked up at me and said, with quiet determination, "I think I can do it. I think ... I think it will work, Mama."

Well, I had to go and get her a very skinny straw, plucked from the plastic dross in the top cabinet (leftovers from Mike's radiation nightmare). I returned to the table and inserted the straw, which indeed fit perfectly. Beatrice beamed at me, triumphant yet generous, inviting me to share in the success of her prediction.

It was a brief victory. She took one bite of dinner, then leaned against my knee in defeat and told the floor, "I don't want to eat any dinner, I just want to drink my water in my coffee cup on your lap."

She climbed into my lap. I observed that sickness brings out the sweetness in children.

Mike agreed, adding that unfortunately it often brings out the bitterness in adults.

I've been living in the House of Sickness for what feels like a long time. There's been Sick, and there's been sick, and neither has brought out my sweetness. First I had the worst cold in memory, and it lasted a solid three weeks. The cough still has a foothold in my fed-up respiratory system. Mike has had a number of complications with his current treatment. Then last week Beatrice developed a fever.

My first thought: no preschool! Egads! Stick a knife in my heart, why don't you, you feverish vindictive little beast, you stealer of my yoga class!

My second thought: I don't feel so hot myself.

So she and I succumbed together, and spent a day drawing and puttering and reading a book about Julia Child fourteen times and watching more episodes of Sophia the First than I feel comfortable sharing publicly. But I will confess that I would have watched twice as many if my conscience allowed, because the feeling of being curled up on the couch together, all hot bare arms and legs, watching the world go by in the bright sunshine, entertained by an auto-tuned miniature singing person with enormous unblinking eyes in a purple dress was simply delicious. Like so, so good.

Illness drains a toddler's willfulness right out of her. It's all funny, sweet absurdities and insights, spoken slowly and quietly, from a face that seems more dominated than usual by saucer-like glassy eyes that are extra shiny and beautiful and tend to stare off into the middle distance. Kind of like, oh, I don't know, Sophia the First's eyes. A child who can't quite drag herself off the couch is so very agreeable. I don't know what it says about me, delighting as I do in those brief moments when my children are defenseless and without a spark of fight in them.

The first time baby Frances got sick, I felt guilty about how much I enjoyed it. She was never a snuggly baby. She always wanted to be facing out, kicking around and engaging with everyone else but me. I felt like my job, most of the time, was to lift her up and support her weight so that she she could attend to the business of absorbing the world around her with her whole being. I was a baby crane. A baby holder. "Mama" was maybe the twenty-eighth word she said. She couldn't really see me because I was an extension of her - the supportive, rooted, reliable part. But then when fever struck, oh ho ho! Guess who wanted to nuzzle into my neck and plaster her hot chubby arms around me? Guess who looked at her mama (who up until that point knew no different), who draped herself around her mama's body and refused to be dislodged? I absolutely loved it. I wanted to sit in the rocking chair with her like that all day.

But I had to go to work. Oh, it was sad.

One of the best things about this year has been the lack of scramble and negotiations every time a kid is sick and can't go to school. I've had to scramble for a lot of other reasons, but usually not that one. So despite the irritation I felt about Beatrice being sick on a morning that I really, really wanted for myself, I also felt grateful for the luxury of a peaceful transition into a day at home, made without frantic calls to babysitters or tense negotiations with my husband about who would sacrifice work. With my third and final baby I am even more gratified by the feel of her soft beloved body taking solace in the spaces my body makes for her.

