Long Journey, Short Time

Photo by Antonio Silva

Last night we had a family birthday party for my seventeen year old. As the inevitable birthing story was somehow, again, recounted and he cringed over the details, I caught my breath. While it has been every bit a seventeen year journey, the time is suddenly so short. How did I give birth to this man? Trite because it is true, it doesn't seem possible that this whole human was once the tiny little wrinkled monkey-bird I first laid eyes on.

For a second I wanted to, consequences be damned, gather him back into my arms like when he used to let me. I failed to reach out and grab my erstwhile baby because my heart wouldn't have been able to withstand his recoil. Lucky me, my chance came at present time when the birthday boy gave me a generous XBOX 360 hug of gratitude. I clung on for an extra millisecond. Call me a mercenary opportunist but my time is running out and I'll takes what I can get. Before I know it, he will be gone.

Happy Birthday Miguel, I love you, I hug you, I gather you into my arms and keep you in my heart. Forever.

Out on a limb

I've decided to start sharing my book in installments. This will help me with re-editing and ultimately allow me to rip this bandaid off with a flourish. I was hoping that some publisher or agent would pick up the book, thus validating me and it, signifying that my work is good enough to share. This did not happen. So, safe or not, I'm sharing anyway!

This picture of a moth (butterfly?) perfectly encapsulates how I feel about putting myself "out there": hideously exposed, perched on nothing but the ephemera of hibiscus petals. At the same time, I am encouraged by the photograph itself. Taken by my friend Maria Banghart, with her son's cheap-o camera at a theme park, I know there is beauty to be found at every turn and real art to be made by everyday people. So, as my Nanny would say: Schlingitiva and Castitute! ( no idea what the spelling should be as I'm not even sure what it means) It sounds bracing and defiant, so I shall shout it as I throw all my pride and caution to the wind and give this thing a try.

photo by Maria Banghart

A Pleasant Surprise

Photo by Maria Banghart

Due to lack of participation, I was on the verge of stopping this blog from making the spurious claim of being a Salon des Arts when I received, for no particular reason, an email that contained some beautiful photographs taken by a friend of mine. Windfall. It got me to thinking about the people that pop unexpectedly into our lives, like a pleasant surprise. My friend, the aforementioned photographer and artiste, Maria Banghart, is one of those pleasant surprises.

I am not a person who actively seeks friendships. Perhaps that is what makes me so appreciative of those I find along the way. I met Maria seven years ago when my youngest daughter and her son entered kindergarten together. Both moms tacitly concerned over the experience level of a first year teacher, we hovered in the background of the classroom on the pretext of volunteering. Since then, we have shared countless volunteering opportunities from Chinese New Year Parades to teaching Art Appreciation classes to fourth graders together. (And when I say “teaching together” I mean: Maria did all the prep work and teaching and I provided crowd control)

During innumerable events and in the spaces in between, Maria has been a faithful chronicler of our children’s lives. I never really had to worry about bringing a camera because I knew Maria would not only have a camera but she would take the most beautifully composed pictures that would inevitably capture the essence of the moment. And the cherry on that little sundae was that she would email copies of these photos to me, completely unsolicited. What a gift.

Our children have parted ways to different schools so we get to see each other less and less despite our being neighbors of less than a quarter mile’s distance. Our lives are indeed driven by our children’s activities so, except for an occasional walk in the morning, I rarely see Maria. And still, like her pictures that show up unannounced in my inbox, she has been and remains, a pleasant surprise.

"Kay, This One's For Gabby

I gleaned the title of today's blog from the introduction to Israel Kamakawiwo'ole’s haunting rendition of Over the Rainbow from his album Facing Future. If you are the last person left on this earth who doesn’t own a recording of this song, I suggest you get it, now. You’ll thank me. Anyhoo, today is my daughter Gabby’s birthday (coincidentally it is also Israel’s) and so, “This one’s for Gabby”.

