Tag: Children

A Clamor of Questions

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I’m scrambling an egg for my daughter.
“Why are you always whistling?” she asks.
“Because I’m happy.”
And it’s true,
Though it stuns me to say it aloud;
There was a time when I wouldn’t
Have seen it as my future.
It’s partly a matter
Of who is there to eat the egg:
The self fallen out of love with itself
Through the tedium of familiarity,
Or this little self,
So curious, so hungry,
Who emerged from the woman I love,
A woman who loves me in a way
I’ve come to think I deserve,
Now that it arrives from outside me.
Everything changes, we’re told,
And now the changes are everywhere:
The house with its morning light
That fills me like a revelation,
The yard with its trees
That cast a bit more shade each summer,
The love of a woman
That both is and isn’t confounding,
And the love
Of this clamor of questions at my waist.
Clamor of questions,
You clamor of answers,
Here’s your egg.
~C.G. Hanzlicek “Egg” from Against Dreaming.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
~Emily Dickinson

When a grandchild asks a question, it is like a smooth and perfect egg safely in the nest, awaiting the exact moment to open up to breathe deeply of the world.

Sometimes my answer, try as I might, results in broken shell fragments, the insides all scrambled and released too soon.

I’m confounded by my love for childrens’ innocence in a harsh and painful world – I don’t always know the best thing to say when the truth has bits of hard shell in it. I end up telling the truth a bit slant so it might dazzle them gradually.

So I encourage them to keep asking their clamor of questions, and I do my best to answer in a way so they stay hungry for more, filled with truths without being blinded.

So many questions in their minds and mine.
So many eggs to open gently so the truth remains whole.

Each, Ever and All

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I’ve fallen many times:
the usual stumbles
over secret schoolgirl crushes,
head-over-heels for teen heartthrobs.
I loved them all.

I’ve fallen so many times:
tripped down the aisle
over husband, daughter, son.
Madly and deeply,
I love them all.

I’ve fallen again and again:
new friends, a mentor, a muse,
numerous books, a few authors,
four dear pups and a stranger, or two.
I loved them all.

I’ve fallen farther,
fallen faster,
now captivated, I tumble—
enthralled with my grandchildren.
I love them each, ever and all.
~Jane Attanucci, “Falling” from First Mud

Six grandchildren in less than seven years
brings a bounty of baby hugs and snuggles.

With each one,
I fall farther and faster than ever before.

In a lifetime of falling head over heels
for those most precious to me,
a loving husband, two sons and a daughter,
dear friends and mentors,
numerous pups and ponies…

still none could prepare me for this ~

the blessing of loving our children’s children,
their smiles and giggles and arms wrapped around us

these have become most cherished
each, ever and all.

Do Not Look Back

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He loved to ask his mother questions. It was the pleasantest thing for him to ask a question and then to hear what answer his mother would give. Bambi was never surprised that question after question should come into his mind continually and without effort. 

Sometimes he felt very sure that his mother was not giving him a complete answer, was intentionally not telling him all she knew.  For then there would remain in him such a lively curiosity, such suspicion, mysteriously and joyously flashing through him, such anticipation, that he would become anxious and happy at the same time, and grow silent.
~Felix Salten from Bambi

A Wounded Deer—leaps highest—
I’ve heard the Hunter tell—
‘Tis but the Ecstasy of death—
And then the Brake is still!
~Emily Dickinson “165″

As the house of a person
in age sometimes grows cluttered
with what is
too loved or too heavy to part with,
the heart may grow cluttered.
And still the house will be emptied,
and still the heart.

Empty and filled,
like the curling half-light of morning,
in which everything is still possible and so why not.

Filled and empty,
like the curling half-light of evening,
in which everything now is finished and so why not.

Beloved, what can be, what was,
will be taken from us.
I have disappointed.
I am sorry. I knew no better.

A root seeks water.
Tenderness only breaks open the earth.
This morning, out the window,
the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.
~Jane Hirschfield from “The Standing Deer”


My first time ever
seated next to my mother
in a movie theater, just
a skinny four year old girl
practically folded in half
by a large padded chair
whose seat won’t stay down,
bursting with anticipation
to see Disney’s Bambi.

