community building

Yesterday dear Edith sent us a photo from Vermont in 2009, a summer gathering of friends and family on her family's green, green land. There we are, three families, younger and shinier, the smallest members of our growing clans not yet born. I have baby Gabriel on my hip and little Frances stands nearby. We all look rumpled and happy.

Yet I felt overwhelmingly sad when I saw it. I don't think it is for the reason you might imagine - that we were young and innocent and knew not the ravages of cancer. Rather, I saw the sadnesses and frustrations of that moment, a time when I often felt lost and alone. Marriage with two little ones and a demanding job (my husband's) was painfully difficult. I was living in a new town, staying home with the children, disoriented and often irritated, at a loss as to what I should eventually do with my own life - if 'my own life' was a category that even still existed. It strikes me now that this blog, begun around that time, was born of desperation.

One night during that visit, as we were all cooking together, I told our friend Mike that I felt nothing I did contributed to our greater community. That my life was about nap schedules and wiping up applesauce and changing diapers. Nothing I did mattered in any bigger way to the world around me.

Meagan! He said, looking at my with sincere surprise. You are doing the most important community-building work there is. You are growing a family. What matters more than that?

I burst into tears, knowing he was right, knowing I still feared I would disappear.

I listened to Christian Wiman deliver an essay that David Brooks brought to my attention in his wrap-up of the year's excellent writing while I was recovering from a migraine the other day. In it Wiman says people who have been away from God tend to come back by one of two ways: destitution or abundance, an overmastering sorrow or a strangely disabling joy. 

I don't know that I've ever been away per se, though I have never enjoyed the closeness I imagine is possible in this life. I've always been aware of that strange subterranean longing, and always stumbled about in a halting doubtful mixed-up way in an effort to draw closer to God. Or at least consider drawing closer to God. There's never been a dramatic moment of return - maybe, rather, a series of botched attempts. A chain of acute moments of yearning, fear, wonder that have beckoned me beyond myself. Many, many Sunday mornings in the pews, singing with a simultaneous ache and flutter in my heart, tears at the ready, a crack in my voice.

That moment of early motherhood was one that encompassed overmastering sorrow and disabling joy. The ache and the flutter. I carried the burden of feeling lost heavily upon my back, but not a day went by without it slipping off for an immersive swim in the flood of joy and peace that a long gaze into one's baby's eyes releases. The all in way that young children - that my particular young children - encountered each moment was a gift to me. They offered a new quality of presence to my days: their exquisite wonder at the way milk swirls into Mama's coffee, or the unpredictable course of a rain drop down the window pane, or the spinning tires of a garbage truck. Who needs a subscription to Headspace? Just hang out with a two year old.

And I could blame social media or the alumni notes section of Swarthmore College's magazine for my inability to sink into the quiet pleasures and satisfactions of taking care of my children without ambivalence poisoning the well. But that's not really it. It's something deep in me, deep in our culture, that demands one justify herself. Earn your keep; succeed in life. Dream big. The sky's the limit!

Ah, well. I have not started the bilingual family-friendly mental health center of my dreams. I have written no books, achieved no fame, made very little money. I'm still chipping away at that damn elusive LCSW. It's been over seven years since that photo was taken, and I am still sometimes accosted by the fear that I have nothing to show for it.

But I would much rather be the me that I am right here, right now. Dwelling as we have over the past year and a half in this alien cancer world has brought my focus more into our home and less into the world than ever before. In some ways it's a greater intensification of that other time with two little ones, funneling so much of myself into my family. Yet I don't doubt the existence of myself now. Most of the time I know that what I do matters. The work I do as a therapist affirms it every day. We grow and experience our very realness in the context of relationship. So nothing much has changed; everything has changed.

I've spent more time with my husband since his diagnosis than I've probably spent with him over the entire course of our relationship up until that point. A few of cancer's strange gifts: transforming my love for my husband into something raw and palpable, something stubborn; strengthening my marriage; demanding emotional honesty from me (nothing else works when you're anticipating a fast-approaching stem cell transplant).

