oh this is hard

Working mom snow day

snow day picnic

This is what happened a few weeks ago, during Nemo: Friday, snowday.  Monday, snowday.  Tuesday, conference day.  I work full time.  I do not have anywhere near full time childcare.  Put these things together and you create a difficult brew with the potential for raised voices, frustration, and hurt feelings.  I think of the witches at the start of MacBeth, even.

Because I had known all along we weren’t going to have school on Tuesday, I’d booked Monday solid.  From 8am to 4:30 I had phone calls in 30 minute increments.  Sunday evening, the phone rang and the school’s number came up on caller ID.  I picked up, my stomach sinking.  The familiar automated voice began … Another snow day.

As my friend Christine says, I love when I can be relaxed and roll with a snow day.  I love when – and this is sometimes true – I’m able to reschedule things and spend the day sledding, baking cookies, and just hanging out.  But at this particular moment, I couldn’t be that mother.  I was just grateful that my office is in my house, so I could at least be in the building with Grace and Whit.  I know a lot of people don’t have this luxury.

All morning long I ran back and forth between my office and the family room.  I set the kids up with a big game of War with my grandfather’s old orange and black cards before capitulating and letting them have their screens.  Whit played Minecraft and Grace played games with cartoon dogs on her itouch.  It was mostly calm.  But I could hear them talking when I was on my work calls, and could see my email piling up during the minutes I stayed with them.  The strands of my life, which mostly keep me steady, upright, pulled at me from all sides.

I had already packed lunch before the snow day call came, so we brought down a blanket, spread it out on the kitchen floor, and the kids had a picnic with their lunchboxes.  They were slow to eat, and finally I had to go upstairs for an interview on the phone, and Grace sat on the floor, arms crossed, crying, angry that I was abandoning them during lunch.  A few minutes into my call I heard their quiet footsteps on the hardwood floor outside my closed office door, and then the soft click of the family room door closing behind them.   Throughout that phone call I was distracted, heavy with sorrow, aware of all the things I am not doing well enough.

That night, as I tucked her in, Grace said her prayers as usual.  These prayers vary slightly day to day, thought they are always a simple list of thanks.  This is so without my ever having coached her; it’s just her instinct. The impulse to say thank you must run in our family.

That night, my day of imperfect juggling of their needs and those of work, Grace said, “Thank you for so much screen time.”  Oh, great.  But then she said, “Thank you for letting Mummy work from home.”  My eyes filled with tears.  And then she continued, “And thank you for getting to live in this awesome world,” and I felt a rush of something like gratitude, something like forgiveness, something like grace.

Few things reveal the cracks and crevasses in a life like a snow day when you’re a working parent (particularly the one who has primary responsibility for the children that day).  I’ve noted before that my family’s life spins fast, and that we all, and me especially, keep a lot of balls in the air.  Most of the time this works for us.  But on a snow day the tightrope that I walk every day feels tauter, less forgiving, and a fall seems more likely, more perilous.  I remind myself, always, firmly, that this is a conflict of privilege, that having both work and children I love is a tremendous blessing.  I think of my childless 26 year old self, boldly saying this to a roomful of much older women, all mothers.  What I’ve learned, though, is I can be aware of my good fortune and still exhausted by the demands it brings, still sliced – to ribbons! – by the sharp edges of my commitments, my promises, my loves.

Tears at hockey

IMG_7101

From a more placid moment last week

I recognize that things are moving fast most of the time in our family, and that I have a lot of things I’m trying to do, but most of the time it feels like it hangs together.  Usually we even fit in time for some quiet reading and a walk around the block and a few minutes of downtime.  That and hundreds of emails and writing and running and packing lunches and laundry and cooking and … well, writing that makes me tired.  Still, most days, my life – and that of my family – works.

Except when it doesn’t.

Last Monday was one of those days.  I had forgotten that Whit had hockey even though it was a holiday, so at the last minute I had to move my mother’s planned dinner-at-home visit to late afternoon.  We were running late for hockey, and I was snappy and frustrated.  By the time I got Grace and Whit into the car, hockey pads mostly (but not all) on, and headed in the light snow to pick up Whit’s teammate for practice, I was on the verge of tears.

It can turn so fast, can’t it?  Just the night before we had had a wonderful celebration of Whit, dinner at his favorite restaurant, a homemade cake (triple chocolate, which had required my going to three stores to get the ingredients) and presents.  I’d sat at our dining room table, watching the faces of my family in the flicker of candlelight, feeling calm, grateful.  My boy was eight.

