winter sycamore

A lot has happened since last I blogged: Advent. Christmas. The children's break from school. A long break from work for me. And most incredibly, Mike was hospitalized for most of December in Philadelphia, where he had a stem cell transplant. I am guessing many of you also read the Caring Bridge page we maintain so I won't bore you with the details - again -  but needless to say, it was a hard few weeks, including many awful days in the ICU.  

Then Mike came home, and there was so much to learn: new dietary rules, housekeeping rules (we had to move the Christmas tree outside before he returned home; so much bacteria clinging to those spiny needles), how to administer IV meds through his picc line, how to arrange medical supply delivery through the home health care company (still can't work their damn app), how to adapt our space to best enable Mike to cope with his symptoms and vulnerabilities.

We are still learning. A lot.

Some days I feel as if I am running from the moment I wake up until the moment I crash. The dishes, the food prep, the sanitizing! But the hardest thing for me - as ever with all this cancer crapola -  has been the emotional work. The holding of so many feelings. It's challenging, no matter what: making a safe space for all the rage and frustration and joy and fear that one's kids feel while they do the work of growing up.

But now? Now it sometimes seems nearly impossible to tolerate and hold and respond to so many feelings all the time. The system is saturated. Mine, theirs, the family-wide one. I have to honor the emotional worlds of my children and my husband, so I won't go into details.

But sometimes I want to scream. Or cry. Or walk out of the house and sit on the curb for awhile. (I have done all of these things. Today I played a game with Beatrice and Gabriel in which we took turns roaring like a bear. Man, did I enjoy that - a little too much maybe - might have freaked them out.)

This ever-shifting emotional work is like living in a little house that is being battered and blown about in a storm. The rain pours in torrents, and there is an old, leaky roof. I hear a drip of water hitting the wood flooring in the living room, and reach out a bowl to catch it. As soon as the drop splashes into the ceramic curve, I hear another drip across the room, and quickly grab a coffee mug to set underneath it. Then I hear a tiny splash on the tile in the kitchen, and run to slide a bucket into place. One drip turns into a trickle, and the other drips seems to respond and flow faster too. 

I really don't want my house to break. I don't want the floors to buckle and the walls to become damp and moldy. I have to deal with all the leaks so that we'll stay dry and safe.

And yeah, I get that running around in a way that often seems futile, trying to catch everyone else's drips, may be ill-conceived. It surely wears me out. A deluge will probably knock out a wall any day now anyway. Plus, shouldn't I let them catch their own drips? Shouldn't they be responsible for their own feelings, and I'll be responsible for mine?

Well. That sounds nice and healthy and all, but I'm not very good at it under the best of circumstances. And they're children. They need help with their feelings. And he's my husband, and he has cancer. And they're my children, whose father has cancer and just came home battered and bald after a month in the hospital. And he's my husband, who knows his children are coping with his illness. And that's really, really hard. And they all have to live in a house together in which those realities are part of every moment. So I don't know what else to do.

I listen to everyone as best I can. I try to get them to communicate directly. I don't let them vent about each other to me. I forbid the children to call each other shaming names (and then flip out when they do anyway). I worry. I hug them all the time.

I always did that. Twelve a day!

But also? I cry more readily than ever. I burned the banana bread. I forget the allo dietary rules constantly. I drop things. I feel desperate when cooped up with my family all day long, as I have been more than once lately because of the bitter cold. And I see that the children can barely stand it either, and rage or cry if they can't see their friends. Who live elsewhere. Because seriously? Our house is tense.

Exercise helps. Friends help. But perhaps the most reliable source of stability and calm during these full-to-the-brim days of physical and emotional labor has been the view out of the third floor window on my way to wake up the children for school.

If my phone is in my pocket, sometimes I take a picture. It's crazy beautiful. I want to really see it, and tuck it away, and look at it again, and remember the feeling of seeing it. Which I never do. But I still like to photograph the view of the sun coming up and filling the sky, coloring each day a new strange and brilliant world.

Last Thursday I went to work for the first time in weeks. It was great to be back in my office, and to see my wonderful colleagues, but the best part was the walk home.

It was bitterly cold, and hardly anyone was outside. I left the building and began walking briskly, lost in my thoughts, noticing a sense of dread about returning home and the upset I might find there, knowing they would be waiting for me to come and somehow fix it (the unfixable!), and feeling ashamed about dreading the normally happy return from work, and then - and then - some angel wing quietly slid past my left cheek, encouraging me to look right and up, and there was the sycamore tree.

