Month: March 2010

When Whit was a cheetah

Some pictures and a memory from the archives.

On December 22nd, 2005, we woke up thinking Whit had chicken pox. I was excited, and had big plans to put Grace and he in bed together so they both got it (I would love to have avoided that vaccination which seems unnecessary to me). I took him to the doctor that morning and was told it was, in fact, an allergic reaction to amoxicillin. Apparently Whit had a textbook presentation of this allergy: second course of amoxicillin, day 8 or 9. Precisely.He was covered in red spots which were rapidly swelling and growing. The doctor switched his antibiotic and sent us home. Friday morning Whit was worse, with well more than half of his body covered in hives. I went back to the doctor who diagnosed Whit with Stephens-Johnson syndrome. My wonderful, calm doctor (who once told me of a 105 degree fever at 11pm to give Tylenol and see how it was in the morning) told me that the syndrome was a spectrum. On one side, he said, is a “mild rash.” “And on the other?” I asked, obviously. “Um, well, death.” Great. Thanks. He sent us to the Children’s Hospital ER.

To make a long story short, Whit and I went to the Children’s ER on the mornings of both the 23rd and the 24th of December. In each case they observed him, took temperatures, and sent us home.When released from Children’s around noon on the 24th I thought Whit was improving. He had shown no appetite at all and had barely taken any formula. He seemed quiet and listless but not unhappy. As I got the children ready for Christmas Eve dinner at my parents, he threw up violently. I paged the pediatrician’s office, nervous about bothering them on December 24th. One of the other two pediatricians in the practice, not my own, called me back. She told me to watch him, to give him pedialyte in whatever way possible (turned out that the baby Motrin syringe was the only way) and to call back immediately if he threw up again. He was at this point running a fever of about 100 and was about 80% covered in raised red welts.

That evening we celebrated Christmas Eve at my parents’ house with my family’s oldest, dearest friends. I was preoccupied and nervous. I kept injecting his mouth with teaspoonsful of pedialyte, one at a time. He was quiet, almost unnervingly so. Around 7, as everyone prepared to sit down, I took him to my parents’ bedroom to change his diaper. He threw up all over me. I called the doctor as advised and she told me to go immediately to the Children’s ER.

Hilary came with me and Matt stayed with Grace. I drove like a bat out of hell. The Children’s Hospital ER on Christmas Eve? Pretty close to how I imagine Calcutta. Let’s just say we were not the only people there. I can say, though, that if you need attention in this kind of setting, just throw out Stephens-Johnson Syndrome. The seas parted and they took us immediately to a room. Whit was put back into his third hospital johnny in two days and they decided to start an IV. No easy feat with a very dehydrated baby.

I consider myself a fairly unsqueamish person, and have watched my children endure all kinds of injuries, have personally held Grace down while she got stitches in her face, etc. But this was too much for me. After they had tried unsuccessfully four times to insert his IV I had to leave the room. Hilary stayed with him. They finally got the IV into him and he spent most of his first Christmas Eve at Children’s Hospital.

Whit did not have to go back to Children’s after that. The rash receeded, though slowly. We stay away from all – cillins. Whit is officially my “allergic” child. While Whit has no memory of this, Grace does, referring to the incident as “when Whitty was a cheetah.” It’s become a humorous part of the family lore, but the memory always tugs at me beneath the laughter.
That Christmas Eve, Whit’s first, will be vivid in my memory forever. Sitting there on a gurney with my johnny-clad son lying listlessly on my chest, I felt aware, suddenly and heavily, of the responsibility of being a parent. I felt like the adult for the first time. This was the first time (and other than Whit’s second nut allergic episode, exactly one year ago, the only) I’ve ever truly feared for my child’s health or well-being. And yes, yes lo what a blessing that is. How lucky I am. I know. I promise, I know.
The fragility of all felt overwhelming, the gossamer sheerness of the normalcy we take for granted every day suddenly impossibly thin. I am ashamed that I cannot translate these experiences into more humility and gratitude every single day. But in remembering them I am spurred, anew, to this gratitude.

I am grateful, sad, scared, and in the middle of my life.

With so much gratitude to Alana at Whole Self Coach for this wonderful meme, and belated thanks for the Sunshine Award! I’d love to hear any of your answers to these simple but thought-provoking questions

I am: Sitting in bed next to my son. Grateful. Sad. Scared of change. In the middle of my life.

