Faith in Ambiguity

My Father

2013-06-16T01:00:00.000-06:00

When I was a little girl, my father drove an old white Plymouth Duster, and he used to let me climb in through the window like I was one of the Dukes of Hazzard, getting in by way of my grubby sandals on his seat. When he came to pick me up from my mom's house on weekends, I would run out to the old, familiar car and get in, with a great joy suddenly inside me—a joy made of the musty, closed-in, old smell of his car, with its floorboards full of magazines that shifted under my feet, and the not-yet-known location we might go to eat our lunch, and the possibility of adult attention that I could have entirely to myself.

At my dad's apartment, when he first had an apartment away from us, I would sit behind his kitchen counter and he let me order my snack from him. What I always ordered was Marie cookies a glass of Like cola. He was prepared for this and produced them right away. I ate the sweet biscuits and drank the soda and then we walked across the way to where there was oak forest and supernatural creatures could be found. I was seven at the time. I talked about the Carrion Crow and her minions and my dad listened with interest, and hummed. Always, he whistled and hummed. I drew pictures of the planet I said I had come from and my dad looked at them, asked questions, and approved. I made up songs and my dad recorded them, set them to a drum machine, and played them back for both of us. I wrote up small performances and cast him in roles which he performed as I told him to.

"Pretend that I'm a mermaid," I told him.

And he did.

Dad didn't sign me up for music lessons that I hadn't asked for. He didn't give me unasked-for books on how to draw or how to write. He didn't correct my spelling or my choice of words. He just provided an interested audience and let my encouraged creativity work out the rest. As a result, I was a writer and an actress and a singer, an artist and a playwright. I needed no one's permission, having been given the impression that my own permission was enough.

When I was a teenager, I moved in with Dad and that was when he taught me how to cook. Carefully, he'd walk through one meal or the other, explaining how to mince garlic and how to make a roux, how to slowly add liquid, how to thicken a too-thin sauce. Once, for his birthday, I tried to make Mushu Vegetables with homemade pancakes and the pancakes were revoltingly lumpy and thick, inedible. Dad wasn't disappointed. He never seemed to be expecting anything. He was pleased that I had tried.

When, at 22, I was in the hospital giving birth to my first baby, Dad called us on the phone.

"I wonder if there's going to be heavy traffic heading up that way," he said.

We told him it would be a little while, that he should wait.

Later, he called again.

"It's getting close to rush hour," he pointed out.

Still not having the baby, we said.

The phone rang again.

"I'm on my way," he said.

He arrived just after Rowan came into the world, like a tiny, angry wizened grape, and was lifted off by scrub-clad cherubim to the Intensive Care Nursery away from me.

"Do you want me to order Thai food?" Dad asked.

We said yes.

Dad is a dream-tender. Last summer, when my youngest, Mikalh, came upon a street musician in the Boston Commons who handed him a small violin to try, he decided to become a violinist. I called my dad.

"Can you pay for lessons?" I asked.

"Yes!" he said, enthusiastically.

When my middle child, Devin, wanted to go to an expensive sleep-away music camp in the mountains this summer to study his tuba, he called Grandpa Rick.

"We're trying to raise 200 more dollars," Devin said. "Just give what you can."

Dad sent all of it.

Dad reads my blog and he tells me, when we talk on the phone, how much he enjoys what I am writing. I tell him how much I have to learn as a writer and he tells me, "Don't sell yourself short."

My dad, knows something about creativity because he, himself, is an accomplished musician. He has studied Indian music and Jazz and learned to play six instruments. Now, his favorite instrument is his voice.

Thanks, Dad, for 38 years of encouragement. Happy Father's Day to you.

All the God We Cannot See

2013-06-03T04:00:00.000-06:00

Photo Credit: Morguefile by imelenchon

On the subject of religion, words mostly fail to join us in understanding; these words we speak that begin with "I believe."

I don't feel you. I don't get it. I can't make head nor tail of what you say.

And soon everyone gets angry or gets their feelings hurt—most especially the ones who think they really know.

I'm tired of this surety.

Aggressive atheism is like gathering up all the poetry books and burning them because you can't understand the metaphors.

Hard-nosed religiosity is like insisting on the singular, provable existence of only vanilla ice cream; it's like spitting on every other flavor in the freezer bin, threatening them all with a fiery, melty, imaginary doom.

This is how we fail to know each other.

Watch carefully. It's happening all over again. We fail to understand.

It's not that this overly made-up woman with the cross around her neck has never sat in the dark of a tornado cellar and asked herself whether God was in the wind. It's not, as we've thought, that she is feckless, stupid; unable to plumb the depths. It's that she's thought about this already and she knows that God is not in the wind but in the firemen who came for her, in the embrace of her neighbor, in the moment when her dog was found alive underneath the rubble of her whole world, and she felt gratitude.

She knows graces when she sees it. Do we?

It's not that this stuffy man is a fundamentalist, a naysayer, a bigot when he says no thank you to the idea of God. He is a seeker of wisdom, a kind of monk of the secular world. He is the one who will not enter the door of the temple while the beggars still have to stand outside. We think he's an ass, but he values reason, because he knows how easily we are swayed by the idolatry of passing thoughts. Even in great turmoil, he sets aside easy comfort and holds the line; he waits for evidence.

He knows courage when he's called to it. Do we?

It's not that this woman is trying to be difficult, even if she's furry, bra-less, and wears a pentacle around her neck. She is the sister of all things living; she is the spirit of the wild. It's not like we thought: that she believes in a Goddess sitting astride the Heavens; a superhuman hippie queen who rules the world. It's that she has learned, with practice, to see the divinity in every single rock, lichen, and ant that she observes. She calls this "Goddess." She closes her eyes to chant and everything alive is joined with her.

She knows beauty when she sees it. Do we?

We don't.

We cannot have the sacredness of Nature, the compassion of a loving God. We cannot have the peace of the dharma. We cannot have the courage to live without succumbing to short-cuts, to easy explanations of the unknowable world.

We cannot have these things. Not at the same time.

All the time, day after day, prayers are being prayed that will never leave our lips. Moments of transcendence are visited on the weary, on the sick. Faith is being shattered, threatened, changed, and born in the hearts of people we will never know.

Every day this happens. Spiritual lives are lit up like great torches or snuffed out; souls are trembling in the storm.

And still we think, in some small way, that we know God, or know what God is not.

We think we know this, without the inconvenience of praying five times a day or of keeping the Sabbath, or of daily meditation, and without cultivating the discipline of groundlessness. We know, we think, without the disciplined intention of spellcraft, or the utter trust required to sit, breathing stifled, and pray through a sweat lodge.

We don't really want to know. I don't. Because if we sat in the sweat lodge and let the smoke fill up our lungs, if we gave ourselves up to the practice of the yogas, if we fell to our knees and prayed to Jesus Christ to save us, and meant this with the truth of our entire hearts—we would be changed from what we are.

We would no longer know ourselves. Because we would have gone to a place where we were quite sure there was no God and found that God was there. Even in the abnegation of God's existence, we would recognize the beating heart of awe, of faith, of devotion to humanity and the world.

We would find that God is the same in all moments of rapture,

—and that we never ever knew what anyone else meant when they uttered the word: God.

We do not do this. And we cannot do this. We simply cannot live inside the skin of another person's soul.

But I wonder if we might just ask ourselves how much truth we are missing, all the God we cannot see; I wonder if we can ponder how much wealth is always concealed from us by our own inevitably narrow human minds.

And so it is that I think that some of us might instead place faith where we have prior substituted small truths.

Faith is better; it lasts longer. Feet sunk deep in the unknowable, arms reaching for the trust we need to live our lives; faith is indeed precious, wise.

Aggressive truth, by contrast, is destructive, and, what's more—it's never true.

The truth is unknowable, unfathomable. The ineffable, refracted light of the sacred filters through us and shines its indescribable colors, gorgeous to our eyes.

Perhaps to have faith is to look each time at that light, as it passes through another, as it passes through our egos, landing splendid on the world;

and each time find something in it that is holy, that is new.

“Faith is believing that the outcome will be what it should be, no matter what it is.”
~Colette Baron-Reid

Homes for Tomatoes

2013-05-28T07:06:00.000-06:00

The arugula has already bolted.

We spent the weekend making homes for tomatoes. Digging nice, deep holes, spaced a bit too close, and slamming in stakes in the ground for makeshift cages. Running baling wire 'round the cages for horizontal support. Buying clear plastic to frame them in for added heat; then realizing we really needed Walls of Water instead. Sowing bee balm, calendula, Thai basil, oregano, and nasturtium in the plot so that, when finished, this one piece of earth is a verdant eruption of vining Scarlet runner beans and Lemon Queen sunflowers, hot peppers and green and black and red tomatoes; an Eden awake with blooming and buzzing and the pungent taste of herbs.

Makeshift tomato cages in progress in the new garden area.

From this fenced plot I can see my chickens sorting through the straw, scratching every square centimeter of yard in their patient search for bugs. Running with pieces of thrown dandelion, pursued by other chickens, because nobody wants to share. Blissfully napping under the big lilac, in abnegation of the sun. I have never seen them from this view before; they look cuter than usual.

Sasquatch the Brahma

To my left, in another bed, I have lettuces in untidy rows like the bustling organdy of a recital of small green tutus. Varieties run from spiky to solid, smooth to soft, and my favorite Black-seeded Simpson is dressed in wavering lines. Next to them, onions and leeks have become tall princesses, wearing tiaras of static-shocked electric white, their feet emerging in white and red bulbs in the rich dark soil of the covered bed. Among the edibles, a single columbine has bloomed and hangs a flower like a lantern for fairies lost among the peas. White pea flowers sit next to forming baby pods, sugary and innocent. Undiscovered asparagus spears have shot up to tickle the atmosphere, spreading in ferns and hanging berries, which drop into the mud. Carrots do their work deep beneath the soil, sending only their punk hairdos up.

Carrots, onions, lettuces in the cold crop bed.

In another bed, Egyptian onions have set blossoms next to chives like firecrackers—green sprays tipped with purple asterisks. Cucumbers volunteer from last year and poke their leaves out of the straw mulch. Jerusalem artichoke is everywhere, but still earthbound, nothing more than leaves spreading just above the soil. I have to use my imagination to remember what it is.

This is a Welsh bunching onion next to some Jerusalem artichokes in my perennial edible bed.

All of these plants live here. In a way, it doesn't look like much. Just a bunch of beginnings. Very little now that you can eat. And yet, there is nowhere I am happier than here, with my husband beside me, armed like Thor with his sledgehammer, putting the stakes just where I say. The two of us, in the shadow of my crabapple and my honeysuckle, making beginnings, putting work to hope, with faith that things will grow.

Ready to be planted! Northern NM nights are cold. The full bottles behind the peppers are for thermal mass.

Strong Dreams

2013-05-16T06:33:00.001-06:00

Photo by Todd Nickols

You are the youngest, and the one to whom childhood still belongs. You are the one with the LEGOs strewn all over the floor like tiny dangerous pebbles, the one with a thousand costumes you still wear, the one who looks for leprechauns. You are the only one of these magical creatures—a child still being a child—that I still have. You wake daily, with tousled hair and bleary eyes, ready to climb into laps and cling like a monkey to whichever parent, or whichever brother, is holding you. You come downstairs, suddenly awake and planning to play, and are interrupted by ordinary life again and again, turning suddenly to glare at me, your delicate face framed by wild hair still unbrushed, so that you look like a cross Albert Einstein with his finger in a light socket.

"I need you to eat because it's time for school," I tell you.

Harumph to all my plans.

Other times you are very congenial about the paces I put you through. You indulge me, like I'm a senile auntie whose time on this earth may be limited, doing your grammar pages beautifully with periodic declarations of "You're the best Mommy in the world." There, there, now, old woman. Don't fret. I've put marks on your pages. Now let us get dressed up and travel to Ancient Greece.

You've taken to quoting the Buddha. This is disconcerting in someone so small. Your mind is a place of spiritual largeness, a sky in which you walk from star to star and explore the wisdom of the Lakota, the Ancient East, and talk to Aslan, asking him if he is Jesus and what it means to have faith. You think about everything; you already have all the right questions to hand.

Outside, you build a trading post, a rabbit trap, a long house. You snare rabbits, you tell me, and use all their parts. You remembered, you say, to say a prayer of thank you for their lives. And can you have some candy now? And some juice?

"I have strong dreams," you tell me.

Yes, you do. You are made of strong dreams. Dreams that sometimes scare you, that rip your insides out.

"I can see it, Mom. I can see just what it would look like. I can see everything just how it would be." Fear touches each feature as you speak to me. Waking dreams of sadness. Sleeping dreams of monsters in the night. Around your room, we cast strong spells to keep both out, the two of us.

I think you are made to walk what wiser cultures called the spirit path. I think your time here is to be spent, in part, bearing the discomfort of living in the loud and angry world of war and televisions and Walmarts and finding your way back to the unity of the stars—that sense that you already have and talk about that we are all one, we are all sacred, we are all a part of God.

I know a little bit about this, because I was a child like you.

I lift you in my arms and carry you, because I still can and I won't always be able to. I hold you close so that I can feel your heartbeat against mine. And, for now, all the bad dreams are kept at bay by this simple act of love.

