fourteen thousand days

370 mother's day

Mother's day was lovely. It was a good representation of every day in my life. My husband kissed me and said sweet words. My kids gave me spontaneous hugs. I forgot to do something important. We organized an outing that not everyone was excited about, but in the end, everyone had some fun. A surprise occurred, this time in the form of beautiful handmade cards from the kids and carefully chosen written words from their father, and a very summer-meadowy bunch of flowers. Some things got cleaned, some things got dirty. People bickered here and there. I got kicked by my youngest. We ate something sweet. We ate dinner together. We laughed.

Not to say I am living in a la-la land of lollipops and daisies. I had to give myself a few moments to quietly mourn my relationship with my own mother, knowing I could not bring myself to call her.  Some of that pain and anxiety bled into the day and made me less tolerant, more edgy, and ready to lie down and cry when my 5 year old kicked me and yelled that she hated me. I fought with my old friend Guilt all day long. I listened to the old words resurface in my head the way they sometimes do. Judgmental. Bad Daughter. Ungrateful. Pedantic. High Strung.

But I am at peace at least. At least. When I played the part of Good Daughter, I was in chaos. When I pretended none of it mattered anymore, I was in agony.

Rick and the kids took me to a garden nursery nearby that is beautiful and set up like a private garden instead of just rows and rows of plants on tables. You can meander around on wooden boardwalks, enjoy the spray from fountains, sit on benches placed under old trees, and you can even plant the kids at the outdoor checkers set while you browse. He and I got separated, and he went to the checkout. He told me he was waiting impatiently for a while until he realized he could just shift his thinking to stop waiting and move to just being. He did, and immediately began to enjoy himself.

This is what he and I have been striving for the last almost-two years we've been in therapy. I try to apply it to life every day. I used to waste all my energy dredging up past events or attempting to control future events (mostly that) and I wasn't sitting squarely anywhere. When I remember to do this, my day is amazingly productive and happy. When I forget, I slide back into looking for that control that can never and will never come. We have moved into a place in our marriage and within ourselves where we aren't waiting for anything anymore. We're just being with each other.  Even harder, I am trying to just be with myself. Trying to just be in the world. Such a difference. I hope we can teach our kids to move through their lives like this. I hope to save them years of disappointment and heartache.

In Buddhism, the first Noble Truth is that life has suffering. My therapist spent a year teaching me this, though not through Buddhism. It took that long to really sink in. Really really.

The second truth is that suffering is caused by desire. Desire for things to be different, desire for things to stay the same. Desire to escape suffering. This is what I have been spending my second year learning.

I catch myself thinking "if only" or "when" or "I should" or even "they should", and I know I'm falling into the trap. I catch myself thinking "this is a bad day" or "this is a hard day", but right now, nothing in my life is terribly wrong, so when I take out my own expectations and judgments, the days are shaping up to be pretty good at the end of each day.

We are all here, safe, when I turn the lights out.

It was a lovely Mother's day. A good day.

363 Africa

In 6 weeks and two days I will be on a plane headed to San Francisco, for a plane which will be headed to Germany, for a plane which will be headed to Ethiopia.

In 6 weeks and three days I will be in Ethiopia!

I'm sort of in a silent panic, not really sure where to start. Vaccinations? A Visa? Pants? A backpack? Some very vague idea of what I want to see?

That's the hardest part.

Luckily I am going with a seasoned Ethiopia traveler.  I'll just follow her.

359 forest fairy

My sister in law and my sweet little niece visited us while our boys were off in playing in the Utah desert. So of course we did a photo shoot. Like we do.

I expected there to be a lot more leaf cover than there was, so the sun was extra harsh. I guess oaks are last to leaf out. It was a situation I didn't like but I think I found my way around it okay.

It doesn't matter. You just can't take a bad picture of this baby.

356 ribbon shoes

I was working in the kitchen and noticed a rare moment of quiet. There she was, making herself a pair of shoes out of ribbon.

She asked if she could wear them to the store.

I explained to her about the laws governing hygiene in public places and the many diseases that can be spread and contracted through the feet.

No I didn't. I said, of course!

Then she found she couldn't easily take them off.

Still, she was proud.

We came up with a new, simpler design that she can take on and off. She calls them her "beach shoes".

