Category — Mama Stuff

Their exuberance kills me. They wake up jogging in place, their feet twitching before their eyelids twitch themselves open. They call to each other joyously, especially the baby, now that he can say their names, always with exclamation points or question marks behind them. They burst through the door to find me.

I am ready for them, sometimes. Sometimes I wish they’d sleep a little longer. Sometimes I fix them sippy cups of rice milk and pile some books in their beds and make them stay in their rooms a little longer. Sometimes we eat granola. Sometimes we eat fruit and I make muffins in the toaster oven. I cut them big slices of cantaloupe and little round pieces of banana and they coo like doves over them. Sometimes I stick some store bought cereal in a bowl and that’s that. They always argue over who gets the red bowl. They take turns, but sometimes I forget who had it last, and that’s never good. I usually have to urge them to eat, they are too excited about talking. The little girl climbs in and out of her chair seventeen times. They make silly faces at each other across the table. I suck coffee down like it’s real energy and we’re in a crisis.

We read together. We prefer the small couch, where we can sit in a pile. It’s a loveseat, really, perfect for us. The baby changes his mind often about whether he’d like to sit with us and listen or not. They are still and quiet, breathing into my face, the girl sucking on her fingers. They laugh at the funny parts. They interrupt. They soak it in. We go to the library, and the librarians always smile at me. They love me for reading with my kids. I feel like I get points for doing something that I’m already addicted to, which is reading, myself. “A reading family,” said one librarian last week, sighing happily.

They egg each other on. I am encouraging them to listen to me, and I am gaining ground until one of them sets the others into giggles and all sanity is lost. We sit on the floor in a circle and I explain to them that being good is really much more fun because time outs are not fun and being mean is not fun and fighting is not fun. “What things are fun?” I ask. “Being nice is fun,” the older boy says. “And nice is nice!” the little girl adds, helpfully. “And inviting people over,” I say. “And letting our friends play with our toys,” the older boy says. “And kisses are love!” the little girl exclaims. We all agree.

Sometimes I am good at playing. It helps if I sit on the floor. We sit and play with small squares. “Get me five green ones,” I say to the girl, and she does.  The baby toddles over and snatches them and screaming ensues. Learning is always going on here. I am teaching them writing with the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum (which I love) and they wriggle themselves out of their chairs with excitement. They love the chalkboard. The older boy already knows how to write, but needs some help. The little girl doesn’t know her letters yet, but wants to do whatever the boy is doing.  “We’re learning D”, I say. Then I ask her what letter we are learning. She screws up her face and says “Ummmm.” Then she draws a perfect D.

Sometimes I just lie down on the floor and let them swarm me. I have no energy for anything else. They lean their heads on my face and I smell their warm sweaty hair. We make ahhhhhhhhh noises. Then I pick myself up and start cleaning again.

We work together. They hand me clothes to put on the clothesline. They fight over who will get to give me the pair of purple pants. The purple pants become the Holy Grail. There is a meltdown. Nobody is giving me the purple pants. I will get the purple pants for myself. Dirt is thrown. Then they smile sweetly through dirty faces and hand me clothes again. We do dishes. The older boy carefully stacks them in the dish drainer. The girl moves them from the rinse water to the bleach water. I wash. The baby eats out of the scrap bucket and scavenges for food on the floor. I catch him and send him out of the kitchen, and he falls to the floor and cries.

We swim in the river. I put them in their swimsuits and we traipse down, my pale legs glowing. They are brown and sweet and nutty, and when we jump in the water they become incredibly weightless, like babies. Sometimes the older ones swim by themselves, with their life jackets, and I play with the baby as he floats in the inflatable hippo. Sometimes I hold on to them and we float down the “rapids” or the “rapins” as the girl calls them.  We love this time of day best. The minnows nibble at us and the trees rustle above us, and they find me beautiful rocks to bring home for my beautiful rock “collection”. There is usually another meltdown when we leave, usually by the little girl, we walk slowly home while she cries and pouts. It is nap time.