I think: Too much. Sometimes self-defeatingly.

I know: Less than ever, almost nothing for sure.

I want: To believe in something. To know that my faith will catch me if I fall and that there is grace for us all.

I have: So much more than I need.

I dislike: Entitlement. Unkindness. Rudeness.

I miss: My grandmothers.

I fear: Abandonment. Loss. That I am squandering my life.

I feel: All the time. So intensely that it often makes me cry.

I hear: My son whispering to himself as he builds a Lego on the floor next to me.

I smell: Sunscreen, laundry, and, faintly, the Goldfish he is eating.

I crave: Safety. To be seen and known, completely, and loved anyway.

I usually: Take things far too personally.

I search: For the glowing, surpassing sense of peace that visits me, infrequently but undeniably. Usually it comes in words, the sky, or the sleeping faces of my children.

I wonder: What the months and years ahead hold. What Grace and Whit will remember from these days. What I am supposed to be doing in the world.

I regret: More than I can enumerate.

I love: My children. My family. My dearest friends, who know who they are. Words. Running. The sky.

I care: Deeply. About homelessness. About education. That the people who matter to me know that they are loved.

I am always: Early.

I worry: About big things that I cannot control. The economy. The environment. Change in general. As a child, every single night, I prayed that there be peace on earth and no nuclear war. Literally, for years and years that was the one thing I prayed for.

I remember: Many small moments, preserved like so many tiny jeweled Faberge eggs in my memory. My teacher, Mr. Valhouli, who was the first person to really light me on fire about the power of words and literature.

I dance: Infrequently. Dancing with me is like driving a truck.

I sing: Poorly. It is the thing I am worst at in the world.

I don’t always: Remember that most of what other people say and do is about them, not me.

I argue: Too often.

I write: Because I can’t not. To find out what I think.

I lose: At board games and leisure sports, all the time.

I wish: That everyone had a roof over their head. That I could turn off my brain sometimes. That I could be a more sunny and more serene mother for my children.

I listen: Not as well as I should.

I don’t understand: Very much at all.

I can usually be found: At my computer, in my little third-floor office looking out of the window.

I am scared: That the people I love most will leave me. That I am not contributing enough to the world.

I need: 8 hours of sleep a night.

I forget: How to speak French. Almost anything of importance. My own email address, sometimes.

I am happy: Near the ocean. On transatlantic flights. In the pages of a beautiful book. When I am able to be still with my children. In the presence of dear, trusted native-speaker friends.

Kelly Corrigan: I dare you

Sometimes the biggest secret women keep is what they really want to do with their lives.

Go on: I dare you.

(I dislike watching video on the computer, intensely, but this is worth it)

The Gift of an Ordinary Day

A beloved blog reader sent me the YouTube video of Katrina Kenison reading from her book, The Gift of an Ordinary Day. Predictably, the video made me cry, hard. I ordered the book immediately and it sat on my bedside table for a few days before I picked it up. And then. I read it, in a couple of long sittings, underlining and nodding vigorously as I went. In the simplest terms, this is the poetry of midlife, and a heartfelt exploration of loss. Kenison describes a vague but growing sense of unease in her comfortable suburban life that reminded me of both Dani Shapiro’s description in Devotion of being pushed from behind and my own deep, restless discomfort.

Kenison describes this feeling beautifully: “Watching my sons growing and changing so visibly, almost from one day to the next, I sensed something inside me breaking loose and changing as well, something no less powerful for being invisible.” She and her husband make a decision to leave their familiar town without being entirely sure where they are going. They move in with her parents and eventually buy a small and falling-down house on a hilltop in rural New Hampshire.

The book traces a summer spent in the cabin on the hill, the decision to raze it and the process of building a new home in the same location. Kenison is a gifted chronicler of the everyday: under her steady gaze the most mundane moments become luminous pearls. She describes a late-in-the-day snowshoe with her son and the way that a sunset brings meaning and color to an entire day, the lessons learned in the careful, rote stripping of years and years of paint from their cottage’s old doors, intended for reuse, and the heartbreaking mix of pride and sadness in watching her older son across a college cafeteria, chatting with sophomores and seemingly already right at home.

