Are you kind of understanding what he has to live with?
Then, yesterday, I was reminded again that I said I would try. And I will. I'll come back and try to make a safe place for myself, from myself, and face a blank page, and write mud that can hopefully be turned into something as radiant as dragonfly wings by the time I'm on the eighth or ninth draft. Just like I'll keep trying to be even slightly graceful as I stomp and stumble around the floor in my West African Dance class tonight. And I'll keep turning out these hand-knitted dishcloths until I'm good enough to make myself the hooded sweater that I've always wanted, with a hood big enough to fit on my head above my long neck.
*
Last week I was able to spend time with my grandparents, two incredible people who have been married to one another for almost sixty years. Sixty years! Not only that, but they've been working together in their store every day until just two months ago, when they finally retired. My grandpa is seventy-nine.
What I really love to see, when we're together, is how they sing together while they wash dishes and clean up. Maybe Chinua and I should try that, rather than throwing water in each other's faces and dishcloths at one another's heads. You never know, we might get more done.
March
March 1, 2007
I came up with a new motto for life on the roller coaster. Are you ready? It's "Give it a year." It works like this:
"I'm totally depressed about how this book is coming along. I think my dialogue is stilted and it sounds like I'm in the second grade."
Give it a year.
"I am the worst dancer in my class. I look like a geranium with epilepsy."
Give it a year.
"I'm trying to be more organized, but my house still looks like my housekeeper is a potato. Where is my wallet? I can't find my keys."
Give it a year.
And what it means is to keep trying and not even think about quitting for a year. Wake up and write, go to dance class every week, try to organize. Because I am an insta-quitter. You're probably going to hear about all of this until you're sick of it, but I'm trying to tie myself into getting over certain aspects of my personality that have kept me from doing things I want to do for a long time.
I discovered something over the last dark, snow covered, powerless week: I love electricity! I LOVE IT. What? The power was only out for about 28 hours? Well, it felt like a week. Especially when, during one long, power-lacking night, the kids woke up three times shrieking their little hearts out because the candle had gone out in their rooms. My two older kids have complete darkness in the "top three most terrifying things that could ever possibly happen" list that they carry around with them. The way they scream, you'd think that they woke up falling out of a tree, rather than just in a lack of light, and if there was ever a heart attack waiting to happen, it's being awakened, three times in one night, by ear splitting screams.
But, yes, I love power. I love lights, I love my computer, I love music, I love refrigerators. I'd make a lousy pioneer, although there are times when I willingly leave my world of light and microchips to go into the woods and sleep in a tent and cook over a fire. But it's one thing to sit around a fire in the dirt, drinking chai and singing along with my Superstar Husband with the guitar, all without power; it's another to sit in my house staring at the fridge, willing it to start working so that I don't have to throw my milk out.
On another note, the snow falling yesterday morning was very, very pretty. Like pieces of ash, huge and light and drifting over moss and trees. Our wood stove bravely fought the cold, and we sat inside watching with wide eyes as our rare, once yearly, snowfall made a light dusting over the forest, at least until the sun won out and it all went away. We are blessed.
March 5, 2007
So, I think we've figured out a solution to the little writing-time crisis that has been going on around here. We've tweaked the schedule a little here, a little there, and I think it's all going to work out. My friend Evan told me a long time ago that life with little kids is all about pinching a bit of time from this part of the day and sticking it on over on that part of the day. He said that while his kids were young they were just constantly tweaking their schedule, trying to make it work better, working in circles. I'm glad he told me that, because he's a pretty wise person, and I feel justified in our endless efforts to make ours work better.
My schedule feels a little nuts to me at times. In hours, I have what is the equivalent of a part time office job, but no childcare. In gray hairs (in the making) and effort and sweat and tears, the equivalent of much more than a part time job—but never mind. So, I run around fitting my work in between nap times and non-nap times, and sometimes I just feel like I am not doing anything well. You might say I'm doing too much. I know my friend Dori did, when I called her exhausted and in tears one day, but it's hard not to at this juncture in life, which is why there is a need for frequent readjustment of the only 24 hours that we are given in a day.
But what else should I talk about? Maybe my nearly perfect Saturday? I puttered around my house, cleaning and folding laundry and cooking and taking breaks in between to read and to knit. In the afternoon, while the kids were napping, I escaped to the river with my knitting and my cup of tea and sat with the pretty green lady who has the most soothing voice. My friend Renee said to me later, not knowing that I had been there on that day too, "Don't you think the river is healing?" And it is, oh boy. There's just something about the smooth rush of it, watching the same shapes streaming over rocks and stones over and over again, and that beautiful sound. It's second only to the ocean, and maybe even more accessible, you know? You can see to the other side.
But sitting down there, finishing my second dishcloth, drinking my PG Tips, marked a moment for me. It is the beginning of the season which contains a happy trip to the river almost every day, to sit and think, for now, to swim, later. It is the beginning of a season where the evenings will stretch to be longer and longer, when we can sit on our porches until late in the evening, when we can stop walking around all hunched over with cold. Oh, Spring! And Summer is on the way!