Today, you are eight. You will wake shortly and see that balloons rise above your bed. You will come down, excited, and get a special smoothie and some cereal you really wanted at the store. You will come down, trailing God in your blankets, rubbing stardust from your eyes, and join me as we celebrate the occasion of your birth in this mortal world.

Happy birthday, child of wonder. May this year bring strong dreams of wisdom and peace to you.

Mother's Day: Just the Way it Is

2013-05-13T11:07:00.000-06:00

Techno music is blasting at Chili's. The clatter of stacked plates on trays erupt from the nearby kitchen. A cacophony of voices; plates glancing against each other with the force of swords in battle; glasses set on tables like mallets against sheet metal. Lights vibrating like strobes. Silently, I rest my head on the table. It is Mother's Day. 8 PM. Three hours of driving from Durango and we are in Española where the streets are lined with fast food Walmart chain link desperation poverty, and nature has been tucked away behind the concrete asphalt—just far enough away that it is lost. Forty-five minutes from home. They have to eat. My body is screaming, dying, assaulting me. My legs are going numb. A pain from my lower back rises up, wrenches my neck, twists my jaw and binds my head. I cannot cry in Chili's and so I keep my face still, impassive, expressionless, vacant.

"Happy Mother's Day," Devin says and smiles at me, checking.

And so I am struck again with the brutal reminder of what I'm doing wrong. Carpe Diem. I am supposed to be having a good time. I smile and the stretched, thin smile just makes it worse. I hate myself in this moment—for being the wrong mother. The mother of whom it is said constantly by one child to another, "She has a headache," the mother who needs it to be quiet, the mother who isn't having a nice Mother's Day, the mother who wishes she wasn't in Chili's, who can't eat anything normal at restaurants, who needs to support her neck—and can someone get her a place to rest her back, the mother—the only mother—who is too tired from watching soccer games to walk steadily to the car, the only mother in the world who gets frustrated at the sound of her children's laughter because it's like a bomb going off in her head. (There was a time, wasn't there, when laughter was not like a bomb going off in my head...I wish I'd known then how lucky I was.)

And I've just had it. I'm through with myself. I give up. I am supposed to be able to accept this pain. I am suffering because I resist it. If I could accept it, then it wouldn't hurt so much. If I could accept my children and their loud, bomb-blasting laughter and repeated getting up from the table into the walkways and the path of servers, then there would be no suffering. If I could accept that I can't accept it, then there would be no suffering. But there is suffering. There is tremendous suffering. And it is contagious. It infects everyone at the table as they hang by their fingernails on the expectation of my delight in Mother's Day, making small talk and glancing at me nervously. I am so—disappointing.

There is one job given to me worth doing—to be a mother—and I am screwing it up. And I cannot seem to figure out how to do it better than I am.

I think there is some lesson here, just out of reach; just behind a corner, that I can't see yet. I tell myself I am not supposed to see it yet. I am supposed to hang out here, increasingly desperate, until I am ready to learn something. Meanwhile, my ego is having a temper tantrum: throwing blocks and spitting, pulling hair, refusing to accept reality—just wanting anything other than the body and the familiar set of thoughts and emotions I've come to know as "me"—wanting to cut to the chase, come out on top; be crowned as a winner, able to laugh at my former idiocy, and have laurels set upon my brow. I want very badly to be an inspiration to everybody, unearned, and I don't want to spend time with the ugliness of pain and fear and disappointment and wanting things I cannot have. I want to to have survived.

This is what I'm like: I am not good with pain. But I like the after. I like the accomplishment of having lived through things. I feel elevated by the times I've spent with darkness, the prayers I've prayed in desperation, the emptiness I've stood in and stayed with and learned from. But I don't write much to you from there. I write from the after: the bliss where a child is suddenly handed to me, wrapped in warm receiving blankets—not the moment when I'm screaming that I cannot do this, that I want you to shoot me, that I don't have what it takes. I want you to see the victory and not the sobbing, bloody slog that took me there. I don't want you to see me scream.

But here I am anyway. When I am in pain, I shut down. I focus my eyes on a nearby tree through a window and I wait for the pain to go away. I pretend that I don't have a body, that I am astral projecting somewhere else. Every time someone speaks to me, asking if they can do anything, it disrupts my small sense of relief. When I am in fear, I press it deep down like a seed, far into the soil, so deep that the light can't get there, and I stand on top of where it's planted and bite my cuticles. When I am angry, I breathe deeply and focus on a stillness that I think is inner peace. I am shocked when fire blazes out of nowhere—anger out of nothing. Because I really wasn't angry. I was sure I was doing fine.

I think—have thought all my life—that I can get 'round myself; that I can cheat, that there's some way to get quickly to the moment of glory without paying the price of pain. Maybe this is why I get to have fibromyalgia and migraines and TMJ. I don't really believe in divine plans per se, but I do believe that the Universe just keeps presenting us naturally with opportunities to master things we haven't yet been able to learn. (The more I think about it, the more I think these two ideas are basically the same thing anyway.) If I have failed to learn how to live with myself while recovering from alcoholism and bulimia or getting divorced or having three kids or falling in love, then I get to keep developing chronic painful conditions, so that I can practice noticing that I can't really escape suffering. The Universe is boundless, generous, infinite. I get every chance I need to learn again.

At least, true or not, cast in that light—I'm doing this exactly the right way. I'm just a child being raised and making mistakes as I grow up. I'm up in the walkway of the restaurant again and I'm causing a disturbance, but I still get a chance to sit in a restaurant once more. No one ever takes the chance away. I still have my menu and my drink and my fork; I am taken here again and again, no matter what kind of scene I make.

"Suffer, Child," the Universe seems to say kindly. "Suffer your physical frailty. Suffer the pain of not being who you think I want. All these ideas are yours: 'Should be happy,' 'should be well,' 'should be calm.' Suffer as long as you need to. I will wait for you. There's all the time in the world."

And so my instruction is to suffer and really do it well; really notice it; to not give it short-shrift—to suffer so well and so authentically that I'm right there with myself—to finally just give up and let the suffering be there.

I can't do it yet. But I'm trying.

So—all this is to say: Happy Mother's Day. It's fine just the way it is.

Brooding

2013-05-08T06:32:00.000-06:00

Another black australorp, brooding

"Where is Ninja?"

For a good five minutes, I examined the different parts of my yard: the lilac bush, the smaller hen houses, the garden beds, the underneath of the trampoline. Nothing. I started peering anxiously over the fence into the yard where my neighbor's eighteen year-old greyhound lives, scanning the ground for torn feathers or the unidentifiable lump of black that might turn out to be my missing bird. No Ninja.

I looked back at the hens again. There was Henny Penny. There was Sasquatch. There was Ostrich—all of them, eating scraps of kitchen leavings in the mounds of golden straw; very definitely three and not four birds. My little black chicken, I concluded, had been abducted by aliens. Mild panic set in.

After a minute of helpless contemplation, a thought occurred to me. I opened up the side panel of the hen house and there she was in the nest box, laying her egg at an unscheduled time. I thought first, Whatever, Chicken and then, Thank God. Problem solved. My heart slowly dropped backed down to a normal rate.

"I thought the chicken was lost!" I told my husband as I came in from the yard.

The next morning at scrap-time, the chicken was in the nest box again.

"Why are you laying your egg at breakfast time?" I asked her. "You're missing strawberry tops and asparagus stems."

She looked at me, with that particular black australorp gentleness, like a chicken empath, and then settled back to her business, ignoring my intrusion on her work.

The next morning was the same. When I went out to clean the coop later on, I finally wised up. The chicken, at 1 PM, was still in the nest box.

"Devin!" I yelled. "This chicken is brooding!"

I reached my hand into the nest box to pet her and all the feathers puffed out in a ridiculous porcupine-puffer fish-chicken show of maternal protectiveness. A guttural percussive warning uttered from deep within her belly.

"Good grief," I said. Devin and Mikalh came over to look.

I lifted her up, just slightly, and saw that she was sitting on a clutch of everybody's unfertilized eggs, which we hadn't picked up since she'd been on them every morning I went out.

"Will she have chicks?" Devin asked me.

"Devin," I explained "we have no rooster."

"Why does she need a rooster so she can sit on her eggs?" he asked, thoughtfully.

Somehow, my children's understanding of human procreation has never quite extended to the avian world. I explain it repeatedly and yet it just won't stick. There is an egg, you see, and from it should come chicks. This is just basic knowledge. They are highly skeptical of my attempts to convince them otherwise.

"Let's get a rooster!" suggested Mikalh, helpfully.

Yes, because there is no situation that cannot be improved by an aggressive, strutting rooster who will crow and wake up the neighborhood in the wee hours of each morn.

Something smelled. Underneath the eggs Ninja was sitting on, one had broken and, with the warmth of her body, was emitting quite a reek.

"I have to get this chicken out," I told the kids. "Poor chicken."

Since no chicks were imminent, they lost interest and ran off to play basketball.

I lifted up poor Ninja, who had torn her belly feathers out and lamely placed some of them around the eggs all streaked with drying yolk. She made the guttural sound again and puffed up like a blown-up chicken balloon but did not peck me. She is just too gentle a girl. I set her in the straw where, right away, she began looking for an insect to eat without laying her feathers down.

I cleaned out all the broken egg and set aside the others for tossing while each of the other hens climbed into the nest box to personally find out what I was doing and see if they could be of any help.

"You're in my way," I told them.

This was in no way a problem for them. Coop cleanings are just about their favorite things.

The rest of the day, Ninja wandered the yard, eating and drinking normally and otherwise doing the chicken things she'd neglected recently but all the time puffed up to twice her normal size. The other hens followed her like a Greek chorus and offered commentary. I guess this must have gotten to be a bit much because later on, I found her having hopped the fence into my backyard, where she was wandering around with my dog.

"Poor Ninja," I told her.

She looked at me thoughtfully, with her usual Bodhisattva quality.

It took a couple of days to convince her that she wasn't going to hatch out eggs. She would seem to be broken of the habit and then somebody laid an egg in the nest box again and there she was, settled on everything.

You will sometimes hear people say that so-and-so "is brooding" over something. I never fully appreciated this before. This is quite what we are like. We are distracted perhaps for a moment, by a familiar touch and the possibility of an insect in the straw, but then something just seems to be missing for us. We are crying for meaning. So back to the nest box we go—to our self-imposed fast and dehydration and we'll sit here on this damn idea until something living comes from it! If someone tries to offer comfort, we'll puff up in otherworldly shapes, utter strange cries to tell them to get out of here. We think something important is happening.

But, no, it's just us—sitting on a clutch of ideas that will never break their shells.

From Womb to Waves Goodbye

2013-05-02T06:23:00.000-06:00

The school year is drawing to a close. I can't think of a single year when I have learned so much about what education is and isn't and how parenting fits in, and doesn't, as I have this year. I am in no way done learning. I started my homeschool year with my son attempting to replicate school at home—only better, I thought, and more tailored to his needs—and I have learned that homeschooling generally doesn't work that way for a reason. Seeing what and how things can be learned by doing less has been eye-opening, but more than anything, if I'm honest, it has been terrifying. When my kid learns without my overtly planning everything, I feel moorless and I come right up against the deep and paralyzing dread that I am ruining him, setting him up to fail, leaving him behind, not doing my job. These moments of doing nothing are scary. All evidence to the contrary, doing what is closest to what everyone else is doing just seems the safest thing. I have learned that I will just keep on doing this act of imitation until I realize that I am sacrificing my son's happiness on the altar of my fears. So, now I'm looking again and asking myself how much of what I ask of him is what he needs and how much of it is like a little comforting rhyme that I repeat to myself in the dark so the closet zombies will not come.

Parenting my older kids has also been an opportunity for growth. With one child suffering from chronic health issues and the other peaking at perfect grades before suffering apathy and depressed disinterest in school, this year, I have learned that I care more about my kids' well-being than their grades. I didn't used to know that they were necessarily separate things or could be in conflict occasionally. I used to feel like if I just kept baking special cookies and serving healthy salads with dinner and giving hugs and attention and guidance, then the grades would obviously come. It turns out life is more complex than this.

At the very core, I've learned that my worst fear—that my kids will turn out like me—says something about the gratitude and joy for my life that I'm clutching to myself and hiding from my kids, lest they also wish to become teenage alcoholics who don't complete college. It's time to give that up.

The ultimate task of parenting, from womb to waves goodbye, seems to have something to do with first connecting with this other human so that you do not know where they end and you begin and then learning to understand that you are ultimately not in control and not responsible for how their lives shape themselves. To the extent that I can do this well—that is when I love. As long as I am attempting to control the experience and trajectory of a person who isn't me, the two of us will suffer, because I cannot make them grow up to whole and happy, I cannot make them find their way to spirituality, and I cannot even make them clean their rooms, no matter how much love I mean. I have power to influence and love, but none to control.

I am profoundly grateful to these children of mine for letting me test-drive my infant soul with their very lives. They are quite forgiving, quite patient with the efforts of all these silly adults to control their hearts with our tiny dams. They roll over us—sometimes smiling, sometimes yelling—like the swelling ocean breaking over our walls. They ebb back, patiently cooperating, and then surge forward, to finally grasp the adulthood that was always theirs.

