Category Archives: Hoping

On kindness

On Sunday morning, we woke up to a 58-degree house.  Which is not much colder than we USED TO keep it, but since having babies, it’s been warmer.  Indeed, the discovery that the furnace had broken helped alleviate our concern about the youngest, who had been crying on and off since 3 am.  Turns out he was cold.

The good news was that the high that day was predicted to be ABOVE zero — 16 degrees above zero, in fact!  But since it would drop to zero that night, and since it was a Sunday and since our furnace is old enough that the one place our heating guy could get the right part was closed and no one was returning his phone calls…well, we got that basement woodstove going and started opening cabinets.  We had some good passive solar going, and of course there was the requisite emergency baking (for the heat of the oven, you know), but it still seemed clear that we’d need a better strategy.

We considered turning off the water main and taking up a friend’s offer to stay with them that night, but that would have meant letting the woodstove go out, and that just seemed dangerous (my dad said to put antifreeze in every drain — yipes!).  But then we thought about the offer in a different way: here were friends we like but don’t get to see all that much, offering us not just a warm dinner (and cake!  CAKE!) but the whole necessary array of beds and cribs and tubs and whatnot.  Maybe, we thought, we should throw ourselves on this kindness, and see if there’s more out there, too.  So we called neighbors and ended up with two space heaters — enough to keep the pipes on each floor in good shape.  And we knew that if all else failed, we could pack up and go in the middle of the night: not one but TWO sets of friends offered to leave a door open so we could just barrel in and find our way to a bed, no matter what the time.  My favorite line from the whole experience was from our excellent neighbor Bruce said: “Whatever you need, the answer is yes.”  I breathe easier just WRITING it.  It felt like we were taken in and held by all this caring.

As I was telling my dad how all this went, he mentioned his stepson had a similar experience recently — his car broke down in front of a stranger’s house in the woods of New Hampshire, and they invited him and his five-year-old daughter in for warmth and cocoa.  As they waited for AAA and assorted paternal types to deal with the car, these kind folks chatted with Jon and Amelia, learning a) that they live near a little lake, and b) that while Amelia has snow shoes, she does not have ice skates.  So what did they do?  Went and found an outgrown pair in the closet that will fit her small feet, and gave her them, asking her merely to pass them along to another little girl when she outgrows them.

We always hear about the shootings, the disease, the fistfights, the disruptions.  We hear about the agony and the ecstasy, but we rarely hear about the simple kindness, the interconnection.  Margaret Wheatley is right, in So Far From Home, when she says “most people don’t want to know they’re interconnected…[it] is too much of a burden.  It requires that we take responsibility for noticing how we affect other people…” (p.55).  And that is monstrously hard.  But still, my theory is that there’s more basic goodness out there than we know. I believe that most humans want the opportunity to be kind, to be treated with kindness and to receive it with grace.  Our innate generosity gets papered over with cynicism, defensiveness, and fear; our natural openness gets shut off and buried like some kind of dangerous supply line that might spurt everywhere if uncontained.  And you know what?  It DOES spurt everywhere. The whole world gets wet.  Kindness begets kindness and our very vision begins to shift, peering as we do now through the soft rain of basic human goodness, visibility low so that we have to look at who and what are here right now.  But what else can we do?  Of course we look a little goofy, with our wet hair and our smiles, treating people as if they have a right to be loved. We wring ourselves out, have a laugh, and lay down in the sun to warm.

On the sweetness of children

We’ve developed something of a Goodwill habit at our house: I hunt down old sweaters and velvet to upcycle (and, of course, the occasional fabulous garment to wear), and the boys find books and toys.  We’ve had amazingly good luck lately, and the visits are fun for all of us.

On our trip yesterday, several people commented on how sweet my boys are.  One lady in particular did it at length and with the kind of pointed remarks and sidelong glances that made me look around for the other, less-than-sweet boys who were being implicitly criticized.  But it seemed she was entirely genuine.  I was pleased and gratified, of course, and I agreed with her: I DO have sweet boys.  Much of the time.  And, I explained, when they aren’t being sweet, well then, we aren’t out.  For long.

