Category — Sad Today

Sometimes a break is in order.  Life has continued, for me, full speed ahead, and I’m sorting through my emotion-box, restacking and refolding.  I think I have everything in order and then I wake up again, not wanting to get out of bed, and I realize, we’re not through this, and I need to hold my hand again to get through the day

I’ve been eyeing my computer every time I pass it, but my routines are scattered and confused, and I haven’t been able to write.  It seems to be a law in my house that my kids become incredibly needy if I’m on the computer while they’re awake, and I usually write in the early hours of the morning when they’re still sleeping. These hours have been unavailable to me lately, and I haven’t been pushing myself.

I’ve been taking a break.  And I guess I still am.  Thanks for understanding.  By the way, I loved your weekend words.  They warmed me and I felt like you brought me right into your experiences. 

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.

I haven’t been feeling well.  The last week has been incredibly hard, but I want to write about what heals me, because God is always so good, there are little gifts here and there.  My Superstar Husband had a concert on Saturday and Renee was wonderful and watched the kids for me so I could go.  And I sat on a leather couch in a well-lit cafe, with a cup of coffee in my hand and watched my best friend play the music that I love.  When he was introducing the song that he wrote about me, he said he was married to the most beautiful girl in the room, and I felt awe fold in on me, tearstained, wrinkled soul that I am. 

And the drives, lately.  The drives.  Sometimes we drive around a curve and suddenly there is a view before me that is so breathtaking that I want to hurl myself into the center of it and drop into it like a stone into a lake.  Or squeeze it, squeeze it and squeeze it.  It’s like the line from the Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, God’s World, where she says, “That gaunt crag, to crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!”  When I drove to Sacramento a couple of weeks ago I took Highway 20, through Lake County, and all along the lakes and the hillsides there were these purple flowering trees, so incredibly vivid in the brown and green hills.  I rounded curve after curve calling applause! applause! to the purple flowering trees, because it is hard to clap when you are driving on curvy roads.

On Sunday we went out to the ranch of some new friends of ours, and again, I was stunned.  We followed them home, and we left the highway to drive for about twenty more minutes along a small road that was only paved partway up.  We climbed and climbed through the forest and then came out of the woods and we were surrounded by such a pastoral view of wildflowers and valleys and hills stretching off into the distance that we all gasped.  There were happy cows grazing in fields, and funny-looking sheep among boulders and you could see for miles.  We drove up farther and got acquainted with the house before going on a journey to find the waterfall.  The kids and I climbed onto a hay bale in the back of the Kubota and I held them tight as one of our hosts drove us down steep inclines to get to the waterfall.  When we got there, we sat on a warm, flat rock and YaYa had a revelation (“The water falls!”) and then the kids rolled in the grass and found bugs and worms. 

It was such a sweet break, such a warm and comforting day.  Grass and wind revived me and I felt healed by the beauty my eyes were taking in.  When we all piled into the Kubota and climbed back up to the house, our hosts fed us hot chocolate and popcorn in the sunny dining room and we ended up staying so late that Renee made dinner and we stayed for that too, and drove home tired and happy. 

There have been days like these.  And there have been days of loss, loss that I don’t know how to contain.  Do I hold it in my heart, or do I open my hands and let it fly away?  I am in the midst of a miscarriage, a baby so young I didn’t know I was carrying him.  I found out that I was pregnant about two minutes before I found out that I was also possibly losing the baby, and my heart lifted and then fell, and it has been like that for days now.  We are not sure what is going on with you, they say.  We don’t know how far along you are.  We think you are miscarrying.  It may be ectopic, they say.  And that is life-threatening, they say.  We need to watch you.  We need to do another sonogram. 

So they have me coming every other day (driving over an hour each way) for blood work to measure my hcg levels, to make sure they are going down okay, and meanwhile I am bleeding and I am opening my hands, letting him go.  It’s amazing how much sorrow I feel for a baby that I wasn’t planning on having.  It’s amazing how much my heart expanded in the short time that I prepared myself to have another baby.  I would have said I couldn’t handle one more thing right now, one more bit of sadness.  But I guess I am, I guess I am handling it.  And when I drive up to the hospital, the trees and the mountains and the grass hold me.  And I see these things are from my Father, just like when people feed me and sun comes through the trees and the future doesn’t seem as scary, for a moment. 