I stopped. It was illuminated on one side, the sun-facing surfaces of its silvery white branches aglow in the setting winter sun. The sky was opalescent and diffused with soft light and moving with every whispery color a nine degree January sunset can muster: pale green and orange and yellow and pink and blue. The clouds were brighter bits of pink and orange. A flock of birds swooped haphazardly and yet uniformly past the sycamore, black and distinct on a celestial field.

And there was that tree right in the middle of it! It said, Meagan, look at me. Look at me in my created silver splendor, my winter glory. Look at the sky. Just look.

I put all the cracked mugs and bowls I'd been carrying down, filled with my beloved family's feelings, right there in the snow. I felt the sharp bitter cold in my nostrils. I began walking again, and listened to the snow squeaking in rhythm, compacted under my boots with every step. I watched the light move long and pale along the red brick buildings. I turned back to see the tree, now in shadow, and I felt my heart become unencumbered. I felt it bare and reaching, like so many shining branches.

I smiled. I was ready to greet them now.

A couple of hours later I fell apart, trying to do too many things at once, but that's okay. It didn't detract from the peace that the sycamore gave me. Here in our little city, between concrete and brick, the natural world still calls me, reminding me of the steady ground I stand on. I'm supposed to be here, breathing this cold air, beholding an otherworldly tree, feeling a soft cheek nestled in my neck. The house might flood, and I may not be able to do much about it.

Even so. It is all of it so very, very good.

feeding & being fed

I wonder how many meals we've been given since Mike's diagnosis in July 2015? It's been twenty-eight months of blueberry baked oatmeal waiting on the porch, hefty Blue Apron deliveries full of surprises, frozen soups for some future chilly night thrust into my hands at the doorstep with a smile, perfectly selected take out (how do they know?) arriving right on time for dinner. It's been a long, grueling walk, but through it all, we've been very well fed.

Today I'm not at work, and I'm not at a medical appointment for Mike. I'm in my kitchen, watching the sun and shadow move across the bright pear pattern of the curtains, listening to the quiet bubble of a bolognese sauce I'm simmering. Some friends here run a farm-to-table restaurant in town, and for many months they have been delivering bags filled with beautiful local produce culled from the restaurant's weekly haul at night, on the way home from work, such that on a regular basis I stumble downstairs in the early morning to discover an overflowing bag of vegetables waiting on the doorstep: abundant lacy green carrot tops and lettuce leaves spilling over the top, the bottom weighed down with dusty potatoes and apples in varied hues.

The sight of this bag fills me with gratitude, wonder (how can they keep doing this for us?), and more than anything, excitement: it wakes up my mind, which immediately starts planning what I can do with all this gorgeous food, when I can cook it, what might work especially well for Mike. I unpack it all on the kitchen table, stand back and behold: it is art, it is potential. The last delivery included ground beef (they've taken on a grass fed cattle ranch) and I remembered the last bolognese sauce I made a la Marcella Hazan: long-simmered, saucy, satisfying, easy to swallow and easy to enjoy. He liked it.

I think the hardest times in our journey of one treatment after another have been those during which I couldn't feed Mike. When he can't swallow, or feels nauseated, or is just too sick to come down to dinner, I feel helpless. But a day like today? Time and quiet in which to chop and saute and simmer, imagining the pleasure the meal I'm preparing will bring, is balm to my harried soul.

We are particularly anxious right now. Mike has an admission date for his stem cell transplant next week, but there are three clinical tests between now and then that he needs to 'pass' in order for this to happen. We all caught a cold over Thanksgiving. He's definitely not at his best. What if they won't approve the transplant? What then? For that matter, what if they do? My mind is constantly looking ahead, anticipating child care needs, imagining various back bends in order to maintain my work schedule, planning Philadelphia overnights, worrying about the changes we need to make at home to create a safe post-transplant environment. Will I need to take FMLA to take care of him? Will I need more intensive child care? Will I have to forgo sleep, or exercise, or God forbid, cooking?

So in the midst of this inner scratching and scrambling and knot-tying, I am given the gift of this day at home with a gentle, slow-cooking project to anchor me back to myself and this moment - so full of good smells, sunshine, quiet neighborhood noises.

Cooking gives me a sense of agency. In the face of so much uncertainty and fear, I'm doing something. Creating a meal is something to hold onto, a practice to steady my shaky feet. And being fed gives me the feeling of being supported and cared for. It's beautiful. My awareness of my own need to cook for my family right now helps me to accept the bountiful gifts of food we've received - I know that feeding is important for the feeder, too. It calms our anxiety. It nourishes us, the very idea that we are nourishing others. It's not always easy to be so consistently on the receiving end, but when it comes to food, it makes so much sense that I can accept it peacefully, with gratitude.

