Remembrance

I held a small ceremony to mark the 20th anniversary of the passing of my mom. I wasn't sure how well it would be received or attended, but I really felt like I needed to do something. It has been so long without her.
I had seen many years ago that Hawaii started a lantern floating ceremony on Memorial Day that looked so peaceful and beautiful. People write messages to loved ones and then float them off the coast of the beach. I wanted to try and recreate something like that for my mom. I think it was a wonderful success. The evening started off with a sun dog appearing in the sky, and a small breeze sent all the lanterns with their messages safely to the other side of the lake.
It was a beautiful evening surrounded by friends and family. I feel incredibly lucky to have so many people still here to remember her by. I'm hoping to try and do it again sometime, to keep her memory alive.

Breaking Through

“I am not what i have done. I am what i have overcome.”

May 7th, Mother’s Day weekend, I ran my first 5K with my husband. We wore orange in honor of my mother, we stuck together as we dodged through the strollers, and walkers, and dancers, and kids. My husband even got hit with a spraying can of beer. But we did it. I did it. Asthma and all. For her. For me. For the fact that I am still here breathing, even though the pain can still take my breath away.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mommy.

Nineteen Years

"Why does it take a minute to say hello and forever to say goodbye?" ~Unknown

Nineteen years

Since you left this place.

Since I’ve held your hand.

Seen your face.

Days go by

Disjointed at best.

Inured, eviscerated

Within the same breath.

I never thought

I could carry on

But here we are…..

Nineteen years already gone.

It Was Not Death, for I Stood Up

"I don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it.  If you don't, you feel even worse.”  ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Robin Williams was one of my mother’s favorite actors, and very quickly became mine. I think I was about Little Bear’s age when I first saw him in Popeye (and became acutely terrified of octopi immediately after that). I also think I was the only six year old to watch Good Morning Vietnam, and The World According to Garp - parts of which were blocked by my mother’s hands over my eyes and ears - because I was begging my mom to let me see him again in a movie. Thank goodness we got a copy of Toys a few years later, although I still sometimes yell “Watch out for the under toad!” while running into the surf at the shore. When I heard the news on Monday afternoon of Robin tragically taking his own life, my first thought was one of sorrow, that the world was a little bit darker without his light in it. My second was that my mother would be overjoyed to see him again in “person,” besides the one time she ended up seeking him out to apologize for her son kicking him in the leg in a hotel pool. But as I read the comments on every article and news posting, and have absorbed all the backlash pieces that have popped up, my main feeling is grief. For everyone out there that condemn his death, malign his name, and call him a cheat, a coward, a weakling, and - worst of all - selfish, I applaud your ignorance. And my wish for you is that you keep it your entire life. I would rather you shouted your stupidity at the top of your lungs till the end of your days than to ever have to be afflicted with something as dark and insidious as actual severe depression. I don’t like to talk about my health problems. Especially my depression and my anxiety. I know I’ve mentioned it, I’ve wrote about it, but I don’t like to talk about it. Mostly because of the opportunity for judgement from the blissfully ignorant masses that thankfully have no idea what its like. There are a slim few that I share this darkness with, in some ways to protect them from it, and in other ways to protect myself. Nothing irritates me more than those inspirational photos that say people need to just choose to be happy everyday. As if I chose this disease for myself, and was happy living with it. Might as well tell a cancer patient to choose not to have a tumor when they wake up every morning. Part of the misunderstanding I think lies in the word we use as the label itself. You can feel depressed without having depression. But having depression is nothing like being a little low in spirits that feeling depressed means. Let me just say that again to let it sink in. Having depression is nothing like feeling depressed. I’ve mentioned actual depression is insidious. You might even personify it as a kidnapper, or a jailer, because the first thing it does is isolate you. It isolates you from your family, your friends, the world in general. You start to feel irritable and angry with those around you, then awkward, and alone after you’ve driven them away. You can easily identify that something is different, something is wrong, which almost immediately translates into something being wrong with you. Everyone else seems to be able to laugh, or cry, or sleep at night, or wake up in the morning. Why not you? It also isolates you from the rational parts of yourself. That self esteem that your wonderful parents gave you, the compliments from your friends, the praise and promises from the love of your life that everything will be okay, and they love you anyway….they can’t get through. There is no cell service at this island you find yourself stranded where those encouraging messages could be received. You’ve become the new lead in Cast Away, but instead of having a benign volleyball to talk to, you’ve been left with a deceitful forked tongue serpent that likes to lie to you. You are on this island, trying to communicate with the people in your life, whom you can see, but not really hear or understand. Especially since they are shouting from so far away, and that serpent is right next to you, drowning out their words by speaking directly into your ear. And the longer the serpent is next to you, the more chance it has to wrap itself around you. At first the contact might even feel nice, or comforting - you can actually feel something for once! But ultimately, you realize that the closeness will eventually kill you if you don’t do something about it. So you struggle against its bonds hoping to free yourself. You struggle with those python-like bands around you every day, every moment. Some days its just too exhausting to fight them. The thought of making the effort to even get up out of bed in the morning is so overwhelmingly tiring you just don’t. Trying to smile, and converse, while those bands are squeezing around you, making your bones ache and your lungs pinch from lack of air is sometimes too painful. Every decision you make is weighed against the effort of moving, and carrying this burden wrapped around yourself. No one can reach you past its coils. You long for real contact. An actual true sensation of feeling something touching you besides this insidious serpent. With depression, the most vital decision is when you actually admit to struggling out loud. Sometimes, with the right support, you can get medication, and therapy. But its still a process. The pills don't take the serpent away like aspirin resolves a headache. The psychologist can't pry the lies out of your brain or stop their hissing from sounding in your ears. The bonded sensation still squeezes the breath out of you some days, and then feels like its fleeting the next. Or sometimes, it just doesn't help at all. And when the pain wears you down so much, and the people yelling can’t reach you, or hold you, and you have just been listening to the lies murmured about you for days, months, and years, unending, sometimes - like Robin - you do feel like the only recourse, the only relief, the only escape is to do something. Anything. The only thing you feel you really can do. Something drastic.