I realized as I said it that I may have finally cracked the code of all the “Love and Logic” and “Aha! Parenting” approaches.  If you can let go of your own agenda and your own attitude for long enough (which I find really really hard), you can really BE with your kids and hear how THEY are doing.  Which gives you either a vast array of emotional responses (anger, resentment, frustration, grief…) or, much more simply, a clear choice: to keep grumpy kids at home or to take them out in the world, knowing full well what that may entail.  On days when I’m close to my best self, like yesterday, I can make that choice and then not be particularly put out if the trip causes more turmoil instead of less.  In fact, yesterday we even had some moments of near-meltdown in the toy section, which led to me calmly crouching down by Ezra and explaining that we could stay and browse if he could be quieter and a good listener, or we could go home.  I suspect it was my (I confess) unusual calmness and rationality in meeting his little outburst that caused it to settle so fast.  But it was not ten minutes later when the kind lady started saying such nice things about him.

I’m kind of thrilled that these lessons are slowly settling in, slowly coming to life in how I actually work rather than how I’d LIKE to work.  Just showing up without an agenda makes it weirdly possible to pursue my agenda.  Being present to all the humor and chaos of my boys helps them tune into ME, too, so that when I’m fed to the eyeteeth with toys underfoot, we can have a cleanup game, together.  With dancing.  I feel like we’re all trained to find peace by escaping upheaval — but sometimes our lives ARE the upheaval, and the only peace (of hope of accomplishment) is relaxing into it.  If you can’t get out of it, get into it.  Like swimming, I guess: it’s when we stop thrashing with fear and exhaustion that our bodies can finally teach us to float, eyes closed, belly-up to the sun.

Friends: to have and to hold

I recently read Pam Houston’s latest book, “Contents May Have Shifted.”  Like most of her work, it’s a fascinating inside look at globetrotting, wilderness survival (usually both of those, together), relationships with men, and some measure of recovery from an abusive childhood.  And all of them lean heavily on her friendships with women — rich, whole, complicated, open, hilarious, and intimate. Most of the time, these friendships seem like backstory, or like the tide that moves her life, enabling her to cope with everything else.  But for the first time in this novel, it hit me: these friendships are her LIFE.  For real.

So of course it got me thinking about my own friendships, the handful of extraordinary women I treasure around the globe, and how the first thing I got when I had a baby was a bluetooth so I could talk while nursing.  Well, eventually my bluetooth died and I had another baby and then it just came to pass that most of my conversations with my friends were in my head.  And since that’s the kind of people these women are, it was okay just to touch base every six (or eighteen) months.  But here’s the thing: I MISS them.  I miss the sound of their voices, the stories of their cooking, their kids, their bosses, their wardrobes, their reading, their vacations, their partners, their home improvement projects, their yoga mishaps, their favorite new wine, their afternoon tea habits.  I miss the gestures that you can’t get over the phone anyway, but at least the turns of phrase will help.  It occurs to me that handwriting is an excellent substitute, so I’m digging up my stash of cards and trying to locate some stamps.  (STAMPS?)

How do we end up here, more connected than ever and yet so busy and distracted that we forget to even WANT the kind of deep connection that used to be the whole point?  And more significantly, how do we get back?  Or how do we move forward into each other’s lives in ways that honor what all we’ve got going on AND our need for each other?  How do we construct a village when we live so scattered?  I realize this is largely what the blogosphere has done for many of us, and I am powerfully grateful.  But there’s more to it than that, and I want to live in it.  So I’m trying harder to live like Pam (or her characters; that’s always a little fuzzy): to let people in, even right from the beginning.  To recognize the connection that’s there rather than play it down.  To issue invitations and keep issuing invitations; to go when and where you are invited.  To bring things with you, however small.  To realize that thank-you notes are not always about formality but are often actually about real gratitude that doesn’t NEED to be expressed but that WANTS to be.

