Then, at the mall (it was rainy and cold out) I emerged from the bathroom with Kenya, only to find Kai standing in the hallway with his overalls on backwards. He was not alone, his dad and grandpa were there with him, so I asked, "What happened?"
Chinua said, "He's got his own style!" My dad said, "I don't even want to go there," (since apparently Kai had insisted on taking ALL of his clothes off to use the toilet) and I realized that they were both totally okay with letting Kai walk around for the rest of the day with his overalls on backwards. I quietly took Kai into the women's bathroom and helped my poor kid out. Is it just a mom thing? I mean, they don't fit that way, there's this bulging thing that goes on in the front and a tightness in the back, and that can't be comfortable.
Then, when we were eating dinner, Kenya managed to spill her water, which is totally normal, for a three-year-old. And we cleaned it up. And then she managed to spill it another three times. The floor was very clean, when we were done eating and left the establishment. We had pretty much mopped the whole place.
What else? We ate ice cream, Kenya opened a few early presents, we bought things, and on the way home we listened to a live recording of Chinua's music from 2002 that someone recently gave us. We didn't even know it existed. And I drove and thought of my parents and how much they love me and their son-in-law and their grandchildren, and how they didn't even hate me at all! And I was glad, and I was thankful, and I was also the teeniest bit quite anxious, as I always am, and when I got home I asked Chinua if he thought that they knew how much I loved them, and he said, "I don't know, maybe you should tell them." So guys, if you don't know it already, I really, really love you.
April
April 3, 2007
I haven't been well. The last week has been incredibly hard, but I want to write about what heals me, because God is always so good, and there are little gifts here and there. My Superstar Husband had a concert on Saturday and Renee was wonderful and watched the kids for me so I could go. And I sat on a leather couch in a well-lit cafe, with a cup of coffee in my hand and watched my best friend play the music that I love. When he was introducing the song that he wrote about me, he said he was married to the most beautiful girl in the room, and I felt awe fold in on me, tearstained, wrinkled soul that I am.
And the drives, lately. The drives. Sometimes we drive around a curve and suddenly there is a view before me that is so breathtaking that I want to hurl myself into the center and drop into it like a stone into a lake. Or squeeze it, squeeze it and squeeze it. It's like the line from the Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, God's World, where she says, "That gaunt crag, to crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!" When I drove to Sacramento a couple of weeks ago I took Highway 20, through Lake County, and all along the lakes and the hillsides there were these purple flowering trees, so incredibly vivid in the brown and green hills. I rounded curve after curve calling "applause! applause!" to the purple flowering trees, because it is hard to clap when you are steering on curvy roads.
On Sunday we went out to the ranch of some new friends of ours, and again, I was stunned. We followed them home, and we left the highway to drive for about twenty more minutes along a small road that was only paved partway up. We climbed and climbed through the forest and then came out of the woods and we were surrounded by such a pastoral view of wildflowers and valleys and hills stretching off into the distance that we all gasped. There were happy cows grazing in fields, and funny-looking sheep among boulders and you could see for miles. We drove up farther and got acquainted with the house before going on a journey to find the waterfall. The kids and I climbed onto a hay bale in the back of the Kubota and I held them tight as one of our hosts drove us down steep inclines to get to the waterfall. When we got there, we sat on a warm, flat rock and Kenya had a revelation ("The water falls!") and then the kids rolled in the grass and found bugs and worms.
It was such a sweet break, such a warm and comforting day. Grass and wind revived me and I felt healed by the beauty my eyes were taking in. When we all piled into the Kubota and climbed back up to the house, our hosts fed us hot chocolate and popcorn in the sunny dining room and we ended up staying so late that Renee made dinner and we stayed for that too, and drove home tired and happy.
There have been days like these.
And yet there have been days of loss, loss that I don't know how to contain. Do I hold it in my heart, or do I open my hands and let it fly away? I am in the midst of miscarrying a baby so young I didn't know I was carrying him. I found out that I was pregnant about two minutes before I found out that I was also possibly losing the baby, and my heart lifted and then fell, and it has been like that for days now. We are not sure what is going on with you, they say. We don't know how far along you are. We think you are miscarrying. It may be ectopic, they say. And that is life-threatening, they say. We need to watch you. We need to do another sonogram.
So they have me coming every other day (driving over an hour each way) for blood work to measure my HCG levels, to make sure they are going down okay, and meanwhile I am bleeding and I am opening my hands, letting him go. It's amazing how much sorrow I feel for a baby that I wasn't planning on having. It's amazing how much my heart expanded in the short time that I prepared myself to have another baby. I would have said I couldn't handle one more thing right now, one more bit of sadness. But I guess I am, I guess I am handling it. And when I drive up to the hospital, the trees and the mountains and the grass hold me. And I see these things are from my Father, just like when people feed me and sun comes through the trees and the future doesn't seem as scary, for a moment.