Cancer has helped me settle in with my children too; settle in to the sorrow and joy of every day with them. It has helped me to say yes, to welcome it all. On one of these rainy lazy Christmas break days, Gabriel and Beatrice and I decided it was time to tear ourselves from games and books and go to the park. It was so dreary out, but we made it to the playground where Gabriel suggested we play tag. The sky was white-gray overhead, the mud slid beneath our shoes, the air was stabbing cold in my lungs. I wished I'd worn a hat. He ran so fast, every time I thought I had him I'd reach out wildly and he'd dodge. We pursued each other all over the field, with Beatrice screaming and doing her best to keep up and me laughing and yelling, completely out of breath, unable to catch my boy. Then he slowed suddenly, grinning at me, who could not stop in time and slammed into him, bringing us both down hard on the cold wet grass. Then Beatrice flung herself on top of us.

Exhilarating, it was simply exhilarating, looking up at the stark sky and the laughing faces of my kids, feeling the mud soak into the seat of my pants, the delight of it all alongside the ragged sadness tearing around the periphery, of time passing, of loss, of terrifying unknowns ahead.

Overmastering sorrow and disabling joy. At the same time. Thank you, yes. I'll take it. It wipes away the fog on the windshield, that I might see a little more clearly. My worldly ambitions still tug on my sleeves. A loneliness bubbles up that urges me to dwell on surface deficits in the hopes of stoppering its source: the weight I've gained, the gray hairs I've accumulated, the things I haven't done. I get stuck in that sometimes. But still I treasure that cleared space.

This morning I read a column in our local paper by a priest named Father Wolf, whom I've heard patients at my clinic refer to affectionately as Padre Lobo. He quoted Pope Francis in a recent message:

The family is the indispensable crucible in which spouses, parents and children, brothers and sisters learn to communicate and to show generous concern for one another, and in which frictions and even conflicts have to be resolved not by force but by dialogue, respect, concern for the good of the other, mercy and forgiveness. From within families the joy of love spills out into the world and radiates to the whole of society. 

This time when I heard that I was doing the most important community-building of all, I could receive it without tears.

Happy new year to all of you, and blessings to you in all the often-invisible, thoroughly essential, generous work from the heart that you do every day. It ripples out into the world in ways we'll never know.

mysterious now

Today my 9:40 appointment didn't show, so I texted Heather to ask how Mike was. I had been so worried. He went back to New York yesterday, without me, for a procedure today and then treatment tomorrow.

She told me he had just come out, that he was fine, it went well. She described the waiting area, the hospital. She gave me the doctor's report.

I was sitting at my desk in a small windowless office in Pennsylvania, hunched over my phone. That moment happened. But as I read and reread Heather's text, other moments happened too.

All the long minutes in waiting rooms; all the strange, too-bright hospital spaces. The port, biopsies, PET scans, radiation. The waiting. The white/gray palette, the fluorescent lighting. A doctor walking at a clip across the rows of chairs to give his report. Me, suspended in molasses, an odd mix of breathless anxiety and leaden limbs, struggling to find a breath. His manner is particular to certain kinds of specialists and surgeons; it somehow combines excellent eye contact and intensity with a clear message: please allow me to manage this exchange so that we can complete it within about six minutes. Don't ask too many questions. Good? Good.

Oh, how could it be Heather there, and Mike there, and not me?  I know that moment. It's in my bones. It's a combination of moments, just beneath the surface, ready to bubble up and break into my right now with a simple glance at my phone.

We got our Christmas tree about a week ago, and spent Sunday afternoon pulling out decorations. Some of you may remember that last Christmas Mike was just completing what we thought was his one and only awful treatment, a chemo-radiation-chemo sandwich that made for the most challenging fall this family had ever known. We were living in a rented house with many borrowed things, and didn't have access to our holiday decorations.

So friends and family sent us ornaments: beautiful angels, stars, Santas, snowflakes, woodland creatures, elegant glass spheres.

Boy, was that overwhelmingly generous and kind and Christmas-miracley. We opened so many little packages last year. I labeled each ornament with the friend's name who sent it. The children loved it. Our tree was so beautiful.

And those are the ornaments we unwrapped last week. Usually a dig into the box of ornaments is a sweet journey through so many times and places: my second grade class, Frances's preschool, Mike's first Christmas, the year Gabriel was born. But this year we traveled to just one time, one place: a year ago. A gentle, worn-out time. We thought we'd made it through the worst of it. We knew we were laid low; we knew our friends and family were with us. We were looking ahead with full hearts to a time of recovery and healing.