When she felt a bit more energetic in the afternoon, we walked and collected all kinds of bits and flowers in the seat of her stroller for some "muffins" that she cooked up in the front yard. (Can you see the bit of robin's egg? That was the best ingredient). Then later we (and by we I mean I) made these outrageously green muffins. It took me back to days spent like that with little Gabriel while Frances was at preschool, the luxury of a slow expanse of one-on-one time with a person who is just becoming, a person whose body - and soul - are deeply linked with your own.


p.s. The Julia Child book was a lot of fun, and led Gabriel and Beatrice and me to watch clips of her show on YouTube. And learn what a galantine is. What a gal.

the golden thread

When Beatrice was four months old, I forgot how to fall asleep. I was exhausted, and growing weary of waking up repeatedly with her at night. But cruelly, just as she started to sleep for longer stretches, my nighttime mind began to fret about starting a new job and leaving her with someone else all day. The fearful, ambivalent, not-ready-to-be-parted part of me kept me awake.

It was misery. I started spending my evenings taking baths and smelling lavender and avoiding screens and drinking soothing cups of tea. Useless, for the most part. All of those outside-the-normal-routine gestures just brought my attention back to the fact that I couldn't sleep, which ramped up my distress about not sleeping, which ensured that I would not sleep. Insomnia is a real bitch that way. 

In the end, I had to start my job and discover through direct experience that we would both be okay before my body remembered how to sleep again. The only helpful thing I took away from those awful weeks was the importance of an evening routine, one that can carry through periods of restful sleep and insomnia. I established a new mini routine then that has endured: reading a very big book, a tiny bit at a time, before I turn out the light.

The idea was to engage with an enormous novel that wouldn't be much of a page-turner. The first was War and Peace. I wanted a book I could open and read for a few minutes every night, just to check in with the characters while I got sleepy. Pierre? Still there? Still a bit muddled? Okay, sounds like things are proceeding as expected. Carry on. Good night.

Now every night I spend my last few waking minutes with the same people for months on end. It's rather soothing. The bigger the book, the better. I only read it before bed (I keep my daytime novels separate). And, almost three years into this practice, I am here to tell you that a person can conquer some hefty books - books I normally wouldn't even pick up - by climbing them five or ten pages at a time. 

After War and Peace came Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment. Then I left Russia and went to England: Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Our Mutual Friend. Now I am two thirds of the way through A Tale of Two Cities. 

(About half of these I'd read before, which I find increases the soporific potential of the text, as plot-related suspense is minimal). 

Who knew I'd take to Dickens? I'd always avoided it because I thought it was schlocky and sentimental and full of stock characters. Maybe it is. But I love it anyway.

I've been thinking about Lucie Manette, weaving her golden thread. In A Tale of Two Cities she is more or less an angel descended from heaven with - naturally - golden hair. She ties her tormented, brilliant father, her almost-as-angelic husband, and other delightful related characters into a peaceful, harmonious family. They all depend on her for their sense of connection, stability, and continuity. 

For her father, Dr. Manette, "she was the golden thread that united him to a Past beyond his misery, and to a Present beyond his misery; and the sound of her voice, the light of her face, the touch of her hand, had a strong beneficial influence with him almost always."

Later, Lucie is depicted as sitting quietly at her work in their shared home, listening to echoes (both domestic and political, from France, where larger forces are about to irrupt into her family life):

Nor, how there were echoes all about her, sweet in her ears, of the many times her father had told her that he found her more devoted to him married (if that could be) than single, and of the many times her husband had said to her that no cares and duties seemed to divide her love for him or her help to him, and asked her "What is the magic secret, my darling, or your being everything to all of us, as if there were only one of us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to have too much to do?"

I smiled when I read that. Oh Charles! You describe just what the members of my family seem to wish for: the experience of enjoying my full, devoted attention, to indulge the fantasy that only he or she exists in my eyes. So often I feel their anger flare when they become aware of others' claims on me. All of them, as babies, would place the flat of their chubby palm on my cheek and forcefully turn my face back towards them when I spent time turned away, talking to someone else. Today it's as if the children are in competition to hold my gaze the longest. Ignore the rest of them, Mama. You only love me.

Somehow Lucie is able to give each member of her family this illusory certainty. They know she loves them all, yet when when she attends to one of them, that person feels themselves to be the center of her world. 