The bottoms are a cereal box. I fully intend on taking her to the store in these.

355: family portrait project year 3: april

That's us in our Land Rover. Except without the Land Rover. Isn't it a sweet truck? We always thought the stadium seating was great for the kids.  It even has these little windows in the roof back there to make you feel like you are not trapped in the back back.

We can't even go pet it lovingly or sit in it and pretend it's not broken because it's in Spokane, dead. We'll get a storage space for it while we wait for a new engine to be shipped over from Great Britain. I plan to phone the Queen straight away and ask that she please hurry the fuck up.

I have fond memories of test driving it thirteen years ago in Boston while I was 6 months pregnant. The dealer let us take the car without an escort, and I squealed the tires and hopped the curb as I left the lot. There was some cackling and dash slapping. It felt very Ferris.

"Relax. I'm a professional!"

It was mine for a few years, me stepping up into it to heave my babies into their seats like the squat and short person I am. But I loved it. I loved driving it, though when we had the third baby I needed something else and Rick got the Rover full time. Land Rovers aren't known for fitting three car seats adjacent. Or for keeping their oil in.

We've been a lot of places with it. About 170,000 miles of places. That's probably $42,000 in gas. Rick has had a thousand off road adventures in it with a group of people who we will always call friends. When we bought it, we fully expected to have it for at least 40 years. After a crappy bout of really bad mechanic work two years ago we are ready to forge ahead and try to save the truck. Because fifth engine's a charm, right?

For the picture, I told the kids, "You don't even have to look happy for this one". And that is some serious Oscar material right there.

See for yourself:

341

Kindergarten Round Up is coming.

I wrote here about my youngest child, Ellery, and her experience with preschool. It wasn't pretty. After I pulled her, I just assumed she would do better in Kindergarten, at the same school Garrett and Brenna attended.

The time to fill out the papers is coming, and I'm finding all kinds of old neurotic feelings of dread and fear rising to the surface again.

When we lived in Washington, circumstances led me to pull our kids from public school, and I homeschooled them for almost 2 years. It was going really well. I loved it. I loved giving them the time to explore, read, create, whatever. Then I had Ellery, and then we moved to Oregon where we did not know one soul.

The stress of the new baby, the move, the lack of family, and my husband's new job which demanded a big chunk of travel time started to wear on me. I didn't have the skills to cope properly. Everything started to crumble. At that time in my life I was dealing with an emotional breakdown related to my childhood, with a hefty shot of untreated depression thrown in. I was in no condition to nurture my kids' education. Portland has a strong homeschool community, but we were not in Portland.

Our town is Americana at its ugliest. It's a pretty town on the surface, but with a deep undercurrent of suburban one-upmanship and entitlement. We are just plain different here. I could list the ways, but it doesn't matter.  Around Thanksgiving the kids were really feeling the isolation and the effects of my personal desolation. We toured the school, I held my breath, and hoped my kids could find a few kindred souls in those walls.

But now. Now I've been in weekly therapy for almost 2 years. Now the kids are older. 5 years later the homeschool community is growing and while it still isn't here in our town, it's not too far away.

I sent them to school out of fear. Fear that I wouldn't be able to teach them at higher levels. Fear that they would be insufferably lonely. Fear that I have illusions of competence that would only dissolve into the crumbling again, despite my emotional growth. Fear that maybe all my convictions about childhood and growth and freedom are just misplaced anxieties of my own. Fear that I was just not lucky enough to have what it takes to do this, that I should be grateful for getting this far, surviving my childhood enough to at least be a decent parent. Fear that asking too much would lead to disaster.

But I continue to send them because they like it. They enjoy most of their teachers, they like the business end of school, the independence, the lockers, the special opportunities like extra competitions and group projects. They are learning.

Garrett loves school. He might be slow in the mornings, but he never says he does not want to go. This is common for, say, 1st grade, but for 8th grade, I'd say that's a sign he's in the right place.  Maybe he feels me breathing down his neck, just waiting for an opening like a starving vampire. More likely he just genuinely adores the environment of school. He has his small tribe of boys who are just like him: smart, bookish, Lego-loving little engineers who spend their lunch time debating the possibility of a JFK assassination conspiracy.