I imagine all our friends enjoying the sense of steadiness and warmth that cooking gives me when they bring us a batch of cookies or a glass jar filled with saucy meatballs. They get to do something. I'm not the only one who loves Mike and my kids. Our friends and family should get to reap the soul benefits of doing something, too. I am less alone in this caring network of feeders and eaters.

Maybe that's why I am sometimes irrationally annoyed at my kids when they don't like something I cook. (This happens, incidentally, every other night). Don't they get it? I get to feed them. That's the deal. It helps me feel like myself, capable and grounded. When they take that power away with their pickiness, it's a real downer. Or why I feel particularly helpless when what I make just doesn't work for Mike - too hard to swallow, too off-putting. No, no, no! That's not how this is supposed to go. I get the pleasure and peace of nourishing you. Cooperate, people. Please.

I have not achieved enlightened selfless feeder status, obviously. Feeding a family under the best of circumstances can be a treacherous proposition. What question creates more dread in this mother's heart - what question is more laden with lurking whines - than what's for dinner, Mama? It's hard. Harder still with a cancer patient. But wow, wow wow wow, this morning is heavenly. Beautiful ingredients, time and space and quiet, and the anticipation of a happy family at dinner after the children are back from piano lessons and ballet class.

After that, who knows what's coming for us. But for tonight, we'll eat pasta.

good-enough ambitions

No offense Mama, but maybe I want to accomplish something more than just be a therapist or a college professor. I don't think you can understand.

This came up in one of many conversations about ambition, perfectionism, and grades held in our kitchen over the past weeks. I was suggesting a fixation on achievement and grades could be really detrimental for kids. Frances was suggesting that her drive to achieve, which would lead to great things, was a serious priority for her. It sounded to her that because I think the pressure to perform is bad, I don't consider the fruits of that pressure to be important. Mama thinks everyone should chill out and stop striving for success all the time. I couldn't understand because I don't strive myself.

Being a psychotherapist who works with college students, especially college students studying and living in a high-pressure, achievement-oriented institution, has made me fear all talk of grades. The word ‘extracurricular’ makes a tendon in my neck start to stiffen and ache. Sure, I see the students who struggle with depression and anxiety. But the perspective they offer is often similar, reflecting a larger culture in which every moment has to be accounted for, made productive, utilized to set one up for success in The Future (and ideally also documented in a flattering light on Instagram). A grade on a quiz leads to a grade in a class, which leads to a better or worse GPA, which determines study abroad programs, fellowships, grad schools, jobs, and who knows what else, which determines salary, status, and power, which determines...well, that's when it all gets hazy. It's unclear what all this scrambling is for. But basically, if you let one thing slip, you could end up homeless. These are high stakes.

I fear the college experience for many students is dominated by pressures to keep pace in this grueling marathon. And since I see the ravages of the race first hand, when I come home and hear worries about grades from my own children, I tend to overreact. I fear for them. I throw up my hands and say things like grades are meaningless! And talking about your GPA is soul-crushing! And that's it, we're going off the grid!

Super helpful, I know. Probably part of being so stirred-up and preachy about the gaping maw at the center of our achievement culture that threatens to swallow children whole is that I kind of do understand Frances’s point of view. Deeply. I like to get an A, too.

I think my initial ambivalence about psychotherapy, back when I was in graduate school and considering a more advocacy/policy–oriented social work path, was not merely a political suspicion of medicalizing social problems (poor people don’t need antidepressants, they need better paying jobs!). I think my own ambition revolted. A career comprised of countless private conversations conducted in a small room? Conversations that I couldn’t talk about with anyone else? No recognition, no fame, no objective marker of success or progress? No good grades? Geez. Just muddy human interaction, conducted in obscurity. 

So much for the world stage. 

But I was drawn to it, despite multifaceted ambivalence. As I got older I was able to notice with greater clarity how meaningful this work is, how relationships are a powerful means of transformation, how feelings really are my métier. I discovered how thrilling a series of private conversations can be.

I’m not famous, it's true. Thankfully I love my job.

But you guys. Sometimes I would like to be famous. Achieve something of note! Make big things happen. Create something beautiful.