The younger two sleep. I make coffee and sit with it, nursing it. I take a minute, and then the older boy and I work together. Sometimes he plays outside with his friends. If he can’t find them, he insists that he doesn’t play by himself, so I get him to help me. If I don’t mention the word “play” he usually starts playing with something. A couple of sticks. Some rocks. A truck. Sometimes he watches “Really Wild Animals” and sings along with the cheesy songs. I do office work or clean cabins or cook food or do all sorts of other odd piddly things until it is time to get the other kids.

We eat with everyone. We do more dishes. The Superstar Daddy takes photos or sings or does card tricks. We wander home (across the land) at some point. We have bonfires, with marshmallows. We read some more. I kiss them. I close their door and collapse on the couch. Then I get up and put a load of laundry on.

At some point they have become a force. We do everything together. They are my kids, there are three of them, and they take up 80% of my thoughts.

We don’t own a lot of stuff. (Or maybe we do, have you ever seen that book where people around the world put all their belongings outside of their homes? We own a lot more than a lot of people.) We have this family of ours though, and they take and give more than I could have imagined.

We may be moving soon. We are thinking out of the country. Out of North America. And I keep thinking, over and over again, that I am just so glad that we move together, that this thing called family will come with me, now, where I go.

Some lame stomach bug.  Puking and all that.  You really wish you cleaned your bathroom better, every time you have the stomach flu, let me tell you.  Live and don’t learn.

Our internet has been sick too.  Not communicating well with the mother ship, or satellite, or whatever.  Don’t you think it’s weird that we get our internet from a satellite?  If I see myself on my stats, I register as Unknown Country.  That’s pretty cool, don’t you think? 

An Unknown Country.  A place where they sit in peace and don’t have stomach flu, where they can get on the internet at hours other than midnight, where the babies don’t grow up and that isn’t wrong.

I don’t want my Leaf Baby to grow up.  I know that’s wrong, and really, I do want him to grow up, to be normal, to have a life, but also, I want to smush his cheeks forever, while I say, “Chubby bunny, chubby bunny” without him pulling away and saying, Mo-ommmm.  Is that too much to ask?  Or how about if he could just babble like he does now, forever, acting like he’s having a conversation but really making no sense?  It’s adorable. 

Oh jeez.  It’s obviously past my bedtime.  Just wanted to let you know a little of what’s been going on around here.

It was only a week that I knew about your life inside of me.  The week seemed like years, though, and I still feel like your memory echoes through me, I have to remind myself that you aren’t there anymore.

At first the doctors thought you were just too small to see, and then they thought that I was losing you. Later they realized that I wasn’t losing you, and they thought again, maybe you were too small to see!  Maybe we just needed to wait.  My heart soared with hope.  On Friday we saw you for the first time, on the sonogram.  I saw you.  You were perfect, I heard your heart beat.  I knew without needing to be told that you were in the wrong place, knew from the way the technician cocked her head, caught her lip between her teeth.  From the way she wouldn’t quite look at me.  We looked at you together, not speaking, as she got all the pictures she needed, to be sure.  You were so tiny, just beginning to form.  And yet that heartbeat.

Things moved quickly after that, it was my Good Friday.  I felt alone, I sat while doctors poked at me and took blood and I waited.  They wheeled me away, into the operating room, and then I fell apart.  I shivered and tears poured out of my eyes as I lay on my back under the lights.  One of the doctors took my hand and I took some breaths and thought of sending you into pure beauty.

Since I woke up I have had peace.  The first person I saw was your father, and I told him about where you had gone.  My heart is glad, knowing that you are still alive, that you are in the Everlasting Arms.  It was so hard to know that you were there and you were perfect, but that you couldn’t live.  But life is all around and you are alive and we are alive and the big thing, the big loss, which is the potential in you, the potential of who you would become, is not really lost.  You are all that you are meant to be now, I believe, I think you are more beautiful that I would ever have been able to see here. I can’t wait to meet you, to recognize you, to become all that I was meant to be when I shed this old self.

