On Sundays, when the rain held off, after lunch or later, I would go with my twelve year old daughter into town, and put down the time at junk sales, antique fairs.
There I would lean over tables, absorbed by lace, wooden frames, glass. My daughter stood at the other end of the room, her flame-coloured hair obvious whenever— which was not often—
I turned around. I turned around. She was gone. Grown. No longer ready to come with me, whenever a dry Sunday held out its promises of small histories. Endings.
Spirit of irony, my caustic author of the past, of memory,—
and of its pain, which returns hurts, stings—reproach me now, remind me that I was in those rooms, with my child, with my back turned to her, searching—oh irony!— for beautiful things. ~Eavan Boland from “The Necessity for Irony” in The Lost Land.
How is it we look past the golden treasure right in front of us, the beauty gifted generously to us, to pursue the glittery with no value in the long run?
If my history of misplaced focus be forgiven, it is only because of your own golden and generous grace – ironically, always the most beautiful object of my searching.
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But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August, you can have August and abundantly so. You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead, but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed, at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise. You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump, how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards, until you learn about love, about sweet surrender, and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind as real as Africa.
And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s, it will always whisper, you can’t have it all, but there is this. ~Barbara Ras from “You Can’t Have It All” from Bite Every Sorrow
My pragmatic mother gave up her teaching career for marriage and family so would remind me regularly that I couldn’t have it all: there was no way a woman can have a husband and children and a farm and a garden and animals and a profession and write and travel and volunteer in the community and not make a mess of it all and herself.
My father would listen to her and say to me softly under his breath: “you do whatever you put your mind to…you know what you are here for.”
They were both right.
The alluring abundance of this life has invited me to want to touch and feel and taste it all, not unlike another woman who was placed with purpose in the Garden to be a side-by-side companion and co-worker. Yet she demonstrated what happens when you want more than you are given and yes, she indeed made a mess of things.
Yet there is this: despite wanting it all and working hard for it all and believing I could do it all, I missed the point altogether.
Life is all gift, never earned. Life is all grace, not deserved. It is all August abundance, it is right now, sustaining us through the year’s droughts and floods and storms and drab gray weather.
And there is this: I know what I am here for.
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When the doctor suggested surgery and a brace for all my youngest years, my parents scrambled to take me to massage therapy, deep tissue work, osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine unspooled a bit, I could breathe again, and move more in a body unclouded by pain. My mom would tell me to sing songs to her the whole forty-five minute drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty- five minutes back from physical therapy. She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang, because I thought she liked it. I never asked her what she gave up to drive me, or how her day was before this chore. Today, at her age, I was driving myself home from yet another spine appointment, singing along to some maudlin but solid song on the radio, and 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 “The Raincoat”
When I was 13, I grew too quickly. My spine developed a thoracic scoliosis (curvature) — after inspecting my back as I bent over to touch my toes, my pediatrician referred me to a pediatric orthopedic specialist an hour away from my home town.
The question was whether I would need to have a metal rod surgically placed along my spine to prevent it from more misalignment or whether I would need to wear a back brace like a turtle. The least intervention would be physical therapy to try to keep my back and abdominal muscles as strong as possible to limit the curvature.
Since my father didn’t have much flexibility in his work schedule, my mother had to drive me to the “big city” for my appointments – as a nervous driver, she did it only because she knew it was necessary to get the medical opinion needed. She asked me to read aloud to her from whatever book I was reading at the time – I don’t think she listened closely but I think she knew it would keep me occupied while she navigated traffic.
At first, we went every three months for new xrays. The orthopedist would draw on my bare back and on my spine xrays with a black marker, calculating my curves and angles with his protractor, watching for a trend of worsening as I grew taller. He reassured us that I hadn’t yet reached a critical level of deviation requiring more aggressive treatment.
Eventually my growth rate slowed down and the specialist dismissed me from further visits, wishing me well. He told me I would certainly be somewhat “crooked” for the rest of my life, and it would inevitably worsen in my later years. I continued to visit PT for regular visits; my mom would patiently wait in the car as I sweated my way through the regimen.
