I don't lie awake worrying about money, sickness, danger, or potential disaster.
I do lie awake worrying about people.
I have a lot of anxiety when it comes to people and social situations. At the best I can be a good friend, listen to people, be in public and not be terribly self-conscious, and go to sleep at night easily. At the worst I flinch when people look at me in public, am afraid of talking to people, and am knotted up inside at night, worrying. After a conversation I may go over what I said obsessively, wondering if anything was wrong or upsetting or offensive. I'm coming to think that I need to seriously address this.
But how?
It is the hardest thing I have ever faced in my life. Why am I so afraid? What am I afraid of? I guess I'm just going to have to continue to write it all down. I think I could seek a diagnosis, and probably find one, but I'm reluctant to do that. I don't want to be contained within an illness. There are many parts to a mountain: there are the trees, the rough patches, the old stones, that dirt underneath. There is the sky, coming all the way down to touch the dry earth, the occasional wildflower and there are wide-open spaces. I am not made only of the parts of me that are sick and hiding, and I hope that healing is more than surgery, more than medicine, more than a bandaid. I don't know why I am so afraid of people being angry with me, I don't know why I feel a sort of constant judgment humming underneath the ground. I have seen those open spaces, I know that there are many trees to climb through, to get there, and I know there will be the small flowers in the trees, the glimpses of blue sky to help me through. God is a true Friend; He neither allows me to escape this, nor allows it to break me. And there is my Superstar Husband, who, when I am wild with fear over the days ahead of me, the people I will disappoint, the mistakes I will make, looks me in the eyes and says, "You only have today. You only have this moment."
August 26, 2006
If you ever want to juggle fire on the beach, and you're hoping for a crowd, just park yourself next to a bonfire with many many teenagers standing around it. They will not be able to contain themselves, and you'll find yourself surrounded by awed, cheering fans who will either shriek and scream in delight (OH MY GOOOOOD!!!!), if they're female, or say, "Oh dude, that's sweet. Check that OUT," if they're bros. Teenagers are so great. They almost always make me tear up, partly because I remember what it felt like to be a teenager, how I was almost coming out of my skin with ideas and humiliation and the wonder of the universe, and also because there is nothing quite like the paradox of a teenager, how self-conscious and free they are. They're all like, ohmygod, someone's looking at me, and then screaming in exhilaration as my Superstar Husband catches the torch by the flame (ouch!).
Seriously, though, Chinua is amazing, and he did gather quite a crowd. It was really fun. And the great thing about Southern California is that everyone is so laid back. The fire department showed up to keep an eye on things, but no one asked Chinua to stop.
*
My son, while trying to eat a hot potsticker, said very seriously, "It's not hot on my white teeth, only on my gum teeth." I am very proud to be his mother.
Yesterday we went to Mexico, and it was a combination of being the best experience that I've had in a long, long, time, and being a day of me trying to get away from myself.
I was looking around and loving where I was, loving my beautiful family, loving Mexico, loving the beach and the taco stand and my husband. Chinua can get along well enough in Spanish with a good enough accent that people take him to know it fluently, and the train of conversation takes off, with him clinging to the sides. I loved Mexico from the first day I was there, seven years ago, and my innocent, pre-India self was amazed and intrigued by the messiness of the streets and the pinned-together houses. Chinua and I, longing to leave America for a while and travel, drank it in yesterday like thirsty sailors.
But there it was, the anxiety, that knot in my gut that never left, the tension in my neck that curled around my spine and yanked, the sick feeling that had me in tears a few times. I hate myself like this. I don't know how to love myself like this, and even worse, I don't know how to believe that God loves me like this.
And then I went swimming, by myself, while the kids and their Superstar dad made a sandcastle on the beach. I stood in the waves and was knocked off of my feet again and again, and I thought, yes, this is how it feels, this is why I never catch my breath. I pretended that the waves were my fear and my loneliness, pretended that if I could just stay standing I would beat all this, that I would feel like Rae again, like that teenage self who can scream and shriek in delight. And then I let myself be carried for a while, and I was tired, and I wondered if I could let go enough to let the waves of this great fear hit me, yet still see the sunset, like I was seeing it around me, the sherbet colors, the sparkly horizon. And I rested, and I breathed deeply and watched the silhouetted fishing boats with their circles of birds.
September
September 8, 2006
I remember the first time that I ever saw Chinua. It was summer. I had turned eighteen that spring. He was running down the steps to open the gate for me at the old community house on Ashbury Street, in the Haight district of San Francisco. I saw him open the door and jog down the stairs and I thought, Um. He was gorgeous. There wasn't a buzzer at that house, we always had to open the gate manually for every person who stepped inside. At the time I didn't know there would ever be a "we". I didn't know that I would live in that house, would walk through it with my husband, right before it sold, or that Haight Street would become my home.
My friend Heidi and I stepped inside and joined some people who were standing around in the kitchen. Chinua and I started to talk about Canadian politics, a subject that I knew nothing about, but I'm sure I made a few things up. We had come to see another person, someone we wanted to talk to about maybe doing a little volunteering around the Christian house. The Christian house was in the Haight and existed for the purpose of loving kids on the street, being Jesus love for them, having them over for showers and food. The lady we were looking for wasn't there. So we left.