I know, without our loss being any less valid, that there would have been harder ways to lose you.  I know many people who have lost children farther along, and in unfathomable ways, and my heart hurts for them.  I pray for strength for all mothers and fathers who have empty arms.  The doctors were afraid that I would be sad, being in the labor and delivery wing of the hospital, but they didn’t realize that life was what I needed.  I needed to remember that you are alive, and to remember that I have three very alive children who were born in the same way as all those crying babies in there.  I have been blessed.

I joked with the nurses, afterwards, about how I avoided cesarean birth three times but still ended up with a cesarean wound. This scar is all yours, little one, I remember you with this burning pain in my gut, I will always remember that you were here, you have not passed without making a mark.  I will always think of you, my fourth child, when I think of heaven. Heaven means meeting you.

All my love,

Mama.

Chinua and I are so absolutely thankful and awed by all the love and support we have received through your letters and comments.  Thank you for being such a great community to us.  We will move through this into the Spring, and we are thankful for our friends being with us.

Have you ever seen that Saturday Night Live skit where Garth Brooks (as some unknown country singer) sells his soul to the devil so that he can write a hit song?  And then the devil shows up and it’s Will Ferrell with a black trench coat and some red paint on his face?  And it turns out that selling your soul to the devil is just plain dumb, because all of his songs are stupid, like “Fred’s Got Slacks” but the one I’m really thinking of is “Mondays oh I hate Mondays… oh oh oh oh oh oh oh… Weekends! I prefer the Weekends!”

Because Mondays, oh I hate Mondays. And I do prefer the weekends.  There is no greater happiness than a Saturday afternoon, after I’ve put my younger two in bed for a nap and I sit on my little couch with a cup of tea and read, or write, or lately, knit.  Oh happiness.  On weekdays I am very, very busy.  As soon as my little ones are napping I am rushing around doing various office work and administrative blahdy blah blah, and I think that the idea of the impending week just kills me on Mondays. 

But, I can write again, because it’s Tuesday and I am not paralysed with fear and dread anymore, so I can write my way out of it.  Like, I can tell you how I’m going to start calling chores “meditations”.  We will not use that word, chores, anymore.  “I’m getting up from the table now, because I have to do the dish meditations,” or, ”I can’t come out and play just yet, I have to do some meditations.”  Plural like that, because I think it sounds cuter. 

I’m not talking about in a lofty, detached way of doing things, but more a trippy, “dude, this soap is really sudsy and it feels soft on my hands” way.  You know, noticing.  Marveling.  Like a kid who loves to use the vacuum because it’s just so cool. 

Think about the way it feels to bathe your newborn for the very first time.  You hold them so gingerly, you are a little scared of all this water near their little open nostrils.  They are tiny and bird-like and they might cry, if they are like Kid-A, or smile, if they are like YaYa.  But you are so reverent.  Then think about the way you bathe your little kids now (maybe this is just me) as you dump a cup of water over their heads and hurriedly wash their hair.  You’re thinking, “Didn’t we just DO this?”  I’m saying that I want to bathe my baby slowly, marveling over his toes and how they look more and more like his dad’s, aware of the water, my baby’s skin, and how intricately he has been formed, what a miracle he is. 

So, there you go.  I’m just writing over my reluctance to do things I consider mundane (like make the bed for the sixteen thousandth flipping time in my life) trying to tattoo my hands with the words: slow down, be thankful, consider, and above all: give a sacrifice of praise.

So I sat with some new friends in San Francisco, eating vegetable soup and chatting about that one time when the ship Chinua and I were on in India broke down in the middle of the Indian Ocean, when I heard a car’s horn outside.  I jumped up and fell over, then scrambled to my feet and ran through the kitchen to the back window, banging my head on the glass as I tried to look outside.  Oh.

“False alarm,” I said, as I headed back to the table.  They looked a little alarmed. 

