Those quiet hours turn into years

Let me tell you a joke.

I am eager to tell you the joke my daughter made up, if you have a moment. I want you to hear it because I want you to open it up and jump inside of it and delight in it. Because I want you to know that she is funny and clever, and not just a kid with issues. Because she won't look you in the eyes when she tells you her joke, and she will talk with a weird cadence and pitch, and walk nervously around the room.

Q: What kind of a glass does a volcano use?
A: A magmafying glass.

Look at that clever turn of phrase. Look at how she knows things that lots of kids don't. How she thinks about things from a different angle than most. A magmafying glass!

See, I already know you will look at her and think of her as different, so I am eager to recast "different" for you: She's quirky! She is delightful. She is an okay kind of different.

What I am really asking of you, I think, is not to listen to a joke, but to find a place for her in your world. The world of people who generally interact well with others--I want you to make room for her, the kid who prefers to be alone at recess, who is single-mindedly obsessed with her pet cat, who loves Doctor Who and all things math and science. And who doesn't understand when to stop talking in a conversation, and who cannot look at your face if she doesn't know you that well, and who has little tolerance for "silly" and hates the unexpected with a fiery, explosive, emotional kind passion.

Who cannot bear the thought of touching any kind of tissue paper.

Who literally panics when she's near babies.

Who cannot tolerate loud noises of any kind. Or stern voices.

Who hates most music.

Who avoids anything new.

Who abhors elephants to an almost pathological degree.

Who has a funny breathing ritual-thing she does if she doesn't like something, or really likes something, or just can't ignore the sudden slamming in her heart that happens for no reason at all.

Maybe it's not that I want you to hear a joke, or delight in it, or to find a place for her in your world (though that would be nice). Deep down I know that I am asking you, really, to help ease my worry a bit. This kid, this tender-hearted kid. How will she ever be strong enough to handle the world?

Q: What kind of glass does a volcano use?
A: A magmafying glass!

A: She is going to be okay.
A: She is going to be okay.

I have to believe it matters.

In the cold, near a parade of warmth, lights and sounds and cheer and smiles, my daughter and her friend are enveloped in a conversation about faith. At this age, though, it's less a conversation and more a complex topic centered around a simple bargaining process. "If you believe in God," says my daughter's friend, "then I'll let you be leader of the club for a week." Their club is an exclusive recess club. They call themselves the Nature Girls. While Madeleine has always been the lover of nature--it's a central part of her identity at this point--her friend has been the de facto leader since day one.

I can see Madeleine shift, first in, then away, from her friend. I can see the strained smile, the growing worry. She's had this conversation before with other kids, many times, but this is her best friend. I squelch the urge to intervene and instead adopt vigilant worry, perched on the fringe. I watch the parade, waving at the little girls in angel halos as they sing "Silent Night" from a float bedecked in clear Christmas lights. "Merry Christmas!" my youngest daughter shrieks, waving wildly.

"I'm not going to believe in God," Madeleine says firmly. She's smiling. I see that it's a forced smile, that she's trying to keep it light. I see her friend lean in and say something so quietly I cannot hear it, but it's clear that Madeleine does. Her face falls, just for a moment, and then she shakes her head firmly, "No," she says. "You can't make me believe it." She looks unsure.

I can't help it then. I lean in. "Hey guys, now isn't the time for that discussion. Let's enjoy the parade."

And they go back to their spectating.

Later I find out that what the friend said was this: "I'm just worried that you're going to hell," is what the friend said. Madeleine relays this information to me at night, in bed, as she stares up at the ceiling twisted up in covers and swimming in stuffed animals.

Oh, the things we teach our children.

Oh, the things we forget to teach.

Madeleine and I have The Conversation, the one we've had over and over, and I say it again: You just have to ask her nicely not to talk about that stuff with you, that it makes you uncomfortable. You can tell her you're still figuring things out, but that it's nothing you're ready to talk about with her.

I think, not for the first time, how much easier things would be for her to have this simple code of beliefs to follow, a system, a bigger power to put her trust in. How she wouldn't have this thing that sets her apart from the other kids at school. How she's choosing a hard road to stick to, holding on fast to her staunch belief that all there is is nature and all there is is now, and no greater being created it, it's just a thing that is.