I want to tell you something else about depression. It might fly in the face of what you believe in - what every psychotherapist, psychologist, doctor, priest, rabbi, friend, parent, or child may tell you - but ending your life is not a weak, cowardly, thing. It takes someone strong to actually go through with it. To actually decide to act, to choose to go through with something so final and permanent that goes against the basic human instinct of survival, is, thankfully, not something everyone can do. And to be so desperately embattled with a serpent that it seems your only viable option to free yourself, is to end yourself, does not deserve condemnation or criticism. It deserves reflection, and empathy, and at the very least, understanding. In mourning, we all, selfishly, cry for what we have lost. We should also remember to find joy in what Robin has gained by finally being released from his bonds of disease. The cessation of his pain. "Genie, you’re free!"

~ I pray you've found peace and laughter in heaven, Mr. Williams. It was a privilege sharing time with you. My thoughts are with your family and friends. Say hi to my Mom for me. XOXO

Speak To Me

"People see God every day, they just don't recognize him." ~P. Bailey

Albrecht Dürer - Praying Hands. One of my mother's favorite art works.

I had a funny conversation about religion today at a baby shower. And when it comes down to it, I guess my true answer is that I'm a very spiritual person, but probably not an overly religious one. Some of my friends are atheists, my own husband is most likely considered agnostic, and my kids aren't all that interested in church even though I try to drag them there on a regular basis. But be as that may, I cannot dismiss the power faith has in my life - including my daily life.

I have to admit the loss of my mother caused a pretty seismic shift in my childhood. My mother was the driving force of my own religious upbringing. She came from a very devout Catholic family, sent me to parochial school for my elementary education, and taught at one for about 9 years before she passed away. I'll never forget how excited she was to go see the Pope right before she died. Sure she was seeing him from the nosebleed seats in a sports stadium, but she was as giddy as a teenager getting backstage passes to One Direction. However, the event of her death, and the circumstances surrounding the people she worked and taught with, really soured my whole outlook on faith, religion, Catholicism, and for a little while, God himself. Sad to say, I was a typical angry teenager with the mentality of a toddler. I wanted to know "why?" Why, why, why, why, why? Why my mom? Why did this happen to me? Why not take me instead? Between the "why's" and the "what-ifs" my spirit was sucked down an abyss faster than Alice went down the rabbit hole.

It took me a long, long, time to accept what happened. Even longer to accept that it didn't happen to punish me or because I was bad, or unfaithful. And it was an even more lengthy road back to my spirituality. Sure there were the reminders, and the nudges to go back to my faith. I started attending a Youth Group with my girlfriend because I slept over her house on weekends, and that's where she ended up on Sunday mornings. Coincidentally, (or not), it was the same place my husband ended up on Sundays as well. I became a member of the E & C Club, and would only go to church on Easter or Christmas with another family when I went to their house on holidays. And then there were the little happenstances that kept occurring around me that couldn't be discounted or explained away. Things like certain songs coming on the radio when I was having a hard time missing my mother. Seeing people or having someone call me out of the blue when I was feeling frighteningly alone and desperate. Certain photos or papers of my mother's that would mysteriously fall out of books or drawers when I would least expect it. These little signs were like a tide ebbing away at the dried up remains of my faith. The more I got them, the more I could feel that empty little spot inside where my spirituality used to reside. The more I knew that spot was empty, the more I wanted to feel like it was filled up again.