A few minutes later, while I was horrifying them with tales of a Hindu practise in India which involves “holy men” hurting their own “parts” by chaining things to them and stuff (it was part of another story- I swear- I know, you don’t want to have me over for dinner now, do you?), my phone rang, the happy Latino Chinua ring, and I snatched it up. 

“We’re here.”

I jumped up, repeating the scene from before, with an added race down those stairs that I showed you in the last post.  I leapt on top of the van and hugged it senseless.  Not really, but I did open the door before Chinua had fully stopped, and jumped on the kids in their car seats.  They responded in kind.  And they were excited to see me.  Kid A was awesome, he didn’t do what he normally does when I get back from being away, which is to put his hand over his face and shake his head slowly, with a very sad look, as if to say, “I am stunned by your absence, your lack of loyalty to my person.”

Nope, this time we all hugged in a big pile.  The Leaf Baby, though, looked at me curiously, as if to say, “Have we met?” and a big chunk of my heart broke off and rolled out into the parking lot.  I quickly ran to get it and stick it back on, though, remembering that he doesn’t even know how to say his own name, and therefore cannot be held responsible for not having a joyful enough reaction to my homecoming.

I really, really love my family. 

Pretty soon I was back in the mix.  We stayed the night in a little room in that house, and I spent the night climbing up and down the ladder in the loft that my Superstar Husband and I slept in, for various requests from my restless kids.  And a little distance makes me a lot more patient, let me tell you.  However, on the way home the following morning the following conversation almost caused me to run over my own foot, I won’t lie.

YaYa: “I’m hungry!” 

Me: “I know sweetie, one more stop and we’re going to go eat at In N Out.”

YaYa: “Out?”

Me: “No, In N Out.  Burger.  Just wait.”

YaYa: “OUT?”

Me: “It’s called In N Out.  It’s a restaurant.”

YaYa: “It’s not cold in here!”  (Thinking that I said, it’s cold in and out)

Me: “No, it’s CALLED In. And. Out.  We’re going to eat there.”

YaYa: “It’s NOT COLD!” 

And so on and so forth.  These conversations have me wondering whether I’m actually sure that I speak the English language.  Maybe this is some sort of Matrix situation or something. 

Saturday was the one-year anniversary of the day you were born.  Around here we call that a birthday.  And it felt like a momentous occasion, so we did what sane people do on momentous occasions in January when they live somewhat near the ocean.  We went to the beach.

 

 

You liked the beach, despite the fact that the coast in Northern California is a little bit like a slice of heaven that you can only stand for so long.  It’s an ear-ringing experience.  It is January, I guess, but the thing is that it’s like this most of the year.  I was watching, and people kept coming and going, most staying for an average of eight minutes.  People think, it’s a beautiful day!  And they decide to go to the beach, they arrive, look at the ocean and the beautiful coastline, and leave with a raging headache.  We lasted the longest out of anyone there, mostly because our family is nuts.  We ran around, I wrestled with seaweed trying to make a sculpture, your brother and sister rolled in the sand, your superstar dad took photos, and he and I danced you around. It was wonderful, really, and I forgot to bring you a hat, so I found your brother’s extra hoodie; the one that is still too big on him, and you spent your birthday in a hoodie that was made for someone four years older than you.

 

The one-year birthday is so sweet, because you have absolutely no idea what is going on, what all the hoopla is about, or why we keep singing this weird song to you all day.  You like the attention, but then, you always get attention.  So, I’ve realized, the first birthday is about the pictures.  Our first birthday celebrations have been relatively small.  For Kid A’s first, we were in Yellowstone Park with some friends and sat a hot spring called the Boiling River for hours.  He loved it, mostly because someone had moved rocks to form a pool that was kid-perfect in temperature.  YaYa’s birthday was nice.  We spent it with your grandparents and had peach pie instead of cake, and there were great pictures!  And your birthday was great, if you want to know.  The ocean was astoundingly beautiful, you ate some sand, played with some rocks, and crawled around happy as a clam.  Your brother and sister ran around like we’d recently let them out of their cages, and I watched you and thought about this year.  I think I’ve been happier than ever before, my son.  You are a very important puzzle piece. 

