this part I do well.
I was born to find my love and comfort him. to be
comforted by him. has there ever been any love like ours?
our dark nights, the words that should never be said
forgiveness like deep waters. light comes into the room
when he does, his voice finding me lost,
bringing me back.
I never was beautiful until he saw me.
I was born to look for hope until my eyes sting
with the strain. to wait and watch through the night
to shrug off gentle tries until finally I am broken
clearly unlovable. clearly loved. this is what I was born for:
to finally stop fighting and listen. to be soft. to thaw.
God beside me takes my clenched hands and opens them
this is the way He is, broken things are made new.
the second year
In the second year I continued my way through the ups and downs of my emotions, writing about everything under the sun. It was a year of loss and joy. One notable thing about this year is that I finally woke up and realized I was struggling too hard against anxiety and panic. I needed help. I went to my doctor and she prescribed medication, a serotonin uptake inhibitor that is good for depression, but also effective against social anxiety.
I still remember my reasons for asking for help. I read the book Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos— it's not really about self help, but in the story a woman lamented the fact that her mother didn't take the steps she should have taken to protect her children from her illness (in her case, alcoholism). Reading that was like someone opening the door to a closed up room. I was waiting for someone to rescue me from the darkness of my mind, but really, I was the one. I was the one who could ask for help and protect my children from my illness, because it was affecting them. It can't help but affect your children if you are having fits of panic with toddlers underfoot.
In May I started taking medication, and I can so easily read in between the lines of my writing and see the difference it made to me. I had always been worried that medication would make me a different person—it's probably why I waited so long, tried so many other things— but in reality I felt like Rachel again, for the first time in years. Oh! I thought. I forgot what it was like to be me! Not the me that was shrouded in darkness, even on the sunniest of days. But the me who could see long distances, who laughed in the sun, who will perhaps never be completely lighthearted, but who can find her way through sorrow.
August
August 3, 2006
Kai is getting his Real Nose.
You know how all kids are born with noses that look like Cabbage Patch Kids' noses? You know, squishy and soft and all cartilage? And then there's a point when they have their real noses. This is a real scientific thing. Only, there must be a point when they are metamorphosing from having the Cabbage Patch nose to having the Real nose. And there is no cocoon involved. So why don't we talk about this more? Because really and truly, I've been noticing a lot of change with Kai's nose.
It's longer, for one thing. And when he makes that annoying sniffing sound that he does when he has a cold, you can see some definite boniness in the bridge. It's no longer as squishy. I take this as a sign that he's growing up. He's turning four next month, and he also always wants to know what highway we're on, and whether we need to turn onto any other roads to get where we're going. He notices things like the fact that the sun is getting low, and there's going to be a sunset soon. And he's getting his Real nose. It's a big step.
Of course, in my family, there are three stages to the metamorphosis. My brother and sister would be the first ones to agree to this. We have the Cabbage Patch nose, the Real nose, and then dum da dum dum... the Puberty nose. The sad thing about the Puberty nose is that when it first emerges, it is too large for the face it is occupying. I mean, we all still have largish noses, but in those first days it was really shocking. I remember crying because a boy in my math class remarked in an incredibly loud and obnoxious voice that I had a huge honker. Boy, what a huge honker Rae has! Hardy har har. The Puberty nose is the reason that I spent all my rides to school on the City bus scheming a way to sit in the best possible seat for nose concealment. The very very best were the two back corner seats. It's still habit, I always will pick those seats, though now I couldn't care less about people seeing my nose. You also have my full permission to look at my large feet, my crooked ears, and my sharp tooth.
I remember, though, those teenage years, when the nose seemed overwhelming and I looked at pictures of me with the cabbage patch nose and thought, "What happened? You started out so great."
The Puberty nose, like other aspects of puberty, comes a lot slower for boys than girls, so we thought that my brother had pretty much missed it. I traveled for the greater part of a year when I was eighteen and he was fourteen, and I remember how he opened the door when I got home and I looked at him standing there, fully in the throes of the first stage, the one where it doesn't fit your face. "Oh Matt," I said, "you GOT it. I'm so sorry." Of course, now Matty's face has grown into its nose, and I would challenge any of you into a handsome brother duel if you so desire, but it was a sad time for poor Matty.
So Kai is getting his Real nose, and though I really hope for him that he takes after his dad and doesn't get the Puberty nose, I will be right here to help him through it if he does.
August 5, 2006
You've probably heard enough of my incredibly crazy shopping marathons with the kids in tow, but I just have to say a few more things about this one:
1. The first thing that happened to me was that I needed to use the bathroom, so I took my Target cart and my three kids into the bathroom with me, and proceeded to break the button off of my pants, absentmindedly thinking that the button was a snap. You know, I went to unsnap them, except that there was no snap, so the button broke off and went flying across the room. Does this happen to anyone else? So I walked around with button-less pants all day. Once again, just sweetly trying to affirm everyone's preconceived ideas about frazzled mothers.