I am now a great believer in "God winks" (to borrow the term from a book I once read). Mostly, I believe I receive them from my mother. But there have been other occurrences that have happened that don't carry her mark on them. These little signs and messages are treasured and cherished by me every time they occur. They're delivered to me through the radio, strangers, books, and my own kids. They remind me that I can still connect a part of myself with the one remaining essence of people who have passed away. That even though I might not be able to see my loved ones, they can still speak to me and be involved in my life. Because as much as I'd like to say I've matured, and learned to keep my faith overflowing, there are still events that cause those little tremors to return. Things that seem senseless, and cruel, and unfair, and revert me back to that demanding toddler mentality of "why? why? why?" But again, I am sent a sign, a message, an answer. 

On today of all days, I struggled with the 8 year "angel-versary" of the death of a friend's son. I have never been able to reason or wrap my head around this loss. Such wonderful parents having such a small window of time with their little boy. And they are such loving, positive, people despite that. The effect they have on others and for others in the name of their child is a beautiful thing to behold. Their courage and strength are amazing to watch, and because of that, it is so easy to slip back into that questioning mentality. Why? Why them? And in the Gospel reading at church today was a section that jumped out at me. My answer, if you will.

John 9:2-3
And his disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered, "it was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him."

For me, his works have never been displayed better. Faith, humility, dedication, love, and kindness. Thank you for the note.

Joyful Joyful - How I Miss Thee

"You're the one I want to be with, you're the reason that I came. And you'll find Me in the stillness as I'm whispering your name." ~Anon

The stockings seem much emptier,
The tree looks not as green.
The carols sound so out of tune,
And the traditions have just become routine.

I've relived all my memories
Of the twenty-fifth of December
To try and find whats missing now,
From the Christmases I remember.

Its not a certain flavor
Or a gift beneath the tree,
But more that special feeling
the season once brought to me.

After years of searching high and low,
through woods, on beaches, in shops, and pews,
I'm almost sure that what I'm missing
Is sharing Christmastime with you.

With you the season came alive,
A wonderland in any weather.
Its something I've lost bit by bit
Since we last were together.

Gifts and shopping hold no thrill,
I've no pride in well done decorations.
I still roll the cookies and pour the eggnog,
But I just don't feel much celebration.

What was the wellspring you possessed
That renewed your spirit from year to year?
I miss the peace, the joy, the laughter,
The successful missions spreading yuletide cheer.

Its still and cold this Christmas Eve,
The sky is dressed with its brilliant lights.
As I turn my face up to the stars,
I think of you, and send my love tonight.

And if you could still send me a gift
To open as tomorrow comes,
Please help me find that joy, that hope,
For this Christmas and for future ones.

Illuminati

Someday perhaps the inner light will shine forth from us, and then we'll need no other light.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

My depression most often makes me feel isolated. Unreachable. Unrelatable. Its the hardest type of battle because the entire time I’m feeling so cut off, the knowledge is there in the back of my mind that this is a prison of my own making. Not purposefully, but nonetheless. I know that the shadows and darkness I live in aren’t real, but constructed by my head. Yet, the invisible wall separating me from the rest of the world still seems unbreachable to me. Until there are instances that make me feel like I’m at the end of a light tube. When the moment of connecting to something or someone kindred to me beams in like sunshine of the outside world reflected in off of a series of mirrors to illuminate me internally inside the dark little cave in my mind.

This was posted a week before my Mother’s birthday - but I didn’t see it until months later, until after passing the anniversary of her death. I was true to my promise from years before, and planted a garden that day. Trying to use the anniversary of her death as a day to remember to celebrate life instead of dwell on the loss. But I still have been walking around numb and isolated until I read this; a letter Joan Carpenter’s daughter, Karin Cook, wrote to her mother over a decade after she passed. Another mother, another daughter, another lifetime. But the pain, the love, the loss, the uncertainty are all the same. Transcending the differences between us and uniting me to her, if only for a few minutes.

Dear Mom,

What time was I born?

When did I walk?

What was my first word?

My body has begun to look like yours. Suddenly I can see you in me. I have so many questions. I look for answers in the air. Listen for your voice. Anticipate. Find meaning in the example of your life. I imagine what you might have said or done. Sometimes I hear answers in the echo of your absence. The notion of mentor is always a little empty for me. Holding out for the hope of you. My identity has taken shape in spite of that absence. There are women I go to for advice. But advice comes from the outside. Knowing, from within. There is so much I don't know.

What were your secrets?

What was your greatest source of strength?

When did you know you were dying?