Sometimes when I’m walking around the Land there will be a big noise, like a pack of wolves bursting through the brush, and it terrifies me, but then I turn and I see that it’s only a flock of quail.  Why do those quail need to be so scary?  I think this is like the fear that overtakes me sometimes.  The days ahead are only days, after all.  The people are only friends.  What I think are wolves are actually quail running from me, scattering from the bush with their hearts beating madly.  Neither they nor I need to be afraid.

I can’t really explain what is going on with me right now, except that it is deep and swimmy and a little froggy.  Does that help?  I am encouraged and overwhelmed all at once.

Maybe I can just let you know some factoids.  Sketch a little picture, so that you can put it together.

I drove some of my friends to the airport yesterday.  We drove down to Sacramento on Saturday, then I dropped them off at the curb early Monday morning.  It’s the first step to them moving away from the Land, which makes me very sad.  I’m happy for them, but sad for me.  Yesterday, as I was sitting at my friend’s cafe, my sadness punched me in the gut when she said, “this is good for them, hey”? and I laid my head on her bar counter and cried.  I wanted to pull myself together, only there seemed to be nothing to pull together.  Over the last two years I have lived through a slow attrition of a community that was tighter than anything I’ve ever been part of, (I’m being starkly honest here) and though we have hope of rebuilding, it is hard to say goodbye to people when you’ve seen each other married, give birth, walked through foreign corridors together…

I feel as though pieces of me are trickling away, as people move away.  I invested too much in my friends, I guess.  I don’t know how to grieve this properly, I waver between hope and belief and bitterness and a kind of flinging my hands around my head. 

It is NOT all about me.  I know.  This is about a whole village, the movement and shape of a group of people who have grown and walked together, and I see God’s shape in it.  He is a great orchestrator, an author.  Our stories continue.  But, I feel hurt.  I feel left, out here in the woods, where the trees are always tall, where light is green and golden, alternately.  I go back and forth, reminding myself of all that I have to be thankful for, and then feeling forgotten and used up.

So.  That is one thing. 

Another?  Well, I have these kids, see, and I know that you know that.  But, boy.  I love them to death, and I’m also feeling a little overwhelmed by how much they need me.  An ebb, if you will.  I know you understand.

Also? God is reawakening my heart for the world.  Seeing that speech of Bono’s happened at a pretty key time for me.  Everything seems centered around this.  All my conversations, the things I stumble across on the web.  The major things that come out of it are the extreme need of the poor and at-risk kids and adults of the world, and the responsibility of the rest of us.  I am convinced that our culture has become more and more frivolous at a direct ratio to the needs in the rest of the world, and I wonder if people simply don’t know how to help, or can’t understand the enormity of what is going on.  I read one statistic of a predicted 20 million children being left orphans by AIDS by the year 2010. 

I was thinking of some sort of art project about this, and when I asked Chinua how long it would take me to paint 20 million dots, he figured out that if I painted five dots a second, for 24 hours a day, non-stop, it would take me over THREE YEARS. (!!!) Gasp. Choke. Sputter. How can this be?  

What’s interesting to me is that the Bible is so completely full of directives to help the poor and oppressed, and it is clear that that last part of Bono’s speech is true.  God’s heart is completely with them.  I am mulling and chewing on what I can do.  It makes me feel a little as though I will split in two, but I’ve been encouraged that it is God who is putting this together, especially after talking with several friends who have had the same wind blowing on them. 

I have also been encouraged by my friends, heroes of mine who have realized that part of their reason for being here is making choices that give to people around them.   While I was in Sacramento, I had the privilege of meeting the new baby girl of some friends of mine.  They’ve been waiting for her for awhile, having decided to adopt their third child, and she came home with them a little over a week ago.  She’s precious, like a rose, and it’s lovely beyond words that they have found her and she has found them.