 

 
It’s funny to think that soon you will walk.  Probably next month I’ll be talking about your first steps.  It’s even funnier to think that you will one day be taller than me.  Sometimes I see moms go by with their tall sons, even the middling tall ones, the ones up to their noses, and I get a lump in my throat, thinking of myself with my three kids around me like flowers, a hand on my shoulder, a slight squeeze on the hand from YaYa.  Of course, these are just images in my mind, and when I see those moms with the tall children I don’t see the argument about whether or not the family can afford a new gaming system that just occured in the car. Still, thoughts like these, about the boy you will be, help to put the 1:50 AM poop of last night into perspective.  (Can we synchronize our schedules, by the way, lovie?  Just asking.)  And then you will be almost grown and one day I will stand on a chair to scold you, like an old friend of the family did with her kids, and you will probably have to try not to laugh.    But now, now you are not even walking, and you say only a few words.  You say AMA, and DAD! and NIE NIE! and you pretend to say several phrases like “I love you” and “Thank you” and you use your sign language, although every single time you want something you let out a great shout and I remind you to say “Please” or “More” in sign instead of shouting, and you do it with your kewpie smile and your fanged teeth (your side teeth came in first, instead of the front ones, giving you fangs that don’t worry me too much, since when I hold you up to the mirror I can still see your reflection) and then you shout again if I’m not fast enough.  You play with mostly bigger kid toys now, like blocks and the magnets on the fridge and drums and trucks, and I keep thinking that I need to get rid of that basket of baby toys that is sitting in the living room, but I never do, and there it sits, this silly basket of toys for a baby who is obviously not a baby anymore.

 

But, on Saturday Kid A and YaYa climbed a mountain.  Or, it was a rock the size of a mountain.  Your dad helped them climb it (he “helped” YaYa by carrying her up) and there they were, silhouetted against the sky and the sparkling ocean, two great explorers.  I could see them and hear their seagull voices calling at me to look at them!  they’re so high! and I sat with you in the circle of my arms feeling so thankful and proud of my family, and I kissed your fuzzy head and was glad that we have a little more baby time left, you’re not such a big boy after all.

 

Photos courtesy of my Superstar Husband 

The other day I was watching Kid A in the Big House.  A while ago, while Chinua and I were on vacation, a major overhaul was done on this house, which is the community space, and some very motivated people got rid of all the ugly couches that have been passed down to us over the years (and believe me, these were some UGLY couches) and the ugly nasty carpet that had been stained and burned over the years (and believe me, it was REALLY stained, ugly and burned.  One of the people who had lived here had even burned his name, MIKE, into the carpet with a poker. Why?  These are the sort of mysteries that plague our lives.)  and redid the main room.  They painted the floorboards, and in place of the couches, they laid mattresses around the perimeter of the room, covering them with high thread-count sheets and delightful body pillows.  We have LOTS of delightful body pillows.  What they didn’t know was that in addition to being great seating/lounge space, these mattresses would provide a much-needed function here at the Land. 

Kid Bounce Space.  Every single day (and believe me, I MEAN every. single. day.) the kids take off their shoes and bounce bounce bounce on the mattresses.  You might not believe it of me (No, not you, you think) but I can be a bit annoyed about things like pushing the mattresses which are our seating back together, or rearranging the cushions. This is why I have no throw pillows in my home.  I cannot bear the strain of putting them back in their places.  And because I’ve never bought any.  Okay, there are two reasons that there are no throw pillows in my home.  Anyways, I was a bit annoyed with this whole jumping thing until I shook myself by the shoulders, which is not so easy to do, and realized, HEY.  KID BOUNCE TIME.  We need Kid Bounce Time.  And we don’t even need to have any bulky equipment, just these innocent mattresses on the floor, doubling as nice seating and Kid Bouncers.  The pillows make great log cabins, too, because there are just so many of them. And wouldn’t you like to jump into a big huge pile of delightful pillows that are just as big as you?  I would.  And then I would like them to turn out to be chocolate, so that I could eat them.

