in which Beatrice endeared herself to me even more completely, on the day after we learned Mike's cancer is back

It was bedtime. I was standing behind Beatrice at the sink while she stood on a little stool, looking in the mirror and pensively holding her toothbrush aloft.

...I think I want to go to Massachusetts, too. Mama, I want to go with Didi and Gabriel.

(On Saturday my mom is taking the two older children to the house we rented in Massachusetts months ago but can't visit because of Mike's illness.)

Beatrice, I didn't think you would want to be away from us for an entire week. And this way we can have special time together. We can go back to the fountain, and go to the library, and play hopscotch, and go to the market, and watch movies.

...Well, okay. I like those things. Okay, Mama.

We'll have lots of special time, just Beatrice and Mama and Papa.

(A big smile lights up her face in the mirror).

I adore time with just Mama and Papa!

(I grin back at her).

And Papa and I absolutely adore spending time with just Beatrice!

(Beatrice backbends a bit so that she can take an intent, upside-down look into my eyes without the mirror mediating).

Would you say that one more time, please?

Papa and I absolutely adore spending time with just you.

She spun around, almost falling off her stool, and laughed and hugged me, utterly delighted.

the first ending

This morning, before the Last Day of School, I was tying up packages of chocolate chip and apple cinnamon oatmeal cookies that we spent a very long time baking the day before, and hollering up the stairs for Gabriel to brush his teeth, and fighting with Frances about practicing the piano, and noting that Beatrice was not dressed, and worrying about Mike's light-headedness, and realizing that I hadn't made Gabriel's lunch yet nor worse still, egads! - my COFFEE - when a nagging, itchy feeling started to bubble up from the murky depths of my brain. We had seven minutes before it was time to leave. What else in the world was I forgetting?

I turned back to Beatrice. Had she brushed her teeth? No. That wasn't it though. She was leaning over a chair with one dirty foot in the air.

And then I knew. I could not for the life of me remember the last time she'd had a bath. It had been many, many, many days. So many it had fallen out of the nighttime routine. My first thought was: does that constitute neglect? Will her teachers notice and call protective services?

My second thought: don't the painstakingly homemade cookies somehow counterbalance my lackadaisical approach to hygiene? The cookies that I involved Beatrice in baking, even after I watched her fall backwards from her chair at the counter, taking a bowl brimming with a double batch of dry ingredients toppling with her, coating every kitchen surface including our shoes in cinnamon-scented white powder?

(Not even that event prompted a bath).

(To her credit, she spent a long time industriously smearing flour into a gluey film all over the cabinetry with damp paper towels, trying to reverse the damage.)

The fact that I forgot that Beatrice sometimes needs a bath weighed on me as we walked to school. It was a reminder that I'm back in the mode I inhabited last fall, during Mike's initial chemotherapy. The conditions are remarkably similar: we're wading into a big transition full of uncertainty, Mike is really sick with a slew of complications, and the kids need extra support. Multitasking is frying my brain. I'm back to making frequent trips to the CVS, where the kindly pharmacist greets me with "Picking up for Brogan?" and ends the transaction by giving me a sympathetic smile and calling, "See you tomorrow!" as I head towards the door.

The difference is that now it's more familiar, and so while less laden with anxiety, it's also somehow less tolerable because this isn't supposed to be happening. When Mike was recovering earlier this spring, we allowed ourselves to make plans, to nurture expectations about the future. Now, three cycles of cancer treatment later - and anticipating a fourth - we are letting go of one expectation after another. Visits with friends, a birthday fishing trip, an anniversary date - all canceled.

Today was the last day of school. I thought that on the last day of school I'd be back to inviting friends over for dinner, to making plans, to living a life generally colored by more giving and less receiving. I thought we'd be squeezing a lot of fun out of our last weeks in Lancaster. Instead I dropped off the kids and talked through Mike's symptoms with the nurse who called to check in, to see if he improved after IV fluids yesterday.

Throughout the scariness and heartache and tumult of this school year, the children had a safe, peaceful place to go every day, organized by reassuring routines and populated by kind teachers and friends. I have never felt so grateful for a school community. The New School is marked by a culture of courteousness and creativity; it's a place where a seven year old patiently holds the door for the three year old behind him (and her mother) and the art show is the biggest event of the year. We've walked the four long blocks there in all kinds of weather, meeting friends along the way, sighting bunnies and mushrooms and irresistible big sticks, arguing and joking and gossiping.

So can you blame me for crying when Beatrice's teacher Sybil enveloped me in a goodbye hug at pick up time? All the losses of the moment got jumbled up, and in the safety of her arms - and in the sight of her glorious purple hair - I cried.

My kids have been mothered by so many excellent teachers and older children and fellow parents; now as the summer diaspora begins I fear the mothering gig falls back entirely to me. I'm afraid of the responsibility; I'm afraid of the sadness I'm sure they will feel at losing a daily connection with such vibrant networks of care.

This afternoon Gabriel's grandfather came and picked him up for a special solo visit. Frances and I played in the front yard. I made dinner. Mike felt well enough to help clean up. I read nursery rhymes to Bea. Frances and I sat and read her writing from the year that she brought home to share.

Before I sang her bedtime songs, I gave Beatrice a bath. And when she asked, I got in with her. She loves that.

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.