2. It happened. My sweet little undemanding boy has started to ask me to buy him things. I LOVED that he never did this. He was the kind of kid who would point at things and say sweetly, "Isn't that a nice Cookie Monster balloon" and then smile and be happy and just hold that picture of the balloon in his heart to be cherished. But some little bird landed on his shoulder and told him that maybe he could have that balloon. That maybe it wasn't enough just to like it. And maybe if he asked for it, I would pull out my magic papers and buy it for him. And so yesterday he thought he'd try it out. On many things. We're going to have to start talking about money and socio-economic brackets and the fact that this family doesn't just walk into Costco and buy a freestanding basketball hoop. We're at Costco to save money, not spend it on a box of Glade scented candles. We buy lettuce, son. And those big bags of onions, potatoes, and spinach. Also laundry detergent. And garbage bags.
Okay, well, maybe I'll leave all that stuff out, but still. I'll have to help him understand about his own buying power.
3. Okay. Grocery carts. Grocery carts were made with the idea that you might have a more sane child spacing thing going on than I do. The littlest kid rides in the cart, and the older ones walk. Or, at Costco, the two littlest kids ride in the cart, and the oldest one walks. This assumes a lot. It assumes that the kids who are walking have the maturity to do so without causing harm to themselves or to others in the store. Which isn't so much the case with us. My favorite part of the day was when Kenya was lying on the floor on her back and Kai was dragging her down the aisle by her arm. Or maybe when Kenya was doing the army crawl in the freezer section. The bottom line is that Kenya shouldn't be unrestrained in the grocery store. Although, actually, she does really well for a two-year-old I think. But Kenya really shouldn't be unrestrained anywhere when she hasn't had a nap.
I guess I just need to get used to my new way of life. Grocery shopping in
volves a lot of fierce whispering, and sometimes a lot of fun. Like when I was heaving the Costco sized pack of paper towel rolls onto the cart and Kai burst into action. "I'm SO strong! I can help you! I'm like SUPERMAN I'm so strong."
And then there was when we were finally home eating Renee's fabulous tacos with the fixings and Kai inexplicably yelled, "Wait a minute! Did I eat ashes? Because my belly really hurts." Hmmm.
And there was the Leaf baby. He is a perfect angel sent from heaven. I mean, the child doesn't cry. He got cheated on practically every nap and still, all day he simply stared lovingly into my eyes. So, there's that. And there was the end of the day, when I was getting the kids into bed (Chinua is away for a few days, to sing at his friend's wedding) and I pulled a Dora the Explorer and asked them what their favorite parts of the day were and Kai said driving, and I said that story about the paper towels, and then I asked Kenya and she echoed "towels" and then we sang and we prayed and I felt this burst of happiness, like finally we were on top of the day, and the day was not on top of us, and all the craziness and my sadness in missing one of my best friends who moved away faded into the night, and then the kids were sleeping and the house was quiet and I sat down and checked all my working parts and found that everything still worked and then I just listened to the quiet.
August 7, 2006
Over the weekend some very kind people came to the Land to do some work on various projects we have in the mix. They were mostly men, except for one tall and fabulous woman named Nancy who is housemates with one of the most amazing women I know: my friend Amelia. Amelia of the fudge and knitting and PG Tips tea. Also of the sushi and Wendell Berry and hours of listening to me talk. Also German pancakes on Christmas morning with orange syrup. Ahhh Amelia. Anyways, although I don't know Nancy as well, I always love to sit and talk with her when I get the chance. We end up talking about tall girl stuff.
The rest of the crew were men. They had manly trucks and manly five gallon buckets with tool belts strapped to them, and they installed wood stoves and fixed plumbing and split firewood. It was great.
They took to calling Kai Max. "Hi Max!" they would all chime, when he came near. He hated it. "No, no, no!" he would exclaim, making little chopping motions in the air with his hands like he does when he's really sincere. "I'm NOT Max!" They laughed and said, "Okay, Max."
This kind of rough uncle teasing is not my favorite approach to kids. I mean, when Kai asked me the other day if we could play "goofball" (instead of foosball) I tried my best not to laugh at him. But I figured, if these incredibly kind guys found this amusing, probably other people who wander in and out of Kai's world will tease him in the same way. In the past I have asked people not to tease him ("Eddie, please don't pretend to put him in the cooking pot on the stove...") but I figured that Kai is getting old enough to learn how to deal with teasing.
So, I took him aside at one point, when he seemed to be getting really distressed, and told him that he should just say something silly back to them. When they called him Max, he could say, "Hi Zizzer zazzer zuzz" or he could just call them Max right back. He brightened immediately and walked back over to where the guys were working. "Hi Max!" one said cheerfully. Kai looked up. "My mama says that I should call you Max back."
It was like that for the rest of the day. I couldn't explain to him that he should just say, "Hi Max," back to them, because he always would say, "My mama said..." And it was so sweet, because he's so little, and I'm a hero to him.
It was a good example though, of something I've been mulling over, which is how to deal with people who don't always have the script that you want them to have. I've learned that in my own life, but now, with my kids, it's a challenge again. I'm used to people making comments about my dreads, and I'm used to what used to happen before I had dreadlocks, which was that old ladies would approach me and tell me that they paid hundreds of dollars to get their hair to have the ringlets that I had naturally. But what I'm having to get used to is all the comments that I get when I'm out with my kids.