I called a dear friend yesterday to see how her boys were recovering from the flu, and we had a hilarious hour of conversation, punctuated by the games and needs and uproar of our collective male offspring.  At one point, her four-year-old, who now has a suspected stomach bug, dragged his exhausted body across the floor to her, every fiber of his being working toward, it appeared, resisting the need to vomit.  She’s offering me a cautious “hang on a minute…” when I hear her boy ask in a sprightly way: “Who ya talkin to?”  Surprise!  He’s fine.  Just enjoying the drama of mama home — again — with all their illnesses.  She sighed, appropriately pleased to be still clean and dry, and told me in a thoughtful way: “You know, I’m really glad you called.  I don’t think I could have made it through another one of these days.  I may call you again this afternoon.”  You see?  We are lifelines, and laughter, and succor, and sanity.  We are, it often seems, all we’ve really got.  Which is absurd, in many ways, but you know what I mean: we are the only ones who get us completely, who ARE us, in a certain way.  So if our job is to be present to ourselves, surely that means in part being present to our better selves, wherever and in whomever those selves are located.

Small achievements, small regrets

I’m trying to keep things small these days.  So those ambitious and beautiful patchwork velvet scarves recycled from old clothes — well, those haven’t been happening, except in my head.  The PLANS have been laid for a month now.  But apparently the downside of the otherwise-totally-awesome upcycling process is that you have to first “make” your “fabric.”  Which means cutting into something with many possible uses and which may or may not be replicable.  (I realize this is how you tell the newbies from the old hands in this work — the old hands know there’s always something else awesome out there.  I don’t, yet.)  So I agonize over the cutting and spend lots of time trying to decide whether to rip out seams or cut them out (old velvet: the answer is cut them out, because once the ripping is over, your fabric is likely to rip along the stitch line anyway).  Today, instead of beating myself up for not making the scarves, I decided to just make rectangles.  It took me much of the morning, since I was working with tailored garments, one of which even seemed to be bias-cut AND was heading toward its at-least-third life in my hands.

But now I have gorgeous, sumptuous rectangles that both babies want to get their hands all over.  Thank goodness for scraps.  (Or, according to the scared voice in my head who always promotes the logic of scarcity, I have now ruined the potential of several neat old garments.  Good thing I didn’t yet cut up that sweet little coat I’ve been considering.)

The other big achievement of the morning was finding Malachi in a still moment and snipping off his curly little mullet.  I did this with the relish (and, apparently, thoughtlessness) of someone who has been casually watching for just such a chance.  Once it came, I didn’t really ponder why I was taking it.  But take it I did, and the smallest among us now has more respectably short hair.  As I took the curls and the baby into the kitchen, replete with a strange sense of swollen, senseless grief, Len cheerfully announced: “No more first haircuts!”  and the tears spilled over.  Since then, I’ve also realized that winter in Maine is not necessarily the time to cut off a baby’s neck-warmer.  But I think I’m mostly just a loving mama who is hardwired for regret, and so this seems like a big one that I didn’t properly anticipate.

It’s like the life-management metaphor of juggling various balls: just know which are made of glass and which of rubber.  Cutting up fabric is really only ever cutting up fabric.  And basically, you could say the same thing about your child’s hair.  But when you realize that you just altered a particular way of being when you’d give your soul not to alter it, well, that’s a little painful.  And silly, of course.  I’m working on letting go of my attachment to his hair.  But I will say this: I’m looking forward to it growing back.

One of the ways you know you’re living with the right people

backlit paperwhite

This morning was a hurried morning, as they usually are.  Potty training isn’t making life any easier yet.

Malachi surprised all of us by sleeping tall paperwhitewell from midnight to 6, so he awoke confused and starvacious. Ezra announced he did not sleep enough, which was why he was sad and grumpy and unable to use his big-boy voice.  There were Cheerios everywhere and Sunbutter on my sleeve and coffee splatter on Len’s work tie.  In the midst of all this noise and hustle, the sun rises above the neighbor’s trees and beams directly in the eastern window, backlighting the newly-unfurled  paperwhite so that it glows, transformed, a fierce beacon on a fragile stalk.  Ezra and Len and I stare amazed for a moment before I grab my phone/camera; then Len grabs his and Ezra starts grabbing at our waists for us to lift him up to see. Malachi, strapped into his high chair, spends some time trying to owl his neck all the way around and then gives it up, content to eat and watch us watching.  Where else, I ask you, would I find people so willing to let their lives be altered by such a brief moment of beauty?  Who else would see this and drop everything to stand in its light, breathing more quietly while we wait for the sun to shift?