I wish I had paid closer attention. The things that really matter you gave me early on—a way of being and loving and imagining. It's the stuff of daily life that is often more challenging. I step unsure into a world of rules and etiquette, not knowing what is expected in many situations. I am lacking a certain kind of confidence. Decisions and departures are difficult. As are dinner parties. Celebrations and ceremony. Any kind of change. Small things become symbolic. Every object matters—that moth-eaten sweater, those photos. Suddenly I care about your silverware. My memory is an album of missed opportunities. The loss of you lingers.

Did you like yourself?

Who was your greatest love?

What did you fear most?

In the weeks before your death, I knew to ask questions. At nineteen, I needed to hear your hopes for me. On your deathbed, you said that you understood my love for women, just as you suggested you would have fought against it. In your absence, I have had to imagine your acceptance.

There are choices I have made that would not have been yours. Somehow that knowledge is harder for me than if I had you to fight with. My motions lack forcefulness. I back into decisions rather than forge ahead. This hesitancy leaves me wondering:

Did you ever doubt me?

Would you have accepted me?

What did you wish for me?

I know that my political choices threatened you. Your way was to keep things looking good on the outside, deny certain feelings, erase unpleasant actions. Since your death, I have exposed many of the things that you would have liked to keep hidden. I can no longer hold the family secrets for you.

I search for information about your life. Each scrapbook, letter, anecdote I come across is crucial to my desire to understand you and the choices you made. I have learned about affairs, abuse, all things you would not have wanted me to know. Yet they explain the missing blanks in my memory bank and round out your humanity.

Who did you dream you would be?

Did you ever live alone?

Why did you divorce?

Did you believe in God?

One thing you said haunts me still. When I asked about motherhood, you said that children don't need as much as you gave. "Eighty percent is probably plenty." I was shocked by your words. Did you regret having given so much of yourself? Now, those words seem like a gift. A way of offering me a model of motherhood, beyond even your own example.

Becoming a mother is something I think about a great deal, almost to the point of preoccupation. I have heard it said that constant dreaming about birth often signals a desire to birth one's self, to come into one's own. My process of grieving the loss of you has been as much about birthing myself as letting you go.

What were your last thoughts?

Were you proud?

Were you at peace?

What is it like to die?

How frightened you must have been shouldering so much of your illness alone. The level of your own isolation is a mystery to me. In my life, I try hard to reach out, to let others in. I fear loss more than anything. I turn on my computer. Make things up. I tell the truth. My daily work is toward connection. All these questions move me to search, less and less for your answers and increasingly for my own.

Love,

Karin

“My process of grieving the loss of you has been as much about birthing myself as letting you go.” I never thought one little sentence could embrace me so completely. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be understood, truly empathized with, instead of just pitied and consoled. And just like that I can remember myself. Light pours in, and I can see a way to go on. Up. Out of the darkness.

Thank you for the light.

Paying for Permanence

You may lose your most valuable property through misfortune in various ways.  You may lose your house, your wife and other treasures.  But of your moko, you cannot be deprived except by death.  It will be your ornament and companion until your last day.  ~Netana Whakaari

My mother's Grace Kelly photo

As an adult myself, most of my regrets about my mother are about never knowing her as a grownup. I was right on that cusp of learning all about her past and fleshing her out as a 3 dimensional human being when she passed, so all I'm stuck with is my childhood perception of a woman whose favorite color was orange, loved to teach and to sing, and hated anything that tasted like raspberries.
I might be biased, but I think it makes an impact on your self image when you really have no archetype to guide yourself by growing up besides the airbrushed models in a magazine. Getting older now is even harder.Choosing clothing becomes an exercise in toeing the line between kosher and Cougartown. Its not like high school when you knew what not to wear. Over one hundred fellow classmates created quite the learning standard. Nowadays I just follow the rule of keeping as covered as possible while I try to keep up the New Year's resolution of exercising and eating better. And most days I wish I had my mother to talk to, because I know she would empathize with me. I imagine her growing older more gracefully than my blind man's stumble I've got going on. She had already mastered Weight Watchers, and Mary Kay, and how to apply Loving Care by the time she was my age. And thinking about this reminded me of a happy discovery many years back.
For her 43rd birthday, she got Glamour Shots done for herself as a gift. I remember this distinctly, because she was very dissatisfied with her looks and her weight. And she left for her appointment grumbling that she didn't think they'd be able to make her look any younger. I thought she looked like a movie star, and fell in love with one of the proofs that she didn't have printed. As a surprise, she had the proof copied for me and presented it to me in a frame. After she died I wanted to re-frame it and was surprised to discover an inscription on the back.