Her faith in things is all about the things she can hold. She dug up her pet rat in the backyard after it died, several times, to look at its body. To attempt to understand that big question: What happens to us after we die? To her, the proof was right there in her hands. A decomposing body, slowly becoming part of the dirt. She could see in an immediate way how it would feed the tree it was buried beneath. She could see the birds eating bugs from the tree way up high, she could see the way the light hit the leaves on that towering maple tree, and how the leaves would fall and decompose, and how it all keeps going, over and over and over again. 

This is what she believes in: the inner machinations of the universe, even at the smallest level, and maybe especially at the smallest level. This is what she trusts.

It's all the same thing, is what I want her to understand. You call it nature, others call it God, but it's all the same thing. But for now she wants what the kids who question her want: easy answers, and easy means a black-and-white view. Us/Them. Either/Or. God/No God. So she's still firmly against the idea of God.

Curled into her bed she wonders about hell. "Why would people even think of that? Why would anyone want to believe in that? And heaven? Why would people think of heaven?" She gestures around her room, her brown eyes deep and dark and fathomless. This is what there is, she says, almost to herself.

I see the line she's drawing with the waving of her hands: You and me and this bed and that pet and this pet and on and on and on. And I can't possibly disagree. And so I tell her goodnight, and tell her to stay strong, and remind her of our mantra: All that matters is to be a good person in the world. To create more good, instead of taking any away.

On the way out of her room I issue up a small prayer, and I don't even know where it's going. To the wide and endless universe. To the ear of God. To the God of small things now falling asleep in her bedroom. "Keep her strong in the face of doubt, without being closed off to infinite possibility," I pray. Up and out it goes. Somewhere. And I have to believe it matters. Faith is a funny thing that way.

Violet

There was no heaving production, no screams, not much noise at all. A quiet push. Another. And then there she was. Nameless then, so small, she greeted the world with furious, skinny legs flailing. She was whisked away, purple-red. "She'll be just fine," a nurse murmured. I had worried about her being so early, but she was healthy. Small, but healthy.

When the doctors and nurses had mostly cleared out and Wayland was cradling that small bundle in his arms, we talked about names. And a name I had considered previously and dismissed came up right then, unbidden: Violet. Attached to the name was a sudden prickling certainty that Violet, this tiny, now quiet little one, was different. As sure as I knew anything right then at that moment I knew that she was different. I sensed some great possibility already blossoming in the tips of her spread, purple-red toes.

She's now a newly minted 7-year-old and oh, it's funny now to think of how usual her birth was, how simply it unfolded. I found myself trying to explain the state of things to Madeleine a few days ago, to help her grasp the enormity of what we're dealing with without actually scaring her. In the face of four different impending doctor's appointments, all with scary ologists attached to their names, these conversations must be had. We still hadn't had the conversation with Violet.

Meanwhile I find myself monitoring Violet, scanning her every behavior looking for some sign that things are getting worse. Mostly lately, though, I just notice the distance. She lets me hug her, stiffly, and she leans against me when she needs to. She tells me she loves me. But some part of her is locked up from me. And I don't know if it is something to do with all of her issues right now or not, but it's maybe the hardest part of everything. Because the part I can't get to, I know, is the part that needs help. I see it there in her eyes, and there is nothing I can do but continue: seeking out answers, shielding her from what I can, and loving her just the way she is, as much as she lets me.

Green roof that covered a thousand foxes.

Deirdre Remembers a Scottish Glen
Irish, unknown, possibly fourteenth century

Glen of my body’s feeding:

crested breast of loveliest wheat,

glen of the thrusting long-horned cattle,

firm among the trysting bees.

Wild with cuckoo, thrush, and blackbird,

and the frisky hind below the oak thick ridge.

Green roof that covered a thousand foxes,

glen of wild garlic and watercress, and scarlet-berried rowan.

And badgers, delirious with sleep, heaped fat in dens

next to their burrowed young.

Glen sentried with blue-eyed hawks,

greenwood laced with sloe, apple, blackberry,

tight-crammed between the ridge and pointed peaks.

My glen of the star-tangled yews,

where hares would lope in the easy dew.

To remember is a ringing pain of brightness.

- Translated by Martin Shaw and Tony Hoagland

HEAR MY CRY

The tell-tale signs of someone crying, or trying to cry, discreetly. Raising a shoulder and turning a head just so, to wipe an errant tear away. The dig at the corner of the eye: No really, I have an itch, is the message you're trying to convey. If I could just...Oh, the itch is in the other eye now. Allergies. Or the particular set of a jaw, the lips pressed, the unwavering focus forward, the slight head tilt, as if you could roll the tear back into your eye.