On letting go of the story line

Pema Chodron, in various of her works, talks about “letting go of the story line” as one of the crucial skills that enables us to stick with the practice of living, of being present to our lives.  I had never even heard the concept until I went to a retreat she was running at Omega when I was 35 weeks pregnant.  The retreat was called “Smiling at Fear,” which seemed like a good idea, as I had just left not only a job but a whole career I’d spent 15 years building AND I was about to have my first child.  I was working and working at the concept of befriending my negative emotions and I just couldn’t see how you make friends with a runaway train and I was feeling the old desperation rise up in my throat.  But then she said that about the story line, and how we spend so much of our lives acting out particular stories that we feel define us, and all of a sudden I could see it.  Even THIS, the process of wanting to shift something and not being able to, was a story line I was committed to.  So what happens if we let go?  Well, it turned out that letting go of that one meant that I could just BE there — in a beautiful warm room with two extraordinary friends and several hundred other fascinating people.  With a wise and holy teacher before me and another one inside me: that joyful acrobat in my belly has never since stopped teaching me.  I was able to breathe, to stretch, to sit in quiet and gratitude.

I think often of the challenge of setting down the story line, and less often I actually remember to do it.  But sometimes life surprises me.  Yesterday, for example, was full of surprises.  My 14-year-old car had been making some terrible noises, and I realized that I really didn’t want it on the road, much less carrying me and my two precious babes.  I had convinced myself that it was a clutch problem, or worse, and that now, here, finally was the repair job that would be the death of Hubert (yes, after the excellent bloodhound in Best in Show.  We generally name our cars after dogs).  So I prepared for the worst by doing what I do: managing for time and money.  We spent some time looking up used cars online, and I concluded that Tuesday’s lineup of meetings would give me only four hours for car repair, so we’d better the diagnostics done Monday.  I called the shop (Center Street Auto in Auburn, Maine — if ever you need anything, they ROCK), and they graciously agreed to take a quick look for diagnostics if I came in at 11.  So both boys and I “took Hubert to the car doctor.”  Twenty minutes later, they handed back the keys, having identified and fixed a loosening wheel (!!!).  No cost, no trouble, no major life shift.  Oh!  Look at that.  I had the story all wrong.  Which is reason number 2 for setting down the story line: first, it makes you crazy if you let it define your life, and second, you might not even have the right story.

When we get home, I gratefully remove all the winter accoutrements from our three persons and head to the kitchen to figure out lunch.  But there’s water in the disposal (which is the only drain in our kitchen sink and which, we know from past experience, has no main drain cleanout beneath it, so any serious problem in the pipe becomes a serious plumbing issue in the house).  AH, I think.  There it is.  Not the car but the plumbing.  THAT will be our major problem.  But before I despair completely, I figure I’ll do the recon I’d feel stupid to skip: and of course, the under-sink unit had merely become unplugged somehow.  Crisis averted.  Story line aborted.  Or perhaps there’s a different story line starting to form: maybe I am a resourceful protagonist who can sometimes solve her own problems and so doesn’t need to freak out about them.  Everything in its own time, eh?

It was a sunny day, and warm (upper 20’s), and we still had a nice foot of snow on the ground, so I hauled both boys outside after naptime.  The storyline there is about hassle pre- and post- and about crying over snow in the wrists while we’re out there.  But I announced we’d have outside time, and by golly we did.  Ezra helped me pull Malachi in the little red sled and went down the hill twice himself; he even made the lower half of a snow angel. Twenty minutes of enjoyment outside and we went in for warm snacks.  The sun slanted glowingly into the kitchen; the neighbors’ trees were all bronzed and rosy at their tips; the startlingly clear sky showed not one but three jet trails, brighter than light, converging slowly toward Portland. Of course there’s going to be whining, I thought.  Of course the snow gets in at our wrists, right where our skin is most fragile and thin.  But this does not mean we stay inside.  We try to remember that we will warm up again; we zip up and tuck in and open our eyes to the sky.