Just recently, while being dissatisfied with my own self image, I remembered about the whole thing; the pictures, her grumblings, and the gift with the surprise message on the back. I realized this would be a perfect memory to keep in my face day to day. Not only my mother's love, but her whole perception about love and beauty. Maybe I was the influence for her that made her decide that middle age wasn't as bad as she thought. Perhaps her eleven year old daughter's adoration over her looking like Grace Kelly made her feel better about herself. I'd like to hope so. And I'd like to remind myself that, every day. So, I concluded it was time to do something for myself that would make me feel beautiful, and decided to get her words inked on my arm as a tattoo. A permanent message to serve as my reminder that not only am I loved from above, but that my own daughter is watching me, and seeing, too. If anything I need to keep my eyes open and upward for her. To try and remember to see myself through her eyes. Hopefully it will help me be kinder to myself as well.
Missing my mother is an evolving beast. I've gotten over it in some areas, substituted in most, and still wallow in a personal pity party in one deep, buried, corner of my emotional closet.  Its also hard not having many tangible things to remember her by. My sentimentality about objects didn't kick in until after she was gone, so I never kept birthday cards or the little notes in my lunchbox she used to leave me. But this I can carry with me. Not just in my heart, or my memories, but as a part of me. Solid, beautiful, and permanent.

Blue Christmas

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

I still pick out a Christmas gift for my mother every year, even though I haven’t shared the holiday with her in 16 years. I don’t actually buy it or wrap it, but usually in my shopping travels I see something that she would have liked, or just simply experience something that I know she would enjoy. It makes me wonder about what her preferences and likes would have been in this technologically advanced age. I like to imagine her with a smartphone and a Kindle, tagging me in numerous Pinterest posts and commenting on my progress on Goodreads. Its all very much a fantasy, though.

To be honest, I think she would be disappointed with me this year. Try as I might, the events over the last few days, weeks, and months have weighed me down this season, and I just haven’t been able to muster up much Christmas spirit. The tree and the house lights were put up, the cards were sent, but the other customs and staples of the year; the baking, the nativity figurines, the thrill of giving, were glaringly absent. From the outside looking in, I’m sure it seemed like a happy Christmas, but I’m still lacking that renewal of spirit I associate with celebrating the anniversary of a certain child’s birth. I find myself just unable to find the joy in wrapping gifts when I think about those parents and families in Connecticut who won’t have the joy of watching their kids opening their presents Christmas morning. Or make cookies with my own sons and daughter when theirs will never be able to sneak one again, or just simply enjoy licking the spoons. To watch my six year old Monkey catching snowflakes on her tongue in a magical Christmas Eve snow without remembering 20 five and six year olds that will never experience another snowflake. I can’t savor snuggling into bed at night with my husband when neighbors in my town - in my state - have no beds and no homes to gather into. The disparity of so many people banding together to try and make it a wonderful holiday for some, and others setting out to unleash their evil on the civil servants who selflessly sacrifice to help and protect us make it impossible for me to see the hope and goodness in our country. Maybe even in our world. There is so much arguing and blame going on right now. Everyone wants a solution, but nobody wants to work together to really get to the right answer.

This isn’t the world I had in mind to bring my children into. A country that is more invested in their individual right to bear arms, than in seeking to heal the people as a whole through proper health and mental care is not where I want them to grow up. Legislators who are determined to undermine and cut the pay and benefits of educators - the people who have the job of shaping the people who will lead our future - are not the people I want in power over my kids’ learning opportunities. And thinking about those teachers that died, who did the same things that they award medals to soldiers for when in combat, it seems like the biggest insult that they are not supported more by the public, or by our own government. Finally, I can't get those poor parents out of my mind. How many holidays will they spend like me, seeing gift opportunities for someone they can no longer buy for?

The future just looks bleak and unpromising to me. If ever a child’s birth could deliver us from evil, I believe it would need to be now. Searching for that feeling of Christmas while donning a lead mantle of depression is an exhausting and bitter enterprise. And yet.... and yet, even as I go to bed this Christmas night with a heavy heart I keep digging inside myself. For as in the words of Anne Lamott, “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.”

Surely the miracle of the season has planted a seed of hope inside me somewhere. Inside all of us. Somewhere dormant and ready to bloom in the light of the morning.

Haven

"Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." -  Matthew 19:14

The news today is tragic, and heartbreaking, and I just don’t want to believe it. What is this world coming to when any and every public place is becoming an open arena for others’ twisted sense of justice and judgement? Workplaces, highways, malls, movie theatres, and schools. Kids even killing one another for their bicycles. Nothing is safe anymore. I feel there is no sense of security anywhere in the entire United States.

And all those little children. I just cannot understand what any little child has ever done to a grown adult to deserve the bloody and violent end they met in Sandy Hook Elementary today. Being a mother, knowing so many mothers, so many who have fought for and cried for each one of their own children, my heart cannot comprehend the loss of so many. For something so senseless.