Sometimes when I'm walking around the Land there will be a big noise, like a pack of wolves bursting through the brush, and it terrifies me, but then I turn and I see that it's only a flock of quail. Why do those quail need to be so scary? I think this is like the fear that overtakes me sometimes. The days ahead are only days, after all. The people are only friends. What I think are wolves are actually quail running from me, scattering from the bush with their hearts beating madly. Neither they nor I need to be afraid.
April 7, 2007
From Chinua:
My wife Rachel is in the hospital recovering from surgery. We discovered that instead of miscarrying, she had an ectopic pregnancy. It had to be removed, tubal pregnancies never result in a live birth and the mother's life can easily be lost. Thank all of you so much for you genuine concern, it is humbling. She wanted to thank everyone that has been so kind, and to let you know that God is answering many prayers.
When I saw Rachel in the recovery room, she was surrounded in white, pale skinned and woozy. Her eyes seemed to stand out, red rimmed but full and clear. I have seen her like this before; I know that this is when she is strongest. Cotton-mouthed and smiling, she said in a simple voice "Jesus has our baby now". It was audacious and shattering to the cold, beeping, clinical and hopeless room. It was very much like her.
In most times of tragedy, it is hard to understand what happens as you pass through them. I feel a small echo of how I felt when my mother died. There is a harmony to the ebb and flow of emotions that resist any simple description.
When you lose a pregnancy, you naively assume that it means you will simply sit around and be sad until you snap out of it. In reality (as I am sure that anyone who has been through the same will attest) we grieve in pieces, small parts and little private fractured moments. Those moments are interspersed with mundane feelings, elation and revelation, connection with my living family, and blank denial. There is a rhythm to it all that produces a sensation its own, not unlike the tide.
We are sad, but encouraged and drawn together, there is loss and gain. On one hand it seems natural in a way that is comforting, but absolutely tragic considering the incomprehensible purity and simplicity of such a tiny soul. The baby was five weeks and had a heartbeat.
Of course debates rage about souls, life, meaning, heaven and so forth, yet all of that feels so academic and unreal right now. Even well accepted
, well-meaning and theologically exact platitudes fail to address something far deeper rooted in all of us, something more primal. I have lost a child. I am a father of four, one was barely more than a hope. I am the beloved of the most beautiful and wonderful woman alive. She has given a tiny birth through a scalpel. To that heartbeat, we say a tiny goodbye. The Lord gives, the Lord takes, blessed be the name of the Lord.
April 9, 2007
To my sweet baby,
It was only a week that I knew about your life inside of me. The week seemed like years, though, and I still feel like your memory echoes through me, I have to remind myself that you aren't there anymore.
At first the doctors thought you were just too small to see, and then they thought that I was losing you. Later they realized that I wasn't losing you, and they thought again, maybe you were too small to see! Maybe we just needed to wait. My heart soared with hope. On Friday we saw you for the first time, on the sonogram. I saw you. You were perfect, I heard your heart beat. I knew without needing to be told that you were in the wrong place, knew from the way the technician cocked her head, caught her lip between her teeth. From the way she wouldn't quite look at me. We looked at you together, not speaking, as she got all the pictures she needed, to be sure. You were so tiny, just beginning to form. And yet that heartbeat.
Things moved quickly after that, it was my Good Friday. I felt alone, I sat while doctors poked at me and took blood and I waited. They wheeled me away, into the operating room, and then I fell apart. I shivered and tears poured out of my eyes as I lay on my back under the lights. One of the doctors took my hand and I took some breaths and thought of sending you into pure beauty.
Since I woke up I have had peace. The first person I saw was your father, and I told him about where you had gone. My heart is glad, knowing that you are still alive, that you are in the Everlasting Arms. It was so hard to know that you were there and you were perfect, but that you couldn't live. But life is all around and you are alive and we are alive and the big thing, the big loss, which is the potential in you, the potential of who you would become, is not really lost. You are all that you are meant to be now, I believe, I think you are more beautiful that I would ever have been able to see here. I can't wait to meet you, to recognize you, to become all that I was meant to be when I shed this old self.
I know, without our loss being any less valid, that there would have been harder ways to lose you. I know many people who have lost children farther along, and in unfathomable ways, and my heart hurts for them. I pray for strength for all mothers and fathers who have empty arms. The doctors were afraid that I would be sad, being in the labor and delivery wing of the hospital, but they didn't realize that life was what I needed. I needed to remember that you are alive, and to remember that I have three very alive children who were born in the same way as all those crying babies in there. I have been blessed.
I joked with the nurses, afterwards, about how I avoided cesarean birth three times but still ended up with a cesarean wound. This scar is all yours, little one, I remember you with this burning pain in my gut, I will always remember that you were here, you have not passed without making a mark. I will always think of you, my fourth child, when I think of heaven. Heaven means meeting you.
All my love,
Mama.