Brenna is less in love with it this year and has not yet found her tribe of smart, bookish, creative little nature lovers who would write stories together. I worry for her self confidence being affected too negatively by cliques, not fitting in, by feeling like that since she doesn't excel in sports or fashion or having an overachieving socialite mother, she has to instead maintain perfect scores. But the good news is that she is still persevering. She hasn't come home and demanded a trip to the mall to get all the "right" clothes. She hasn't asked to join a sports team. She knows there is value in being herself, and I know she is strong enough to endure a few more years until she escapes the lunacy of middle school. When she shines in school, she really shines, and it feeds her feelings of confidence in ways I am not sure I could.

Here is a great article about middle school philosophy and why kids have such a hard time there. 

The Kindergarten Round Up is frightening to me because it feels like a deadline. In our experience it was easy to transition the kids from homeschooling back into public school. They did really well. But removing a child from school to homeschooling is a bigger transition. I worry that once I enroll Ellery, the decision will be made. Pulling the big kids would seem like a punishment to them. We are in it for the long haul with them, unless they one day come to me and ask to homeschool.

Making decisions is never easy for me. Until recently it was virtually impossible, if I am honest. I appeared to make decisions but really just deferred to other people or circumstances and then blamed them later for the bad outcome. I also fooled myself into believing I didn't have choices most of the time, that I was trapped or swindled. Or that I was lost in the repercussions of my own very few and apparently badly executed decisions. It took a lot of work for me to understand the nature of choice and impermanence, and of course above it all, the lack of control we have over life in the first place. Sometimes letting go completely is the best choice of all.

As the weeks plod on and I find myself getting mired in the fear and the worry and the decisions, I try to remember no choice guarantees any particular outcome. And no choice is permanent. I'm just trying to let go.

340

Well, that didn't take long.  When I wrote ten days ago in my book recommendations my feelings about tornado survivors thanking God for intentionally saving them while bodies lie around them, I considered pulling the post completely. I have friends who are religious and I respect them as mothers, citizens, and thoughtful individuals. I have online blogging friends who are religious and amazing, wonderful people who I would love to have come sit at my table and visit. I worried that I was being offensive or aggressive. I worried that I was doing what I always seem to do: stay quiet and make friends, then open my mouth and drive all those friends away.

But here I sit, looking at the news, and what do you know, there it is. These latest storms brought a deadly tornado to one small town in Oklahoma, and now Tornado Survivor Guy says: ""We are truly blessed. God saved us, and that's what it's about," Lord said."

So who did die in that storm? Who wasn't blessed? One dad with his 5 and 7 year old daughters, and another dad with his 10 year old daughter. 

Would Tornado Survivor Guy dare say the natural opposite of what he declared? Maybe: "Those children were not blessed. God did not save them, and that's what it's about."?

I don't get this, I truly don't. I know it's possible to be God fearing and God loving, and still believe in the random nature of the world. I know people who do. It's possible to be grateful for what you have without believing that it was all handed specifically to you, but not to the 5 year old baby girl who had her body smashed by flying debris as her house exploded while her daddy tried to protect her.

What amazes me, beyond the egocentric attitude, is the willingness to proclaim this right of receiving mercy from God while others did not. Being proud of it. To believe in such intention means, by default, that God also intentionally handed out the method of death to those girls. I will save you today, but you I will kill. And this is how.

That is not a god I could worship. Personally blessed because you were born in the US and you get to set your crock pot up in the morning, and not North Korea where you are eating grass?  Personally blessed because your husband landed that nice IT job with benefits and vacation and you get to watch a little tv at night, and not because you live in Nepal where you, your husband, and your 5, 7, and 10 year old daughters all have to work every day just to get enough food to avoid dying? Personally blessed by God that your mole came back from testing as non-cancerous, and not because you're an African woman who just gave birth to another HIV positive baby who will die quite soon, since your country hasn't been blessed yet with lots of extra money for elaborate drug therapies? Maybe God will bless Africa soon. God knows they need it.

Obviously I can't successfully hide my feelings on this. I'll probably worry myself about this post for days. It's difficult and sad and taxing to look outside our bubble and have a clear world view, but so, so completely necessary. A few nights ago we were watching a report on Myanmar and the recent election of Aung San Suu Kyi. The discussion was centered around labor unions, which in this country creates visions of signs and angry yelling and styrofoam coffee cups in the hands of tired picketers. In Myanmar, it's a little boy in a shack explaining what it was like that day the armed men stormed his house and shot his mother in the back while they were all running to escape. I recorded it for the big kids to watch soon. Maybe it will be the first in a large collection I can select from on those heavy complaining days.

