2. Listen to Radiohead's Hail to the Thief album. Sometimes it will lift your spirits just to be really, really melancholy, with lots of angst.
3. Talk to the Leaf Baby for awhile. He'll make a combination of faces and sounds that make you laugh until you've shaken all that sadness right out of you. He'll make dolphin sounds, raspberry sounds, squinch his eyes up, and wrinkle his nose. You'll want to hold him forever.
4. Read Harold and the Purple Crayon. Especially the line about the "very hungry moose and the deserving porcupine". That line makes you laugh every time.
5. On that note, read One Fish Two Fish, by Dr Seuss. Go play a game called Ring the Gack. This makes you laugh too.
6. Listen to your silly husband in the car, people watching. He'll say, "Where are you going?" to a woman walking by in a big rush, not so that she can hear him, of course. Or, "You got some foooood?" to a woman carrying a casserole dish down Market St. Or, "What's in your little green bag?" to a business man carrying a tiny green bag with handles alongside his briefcase. All of this is only loud enough for you to hear, sitting in your van in traffic, and cracks you up to no end.
7. Laugh at Kai, secretly, when he manages to say the oddest things you've ever heard. For instance, when he yells out, HEY! and you turn to look, only to see that he's talking to his pita and hummus. Or when he calls out from the back of the car, "I burped, and it tasted like my yummy bubbly juice, and now I'm sad that it's all gone."
8. Buy yourself a new book.
9. Make plans for an upcoming trip to Canada. Okay, so this might actually stress you out quite a bit, but focus on the positive: you'll be in CANADA. Your home and native land. You'll be able to hang out with your parents. And Becca. And Matty. And go to your brother's wedding. And smell the air that smells so different.
10. You would normally eat some chocolate or ice cream but now you are finding out that sugar has a very bad effect on you, and that it gives you a false high that brings you right back into the pit later. Too bad. Eat healthy things and feel happy about it. Think about cells being regenerated and your brain cells being replenished.
11. Mull over that scooter ride again and think about the time that you and your Superstar Husband rode scooters on tropical Havelock Island in India. Okay, maybe don't think about this too hard. Especially not with that gray sky looming.
12. Listen to Kenya laugh. Get a kiss from Kenya, or a hug, or a touch of any kind, because this will give you great happiness.
13. Clean your house. This is calming and methodic.
14. Sing really loud at a gas station. This makes people look, but spreads joy around. Maybe. Depending what you're singing and how well.
And a half: Drink half of a forbidden cup of coffee, just because.
October 12, 2006
I don't think you can ever know how having a new child will affect your family. How could you? The small person that is your child shines and darkens in ways that have never appeared to you before. Sometimes there is a spark of recognition, a piece of your childhood, the smile of your sister or the eyes of your husband. But this person is new; new to the world and to the small village that is your home.
With the birth of each of my kids, I died a small death and awoke to new love. With Kai, it was the death of my independent self, a self that spent hours reading and writing and painting, a self that jumped in the car without checking lists or shoving shoes on tiny feet. With Kenya, it was the death of having only one baby, the concentrated affection, the passing back and forth of one child. And with Leaf, it was even more imperceptible, but it was the transition of Kenya being my baby girl to being my middle child. This is what felt like a small death to me. It's what made me cry, during that first week.
But the awakening! The new love, the kind of love that you never have for anyone else, not even your spouse. Love for my husband is constant and huge in me, but how many times have I watched my children sleep and felt that clutch of pity, the fierce protection that brings tears to my eyes? I've never felt love like this before having these children. It has made me intensely vulnerable, easily shaken, and yet as solid as the hills.
I've also watched each of my children's hearts expand with love as our family has grown. They open and blossom in care for one another, and this is what forms them, in addition to the love they receive from us. Leaf has never known a life without a brother and a sister. Kai has received each of his with joy.
In all the craziness, the dullness, the frustration of parenting, love binds. Love takes a family and makes them a small force in the world. In all the ways I've changed since my first son was born, the biggest are that I am more loved, and that I have more love.
October 23, 2006
The day didn't start out so bad, yesterday. We were driving on one of the loveliest sections of highway in the country, which was made even more beautiful by the fact that the poplars have turned yellow. Bringing the car around curves, I was presented with beauty that soothed all the crazy parts of me. We drove through the dark forest where the sun shot through trees of the brightest yellow and out into vineyards and peace was all around me and the kids chattered in the back seat. The orchards and vineyards in Sonoma were turning as well, and there were soft hills of fiery little trees spreading in every direction.
We're leaving for Canada this week, and I'm hustling to get everything taken care of before we go. Chinua has a flight to Israel from Seattle on Thursday, and we'll be gone a little over two weeks, which means that we need to pack and prepare, STAT. I had some bookkeeping work to take care of, close to the City, so I zipped down and did it yesterday, taking in some psychological trauma as well, just for kicks.