So, I was watching Kid A, and he was playing out some scene over and over.  Running over to one side of the room, then turning and running and jumping on the mattress, dropping his sword and falling down dead.  He did it, maybe… sixty-eight times.  Finally I asked him what he was doing.  “An Orc is shooting me in the back with an arrow,” he replied.  Ohhhhhh.  I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.

This is my son who cried his way through the entire movie, “Curious George,” because the monkey was sad. 

This is my son who cannot stand most Disney movies because he is shaking and crying by the time whatever disaster befalls a parent/brother/close friend of the main character happens at the beginning of the movie. 

I talked about empathy a little bit a couple of posts ago, and the truth is that Kid A has always been really, really empathetic.  It is what makes him unable to get through a movie with a plot, because the plot usually involves someone being hurt or alone.  But I’m realizing that he really is like other little boys in that he doesn’t automatically equate getting shot with arrows or cut with a sword with physical pain.  Thus, the gore.

There is a family who lives here now with two little boys, one Kid A’s age and one a couple of years older, and I think that this has to do with his recent steps towards manly sword fights and battles.  I often come out of my house to find myself under mild attack.  Either that or they scurry back toward their “castle”, which is a clump of three very tall and thick Douglas Fir trees stuck together at the base with a space in the middle big enough for three or four tiny warriors.  Then I find myself looking down a bow shaft.  The arrow does have a sucker on the end of it, so I don’t feel too threatened. 

I love the fact that Kid A has other little boys to play with, and I especially love that their castle is made of trees, and I also laugh at the fact that Kid A is busy getting shot in the back  (sixty-eight times) and having swords run through him.  However, I totally can’t relate.  My son is, well, a son.  I’m a girl.  A woman.  I’m the one who doesn’t like the fight scenes, who yawns her way through the fight scenes, either that or flinches and leaves the room. I love the movie Hero (Chinua is big on Kung Fu) because of the colors, the flying, the breathtaking art of the movie, not the fight scenes.

So it’s a bit mysterious to me, this gore, the dying over and over.  I’ll just watch from a little ways back.

 

I just convinced my kids to go back to bed for a little while.  Now I sit in the chilly morning (haven’t made a fire yet) thinking random thoughts like, “I really have a lot of hair,” as I attempt to put it somewhere comfortable while I sit.  A good friend of mine has dreadlocks that reach below her bottom, and I always marvel at the fact that she doesn’t seem to mind sitting against it.  I’m constantly searching for somewhere to put my hair, should it be around at the front? Off to one side? 

I just wanted to share some silly kid stuff with you this morning.  My kids have me laughing at them all the time, in their different stages of growth, doing what they do.  I love hearing the YaYa Sister beginning to form her own little thoughts and imaginary plays as she gets closer to turning three.  The other day she was sad, probably because she fell, since she falls about seventeen times in the space between when she wakes up and when she takes her nap, and I held her for a minute and then said, “Okay, time to get some lunch!”

“To feel me better?”  she asked, in her little heartbreakingly high-pitched mouse voice. 

“Well, yeah, but mostly just because it’s lunch time.”  My kids are always asking me for something to eat or drink to “feel them better,” and I have some sense of responsibility about not making them feel like eating is the only way to feel better.  Maybe I’ve been reading too many magazines. 

“It WILL,” she insisted, in her intimidating little pipsqueak voice.  “It will go into my leg and feel me better!”  Kid A has always had this vivid imagination when it comes to his food moving around his body, and YaYa has picked up on this.  They often try to get more treats based on the fact that their food has already moved into their legs, and therefore doesn’t count anymore.

Kid A has been on a different track lately, tuning into his various emotions and turning to me for some sort of answer about why he feels the way he does during different confusing times.  When we drive, he calls questions from the back of the van:

“Why are my eyes closing?”

“Why am I yawning?”