When did we usher in this era of people seeing death as an only resort? Taking their own lives because of stress at home or at school. Taking others with them for no other reason than the fact that they are there at the time. Or releasing their frustration on innocent bystanders because of some trivial disappointment and then turning the guns on themselves. How did death and murder become such a logical option for these people? Why does the decision to kill, and to kill so many, even come up when contemplating seemingly insurmountable problems? When did this currency of annihilation become so abundantly used by our youth?

There is something inherently wrong in society if more and more young people are turning to death for the answer. We are severely failing our children in teaching them coping methods and problem solving skills if shooting their frustration out of a gun or ending their life is the only option they can see when faced with difficulties. This has to change. This has to stop. We need to stop medicating, stop labeling, and get to the issue of WHY all these children are so depressed and desperate to begin with.

And tonight - a night I should be going to bed happy and inspired by my own son’s birthday - I will spend crying myself to sleep. Praying with all my heart for all those families who will never have another birthday with their loved one, or with their child. Who will be spending the remainder of the holiday season planning funerals instead of celebrating. I will be praying for an answer to end this senseless cycle of violence. And the ability to teach my children better. For the betterment of all the world.

A Decade of Differences

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. ~Anatole France

With the passing of the tenth anniversary of 9-11, there is a lot of thought processing evoked. So many people saying that they couldn't tell you what they did two days ago, but they can still remember with clarity what they were doing 10 years ago when they heard about the towers being hit. I remember my mother saying the same thing about her hearing that President Kennedy was shot. I remember my grandmother and grandfather being able to tell me exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about Pearl Harbor. Hearing them say those things as a child, I couldn't grasp how things like that could cause such an indelible memory. But now I do.

Its a decade later, and now I'm in a different position. Now I have the delicate position of educating my children about an event that happened before their time. I'm still struggling what to tell them, because in some ways, I'm still discovering the lessons I've taken away from that day ten years ago. And then there is the whole question of how to explain everything to my kids without shattering their innocence. Monkey's eyes were opened to death at the beginning of the year. Not that she is ignorant of death - we live across the street from a cemetery, she's heard death referenced in movies, she knows her Nana passed away before she was born; but early in the year we experienced the unexpected death of our neighbor. Someone she knew, who had a face, and a voice, and a name. I could tell it really hit her, and how she grappled to wrap her four year old mind around it. The questions and fears she had for weeks afterwards were hard, and a little frightening for me to answer. I couldn't bring myself to use the platitude that she didn't need to worry, that it wouldn't happen to her. It happened to me, it happened to the family next door. Ten years ago, it happened to almost 3,000 other families.

That still leaves me with what message I want her to learn about 9-11. How can you condense the lessons of what happened between now and that terrible day 10 years ago into something that doesn't overwhelm a kindergartener? For a child whose concepts of justice and equality are so delineated in black or white, how can you possibly introduce all those gray areas that senseless death seems to occupy? Is there any way to really convince her that the good that came out of that day, the shows of compassion, samaritanism, the renewed sense of community and nationality, outweigh the loss that was suffered? Is there any way we will ever be able to convince ourselves?

I think of all the moments I've experienced since that day. Life changing moments that have overjoyed and saddened, empowered and overwhelmed. Moments to be celebrated, and moments to be greived. Sunday was a day greived by a nation. I think everyone has lost something since that terrible day, whether it was a loved one, or just the burdenless life of innocence. It is hard to celebrate what you have retained, and what you have gained, when remembering what so many have lost forever. I believe that is the object, though. Ultimately, we must retain, and be open to receiving the gifts we are still given. We must not let the lives of those lost be lost in vain. Speak for them, laugh for them, cry for them, live for them. As a nation we must recover for them, fight for them, and try to change the climate in this world so our fate does not befall another. Perhaps the time freedom comes to all be the indelible memory our children's generation collectively share.

My prayer for you is that 10 years later, when you think of them ... that it brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. ~Joseph Biden

That Old Familiar Feeling

"We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death. And loss, strangely, can attune you to what is beautiful about existence even as it wounds you with what is awful." ~Meghan O'Rourke

Distance lends perspective. It surprises me to come back to where I once was, and have the ability to discern changes or gain understanding. It surprises me more when I can turn that around and recognize an element of myself in someone else. I suppose if that didn't happen, I'd be useless. Never learning anything or being able to improve my outcomes. I find this happening alot lately, emotionally. I had anxiety. I slugged through depression. I got treatment. Got better. And now that I'm off the medication I can recognize I'm getting worse. Since I've tasted life without that shroud clouding my thoughts, its so much harder to resign myself to it again. But what is also eye opening to me is how well I'm doing, considering the circumstances.