Mindfulness with the Meth-Addicted Spider Monkeys

2013-04-25T06:34:00.001-06:00

Photo Credit: Morguefile by mariocom20

Mindfulness. Doesn't that just sound like a good idea? I've had mindfulness on my mind. It's on my to-do list: become mindful—perhaps later, after I finish getting the house the way I like. Just before spring break, I went so far as to go to Tara Brach's website and poke around a bit. I liked what I saw, but I didn't have any time at the moment to watch any of her too-long videos because I was very busy checking my email and watching my children do all the things that they shouldn't do. So, I bookmarked it and added it to my list of things to accomplish over the vacation: clean out chicken coop thoroughly, de-clutter, become mindful watching Tara Brach.

Guess which thing I didn't do?

I had already spoken to my mindful friend Kristine about sitting with the Buddhist group at my church the week before. She was very encouraging and excited that I was interested, but also let me know that all of them mediated for half an hour at the beginning of each gathering. Half an hour. I still have very unpleasant memories of attempting sitting meditation in the past. You are, in fact, supposed to meditate if you are sober. I believe the step says: "We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out." The prayer part I've had down for years. The meditation part, I'll admit, has been a bit bumpier.

In my attempts to mediate properly over the years I have discovered these three things: breathing deeply is not necessarily relaxing when you are prone to panic attacks; spider monkeys on meth-laced Frappuccino regimens have less energy than my own ongoing narratives about myself, which run constantly and at full volume in my head; and sitting in meditative poses is as comfortable for me as being folded into a box. And now, I had fibromyalgia on top of all this.

Kristine encouraged me to tell the Buddhist group leader about my concerns. For some reason, this made me feel a great deal better. I would do this—after.

So, then it was the week after spring break. And Kristine had just gotten back from Mexico, so certainly she wouldn't be going and my kid and husband needed me to be home with them because they had just gotten back as well, so I didn't go then. I needed to go with someone, and there was no reason to be selfish about it either.

And then this last Sunday arrived. This time, I had emailed the leader and told him that I had very little experience with meditation and that I had fibromyalgia and wasn't sure if I could stay in one position for thirty minutes. He'd encouraged me to come and do what I could and said they'd help me to be comfortable. So, early, I texted Kristine to see what time it started and she said she wasn't going this Sunday but it started at 8 AM.

"Oh, OK then", I texted back."I'll wait until next week. I have a terrible headache anyway."

But she wasn't going to be able to go next week either and, it occurred to me, neither was I.

"Maybe I'll just go," I said.

I had a half an hour to decide. I'd been in some of the worst pain of my recent experience this last week. That was a very good reason not to go. And I'd have to walk in by myself. And what if my body freaked out immediately, or I had an attack of PTSD or something awful? I know me, and so I know I would just stay there, miserable, afraid to draw attention to myself.

Then I had this thought: This is you. This is your life. It's not about to be some other way. If you want to do this, bring the you and life that exists with you and just go and try.

So I went.

I did myself proud. I walked in, smiled, said yes I was Tara, and that I was going to need to lean against something so my jaw didn't go into spasm. The leader spent a good ten minutes thoughtfully setting me up on pillows and explaining exactly what would happen. Someone had a chime on their cell phone and, with all of us set up, it chimed.

My eyes were closed and I was in more or less the correct posture as I tried to focus on my breathing. The first thing I noticed was that there was a sharp pain in the center of my solar plexus when I exhaled which pulled through my chest to the center of my shoulder blades. It was probably costochondritis , which I already know that I have, but immediately I remembered an article I'd recently come across while sitting in a waiting room—the story of a marriage that survived MS. In the article, the foreshadowing of the husband's illness came when he experienced a symptom known as the "MS hug". I decided that this was what I was experiencing and began wondering how many of my symptoms were consistent with MS. All the while knowing that none of them were. This continued for some time before it became hard to think because the pain involved in maintaining my position became so large that thought was more or less impossible. Whatever thoughts I did have became largely focused on wondering how much longer this would last.

Meanwhile, over the top of this meth-Frappuccino chattering, there lay a very thin layer of stillness, like the membrane inside the shell of an egg. The thin-membrane of stillness hovered, unconcerned with the MS or the pain and compassionately resolved itself into remaining seated until the chime rung out again. The meth-Frappuccino spider monkeys began to notice this.

"Wow, I'm so deeply spiritual," one said.

"I'm actually not. Here I am thinking when I am supposed to be breathing," said another meth-addicted spider monkey.

They began an argument and made cases to prove their opposing points.

The membrane of stillness just paid attention to the pain increasing in my legs and chest and back and tried to locate a consciousness large enough to contain both the pain and the stillness all at once. My body started beating drums to let me know that we were done here and something terrible was happening and this needed to stop right now. The monkeys rambled on about my spirituality and Multiple Sclerosis and I continued to sit.

And then the chime rang. I opened my eyes and shifted my position. "Hallelujah!" my legs said. And I noticed that the pain, while still there, suddenly seemed smaller, and the consciousness around it seemed larger, despite the monkeys and all the arguments about MS.

And at that point I realized I was hooked. Just like the spider monkeys on their meth.

Love We Don't Deserve

2013-04-20T08:35:00.000-06:00

Photo Credit: Morguefile by imelenchon

I have fibromyalgia. Because I don't write about it a lot, I think that I have some readers who don't know this. I have fibromyalgia and chronic migraines and TMJ, and this week, it was bad—all of it, at once. If you have people in your life who manage chronic illness, you may want to know that the reason they look like they're doing so well is because you normally don't see them when they are not doing so well. We tend to stay in, and we tend not to want to broadcast our pain into the public world because what we get back when we do doesn't always make us feel better, even though we are also dying for people to know what it feels like, in some weird, childlike way.

I wrote this because I decided that I was going to go crazy if I didn't, but I am sharing it, because someone else may feel like they are going to go crazy because no one feels the way they do. If you know someone like that, share this with them. They may feel better, if only because they are doing better than this. And, so you don't worry, even I am doing better than this. I am doing awesome. I am a great mother and I am still continuing to get up and care for kids and, in fact, educate them, and I have been nice twenty times for each time I haven't been. But this is how it feels to be in so much pain that you have to to do something and to find that there is nothing to do, and this is what it feels like to receive love inside of that space—at least for me. So, please use this piece to find compassion for yourselves—because we can all relate, on some level, to a pain too large to bear—and for others you come across in life who may behave like wolverines with their leg in a trap when you are just trying to be nice to them.

Tara

It took a while to notice that the pain had become a balloon inside which all the air was trapped and everything was expanded, and nothing could get out. For five days, it had been there, getting louder, and I had been enduring, and doing nice things, and now there was no endurance for it left. Now I was furious. I wanted to smash the breadth of it against something hard and watch it shatter, yelling “How do you like that now?” but there was nothing to shatter but my own plates and cups and ornaments and relationships. I wanted to scratch it and watch it bleed, but it didn’t have a body. It just had me, and after all these years, I am tired of watching myself bleed. I gnashed my teeth at it, and—mirror-like, it gnashed back.

As all this went on, my husband sat in the living room relaxing and my children watched something on an iPad that I’d told them they couldn’t be on until all the homework was done. And cups and dishes and coats and papers and shoes and cat hair and sounds were left all over the house, hanging onto and nullifying the neatness I can remember having won.

So, I got up to clean dishes, because if I didn’t I was going to have to smash them, and my husband said, “I can do that later, hon.” And I ignored him because the cups and the dishes and the coats and the papers and the shoes and cat hair and sounds were there now, not later, and later never fucking comes anyway. And then I decided that I wanted to smash my relaxing, not-helping family and watch them break against the wall like pieces of china just so that they would be silent and stop ruining everything. But I could remember having loved them a great deal and having hated myself for hurting their feelings before. And I felt sorry and ashamed and beaten and still-destructive all at the same time.

So, after the dishes were loaded, instead of smashing my family, I went to my bedroom and tried to focus all of my concentration into the part of me that could be still. I became a rock on an expanse of sand, just lying there on my bedspread, with no muscle pain tearing my body apart, and no jaw pain ripping open my skull, and no headache that bored into the thinking part of my flesh. I am just a rock, I thought. And a rock feels no pain…And my husband came and went like a timid mouse, bringing pills and putting up with me and suffering silently and distancing himself emotionally for his own protection but being good, and I just lay there and I just wanted someone—anyone, but especially him, to break the balloon and come in and get me or at least squeeze into that space and nestle beside me, for just a minute, so I didn’t feel so alone.

Instead, though, everyone stayed away and ignored me or did their best and always remembered that the balloon in question is where an angry, volatile, hurting person lives. And, instead, I went to sleep on waves of physical agony and despair and woke up still hurting and wanting to smash things.

But I also remembered that I didn’t want to spend the day in the balloon alone again, where the pain bounced off the latex walls in echoes and hit me again as it came back, so I sat down and wrote this, and then I gave it to my husband, who was going somewhere, and asked him, “Do you have time to read this now?” and he did.

And then, as his arms reached around me and the softness of his always-warmer caramel flesh pressed up against mine, all the pain still ripped through my body, but the aloneness slipped out like air through a tiny hole made by a pin in the balloon. And, because of this, I think I can get up and go take a shower now and, because of this, I think that I can get through at least one more hour. And because of this, I think that the Universe might love me, too. And I am so glad, because it is when I am most unlovable, when I am fighting and spitting and raging and sobbing inside, that I need this assurance the most.

Sometimes, we all need to have access to that love we don't deserve.

The Human Heart

2013-04-19T06:33:00.001-06:00

I am just a little frightened by the violence of the human heart.

I am out here on a road, with human hearts veering out of all reason, with no seeming sense of the power of the vehicles they drive, splashing twisted metal across the news as they break themselves and everyone around. And I am in here: in this body, behind the wheel of my own human heart, where, occasionally out out on the road, I think, "Damn, I'm not sure how to drive this thing." I seem to lurch suddenly, when I was sure I had this down. Smooth sailing it is not.

And, reading the news with my morning cup of coffee, raising my family, I don't want to keep watching the world or myself make the same kinds of mistakes. I want us to grow up and learn something. "I can't bear to live through anything like another post-9/11," I think. I think it and catch the edge of bitterness in my thought.

Right now, I am teaching two of my children history. I believe in honesty. I believe in honesty, because lies about history are dangerous, dangerous things, but I also believe that I need to pass on a world that my children will ultimately believe can be good. To do this well requires thought. "The Americans...," my Native American son has taken to saying with a certain tone of anger in his voice. And this may well bother somebody, but that fact that he feels this way, to my mind, simply means that he is paying attention, that he is imaginative, and that he has absorbed compassion and can place himself in the shoes of people living long ago. I think this reaction speaks well of him.

"But you are American," I told him."America is all of us. It is the descendants of the white slave owners and the the slaves and the Natives who lived here first. It is the descendants of all the immigrants who've landed on this shore since then. It includes the parts of America that used to be Mexico, and the Mexicans that have come here since looking for a better life. It is everyone. And the history of America is not just the history of what was done to the slaves and the Indians. It is the history of their resistance and their survival and the history of the abolitionists that said this wasn't right. This country began as a slave-holding country and soon, we will recognize gay marriage. We are getting better as our country gets older. American history is the history of that. And you can be very proud of that history."

"OK," he said, and he looked a little less piqued.

And yet, the fits and starts as we jerk around can make me a little ill. I am older and I am done being horrified by history, but I am not being horrified by the present. And I am not willing to be done, because the fact that I'm horrified means that I'm paying attention, that I'm imaginative, and that I have absorbed compassion and can imagine, at least in part, what it is to be a Newtown parent as Congress squelches discussion of gun control or a bystander watching the world explode at the Boston Marathon. I don't want to stop looking, and I don't want to lose myself. I am not always sure what it is in my power to do. Sometimes, it feels like not a lot.

I have decided that my primary sphere of influence is my own community. So, if I'm to learn to steer this human heart, my primary work is here, where I already am. That is why I try not to look away. I let myself be moved by the world. I let myself speak about being moved. I try to listen. I try not to make wedges but bridges, when I can remember to do that. I am, every moment, practicing my values to my children and to my Facebook friends, to my family, to my cat, if he will listen to me. That is all I know how to do. When I don't, I get a little smaller—make a self that's a little narrower and has a membrane that is designed to keep invaders, and a lot of beauty, out. So, I try—at least I try not to look away in the face of suffering, and I try not to let it make me hard, but to let my heart be soft, which means that rather than being angry, I am sometimes sad.

This week, I am sad and horrified, just like my son. And I think that's what I'm supposed to be.

Last week was golden. This week is sad. It's just that it goes this way. I have the luxury of saying this, since no one in my life has died or had their leg amputated, and no one in my life died in Newtown either and so I can walk away from the news and go back to chickens and children and things that seem to have stayed the same. But nothing stays the same. Not even here. Last week was golden, and this week is sad. And it goes this way, and I will not turn away.

The world—and my world, too—can keep on having my human heart.

Mexico

2013-04-14T08:27:00.000-06:00

They are back—the husband and my eldest son, back from Mexico, where they went to build houses, back with tents and foam sleeping pads and dusty, dirty laundry and grime deep in their hair. They are back with gifts for the family: a chicken planter for me, some t-shirts, and a wonderful wrestling mask from Rowan for Mikalh.

