rebel girl

Around nine o'clock last night, after I said goodnight to Beatrice and Gabriel, I put on my shoes and headed out of the house. Frances was at a birthday party three blocks away that was coming to a close. I have a reputation for arriving late and I prefer not to give my children any more examples than necessary that they can use against me.

But as soon as I felt the breezy warm evening air against my bare limbs, my whole being slowed and relaxed. Suddenly there was absolutely no rush whatsoever. Thousands of summer nights past -  in a car with the windows down, sitting on cooling sand by the ocean, talking on a front porch, walking home late from a party - all quietly melted into the present moment.

Some people complain about the humidity on the East Coast. Okay, I do too; usually in late August when the whole thing is getting old. But I challenge you to complain about humidity on a June night when everything feels gentle and hushed, and the air has a pleasant comforting weight, and you are walking to the music of your flip flops slapping the cracked sidewalk and a few birds who are up too late, and the sky before you is glowing faintly behind the shadowy buildings and trees and telephone poles with the tail end of the sunset, peach and yellow, and fireflies's tiny flashes are just getting started. Then the humidity is perfection.

I thought about Frances, how she was at a party that ended at nine, how she is nearly twelve years old, how she is going on tour with her choir next week and will get on a bus with many other middle and high school students headed towards Michigan and not return for five days.

It often feels very weird that your children grow up. It also feels weird that your children aren't you. They are part of you, but so strangely and utterly separate. They think and behave and feel differently.  Weird.

But lately, it hasn't really unsettled me that Frances is getting older, nor that she is herself (instead of me, or Mike, or anyone else). I notice these things. It's hard not to - what with all the independence and borrowing my clothes and responsibility and general brilliance shining all around her going on. I notice constantly. But mostly, lately, I enjoy it.

Years ago Frances asked me not to use pictures of her or write about her here - at least not without her permission. Once upon a time she inspired many, many blog posts. Now I am in the habit of composing the posts about Frances in my head, and leaving them there. But I think this one is okay (right, Frances?) because it's mostly about me, and what it has been like to mother my rising seventh grade daughter.

Yesterday morning, I went on a run. I've been feeling very plodding and lazy on my runs lately, so I brought along my phone and listened to a Spotify mix. Around mile three, when I was about ready to shift into a walk and head home, I heard the thrilling, driving drum beat that opens Rebel Girl.

That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood.

Oh man, I love that song. I let it propel me forward and fill up my mind, so that I dropped the worries I'd been carrying and simply ran.

That girl she holds her head up so high
I think I wanna be her best friend, yeah

In that open energized mental space it hit me: Frances is that girl! She's the rebel girl. Maybe this song is about my daughter.

I think I laughed out loud.

I had always identified with the singer. I admired rebel girls, usually from a safe distance. I slouched, spoke quietly, bit my nails (still do). I lacked their charismatic boldness but I seriously loved to be around it.

I've seen Frances hold her head up so high. I've seen her be assertive and generous in so many ways lately: performing, writing, with friends, in her school community. I won't say too much and risk encroaching into forbidden territory by writing directly about her. But I know as she has done the hard work of growing up in the midst of our terrifying family struggles over these past two years, I've often had moments where I stood back, puzzled, and thought, "But I would never have done/said/thought that at her age." Or "I would never have had the courage to audition for a solo." "I'd never have talked that way to an adult." "I'd never have worn that."

All true. In those moments I sometimes felt a faintly scary alienation, a mystification about this passionate girl who began her life inside me that made me nervous. I've turned to my mother and said, "I was so different at her age," and she has concurred. Sometimes I feel irrationally irritated. It can all be very weird, I tell you.

But something about Kathleen Hanna's voice took that unease and turned it into a kind of triumphant delight. Frances is different from me. I don't want to be her best friend, but I think other girls might. We all admire her forthrightness, her fast mind, her penchant for fashion.

So after the party, on the walk home through the June night, I had to tell her that I thought she was rebel girl (Mike introduced her to the song years ago). I told her about my run and how the song had struck me, how I loved her ability to say what she means, to claim her own space; how I loved her, admired her, how we were different and how that was definitely okay.

Did any of it make any sense to her? Probably not so much. I was effusing; we were both tired.

