Yesterday was the first day of Sunday School. Frances shrugged me off on her way to the middle school group. I walked Gabriel downstairs to his new classroom where he shot me one of his heavy-lidded, evil eye looks as I lingered in the doorway. It meant get out of here Mama, it's bad enough as it is without you embarrassing me. As I headed back towards the hallway with Beatrice, we passed an open doorway and a very nice woman called out to us.
Are you coming to Sunday School, Beatrice?
I hadn't realized she was old enough this year. We peeked in and saw a bunch of blonde heads bent over pieces of white paper at a small table, chunky broken crayons in use. I helped Beatrice pull up a chair and find some supplies, then leaned over to hug her from behind.
She knew my intentions. She turned around in her plastic chair and clung to my neck like her life depended on it.
You can't go, Mama! You have to stay with me!
[Incidentally, I really do feel as if my kids are either pissed at me for staying or pissed at me for going most of the time; sometimes the same kid is harboring both feelings simultaneously. An impossible position.]
She could tolerate detaching herself physically but would not allow me to inch more than a foot or two away. So I stayed. A little boy who had a tiny row of stitches visible within a yellowing bruise along his hairline also refused to let his dad leave the room. We were two parents, two teachers, and six children between the ages of three and five in a basement classroom. There were shelves with simple storytelling props (wooden sheep, figures, pieces of colorful felt), and a model of Jerusalem that you weren't supposed to play with because the city walls were not staying together very well anymore, and a bulletin board with a single child's art on it. Someone named Bella.
I knew I had to go home to pick up Mike before church started. I really wanted a cup of coffee in the parish hall.
When everyone had gathered on the red rug in the center of the room, the kind, bright-eyed teacher greeted each child one at a time. She told them what they would be learning about and playing with and making in their class. Then she said, Did you all have a good summer? Did you have any adventures?
I hate this moment. A well-meaning adult smiles at one of my kids and says, "did you have a great summer?"
That suggests the norm is to have a great summer. Kids are supposed to have fun over the summer, and come September they are supposed to be happy to share with their teachers and friends all about their fun summers. Kids aren't supposed to have moved houses twice, to have sent their papa off to the hospital for a week at a time, to watch his hair fall out, to cancel vacation plans and visits with friends, to worry about their parents. And while our big kids did squeeze in some classic summer fun off with friends and grandparents, Beatrice is too young to be away from us. Her summer was, unavoidably, dominated by cancer and its repercussions.
So when all the other children had shared about their favorite rides at Dutch Wonderland and how their daddy can jump higher than the biggest wave (how I wanted to muzzle that sweet boy), the teacher turned to Beatrice.
Did you have a vacation this summer too?
Beatrice was quiet for a moment, knees to her chest, holding onto her shoes. I studied the shiny linoleum framing the carpet, harsh and bright where the fluorescent lights above were reflected. I bit my lip. Then I watched her dear face.
Well...we are going to go to Massachusetts for a summer vacation, I think.
Massachusetts! exclaimed the teacher. Do you know where you went in Massachusetts?
Well, I know they have swimming holes there. And trails in some big forests. And mountains called the Berkshires are in Massachusetts.
The Berkshires! Beatrice. That's a big word.
It took all I had not to cry, and then a little bit more not to snatch her up and run out of there. Does she think we still haven't had our summer vacation? She knows Frances and Gabriel went with Gramma for a short version of it, while we stayed home. Or did she know that there were no vacations this summer, and why, and she was just trying to please the teacher with an acceptable response? Or be like the other kids with mommies and daddies and trips to the beach?
I wish we had gone to the Berkshires. I wish when adults asked my kids about their summers, they didn't have to hesitate and wonder what to say.
About a week ago, sitting on another red patterned rug, I told Heather and Mike about how when I read the Little House books aloud to Frances and Gabriel years ago, I would marvel at Ma. How she kept track of the days, how she and Pa would drag in ice to melt over the wood stove in a metal washtub to bathe their girls all the long winter, how she would enforce quiet and study on Sundays. What a drag it must have been sometimes. What a ceaseless effort, creating civilization for her family, beating back the chaos and dirt and lassitude that must have always threatened to destroy their tenuous stability. To my ears some of it sounded downright crazy. Ma! Did you really grate carrots and squeeze the juice into your cream so that your butter would cast a pleasing yellow glow? Wouldn't you have liked to sit down for just one minute instead?
But she really couldn't have. She had to do those things. Her family depended on her to insist upon the importance of doing more than just survive - to rather create beauty and peace and discipline, way out in the wilderness.
I feel like her now. I make them practice the piano, and speak to me respectfully, and brush their teeth, and clear the table. I chop onions and wipe down the counters and change their sheets and do their bedtime routines. In the context of Mike's illness, frequent moves, and the uncertainty of our future, it does feel at times as if we are in the wilderness.
I labor to make our family's center hold. Pete, the chaplain at the cancer institute, told me once that none of it is wasted. That made me cry. I listened to an old interview with Marie Howe last week and she talked about being a teenager and taking St. Theresa's advice to heart while she submitted to her father's harsh punishment, picking up cigarette butts in the yard: make every task a prayer. Do everything as if it were a prayer, offered up. Wash this dish, tie this shoe, replace this roll of toilet paper: carefully, intentionally, with love.
I think it is possible, and even probable, that these daily labors are holy acts and that I can understand them as such. I want to hold that truth close, while also acknowledging that just because it is holy and never-wasted does not mean it isn't Hard As Heck. Holy usually travels with hard, I guess.
Back to Beatrice, on the rug. I didn't cry; I didn't run. I didn't correct her and tell the teachers that she never went to the Berkshires. I let her tell her own story, and I stayed as long as I could. Then I apologized and said we had to go, and she and I went to go pick up Mike, meet up with the kids, and go in to the service.
This too is a kind of very hard, very holy work that I do that tests me far more than any greasy stovetop (though I despise cleaning a greasy stovetop): the quiet, constant emotional work of being present and steady for my family.
I used to joke that my feelings get a workout every time I do my job. Being a therapist involves a lot of holding of other people's intense emotions, a lot of feeling-with.
But this? This mothering-in-the-presence-of-cancer is like Olympic training for my feelings. I stay with everyone through the fear, worry, anger, anxiety, grief. My heart breaks with them, for them, alongside them. To be a mother, at least for me, is in part to hold the suffering of my husband and children. (Like a sea turtle holding up the world, or Atlas holding up the sky. Somebody has to do it. It's the unacknowledged, quiet work we all expect women to do.)
And it is also to share myself with them fully: to sing along, to laugh too loud, to make them wait while I talk with friends, to do a little dance, to cook a weird meal, to make things with acorns or write messages to neighbors in chalk on the sidewalk. To embarrass them. Being myself with them is a constant that they can depend on.
But it sure does wear a person out. Hence the paramount importance of doing what I can to keep filling this fragile teapot. There's time alone, and time with friends, and running, and reading. But there's also the solace and courage I take from the millions of mothers who have walked this path before me, in the face of challenges I can only imagine, in every time and place. Caroline Ingalls, a Syrian mother in a refugee camp, Mary mother of Jesus, my mother, a mother standing on the sidelines down the soccer field from me, looking gorgeous and together and feeling a wreck inside. Marie Howe told a story about the first time she replied to her daughter, who asked why she had to make her bed, because I said so. She suddenly felt the room fill with millions who had gone before her and uttered those same words. They were applauding. Because we said so.
Everything shared, she said, is better.
I think so too.