Violet usually goes for an open-mouthed wail, the tears streaming blatantly down her face. When she's sad, it's almost confrontational. Look, everyone! Look at all the feelings I am feeling! Lately, I've noticed a change in that, though. Ever since a teacher taught her that it's okay to cry as long as you do it quietly, she dips her head forward until her hair curtains her face and rubs her fists into both eyes at once over and over until her face is red. And now instead of the glorious wail of HEAR MY CRY and instant relief she holds it in as best she can and walks around all day with a certain heartbreaking weariness.

And then there is Madeleine, who almost never cries. She'll do anything she can to hold it in. I've seen her rake her fingers down her cheeks. I've seen her grit her teeth and claw and push and yell. She roars and rages instead of crying. She defies and refuses. I feel like I know her one minute and the next I realize I've never learned her language, the language that makes her know deep in her heart that she is loved, really loved. I say, "Madeleine, that's rude," when she's being rude, and she hears, "Madeleine, I hate you and you are terrible." I tell her she's wrong about that, that I love her very much, and she hears, "I don't understand you and I never will."

And still she doesn't cry. She pushes and yells "STOP IT" and runs away. Until she breaks and then her face falls and everything in her does, too, and she sobs "You never help me, you never help me." She buries her face in her beloved white blanket and cries and cries and cries. And there is no comfort to be had then. She cries the tears of the abandoned, as though I'm not standing right there smoothing her hair back and telling her I love her.

I am mostly bewildered by this, by all of this, teaching these young, complicated, volatile, beautiful young girls how to dive into the depths of all that emotion and realize that everything is going to be okay. I wonder if I can teach them that. If it's something you have to learn. I remember realizing at a very young age that people liked it best if you would stay calm. And so I did my best to do that. I wanted to keep the peace then and it was something I could maintain, mostly. I was quiet, I retreated inward. I read books and I wrote and I just stayed in that tranquil zone as much as I could.

I think I take that for granted now. I think that that tranquility should just happen, that my daughters should recognize how important that is for their own sanity and for the sanity of the people around them, that it just feels better to stay calm and not let everything upset them so much. In fact, I feel confused and lost in the face of the truth: That they don't have the first clue how to access that calm and peacefulness. That they have no idea how to calibrate their emotional responses to something that is more appropriate and more tuned to calm.

This is probably my biggest weakness as a parent. Because even as I confront the idea that I am not good at teaching them calm and how to calibrate their emotional responses I am growing resentful and angry by the day. The peace and calm that I take for granted as being a thing that should just always exist is being encroached upon by the loud, anxious, screaming, furious, sad and happy rages of my daughters. And it is changing me because I have lost my way. I don't know how to access that calm anymore, really, unless I am sitting in front of the TV after they have gone to bed and falling asleep on the couch. What a sad, sad life. A half-life. A getting-through-it life.

And like one of those horrible vicious circles that everyone talks about, they see that. An Ouroboros of negativty, it comes out of me and it sticks to them and they spit it back out at me and we just keep the negativity going and going and going.

We need to figure out another way. And I guess the thing that I've been avoiding is that it starts with me. Breaking a cycle like that is hard work, but it has to start somewhere. And for me it is here, where it always is: words.

Earth's familiar atmosphere.

Dog Spring
Kate Reddy

Do you miss dog spring bounding in
With its rife colors on green
Stalks, the lightheaded air
Earth’s familiar atmosphere
Carrying the longing of cut grass
And flowers, radios waves, voices flowing
Infinite combinations of
What did you say? Where are you going?
I thought it all might stall
In acknowledgment, in reverence. It didn’t.
No, tulips, bees, and sparrows
Still pop, hover, and fly above the ground
Where your particular bones
Turn to stone
To be skipped across some light
Reflecting water in an unknown lake,
Spring rises in its lovely, maniacal way.

(From the Orion poetry exchange here.)

The elements came together

Just the sound of your heart in your head.

 
"Like the sound of a page being turned in a book/Or a pause in a walk in the woods"

Making a note.

Madeleine says "memory" like this: "renembory."
She says "memories" like this: "renembories."

And it is such a perfect little bit of innocence that I will not correct it, ever.

You can have clouds and letters.

You Can't Have It All
Barbara Ras

-->

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.

Shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings.