I had the two older kids with me. In trying to configure who would take care of which children when both of us had great swathes of work to cut through, I settled on taking Kai and Kenya, thinking that they'd be the best for the seven hour round trip, while the Leaf baby would be the easiest, relatively, to take care of while working at home. Those big long naps are great. (By relatively, I REALLY mean relatively. It's funny how you get to saying, "Wow, this is so easy, I only have the two kids to take care of today." I imagine in the larger families they say, "Shopping was a cinch- I brought only five of the kids along!")
We just had to make one, brief stop at Target. Can you hear the creepy music?
I don't know why so many of my life events happen while I'm on shopping expeditions. I guess it's a comment on the nature of parenthood, the weekly forays into the wilderness of Costco, the way my whole life seems to be reflected in one little shopping trip. I mean, how many times can you walk through Costco without going absolutely freaking insane? Oh, they have their Christmas display up again! Wow, has a whole year passed already? What's that, for Halloween? A MAN-SIZED SCARY FIGURE? Oh, Costco, what will you think of next?
I've also shopped at practically every Target on the West Coast. Living in the woods means that you stock up when you can, so we shop wherever we are, north or south, east or west, this town or that town. Yesterday I was in Novato (a town to which I will now never return) and all I needed to buy was long underwear, socks, pull-ups, (for Kenya, who by the way is now a whiz at the potty) and a Dora the Explorer DVD for the kids to watch while I was working. (They have ONE, which they've watched seven hundred times, and I figured that I was pushing my luck by trying to keep them occupied with it again, while I worked.) I picked it all up in record time, didn't go near the clearance racks, and checked out. We were on a tight schedule.
Then I walked out to the parking lot and realized that I didn't have my car key.
After this, a lot of stuff happened, including me retracing my steps seventeen times, searching on floors, under displays, in the bathroom, in the bathroom trash, and in the trash at the entrance to the store. I caught some looks, let me tell you, and I realized that people saw my shopping cart with two kids in it and assumed I was looking for food, or cans or something. I started to make little remarks, standing there with my arm shoulder high in tras
h, messing around with the melting ice cubes in the bottom of the bag, desperate to find my key, like "I really have to find that key!" and "Oh, kids, I hope we find it soon!" to let people know that I wasn't looking for leftover hotdogs. (Seriously. As if I would ever score food from the Target trash cans. The dumpsters behind Whole Foods are a thousand times better.) My Superstar Husband says that my mutterings probably didn't make things look any better.
I hassled guest services until they were ready to throw me out, and called all of the locksmiths I could find in the Yellow Pages. They were all closed on Sundays, except for one 800 number where the lady told me that new keys started at $120 AND UP, and that they wouldn't be able to tell me how much it would cost me until they got there. I don't want to mention how, but I've had a key made before, and it was $80 and I didn't want to pay any more if I didn't have to. (Okay, okay, it was an incident involving the beach and the vast expanse of sand at the shore as well as shallow pants pockets and my little car key, but that was years ago.)
In between trips to guest services, my kids took turns falling apart. I walked around with a worried, stressed out look on my face, with two kids in my cart who were pulling hair and generally losing their minds. It was nap time, for Kenya, and after three hours, my kids weren't even trying to listen. I wasn't holding out to find the key at this point, I just couldn't even locate a locksmith. I was literally stranded at Target, and at one point I looked at the man at guest services and asked him to please show me the way to where they kept all the bathroom trash once they emptied it. They started to think about calling security. On me.
As I was calling the police, a last ditch effort to find a local locksmith, an angel in the disguise of a Target team member ran up with my key. I have never seen anything as beautiful as that girl, standing there with her red shirt and khaki pants. We left, in a hurry, since we had been there for over three hours, and we didn't exactly have three hours to spare when we left that morning. We drove the rest of the way, I worked, the kids were delighted with their new DVD, and I was ecstatic that we didn't have to pay money that we didn't have for a new key.
You might think this is the end of the story, but you'd be missing the part where we finally left, hungry and tired, to drive the long drive home. We stopped to get gas and…
…I couldn't find my wallet. It was gone.
I'll give you some hints. I located it in the very same store that my keys had been lost in earlier. The very same boy that I had been hassling about the key handed my wallet to me in a polite and embarrassed-for-me manner. I cracked some joke, tried to get him to believe that this wasn't an everyday occurrence for me, and scratched the Novato Target off my list of places that I can show my face ever again.
The list is getting shorter and shorter.
October 31, 2012
If you walk into a coffee shop in Canada, and order a coffee, and then meander over to the counter where you doctor your coffee up, you won't find a container of "half and half" like you will in the States, you'll find a container of "cream." What Americans call half and half, Canadians call cream, and heavy cream is called whipping cream.
What Americans call a stocking cap, beanie, or various other words, Canadians call a "toque". It's French, like serviette, which a lot of Canadians say instead of napkin.
On a sign that indicates a place to use the toilet, you'll see that it's called a "washroom" here in Canada. This has caused a lot of confusion as I've asked for washrooms in department stores in the States and they look at me as if to say, "You want to take a bath?" Now I know to ask for the restroom when I'm in the U.S.