They are back with inspiration. They left as pioneers—the first large batch of members from of our church to go on the mission trip with the local church just down the road. They have come back having touched the sacredness of shared purpose and accomplishment.

In the parking lot, the vans pulled in, and out came teenagers, dazed and weary from the road. Behind and around them were the shadows of even more tired adults. The kids wore t-shirts with lots and lots of tiny words, almost too many to read: "I want to have billions in the bank. I want to be successful. I want all of my endeavors to turn to gold." "DISRUPTED" was written through these words all across the front.

"It says sex on this shirt, Mom," Rowan demonstrated.

In the dark, the kids couldn't stop hugging each other. They piled around one kid and cooed his name. They jumped on each other.

"I want to go home," Rowan said. "I have to pee and vomit and take a shower." Fast food—road food—doesn't agree with him.

"You can pee and vomit in the building," Mike told him. "But the shower will have to wait. We have to unload and clean up."

Rowan, unperturbed, went off, hauled tools, put his belongings in the van. Minutes rolled by and I stood and watched the kids, glowing like fireflies in the dark.

"Are you all packed up?" I asked Rowan, as he passed by.

"Yes, he can go now," Mike told me.

But I watched Rowan, watched all the kids. In the dark, they hung together like insects clustered onto life-giving plants. As soon as they started leaving, it would really be over and they'd never all be together again. They hung in hallelujahs, in hugs, in glorious filthiness—together.

Then, finally, they started to disperse. All at the same time.

"I'm going to go home, take a shower, and go back to Mexico to build three more houses," Rowan suddenly said.

"Mom," he asked me as we got into the van, "I'm going again next year, right?"

"As long as you want, babe," I told him.

"When we handed over the key," he told me animatedly "I felt something in the place where I should have a heart."

So, I've decided that I really don't care if my son earns a lot of money or makes really great grades or does really well in his sport. Those things are nice, and sometimes helpful, but what I want for him—more than anything—is what he just found: his spirit somewhere, a reason beyond himself to be alive.

It's really all you ever need.

Fortitude, and the Secret Truth about Home Education

2013-04-11T09:02:00.000-06:00

The kind of thing I photograph: Here is my child, cooperating with a plot to teach classification using LEGOS.

Two weeks ago, my fifteen year-old was in my kitchen dry-heaving into a garbage can. Eyes watering, between retches he shot questions at me about what his coach would say when he missed track practice, the details of a math test, and the history assignment he needed to turn in.

"Go lie down," I told him. "You cannot go to class if you're throwing up. They won't want you there." I placed a bowl next to him on the couch, smoothed back his darkening blond hair and again directed his homeschooled youngest brother, who was spinning in circles with a bow, to continue practicing his violin. My seven year-old's eyes, now dark with something like evil, fixed on me, and a harumph escaped his tiny chest. He collected his instrument with all the enthusiasm of a person holding a now-familiar dead rat.

"Nice bow grip," I told him. "Check your foot position."

This is the sort of comment I am supposed to make.

"My feet are in position," he told me, imperiously, and turned to play as if drawing a crossbow, ninety degrees from the music stand—like Hawkeye at Carnegie.

Trapped between the rapidly approaching walls of pleasant indifference on one side and firm and loving commitment on the other, I chose the latter and was crushed between them like a bug.

"Fine," he wailed. "I'll do it your way! I can't even see my music!"

Obstinately, he thrust his violin into an unnatural position, his waist twisted, shoulders thrust and lifted, and, standing uncomfortably, abutted the scroll into his stand. "See?!"

"OK. I'm not going to argue with you," I explained, impersonating Ghandi, as passive and loving as a gently swaying shrub. I would let his anger complete itself without my participation. I was a master of non-violent communication. I was modeling patience. I let myself fill with inner peace.

In the new and ridiculous position, my youngest applied his bow and let out several tortured sounds: "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" played as the unsettling interlude to a Megadeth song.

"See?" he continued to demonstrate.

"I don't want to argue," I explained, from my happy place, as peaceful as a dove.

Moans sounded from the couch, and again I stroked my oldest's hair.

The argument, with or without me, continued, the pitch of violin and voice reaching a sustained staccato whine.

"Put it away then," came a voice from my lips, sounding a bit more cross than Ghandi's would have, "If you can't do it without getting angry, put it away and do your grammar then."

The tone was somewhat grumpy, I reasoned, but this is more or less exactly what the great man told Britain, if I remember correctly. "If you can't stop acting like an asshole, just take your crap and leave," he said. "I'm setting boundaries here."

Having failed to embody non-violent communication, I now attempted to channel Gloria Steinem: rational refusal to be stepped upon, firm boundaries, an unflappable sense of self.

"I don't think," I said, firmly, "that I told you to pet the dog." My youngest was stooped by the couch, midway between violin and grammar book, and, for two full minutes, had now been gently stroking our family pet. "The choices are: continue playing violin but without whining or stop, and come and do your grammar pages."

I was glad that, from my years of work at an elementary school, I have retained my teacher voice.

He put the violin away and stomped over to the open grammar book where, subsequently he decorated several lines of grammar with wavy patterns, like verbal Easter eggs. I erased the lines. He aggressively misread directions. I corrected. He scrawled in cuneiform. He was told to sit on the stairs, was talked to, agreed to behave, then came back and started up again. Gloria Steinem began to stew.

For several more minutes, I had strong boundaries and an unflappable sense of self. Following the tenth act of grammatical sabotage, I was broken. I became June Cleaver and turned, pleadingly to my half-dead teenager on my couch, a look of constrained panic in my eyes. Let the oldest male in the house save me, the look said. I am clearly dying here, and it is only 9 AM.

"Stop being so difficult," he told his brother, firmly, in his deepening male voice. "You could have had this done by now."

There. See? From Ghandi to June Cleaver in so many minutes and we've not even finished one page of work. I blamed my child for this transformation. Even Ghandi couldn't have stood up to this kind of bull crap. My eldest slumped back into the couch cushions, disintegrating into nausea, as his brother, now chastened, did some work.

Things went on from there, haltingly, in fits and starts. Handwriting was aggressively looped and scrawled, subjects insulted verbs. We were on thin ice the entire morning period until I mentioned the hero's cycle to him. Then, suddenly, pencil racing, the rebel, now a writer, put down the beginnings of the heroic tale of Silly Dog and Super Kitty Paws, his unexplained rage forgotten. Watching him with gratitude and relief, I turned into Sigmund Freud.

What was his problem anyway? (The mother. Freud's answer is always the mother.) After several moments of irritated contemplation, I switched psychiatrists, becoming instead an anonymous, empowering female—frumpy but clever, and wearing low beige heels.

Jealous? Could he be jealous that his brother is home, lying moaning on the couch?

At any rate, the cloud of dark rage seemed to have passed. We went on to the subject of history and finished strong with a start on the early Greeks. I wondered only periodically if it would be worthwhile to get him a psychiatric evaluation. (Perhaps, if I had not, at some point, had this thought of all my kids, I might have taken it more seriously.)

The day ended with laughing neighbor children in my backyard, petting our chickens, and with the quiet work of making a green salad and thinking in the kitchen by myself. Again we had made it through.

I follow several home-school blogs. On one of them, the mother—who is a fabulous photographer—splashes the web with images of her gorgeous almond-eyed children dressed like fairies, felting rainbow wool, having tea parties with real china, and studying clouds through the pursuit of art. On another, the mother publishes complicated unit studies she has developed to tackle everything from dinosaurs to natives of the northwest coast. From hers, too, smiling, happy children beam up, engaged in hands-on learning, and absorbed in happy, loving play with their adoring mom.

Searching Google, it would be easy to think that home schooling is the art of taking little children who might, under normal circumstances, drive anyone crazy and making for them a utopian educational dreamscape—a measure I'm sure I could never meet. It's daunting—this idea we have of what education might really be, what we have to make it. I also think it's crap.

Maybe it's because I've worked in public school classrooms and seen the debacle of a kindergarten child who has peed through her pants onto the gym floor—just before the other children race back in her direction during a game of tag. (School: the place you send your child to slide through a puddle of someone else's pee.) I've seen the ever-patient teacher, just like me, lose her patience with the child who refused to do his work. I've seen the worksheets—some clever, some boring—the art projects, the play-dough ground into the floor.

Human beings work at schools, as frail and real as mothers. You would not confuse them with saints, once the parent volunteers leave and shut the door. They are ordinary, like I am. Ordinary in personality and extraordinary in commitment. They are dedicated, kind, wrong-headed, inspired, angelic and destructive, and doing the best they can.

Maybe having seen all that, I realize that it's always easy to assume that if I can send my kid Somewhere Else, that Somewhere Else will do a better job than messy, impatient me. (Which, of course, is fine, as long as it's true in the particular case of my kid. I've decided I have to evaluate the truth of this notion on a case-by-case basis, one child and one year at a time.)

I am guilty of this misrepresentation. I put pictures up on Facebook—show my friends the gorgeous paper fractals (without any pictures of me snapping at my child that he's not gluing fast enough) or the day we were Phoenicians and used blueberries to dye our socks. I show them our ecology with Skittles, our owl pellet dissection—replete with smiling faces and a love of learning glowing in the scene. I leave off the glowers and stomping feet, the jealousy and defiance, my ineffectiveness to the background sound of dry heaving on my couch.

But all of these together are the truth of what it takes to educate my child. Because I worked at his school and was stopped in the hallway in the middle of my workday to discuss the stomping feet and scribbling that happened there, I have no illusion it would go better Somewhere Else.

My point is not that everyone should homeschool. It's not necessary for every child, and most parents don't want to. And that is that. (Most of these pro- and con- conversations about child-raising come down, of course, to what a parent wants to do or not. The rest is largely noise.) My point is that education, like parenting, and like life in general, is kind of messy. It requires talent, commitment, and a sort of stubbornness. It seems to require a lot of toilet paper tubes and white glue and endless pencils and most of it does not make good photographs. Perhaps that's why we respect teachers—because we know they're in the trenches with our children, their hair flecked with glue and scraps of paper, and that they're demonstrating a patience we fear we may not have.

They probably don't have it either, sometimes. Then, they take a breath and just keep being there. That's when they have fortitude and they have no other choice. There is no one else coming to teach this trying child.

Fortitude. In parenting and in life, it can get you to the end of a great many trying days.

A Faith that is Born of Ambiguity

2013-04-02T08:54:00.003-06:00

Photo Credit: Morguefile by cooee

I am going to tell you something that will sound very strange coming from a confessed atheist: I have never lost my faith.

Since the days that I first darkened the doors of a twelve-step fellowship hall twenty years ago, my life has been a daily negotiation between myself and that entity that some people call God. I am writing a book about this journey and where it has taken me, so I won't tell you the whole story here, but suffice it to say that, at eighteen years old, I was ready to give the care of my life over to an entity much larger than myself.

I grew up Unitarian Universalist. God had nothing to do with it, really. The subject of God at church was like the subject of politics at Thanksgiving. (Don't go there, or be sorry that you did.) I went looking and found God myself, later; I called Her the Goddess. I was still a teenager, and I said I was a witch; the taste of rebellion was like chocolate on my tongue. There was something real, though. At seventeen, I felt, I knew that all life was sacred, that nature was the lived Eden—the brutal Heaven of my heart. I fell on my knees in awe, the spirals of my DNA an echoing answer to the petraglyphs of old.

And I became a bulimic while waxing poetic about the Neolithic fertility goddess with her curves and breasts like hills of warm and earthy clay.

It didn't matter what I believed in. I had no relationship with God.

Unable to stop purging, I was afraid I would return to the life I had known months before the Goddess—a life of drugs and heartache, a life of reckless danger and hurdling pain. I went to the meetings where strangers talked about God and said the Lord's Prayer. Those meetings where I did not belong.

And in those meetings, I was saved.

Finally, I realized that I did not have to try. I did not have to force a will as thin as paper against the juggernaut of my addiction and my pain. I let go. I stopped trying. I walked to the edge of a cliff and fell, arms forward, into the arms of my salvation.

My head rung with the notes of "Amazing Grace."

And for seventeen years, the grace carried me. It carried me through an unplanned pregnancy. It held me through a terrible divorce. I knew God had me. It didn't matter who I said God was. God was what I knew when I woke up in the morning and promised my life to the care of the peace and stillness that would come. God was the answer I found in my self-reflection. God was the urgent need I felt to right the wrongs I did. God and I were fine.

And then something happened.

Finally, unexpectedly, something occurred that was beyond my capacity to hold inside the reason of God's Plan for My Life. I didn't know that I believed God had a plan for my life until I realized that this wasn't it. This wasn't the plan, and this wasn't the right life. I seemed, by mistake, to have ended up with the wrong God.

I was bereft.

In the end, though, I was saved again, just as I had been saved before. I stood before the Universe holding the God I'd had and, just like before, I found that everything in my hands was made of Self. It was small and imperfect, a reflection of me—limited by my imagination, crushed and warmed by the tight grip of my insistence on my will.

I let this small God go.

What came next was Nothing. And Everything. The multitude of laws and forces all greater than myself. The stillness, the emptiness, the complexity, the solitude, the fullness and togetherness of Life Itself. Forced again to my knees by wonder and joy, my heart was full again; full of the Everything-Nothing that is Life.