"Hey, do you mind if I tell you a story? One you might not have heard. All the elements in your body were forged many, many millions of years ago in the heart of a far away star that exploded and died. That explosion scattered those elements across the desolations of deep space. After so, so many millions of years these elements came together to form new stars and new planets. And on and on it went. The elements came together and burst apart forming shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. Until, eventually, they came together to make you. You are unique in the universe. There is only one Merry Galel and there will never be another. Getting rid of that existence isn't a sacrifice, it is a waste!"-- the Doctor to Merry Galel on "The Rings of Akhaten" (Doctor Who!)

Do hard stuff.

They all wanted to climb the cliff. There was a cave up there, and the three of them were ready to explore, head lights and all. I eyed the mouth of the cave warily, considered the climb. The way up wouldn't be easy. It was nearly a perfectly vertical climb in some places, though you could see where attacking the angles of the rocks and dirt could give you some relief. Just a little. The way down would be harder, almost, coming down so steeply, trying to keep momentum and gravity from joining forces.

I didn't want to do it.

I told them that. "I'll just wait here," I said. I had my camera; I could explore the creek and take some pictures. Get some alone time. I ignored the way their faces fell, or tried to.

Wayland pushed. "Come on," he said. "You can do this." Madeleine, who was already on her way up, came back. "I'll help you," she offered.

Violet was already ahead of all of us, scaling the rocks with ease.

How does she do that? I wondered. How do any of them?

Finally I agreed to try the climb.

They all climbed up without me and I took my time, almost stubbornly slow. Climbing a little, pausing. Staring up at them, feeling: Nothing. Well, not nothing. Sort of a tug downward, I guess. A tiny voice in my head telling me to go back. That I could stay on the ground and explore the creek alone, take my pictures. And a tug upward, too, watching their complete ease with the task: up and up, so sure of themselves. I wanted to be them. I wanted to be with them. But I wanted to not have to try.

I never want to try. I want it to be easy.

So up and up I went.

They reached the mouth of the cave and I sat on one of the tiny ledges I found on the way up and stared at them. They weren't all that far away now. It would take me less than a minute to get there. But even coming so far, the tug downward was still there. Stop. Stay. You don't have to do this.

"What's wrong?" Wayland asked.

"Do you need more help?" Madeleine asked.

"I don't want to climb," I said.

Violet came closer to the ledge and peered down at me. "Well, you have to climb sometimes," Violet said. "Otherwise you won't know if you can do it. And you will never know how fun it can be."

Why is my kid smarter than I am? I wondered.

I did go the rest of the way, but I didn't explore the cave. And I didn't feel it, that thing I am sure they were feeling. Just connectedness. A belonging. A natural ease with themselves and their relation to things.

I consoled myself there at the mouth of the cave, waiting for them to come back. It's OK if climbing isn't for you, I told myself. Not everyone likes to climb.

But it isn't really about the climb, is it? It's about being afraid and unsure and letting that dictate how you enjoy your life. Or how you don't at all.

When was the last time I did something challenging? Frightening? Something that yanked me right out of my comfort zone? When did I last do the good growing? The kind where you plunge your hands into dirt and sift through the sand, the kind that leaves you raw and new and electrified. When was the last time I allowed myself to be a conduit for the sort of energy I want to project to the world? That I want my kids to have?

Do hard stuff, was my takeaway here, because I have stopped growing. Just stopped. Thanks, kid, for teaching me.

Motherhood, today

You made more sense as a bud
petals furled around a delicate blossom of blood and vein
you made more sense contained, all a part and not apart from me
you made more sense then, a slender tooth of bone
wrapped in cells dividing into infinity,
you made more sense.

I'm not a miracle, you say, and the act of saying renders you wrong
you, whose tongue shapes thought into sound, you
whose brain whirls and clicks, all inward gentle machinations,
plotting the peculiar way children do you make me see the unseeable:
holding up a folded paper, you say: look, a rainbow prism, and I agree. 
I can see the light shining from your paper or maybe your fingers,
of course I do.

You are a study in nonsense, of surprises and
dashed expectations. You're a blossom of angles
and edges, bent knees and sheer will. You're full flower,
unconstrained, and it is still infinity, an unfurling that extends so far past my reach
that I'm left grasping and gasping.

Come back. Stay forever.

I can't, you remind me. One day I'll die. 
And one day you will, too. 

You made more sense as a bud --
I could harbor a bud, easy.

But there is no holding on to this, no tether

(you infinite bloom)

There is no letting go, either.