A few days later, Heidi and I helped out with some people who were serving a meal for people in need in a church. Chinua was there, with his guitar, playing worship songs while everyone ate. I was serving salad, and the older lady beside me had two things going on. 1. A bit of a control issue about the size of the scoop of salad I was giving people, ("That's too big," and "No, not so small!") and 2. Quite the crush on Chinua. She went on and on about how he came all the time to play at that meal, and that she just loooooved his voice, had I heard his voice? And there was just something about him. Since Ms. Perfect Salad Scoop beside me was talking about him so much, I did watch Chinua a bit, and I did listen to what she said about him and I know this is going to sound like the silliest thing in the world, but what I really thought was, "I know him." Except that I didn't. I had just met him.
That was all, we left town and went back to Canada. But about eight months later I ended up volunteering at that same house in San Francisco for a week.
I was a shy and gawky girl, growing up. In social situations I was completely self-conscious. I had a few rules for myself, like, never let your true feelings be known; when in doubt: be silly; and above all, never, no never, let a boy know that you are interested in him. I had some pretty good force fields. On that trip to San Diego I had come to the conclusion that there really was no one out there who was interested in a girl like me. I was traveling with five other girls, and we met a lot of guys, guys whose eyes glassed over when I started talking about books or art and God.
A few things happened during that week. The first was that when I came running up the stairs in the upper part of the house one day, Chinua was walking out of his room and said, "I like it that you're tall, like me." My height had been such a thing of consternation for much of my life, and this was the best moment of height that I had ever had. Aaaahhh, I thought, this moment is what it was all for: my Social Dance clas
s in the ninth grade, when I was already 5'9" or 5'10", I don't remember, and it really doesn't matter, because my dance partner was a boy from Hong Kong named Helmut who was prematurely gray and hilarious, a great friend, but still half a foot shorter than me. Or all the boys I knew who were my friends and always stood on tip toes around me to make themselves the same height or taller. It all suddenly seemed insignificant when I was standing beside Chinua, who was 6'2" and liked it that I was tall.
The second thing was that somehow it came up that I really liked poetry, and Chinua gave me one of his books, a compilation of e. e. cummings poems. Note to boys who like girls who love poetry: ALWAYS give her a book of poems, preferably by someone like cummings or Rilke or well, anyone at all. It will make her feel like a queen.
The third thing was that he asked to see my own poems and then we sat on the stairs and he read them, while I read some of his. I will remember the way those stairs smelled for the rest of my life, it was a good smell, and after that I could never walk inside that house and smell its housey smell without sighing with happiness. I had no idea at the time, but it is a testament to how smitten we both were that 1. he told me that my poems were epic, that they were better than everything he had ever read, better than cummings or any great poet and 2. that I believed him.
The fourth thing was that he took my friends and I out on a tour of the city and we went hunting in North Beach for this little jazz club he had been to, only we never found it. And the beauty of that night was this: we were silly. We were silly and we had so much fun that at one point Chinua fell down on the street laughing. On the corner of Columbus and Broadway he just lay down and laughed. Of course nobody even so much as glanced at us. And then we played at the playground in Washington Square and spoke in silly British accents and I have never had so much fun in my life. And then my friends and I left, the next day. The whole time it had been dawning on me, that if we were standing in a group, Chinua would stand next to me. He seemed to like to talk to me, he seemed to favor my company. It was shocking to this awkward, gawky girl.
Looking back, all the signs point to smitten, but Chinua and I had what I like to think of as the perfect romance, because it was a year and a half later, after many letters and many phone calls, with him traveling around India and Nepal, and me traveling around the States and Canada, and then at the very end of that time traveling in India, Nepal, and Thailand together, a whole year and a half later that we ever talked about how we felt about each other. It was always there, right from the beginning, but we just didn't open up that can of worms. And built an amazing friendship first. Eventually we had all that, we had the romance, we had the proposal, we had the amazing wedding.
Which was good, because we need that now, as we are celebrating our fifth anniversary with three kids, the youngest still only seven and a half months old. We had three kids in four years, and took on some serious responsibility within our community. We've gone through money stuff, kid stuff, my postpartum depression three times, we've traveled together, lived in tents and an RV, lived in two towns and a big city since we were married, been lied to numerous times by people that we've cared for, had things stolen from us. We've written songs like "Everything's gonna be all right, everything's gonna be okay, everything's gonna be alright, no matter what they say" that we sing to ourselves to feel better, we've lived in small spaces, we now live in a beautiful big space. We've swum in rivers, lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, and a few oceans (warm and cold) together. We've been through flooding, storms, and mudslides, we've sat in several broken down vehicles together. We've danced, we've sung at many weddings, we've tag-teamed as photographers, as parents, as community directors. We've tried to juggle together, we've eaten many different foods, been guests at many different homes, driven down countless roads. We've filled our tank with gas many, many times. We've spoken words that shouldn't be said, we've cried (mostly me), we've been immature and petty. We've made up. We are solid and we are in love and we've been through a whole lot and I can honestly say I've never known anyone I esteem and respect as much as my Superstar Husband.