Enthralled with so much color,
motion,  music, songs and fun
characters, I am wholly lost
in this new world of animated
reality when suddenly
Bambi’s mother looks up,
alarmed, from eating
a new clump of spring grass
growing in the snow.

My heart leaps
with worry.
She tells him
to run quickly
for the thicket –
find the safest place where
she has always
kept him warm
next to her.

She follows behind,
urges him to run faster,
not to look back,
don’t ever look back.

Then the gun shot
hits my belly too.

My stomach twists
as he cries out
for his mother,
pleading for her.
I know in my heart
she is lost forever,
sacrificed to save him.

I sob as my mother
reaches out to me,
telling me not to look.
I bury my face
inside her hug,
knowing Bambi
is cold and alone
with no mother
any more.

My mama took me home
before the end.
I could not bear to watch
the rest of the movie 
for years.

Those cries
still echo
in my ears
any time someone hunts and shoots
to kill the innocent.

Now, my own three children are grown,
they have babies of their own,
my mom is gone from this earth.
I can even keep the seat from folding
me in half in a movie theater.

I am nearing my eighth decade, and
there are still places in this world where
mothers and fathers
sons and daughters
grandmothers and grandfathers
sisters and brothers
and babies are hunted down
despite the supposed safety of the thicket~
the sanctuary, the school, the grocery store, the home,
places where we believe we are shielded from violence.

There can be no innocence when any of us may be hunted.

A Telling So Soft

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Now I understand that there are two melodies playing,
one below the other, one easier to hear, the other

lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard
yet always present.

When all other things seem lively and real,
this one fades. Yet the notes of it

touch as gently as fingertips, as the sound
of the names laid over each child at birth.

I want to stay in that music without striving or cover.
If the truth of our lives is what it is playing,

the telling is so soft
that this mortal time, this irrevocable change,

becomes beautiful. I stop and stop again
to hear the second music.

I hear the children in the yard, a train, then birds.
All this is in it and will be gone. I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.
~ Annie Lighthart, “The Second Music” – author of Pax

So many themes run through our daily existence. Usually we can only attend to one thing at a time, most often the loudest. Yet if we listen and look closely, there is a softer telling just discernible under all the noise. Sometimes, like a fugue or canon, the themes trade places, one softer which becomes more apparent and insistent, then fading to soft again.

I want to hear the heart beat of the river of life that flows through me. May I never forget what is underneath all the noise.

They All Know…

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The squirrel sticks its head from the tree’s knot,
shrieking directions, a village gossip with a huge
plumed tail. It moves down the scalloped bark, swaying
on tiny nails, and stops, eye-level with my swollen belly.
A black blur of bird swoops, the velvet of its wing
against my cheek. It nests among a ruckus of robins,
less interested in being fed than being heard. Around
the curve of the road, I near the farmer’s fence. His
mare lowers her fan of lashes. In the pond, a fish flips,
exposing its silver stomach.
~Tina Barry, “The Animals Know” from Beautiful Raft

photo by Harry Rodenberger
video by Harry Rodenberger

It has been over thirty years since I carried a child in my belly. Each time, I remember having the feeling our farm animals knew I was “expecting” even before it became obvious. Maybe it was because I was so overjoyed, I carried myself differently. After experiencing a miscarriage and two years of infertility workups, it felt almost magical being pregnant. It seemed as if our invisibly growing baby was already welcomed by all the creatures on our farm and were celebrating the anticipation along with us.

While I was pregnant with our first son, after such a long wait for parenthood, we bought a new dog, Tango and moved to a farm from the city. She was a year old and had never been around babies, so we weren’t sure how she would adapt to both new surroundings and new owners. As we drove six hours to her bring her to her new home, she happily settled in for the trip lying on my bulging tummy, pummeled by kicks from a baby she would soon meet face to face.

She loved him as soon as she saw him.
She had known him and understood him as he grew inside.

Now, decades later, our family’s next generation is fulfilling their own hopes for the future: we have four cherished grandchildren in addition to the two we are now waiting to meet — one will be any day now.

The expectation of new life is so sweet. All that lives and breathes anticipates this new soul budding and about to bloom.