She's like a dream mother/daughter/wife. You might dismiss her because of that - how can she be real? Where is the darker side of her, where is the her of her, the part that is always stepping aside so that others might shine brighter?

It's a troubling portrait. But I don't want to throw the golden thread out with the bathwater. On Mother's Day Gabriel spontaneously told me that I was the most important person in our family, because I was the center of everyone. You're the salt, he told me. You're the salt of the family. Nothing tastes good without you. 

One needs to feel completely loved, completely seen. Recognized. A child needs someone who can step aside and watch and allow her to be the hero of her story. She needs someone like Lucie, who spins out a golden thread connecting her both to her family and to herself. An adult who has been deeply hurt needs the same. Lucie, by offering her gentle, consistent love, allows her traumatized father in particular to integrate, become whole. In her presence, with her golden thread, he can knit his past, present and future together. After a time of isolation and imprisonment, Lucie's golden thread enables him to rejoin the world as his full self.

So that's kind of like what I do as a therapist. My client has the attention of my whole being. I set my own agenda aside, or at least try to, and I attend with all I've got. I want to create the feeling Charles describes. Right now, only you matter to me. For fifty minutes. Then I need a break, because it's hard work. But Lucie Manette doesn't need any breaks. She gives, gives, gives. She effaces herself and shutters her darker feelings. In that sense, she only expresses part of who she really is. She operates as a half-person - which is a large part of why she is so valued and adored. An angel in the house.

Yet Lucie's work is essential. It is the work of nurture, of love, of supporting another person's growth. Young children believe they are the center of the world, and they should. They need a spinner of golden thread - lots of spinners, really - to support them in that false yet necessary belief. There are times when adults need moments of being the center of the world too. We all need to feel seen, to be valued and recognized. This enables us to love freely.

And now my older children are living out a moment in which I can see their own powers of seeing, holding, and loving other people developing. They are becoming golden thread spinners in their own right. It is amazing, really. I watch them with their friends (both children and special adults); I catch them in moments of kindness, of generosity. Gabriel told me I was the salt. Frances tells me I look beautiful. There are moments when they even recognize me - a separate subjectivity who exists and cares about lots of things, not just what happened at school today. Wow. Just, wow.

Don't get me wrong; those are rare moments. But they offer a glimpse of the people they are becoming. People for whom life tastes good, even when I'm not there. As they grow, it is up to me to make adjustments on my end - no longer the sole golden thread spinner weaving a snug nest, but one who can let out lots of slack and allow my children take it up, connecting themselves farther and farther afield. They can do that, knowing they are ever safely tethered to home.

spring stirrings

A dogwood tree can break your heart. 

It's been cold and rainy, and I've been sick. I keep passing the abundant deep pink and cream colored blooms in my neighborhood and thinking: wait. Hold off. Don't change yet. I'm not ready! I haven't basked in the spring sunshine and gazed up into your elegant branches! I haven't stretched out on my back under the cherry tree on our old front lawn reading a book all afternoon, I haven't sat on Parrish Beach at Swarthmore on a perfect May day, struck dumb and warm and lazy by the sunshine, unable to get up and write a final paper. I haven't taken a blanket into the backyard to sit with one of my babies and wonder about what to do with the garden this year.

When the weather changes, all the springtimes past loosen from their moorings.  It is not always a comfortable sensation.

But getting back to the dogwoods. 

Dogwood flowers are delicate, yet muscular. Simple, yet very fine. They are like a cluster of ballet dancers, clad in those marvelous tutus that jut out in a horizontal line across the body, perpendicular to the legs and torso. The tutus defy gravity with vibrant buoyancy, bouncing with each new knock of toe shoe against the floor, just as the dogwood petals nod and wave gently in a stirring breeze.