But now I stood by the side of the hockey rink, fighting tears.  It was freezing, and in my rush I hadn’t brought a hat or gloves.  I jammed my hands into the pockets of my down coat and pressed my forehead against the cold plexiglass between the rink and me.  I watched Whit skate, feeling my breath coming fast and a tightness in my chest:  I am trying to do so much all at once.  Because of this, I do everything badly.  I am just so tired.

I drew a ragged breath and fought to control the tide of sorrow that rose inside me.  Suddenly I heard Billy Joel in my head: this is the time to remember, ’cause it will not last forever…  I shook my head, new emotion churning around the self-pity.  I felt both chastened and annoyed; I was reminded of my own desperate wish to be here now and of the simultaneous weight of my expectation that I can do so all the time. Is my constant sense of failing to be present getting in the way of my actually being present?

I don’t know.  I don’t think so, because I know I was far less here before I started thinking about this.  But it certainly makes me excruciatingly aware of all the ways and times that I fall short of the engagement in my life I so badly want.

I looked at Whit, his little figure blurred by my tears.  I want so fiercely to fully live these years, to pay attention, not to miss a thing.  But still, so often, I fail.  I allow my own exhaustion or aggravation to occlude the beauty of this ordinary, flawed existence.  It makes me weep to think of all that I have already missed.  I don’t even want to blink, for fear of missing anything else.

For the rest of the night, all I could hear was this:

This are the time to remember
Cause it will not last forever.
These are the days to hold onto
Cause we won’t although we’ll want to.
This is the time, but time is going to change.

 

Lumbar puncture

spine

Well, it happened again.  In March 2009, I wrote a post called Fragile in which I talked about facing the world bravely, accepting the fact that “at any moment Grace and Whit could meet with danger.”  That same day, Whit wound up in an ambulance and at the ER being treated for his second anaphylactic reaction to nuts.  And in May 2012, I wrote  10 Things I Want My 10 Year Old Daughter to Know, which included, as #2, “don’t lose your physical fearlessness.”  Two weeks later I was back at the same ER, this time with Grace because she had broken her collarbone.

This time it was my turn.  I was being smug about my own health.  The evening of New Year’s Day, at a lovely dinner with Grace and Whit and my parents, I spouted off about how I hadn’t been sick in years, how the green juice I drink every day was keeping me healthy.  I leaned back in my chair, pleased with myself.  That was Tuesday night.

By Thursday, I had swollen glands and felt tired.  By Friday, I had a fever of 101 and a crushing headache.  I woke up Saturday morning and could barely move my head because of severe neck pain.  We called my doctor’s office.  They said to go immediately to the ER.  When we got there, it didn’t take long for them to decided I needed a lumbar puncture to rule out bacterial meningitis.

A spinal tap.  I started to cry.

Matt left the room as instructed and I curled up on my side as I was told.  They tried for 20 minutes to find spinal fluid, poking a needle around in my spine.  I swear I cried and yelled as much during those 20 minutes as I did during labor.  It was painful but, even more, it was a foreign and frightening sensation.  I felt as though icy fish were swimming up and down my spine.  I felt flashes of sharp pain down my legs.  I felt a needle scraping against the bones of my vertebrae.  To say I have new respect for the spine and for the power of nerves, and for the fact that the spinal cord is in fact a cord is an understatement.

Finally they withdrew the needle and told me they had to try again.  I cried some more.   They started over.  This second time was quicker, and they found the fluid.  In 75 minutes we knew that I don’t have meningitis.  I still feel lousy, as of this writing (Sunday night), but I’m hugely relieved, of course.   My back hurts a lot at the site of the puncture.  I asked Grace to take the picture above because it seems so extraordinary that all that is left from a long needle in my spine (twice) is this little band-aid.

I can’t forget the searing pain of that first attempted lumbar puncture, though.  I don’t think I ever will.  And I am reminded, yet again, never, ever to take anything for granted, and never to be so self-satisfied as I was on Tuesday night.  I am still drinking my green juice, though.

Have you ever had a lumbar puncture?  How was it?

 

 

I hope so too

It’s been an odd couple of days.  I am still floating on that disorienting current of grief and gratitude and guilt that I mentioned yesterday.  I’m experiencing Grace and Whit in high definition, and my awareness of their every detail of is at an all-time high; I’m dazzled, and overcome, by the physicality of their bodies, their presence in a room, their noise, their sheer being-ness.  I look at them and think, again, they are tenaciously sturdy and incomprehensibly fragile at the same time.