I called that Not-God and I called myself an atheist.

And every day since that day, just like every day before it, since the day I walked through the doors of that twelve-step room, I have worked out my relationship with that Everything-Nothing, with that power that is greater than myself. I believe not that there is a plan for me and not that life will leave me un-mauled, but that life is beautiful and worth living and full of the beauty and fire and meaning that we add to the experience of breathing in and out. I believe these things because I have to, and because my living makes them true.

I remember not that I am destined for happiness, not that I will meet my reward in this world or the next one, but that I have been saved from the monstrous power of addictive self. I am saved today, and I was saved yesterday, and perhaps—if I remember—I will be saved tomorrow. To ask more of life is perhaps to ask too much.

I have been an agnostic and a believer. I have been an atheist, a pagan, and a prayer of daily prayers. In all these ways I have set my feet on the path before me: the path of spiritual growth. I am unafraid to change my God if I have to do so to continue on my trek. There is no other way I want to live but this, with my whole heart seeking, my commitment deepened by my doubt.

And that is how an atheist can say that she has never lost her faith.

Note: I want to make it clear that this post is a personal statement and in no way reflects the experience of other self-proclaimed atheists, others in recovery, or the way anyone but me might choose to use the words "God," "atheism," and "faith." I share it because it is meaningful for me to reflect on. It is also meaningful for me when I read other people's heartfelt accounts of their spiritual journeys. I hope that something of what I shared may be meaningful for you, whether you are a believer, an atheist, or someone to whom the question has not mattered at all.

The Purpose of Weeds

2013-03-22T07:02:00.001-06:00

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Heirbornstud

Last fall, I double dug a garden bed, shaped like a triangle, and seeded it with native flowers. Perennials for pollinators—their seeds spread too thickly, in hopes of some good luck. I want a new flower bed, one riotous with buzzing bees, dancing with butterflies—a flower bed of hyssops and prairie zinnias and the magenta of hummingbird mint, crowned by the nodding heads of purple coneflowers with their yellow coronas dipping reverently to earth. Something multi-colored up against the small expanse of blue grama grass and yellow-flowered yarrow that is my front yard. In fall, the seeds set and were fortified by chills in winter, settled under snow, and thought.

In spring, I am starting to see dandelions. Purslane. Pigweed. Clover. And a leaf or two of what I think might be zinnia.

These infernal weeds! What are they doing, encroaching on my tasty soil? Wetting down the area, I sit thoughtfully, pulling—grabbing up as much root as I can. Always weeds; like the unbeckoned thought across an empty mind, the shopping list that arises in the moment of a kiss, the ad for Viagra during family movie time. Weeds with roots that won't let go, that break off leaving bits of themselves sunk in mire. Weeds that tease me "Nanny-nanny boo boo," and pop up again once I've looked away; like the never-ending pile of papers accumulating by my keyboard, ever begging to be filed; like the disappointments I put away each night that wake up with me the next morning, fresh as if I've never told them to be gone. Weeds like the flaws in my very nature that spoil the pretty show I hope to make. I do the therapeutic work of yanking at them, then covered in dirt, I come in to teach my child about ecology.

This subject is my favorite; the science of sacred wheels. Nutrient cycles. Carbon/oxygen cycles. Food chains. Food webs. Life cycles. The world breathlessly passes energy from one hand to the next—from seed to mouse, from mouse to snake, from snake to hawk. The hawk's body decomposes on the earth, consumed by tiny organisms, made food by saprophytes, and it becomes a source of nitrogen for the tree that bore the mouse its seed. For me, a biology textbook is no less than the holy word. I speak as if in church: "photosynthesis." Everything has its purpose inside Nature—to maintain or restore balance to the system of which it is a part.

Purpose. These weeds in my holy triangle are there, of course, because I invited them in, by heaving up the turf and turning soil, disrupting vast colonies of microscopic life, turning in compost, and leaving the earth bare in wait for plants that would come later to a home I made for them. In moved the nitrogen fixers, to do the magic of making sugar out of air, the dandelions—bringing up nutrients and moisture with their deep tap roots. The earth, eschewing the vacuum I've created in a small pocket of her world, has gifted it with exactly what it needs to be healthy—the mother's milk of disturbed land. She will turn it, if I leave her, into forest, eventually: fixing nitrogen, stabilizing soil, holding moisture, creating a home for shrub-land then eventually for trees. It will never need to be watered or fussed at or fertilized. It will take care of all of that itself. And feed the pollinators, too. When will I ever learn?

Lying in bed with the thoughts I pull like weeds, I wonder what is their purpose. Are they out of nature, unholy, things to be cast aside—or are they instead the ugly nursemaids of my own nature, bringing up, from the deep, faint echoes of a source of truth I may not want to hear? Resentment, sadness, regret—seen in the correct light, are these not the pioneer plants, only first in succession to the restoration of a disturbed piece of mental land? Pull them out again and again and they come back, still trying to fill the emptiness that is always left behind. What courage and stillness would it take to allow them to spend their time, bringing life back to a damaged corner of my heart? To trust that later would come fuller plants, the shade of trees, the singing of birds—a system that was whole again?

Sometimes, I can feel the rightness of that still waiting in the bones of my mammal frame. And sometimes, that trust is too expensive and with a thrust of my spade, I dig in once more and pull out another weed.

Potentiality

2013-03-18T07:04:00.001-06:00

Last summer's garden mid-June

You will find, now that it is the season, that I write about gardening a lot. I wrote about it a lot last year—my seeds, my soil, the inspiring mycorrhizal fungi building relationships in the earth. This has inspired some of my readers at various times to exclaim with admiration, "I garden too, but not so masterfully as you!"

Were any of these readers to visit my home they would find a woman whose counter is covered with bowls of soil and testing equipment, the maps of carefully planned garden beds, their crops all rotated from years before. Gardening books and notes are heaped upon the table. Ah, yes, they'd think, she really knows her stuff. But then, at length, they might notice that I have grass growing into my perennial beds and that my catmint is wilting, desperately in need of division and re-planting, which I keep putting off. They might notice that my Russian sage has spread its suckers and is taking over the world of soil within its grasp: an empire of unwanted xeric plant.

In the backyard run chickens, next to pieces of sodden cardboard I once thought I'd use for sheet mulching, and are digging themselves dust baths in what once long ago was turf; there is another garden bed next to dog poo, an abandoned light-saber and one single dessicated unmatched child-sized sock. The home of a master gardener is probably not the description that would come to mind. The usual comment is something like, "And this is legal here?" with a nod to the chickens and ducks.

Yet they would sense that my yard has the potential to be wonderful. And that is what I'm masterful at: potentiality.

I took a course some long years back—a seminar of sorts—in which we were asked to write down all the commitments that we had, everything small and large that we had a vested interest in bringing forth into the world. My list was longest, and so I won. After having done all this and stewed on it a bit, seen the commitments we had, which we hadn't acted on yet, and gotten all inspired by the largesse of our hearts, the seminar leader then informed us that we could easily winnow down our lists by considering them thus: the only things we were actually committed to were the ones we were acting on.

I find I often think of this. "You don't have a commitment, Tara," I hear the seminar leader say. "You have a fantasy."

If anyone is insulted on my behalf, they needn't be. I have, in the twelve intervening years, failed to bring one single thing into being from that list that I was not already acting upon then. I have not built a geodeosic dome or started raising dairy goats or become the leader of a seminar myself. And I have come to accept this commitment/action business as the gospel truth.

My life has long run like that list that I made when I was twenty-five. Become a writer. Get a career. Save humanity. Run a half-marathon. The noise and distraction of interests, like commercial breaks, which run across the screen that is my brain. What, I have been asking myself lately, is the program? What is the purpose? What is the desire? What unity is the rest of it all there to serve?

The answer, of course, is found where my hands are already dirty, in the evidence on the ground. It seems I want to be a student. No matter what I am trying to do, I surround myself with books. I experiment, my face streaked with soil as I mix test units to find and record the level of phosphorus, nitrogen, potash. I like to teach only because I'm learning as I go. In the yard, full of chickens with mysterious ailments and psychological quirks, seed beds ready for planting, years of experiments to try, I find my purpose, something worthy of my life.

Conversely, the pretty, kept-up house and yard I dream of will probably always remain a fantasy, as I walk by the sock yet one more time on my way to pick up a chicken in my arms.

Bones in a Bag: the Reduction of the Human Soul

2013-03-12T06:40:00.001-06:00

Photo Credit: by T.Voekler Wikimedia Commons

On my kitchen counter: a half-gallon of vanilla soy milk, two cookbooks, an empty cup for coffee, a naked paper towel tube, and rodent bones in a bag.

I pour myself the cup of coffee, pick up the tube and, looking through it like a telescope, wonder about voles. An interesting fate, that—to have ended up inside an owl pellet carefully wrapped inside tin foil, crowded together with the skeletal remains of other voles. Then to be slipped into a plastic sleeve and stapled together with a minute magnifying glass and plastic forceps, sold as a hands-on element in a literature unit on Poppy, a book which has no voles.

Much later, after waiting all winter in a drawer, to be found, in pieces. "Oh, yes! Here is a complete skull!" Vertebrae choked with digested grey fur laid out like beads in a row, alongside slender ribs like tiny Cs which opened their jaws too wide. A jawbone complete with yellowed teeth, hipbones like odd spatulas. "Look, honey! It's a vole!"

This vole is old now. Its great-great-great-great grandchildren have probably already been raised and have bred and are now, as we speak, being consumed by hungry owls. The vole is archaic. Alive, he'd be a relic, a Civil War re-enactor in the streets of the lively now. He could tell us tales of the ways voles used to live—the simple, idyllic days of vole-ish harmony that went before. Instead, though, he's been scraped off my counter and placed carefully into a sandwich bag.

I am forced to wonder: what would I be, once reduced to my components, laid bare and labeled according to a chart? This metatarsal laughed uproariously at The Big Lebowski, no matter how many times it saw the movie—it just laughed and laughed aloud? The third vertebrae up loved lilacs. The lower mandible made Christmas cookies with its children every year. This rib cage, intact, provided the nurturance that raised three sons with all its heart.

It seems ridiculous, to be so reduced. And yet we do reduce each other. Right down to the bones.

I had, this week, a most unsatisfying set of conversations with some of the staff of my son's school. It has been difficult to put my finger on what was so insidiously soul-sucking about these exchanges, why they felt like entering a strange land in search of allies and leaving instead at war. Looking at this bag of bones, I know.

In the reflected words of the school counselor, I felt myself made small as the spit-up vole—felt my heart picked up and examined, laid down and labeled; one word applied, unsaid but loudly shouted, for all the fierce love for my child, my desperate desire to see the world do right by him:

"Difficult."

And so the label will be stuck. Ranks closed, rude politenesses were offered, the smug certainty of barely-restrained scorn was held in check until the counselor could get off the phone and tell a colleague what a pain in the ass this woman was.

I am sorry that it went that way instead of how I hoped. I look in this bag. Bones, devoid of flesh and meaning. Devoid of motherhood or fatherhood, absent context—swallowed and spit up. I do not know this counselor, whether she is a mother, whether she ever lost a child. I do not know the mistakes she thinks she made or the wars she is fighting to preserve the children placed under her charge. She is nothing to me but the woman who is treating me like a problem while I am trying to help my child.

Perhaps I will write her a thank you note. Or, perhaps, I will just remember that I know less of her than nothing—her name and her title, as meaningless, after all, as old bones in a bag.

March: Stealing Spring from the Jaws of Death

2013-03-11T06:31:00.004-06:00

Winter, for a minute, stole spring's coming; freezing the lazy grass sudden-stopped in its swaying, now formed in erect swords of ice; dusting golden straw with the paleness of death. Hanging in stillness, the birds held their breath and waited to exhale the notes that would herald the warming joy of things stirring deep beneath the earth. The song buzzed within their throats.

I also waited, forced by tyrannical lists to action, covered in sweaters—aching under barometric pressure, which kept rising and falling like the regimes of tiny, fleeting men, living out their negligible lives in the time it takes to SNAP.

Business was done while frost lingered on the grass and yellow crocuses poked out their faces in the sugaring of snow. Inside, we swept and mopped, just as if the world wasn't changing its mind and changing it back again, a titanic two year-old into which I must soon set my seeds.

The cat hid underneath the couch, afraid of being placed into the cold. Ducks padded carelessly and slept upon the ice while chickens hid inside their coop, afraid to set their tender, forked feet onto the frost upon the earth.

Southward trees trying to flower were, perhaps, crushed in their efforts and summer will bring us the dearth of their fruit. Perhaps.

But March, like an old friend, holds no surprises for me. We will freeze in winter jackets, cast them off and stand in t-shirts in the 45 degree blaze that feels like summer, praising God in the highest, singing Hallelujah, our feet half-sunk into the mud. Snow will fall again and we will photograph tulips as they stand tall against assault.

For what is spring without winter? Just the unearned laughter of the neophyte who has known no hardship, dressed in blossoms never threatened by the chill.

We, in the mountains, steal spring from the jaws of death, and it lasts half a moment before summer rises and crushes it with its blaze. The blossoms we wear are dear as gems.