If the spring I long for, that I am looking around for with a bit of urgency in my gaze (for everywhere it falls I find change, and time passing, and signs of summer coming), is represented by the cool, inviting precision and articulation of the dancers from a scene in Swan Lake - well then, the summer is a crush of commuters barreling down the subway station stairs to make the next train. It's a jumble, a self-interested crowd, a mass of life that stops for nothing. These people burst from the wings in their boots and heels and could care less about a tutu's delicate bounce as they charge across the stage. 

It's the riot of green leaves and bugs and heat and thunderstorms that will be here before you know it. 

 

And when it comes, we will leave Lancaster and eventually resettle in our house in Annapolis. A good thing, right? I should probably put my head down and join that flow of commuters walking at a brisk pace, focused on their goal. I should get on a train, look at my phone, and look up and step off only when it has arrived at my station and I can begin to try on those old ways again. 

But damn if I can't seem to stop noticing all the time. Noticing the ease I feel on these streets, the harmonious architecture, the frequency with which I meet spontaneously with friends, the delight the children take in walking places by themselves, the gratifying flow of sharing everyday life with my mother, the bounty of the market, the pleasure I took in my job (over as of last week), the culture of kindness and courtesy at my children's school. The neighbor's cat, Boots, curled up on Frances's hoodie on the front porch, napping in the sunshine. 

The heartache of this beautiful rainy spring is all about being-towards-departure.  

Kind of like life, I guess. But a ramped up version, because I'm all transition-y.

When I told one of my student-clients with whom I had worked well for a number of weeks that I wouldn't be returning next fall, he looked at me and smiled. He let his head drop sideways; it fell heavily into his right hand that had been resting on the chair's armrest. "Everyone leaves, Meagan," he said. "Everyone leaves."

It was a terribly sad moment. In his short life thus far, that had been consistently true. I would be one more person who left. The difference was that he could tell me about it, and we could share the sadness in the room together with comfort and trust. And so I found that moment to also be very beautiful.

So inspired by his courage, I'll share this with you: I'm sad to go. I'm scared to keep living our new reality, in which cancer is almost like a sixth family member, back in Annapolis. I'm scared to leave the place where we all learned how to live with this, supported by grace and love and the feeling I have of being at home.

I think the dogwoods, at this very moment, tinged with hints of brown and a bit crowded by new leaves, are an example of wabi sabi. Maybe. I don't totally get it, but I like the idea that in their current state of flux and imperfection they are perhaps at their most beautiful. That would suggest that I need not panic because they are changing too fast and surely I will miss the best part; rather they are exactly as they should be, just at the moment I am fortunate enough to behold them.

p.s. One of the things Beatrice I have been doing on rainy cold spring sick days is watching Russian ballets on Youtube. Who would have thought? She is captivated by this Odette. I am too. 

on writing, reading, and the work of being a whole person: an ode to elena ferrante

Last week I gobbled up the last Neapolitan novel, The Story of the Lost Child, in the throes of the worst cold in recent memory - which I am only now emerging from - and when it ended I was bereft. The story of Lila and Lenu gripped me by the shoulders and gave me a shake, then ran its fingernails across my scalp, then hugged me ferociously, then, finally, sat me down abruptly on a hard wooden chair and left. Something pervasive and yet muddled had blown through me; I was confused and alone in its wake.
 
So I grasped around, trying to make sense of what had happened and in so doing extend the immersive reading experience a wee bit more. I just want to keep talking with my brilliant friend. I inhaled every recent interview with the elusive Elena Ferrante (who would point out that she is in fact NOT my friend) that I could find online. The famously absent author has done a few, via email, and one in person, for the Paris Review.

She made me think about how living out feminist values - and maybe by this I mean living an authentic and engaged life, especially on an interpersonal level - and writing and reading are all part of the same daunting gesture. How literature and the intimate politics of the personal are intertwined. 