There are so many summer nights ahead for her, and most of them will be without me at her side. Frances will do so much that I have never done and never will do, in a way that is all her own. It boggles the mind. Our rebel girl is just getting started.  

all in

When Frances and Gabriel were much younger, Beatrice was but a twinkle, and Mike was a new faculty member working all the time, I felt weighed down with the responsibility of having to manage kids and a house and a life. It was lonely. Mike was often away, and I was often at home. If there was a domestic problem, chances were I would have to be the one to solve it.

Gross bug in the bathroom? Mama will get it. Sick with a fever? Mama will take you to the doctor. Empty toilet paper roll hanging sadly in the bathroom? Mama will get a new one. Pile of toys on the step that Mama put there in the hopes that the owner of the toys would notice it and take it upstairs to her room but forgot to explicitly tell the owner to do so? Mama will sigh upon stepping over the pile for the seventh time and take them up herself at 11 o'clock that night.

There is something so terrible and isolating - so adult - about knowing that no one else will do it. If you want a clean counter, you have to wipe up the spill. Or you have to stand over your four year old and instruct him on how to properly wipe up the spill, which is in fact harder. Sometimes that spill is no big deal; sometimes it feels weighty and awful. Sometimes a fairy godmother would be nice.

All these years later, living with cancer has taught me that in fact I have a fairy godmother. I have about ten fairy godmothers. There may be more waiting in the wings that I don't even know about.

About two weeks ago I told a couple of friends at a school event that I was tired of managing everything. I wished I could make like a fragile Victorian flower and collapse onto a fainting couch and let other stronger people take care of our impending move. We can help with that! they said, and right before my eyes, they waved their magic wands (i.e. whipped out their phones) and arranged to borrow a truck and have a friend drive it the next week. Emboldened, that night I emailed a few friends and asked for help. They came and transformed the daunting process of moving furniture from Annapolis to Lancaster into a piece of cake.

After Mike's diagnosis and our emergency move to Lancaster, we needed so much help. I was terrified for my kids. I knew I couldn't do it all alone. So I let it be known, and we were indeed showered with loving support. But I was plagued by an uncomfortable, slightly nauseated sensation in the pit of my stomach much of the time because I knew there was no way I could repay it all. Not in my lifetime. Some part of me worried about the debt we were incurring. Not just material help style debt, but friendship debt, kindness debt, spiritual debt. I could never make enough dinners to repay all those meals; I could never send out enough hugs and poems and homemade gifts to balance the scales. I would be in debtor's prison forever, aware that I had simply taken too much.

Can you believe how long it has taken me to finally understand that love is not an economical arrangement?

Nearly two years later, something about our friend Teb instantly agreeing to take a day off work, pick up a truck, drive it 100 miles away, load it with furniture, and drive it 100 miles back - and my own easy acceptance of this gift - made me stand back and really get it. When it hit me, I cried and cried.

I didn't feel anxious receiving his generosity because I knew that we are in this together. We're all of us all in. His actions said: you have a problem? Then I do too. Let's solve it together. And eat burritos and hang out and laugh with other friends who are in it together with us.

I will never feel alone in the way I used to, because I have learned that I'm not alone. I wish it didn't take a life-threatening illness to teach me that. But I'm grateful to know it all the same.

Visit the sick and the imprisoned. Give to the poor. We might go to church, and think of these good works as something we should schedule in on a Tuesday afternoon. And indeed we should. But. I've been thinking a lot about this. Aren't we are all sick, trapped, and poor - to different degrees, in different ways, sometimes varying over the course of a single day? By accepting our suffering, sharing it, extending our love to others from that hurting place - might that be one way to understand what it means to take up our cross?

And by asking for help, are we not inviting those around us to step into a way of being that calls forth their best selves? And encouraging others to do the same?

Sometimes friends try to reassure me when I express discomfort with receiving their support by reminding me how many times in the past I have helped someone else, and that someday, when this difficult time is over, I will again be able to help others in need. That is true, and there is some comfort in it for me. But it isn't the most important truth. I might need a lot of help for a very long time. I can't hang my hat on the hopes of someday being able to properly pay it forward and right the scales.

Because when you're in it together, it doesn't matter. If our burdens belong to all of us, debtor's prison no longer makes any sense. We carry neither our sorrows nor our joys alone.

Consider Gabriel, who when given some kind of treat - ice cream, Halloween candy - will insist on sharing it with you. Usually I am happy to accept, but recently I said no thanks. He urged more insistently. I explained I just wasn't hungry. Please, Mama! Just try a little, he said.

Gabriel, why do you want me to eat this so much? I asked.

Because, he explained, it makes it tastes better when you eat something special together.