Spring, in fact, may never come again, and so we beat our fists on snowfalls and looks for robins in the March landscape—barren, full of skeletons, and promising of hope.

A Tragedy of Cruelty

2013-03-07T06:35:00.002-07:00

There, in the yard, was one hen on top of another. Poor baffled Ostrich was underneath. In the wash of high hanging sunlight—the exploding sudden goldenness that told me spring was near—Henny Penny was pulling her feathers out. "No!" I bellowed. Tossing down my purse, a violin, a folder full of music and a hoodie belonging to my son, I rushed into the fowl yard and extracted Ostrich from the fray. Where before there had been a blackened lump, a purplish cast, now there was the addition of missing feathers and fresh scabs from the assault. My mother, ever at my aid, picked up Henny Penny, gently admonishing her while she looked with deep and skeptical attention at the people in her yard.

"I've got it," I told my mother, with the abrupt voice of sadness sticking in my throat. "You can go ahead and take Mikalh and go."

She did.

I took the hen from my mother and carted her off to the isolation of her former yard, where the little house she'd lived in with her water and food containers still remained. I set her down. As I filled her water and food, she looked at me as if to ask why I had removed her from her flock. Chirruping long and disturbed chicken noises, she paced about the area. I refused to really look at her. I made sure she had food and water, bedding and safety, and I left to go back and make sure Ostrich was OK.

Treating Ostrich's wound with saline and Neosporin, I wondered if she was damaged beyond repair. Birds are delicate. Ostrich, although bloodied, was thrilled beyond belief that her tormentor had been carted from the premises and dug happy holes in the earth of her chicken run where she cleaned herself in dirt. Her two gentle friends did not pick at her. All day I watched them through the window, every few minutes, terrified of the chicken instinct to go after anything that bleeds. No one hurt her. She chased insects in the dirt. Henny Penny, in her separate yard, paced like a panther, calling out loneliness I could not answer, in the universal language common to all things that have a heart.

It was 6 PM before I realized I'd left my purse and the violin outside and never picked them up. So troubled by cruelty and tragedy I'd been, I'd left them in the yard.

A week ago, the news reported some teenagers in our town doing something horrible and cruel, bullying another child—another child with autism. A video of what they'd done had been posted on Facebook. The local news added hyperbole to tragedy, telling us, "The video shows just how far teenagers are willing to push the limits," while my own teenager watched in horror.

It haunted me for several days, both the outrageous act and the commentary on adolescence that surrounded it. So much noise. Noise and anger. Comments calling for children to be locked up and hopes that they'd be raped in jail. So much anger. So much screaming and chattering and commenting and generalizing and carrying on.

So much that you'd almost forget that someone's child had been penned under another, still with fear as his feathers were pulled out, his flesh sundered, his soul bruised raw. So much noise you'd almost forget the howling universal cry of loneliness uttered by some children who society didn't know how to look after until they did real damage to someone else. Maybe more than one someone else, before they were caught. In this small town, we saw these kids grow up and no one knew what to do about them. Now they will be half-grown villains, when before they were only children without love.

This horrible transformation seems to me one of the most tragic, and perhaps personal, things of all.

My little red hen paces her yard, calling out. I have no words to explain to her why she has to be alone. "It's your own fault," I tell her. She looks at me and looks at the other chickens, and she starts her keen again.

I leave her there and go back to the three sweet hens, where I sit on a chair by Ostrich and watch her pecking, breathing in her happiness and freedom from tyranny, as I sit kissed by the spring-struck air.

If You Give a Chicken a Muffler: A Lesson in Cause and Effect

2013-03-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

Here is Ostrich Ventress, the subject of my tale

If you choose to acquire a naked-necked chicken, when it's winter, you will wonder if her neck is cold.

If you wonder if her neck is cold, you will begin to find yourself neurotically checking her neck every day to see if it looks cold.

If you check her neck every day, one day there will appear black markings on the neck and you will decide that the chicken has frostbite and is probably going to die.

If you decide that your chicken has frostbite, you will Google "chickens" and "frostbite."

If you Google "chickens" and "frostbite," you will find pictures of roosters wearing hats, accompanied by comment threads explaining how certain women put hats on their dear little chickens to protect the combs from cold. "Good idea," you will think.

If you find pictures of roosters wearing hats, you will post a request on Facebook that your friends knit your naked-neck chicken a muffler. "Sure," one friend will say.

If you ask for a chicken-muffler on Facebook, you will become impatient and, while you are waiting, you will cut up an old, black sock that belongs that your youngest child. Then you will snatch up the frostbitten chicken and wrestle her to the ground where you will place the sock over her head and scrunch that sucker down.

If you put a black sock onto your chicken, the dominant hen will go berserk. She will think that you have replaced her nice, docile little friend-chicken with a vicious, dangerous, black-necked cobra-chicken and she will chase it madly around the chicken run, trying to peck out its eyes. Feathers will fly everywhere.

If your top hen goes berserk, you will be forced to put a diaper on her and bring her in the house while you are trying to teach math. "Forget about the muffler," you'll tell her. She will walk into the kitchen, where she will helpfully peck out all the crumbs she can find hidden in various cracks.

If your hen is in the kitchen pecking at the tile, you will start thinking that you should take that sock-muffler off the other hen. This is going to get ugly, you will think, and so you will head out to the chicken run and pull that black sock off.

If you pull the black sock off, the next morning you will find that the frostbite is really a hematoma the size of a large grape, swollen and disgusting on your naked chicken's neck.

If you find a hematoma on your innocent chicken, you will panic and return to the internet.

If you return to the internet, you will find that hematomas are self-limiting but must be covered and so—you will go and get another sock. This time you will choose a white sock, in case that makes a difference to the murderous hen.

If you put a white sock-muffler on your chicken, the next morning you will find that she has partially unraveled it and that there is a loose string encircling her tongue, which is magically connected to the moist surface and inextricably joined together with her flesh. The bird and the sock, essentially, are one.

If you find a string wrapped around your chicken's tongue, you will spend the next twenty minutes extracting it, all the while apologizing profusely to your bewildered if docile bird. Finally, and with scissors, the string—and a small part of the tongue—will come loose.

If you free your bird from a tongue trap, you will abandon the idea of mufflers altogether and you will place your bruised and baffled chicken in the yard, where she will thoughtfully eat lettuce and forget everything you've done.

If you return the chicken with the hematoma unprotected to the yard, the next morning you will go out early, very nervous—and look carefully at her neck.

Of Cats and Camellias, Boys and Girls

2013-02-27T06:22:00.001-07:00

My son doing boy stuff, back in 2010, when he had his hair long and people kept thinking he was a girl. Picture by "B" Gordon

I stood on the sidewalk, watching the boys. They were playing, hollering, running—doing the crazy things that boys together do. I’d walked to Daniel’s house hoping to find him by himself and instead he had a friend. With the friend here, the rules of our usual friendship did not apply. No tea parties or dress-ups, no complicated fantasy book schemes. Should I go home? I stood awkwardly on the sidewalk, which was wet with recent rain, shifting my feet and waiting for clarity about what to do. On the ground around me, worms were drowning, and sodden flowers fallen from the yard’s camellia bush lay flattened on the ground. The sky was ready to erupt again at any time.

“Bam!” yelled the second boy, a redhead. A wet camellia went spinning through the air. I dodged it—barely.

“It’s a bomb,” he said. “You’re dead.”

I didn't want to be dead. I stood there, calculating stubbornly my response to a scenario in which I did not want to play my part.

“Come on, Tara,” entreated Daniel. “Play along. You can bomb him back.”

Well, I supposed. I bent, picked up a flower. It was as soggy as a sponge. Pink like Pepto Bismol, rose-like, damaged by the rain. In my hand it felt substantial, a water balloon ready to be tossed. I chucked it. I couldn't aim and it missed the redhead by a yard. It landed with a satisfying splat on the concrete by the steps. The boy ran away, whooping. The war was on.

Racing, smacking through wet shrubberies, running over saturated grass, we gathered up camellias and lobbed them at one another until out of breath. I was hit once. Surprisingly, it stung. The flower smarted when it smacked me on the cheek! Nothing but petals and yet there it landed, hard as a mother’s warning slap, leaving my cheek red. I felt anger rise up in my gut.

“I’m going to get you now!” I roared.

I came home later, covered in mud, the marks of petals on my skin. The world of boys was enchanting. A world of war and terrible aggression—of letting go and going after—it was a carnival ride, and sword wounds just a bloody grin.

Boys had never really been interesting before, as boys, as suddenly they were.

"Come back here!" I yelled and then muffled my voice. The cat with the leaves in her tail would not consent to let me place the tail in water, and relieve her of the leaves. And if someone caught me at this, I was definitely going to be in trouble. Adults, who never really undertook anything of importance, would not understand.

"Bear-Bear!" I insisted.

The bowl of water slid and tipped.

"Mraaaaaooowww!" the cat complained.

Finally, I got hold of the tail, which was interminably tangled, always filled with leaves and things. Her nose was filled with snot. She breathed it in and out—she was a snot-dragon full of tangles, knots and the leavings of old trees. "A permanent cold," my mother said she had. Pneumo-something.

She looked to me like something needing care. Holding onto the captured tail with both hands, I directed it into the mixing bowl.

"You're going to be fine," I told the cat in a motherly voice. "You need a bath."

Submerged in the cold water, the leaves got wet and the tangles stayed in place. Over the course of several seconds, it occurred to me that perhaps I'd miscalculated. Lacking a brush and the necessary fortitude to work the tangles out by hand, I let the kitty go, and she scuttled off and hid. I emptied the bowl into the sink and left a small, hairy puddle on the floor. Then I set about making her an apologetic milkshake made of milk with cat food sprinkled in.

Right now, I'm thirty-seven. I have three boys and a husband. A boy dog who chews up garbage and a boy cat who pees in anything rectangular which I leave in the kitchen corner that he likes. Two male ducks, one of whom likes to bite my jeans as I turn and leave his coop. There are my egg-layers, of course—six of those; two white ducks who spend spring underneath the boys with the feathers wrenched out of their necks, and four hens, who squat obediently when I go out to pick them up. They all live outside. Inside, there are penises wall-to-wall.

Except for a few moments of wild abandon, I spent my childhood preparing to nurture things. I dressed cats in little outfits, placed them into various houses and set up a battle triage for wounded shrews. When shrews kept dying anyway—because of the activities of my cats—I set up a war memorial for them on the refrigerator door. This was a stark exposition of life lost, bearing simply a date, the cat responsible, and the posthumous name of each shrew. I wrapped them in paper towels and masking tape and deposited them in the earth, where I said a solemn prayer over their souls. And so it was that I prepared myself for motherhood.

The boys, while I was doing this, were preparing themselves for war. They were throwing down their lives for a cause greater than themselves, unnamed, and collapsing in splendid agony on the concrete to die with howling cries, only to rise again later and launch a last attack. Every day on the agenda: Kill. Die. Rise from death. Kill again. Perhaps die. Win, if possible. Then, snack.

I have given up combating this tendency in my kids.When I initially forbid cartoons and movies, Rowan pretended he was a lion and the girls at playschool were gazelles. The last thing they heard was a roar in their ear before they died. I kept on getting phone calls with requests to cut his nails even shorter than they were. If you want to comment on my parenting, don't. It's too late for me to parent him differently now. He's fifteen and, happily, he's stopped roaring in people's ears. Nobody cares anymore how he keeps his nails. At any rate, it was then that I introduced superheroes. At least they were "good." Rowan stopped being a lion and started being Spiderman. I think this may have been an improvement, ethically.

Boys on the playground, forbidden to play-fight, play-fight surreptitiously or simply get in trouble all the time. Not every boy. Lots of boys. The ones I'm talking about. What is this war they are girding themselves for? Am I missing something about adult male survival that they really need to know?

"I didn't want to play World War II games," confided Mikalh to me, "but that's what everyone was playing, so I just pretended I was an archaeologist in World War II."

"It sounds like a good compromise," I told him.

Later on, he killed his evil brother with one powerful kick to the head. I hope this training will prove useful someday.

On second thought, I fervently hope that it will not.

Night Wind

2013-02-25T05:56:00.001-07:00

The wind kept me up last night. It was groaning, barking, clamoring at the roof. It tried to get in the bedroom window, tried to freeze the hand that was holding my book. I wouldn't relent. I got a frumpy sweater and wrapped myself up—sectioned and bowed—like an old lady in her bathrobe, and I lay down again with the covers pulled up right over the tops of my ears. Only my hand and my eye were exposed. My hand, my eye and the book. Winning. That's me.

Exactly why was the heat in my room unable to combat this infernal wind? It didn't make a sound—not one that I could hear. The vents were cloistered mutes. My heating system had left me to die of exposure, there in my own bedroom, just as if I hadn't been feeding it for years—feeding it money and turning its little thermostat in expectation of hospitality returned.

Wild things tore the night into a thousand pieces while I tried to be asleep.

Cats were picked up by gales and carried away from fences, keening, to be plunked down next to the open maws of dogs. Dogs were beaten stiffly with clubs of air about their naughty heads. The songbirds were taken and fed to the north, which was sucking the whole world in. February, February. I know it's you. You want to lift the dark world up and shake it a little bit. Set it back down and pretend like nothing has happened. Hide behind a corner and make us think that it was March.