On intentions and resolutions and out with the old and all that

One of my more delightful projects, since leaving full-time work, has been facilitating some discussion series for the Maine Humanities Council at our local public library.  The second of those, just completed, was on the contemporary detective novel as social novel — we read Laurie King, Tony Hillerman, Eliot Pattison, and Katherine V. Forrest.  In each of these, there’s the age-old tension between the-way-things-have-always-been and the forces of modernity; scholars of postcolonial theory will recognize all the makings of hybridity, of a world that is many things, combined, and that therefore is more complex and less easily boxed up than we might like.  Hillerman says it best, in “Dance Hall of the Dead,” when a character mentions the motto over the entryway of an Indian reservation school: “Tradition is the enemy of progress.”  Under these auspices, kids were pulled from their families, beaten for speaking their native languages, and turned from their cultural heritage.

What the heck does this have to do with New Year’s?  I’ve been thinking about the innate violence of resolutions, the way many of us feel encouraged now to excise the warts of our being and stitch up the wounds ourselves.  Lose weight (you fat slob); lay off the booze (though you’ll be dead boring if you do); stop cursing (what the #*&^! for?); get a damn job (unless you’re actually as worthless as you seem).  It’s a tough time of year anyway, and when you add in all that stock-taking and all those toggle-switch models of change (flip UP for good behavior, DOWN for bad), well, it gets plain painful.  I am, however, a big fan of the “intention” — a gentler, kinder version of a resolution that seems to start from the premise of oneself as a decent, rational, perhaps even lovable being, with a desire to commit to certain shifts.  Intentions seem to make room for human foibles; they seem less apt to end up as “successes” or “failures.”  Perhaps this is because of the kinds of traditions they stem from — Buddhist, yogic, mindful, generous.  These are traditions that accept us unconditionally, that insist, in fact, upon us being always and only who we are, warts and all.   In my book, these kinds of traditions are the only possibility for progress, largely because they don’t make room for the concept of “enemy.”  There’s you, there’s me, there’s the world, and we’re all just trying to get along without mauling ourselves or each other too badly.  I intend, then, to be kinder and more accepting of myself and others; I intend to honor the old as well as the new, in others and in myself.  I intend to seek transformation and positive change in myself and others (like, for example, potty-training); I intend to love us all as hard as is humanly possible in the process.

On Frost and Other Calamities (or: a response to Newtown)

I was driving to Portland (Maine) today and was moved by the depth and consistency of frost everywhere, on everything.  And this came to me. After the day’s events (I wrote this on December 14th), which leave me stunned, horrified, aching, desperate in my fear and grief, I feel muted, like this is the only thing I have to say.

We are told the logic of it

the process by which moist air cools, freezes,

drapes itself over plants.

But you’d think it was otherwise, that

rime so even and so evenly

distributed could not come from the whimsy

of the world.  It must

emerge from the thing itself, from

a thin bitter core

osmosing outward to protect the plant,

to armor its arms before the onslaught,

the fracture, the glorious glisten.

This time, when warmth comes, they wilt into the soil.

But now, every surface bristles with glow, sculpted by chill.
Surely there are not so many contact points as that; surely 
we do not live quite that vulnerable, exposed 
to the air like sores.  Surely 
this armor must be necessary.  Surely 
there is a purpose to this hardness, this crystalline crust:  
the discovery of all our touchingness, every surface an opportunity
for damage, for light?

On the sense(s) of love

Ezra, in the throes of recovery from several simultaneous dread diseases, ate something close to an actual dinner tonight. This led to a significant increase in chattiness at bedtime. In the dark, as he’s supposed to be falling asleep snuggled next to me, he offers in an enthusiastic whisper: “Mama? Red-eyed tree frogs have red toes. And they’re sticky so they can climb every something they want to climb. And they can jump every jump they want to jump.” As Kingsolver once said: “It is senseless to love anything this much.”