Dear friends, if you are lonely - if you need help - consider telling someone you love about it. I wish I had called a friend all those years ago when I was home with little kids and just said: there's a really gross bug in the bathroom and I can't bear to deal with it alone.

Would you come over?

can-be attitude

This morning I reluctantly said goodbye to my very sick husband, then an excellent friend came and collected my children to take them to an early church service, and by eight I was driving to my social work alma mater, Bryn Mawr, to take an all day licensure prep course.

On the way, I discovered If You're Feeling Sinister was in the CD player and so had the distinctive pleasure of singing along to every song. I first encountered that album nearly twenty years ago (it's shocking, I know! - but do the math, you'll see); it's tied up with the first months of my relationship with Mike, an essential part of the soundtrack to a string of dizzy, romantic, on-the-cusp-of-adulthood hours passed together in his tiny Williamsburg apartment on Metropolitan Avenue at the tail end of the twentieth century.

That's one of the benefits of falling in love with one's partner relatively early in life: so much of the music that moves me is somehow tied to us. Even the things we each loved in high school, before we met, seem to have been folded in - at this point I have embraced (at least in theory) countless obscure 90s hip hop lyrics as my own.

Anyway. I was driving through the lush spring green of Bryn Mawr (I had forgotten how beautiful it was) intermittently singing and crying and praying and worrying. When I hit the last track I could not help but belt out:

The best looking boys are taken

The best looking girls are staying inside

So Judy where does that leave you?

Walking the streets from morning to night

Judy! I heard your song about the dream of horses in a new way this morning. Sometimes there are simply no good choices to be had. Sometimes you feel sad and restless; unmoored.

I do things all day long. I make breakfast, and brush little rows of teeth, and bike to work, and take kids to baseball games and piano lessons, and chat with friends at the fair down the street. All those things happen, and often even go well, but a part of my heart is nearly always pacing. Like Judy. My heart is walking the streets from morning till night.

Having choices, solving problems, putting a can-do attitude to work - it's basically our birthright as Americans. Right? I love to make things happen. But our fragile bodies (and families and communities and planet) trouble that comforting approach to the problems of life. In the face of my own true love's suffering these past days, the limits of action - the poverty of options - are rough stone walls hemming me in. It seems all I can do now is suffer with. And pace, and feel afraid, and press my forehead against the cold stone.

And tell you guys about it.

Mike was admitted to the hospital while I was learning test-taking strategies this afternoon. His dad took him through the emergency department. I feared that would happen today, while I was away. He's there now, I hope resting well, and I am here at home, in between many loads of laundry, elbow-deep in a bag of tortilla chips.

I just remembered the next part of the song:

With a star above your shoulder lighting up the path that you walk

With a parrot on your shoulder, singing everything when you talk

Starlight, yes! It's soft and hazy, but gentle too. Dear friends, maybe - oh maybe - this moment of limits and uncertainty will prove more illuminating and more beautiful than we could ever now comprehend. 

in defense of unfettered neck access

Weaning a toddler doesn't sound too complicated - until you try it. At least for me, the whole process was more than a little bit agonizing. When each of our kids was about two, I felt ready to have my body back, not to mention ready to have a break from the challenges of managing demands to nurse in all kinds of uncomfortable places from my marvelously verbal children. (A particularly vivid memory: I am in the middle of a busy H&M beneath terribly harsh mall lighting, wearing our precocious ten-month-old Frances in a sling. She begins pulling at my shirt and hollering NURSE! NOW! NURSE NOW!! at a decibel clearly audible over the store's pulsating sound system. Nearby tweens stare open-mouthed in horror.)

That was the kind of situation I was motivated to leave behind us. But I also felt attuned to all the benefits for my big walking talking babies: the sense of safety and peace that nursing gave them, the magical way it calmed a tantrum or distress over a skinned knee, the reassurance it provided when we reunited after I had been away at work.

The slow, gradual process of putting more and more limits around nursing was different for each kid. With Beatrice, the less she nursed, the more she wanted to maintain soft-and-warm style physical contact with me in other ways. First came The Belly - as in, I need The Belly, Mama! Unless she was otherwise engaged, she wanted to have a hand planted under my shirt, as often as possible, regardless of setting or company. No matter if Mama was wearing a dress - she just ducked under the skirt and slid up an arm.

Good thing motherhood robs you of your modesty.