I want them to be thankful for what they have. To me that means knowing they are no more deserving than any one person on this earth. That more accurately, they weren't given anything, but are only unbelievably lucky to be born into a tiny sliver of a minority of the world's generally underfed and oppressed people, and this privilege wasn't something God decided to withhold from all those other billions of babies.  It doesn't sound like Tornado Survivor Guy cares much for this distinction. He's not just some humble lucky bastard; he's blessed. Special. Chosen.

Good for him. Too bad for those three little girls, though.

337

I am not the biggest fan of poetry, but something about Mary Oliver really speaks to me. She's lyrical without being grandiose.  I feel as though I'm sitting in a room with her.

I haven't yet read everything she has written, but this particular poem stands out to me. Especially lately.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting 

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

~Mary Oliver

331

I'm having a head slapper moment lately. We aren't food purists by any means, but we try to eat well. Organic if possible, local if possible. But you know, we also eat Bagel Bites.

Anyway, my youngest child is a very picky eater. Her palate and digestion were completely decimated by contracting swine flu back when it was all the rage, and ever since then feeding her has been like slowly trying to get a feral cat to come close enough that I can grab it.

Her main repertoire is: organic yogurt, plain pasta, some bread, organic granola, Life cinnamon, hard boiled egg whites, orange juice, and Bagel Bites. She will eat berries, corn, apples under duress and threat, and bananas under duress and threat, and the very ends of broccoli stems. Oh, and peas. It is a limited but basically healthy diet.

But that's pretty much it. No meat passes her lips. No cheese, unless you count pizza cheese, and even then she picks it off. No peanut butter. It's a real challenge in the protein area.

Her behavior has also been incredibly erratic for the last year or so, and I made the connection finally that everything she eats is basically sugar, save for the eggs and broccoli. Here I was feeling all good for not feeding her apple juice, jello, yogurt covered crap, fruit roll ups, blue anything, sugary cereals, or the like. And yet, by the end of the day, the number of teaspoons of sugar (if it could be converted as such) she has had is astounding.

Just her nice organic low-sugar yogurt has 34 grams of sugars per cup, which supposedly equals over 8 teaspoons.

Egads. No wonder she's a beast.

So we're in for some big changes. Yesterday I severely limited her sugar intake, and her behavior was beautiful. All day. She went to bed absolutely starving, though, because all she had for dinner was peas and milk (about 3 teaspoons equivalent sugar, by the way).

It's going to be a tough boot camp, but she desperately needs it. Easter weekend will be its usual bacchanalia of chocolate indulgence, then the training begins. Her little system is shot.

It's unnerving when you feel like you're truly doing good things and you realize one day, with fresh eyes, that not only is it not so good, but very, very bad.

Mothering is a mother.

 

330

My friend Tammie is always posting about the books she's reading, and I find it truly fascinating. Of course she 's highly entertaining. For some reason I think if I did it, it would be supremely boring to all four of my readers here (hi guys!), so I never do it. But hey, the four of you can handle it just once, right? Be a sport. Here are some of my favorites lately.

First up is A Lucky Child.

This kid had enough lucky breaks and near misses that surely there's a basement somewhere containing a disgruntled person hell bent on disproving his story. But it's true. Just as some people have the worst luck, others have the best. And he had the best, in his opinion, for a Jewish boy in Europe during Hitler's era. He lost his family, was sent to Auschwitz, and wtinessed horrific unspeakable things, but he lived. And not once in the book, not even one time, does he thank God for it.

When a tornado hits the Midwest, there are always people on camera for the local news expressing sorrow at the family next door who found their dead toddler in a tree 100 yards away, and in the next breath thanking God for personally saving them. Maybe it's easy on small scale to believe that somehow you are more worthy of good luck or that your purpose is still needed on earth, as opposed to that unfortunate toddler. Maybe you can convince yourself that the toddler's purpose was to teach you a lesson about how precious your life is. I find that rationale to be the most repulsive, honestly. Oprah liked to pull this one out a lot, as though some souls are no more than tools to those of us who are already throwing our lives away.