We didn't know what was coming. It's been a hard year.

Those ornaments exacerbate the absurdity of living another cancer Christmas. How has it been an entire year? How can the way we were, the way we are, the way this year has unfolded, all be true? How can we endure it, surrounded by these achingly poignant symbols of hope and love and healing in the living room?

Early in the decorating process, Beatrice pulled out the popsicle stick ornament pictured above and gently unwrapped it, laying it on the rug. She looked up at me.

This ornament makes me cry, she said.

Why? I asked.

Because. It's so beautiful.

Then I kneeled down with her. I turned it over. 'Annie' was written on the back in black marker. She's a teenager at our church in Annapolis. Every Monday night we used to go to church and the kids would practice acolyting or singing and often a craft project would be going on in between activities. We had been the occasion for a craft project last Christmas. Annie and others had made popsicle stick and glitter snowflakes and sent them to us in a big box.

I sat admiring it with Beatrice. Mike sat down in the chair next to me and rested a hand on my back. I leaned my head on his knee and cried. She asked me why I was crying.

Well, duh, Beatrice.

Because it's so beautiful!

So many nows are achingly vivid as my family enters a second turn of the seasons living with a terrifying disease. The children's faces are exceedingly beautiful. Their bickering, too, is unbearable. The shape of branches against the evening sky is so stark. The yellow leaping fire in the fireplace is extra compelling. The Christmas music is more heartrending than ever.

These saturated moments linger, slide together, overlap, and make time into something else. Something more mysterious. How can it be that that was yesterday, a week ago, a year ago? I cannot begin to fathom it.

I finished reading Little House in the Big Woods with Beatrice tonight. We've shared those beloved chapters with various listeners over the past few nights: Frances and Gabriel, Tessa and Annika next door, the dogs, Kate the babysitter. Everything grows still. Part of the magic of the book is the slow, immersive quality that marks Laura's experience of time; reading it aloud is a way to participate in that alert, attuned stillness.

She intuitively understands something about the way time feels sometimes: a moment can be so full of itself. It overflows with realness. That kind of vivid experience can invite you further in, and somehow also make you notice it, linking you to moments like it that have happened before and will happen again.

Laura is inside and outside time. The immersive moment can be so extraordinary that it invites her to stand back and marvel.

The book begins in the fall, and ends in the next fall, just as winter is approaching. Just like now.

Pa plays his fiddle as Laura and Mary fall asleep. In the last passage of the book, he plays Auld Lang Syne. Laura asks him what the days of auld lang syne are, and he tells her they are the days of long ago, and then tells her to go to sleep.

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on his honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting. 

She thought to herself, "This is now."

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

living the dream

When we first arrived in Lancaster last summer - disoriented and tangled in a number of secondary crises, all set in motion by Mike's rare cancer diagnosis that had just hit us like a truck, throwing every part of our lives into terrifying, uncertain disarray - the sky was too blue.

The squirrels chattered too frenetically. The sun shone in my eyes. A car alarm would vibrate inside my skull. Black telephone poles were ominously stark against white clouds. The world was saturated in such a way that perceiving it with my senses hurt.

And now, over a year later, as I come to the end of a time of relative stability that the clinical trial Mike is currently on has afforded us, the world has become more vibrant again. But not in an aggressive, harsh, more-disaster-shall-rain-upon-you-momentarily kind of way. More like golden autumn sunshine at four in the afternoon, illuminating everything and making it so beautiful you could cry. Every day, dry leaves skitter and scrape across pavement, damp wind chills my fingers gripped around the handlebars of my bike, heavy gray clouds let shafts of light through in a fast-moving sky, faces of strangers brighten in shy welcome as we pass on the street, and all of it is beckoning to me: notice, notice, notice. See this world. See this abundance.

Moving through one's days with so little protection can hurt, but not like it did when I was in shock last summer. It's the hurt of a full heart, the ache of loving a lot. 

This fall we settled into a new living situation in my mom's home, and Mike settled into a new treatment protocol, going back and forth to New York every two weeks. I started working again, doing what I love. We found a sweet babysitter. Dear friends have come to visit. We have neighbors with whom it is a joy to share everyday life. The kids got involved in school and activities and friends.