I don’t think those kinds of things require scrambling on a harrowing hamster wheel for the first 25 years of life. However. You might need a bit of drive. I often find myself promoting a kind of counter cultural perspective: let go of internalized achievement pressure; find more stillness; make space for clarity, for the strangeness and wonder of every day; accept limitations - embrace them, even. Everything good will flow from that. But when I saw myself through Frances's eyes, I knew my own tangles twist deep inside still. Does my own mediocrity, complasence, fear of risk-taking, and general middle-aged fatigue sit hiding in a closet, trying not to be noticed, at the heart of my personal anti-achievement campaign? Good lord, am I just making excuses for myself?

I compare my kids' experience to my own all the time. I can't seem to help it. I sit with my feet in the chilly damp grass on Saturday mornings, watching Gabriel's soccer games, trying to keep my cool when he darts towards the ball. It's just a game, right? For fun? Right? I see Frances’s ambition crackling all around her and I marvel. Great things. Yes! Reach for great things. Beatrice is assertive in a way I still can't hack at age 40. She tells kids to get out of the way and let her have the slide to herself. What else will she commandeer?

I delight in their accomplishments, their bold expression. But you dear ones: don’t get hurt. Or suffer. Or become anxious. Or mad at yourself when you fall short of the A. Or fail to notice the mystery and beauty of life because you are so focused on forward motion. 

I want them to be happy. I want them to be brilliant. I want them to be happy exercising their brilliance. I want the world to see them and love them as I do.

I want to protect them from the cult of success, and I want them to try really, really hard, because it's good to try hard. Because the world becomes more rich and complicated and marvelous and part of you when you do.

I want to blow gently on their flames, enough to help them burn brighter, but not so fiercely that they flicker out.

I definitely don't want to pressure them into being famous novelists/comic book artists/dancers/physicians/singers/scientists as a means to vicariously satisfy my own ambitions. Please, if you ever catch me at that - tell me to give it a rest.

Like Frances said, I'm just a therapist. Just a therapist in a college in a town in Pennsylvania, doing part-time good-enough work. It's not the stuff of dreams. It's one piece of my life, and despite any deep down doubts about the relative quiet of my professional achievements, it brings an ever-shifting meaning and depth to my days. It's like my last post, about returning to the same place over and over that can never be the same. My work affords a similar sense of surprising newness within the confines of the same two chairs, the same four walls, every day.

Most importantly, it allows me to take care of my family, which is, I suppose, where most of my ambition finds expression anyway. What would Frances, or my twelve year old self, make of that?

heart maps

I've been thinking a lot lately about my slippery sense of place. For instance, I've walked the long block of Fifty-first street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues with Mike on our way to and from the Columbia midtown office in every season: tuning into the unfamiliar languages of scantily clad tourists from Europe and Asia in the summer, shouldering past midtown office workers in a biting winter wind, jumping over muddy spring puddles at intersections, always looking up to see the moving clouds and sun reflected and flashing on the sides of skyscrapers. It can be intoxicating or assaultive, tragic or joyful, all depending on Mike's state and whatever the latest bit of news we are digesting happens to be.

That walk is a gauntlet when I know Mike is summoning every scrap of available energy he has to keep moving, when he's short of breath and cold with an oncoming fever. I hold my breath, I will the people and traffic to cooperate. When he is sick on the streets of midtown, the landscape becomes hard and flinty, and everyone around us is The Enemy. They are so brusque, so aggressive with their quick steps. Or sometimes they are The Spoiled Rotten Healthy, walking to work with vigor and urgency, gym bags slung over shoulders and enormous iced coffees in hand, completely clueless as to the riches they are plundering, the insult they indirectly face us with, we who flinch in the wind and are often afraid of the future.

I walked those same blocks when I went to see Broadway plays on visits to New York with my family growing up. The TKTS stand was a happy wait, full of anticipation, wondering what show we'd land at. Now sometimes I walk past those throngs of tourists thinking, what is the damn point? Why squeeze together like that in a little concrete sardine can in the middle of Times Square? Did you really come to New York for this? 

Of course they did. They aren't walking Cancer Row, like me. They're walking an entirely different city.

Then there have been times, like last week, when we walked back from the office in the late afternoon sunshine feeling dazed and strange, trying to digest the surprising news that the current clinical trial is having a decidedly positive effect. My eyes sought out fellow vulnerable travelers: impatient children in strollers, old women walking at a regal glacial pace in heels, immigrant workers heading home from their shifts in delis and threading salons and cleaning crews, the Chinese vendors with placid expressions selling cut paper cards on folding tables at every corner. The October sun and shade felt equally gentle on my face.