“Why am I tired?”

The other day YaYa hit her head, (what did I tell you about her falling a lot?) and she cried a different kind of cry, the sort of chest-splitting cry that has you picking your kid up in an instant.  As I was comforting her, Kai asked me, with a little wobble in his voice, “Why am I going to cry too?”  It’s like the first branches of empathy showing their knobby ends, and he’s confused, like “She’s the one who’s hurt, why am I crying?”

These things fascinate me, they turn me into a scientist and I sit with my notepad and pen and take notes while observing my kids.  “During imaginary play today, bad guy named: The Wicked Pharoah. Funny. Good memory and application skills.”

And then there’s Leaf.  He’s actually probably progressing the fastest, but his talking is still like this:

“Nyah hunuh gloo feeb MAMA gla gla gla gob.”  Scientist me: “Babble has become almost continuous, ready for conversation.  Good variation of consonants.  Sign language coming along.” Other me: “I love this baby so much I think I might die from it.”

 

Yesterday I fell in love with my Leaf baby a little more.  I don’t know why there are some days like this, where you look up and recognize each other and one more chink slides into its place; your understanding of each other is a little more whole, you find that your heart can really expand just a little more.  I never cease to wonder at the bonding experience with babies.  I wrote about it a little here, and still, I wonder.  Now Leaf says, “Hey!” to me when I come back into the house if I’ve been gone, and his expression is entirely welcoming, and I think I need that kind of welcome in my life.  No one gives it like a baby, so pure and open.

Yesterday I saw another beautiful piece of my daughter, when Chinua was talking about Kuumbaa, the sixth principle of Kwanzaa.  (We’re celebrating extremely late this year.) Kuumbaa means creativity, and my Superstar Husband was talking to the kids about their own creativity.  He said, “Kid A plays guitar, and that’s Kuumbaa, and Leaf loves drums, and that’s Kuumbaa, and YaYa is really good at drawing, and that’s Kuumbaa too.” And YaYa’s face started to shine, she wears her emotions so transparently, and she impulsively gave Chinua a huge hug.  It meant so much to her to have that affirmation, she really really felt it, and the whole evening was one of those times that puts everything in place.  Our children, our family, the role we have as parents.  It was perfect.

The other day, after I posted last, the crisis that I spoke of got worse.  It involved drug use, and someone had to be taken to the Emergency Room on Monday night.  Everything is okay now, and I think we’re at the beginning of a long journey of working through a lot of emotional brokenness with this person, the kind of thing that would have them on a binge, totally out of the blue, but I still feel so scattered.  While Chinua was putting the kids to bed on Monday night, I was trying to break into someone’s psychedelic madness and bring sanity.  My friend and I tried to help for three hours, until we had to give it up and put it into the hands of doctors more capable than we.  Three hours of trying to communicate with someone who is not in the same world, mentally.  Three hours of trying to convince someone not to walk around blindfolded, literally, not figuratively .  Three hours of crying on and off, of witnessing heartbreak.  And then to come back to my cabin, after we had given it up, after we decided that all that could be done was at the E.R., where they could pump a bunch of sleep medicine into our friend and have her sleep it off, for me to switch off with Chinua, who got in the van to go, and to find Kid A in the bathroom, asking me to wipe his bum.  Suddenly, bum-wiping seemed so normal, so sane. 

I’m rambling a lot, I know.  I’m just trying to make some sense out of this.  I’ve seen a lot of really really hurt people who do things to sabotage good in their lives.  And now here I am, with my community in the woods, and I bathe children, I send out tax receipts, I dive into madness, and I fold laundry.  I work to keep my house peaceful, and then God asks me to leave that peace and help a person who is without peace, someone who is tormented.  It has happened again and again over the years, and it always makes me feel like there are two of me.  Different women to do different things. The noise of quarreling kids is a kind of peace, compared to the roar of cold brutality from the Enemy. 