Another friend of mine has been building into her community for a while now, almost a year, through the ownership of a cafe in Sacramento which supports local businesses and economy.  (When you check out the link, check out the rest of the LJUrban site, they’re pretty sweet.)  She’s also the kind of friend that I would keep in my sleeves if I could, but alas.

Bits and pieces, I know.  I guess to wrap up I would say that I see people moving in the kind of ways that are like shadow  puppets on the wall, like the something more beautiful than they are. Adopting is beautiful, but there are still diapers. Running a cafe that refuses to make its money off of other people’s suffering is heroic, but there are still those bills needing to be paid.  What I’m saying, I guess, is that revolution is made of many sacrifices.  All of those sacrifices together build something larger than themselves (is that called synergy?) and fling themselves into the face of a great and pervasive evil that broods across our culture, an evil of selfishness.  It’s the evil I face everyday when I don’t feel like taking care of others, when I want to sink into laziness.  If a battle is going to be fought against injustice, it seems like it begins with the same motions that cause us to wake up in the middle of the night to take care of a sick child.  Why do we do it?  Because they mean so much to us, because they’re our family.

I think we need to expand our family a little.

Under all of the little things and the big things in this last couple of weeks, there has been a constant stream of sadness in me, not without reason.  I’ve done my normal things to overcome it, but today it feels as though I’m losing.  And it’s the kind that cripples my writing, that makes me want to hide when the phone rings, that makes me want to wear a t-shirt that says, “I don’t want to talk about it.”  That’s pretty good, actually, I think I may have that made.

So, all I have to offer is this: the YaYa Sister came out of her room yesterday, first thing in the morning, and walked over to where I was writing on the couch.  Without further ado, she said, “Mama?  Today can I choose Life?” 

Talking about cereal, of course, but still.  Mildly prophetic, no?

1. I love to sit and drink an Americano with two shots of espresso.

2. I’m so glad that Elena bought me that little espresso machine.  She’s prescient like that. Probably knew I’d be using it everyday.

3. The sky is so pretty today.

4. I want to knit myself a sweater with a hood that’s big enough to fit over my gigantic head (actually my head’s not that big, it’s just that my neck is so long) and some socks, and a shawl, and some slippers and everyone I know linen hand towels and cotton dishcloths and soft wool blankets. 

5. How long will that take me?

6. I want to write about something kind of intense, but I don’t want everyone to feel sorry for me or have sympathy for me.

7.  I want everyone to feel sorry for me and have sympathy for me.

8. No I don’t.

9. Shoot, that Leaf Baby is cute.

10. I want a burrito.

11. My friend Devon looks so pretty with her new hair color.  I wonder if I should dye my hair?  Maybe black?

12. Black is a bad idea.

13. I want some stuffed pizza like we had on my last day in Chicago.

14. I hate that a lot of my friends live far away from me.

15. This coffee is really good.

16. I’m proud of myself for writing over 6000 words in the third first draft of my novel this week. 

17. My novel sucks.

18. No it doesn’t.  I love my novel.  It’s my fourth child.

19. Okay, so the kind of intense thing is this: I’ve lived in community since I was eighteen years old, which is eight years, for those of you who don’t want to do the math.  It’s all of my adult life. I’ve never really lived any other way.  And when I started out, I had a lot of ideals.  I was really starry eyed and intense about loving one another and looking out for each other and considering others before ourselves.  And then, over the years, I began to get slightly jaded.  And as people wandered in and out of my life, I started to more often have my arms crossed over my chest, to protect myself.  And then I started to think things like I’d better look out for myself, because no one else will.  And actually, even I can’t look out for myself, so I guess no one is. And then I even thought things like I can’t tell anyone how I really feel inside.  And that turned into I’d rather kill myself than feel like I do. And then, there’s no way out.  And then something broke, and I started to talk to people more, and my fists unclenched a little, and life looked a little more beautiful, and I started to notice wildflowers again and to feel happy when I was hanging out with my friends, rather than alone.  And thoughts of death didn’t come so suddenly, and I began to take pleasure in my kids, and the forest was healing to me.