The book is suffused with loss. Kenison explores the very same themes that preoccupy me every single day. She wrestles with the impermanence of life, the inevitability of time’s moving forward, and the profound desire to recognize the beauty right in front of her. The project of building a house and of falling in love with a specific landscape becomes a metaphor for finally putting down roots, literal and symbolic. This, of course, entails closing doors and accepting what will never be, which Kenison acknowledges and mourns.

Being alive, it seems, means learning to bear the weight of the passing of all things. It means finding a way to lightly hold all the places we’ve loved and left anyway, all the moments and days and years that have already been lived and lost to memory, even as we live on in the here and now, knowing full well that this moment, too, is already gone. It means, always, allowing for the hard truth of endings. It means, too, keeping faith in beginnings.

Another theme that Kenison speaks about is the importance of making space for her sons to simply be. She describes the difficulty of ignoring the culture’s “siren call” but is delighted about the summer in the cabin when the family does nothing. She is passionate about giving her sons the space to daydream and to become themselves. This is so resonant for me, and of course I am reassured to have such an eloquent and intelligent person advocating the view I share.

As Kenison unpacks boxes in her new home she stumbles upon a pile of old journals. In their pages she rediscovers her old self, from 10 and 15 years ago. She realizes that her desire to live in the moments of her life, to really see the peace and the beauty that she knows is heaped in front of her has always been there.

This, I realize, is what I’ve wanted all along: to be more attentive, to honor the flow of days, the passing of time, the richness of everyday life. Some part of me has always known it, known it well enough, apparently, to write it down, over and over again, year after year. Finally, there is another part of me that’s ready to stop and listen to what I’ve been telling myself, ready to pay attention to what I know.

She knows that she already knows the answers, such as they are. Perhaps, really, there is no single answer, but only more questions. Still, to sit with oneself and to learn what we already know: this is no small feat, no simple task. It takes maturity and wisdom and peace. To be quiet enough to trust what our body, and our spirit, is telling us. Kenison etches this journey in gorgeous, simple words: the faint markings of the first frost on a window come to mind, lit to sparkling brilliance by the sun coming up. Her search is both blindingly simple and the most complicated thing in the world: to know who she is, out beyond the traditional markers of identity (“mother,” “wife,” “publisher,” “writer”) and to recognize that much life’s task is to say goodbye. To those we love, to places that have held us, to versions of ourselves we may have been very invested in.

In the keen awareness of her son’s movement away from her, Kenison hears the call to grow herself. This, of course, takes faith: in the face of fear and change, it would be easy to instead cling to the familiar, to make a shrine of that which has always been known, always worked. But no.

I know I can’t make time slow down, can’t hold our life as it is in a freeze frame or slow my children’s inexorable journeys into adulthood and lives of their own. But I can celebrate those journeys by bearing witness to them, by paying attention, and, perhaps most of all, by carrying on with my own growth and becoming.

That is what this book is. It is a beautiful witnessing of Kenison’s ordinary family life and of her growing sons. It is a record of three unsettled years of moving towards a new definition of home. And it is the commitment of a woman at midlife to continuing to grow, which means letting go of old identifiers and, ultimately, coming home to herself. In moving foward we circle back, we women do, to something that has always been true but that has required a certain amount of life experience for us to be able to see. Doors open and doors close, we move resolutely forward, yet we also dance back to something primal and primitive. We must accept that every single moment is limned with loss.

The transience of life breaks our hearts and also gives them back to us. In letting go of our attachment to the now we are pierced with loss, but we also know something new will come. Kenison quotes Jack Kornfield, “To live is to die to how we wanted it to be,” expressing the interconnectedness of true awareness and painful loss. It is in trusting the journey that peace comes. My favorite line from the book is this one, towards the end:

The future is never ours to call anyway. No matter how carefully we may try to orchestrate or foretell outcomes, there are forces at work in this universe that are far more powerful than any of our human machinations. So be it. We all learn by going where we need to go. Let us welcome the mystery then, and trust that what is meant to be, will be.

Read this book. It will sweep over you like a wave of truth, like the soft morning air at the ocean, like the smile of a good friend. If you are interested in what it means to be a mother, a woman, a seeker of peace and contentedness, you will find much here to love. This is a much, much more beautiful rendering of many of the thoughts and fears that are dearest to my heart. Thank you, Katrina Kenison. Thank you.