And compared to past chemotherapy regimens, this trial has been blessedly easy on Mike. His hair has grown back, he's put on weight. He has energy for things like taking Gabriel to basketball and going out on a date with me and telling the kids to pick up their toys. In short, for the first time in many many months, our lives have felt predictable, full, connected to others. Normal.

But the goal of this treatment is to get his cancer into remission so that he can have a stem cell transplant. Right back into battle. Soon he will have a PET scan to see if he's ready for that step.

So December, with its scans and treatment decisions and transitions, has been looming. This autumn idyll cannot last. In that sense, life isn't normal at all. It's a respite. We all know that things will get really hard and scary again.

But this not-normal normal life, this moment bookended by a very hard past and a very hard future? It tastes so good. Over the top good. Exquisite!

Maybe it takes knowing that everything really can turn upside down in an instant to fully appreciate the miraculous right side up quality that most days quietly offer.

The feel of Mike's warm back moving gently in sleep next to me before I get out of bed. The smell of coffee. The way Beatrice says good morning Mama and smiles and reaches for me before she even opens her eyes. The letter from a friend unfolded on the desk, asking to be reread. An emoji-laden text exchange with the babysitter about piano lessons today. Right side up, right side up, everywhere I look.

I recently added one extra day of work a week, back at Franklin & Marshall. Last Monday was my first day seeing students again. As I was locking up my bike before heading in that morning, one of the psychologists on staff crossed the parking lot and called out to me.

Biking to work!! Meagan, you're living the dream!

I looked up at her and smiled.

Yep, I said. Pretty much.

everything nice

I hail from a family of performers and artists, people who are pretty comfortable in the spotlight. Me? Not so much. I held my mediocre own in a handful of elementary school plays and dance recitals, but honestly, I am the kind of person who begins to sweat when in a new class or group and the leader invites everyone to go around the circle and say her name. Worse, where she's from. Worse still, what she wants to get out of this class.

Seriously. Just waiting for my turn to say my name out loud puts me on edge.

What if I forget how it's pronounced?

My one and only true starring role was in a production written and directed by my dad and his friend Richard called Moby Duck. I was roughly Beatrice's age, about three. My sister Rachel was a baby. I played Captain Ahab outfitted in a souvenir Sea World cap, a dress with an untied sash, and tights whose crotch had succumbed to gravity and settled around my knees. I carried a harpoon made from a toy broom with a triangle of cardboard taped to its handle. The Pequod was constructed from a cardboard box.

Queequeg was a yellow crocheted duck, voiced by my dad. Hence the title.

I don't think the directors really explained the story to me. Mostly I think they enjoyed each other's company and the wild silliness of making an absurdist home movie in our Providence living room. I was basically a prop, and a good reason for two adult friends to make a cardboard boat.

However. They didn't take my deep aversion to conflict, violence, and scary stuff into account. At one point my dad covers himself in a white sheet, gets down on his hands and knees, and enters the camera's field bellowing thar she blows! while sort of scooting towards me and parachuting the sheet up and down. Richard directs me from behind the camera: that's the whale, Captain Ahab! Get it, get it with your harpoon!

I scream in terror, throw the harpoon overboard in the general direction of the whale/dad, and run to the back of the boat to cower.

After a couple of takes, the adults realize things are not going so well. My dad takes off the sheet to negotiate with his actor. I begin pacing around, trying to explain why this whole whale hunting thing is seriously not working for me. I suggest another story: a baby fish and a baby whale get to be friends. And then the baby fish and the baby whale get to be friends with me. 

Uh huh, nods my dad, staying in his Hollywood director persona. He repeats the plot. I nod emphatically. He ponders my treacle, then tries to convince me again of the merits of the Moby Duck idea. He suggests compromises. Maybe it could be less scary. Maybe Captain Ahab could...

Daddy, Daddy. Daddy. No, Daddy.

I interrupt, fretfully raising and lowering my hands, patting the air in front of me in a calm-down gesture, as if trying to settle an unruly mob.

Daddy. I want it nice. Everything nice. 