Somehow, they just know…

Love By Letting Go

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It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day — 
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled — since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take — the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show — 
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
~C. Day Lewis “Walking Away” from Complete Poems

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
~ Frederick Buechner

Once again I bid goodbye, if only for a little while.  It never gets easier to part from one’s family members when they are called to be far away.

I began writing regularly over twenty years ago to consider more deeply my time left on this earth and what my family meant to me, here and now, and for eternity. Family is carried inside the words I write without often writing about them directly. They inspire and challenge me; they love and stretch me. As our children married, then were blessed with children of their own, I know they are sustained by what they have carried away from this home as each drifted away.

Life is about nurture – helping the cherished seeds you carried deep inside to thrive when let go.  Then we can never really be lonely; our hearts never empty.  We stay connected, one another, forever, even when miles and miles and lifetimes apart.

Trusting Angels in the Wilderness

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…any father, particularly an old father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God.

It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.
~Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

A reassuring truth for many families during this graduation season – 
in past years, we too watched our children leave home to begin a life of their own. We trusted in God’s providence that in our absence, there would be angels in the wilderness waiting to guide them.

Indeed there have been angels and continue to be –
you know who you are!

In turn, over thirty two years of clinical work in a university health center, I had opportunity to be that refuge in the wilderness for thousands of young adults who had left their parents’ home to seek out their own journey. Sometimes they found themselves stranded on a path that was twisting, rocky, full of pitfalls and peril. 

Despite plenty of my own limitations over those years, I found keeping this perspective helped me greet each new face, not only with a physician’s skill and knowledge, but always with a mother’s embrace.

Are there angels in the wilderness? I don’t know
I’ve got my doubts, but if you say so
But I’ve got a feeling we’re doing ok
We’re doing our part, to make the brambles seem less sharp

Beneath the wing of an angel
Far away from the night
Carry me till I am able
Beneath the wing of an angel

On the wing of an angel
Fly me on to the light
Hold me close till I’m able
Beneath the wing of an angel

Prepared for One Another

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Her fate seizes her and brings her
down. She is heavy with it. It
wrings her. The great weight
is heaved out of her. It eases.

She turns to the calf who has broken
out of the womb’s water and its veil.
He breathes. She licks his wet hair.
He gathers his legs under him
and rises. He stands, and his legs
wobble.

After the months of his pursuit of her now
they meet face to face.
From the beginnings of the world
his arrival and her welcome
have been prepared. They have always
known each other.
~Wendell Berry from “Her First Calf”

I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.
~Ada Limón from “The Raincoat”

Mothering is like the labor that starts birth –
barely able to breathe,
bombarded by the firehose of contractions and pushing
then emptying out
while filling up to overflowing
for nurturing of this child forever
– so much so fast. 

I knew them even before I met them. I knew them as they grew. They changed me; I became soft and cushiony, designed to gather in, hold tight, and then eventually, reluctantly and necessarily, let go.

All the while a mom does whatever she must to protect her children from getting overwhelmed and drenched by the storms of life.

Now that my children have children of their own, some already birthed, two soon to be birthed, I still try to throw my raincoat over them all to keep them from getting wet in inevitable downpours. 

My reach will never be far enough.

Time, like a firehose, pounds away both at me and them. It is ruffing and buffing me every single moment, each moment a unique opportunity to love deeply and completely this soul who I carried under my heart.

Fixing Eyes on the Unseen – In Sorrow, Scraped and Torn

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“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf,
“and so do all who live to see such times.
But that is not for them to decide.
All we have to decide
is what to do with the time that is given us.”

The world is indeed full of peril,
and in it there are many dark places;
but still there is much that is fair,
and though in all lands
love is now mingled with grief,
it grows perhaps the greater.
― J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Fellowship of the Ring

God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. … It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor. …

Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.

How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us? You have allowed rivers of blood to flow, mountains of suffering to pile up, sobs to become humanity’s song–all without lifting a finger that we could see. You have allowed bonds of love beyond number to be painfully snapped. If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself.