"Are those YOUR kids? Wow. They're so beautiful."
"Can I touch her hair?"
"What a gorgeous little girl."
"They've got the good skin, huh?"
"Wow, look at this hair. Are these YOUR kids?"
And there's the now famous, "How much do you get paid for two?" That was what a lady asked me when we lived in San Francisco and I had Kai and Kenya at the playground in the Panhandle Park where mostly nannies hang out with their charges in the middle of a weekday. So I can excuse her. I told her that I wasn't getting paid, and if she found someone who wanted to pay me, could she please contact me? She was flustered and said, "Oh, it's just that they're so... beautiful." Polite people say "beautiful," instead of "dark-skinned," but what they really mean is, "You're white, and these children are people of color. Are they really yours?"
But, although I don't usually mind comments about our family, or the things people say, it is starting to bother me a little. Maybe because the addition of a third child has upped the ante and more and more people have started to approach me in grocery stores. Part of this can probably be attributed to the fact that we look a little like a circus act, with Kai doing handstands and Kenya doing her best impression of a tightrope walker.
I was complaining to my Superstar Husband about this on the phone the other night, all the questions about whether I really was the mother of these children.
"Rae," he said. "You're really going to have to find a way to deal with this, because you'll be dealing with it for the rest of your life."
"Yeah," I said, "but it's just that they ask if they can touch Kenya's hair and stuff."
"Welcome to my life. Welcome to the rest of our life. You'll just have to come up with a good response."
So, just like Kai, I'll have to come up with a "Hi Max" of my own. I'm just not sure what that will be. Or I could say, "My husband told me to say..."
August 16, 2006
It's been a long time since I wrote, which is not good. It's not good because what happens is a sort of traffic jam in my head, which causes me to get absolutely stumped, wondering what to write about.
What to write about?
Well, I could write about why I haven't written in so long. About the fact that my family is on vacation, and how there is nothing in the world like spending some time alone with your family. And I'm not really saying there is nothing more blissful than spending time alone with your family, (although it is much-needed time, I will add, since I live in a community and rarely spend a day alone with my family) there is just nothing like it. It is blissful, at times, frustrating at times, as my Superstar Husband and I begin to decompress and then attempt to communicate the long overdue stuff with one another, which is like getting the ketchup out of the bottom of the ketchup bottle. Having a deep conversation with this particular wife is also a little like conversing with Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves: there are a lot of us in here. I do want to talk about it, I don't want to talk about it, okay, now I do again, now I just want to snarl at you, now I'm picking an outright fight, okay let's talk nicely again, okay happiness! we're talking! we're working things out because everyone knows that marriage is long raft ride in a lovely green river, with rapids here and there that need to be navigated with care.
It's just that I feel sorry for Chinua, that he has to be in the raft that has the crazy person in it, sometimes paddling, but sometimes trying to hit him in the head with the oars. And sometimes even stabbing the raft with a pencil on purpose, just so we have to sit on the bank for a while with a patch kit.
And that brings me to something else, something I can barely even write about but really feel like I have to. I noticed somewhat of a theme, as I went back over my previous writing. There was a suspiciously large amount of entries about me crying in public or freaking out in stores because people were looking at me, or getting upset because the checkout lady was talking to me in a mean tone of voice. And there is a lot of writing about anxiety. An
d you have to understand, that there are many many things in life that I am never anxious about. For example:
Germs. (Go ahead kids, eat those crackers off the ground, seven second rule.) This is one reason that I do so well in India, I believe. People like me were MADE for travel in countries like India which have, let's say, issues with sanitation. I'm going to be ridiculously open here and confess to you that as a kid, I ate a lot of gum off of the ground. My poor mother was always asking me what I had in my mouth. "Nuffing," I would say as I tried to hide a large wad of someone else's watermelon gum under my tongue. Obviously I regret this decision to eat gum off of the ground as a child, simply because it's a little embarrassing, but really, I never, ever worry about germs.
Money. Most of the time. I've lived a life of faith for so long that I'm pretty good now at relaxing and allowing God to take care of us. We work pretty hard for no pay, and somehow God always brings us what we need. Like this place to rest, a place that Jessie and her husband Levi offered to us and we receive joyfully because God always likes to work through people. He rarely showers mountains of money out of the sky, but there seems to be a different way of living, an economy made of people who give to each other in different ways at different times. Now, I have had times of near heart attack with money, I'm not going to lie, such as when our community lived in this crazily expensive flat on Haight Street and I was in charge of collecting rent and paying bills. (If there is any job in the entire world that I should not be in charge of, ever again, it is collecting rent.)
Disaster. I'm not super fearful. I travel a lot, have been in fairly dangerous circumstances a lot, and yet don't find that I'm really all that worried that something bad will happen to me or my family. I find it easy to believe that everything will somehow be okay. I know that we could be in danger, that things could heat up here, that one day in India I could be put in a bad position, but I also know that God often doesn't give us the ability to go through hard things until we need it.
Trees Tall as Mountains (The Journey Mama Writings: Book 1) Page 11