The orthopedist was right about the curvature of my aging spine. I am not only a couple inches shorter now, but my rib cage and chest wall is asymmetric affecting my ability to stand up totally straight. An xray shows the wear and tear of arthritis changes in my somewhat twisted chest wall and spine.
I consider crookedness a small price to pay for avoiding a serious surgery or a miserable brace as a teenager.
What I didn’t understand at the time was the commitment my mother made to make sure I got the medical monitoring I needed, even if it meant great inconvenience in her life, even if she was awake at night worried about the outcome of the appointments, even if the financial burden was significant for my family. She, like so many parents with children with significant medical or psychological challenges, gave up her wants and wishes to make sure I received what I needed.
As a kid, I just assumed that’s what a mom does. Later, as a mom myself, I realized it IS what moms and dads do, but often at significant personal cost. As a physician, I saw many young people whose parents couldn’t make the commitment to see they got the care they needed, and it showed.
I was blessed by parents who did what their kids needed to thrive.
Without my realizing it, my mom constantly offered me her raincoat so I wouldn’t get wet. Meanwhile she was getting drenched. I never really understood.
Some of you walk this road, now and in the past, sometimes long miles with a family member, handing over your own raincoat when the storms of life overwhelm.
Your sacrifice and compassion are Jesus’ hands and feet made tangible. He walks along where we go, keeping us safe and dry for as long as it takes.
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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May the wind always be in her hair May the sky always be wide with hope above her And may all the hills be an exhilaration the trials but a trail, all the stones but stairs to God. May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts… ~Ann Voskamp from “A Prayer for a Daughter”
Nate and Ben and brand new baby LeaDaddy and Lea
Mommy and Lea
“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is – in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as she was when she was born, when she learned to walk, as she was at any age — at any time, even when the child is fully grown….” ~Diana Gabaldon from Voyager
Just checking to see if she is real…
Your rolling and stretching had grown quieter that stormy winter night thirty-two years ago, but still no labor came as it should. Already a week overdue post-Christmas, you clung to amnion and womb, not yet ready. Then as the wind blew more wicked and snow flew sideways, landing in piling drifts, the roads became more impassable, nearly impossible to traverse.
So your dad and I tried, concerned about your stillness and my advanced age, worried about being stranded on the farm far from town. When a neighbor came to stay with your brothers overnight, we headed down the road and our car got stuck in a snowpile in the deep darkness, our tires spinning, whining against the snow. Another neighbor’s earth mover dug us out to freedom.
You floated silent and still, knowing your time was not yet.
Creeping slowly through the dark night blizzard, we arrived to the warm glow of the hospital, your heartbeat checked out steady, all seemed fine.
I slept not at all.
The morning’s sun glistened off sculptured snow as your heart ominously slowed. You and I were jostled, turned, oxygenated, but nothing changed. You beat even more slowly, threatening to let go your tenuous grip on life.
The nurses’ eyes told me we had trouble. The doctor, grim faced, announced delivery must happen quickly, taking you now, hoping we were not too late. I was rolled, numbed, stunned, clasping your father’s hand, closing my eyes, not wanting to see the bustle around me, trying not to hear the shouted orders, the tension in the voices, the quiet at the moment of opening when it was unknown what would be found.
And then you cried. A hearty healthy husky cry, a welcomed song of life uninterrupted. Perturbed and disturbed from the warmth of womb, to the cold shock of a bright lit operating room, your first vocal solo brought applause from the surrounding audience who admired your purplish pink skin, your shock of damp red hair, your blue eyes squeezed tight, then blinking open, wondering and wondrous, emerging and saved from a storm within and without.
You were brought wrapped for me to see and touch before you were whisked away to be checked over thoroughly, your father trailing behind the parade to the nursery. I closed my eyes, swirling in a brain blizzard of what-ifs.
If no snow storm had come, you would have fallen asleep forever within my womb, no longer nurtured by my aging and failing placenta, cut off from what you needed to stay alive. There would have been only our soft weeping, knowing what could have been if we had only known, if God had provided a sign to go for help.