And yet.  There are always new corners to be turned, and I have gradually realized that I still have my arms crossed over my chest, and I have completely missed the point, somehow.  To put it very practically, I spend very little time wondering how I can turn someone else’s day from a speck on the calendar to a brilliant spark on their path.  You know, the special things.  Above and beyond.  I spend my time playing out my role in the community, defending myself and my commitment, doing the office work that I tolerate.  But what about life on the mountain?  What about washing other people’s tired feet, for Pete’s sake? What about encouraging others, even at my own expense? 

I’ve learned a lot of simple things in taking care of myself when I’m feeling depressed.  Remember my rules?  1. Wash your face and brush your teeth.  2. Eat at every mealtime. 3. Sleep at night.  I’ve expanded these to include, 4. Take breaks throughout the day. 5. Write everyday. 6. Get on the floor and play with your kids.  And there’s more. 

But life can’t only be reduced only to these things.  I had a realization this week that I’ve begun to think of a community as a place where we cohabitate, rather than a living journey, a walk together where we strengthen each other along the way.  And not only that, but have I begun to think of my marriage this way?  I’ve done so many things that are unintentionally hurtful to my husband over the years that I’m surprised, in a way, that he still looks at me with hope. 

I have a little sermon that I give about condemnation versus conviction.  Condemnation comes from the enemy of our souls and leaves you gasping at the creek bed, wondering whether you should just lie at the bottom until you drown.  Conviction takes you to the edge of a vast ocean and shows you a new way to be.  It hurts, sometimes, to realize you’ve been stuck on the land when you could have been sailing, but the beauty of the ocean soothes you and draws you to itself.  And that’s where I am, I’m not lost in this, I’m afloat, God is beside me.  The sky is pleasant and I have years ahead to try again. 

But I feel like I need to apologize, to any of you reading who have been a part of my community.  I’m sorry.  I forgot how beautiful it could be.  I don’t even know if I’ll be able to do any better right now. The old defenses come up so quickly.  But I can try. 

20. That was hard to write.

21. I like the music that’s playing in this cafe.

22. I need to download some Otis Redding.

23. This coffee is really good.

I’m sorry guys, I’m showing up here right now with nothing good.  I’ve been consumed in office work that sucks all my energy right out of me, I feel low, rejected, sad, and anxious.  Let down, hanging around… oh wait, did I just step into a Radiohead song?  I haven’t been posting all that much because I found myself counting how many poopy diapers I had changed and how many loads of laundry I had washed, and I was writing it all down when I got sick of myself and deleted it, all of it, all my numbers and charts and adding things up.

Nothing adds up.  I’m learning that I should just stay away from numbers.  They don’t feed me.  What does?

My wood stove.  It’s purty.  And warm.

A big heavy four-year-old boy agreeing with me when I tell him it’s cuddle time after he’s had a grumpy morning.  I could sit with his head under my chin all day.  I always marvel at the large skull that has grown from the tiny fragile head he was born with.  Not to mention the long legs from those little bowed bird legs.

My Leaf Baby.  He tries to make me laugh and he always succeeds.

Collecting stones from the beach.

A beautiful painting/song/poem.

BEAUTY.  Oh I need it.  In me, around me.  Lately I’ve been rebelling, feeling like such a cleaning lady.  I know it’s all to the end of creating a beautiful space for my family, but does it have to be so repetitive? Does it have to feel so futile?  Or how about other areas in life? Does loving people have to feel so one-sided?   Can we get a little rain? Oh, here I am, complaining. 

I’ll write again tomorrow, maybe the morning will shake some of this out of me.  I have things to tell you, I do. 

Now I prefer to stew in my misery.

I feel so, so sad and sick to my stomach over the story of the Kim family.  James Kim was found deceased a couple of hours ago, and it is a tragic ending to the search to find him.  His family was rescued from the car they were stranded in, found by helicopter two days ago, but James had already left to search for help.

It is sad, and heartbreaking, and I can’t help putting myself there, being in the car saying goodbye to my husband.  How tragic.

I am praying for his family today, breathing sad prayers that God would sustain them.