March 13, 2007
Under all of the little things and the big things in this last couple of weeks, there has been a constant stream of sadness in me, not without reason. I've done my normal things to overcome it, but today it feels as though I'm losing. And it's the kind that cripples my writing, that makes me want to hide when the phone rings, that makes me want to wear a t-shirt that says, "I don't want to talk about it." That's pretty good, actually, I think I may have that made.
So, all I have to offer is this: Kenya came out of her room yesterday, first thing in the morning, and walked over to where I was writing on the couch. Without further ado, she said, "Mama? Today can I choose Life?"
Talking about cereal, of course, but still. Mildly prophetic, no?
March 14, 2007
Streams of sadness or no streams of sadness, life does not stop for babies. I thought I should let you know a little about Leaf's busy day.
It's only the early afternoon, and already the Leaf Baby has:
-Played in Kenya's potty, after she peed without telling me and then left the door open.
-Stuck his finger in the rat cage and received a little nibble which I couldn't see but still made him cry. (I think this means he's going to turn into a Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle or something.)
-Opened a bag of barley and spilled the whole thing over the floor, after which he attempted to eat it-the raw barley that is, which set off a chain reaction of Barnum and Bailey worthy events when the kids decided to "help" me clean it up, and I let them, only to notice Kai swishing the barley into the living room (Space? How do you say that with an open plan?) with the broom and Kenya dumping the barley back out of the dustpan, at which point I took over, causing Kenya to dissolve into tears on my foot while Leaf was still trying to shove raw barley into his mouth, crying, because he didn't like the way it tasted.
-Dumped a whole cup of water o
n his face which was incredibly shocking to him. Kenya had left her cup of water on the edge of the table and Leaf is now the exact height that he needs to be to pull something like a cup of water towards himself and dump it on his own face, causing himself to sputter and then burst into tears.
-Taken his first steps in succession. He's taken one step before, but today I sat down with him and practiced and he found, to his delight, that he could walk to me.
March 20, 2007
I can't really explain what is going on with me right now, except that it is deep and swimmy and a little froggy. Does that help? I am encouraged and overwhelmed all at once.
Maybe I can just let you know some factoids. Sketch a little picture, so that you can put it together.
I drove some of my friends to the airport yesterday. We drove down to Sacramento on Saturday, then I dropped them off at the curb early Monday morning. It's the first step in their process of moving away from the Land, which makes me very sad. I'm happy for them, but sad for me. Yesterday, as I was sitting at another friend's cafe, my sadness punched me in the gut when she said, "this is good for them, hey"? and I laid my head on her bar counter and cried. I wanted to pull myself together, only there seemed to be nothing to pull together. Over the last two years I have lived through a slow attrition of a community that was tighter than anything I've ever been part of, (I'm being starkly honest here) and though we have hope of rebuilding, it is hard to say goodbye to people when you've seen each other married, give birth, walked through foreign corridors together...
I feel as though pieces of me are trickling away, as people move. I invested too much in my friends, I guess. I don't know how to grieve this properly, I waver between hope and belief and bitterness and a kind of flinging my hands around my head.
It is NOT all about me. I know. This is about a whole village, the movement and shape of a group of people who have grown and walked together, and I see God's shape in it. He is a great orchestrator, an author. Our stories continue. But, I feel hurt. I feel left alone, out here in the woods, where the trees are always tall, where light is green and golden, alternately. I go back and forth, reminding myself of all that I have to be thankful for, and then feeling forgotten and used up.
So. That is one thing.
Another? Well, I have these kids, see, and I know that you know that. But, boy. I love them to death, and I'm also feeling a little overwhelmed by how much they need me. An ebb, if you will. I know you understand.
I have also been encouraged by my friends, heroes of mine who have realized that part of their reason for being here is making choices that give to people around them. While I was in Sacramento, I had the privilege of meeting the new baby girl of some friends of mine. They've been waiting for her for awhile, having decided to adopt their third child, and she came home with them a little over a week ago. She's precious, like a rose, and it's lovely beyond words that they have found her and she has found them.
Another friend of mine has been building into her community for a while now, almost a year, through the ownership of a cafe in Sacramento which supports local businesses and economy. She's also the kind of friend that I would keep in my sleeves if I could, but alas.
Bits and pieces, I know. I guess to wrap up I would say that I see people moving in the kind of ways that are like shadow puppets on the wall, like the something more beautiful than they are. Adopting is beautiful, but there are still diapers. Running a cafe that refuses to make its money off of other people's suffering is heroic, but there are still those bills needing to be paid. What I'm saying, I guess, is that revolution is made of many sacrifices. All of those sacrifices together build something larger than themselves (is that called synergy?) and fling themselves into the face of a great and pervasive evil that broods across our culture, an evil of selfishness. It's the evil I face every day when I don't feel like taking care of others, when I want to sink into laziness. If a battle is going to be fought against injustice, it seems like it begins with the same motions that cause us to wake up in the middle of the night to take care of a sick child. Why do we do it? Because they mean so much to us, because they're our family.
I think we need to expand our family to include more of the world.