September 14, 2006
Kai walked out of his room today and announced, "It's not 'pants', it's pant," while shaking his head in amusement. I smiled.
"Well, no. It sounds like it should be 'pant', but we say 'a pair of pants', so it really is 'pants'."
Kai shot me a derisive look. (As derisive as a four-year-old with brown eyes the size of tea cups can be.)
"No," he said. "It's pant." I don't drop these kinds of things anymore, because really, the kid has to know.
"Well, you're almost right, because almost any other word wouldn't have an 's' sound on the end like that, but it's 'pants'. Trust me."
"No, it's pant."
This is when I had to pull out the old standby.
"Kai," I said. "Who's four years old?"
"Me!!!!" (BIG smile)
"And who's twenty-six?"
"Kenya?"
"No. Me. Who knows how to read?"
"You do? You know how to read, Mama?"
"And who has been through school? Me again. So you can trust me. It may not make sense to you, but I know that the word is pants. You may call your pants 'pant' if you want to though."
I've found that this tactic works well for other things, too, like when Kai tries to instruct me on driving ("You were supposed to stop back there, Mama!" "Kai, do you even know what city we're in?") or cooking or other things. Except that I may say things like "Who's been driving for ten years?" and "Who's not tall enough to reach the pedals or see over the steering wheel?"
It helps us all remember where we stand.
September 25, 2006
Ever since Kenya became one of the speaking members of our family (it seems that it always consists of speaking members and non-speaking members, although the only non-speaking member right now is the Leaf Baby... and our pet rats, I guess) she and Kai have found the strangest things to argue about. They really can argue about anything and everything. Listening to them argue makes me want to lock myself in a sound-proof box, it is even worse than whining, and it showed itself right after I said that whining was the most annoying thing I'd ever heard. Arguing is worse, particularly because it usually culminates in shrieking from Kenya.
It can be pretty funny, though.
Yesterday we were all sitting on the couch, and Kenya was staring dreamily out of the window. (If I wrote in Kenya's dialect you wouldn't be able to understand a thing, so I'll write as if she speaks with more than two consonants.)
Kenya: That's Mama's sky and Daddy's sky and Leaf's sky and Kenya's sky and Kai's sky!
(I'm thinking here, how beautiful! What a sweet girl I have. You always wonder about what your kids are going to say when they finally start talking. And then Kenya says something pretty like that. We can only see the tiniest glimpse of it through the window, too, since our trees are so, so tall.)
Kai: IT'S NOT OUR SKY!!!
Kenya: IT IS OUR SKY!!! IT'S Mama's and Daddy's and Leaf's and Kenya's and Kai's.
Kai: NO IT'S NOT!!!
Kenya: (Bloodcurdling sound that shouldn't be heard within a closed space because of the danger to the baby's eardrums.)
Me: Kai, it is kind of our sky. And kind of not, too. Besides, she can say that if she wants to.
Kai: It's NOT. It shouldn't be our sky. It shouldn't be.
Kenya: IT IS OUR SKY!!! (More blood curdling ensues.)
Me: Okay, kids, we are NOT TALKING ABOUT THE SKY ANYMORE.
Kai: (whispering) It's not ours.
Kenya: SHRIEK!!
Me: NO MORE SKY.
Do you see what I'm saying here? About the soundproof room? Maybe I could just invent some kind of soundproof head. I could walk around with my soundproof head all day and smile all the time, because I can't hear the madness.
October
October 5, 2006
Fourteen and a half ways to improve your spirits (A note to myself.)
There has been sadne
ss this year. Thankfully, these sadnesses are the light kind, no deaths, no major sicknesses. But sometimes they seem to pile up, and they threaten to overwhelm me. I thought I'd write a helpful list for myself to mull over on a day like today, when it seems like I'm followed by a sadness cloud that is tied to me by a strong piece of twine.
1. Riding a scooter will do the trick. For a short while, anyways. My Superstar Husband recently had a birthday, and one of the things I plotted was a motorbike ride through San Francisco with him. It wasn't too hard to figure out, either. We were already going to the City for a meeting, we have an amazing friend named Amelia who watched our kids and lent us her scooter, and she had helmets for both of us.
In my black leather jacket and big, visored helmet, I looked like a superhero from the seventies. Chinua was wearing one of those little helmets that don't cover your face, and because the helmet was made for a small woman, and he is a large man with plentiful dreadlocks, it was perched on the top of his head like a shiny hard kippah. He was our black, Jewish scooter driver.
We zipped down Market in deepening twilight, then drove over to North Beach, the very place we fell in love way back when. We had pizza at a seedy urban pizza place, then sped back over to the Mission in the dark to pick up our kids. It was amazing, everything I had hoped, and even the fact that the idle was too low on the scooter, and Chinua had to restart every time we were at a stoplight, even that was perfect. He was perfect in his shiny kippah, and I held him around his waist and his shoulders and I laughed at the dark.
Trees Tall as Mountains (The Journey Mama Writings: Book 1) Page 12