April 13, 2007
I lost a post last night, and waved goodbye to it as it fluttered out my window and into that land where lost posts go. I've been doing this for too long to be losing posts willy-nilly like that, but there you have it. "Live and don't learn," that's my motto, to quote Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.
It was terrifically interesting, too. Actually, not really, I think I talked about catheters and my bladder. You didn't miss much, but you'll be glad to know that my bladder is working okay again. And I talked about my desire to show people my wound, and how I have good friends who humor me, but how I still want a nurse. I like it when someone comes in to my room and checks on my incision and says, "Oh dearie, you're bruised. Poor thingy," and then clucks with her tongue and pats me on the head, and I gaze up at her patiently with so much strength, bearing the pain so heroically. I'm a good patient, a good heroine in my own drama. I also like watching the food channel with absolutely no guilt, because that's what you DO in the hospital. Watch TV, even in the middle of the day, even at 1:00 in the morning.
But other than the lack of Rachael Ray and nurses who coddle me, being home has been so sweet, and hard. Six weeks is a long time to not be able to carry anything over 10 pounds. The nurse told me the rules as I was being discharged, and I gave her a look that oozed, Come on, you are NOT serious, can you seriously expect that from me? Six WEEKS? She nodded, very serious. I don't think I'll make it, I keep forgetting to not pick up my kids. What are you supposed to do when a little missile in the shape of an edible baby comes hurtling towards you?
Unfortunately, not pick him up, in my case. So I've been sitting on the floor with my kids a lot, which the Leaf Baby loves, he always loves it when I sit on the floor. He thinks it's great fun. I honestly can't believe how this kid is becoming a kid. I know I wrote about it recently, but when he turns around and sits on my lap like I'm a little chair for him, and I can see on his face that he thinks that this is just so cool, I feel these twinges, these whispery feelings like please don't grow up. And then sometimes this brings a wave of grief and I feel empty again, missing that little baby hope inside me. I was looking at a recent photo of me, one from my Change series, I think, and I looked so happy in the photo that the grief ripples started up again. I don't feel like that girl. I feel curled up, protective. I feel wounded.
Mostly though, this grief has made me thankful. I've been given so much. I marvel over my kids, their bodies. I hold my daughter and trip out thinking about her limbs, arms and legs which are growing. I can't believe they're mine, can't believe I've been trusted like this. I guess I'm slow to understanding my own vocation. Sometimes I've whined about it. I probably will again. But I'm treasuring these days.
Last night we had a big bonfire, and a worship circle around it. The older kids love to be allowed to stay up late for these, we've been doing them weekly, and we had a bunch of guests at the Land, which was nice. There is a girl who will be living with us now, up till now she has been living in Golden Gate Park near our old home in San Francisco. Also some travelers who Chinua met in Arcata when he was taking photographs there. A couple of dogs, some more guests, our little community, and my children with me. Kenya sat in my lap and Kai lay with his head on my knee and the firelight made everyone beautiful and we all sang. I felt very blessed, like God has just opened his hands up and poured goodness into my arms, spilling around me like grain pouring from a chute. The feeling stayed with me even as Kenya pitched a mother of a fit when I decided it was time for bed. I smiled at my tired crying girl as I pajama'd her against her will and I thought— I know how just you feel, girl. But you'll feel better in the morning.
May
May 14, 2007
My birthday was amazing. After waking up covered in yellow flowers (courtesy of my Superstar Husband), I went out with my family. We played in the park, then we picked up pizzas and went to meet up with friends, where I thought we'd eat and then do cake or something. But no, I stepped inside the door and my friend Christy said, "I'm whisking you away..." and off we whisked!
I felt as though I was doing something illegal.
"Are you sure?" I asked a few times, until I was satisfied that it was going to be okay. And then I said, "I'm just wondering about the children," and Christy assured me that the children were well taken care of. So I gave myself fully into the hands of birthday whisking, which involved Sushi! and (joy upon joy) a SPA MASSAGE. I loved the massage. I was a little disconcerted by the way the lady acted as though I should know exactly what to do. "You mean I should take all of my clothes off and then get under the sheet?" I asked, sounding prudish but in actuality, I was just confused.
It was great! Of course, being me,
I had to embarrass myself a little by emerging from the massage looking as though I'd mutated into a red-eyed tree frog. I was allergic to the eye pillow the masseuse had placed over my eyes, and they swelled up into flaming red balloons. The receptionist and the masseuse turned to look at me, and their serene faces quickly became concerned. I don't think allergic reaction was the result they were going for, but my body felt very relaxed, thank you.
I recovered as we drove to our final destination, a wee party at the home of some other friends. Once again, I began to ask about the children, and everyone conjured up a story about a homeless man who assured them he'd take good care of my kids. I finally cornered someone and forced the truth out of her. "Sara's watching them," she replied, and from that moment on, I could relax.
Trees Tall as Mountains (The Journey Mama Writings: Book 1) Page 18