So there you have it. Everything nice. Everyone in my family cracks up watching this. I always blush. These days, when I urge peace and harmony in an overbearing kind of way, periodically one of my kids will smile at me and say, okay Mama. We know. Everything nice.

For the longest time I felt ashamed about what I thought Moby Duck revealed about me. Cowardice, fearfulness, a strangely overblown aversion to conflict. Baby whales only, please. At various times in my life I have noticed how my reluctance to be honest out of fear of the inevitable interpersonal conflict that would follow has hampered my ability to love more fully. Sometimes it's been hard on my relationships. There's that little girl, pleading with her dad to please take it down a notch and do my story instead.

Since the election, the everything nice part of me has been hollering for my attention. Kindness, connection, attunement, care - these are the values I am holding close. And I am coming to recognize, nearly forty years into my tenure on this earth, that there is nothing shameful about the way I handled the role of Captain Ahab. My particular yearning for peaceful relationship (as well as my desire to be in charge of the story) is, like everything about us, double edged. It makes me me. It can be a great strength, and a great vulnerability too. It seems like accepting and even embracing my fear of conflict is the only way to grow more courageous, and to be able to risk conflict when honesty and love demand it.

There's a lot of upset and hurt and anger all around us right now. My Facebook feed is a steady stream of people looking to reduce their isolation by sharing their agitation and fear, people offering various ideas for what we can do with this moment, people casting about in a terrifying time for some way to essentially increase safety. 

I went to a training on Friday about using mindfulness and yoga in psychotherapy, especially with clients who have been through trauma. We spent some time talking about our basic human emotional motivations. We can understand these as falling into three 'centers' of motivation: fear/threat, affiliation/connection, and mastery/achievement. In other words, we are motivated by a desire for safety, a desire for interpersonal connection, and a desire to achieve. The only problem is, when the fear center becomes activated - by actual or perceived threats to our safety - it dominates. It colors everything else. Which makes sense: animals, including humans, are created in such a way that every other priority must be pushed aside when their lives are in danger.

But living life under threat is painful and exhausting. It makes it very hard to learn and grow, it endangers our relationships, it takes a toll on our health. It can lead to violence, or substance abuse, or a whole slew of other coping behaviors that are ultimately self-harming.

I see so much hurt and fear around me these days. I feel those things too. But 'everything nice' is telling me: breathe into that fear, acknowledge it, and then gently set it down. Help others feel safe. Help your children feel safe. Help your neighbors feel safe. Then we can remember the fullness of who we are, and allow our relationships and our work to assume their proper place in our lives.

In therapy I often talk with clients about how anger is a secondary emotion. We usually feel it because there is a more painful, primary emotion underneath that seems impossible to tolerate. Fear and sadness are so hard - cover it over with anger instead.

Not that anger isn't useful. I think protests and pins and efforts to figure out what the heck is happening to us are positive. I honor the people in my world who are making more noise than I am right now. What I have to give in this moment is quieter: my own grief. Gentleness and kindness. A desire to help others feel cared for. A kind of vigilance, a quiet waiting.

I brought my family and some friends to see the student African drumming ensemble perform at Franklin & Marshall College yesterday, down the street from where we live. We sat in the back, near other friends. The students were dressed in brilliant colors. They come from every part of the world, and played with wild playful energy, putting their whole bodies into the music with irrepressible smiles on their faces. The vibrations were palpable in the auditorium, and so was the joy of the musicians, who were sharing a great gift and knew it, just by looking out at their audience, smiling along with them.

Afterwards I walked our kids and our dear neighbor's kids home through the park. The sun was setting. The children were full of music and energy and ran ahead of me, tackling each other, playing tag, throwing leaves. They were so free. 

You have to be safe - in body, mind, and spirit - to feel that kind of expansive, joyful freedom. Watching them made me very happy.

So this is my 'everything nice' wish for you and yours today: to share music and singing, nurturing warm meals, time amidst golden leafy trees, snuggles with pets, affectionate greetings with neighbors, dance parties in the kitchen, eye contact and smiles with strangers. That you might be a presence that invites healing and safety in this world. Restoration. And if our neighbors are threatened or our democratic traditions are flouted, and we are called upon to brave conflict, discomfort, civil disobedience? Well, then we will be ready to act, not just from anger or fear, but from a place of love, with our whole, marvelous, human selves intact.