So you were saved by a providential storm and dug out from a drift: I celebrate when I hear your voice singing- your students love you as their teacher and mentor, you are a thread born to knit and mend hearts, all because of a night of drifting snow.
My annual retelling of the most remarkable day of my life thirty-two years ago today when our daughter Eleanor (“Lea”) Sarah Gibson was born in an emergency C-section, hale and hearty because the good Lord sent a wind and snow storm to blow us into the hospital in time to save her.
She is married to her true love Brian– he is another blessing sent from the Lord. Together they have their own miracle child, happily born in the middle of the summer rather than snow-drift season.
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The crust of sleep is broken Abruptly— I look drowsily Through the wide crack. I do not know whether I see Three minds, bird-shaped, Flashing upon the bough of morning; Or three delicately tinted souls Butterflying in the sun; Or three brown-fleshed, husky children Sprawling hilarious Over my bed And me. ~Jeanne D’Orge “Matins”(published in 1917)
This morning I broke through the misty tides of my dreams, surfacing to cool morning air and prelude of a dawn bird chorus.
Today I wake imagining who I might be from a myriad of dreams…
Sometimes I wake as if once again a young girl, sun coming through frilly curtains to shower my face with a warming light.
Sometimes I wake as if once again a sleep-thirsty student, hoping to snooze another 15 minutes before class.
Sometimes I wake once again as if a new mother, dripping and leaking at the sound of my baby’s cries.
Sometimes I wake as if once again a weary farmer, up much of the night with a laboring mare and slow-to-suck foal.
Sometimes I wake as if once again a preoccupied physician, mentally reviewing the night’s phone calls and concerns.
Today I wake as a grandma, wishing my bed would bounce with a pile of birds and butterflies and jubilant children, wishing me good morning and eager to see me up and at ’em.
So who am I?
I was, I am, I will be all those things, as I hang tight to the bough of morning.
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The older children pedal past Stable as little gyros, spinning hard To supper, bath, and bed, until at last We also quit, silent and tired Beside the darkening yard where trees Now shadow up instead of down. Their predictable lengths can only tease Her as, head lowered, she walks her bike alone Somewhere between her wanting to ride And her certainty she will always fall.
Tomorrow, though I will run behind, Arms out to catch her, she’ll tilt then balance wide Of my reach, till distance makes her small, Smaller, beyond the place I stop and know That to teach her I had to follow And when she learned I had to let her go. ~Wyatt Prunty, “Learning the Bicycle” from Unarmed and Dangerous.
—For Lea
The summer you learned to swim was the summer I learned to be at peace with myself. In May you were afraid to put your face in the water but by August, I was standing in the pool once more when you dove in, then retreated to the wall saying You forgot to say Sugar! So I said Come on Sugar, you can do it and you pushed off and swam to me and held on laughing, your hair stuck to your cheeks— you hiccupped with joy and swam off again. And I dove in too, trying new things. I tried not giving advice. I tried waking early to pray. I tried not rising in anger. Watching you I grew stronger— your courage washed away my fear. All day I worked hard thinking of you. In the evening I walked the long hill home. You were at the top, waving your small arms, pittering down the slope to me and I lifted you high so high to the moon. That summer all the world was soul and water, light glancing off peaks. You learned the turtle, the cannonball, the froggy, and the flutter and I learned to stand and wait for you to swim to me. ~Michael Simms“The Summer You Learned to Swim”from American Ash
Learning to swim, balancing on a bike, riding a horse – these are skills that require an adult to let go of a child.
Terrifying for everyone. But eventually necessary.
This summer, our two grandkids are taking their first swimming lessons and I’m learning as they learn.
There are some things I can’t do for them. With good teaching and guidance and encouragement, they learn to do it themselves and be stronger for it, even when there are bruises and sputters and tears.
Lord, help me learn to just stand and watch and follow their journey to independence.
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What does it feel like to be alive? Living, you stand under a waterfall… It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world’s surface, and exit through it. ~Annie Dillard from An American Childhood
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 can be like standing under a waterfall, impacted breathless by the incredible 24/7 responsibility of birthing and raising children. And a mother does whatever she must to protect her children from also getting soaked in the barrage of each drop of time, knowing they too can feel overwhelmed by the rapid passage of life.