I remember that when I first stepping into mommishness, and I had my one wee baby, my friend Carol would tell me that the biggest change in her life since becoming a mom was her lack of a thought life. She had three children, the oldest nine, and the youngest three at the time. Since I only had a baby, I couldn’t really relate yet. Most of my struggles were with being tied to a young creature, night and day, with having really tight cycles of sleep and food and wake time, which are big struggles in the beginning, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t really understand what she meant by that lack of a thought life thing.

Until now. Now I do. It has something to do with waking first thing to requests for juice that grow ever shriller and then sitting at the table sticking to my guns about the fact that everyone is eating their breakfasts and juice can wait until I’ve finished mine, for pity’s sake. And then on into the day, racing away, breaking up fights, telling stories, of course the ever-present and heroic bum-wiping, and just generally, the living consistently with other talking people who do it all the time. Talk. And talk. And talk.

I like to think. It fills up my writer self with stories and ideas and memories. So I was glad to drive down to the City yesterday to work, a job I do about once a month, although I half froze in my heatless car. But nevermind. That’s a thing of the past. It was good to think.

I passed three dead dear, not all together, as I drove. Once, a while ago, I started a poem about the carnage on the highway first thing in the morning, here in the woods. Something about the flocks of carrion birds. Although it was storming so hard yesterday that even crows were staying away. It was storming so hard that I stopped to eat to try to wait it out a little, since I could barely see, and when I ran from my car to the store it was as though I had stepped into my bathtub and turned on the shower.

I thought a lot. Before I left I ran into our communal kitchen for something. It looked as though seven young bulls with dirt on their hooves had wreaked havoc for hours. Somehow in the aftermath of Thanksgiving the kitchen got neglected, partly because a lot of people caught a bug going around and were feeling yucky and under the weather, and probably because it got to the point where it was overwhelming. I felt upset. First I thought, how did this happen? And then I thought, why didn’t I plan better? I should have thought to set up a clean up crew for the after Thanksgiving earthquake. Somewhere in the middle of total responsibility and blame is the real answer.

But it’s like G.K. Chesterton wrote, after a local paper asked writers for essays on what they thought the biggest problems of the world were. His was brief. “I am,” he wrote.

It’s all part of a theme that I’ve been mulling over, in those rare moments when I can mull, about perspective. For instance, I could have continued to stew over the state of the kitchen as I drove. I realized that I was doing it, and understood that it was stealing my joy over what an amazing Thanksgiving we had. I mean, it really was amazing. I had the most fun that I’ve had in a long time. Friends came from far away, we ate, we sang the Thanksgiving song, we played music, we played games like Mafia and Grand Pooba, Chinua did card tricks, and the guys made a sweat lodge.

Yesterday I stopped along the way to visit with my friend who got really hurt in a motorcycle accident. He’s in the hospital, and it’s so, so sad to see him there and in pain. He looked grey, like people in the hospital often do, and his eyes were shadowed and pain-filled. He’s going to get better. That’s the amazing thing. He could have died.

It’s crazy, how crumbly we are. There are so many casualties, all the time, like those deer who stepped onto a dark road, like people who fly off their motorcycles because some other person in a car made a bad choice. Something like seeing someone in so much pain really makes you think about casualties. Sometimes we are even casualties of our friendships, of careless words and the sediment of hurts. For me, seeing my friend in pain and his family working through it made me want to say, I’ll be a better friend, I really will, to everyone I know. There are small things and there are big things, and I want to focus on the big things.

Don’t get me wrong, the kitchen needs to be clean, but sometimes I need to look past the dishes. That’s all.

Morning.
Long drive to work in the City (over three hours).
No kids.
Stormy.
Three dead deer, along the way.
Rain.
Holes in my shoes.
No heat in my van.
Visited an injured friend and his amazing wife.
Wanted to cry.
Cried a little.
Said goodbye.
More storms.
Two accidents holding up traffic.
Crazy rain.
Couldn’t see.
Stopped to eat.
Cleared up a little.
Sun warmed me, just a bit.
Arrived at work.
Lots of work.
Just finished.
Feet still wet.
Headed home.
Long drive ahead.
Dark and rainy.
No heat in the van.
Errands to run (need diapers, food, and a keyboard and mouse).
At the end, home.
Husband.
Babies in bed.
Sleep.
Morning will come.
It always does.