I love you, I thought. I love all of you. Cancer hasn't ruined you after all. I love the blocks between the parking garage and the medical office. I love the little polished concrete park where men and women in office attire stare at their phones and eat their salads; I love the ubiquitous construction workers toiling amidst the scaffolding; I love the Dominican guys barking behind the deli counter when your order is ready. I love you, Times Square.

I love this city that projects vigorous strength and competition, yet whose every crack is filled with vulnerability, strangeness, unrecognizable languages, endless stories.

Back when Mike and I were baby grown ups living in New York, much was hard and unknown in my life, but being head-over-heels in love with the place I lived was always an uncomplicated pleasure. I turned up my nose at Times Square in those days, but in my heart of hearts I knew my old New York - Broadway, the Macy's parade, the tourists, Fifth Avenue, deli bagels - was still special, surviving alongside my new New York, full of things like film series and restaurants and friends and my job. I walked new maps of Brooklyn neighborhoods and downtown Manhattan into my heart. It became a different city from the New York of my childhood, the New York of my mother's acting school memories, and the New York of college visits to my boyfriend's family on the Upper East Side. Sometimes I'd walk an old familiar block, a place I had frequented during a different chapter of my life, and marvel - how could this be the very same street? The stone steps, the iron railings, the fruit stand are all the same. Yet it is transformed. The map has shifted.

It's as if God continually shakes out and lifts up a billowing, diaphonous sheet that floats above the towers and streets and spires of the city, then settles into place, just so, shifting the color and feel of every brick, every face. Time, experience, memory, expectation, the peace or lack thereof in your heart - the light shines through things at a new angle. A different translucent fabric could have settled onto the city at any moment, inviting endless responses to the world that shines through it. You might encounter the same place every day, every moment, and find it endlessly peculiar and new.

I think about this too in leafy Lancaster, in poignant, heartbreakingly beautiful late October. It's our third consecutive cancer fall here. We thought Mike's treatment would be one hard season - a grueling semester - in fall 2015. Then we'd return to our 'real' life. But his disease has defied every expectation, every assault, and our unplanned tenure here keeps unfolding before us, becoming as real a life as any we've lived.

And every fall I fall in love with the corner of town where we live. Every fall I marvel at how I can find the same streets and houses and telephone poles so damn compelling. You don't need the drama and novelty of a cosmopolis. You just need a place to which you can return, again and again. I'm pretty sure I didn't feel this way at fourteen. I hadn't accumulated enough seasons here; not yet.

For me now, in this place and season, it all has to do with the slanting yellow light, the way it makes everything and everyone more beautiful than they already are.

Autumn sunlight does something extraordinary to trees in particular, most especially in the morning and early evening - say at 8:15, when I hustle the children into the car on our way to school and a bit of stillness finds me while sitting at a light, watching the world through the windshield, or a little before 5, when I open the heavy door of the Student Wellness Center after many back-to-back sessions and walk out into the cool air and see the bright blue sky. It reveals a tree's tree-ness, it's botanical soul, by which I mean its miraculous there-ness, its solidity and fragility, its constancy and beauty and dance-like gentle stirring in the cooling air.

I'm a total broken record in October. Look at that tree, you guys! Can you believe how beautiful it is? No really, just look! I simply can't help myself. Any day now my kids will be ready to kill me. We know, Mama. The trees are nice.

But maybe you'll indulge me: today I saw an illuminated maple tree glowing red, each jewel-leaf hanging by a thread, each ready and willing to be severed forever by a strong gust of wind. I don't know what that tree looks like during the other seasons of the year, but I remember it from last fall. The tree doesn't care about me - but it shares itself graciously, completely, all the same. Talk about nobility.

And then there is the brick of Lancaster city's row homes, a similar glowing red in the sun, a brilliance against the green and yellow and orange trees lining the streets. There's the drama of scudding clouds in the sky above the soccer field on Tuesday and Thursday nights, casting shadows that move strangely on the green grass. There's the new clean, sharp chill in the night air that enlivens even as I perform the dreaded trash-and-recycling-taking-out task on Monday nights. There's the sun rising behind the dark trees on the eastern side of the street, their forms limned with pink and yellow, on the rare morning when we get it together in time to walk to school. There's the squirrels. The squirrels! And there's my beloved's face in the passenger seat, moving through light and shadow as we sail through space.

Why is it that the more I see the very same things, the more interesting and the more new they become? Why does repetition make familiar things more precious to me?

I could stay here for a thousand years, a thousand autumns, watching the sky move, light and shadow dappling these singular people in this singular place, and never grow tired of it. A thousand years! I would love the world more dearly still.