The sofa in your living room may or may not be called a chesterfield if you are Canadian. This word is fading with progressing generations, but every Canadian who speaks English as his or her first language will know what you mean if you say, "The magazine is on the chesterfield."
Canadians take out the garbage. Americans take out the trash.
When an American says he's pissed, he means he's mad. When a Canadian says he's pissed, he means he's drunk, really really drunk. For angry, he'll say pissed off.
I'm in my musing, sort of melancholy, philosophical world of being in Canada, trying to figure out what is so different about this place that I can literally feel it in the air as soon as I cross the border, and why it makes me so sad to be here. Sometimes I feel like an impostor: I've adopted Americanisms. I say "huh". I do, all the time. I say trash, I say restroom, and I say "Sem-eye" instead of "Sem-ee" when I'm talking about a big truck.
We're in Victoria, and as we drove past the Parliament Building it was night, and the old, beautiful building was lit up with thousands of little white lights.
There is a song by The Innocence Mission from their Small Planes cd, and I'll just quote the whole song here, since it pretty much exactly describes how I'm feeling.
Song About Traveling
A man said Why, why does traveling
in cars and in trains make him feel sad,
a beautiful sadness.
I've felt this before.
It's the people in the cities you'll never know,
it is everything you pass by,
wondering will you ever return.
A sweet and sad song, and add to that the sorrow that I sometimes feel about not living in the country of my youth, and you have how I feel. Well, add some relief and joy over being with my family right now, some adoration of my kids as well as some general frustration about the little crying party they all decided to throw at six this morning, some desperate missing of my Superstar Husband, and some real homesickness for, (can this be?) America— gasp, my home now, my Redwood cabin, my community. Life is so strange, all the little loves and hurts, the way I love my family and I love my community. The way my home and my husband are intertwined, the way I miss Canada, miss British Columbia, but have come to adore Northern California where I met Chinua, where we have our life together.
And then there are those pangs of nostalgia for India, for Thailand. This earth is vast and there are homes everywhere for me. And yet it is not my home at all, and that is why this constant search, under tables, in lit windows as I'm passing by, this search for home is not futile. It's as if God holds my home in His cupped hands.
November
November 20, 2006
I hate not writing. When I don't write I feel itchy. I feel rank and hurt and stupid. So, I write as much as I can, but occasionally there are times when it seems impossible. And there are times when it becomes essential, like tonight, when I am sitting here with my taquitos and cheesecake at ten thirty, eating forkfuls of spanish rice and typing in an attempt to get my mind into some kind of working order.
Do you ever wish that you could see things for the first time? For example, these giant Redwood trees that are all around my home. We drive through them on small highways all the time, and they are as imposing as mountains, and I can't see them. I want to see the trees, see their enormity, take giant breaths of their height. I crane my head and I can't see the tops, and they have become as commonplace as, I don't know, pavement. I want that first gasp, you know? The eyes of a child. I want to drive into the financial district in San Francisco and see one of these trees, rising far above the buildings, so I can finally digest its sheer size. Don't you want that? To see the ocean and feel yourself as a mite in the center of your world, wet and salty, rather than sitting on the shore staring at the horizon? I want to understand, to truly grasp my smallness.
But large things are hard to see. Sometimes when I'm driving by a particularly large grove, I see how dark it is on the forest floor. Almost no light makes its way through, but there is the gold; pure sun illuminating one leaf here, a group of leaves there, some mossy roots, a patch of clover. These bits of sunlight break through and I see clearly, just for a moment. I see it, I really see those few leaves, and I may start to cry.
I think I've lived for a long time thinking that if I just did everything right, if I was just as nice as I could be, bad things wo
uldn't happen to me. If I played my cards right I would not disappoint anyone, and I definitely wouldn't make anyone angry with me.
I'm beginning to understand that this is not so. I still don't want people to be angry with me, but people are. I don't want to disappoint people, but I do. Somehow these are not the things that God is telling me to avoid. He simply hasn't asked me to make everyone happy. Knowing this doesn't make me any less crumbly inside when I do these things. It doesn't make it feel any better when I lose sleep, when I lose friends. It goes so deep, this tearing around inside over the "f" word. I mean f-a-i-l. It's the word that I dance around most, the whispered word in the dark early mornings when the baby is nursing and I can't get back to sleep and there are things racing through my head besides the phone calls I need to make, things I can't just get rid of by getting up and making a list. I only wish I could. Succeed, Work Harder, Do Better, Buck Up, I would write, and then fall into a deep sleep.
In the sadness of these past months, though, I have seen the one leaf illuminated on the forest floor, the few leaves dancing. I wrote a poem a while back, and the last line was, "This is the way He is, broken things are made new." This is the heart of my faith. This is what I have chosen to throw my life at, and this is what I will waste it all on. Broken things are made new. How many broken things have I seen being made new? The first brilliant smiles of the girl staying with us who has been trapped inside herself, the long-legged steps towards grace, lives rebuilt, families restored.
Trees Tall as Mountains (The Journey Mama Writings: Book 1) Page 13