But in the face of living in a concentration camp, watching people being divided into two groups, sometimes arbitrarily, watching so much unending death of people who were brilliant, or maybe served their community selflessly, or who had babies clinging to their hips, I bet it all comes crashing down that there's no fate involved. It's nothing but the whims of madmen deciding if your purpose is done. The author does great honor to his family and neighbors and all the others he watched disappear from this earth by never assuming he was anything other than just plain lucky.

Warning: reading this book will render you temporarily unable to tolerate even the slightest bit of whining from your own children.

I love, love, love first-person sources for history. I devour them, really. It's what history is all about to me. It's not the dates and places, or the whys and hows that interest me as much as the experiences of the people who had to live in that time, whatever it may be.  I would pay a lot of money to read a homemaker's diary from ancient Rome, say. "Tonight for dinner it was more olives, olives, olives...why we can't have a feast once in a while like the Brutuses I'll never know. But we're never short on the wine, are we? Oh no."

On that note: The Autobiography of Mark Twain.

This is the fattest book I own. It is absolutely gigantic. And it's called "Volume 1". I wish I had the self confidence to write down every thought I had, but it comes out making me sound like a crazy person. Mark Twain is no different, but he manages in a way that few people can. It's such a great read. I can pick it up, turn to any page I want, and dig in without worrying about continuity.  I love Mark Twain's voice. He is on my short list of dead people I'd want to have a dinner party with. Rick bought this for me the minute it was released. I bet Volume 2 will be equally engaging and fat.

Instead of Twain going on with such self-aggrandizing drivel like "Then when I was 19 I volunteered for the homeless motherless one legged puppies rotary", he tells stories the way friends tell stories. "You would not believe what happened to me yesterday in town..." Good stuff.

For the second time: The Hunger Games trilogy.

Is there anybody who isn't reading it? I generally don't like dystopian books at all. They're depressing to me. I don't want to imagine a world society more decrepit than our own because I think the one we're already in is despicable enough. Reading stuff like The Handmaid's Tale, while a very good book, leaves me feeling anxious and icky. Like the way I feel when I wake up from a bizarre and twisty nightmare. But these were different for me. Maybe because Katniss gets to seriously kick ass. Oh sure, she doesn't want to kick ass, and she would much rather live a quiet life hunting animals and trotting around in the woods with Gale, but she gets to kick ass all the same.

Of course, the lessons she learns are terrible, that people are terrible and mob thought is utterly unpreventable. And the lesson we learn is that this society isn't dystopian at all: it's a mirror for our current world. Government officials using human lives for entertainment? Check. Children made to fight wars? Check. Children used by leaders against their adversaries? Check. Weapons used against populations without any discrimination for innocent lives who might be standing next to an enemy? The realization that no one can save everyone? Oh, check mate.

Back to the first-person accounts: This Life is in Your Hands.

I keep trying to put a picture of the book in here, but every time I do typepad deletes everything under it. I will try again tomorrow.

It's a memoir of a woman who was raised in the 60's and 70's by two subsistance farmers who loved the earth, loved nature, loved the idea of starting a national movement toward whole foods, and who completely emotionally neglected and abandoned their daughter. Whoa. What?

I'm not sure I bought the book for this reason, but it was startling. I was instantly drawn in to the perspective of someone who had lived a completely different life than I did, but who knew what it was like to be a neglected child. It's most certainly not just another volume of "woe is me abused child grown up" memoirs that seem to be all over the place. Growing up invisible is heartbreaking. It's a slow decomposition of your insides. It's almost impossible to relate that feeling to people who grew up being seen and nurtured. But the author uses her story well, and every time she is turned away or swept aside or stepped over like a body on the floor, I think even people who had wonderfully happy childhood homes would be able to feel a pang of the alternative.

That said, it was not a sad book to me. I felt empowered after reading it, knowing that anyone strong enough to emerge somewhat successfully from a neglected childhood can also transcend to living above it, instead of forever dwelling in the afterglow.

And when these kind of books get to be too intense for me, I always go back to my well worn and trusty collection of David Sedaris books. Because he distills childhood and life down to pure black comedy.

What are you reading?