Back when I was in therapy, I remember the doctor telling me that she thought most of the issues I was experiencing were due to the unresolved emotional trauma I endured from the loss of my mother. Funny thing about losing someone is that its never truly "resolved." Its more of an ever evolving trauma, constantly reshaping itself and able to wound you repeatedly through life. Like an emotional Prometheus, my heart gets ripped out every time I approach another milestone. As today marks a tipping point in my life, I'm a little surprised at my current perspective. I lost my mother fifteen years ago, just 2 weeks shy of my fifteenth birthday. From now on I will be living without her longer than I knew her.

Two years ago, even last year, I was dreading this day. I was terrified of what I would be feeling, of how it might distort my views of my mother, or myself. But consciously, or unconsciously, I've been taking small steps to already start walking that distance. I decided I needed to start living with her memory, and not just the memory of her loss. Last Christmas - it helped that I was busy with the arrival of Little Bear - I only let myself dwell on her absence once on Christmas Eve. And in doing so it was by singing a song for her. This Mother's Day, I celebrated her by doing a painting project which I know she would have approved of, instead of trekking to the shore to commiserate for an hour or two on the fact that she wasn't here so I could give her a card. I want my kids to know what the essence of their Nana was like, not just know that she's gone. I still want to love her, but I want to do it by having my kids learn to love hearing about her in stories, or seeing her in pictures. And I'm amazed that I'm seeing this all from an even level, and not from the bottom of the emotional hole I usually find myself in when unmedicated. I feel like I'm meeting the pain halfway. Almost like I'm familiar with it, can somewhat predict its movements and mannerisms, and maybe even be a bit welcoming to it, because I know it will move on. I feel the need to reassure others when I recognize the pain they're enduring in their own lives. Not that I'm the poster child for recovery, but hopefully my sympathy might make their own load a little more bearable. Shared pain is half the pain, right?

Standing here, looking back and looking forward, I can still see the future is stretching so much further than my past. But from this perspective it doesn't seem to look as looming as it once did.

Happy Birthday

3-14.
Another year goes by.
Those old raw feelings break back through.
Overwhelm me.
No matter how good I’m doing. How ‘healed’ I am.
And so I should celebrate the day that breathed your life into the world, even after that sweet air has been snatched away from me.
My exhale only lends a hint of what your presence lent to this place.
And fate, in her calm exacting way, piles many more blessings on such a significant date.
Is it wrong that they still don’t add up to fill the hole?
The gaping raw chasm that echoes with my loss.
The emptiness that was previously filled with you.

I need you.
Crave your voice. Your touch. Your guidance.
I miss the sweet whispers that floated into my ears in my dreams.
I look into the faces of my babies, and I’m at a loss as to how I can keep you alive for them.
I search their looks, their smiles, not for my resemblance, but yours.
How can I be complete as their mother, while I have none to complete myself?
How do I rise from the dark mists that pull me under?
Unable to rise like a phoenix, because the dampness smothers the sparks that would kindle me.
Reluctant to look towards a future devoid of your face.
Still trying, in vain, to brace myself for a life untold to you.
Hoping my endurance will help me survive.

The Science of Solace

In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight.... Not people die but worlds die in them. ~Yevgeny Yevtushenko

It has not been a good past few days.

The mood swings from my lack of meds is frightening. The kids are wound up tighter, most likely due to the beautiful weather outside and their lack of playing in it. And on Tuesday it was my birthday. Not just any birthday, but the last birthday before I cross that prime meridian in my mind where I will be on this Earth for more years without my mother than I will have knowing her. My personal Y2K crisis.

But its things like this that really bring home how much I'm missing my mother.


Fallen cupcakes might not make much sense to you, but my mother was both a baker and a scientist. When the cookies came out flat she knew that I needed to add more flour. When my boxed cake didn't come out right, she could tell I was being impatient and didn't mix it for the whole 2 minutes the package directs. When she fell in love with a batch of orange muffins while we were on vacation, she went home and made up a recipe for them. She knew relationships that existed between baking powders and sodas and salts and flours, and I was content as a child to be honored when I was allowed to lick the beaters.

How I wish back for that lab time now. There isn't a recipe that I try to make for Scootch that has come out right yet. Pancakes, boxed cakes, scratch cakes. Modified, fortified, and verbatim. They all crumble, fall, or fail to rise at all. I used to love baking. My husband used to brag I was good at it. But lately it just feels like I'm failing a midterm anytime I lug out the Kitchen Aid. And as much as everyone is sympathetic, I just have this feeling that if my mom were here, she would fix it. She would HAVE a recipe that wouldn't fail me. Possibly multiple ones at this point. In all kinds of flavors so her grandson wouldn't be missing out on what red velvet or devil's food cake did to your tongue.

My only small solace is this;



At least she left me the means to still decorate my disasters.