Maybe there are a lot of different pieces of me.  There is the woman who washes dishes, and there is the woman who wants to write a novel, and there is the woman who says, “take off that blindfold, right now.”  And this is okay, and I am here to do this, to raise children and affirm them, and to help hurt people.  Maybe we are all here for this, in different ways.  It is no small thing, to move from one world to another.  The bridge is not easy. 

So, our internet connection comes from a satellite, as we are too far away from anything to have DSL, and every once in a while, the two of us, the satellite and we, have problems communicating.  It’s like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, except that it is more like We’re on Earth, Satellite’s just Roaming, and then we have no internet.  Like this weekend.  So, it’s a pleasure to sit down and be back in touch.

What a wonderful way to ring in the New Year, sick as soggy toast, not fulfilling a single one of the almost resolutions I had in my mind this year.  Not a single one.  It’s a great start, can I have a startover?  A reset?  No?  I didn’t really write them down or anything, but they were a jumbled mess of jogging, getting up early, reading and meditating on the Bible, focusing more clearly on Kid A’s early homeschooling, working on my novel, and taking vitamins.  I didn’t do any of them.  Not a single one.

It’s actually good for me to start the year this way.  It’s like God saying to me, “Let’s just put away any newly formed ideas about that whole Supermom thing to rest right away, shall we?  Now that we have that out of the way, what do you want to do this year?  I have some ideas.”

I’m excited, when I stop standing over my own shoulder with a whip, to think of God’s ideas for me this year.  When I was younger, I used to think that those ideas would be mostly exciting things that included travel and people telling me that they didn’t know what they’d do without me. I’m ashamed to admit it.  Now, well, I don’t know, but I think that His ideas are more about formation.  More about tossing me ingredients and seeing what I’ll make.  Sometimes His hands work with mine, and what comes out is mostly His own creation, and sometimes I feel like I’m struggling along, messing it up.  If it’s clay, it comes out cracked and dry, and if it’s food, the rice is overcooked and the beans are burnt and tasteless.  But while I’m working on what I’m making, He’s really forming me, which is the important thing.  Am I making any sense?

Like yesterday, I felt like I was thrown a pretty big mess.  We left to go to church and spend the day up in the college town north of us.  When we woke up, though, my Superstar Husband looked at me with bleary, pleading eyes.  He’s been burning the candle at every end lately, and fighting the flu that I fell prey too, so I said, “I’ll just go!”  After some minor issues and a little fun stress-filled tearing around to get everything together, I was on my way with the three kids, and some friends; one visiting, and two friends who live here.  About halfway through the day there was a crisis with a girl who came with us, someone I have really come to love in the last few months.  At first it felt like something I couldn’t handle, like too many ingredients to make anything that wouldn’t be a huge mess, that wouldn’t take hours to scrape off the ceiling.  But then, I heard God’s gentle voice urging me to jump in and try, and I did.  And I found that a crisis like this brought total honesty, that maybe now I’ll be able to help more than before, and then somehow we muddled through the day without anyone getting hurt or lost or too far gone.  And so, what emerged was a day of love and honesty, a day of softness with my kids, a day of working through hard things with friends. 

The point is that I haven’t been able to follow any routines this past week.  My house has been rather messy, no matter my slow-witted attempts to clean it, and I haven’t exercised. But I think I’m starting to see that this year is not going to be the year that I become the majorly sculpted and disciplined housewife, but more like the year that I learn a little more about how to listen.  I’ve been tossed a family, and not only that, but a community, and sometimes I feel like I have nothing to offer, I haven’t come out with enough arms to make something of this.  I think God is still here, though, waiting to see what happens, offering a hand here and there.  He’s the one telling me that Yes, I can be kind to my children even when the house is messy and I woke up later than I wanted to.  And most of all, He smiles at my efforts, gently taking that whip out of my hands,  offering me a shoulder when I flop on the couch at night, exhausted.  He urges me that I can be like a child, that this can be fun, even if it’s not all travel, even if I’m not seamlessly saving the world. What a Guy.  I guess that’s mostly what I want this year, anyways.