As I tried my best to keep my children covered and dry until it was their turn to raise kids and stand under the same waterfall, my own rough edges have been impacted, smoothed and soothed by the flow of time.
I’m well aware rough edges still surface, unbidden and unwarranted, ready to cut a hole in the world for an escape hatch from troubles. So my children and grandchildren polish me even as I still try to protect them from inevitable downpours.
No longer is my reach enough nor must it be.
Life keeps pounding away, but oh so gentler on grandmothers. I know it is still ruffing and buffing me — each drop of time passing over me becomes a mixed blessing.
Each moment so precious, never to come again, yet leaving me forever and wonderfully changed.
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It started before Christmas. Now our son officially walks to school alone. Semi-alone, it’s accurate to say: I or his father track him on his way. He walks up on the east side of West End, we on the west side. Glances can extend (and do) across the street; not eye contact. Already ties are feeling and not fact. Straus Park is where these parallel paths part; he goes alone from there. The watcher’s heart stretches, elastic in its love and fear, toward him as we see him disappear, striding briskly. Where two weeks ago, holding a hand, he’d dawdle, dreamy, slow, he now is hustled forward by the pull of something far more powerful than school.
The mornings we turn back to are no more than forty minutes longer than before, but they feel vastly different–flimsy, strange, wavering in the eddies of this change, empty, unanchored, perilously light since the red hat vanished from our sight. ~Rachel Hadas “The Red Hat”
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
As a child, I lived just outside of city limits in a semi-rural area, only a half mile from my elementary school on a country road. By first grade, I was allowed to walk to school and home again, then when I was older, with my younger brother in tow. I don’t remember my parents watching me as I made the journey, but I do remember some practice walks on a weekend, to reinforce how to safely cross the roads and where to walk alongside the drainage ditch.
I don’t remember ever being worried about what might happen to me outside of my parents’ presence, and nothing scary ever did happen. I’m sure my parents were worried, but both as children had walked to their rural schools on their own – it simply was how things happened in the 20’s and 30’s.
For children growing up now, it feels different.
Our three children grew up on a farm seven miles from town, so rode a school bus or were taken to school by a parent or grandparent. They didn’t have that early independence that I did. Our grandchildren, especially those living in large cities, are even more protected. It didn’t hamper their desire to explore the world – they have traveled all over.
The difference is the anxiety of the parent, watching that child disappear around a corner on foot, or bike or eventually in a car. It is that empty feeling of letting go before one is ready, but when you know you must.
The heart stretches to encompass one’s child out in the world, out of sight, no longer anchored at home. After all, we are that elastic and that resilient.
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When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water. And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some crying I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives— Never closer the whole rest of our lives. ~Seamus Heaney “Clearances -3”
April 2008 – Vigil at Mom’s Bedside
Lying still, your mouth gapes open as I wonder if you breathe your last. Your hair a white cloud Your skin baby soft No washing, digging, planting gardens, peeling potatoes, Or raising children Anymore.
Where do your dreams take you? At times you wake in your childhood home of Rolling wheat fields, boundless days of freedom. Other naps take you to your student and teaching days Grammar and drama, speech and essays. Yesterday you were a young mother again Juggling babies, farm and your wistful dreams.
Today you looked about your empty nest Disguised as hospital bed, Wondering aloud about Children grown, flown. You still control through worry and tell me: Travel safely Get a good night’s sleep Take time to eat Call me when you get there
I dress you as you dressed me I clean you as you cleaned me I love you as you loved me You try my patience as I tried yours. I wonder if I have the strength to Mother my mother For as long as she needs.
When I tell you the truth Your brow furrows as it used to do When I disappointed you~ This cannot be A bed in a room in a sterile place Waiting for death Waiting for heaven Waiting
And I tell you: Travel safely Eat, please eat Sleep well Call me when you get there.
______________
Now that I am a grandmother, I seek those tiny, daily, apparently meaningless opportunities to create memories that my grandchildren may warmly recall decades from now, knowing they were all mine, if only for a few minutes at the kitchen sink.
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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.
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