Since our conversation on Sunday about what happened, there have been very few references to it in our house.  Grace asked me at bedtime yesterday if the sick and angry man was really dead, and I said yes.  She asked me how many children had died and I told her.  She asked me how old they were and I told her.  She was quiet then, for a long minute, and then opened her book, curled closer to me on the couch so that she was flush against my side, and started reading.

Tonight, as I tucked her in, she said her usual prayers (“thank you for this amazing world” being the line that always slays me).  I kissed her on the forehead and began to stand up.  “Wait,” she whispered.  “I want to say another prayer for those kids.”  I sat back down on the edge of her bed and nodded in the nightlight-lit dimness of her room.

“I hope those kids know they are loved, and know how much their families miss them,” she looked at me, her mahogany eyes huge, shining.  “I hope they are settling into their new lives in heaven.  I really hope they are with Pops and Helen.  Maybe they are going swimming with Helen and talking about airplanes with Pops.”  I swallowed hard, struck by her conflation of her late-summer loss with the deaths of these children.  The deaths are of course as different as you can imagine, but I think that conceptually, they each feel both near and far to Grace.  Her great-grandfather, beloved, but old, in a stage of life so foreign as to be a different country.  These children, strangers, but her close contemporaries, the girls and boys she sits next to at assemblies and walks by in halls.   I love that she imagines them drawing comfort from each other.

I leaned down to kiss her again, and felt her arms clasp my neck and pull me tight.  “I hope so too, Grace.” I whispered against her ear, feeling my tears trickle into her hair.  I hope so too.

So much here I do not understand

I don’t have any words to convey how I feel about the tragedy in Newtown.  I have only these three personal stories to share, and for some reason I feel compelled to do so.

Yesterday, after a beautiful, candlelight- and allelulia-filled Lessons & Carols service at our church, we came home in the spitting rain for a late dinner.  It had been a day jammed with errands and details, with the minutiae that compose our lives: haircuts, buying skates, frosting gingerbread cookies, shopping online for a last-minute presence for a best friend, an early hockey game. At each step I felt heavy with awareness of what a privilege every single one of those small things was.  Whit was difficult at dinner, picky about his food, and I just blew up.  I lost it.  Matt encouraged me to go upstairs, and after stomping out to make a point (that point being I am such a martyr) by taking the trash out in the driving rain, I did that.  I closed my bedroom door and folded laundry, and as I smoothed a pair of Whit’s long johns I sat down on the bed, overcome with sobs.  I was flooded with powerful guilt: how can I possibly be so ungrateful, when there are families out there tonight who would give anything for the privilege of a bickering child at the dinner table?  How?

This morning, I walked both Grace and Whit to the gate of school as I always do.  I had to go home before the 4th grade’s morning assembly, so I kissed them goodbye and jogged back to the car.  Once I’d crossed the street I turned and watched their backpacks and hooded heads (again, raining) walk away from me.  I was swamped with feelings: sorrow, fear, guilt, grief, gratitude.  I sat in the car and let them wash over me and then, tears still falling, I drove home.

Half an hour later I sat in one of the assembly rooms at school as Grace’s 4th grade class filed in.  The parents sat in a row against the back wall of the room, and the floor in between was filled with the younger grades all sitting criss-cross applesauce.  This was a previously-scheduled “environment assembly,” and the theme was taking care of our earth.  I’m willing to bet I wasn’t the only parent who was thinking of other things, however, as our children stood and sang in their clear, true voices, about how is “time to turn the tide.”  Tears swam in my eyes.  I looked around the room at the teachers who have cared for and shepherded my children over the years with a new and passionate admiration.  A few minutes later the 4th grade sang Big Yellow Taxi, and the words I know by heart rang out, filled with an unexpected, chilling resonance: Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

So much is gone.  Of course, of course, a million, unquantifiable times more for the families that lost loved ones in Newtown.  But for all of us, too.  In my opinion, his incursion on one of the world’s truly sacred spaces – an elementary school – has altered the world we live in forever.

This is the darkest week of the darkest season.  Friday is the darkest day of the year.  And yet how much more pressing this new darkness feels, this darkness wrought of an incomprehensible act, this darkness from the heart of someone who was a fellow human being.  We are moving towards the solstice, and there is still so much here I do not understand.