Gradually, The Belly became The Neck, which at least made it easier to keep my shirt on. If I were carrying her on my hip, or reading a story snuggled up, or singing a bedtime song, a little hand often wrapped itself around my throat. Strong emotions would lead her to squeeze at times, or worse, pinch (if I had a nickel for every time I have said gentle, gentle with my neck Beatrice we could have self-paid for that stem cell transplant).

Even though her hot little hands don't wrap around my throat as often as they used to, the big kids still tease her about it. And me. They say I look like an otherwise youthful mother with the curiously worn and wrecked neck of an eighty year old. Beatrice laughs. She loves feeling ownership over The Neck. (There's something there for my clinical friends who have a penchant for object relations theory.)

The thing is, I don't mind at all. I get it. At least, I imagine I get it. The Neck is part of my body, but it is something much bigger too. It's an anchor, connecting Beatrice to herself and her family and the solid earth beneath all our feet.

Yesterday I talked to a dear friend on the phone, briefly, in the middle of my work day. The sound of her voice never fails to give me a sense of peace; a break from the work of being 'on' and vigilant and responsible and responsive and anticipating the next item on the to do list. There is no thinking involved in the settling that happens - just an embodied sense of safety, of downshifting into a mode that suggests that in this moment, miraculously, there is no need to do, only to be.

The mere sound of her voice makes me feel like that - a pleasant weight, a long exhale, a stillness inside. Also the warm solidity of Mike when I lean into his side, the particular smell of my mother's neck (the neck!) in an embrace, the strong shoulder of a beloved friend that shifts to accept my heavy head, the smell of a cool damp green morning in the woods. The sight of a client's clear eyes in a very connected, focused-feeling session.

It is these moments that ground me when the unknowability and terror of our present circumstance threatens to break me into a million pieces and blow me away on a strong gust of dry wind.

I love receiving your kind notes and texts and emails. We just lived through an emotional whirlwind, overwhelmed by the awareness that countless supporters took time out of their busy days on Tuesday to help us convince our insurance company to reverse their denial of Mike's stem cell transplant. Things like that happen to us. It's extraordinary. People send us gift cards, dinner, offer to do our laundry, send beautiful notes and poems and art - and they've been doing it for almost two years now.

So that helps me to know cognitively that I'm not alone and I won't fall apart. That whatever happens, I will be able to still be me and still take care of my family - with the love and support of all of you.

But it is what I feel via my senses that helps my entire being know - heart, mind, body and soul - sustaining me in a mysterious way. Today's felt moments build on my own abundance of neck-anchors in childhood - nursing, being held, knowing a set of arms were open and ready to receive me. Things that can't be communicated through a screen: the feel of warm cat fur, swimming in the ocean, leaning against my sister in a church pew, the sound of my mother singing, my father laughing, ice cream cones on a wooden bench. And all of this is layered as delicately and thickly as phyllo dough inside me, and it is illuminated like sunlight passing through honey when I hear Edith on the phone, or climb into bed next to Gabriel at night, past present and future all gently aglow, saying you are supposed to be here, you are supposed to be you. It is good to be.

And all the cracks and fissures that these past months have lined me with, as Leonard Cohen reminds us, only make the light more visible; warmer to the touch.

After days like those earlier this week spent glued to my phone, I feel cut off from that solidity and warmth. I become disembodied. Sometimes I really do have to make medical arrangements and communicate with friends and arrange child care. Ask for lots and lots of help. So there's that.

But it's interesting that I usually feel compelled to check my phone constantly, to turn off the world around and my own body with it and sort of float through a Facebook or Instagram feed for awhile. Some unacknowledged part of me is always anticipating a piece of news that might just turn things around. Maybe Mike doesn't have cancer after all. Or maybe his doctor just found out there's a new cure and we can access it today. Maybe the Pennsylvania board caught wind of all the challenges I'm facing and decided to let me skip the rigamarole and just send me an LCSW license instead. Maybe if I just keep scrolling...

Those things aren't going to happen. I know. Yet I find it hard to break the habitual stance of phone-vigilance. Everyday life with its uncertainty and fear can feel so hard, and the little dark screen in my pocket offers something else. Yet when I leave everyday life, I leave everyday life - and with it all the sights, smells, sounds, and tastes that anchor me to this moment and to the created, beloved world.

Why would I turn away from it all for a minute more than necessary? Being a person is so very odd.

Despite my weaknesses, I do believe that as I age and those glowing layers of felt experience accumulate, a bone-deep confidence grows. Inhale, exhale, look up at the sky.

It is so very good to be.