My dreams were disturbed by the ripping of the world.

This morning, though, all is silent. The house, except my bedroom, is all warm. My cat comes in, reassembled, and now begging to be fed. No new snow has fallen and of course there will be school. All it was was wind. And the world looks almost the same. But for the cracks on everything, you'd think it never happened while I slept.

Author's Note: Most of this is metaphorical, except for the terrible sound and cold. No animals were injured in the making of this blog post.

In Which My Kids Take Over My Blog

2013-02-21T06:34:00.000-07:00

The photo on the right is of his painting of Enkidu.

I am sharing some stuff with you today just because I think it's cool. This falls into the category of "what I'm up to" rather than deep thoughts.

This year, to my great delight, I've been teaching my sons history. My second-grader is currently departing Ancient China for Ancient Africa, and we've traveled a long way already—from Çatalhöyük to Egypt, from the Indus Valley to Mesopotamia. I read him a chapter in his history book while he takes notes on what I say. Then he gives me a narration (tells the story back to me) while I write down his words. We find the area on a map, mark it on a timeline and an add illustration to his own history book of the ancient world. He usually gets to do a craft, and I photograph that to put in the book as well. By the time we've finished he'll have created his own living history book of the ancient world.

My seventh-grader is in New Mexico this year. Our focus has been on slowing down the relentless slog through time he's used to and setting a while with a place and time so we can really get to know it. He is learning to see how history reaches out its skeleton hand from the grave and shapes events as they happen now. He recently did an assignment called a flash-draft. The idea comes from What a Writer Needs by Ralph Fletcher, which anyone who is either a writer or a writing teacher must go buy right now. In this assignment, the object is to create a character who will allow you to convey some expository information that you are supposed to learn. He has studied Oñate and the Massacre of Acoma, and I told him to create a character that was there. "And I want to be there. I want to be able to smell it," I told him.

I am very, very proud of what Devin did with this assignment. He asked me to post it here and I am more than happy to share it with you. He worked hard on it, and maybe it will interest you to see how my kid writes. (His older brother once got this privilege, too.) You get a prize if you can tell me where Devin borrowed the first line from.

Battle on the Butte by Devin Cantua

Background

In 1595 the Conquistador Don Juan de Oñate was granted permission by King Phillip II of Spain to colonize Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico, the present day New Mexico. The Acomas and Spaniards had been peaceful with each other for decades, since they first met in 1540. In 1598, the Acoma leader, Zutacapan, learned that the Spanish intended to conquer them. They planned to defend themselves when the Spaniards came.

Don Oñate sent his nephew, Captain Juan de Zaldivar, to the pueblo to consult with Zutacapan. When Zaldivar arrived on December 4, 1598, one of the first things he did was take sixteen of his men up the mesa, on which the pueblo was located, to demand food from the natives. After being denied the Spanish attacked some of the Acoma women. A fight raged, leaving Zaldivar and eleven other men dead. When Oñate learned of the incident, he ordered Juan de Zaldivar’s brother, Vincente de Zaldivar, to go punish the Acoma. Taking about 70 men, he left for the pueblo…This is what happened next.

*

Nervous! Very, very dreadfully nervous! What will the Acomas have planned for us when we attack? Whatever they might have, I’m ready! I have to be ready, or I won’t survive.

“Ok men, let’s start making our way towards the base of the butte. Once we get there I will give you further instructions!” said Oñate.

“Yes sir!” we all screamed.

Only few of the men got to be on horses—the higher ranked men, of course. I myself was only one of the lowest ranked men there. I had to keep pace with the horses. I don’t think that I am one of the better soldiers, but Oñate only picked the men he thought were sufficient. So why—

“Ok men, I will take half of you guys up the path where the Acomas will see us and we will distract them with friendly talk. We will do this while the other half of you will climb up the back of the butte and set up the cannons and rifles. Then when I give the thumbs up symbol you guys will fire, Capiche?”

“Yes sir!”

Some more men and I sneaked around the back of the butte and started climbing to the top. I was surrounded by the musky scent of man and awfully disturbing noises. This was hell for me. Just imagine being in a bone dry desert, climbing up the side of a cliff, surrounded by the smell of a month old road kill. Sweaty men who haven’t bathed in weeks smell awful. Plus it was about -12⁰ Celsius with no snow, with the sun shining brightly in the sky. I’m not used to this weather yet.

Once we got to the top we started setting up the cannons and rifles. There were only two cannons, but it was tough. I glanced across the top of the butte and saw the Acomas captivated in Oñate’s “friendly” talk. This was going to work out.

After all that climbing and sweating and building of cannons, my hands smelled like dirt covered in brass with a touch of gunpowder all mixed together. We were all ready; we were in our positions and ready to ambush. My friend Manuel lined up next to me and asked, “You ready mate?”

“After all that training how can I not be ready?”

We both chuckled, focused our attention to Oñate, then waited. We’ve been on the same path since we were little boys in Spain. We both wanted to move to Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico with the governor and help colonize the new world. And here we are today on the top of a mesa just outside of Santa Fe about to attack the Acomas with the governor—just like we wanted.

A little later he made the thumbs up symbol. We fired a cannonball and charged in with screams and yells to surprise the Acomas, the attack finally began!

The historic battle raged for three days, but by the end, hundreds of Indians lay dead. The ones who survived were enslaved, and the young men each had a right foot amputated. Just seeing the men crawl away in a pile of blood with a stub on the end of the leg… it left a mark in my head for ever. Turning around and seeing the pile of amputated feet on the ground made me feel nauseated for a while after.

I myself managed to escape with only minor wounds, a fractured wrist and a concussion, but my friend Manuel—he didn’t make it through the rough battle. My stomach tensed up like I was about to vomit. I felt that my stomach would burst and I would fall to my knees in tears, but I had to get over it and move on back to Santa Fe. If one of the generals, or Oñate, saw me tearing up they would think of me as a weak warrior; I had to keep cool.

Was what we did the right thing to do? After all these years are the Acoma people still mad at the Spaniards? I don’t know, but what I do know is that I followed my dream and that is most important to me.

“Wow!” the kids said in amazement.

“Will you tell us another one? Please Grandpa, please?”

“Sorry kids but I think we’re done for today.”

I sat in my chair as I heard the kids walking away saying, “When I’m an adult I’m gonna to follow my dream like grandpa, and I’m going to colonize the new world, too!”

“Well I’m gonna be the governor in the new world, when I’m older!” said Diego.

I just chuckled to myself and puffed on my pipe. I guess they’ll find out what it’s like when they get there.

The Art of Making Things Beautiful

2013-02-19T06:38:00.001-07:00

The new shelf

I'm late. I needed to start my seeds—a few weeks ago, most likely. Is it already gardening time again? The weather here feels like spring. It's practically balmy. 44 degrees yesterday, sunny. I had on a light jacket as I moved about my chicken yard, dropping handfuls of compost for excited birds, who pounced on apple cores and soft tomatoes like they were plum puddings, kicking them around the yard. I have moved my little hen in with the other hens, leaving behind a chicken yard that will become a new garden bed this spring; its soil scratched up and fertilized, all the bugs picked out. I have empty palettes, and it's time to imagine what will fill them in.

Our wee little kitchen. Imagine it without the shelf.

That task is easy enough. I've been looking at heirloom seed catalogs again—glossy centerfolds full of exotic vegetables making gorgeous love to the camera lens. Tomatoes—white, green, deep burgundy, red. Purple tomatillo. Yellow, purple, and red carrots. Names like dragon, atomic, amarillo, scarlet Nantes. There are lettuces, crisp and soft and streaked with red, veined with purple; bitter, mild and sweet. Yes, I swooned, I am ready. I am ready to try again. Last year, my seeds suffered in a makeshift greenhouse adjacent to the front wall of my house. I couldn't keep them wet enough or warm enough. They cooked by day and froze by night. Once full of possibility, they ended their lives as dried-up stalks up death in my compost pile. Then I had to shell out for starts.This year, I'm learning. I'm moving those suckers inside. Where, though, in my tiny kitchen, might they go?

A shelf! Suspended above the chest freezer, in my window. Yes, yes, right where I spend half my life. There I could have seed trays and nurse them with the tender care usually reserved for heart patients on a ward. I need space, I boomed. I walked around muttering. Space! And now.

In an effort to make his wife happy, or perhaps to silence her, my husband then began work on a seed-starting contraption: he bought lumber, sawed boards, and hauled it all in to assemble in its place, all with the enthusiasm of a pall-bearer crushed under the corner of a coffin as he marched. Perhaps there should be a support group for the partners of gardeners: a place where they can talk about the paces we put them through. Oh, hon, I just need you to make some row covers. Can you fix the watering system? I need you to build a box without stepping on my seedlings while you do.

At some point, though, as he was doing all this pacifying shelf-building, he looked over and saw his wife grimacing at him.

"What?" he demanded.

"It's just—really ugly..." I muttered.

Ugly, of course, is the last thing that matters to these men with nails and saws. What? It's going to hold seeds, right? You want it should like a Mona Lisa while it does?

"It doesn't go with with the kitchen," my mother explained. All this was lost in translation.

She was right. It looked like a big, stupid scaffolding hung from my ceiling. I like my kitchen. It's the least awful room in my house. My living room floor is unfinished, with vinyl still attached to the places where we pulled off linoleum. The front door jamb is unpainted. The back door is part duct tape and part glass. I like my kitchen. In my kitchen, I can imagine that I live in a nice house. If I just stayed there, I could almost feel something like pride. I need the seed shelf, though. Where else will I start tomatoes all the colors of balloons?

"I could paint it," I proposed.

A long conversation ensued about paint. White or green? Could I match the green of my counter tops? Did I need to sand? OK, I can paint it. It will be OK. I could have my seeds and my sense of pride as well. I couldn't help but feel I might be missing something, though.

I've lately been reading blogs about decorating with junk. It occurred to me rather suddenly to embrace the crate-like quality of the shelf. Was there a way to have it look intentionally trashy rather than accidentally so?

Stencils! I thought. I'll just make it look like that was the look I wanted all the time. I bought stencils.

"I want to hang herbs from the bottom to dry," I told my husband.

"You'd have to hang them from the side," he said. Of course I would.

Eureka! I purchased three antiqued brass rings for herb hanging attached to the side of the crate-shelf-blight.

All this done, maybe I've just inhaled something, but I actually like this shelf. It looks—chosen. And there's something to this choosing of things that end up hanging around bugging us, things we would rather do without.

Some people start with an empty house and imagine what they want. Then, they fill it in, piece by piece, building toward the effect that they hold perfectly in their mind. They can see it before they see it. They know where to put each piece. They know what to get. Some people start planning in high school. What do I want to be when I grow up? They take classes. They choose a college. They choose a career. Later, they marry and, much later, they have kids. They put each piece in place carefully. They build a real life from what they conceived of and planned for assiduously.

Myself, I start with a bunch of random objects. A couch someone gave us when they upgraded to a better one. Figurines that were presents to me over the years. Children's art—the kind of which the child is especially proud. Kachina dolls my husband had an idea he would sell and make some cash. I started with love and impulse and worked backwards to make all the pieces fit. Kids first, then marriage, and career not at all. This is my life. The life I love. Things happen and I work them in.

Things—and lives—are beautiful, I think, because we want them. When they're dusted and painted, when they're cared for, they belong. We find things to compliment them. We find ways to make them shine. We see them as belonging where they are.

Things out of place, by contrast, are things unchosen. Realities we'd rather not love because, in hating them, we hope that they will somehow disappear.

This making things beautiful is the art of taking what we're given, choosing it, and marking its beauty with the tender hands of love. It's easy once you see it, once the flaw becomes a strength, once you stop wishing for what you do not have.

A shelf, I think, is a really good place to start.

It's Awards Season Again

2013-02-14T05:55:00.000-07:00

This is embarrassing.

Way back on December 6th, I was nominated for the Liebster Award by the perfectly lovely Alicia of Forever Changed, who is so honest and intimate with her blogging audience about the journey of her widowhood. Thanks, Alicia! I really do appreciate it. I gather from her last post that she may have stopped blogging and perhaps this saves me some embarrassment. You see, I thanked her (late) and then I never accepted the award. December was, for lots of reasons, a hard month for me. Things were happening that were ultimately good but felt a lot like persistent nausea at the time. Then Christmas started to come. I had everything I could handle just making ready to receive it. So, I did nothing. I had writer's block and I didn't feel like I deserved a blogging award or wanted to answer eleven questions about myself. I didn't feel clever or funny or grateful or sweet. I'm feeling much better now, but I let the award go. The time, it seemed, had passed.

Then—just this Tuesday—Lorinda J. Taylor, the talented science fiction author blogging at Ruminations of a Remambrancer nominated me for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award. I will thank Lorinda both for nominating me and for being a consistently interesting presence on my blog. I always look forward to a comment from her, knowing it will be well-thought out and anything but trite. She nominated me, and here I still had half of this post sitting in my drafts, taunting me that I really, really didn't deserve another one. This time, I decided not to listen. I don't want to let another opportunity to express gratitude pass me by, so I am going to play this time—but I warn you, I tend to break the rules. I am going to accept both awards at once (which takes a bit of audacity) and change it up a bit. These are the rules for Liebster:

How It Works-Liebster: 1. Add the award icon to your blog!
2. Link to your nominator to say thank you.
3. Post 11 facts about yourself.
4. Answer the questions the tagger has set for you.
5. Create 11 questions for your nominees to answer.
6. Choose 11 up-and-coming bloggers with fewer than 200 followers, go to their blog, and tell them about the award.