March 22, 2007
I'm still here, although I'm drowning in a pool of my own self-pity, which disgusts me, and then that disgust for myself renders me useless. And then I start banging my head on the fridge again. And that doesn't help and it puts dents in my head, so I should probably stop it.
Yesterday Kenya managed to perform a feat that I didn't think was possible. She outdid even the time Kai forgot which way he needed to be facing in order to poop in the toilet. Chinua and I were talking and we could hear her in the background, sitting on the potty in the bathroom with the door slightly ajar, talking to herself about pooping. "You POOPED!" she was saying, in her "big" voice, a voice that is hilarious because of its big smallness. "That's so EXCITING! You're so GOOD! YAYYYYYYY. You pooped in your POTTY!" We laughed a little at her as we talked, so blissfully unaware of the horror that was about to display itself to us. She hadn't called for me to come and help her yet, so I just waited, continuing to talk with Chinua. And then she started crying and we ran to the door and!!!!
She had tried to pick up her potty to empty it, I guess, and then decided to set it back down, only she tripped, and it was flung, it was flang, it was throwed, all over the wall! POO! ALL OVER the WALL! And the floor and the trash can and just, well, everywhere.
I opened the door and then my heart failed me, I tell you the truth, I chickened out, and not quietly. And my Superstar Husband did the most heroic thing that I think he has ever done and cleaned it up. Oh, love. When your man cleans up the poop wall for you.
March 27, 2007
My parents were in town the woods for the weekend.
They arrived Friday just before noon, after driving down from Canada, which takes them around twenty-four driving hours. I, their unappreciative daughter, had decided to shop with the girls for the day anyway, figuring that food in the house was important when guests are around. Have I ever talked about our weekly shopping days? I can never remember if I'm being repetitive. Or if I'm being repetitive. Due to unseemly gas prices and the strain of eight hours of shopping with kids, four of which are spent in the car, we contrived a day during the week when the kids stay with the dads and the girls shop. It's great, we all look forward to it and we save on gas and fuel emissions, and we all drink a lot of coffee and run into bathrooms a lot. Sometimes we spend two hours in a thrift shop, or an hour in a yarn shop, only to race through the rest of our shopping. Sometimes we have fun and laugh all day. Sometimes we get hit on by men driving by, while we're walking down the street ("So much beauty on one CORNER!") which we attribute to absent husbands and kids. (Renee loves the shopping days because she's single, and she rarely gets us girls to herself. I have to say that Renee is pretty much the most perfect friend a mother could have. She's fun and great with kids, but LOVES to do girly non-mommish stuff. I don't know that I could say that I'm the best friend a single girl could have. I wish.) And then sometimes we are grumpy and we snarl at each other and apologize too much and I flounce around like my fourteen-year-old pouty self. She's still lingering in there, not having entirely grown up.
On Friday we were having a good day, although it was our first Friday shopping day without Candace, something that made us all sad. But I did phone Chinua's phone about five times to find out whether my parents hated me for not being there when they arrived. I had hemmed and hawed and hooed about whether or not I should go, and the food issue tipped the scales, but later I feared that I had made a VERY BAD DECISION. And Chinua reassured me that, no, my parents didn't hate me, not at all, and then at one point my mom called and said, no they didn't hate me, silly girl, not at all. And slowly my anxiety began to lift retreat back to that place under my kidney where it lives and waits to pounce on me.
My parents are not haters. I have parents who are mo
re loving than any parents I could ask for, more loving than I deserve. But I do have this crazy anxiety, see? And I remember that when I began this blog I wondered if it should be a chronicle of trying to overcome this anxiety, but then I thought, no, I'm made of more than the knot in my gut. And usually it's true, but lately (again) it is like it's all there is. Like where's the girl? Where'd the girl go? What's this clenched fist in her place?
I need to find a way to work this out. It is a thread that weaves in and out of my life, and HELLO! There's just too much going on for me to be climbing through obstacle courses all the time. I'm not sure what it is. But for as long as I can remember, my whole life maybe, there's been this turning away inside of me, a feeling of needing to escape many things because that's too much to handle, that will put me over the edge.
After freaking out all day Friday, though, I had a really great time with my parental unit. The kids had fun, too.
Yesterday we went to Santa Rosa, just for kicks, we thought, let's drive for a few hours to get to a bigger town. It ended up being really, really fun. Have I ever told you that my Superstar Husband is a little strange? Example: While we were eating, at In 'N Out Burger, the California treat my parents craved, Chinua was doing that thing, you know, the thing where you flip your eyelids inside out? Totally disgusting. Kai calls it the "red eye" trick. I was turned away, since I don't want to imagine the inside of my husband's eyelids the next time I'm kissing him, and he was trying his best to get my attention, apparently not caring that he may never be kissed again. Or maybe so confident of his charm that he was sure he'd be able to overcome his red-eyed stigma. And then the kids wanted to get involved, and Chinua spent the next ten minutes trying to help them flip the insides of their eyelids out while we were eating our fries. Am I the only one who finds this a little odd? My mom was laughing away, everyone in the restaurant was getting a good show, and I was trying not to see the insides of my little children's eyelids. My babies.
Trees Tall as Mountains (The Journey Mama Writings: Book 1) Page 17