Here's what she said about the old slogan in Vanity Fair (all bold is mine):

It’s only a few words, but with their fortunate ability to synthesize they should never be forgotten. They convey what we are made of, the risk of subservience we are exposed to, the kind of deliberately disobedient gaze we must turn on the world and on ourselves. But “the personal is political” is also an important suggestion for literature. It should be an essential concept for anyone who wants to write. 

And later: 

In general, we store away our experiences and make use of timeworn phrases—nice, ready-made, reassuring stylizations that give us a sense of colloquial normality. But in this way, either knowingly or unknowingly, we reject everything that, to be said fully, would require effort and a torturous search for words. Honest writing forces itself to find words for those parts of our experience that [are] crouched and silent. On one hand, a good story—or to put it better, the kind of story I like best—narrates an experience—for example, friendship—following specific conventions that render it recognizable and riveting; on the other hand, it sporadically reveals the magma running beneath the pillars of convention.

I had a teacher in college who told me that in order to write well, one must take out all the lies. This is extremely difficult to do. It demands, as Ferrante says, a torturous search for words, a willingness to open oneself beyond reassuring familiar phrases to reach for the unexpected and disorienting. It is an emotionally rigorous enterprise (something I often validate for the students I see in therapy who are laid low by the experience of being in the grip of writing a serious paper).

Over and over while reading the Neapolitan novels I was struck by the unwavering, disruptive honesty of the writing. The magma. (Excellent choice for characters living at the foot of Vesuvius). 

And then this, on why although she is a passionate reader of feminist thought, she can never be an idealogue:

Our heads are crowded with a very heterogeneous mix of material, fragments of time periods, conflicting intentions that cohabit, endlessly clashing with one another. As a writer I would rather confront that overabundance, even if it is risky and confused, than feel that I’m staying safely within a scheme that, precisely because it is a scheme, always ends up leaving out lots of real stuff because it is disturbing. ... In short, cultural struggles are long, full of contradictions, and while they are happening it is difficult to say what is useful and what isn’t. I prefer to think of myself as being inside a tangled knot; tangled knots fascinate me. It’s necessary to recount the tangle of existence, both as it concerns individual lives and the life of generations. Searching to unravel things is useful, but literature is made out of tangles.  

Within my own tangle (which surely resembles other women's unique tangles): the lure of subservience and the yearning for frank self-assertion; the wish to please and the itch to rebel; the desire for recognition and the dream of solitude; the drive to give and the quickness to anger; the embodied desire to nurture, the embodied desire for stillness. An essential part of me flourishes when I care for my children. I need to touch them, to feed them, to feel their sleepy heads nestle against my neck. But it is easy to hide myself in those activities, to allow that particular thread in the tangle to pull too tightly and make it hard to breathe.

Historically I'm an accommodater, a caregiver. The risk of subservience is real and comes from without and within, a sub-tangle of social forces and relationships and temperament. But I'm not sure a disobedient gaze is what's called for. At 38, I'm more inclined to cast, rather, a naive gaze around at the bits and pieces of my life. A writer's gaze. Maybe that's the same thing as disobedience. This terrifying year has given me a gift. Every so often I feel brave enough to invite those experiences, memories, inclinations that are hidden and crouching to saunter into the light and make themselves known. And when I do I feel emboldened. Honest. Less accommodating, yet no less myself.

What I love about "crouched" is that it suggests something lurking and ready to spring: a predator within that can be transformed by words. In therapy I join with people who, sometimes, have been attacked - by another, by themselves. Or who are afraid of being attacked, and doing everything imaginable to distract themselves from that fear. I try to create a holding environment of acceptance, safety and consistency that enables my clients to put language onto those crouching parts, to bring them into the light of a narrative, to integrate them, to welcome them. To disentangle enough to breathe and grow. 

This too, connects to my last post, and suggests how our relationships come first, the foundation that enables us to give ourselves shape, and thus do the courageous work of honest writing/speaking/living.

 

Whew.

Geez, you guys. Thanks for sticking with me through these ponderous musings. Now go write that novel!