We strain to hear. But instead of hearing an answer we catch sight of God himself scraped and torn. Through our tears we see the tears of God.
~Nicholas Wolterstorff  in Lament for a Son

“My God, My God,” goes the Psalm 22, “hear me, why have you forsaken me?”  This is the anguish all we of Godforsaken heart know well. But hear the revelation to which Christ directs us, further in the same psalm:

For He has not despised nor scorned the beggar’s supplication,
Nor has He turned away His face from me;
And when I cried out to Him, He heard me.

He hears us, and he knows, because he has suffered as one Godforsaken. Which means that you and I, even in our darkest hours, are not forsaken. Though we may hear nothing, feel nothing, believe nothing, we are not forsaken, and so we need not despair. And that is everything. That is Good Friday and it is hope, it is life in this darkened age, and it is the life of the world to come.
~Tony Woodlief from “We are Not Forsaken”

Scratch the surface of a human being and the demons of hate and revenge … and sheer destructiveness break forth.

    Again and again we read the stories of violence in our daily papers, of the mass murders and ethnic wars still occurring in numerous parts of our world. But how often do we say to ourselves: “What seizes people like that, even young people, to make them forget family and friends, and suddenly kill other human beings?” We don’t always ask the question in that manner. Sometimes we are likely to think, almost smugly: “How different those horrible creatures are from the rest of us. How fortunate I am that I could never kill or hurt other people like they did.”

    I do not like to stop and, in the silence, look within, but when I do I hear a pounding on the floor of my soul. When I open the trap door into the deep darkness I see the monsters emerge for me to deal with. How painful it is to bear all this, but it is there to bear in all of us. Freud called it the death wish, Jung the demonic darkness. If I do not deal with it, it deals with me. The cross reminds me of all this.

    This inhumanity of human to human is tamed most of the time by law and order in most of our communities, but there are not laws strong enough to make men and women simply cease their cruelty and bitterness. This destructiveness within us can seldom be transformed until we squarely face it in ourselves. This confrontation often leads us into the pit. The empty cross is planted there to remind us that suffering is real but not the end, that victory still is possible…
~Morton Kelsey from “The Cross and the Cellar”

I’m depending on others’ words right now. The maelstrom of emotions following this week’s latest school shooting silences everything but my tears.

Have mercy, Holy God, on your people.

This year’s Lenten theme:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4: 18

Making Something Happen Every Day

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There in the attic of forgotten shapes
(Old coats in plastic, hat boxes, fur capes
Amongst the smells of mothballs and cigars),
I saw the doll house of our early years,
With which my mother and my aunt had played,
And later where my sister and I made
The towering grown-up hours to smile and pass:
The little beds, the tin-foil looking glass,
Bookcases stamped in ink upon the walls,
Mismatched chairs where sat the jointed dolls,
The clock whose face, no larger than a dime,
Had, for all these years, kept the same time.
I remembered how we set the resin food
Atop a table of stained balsa wood,
The shiny turkey hollow to the tap,
The cherry pie baked in a bottle cap.
Now it is time to go to sleep, we spoke,
Parroting the talk of older folk,
And laid the dolls out fully-clothed in bed
After their teeth were brushed, and prayers were said,
And flipped the switch on the low-wattage sun.
But in the night we’d have something break in,
Kidnap the baby or purloin the pie —
A tiger, maybe, or a passer by —
Just to make something happen, to move the story.
The dolls awoke, alarmed, took inventory.
If we made something happen every day,
Or night, it was the game we knew to play,
Not realizing then how lives accrue,
With interest, the smallest things we do.
~A.E. Stallings “The Doll House”

I was born with a severe imagination deficiency. I could not create my way out of a paper bag, much less make up a story. This never seemed like much of an impediment since I am quite content dealing with the daily challenges of real life. I married someone with a similar world view and we both thrived in our banal and mundane world.

Then we had children. Children born with intact and active imaginations. Children with imaginary friends, and monsters under the bed and a world outside our front door that I didn’t recognize. And they have grown up to have children with wild imaginings too.

Our old doll house is a pretty tame place to exercise excessive levels of creativity, with characters and furniture to move around, conversations to overhear and conflicts to resolve. So I watch grandchildren make something happen in their world while I continue to make sense of the world I was born into.

Their stories become interest accrued on lives well-composed and imagined. Even when a giant troll comes and knocks over all the furniture – there is no need for real life earthquakes in their created-reality.

And so it goes…