Release

I've been a little raw over the past few days. In less than one month it will be the anniversary of my late mother's birthday. She would have been turning 59, just on the cusp of becoming a "little old lady" as she put it so many years ago. I often try to picture what she would be like in the present day. Whether she would be embracing the faded loveliness of her hair or still touching it up with the Clairol mixture she kept under the bathroom sink. If some semblance of today's fashions would be migrating into her closet or if she would be sweetly commenting that my outfit looked better when I wore the original version back in the 80's. And then I picture her with my kids - her grandbabies. The more I think about it lately, the harder it gets to let the dream go.
The connection might not make much sense to you, but this is how my mind functions in self-preservation mode. The month before the date I'm over analyzing, and the month after I agonize. Yet the date in question is usually endured with a minimal amount of pain or with no recollection at all (until I realize I missed it. Hence the post-agonizing.) Sometimes I feel like an emotional pressure cooker, leaking stress out in measured increments to ensure the lid never flies off the pot or the contents go boiling over the sides.
I bring this up because I find myself applying the same tactics to stressful dates with my kids. Allergist appointments or birthday parties with Scootch. Special events or milestones with Monkey. People tell me how great and pulled together I am when they see me, but they have no clue how much I fail to hold on to that composure pre and post game. Nerves, temper, anxiety, insomnia. And on top of that I wonder how well I succeed (or how badly I fail) in hiding these responses from my kids. They absorb so much by observation, and I'm afraid of what they see in me sometimes. Are they paying attention when I'm handling everything well, or are they taking notes when the cracks are visible on the surface? Some days its just so hard to remember how to breathe.
I went back to the doctor yesterday because I just feel like I need to make a choice. Pressure cooker or not, I decided there has to be some way to turn down the heat. Or somebody is bound to get burned.

Bad Mother

I never wanted to be this type of mother. I never wanted to be so zealous and pre-occupied with my child's condition that I frequently commandeered conversations and unwittingly flew off the handle over the small injustices of this way of life. This food allergy life that sometimes feels as if it has us all hostage. I try to stop myself when I feel the pitch of my voice raising, or notice the slightly reclined posture of the person I'm talking to. Maybe I should get away from this crazy lady before my kids catch food allergies too. They never say it, but its sometimes reflected in the glazed look that covers their eyes when I've gone on too long.

But the other side of me thinks I should have every right to wail and stomp and shout at the top of my lungs. I should also have a free license to stay home under the covers too, in the wonderful hermetically controlled environment I have so obsessively lovingly created for my son so he can eat whatever he picks up without fear.

Who am I kidding?

Lots of mothers face this same struggle, if not with allergies than with some other obstacle they're confined to the sidelines to watch play out on their children. Helplessness. I'm sure every mother loathes the mere thought of the world as I do. And I'm sure we'll all be mourning on some level for the rest of our lives over what our kids could've had had they not been gifted with their own particular challenge. I guess that puts me at stage 3 and 4 of the 7 levels of grief.

But what makes it harder is the perceived level of inconsiderateness that is all around me. Something I couldn't even name until I read this article and it put words to those misty intangible monsters that pervaded my thoughts at night when I should be sleeping.

"But sadly, allergy is still not accorded the attention and priority that it needs.
Why? Perhaps it is because allergy seldom kills or maims. Yes, life does go on for allergy sufferers, but unless you have an allergy yourself or live with someone who has it, you will never fully understand the impact of allergy on the quality of life. The physical suffering, the mental torment, the emotional struggles, the financial strain and the endless limitations in many aspects of life, ranging from food to sports or vacation to vocation.

In a nutshell, allergy rarely kills but often steals your zest for life."

The last line seems to sum it up the best. Scootch's food allergy is a theif. It has stolen the joy out of food for me. It has complicated that simple joy of giving nourishment to my children, something that had seemed so easy and pleasant when I nursed them and revelled in how plump and pink and rosy they became from relying solely on me for their food. It has taken away the satisfaction of experimenting with foods and recipies. Of baking. Or treating them with a free cookie from the grocery store while I shopped. It has zapped the anticipation out of upcoming birthday parties. Of looking forward to meeting up with friends, or enjoying a family dinner at a restaurant. Now I'm constantly aware that its inconvenient for any of our friends to try and celebrate or dine with us, as it requires prep work, and questions, and special requests.

But here we are. And we are blessed that our friends and family try to understand and help as much as they do. I feel loved when I get text messages from people who see a cookbook for kids with food allergies, or email me a recipe so I can still indulge my kids with cookies and milk at 11am on a Friday if I feel like it. That noone complains out loud when we're meeting up at the same 3 restaurants because they're the most allergy friendly.

And finally, this, which gives me hope; "The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them." (Bernard M. Baruch).

I never wanted to be this type of mother. Maybe I'll grow out of it.