How It Works-Very Inspiring Blogger:
1. Display the award logo on your blog.
2. Link back to the person who nominated you.
3. State seven things about yourself.
4. Nominate 15 bloggers for this award and link to them.
5. Notify those bloggers of the nomination and the award's requirements.

I have a hard time with this gifting of awards. Many awards go around and I have sometimes made an effort to give them to people who haven't had them in the past, by searching their entire sites. I would like to avoid giving them to all my blogging besties over and over again. I don't know how many followers everyone has. So, here, instead, as a public service, I am just going to go ahead and name some of the bloggers whom I particularly enjoy reading, whether they meet the criteria or not. And I'm picking five so I have time to tell you about them. Here's what's in my Google Reader:

Laura Mullane of Swimming for Shore. She will probably never know I nominated her because she seems to have turned her comments off, but Laura Mullane is a fabulous writer. Her blog chronicles her journey as a mother, full of the uncertainty that she was ever supposed to mother at all. Her writing is striking both for honesty and for its skill. Twice now the death of her animals have left me sobbing by my PC, unable to go on.
Jane of Jane in her Infinite Wisdom. I believe I've nominated her before. If so, I don't care. Jane deals the straight dope. Her heart is pure and her mind is both complex and aimed at truth. Her title may be in jest, but it is not so to me.
Nicole Amsler of her blog by the same name. Nicole just writes really, really well—vividly, luxuriously. And she writes a lot about food, none of which I can eat. So reading her blog, for me, is like watching soft core porn with Boston cream pies in it. Except much more tasteful. Lately, she has set herself up as a book club host on the web, where I virtually read along with her and virtually eat her delicious gluten and dairy-laden virtual snacks.
Katy Anders of Lesbians in My Soup. I read all of Katy's posts. They are clever, bizarre, and magical—perfect and utterly unbelievable, like Cirque du Soleil in words. I never comment because even the comment threads on her blog are too clever and perfect for me. But I read and I admire. Oh yes, I do.
Jennifer Neil of Diary of an Even Fatter Girl. This blog is not about weight loss. It's about being human. And Jenn is willing to be honest in a way that people rarely are. She's funny and she's likable. She's also my good friend. Go read her. She will make you laugh and see part of yourself that makes you squirm. Then laugh again.

I fully appreciate that lots of high-quality bloggers do not wish to play virtual chain mail games with me, and I fervently hope that they will consider these two awards a compliment bestowed upon them. Flick away the niggling requirements, like a booger from the tip of your fingernails. It will not wound me one bit.

Now for the silliness...Music please!

Eleven Facts About Me (should more than cover both, wouldn't you say?):1. I have double-jointed thumbs.

2. I can't cartwheel. I won't do it even if you ask nicely.

3. I sometimes listen to Eminem with my fifteen year-old son on his iPad. I pretend these are teachable moments.

4. I have not read one single word of David Foster Wallace's. Ever. I think this makes me rather a dangerous person, don't you?

5. I have had pet rats, pet mice, pet guinea pigs, and pet hamsters. Of these, I strongly recommend rats. People grimace when I say this, but rats are intelligent and friendly. Mice stink, guinea pigs pee constantly, and hamsters are vicious jerks. Get a rat, or better yet, a chicken.

6. Two of my favorite words are "gnocchi" and "recidivism."

7. When people talk about grammar, I rarely know what the Hell they mean, particularly once they start parsing verbals. And yet I am a literacy tutor. Thank God for Google and Strunk & White. What's worse: I'm a damn good literacy tutor.

8. I have a tendency to argue with people on Facebook, especially about politics. This irritates me about myself and yet I do it anyway. Because they're wrong.

9. All my life I've had cats and all of these cats have been mentally ill. The one I have now only recently pissed on my son's bed and then left two turds neatly inside a wicker basket I have placed in my hall for the purpose of decoration. Later, my son placed this basket, with accompanying turds, on my front step, where it still sat when his friend's mother arrived to pick him up for soccer. "Welcome to my lovely home," I said.

10. I once had a job knocking on your door to ask you to join the Sierra Club. You were very rude to me and I quit at the end of a week. You're sorry now that we've cooked the planet, aren't you?

11. I love to cook, and I am really excited about the chemistry of cooking, but I don't actually understand chemistry."This works," I say enthusiastically of my recipes, "due to molecules."

Eleven Questions I Have to Answer (from Alicia):
1. What was your favorite book as a child/teenager?

This, of course, depends entirely on what age I was when you might have asked me. I will go with junior year of high school and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald because it contains these words:

"This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. "

Fitzgerald made the English language his bitch. I still idolize him.

2. Aside from your parents/grandparents/etc, what adult influenced your life when you were a teenager?

I went to an alternative high school where we had wonderful teachers there who treated us like real humans even though most of us were stoned. One of these was a history teacher who smoked in class and looked like a large toad. He asked in class one day, "How many of you believe that you are ugly?" I raised my hand. He then took a long drag and, after exhaling, said, "I believe I am the most handsome man in the world, and if I can believe that then, sweetheart, so can you."

3. When you were in high school, what did you want to do/be when you grew up?

A psychologist. I had some theory about treating addiction through the use of collage images based on Jung's archetypes. I made a tarot deck for this purpose. It certainly didn't work on me.

4. Of all the "roads not taken" in your life, which one would you like to peek down, just to see what would have happened?

If I had gotten my college degree, I often think, I would be rich and famous now. I would like to peek down there and check so I could see that I'd still be in my kitchen making pot roast and teaching grammar to my kids, but I could pretend to be overqualified. My sense of inferiority, as evidenced by my lack of a diploma, is so integral to my identity, I'm curious to see what I would be like without it.

5. If you went to college, what was your major? Would you choose the same field if you went back today?

I majored (undeclared except in my own mind) in art, psych, sociology, English and humanities while I was attending junior college. If I went back today, I would pursue a degree in English and professional writing or creative writing so that I could be a writer and mother—just like I am now.

6. Do you have any siblings?

I plead the fifth on this.

7. What's the most beautiful place you've ever been to?

Narnia. Loth Lorien. Elysium. Or maybe Ocean Point, Maine.

8. How do you indulge yourself when you need a pick-me-up?

I put orange peels and a cinnamon stick on the stove and cover them with water, boil and then simmer them until I feel cheered up. The house smells like optimism.

9. When was the last time someone else cooked a meal for you?

I think it was my mom, back in August, when my wisdom teeth were all pulled out. I couldn't eat it until weeks later, but it was excellent. Kitchere.

10. What do you wish more people knew about you?

I wish more people knew that my name is pronounced with an r-controlled a, not a long a.

11. Why did you start blogging (which may not be why you blog today)?

I simply wanted a forum for my writing. I figured my parents and my husband might read it—maybe a few friends. Now I blog for the same reasons Catholics go to mass. And to refine my practice of ambiguity.

12. What movie do you always have to watch when it's on television?

This is a trick question because I don't have cable TV. If I did, I might hazard that I'd want to watch The Princess Bride if it came on. All the other movies I like would be bleeped beyond recognition.

"You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."

Eleven Questions I Am Asking:

1. Would you ever dissect a cat—if no one was using it and it was already dead? If so, why?
2. Are you a writer or a blogger? Does your answer affect what you do?
3. Sushi—yes or no?
4. What sorts of things really offend you, not just on an abstract level, but in day-to-day life?
5. What's the one secret ingredient that brings life to your cooking (or, you know, your re-heated Lean Cuisines)?
6. Santa Claus: magical childhood delight or insult to children everywhere?
7. Name the best piece of short fiction you've ever read.
8. Name a novel that changed your life.
9. What is the thing that everyone likes but you, and even so, you know you're right?
10. If you're on the right path, will you be happy? Or are some people called to walk a harder path?
11. Name a really good soup that can be bought in a can.

You did it! You should get an award just for reading. And, in fact, if you—loyal reader—want one, simply follow the requirements and go for it. You bloggers know who you are. My non-blogging readers, uh....I owe you a fruitcake, OK?

The Only Self I Have

2013-02-06T06:35:00.000-07:00

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Flutterby

Some days, when you are a parent, just suck.

Yesterday was one of those. It was not without its pleasant moments. A flash of brilliance in my older son's writing and a smile exchanged afterward. A hug from my littlest. A moment cuddling the chicken, whose feathers are now growing back.* Most of it, though, felt like slowly being bludgeoned with the hard surface of a pair of fuzzy dice.** I couldn't teach anything. We were learning a new step in adding: two digits each addend with neither a multiple of ten. Carrying. All mental. No quick-pencil algorithm in this math. Numbers lay in disorder on the floor—their teeth bloody and broken; they refused to stay in columns, refused to join one another into sums. Nothing I did would work. It was the second day with the same small problem set. My anxiety was starting to rise. My child was stubborn, belligerent, spacey, despondent and disinterested by turns.

This is where my large decisions come back to bite me in the ass. Last year, at public school, he refused to work in his first grade class. He dawdled, dropped pencils and languished in his chair. At the end of the year, he knew less math than he'd come in knowing at the start. We kept waiting, waiting—and his teacher kept waiting, too. We waited for him to decide to try. We encouraged, gave consequences, gave love, sent him to therapy. We didn't know what to do. None of us.

"What can he do in Math?" I asked his teacher. "What does he know?"

"I don't really know," she told me. "He won't do anything."

And so went the entire year.

When I decided to home school my son, I did it knowing that, when he doesn't know how to do a task, he will go to war with anyone, rather than having to try and fail. He will show you he is choosing not to learn, so that you can't see he has no choice. It's the strategy of a learning disabled child. I felt that my job would be to love him, to show him that it was always OK to try and fail. And to never let him win by refusing to do his work.

Yesterday, my patience went bankrupt. It wasn't OK for him to fail. He needed to do it right. I needed him not to struggle to add together eight and two. And I was stuck with myself. There was no one else to do the job.

"I would just give up for the day," said my husband, reasonably.

It sounded so right, so obviously the perfect thing to do. And maybe it was. But I couldn't do it. Tomorrow was coming after me, already the same way as this day and the one before. I can't get away from my learning disabled child. He is brilliant and confounded, all in the same breath. He is epic in his thinking; he is stuck on basics; he is mine. He is mine. And I am his.

This is the only self I have. This self I have is the sort that will become impatient when it takes ninety seconds for a child to recall a math fact that we both have filed as "known." I will try to conceal it. I will stifle my sigh. I will scrunch up the frustration on my face. But I will be frustrated. I will be that way today and tomorrow and Friday and next week and next month and forever. My son will notice. He's sensitive. And he will always be the sort of person who answers slowly, who doesn't hear what I said, who has the slipcover over his ears and is refusing to do his work. He will be that way today and tomorrow and Friday and next week and next month and forever, too. His is the only self he has.

I can give this unpaid teaching gig to someone else. I really can. It's a valid thing to do. That's why we have public schools with fine teachers and administrators and speech language pathologists to help him. It makes all the sense in the world, especially on days like this. But...he has gone there and...I have worked there. And so I know that they are just trying their best with all their knowledge and commitment to teach the children, same as me. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail.

In the end, no one is more committed to this one child than I am.

My art as his mother and teacher, then, becomes one of avoiding false choices, getting past do it or leave it alone. I have to know that there is always another option, always another way. He can learn and I can teach. The problem is with neither of us. It is the method that is wrong. And then, back to the drawing board, over and over—how will we learn this thing? The art I speak of is of never giving up.

The child in psychic pain rushes at me like an angry bull, teased by crowds, poked and prodded, bullied into a fight. You're telling me I have to learn this, woman? OK, the fight is on! The child has no choice but to fight me or must give up being a bull. To sit there, passive, when provoked with education beyond him, is too much. He's heated, angry, petulant. He's coming after me. When I'm tired, when I'm foolish, I will stand there. I will argue with the bull. Holding back its horns until my arms are aching, wrestling with its nature, yelling curses about crazy cows, I'll drain myself of everything I need to win the fight. Some days are like that. Other times, I remember what to do.

The bull charges, tears toward me, ripping up the earth. I stand still; my heart is pounding. Still, I remain there; I can feel its musky breath fill the air just near my face. And then, as the horns lower to gore me, seconds from my end, I make one movement: I slowly step aside. The bull expends his energy in the run. My own is preserved to face him another time.

So it is with children. My job is to be that matador—to let them have the power and anger of their run and to keep from getting impaled on the process of their growing up.

1 PM.

"You did it!" I tell him. "You really did it. You finished that whole sheet. You got all of it correct. I am so proud of your hard work."

He beams.

"I learned it."

"Yes," I tell him. "Yes, you did."

*Yes, I got her a diaper. She has only worn it once since it came two days ago. Her feathers are regrowing on their own. We are all very happy she is doing so much better now.

** This is what I say it feels like being worn down by adorable little people—kind of like being tied up by Ewoks.