Here’s the thing about love: it shows up in more ways than you thought were possible.  It’s in the color of your kid’s hair and eyes; the tiny muscles of his chest; the sweet rancid smell of his morning breath; the blurred speed of his words as he tells a very important story very fast; the giggle as his baby brother pats his back for the first time.  It’s in his hearty rendering of ABC’s (both “his” version and Alpha-Pig’s version) in the back seat of the car; his intense concentration on linking up his wooden train set; his fierce insistence that the LYING DOWN tiger sticker is more important than the WALKING AROUND tiger sticker.  The stone-amber of his eyes; the quick intelligence of his mind; the unselfconsciousness of his dancing.

When he was a baby, Ezra had a tendency to touch, with one hand, a mole on my chest while he nursed.  Little did I know that that habit meant my cleavage would become his “lovey,” his touchstone, his ultimate source of comfort.  For days, now, during his illnesses, he’s been ritually grabbing for my chest, despite the fact that he hasn’t nursed in eighteen months.  And tonight, as we lay reading “The Library Lion,” he said, “Hey, Mama?  Is it okay if I take a break now?  I need to use this finger to count the children.”  In the library in the book, he meant.  I have new hope for tomorrow.

On gifts, especially hope

We travel to New Hampshire at most Christmases when we don’t have a brand-new baby (or the threat of one), to see my dad and stepmother.  They live in a beautiful house they designed and built, completely off-grid, on a mountaintop in the Monadnock region.  It is, I always say, a wonderful house from which to be in the world.  That sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s not: the house is full of windows, as its primary energy sources are active and passive solar, and out every window is a vista of striking beauty.  Just being here is restorative, but also inspiring, and the back-and-forth between the two sensations is little short of a miracle.

I’ve been thinking about inspiration a lot, lately, in all of its forms, and about miracles.  It’s hard to think of one, I suppose, without the other.  I mean the Thich Nhat Hahn version of miracles rather than the standard Christian varieties (the miracle, he says, is not to walk on the water; the miracle, he says, is to walk on the earth).  But at Christmas time, I am reminded that much of humanity heralds as a miracle the birth of an infant around this time, and his astonishing gifts of kindness, courage, generosity, and clear sight.  Having two small boys of my own is miraculous enough to me — their small hands (Chi’s fingers, I decided yesterday, measure nearly an inch now, from tip to dimple) — but that they occasionally also exhibit these larger gifts is staggering.  It gives me, in a phrase, hope for humanity.

Barbara Kingsolver’s character Codi in the unparalleled Animal Dreams struggles with hope, having learned early that loss hurts (here we remember The Princess Bride: “Life IS pain, highness.  Anyone who says otherwise is selling something).  But Codi has a sister, Hallie, who lives inside her hope: “What I want is so basic I’m almost embarrassed to say it.  Elementary kindness.  Enough to eat, enough to go around.  That kids might grow up one day to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.”  I’m paraphrasing, since I left the novel at home, but I’ve read enough times to be fairly sure I’m close.  Hallie says, “The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for.  The very most you can do is live inside that hope.” It’s easier to live in what’s already around you, to try to welcome that or at least not fight it tooth and nail, and to try to make small differences where possible.  But this, I know, demands a shift in what Kingsolver dubs “ground orientation.”  As Codi says, “I’d spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for signs of life.  Hallie was down there living it.”  Perhaps the hope, then, is not necessarily the abstract kind that sets lofty goals and five-year plans.  Or perhaps it might be, depending on the person.  For me, the hope seems smaller, more local, at least these days.

And as I write that, I realize that I’m fulfilling the prophecy of Loyd in that novel, whose brief disquisition on what animals dream about constructs the title of the novel.  “I think animals dream about whatever they do in real life…it’s the same with people…your life, what you do and all that, it’s not separate from your dreams, it grows up out of them.  So if you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.”  (This section is horribly bastardized, a hybrid misquote from a longer conversation.  But you get the idea.)  So as my life has shrunk, and yet expanded in a L’Engle-esque miracle, my dreams have shrunk.  Perhaps I should say, focused. And I’m eager to see the bigger work return to center stage, because I still believe in the macro-levels of  hope that are realized from there.  And yet, at Christmas, it’s easy to be reminded as all mothers are, that in each child lie the seeds of transformation, of hope, for us and for the world.  It’s possible — I might even say it’s likely — that we are, each of us, the gift of hope, the possibility of honesty and beauty and love.