As the title and first paragraph and almost all of my blogs would indicate, I am profoundly moved by music. In fact, and I think I have mentioned this before, I would like my life to be a musical. This week, in the days leading up to my daughter’s fourteenth birthday, that musical would be Mama Mia and the song "Slipping Through My Fingers". Cut to scene of mother singing plaintively,

Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning

Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile

I watch her go with a surge of that well-known sadness

And I have to sit down for a while

The feeling that I'm losing her forever

And without really entering her world

I'm glad whenever I can share her laughter

That funny little girl

I might continue copying these lyrics if it wasn’t so difficult to type through the tears. And I think you get the idea. I first fell in love with this song when I went to see the play Mama Mia in 2000. My girls were only four and two years old at the time but I immediately latched on, with a sort of maniacal sentimentality, to the feeling of desperate longing of the mother who had watched her daughter grow away. I told my sister, who was kindly babysitting my daughters (one of whom had a nasty fever that night) about the song when I got home from the play. I had gotten a cd and played it for her and cried. Over the years it has become a running joke, a sort of code word to halt a slide into obsessing over the passage of time. She’ll belt out “Slipping through my fingaaaaaas.” in a vaudevillian mockery of my maudlin hysteria and somehow that helps bring me back from the brink of said hysteria.

Fast forward ten years and my four year old is, indeed, slipping through my fingers. I remember being fourteen. I’m not ready for her to negotiate her first kiss via Truth or Dare on the back of a bus to Great Adventure. I’m not ready for her to go to high school. I’m not ready for her start disdaining me and hate the way my breath smells. I’m not ready for her to stop constantly trying to hold hands with me with her sweaty meat paws. I’m not ready.

Slipping through my fingers all the time

I try to capture every minute

The feeling in it

Slipping through my fingers all the time

Do I really see what's in her mind

Each time I think I'm close to knowing

She keeps on growing

Slipping through my fingers all the time

She’s been sick for a week and while it was terrible to worry over each successive day of over 102 fever, there was something horribly comforting about having her with me on the couch for an entire week. The week before, her sister was home with a similar virus and I greedily devoured that time as well. For two weeks, I got to hold back the advancing tide of time and separation with each of my girls. Perhaps writing it out loud sounds weird. It is a weird paradox. So weird that when I was watching the Sixth Sense with my kids the other day and we got to the part with the whack-o murdering Munchausen-by-proxy mom, I thought, “maybe that loon started out just wanting to halt time.”

Sleep in our eyes, her and me at the breakfast table

Barely awake, I let precious time go by

Then when she's gone there's that odd melancholy feeling

And a sense of guilt I can't deny

What happened to the wonderful adventures

The places I had planned for us to go

(Slipping through my fingers all the time)

Well, some of that we did but most we didn't

And why I just don't know

I almost deleted that last bit about the Munchausen lady because nobody wants to be even remotely associated with a lunatic. But I believe the fleeting seed of a thought conveys the struggle between wanting to hold on to your kids forever and rejoicing in watching them blossom into incredible, strong, talented, beautiful adults. While my most selfish nature might want to keep Gabriella to myself, the part of me that loves her most can’t wait to see the places she’ll go, the people she’ll meet, the wonders she’ll do.

So, happy Birthday my love, enjoy being fourteen and this one’s for you Gabby:

Haints and Faeries

The God I know is desperate to be in a relationship with His children. When we aren’t in a relationship, He will go to any lengths to build a bridge across the chasm that separates us. On a grand scale, the whole story of Jesus, the Son of God, also God, lowering Himself to be the helpless human baby of a poor woman who undoubtedly had a bad reputation for her “virgin birth”, a lowly carpenter, a prophet of sometimes ill-repute: all just to eventually face humiliation and death so that He might paradoxically become the escape from sin and death for those who choose Him, is an unfathomable demonstration of that desire for relationship. On a smaller scale, the God I know makes an effort to cross the chasm on a minute by minute basis. He calls out to His children on just the level that we can understand. If people would just open their ears, they would hear the whispers or shouts from the God they thought long dead.

In my case, God often catches me in the garden. There, He has taught me as many lessons as are species of plants in my humble patch of land. Why does God meet me in the garden? Because I am an excellent gardener? On the contrary, I am a shamefully poor gardener. I have no innate gift for gardening. My garden is overrun with gophers, deer, a multitude of blights, nutrient poor, hard, constricting, clay soil and an incomplete and faulty watering system. The problems I have listed are just the highlights in a never ending litany of flaws that plague me in the garden. Basically, my garden is a undeniable metaphor for my base nature. I am overrun with blights I wish I could conquer: anger, pride, laziness, lack of perseverance. The soil of my heart is naturally claylike, desiring to squeeze out the root of human relationship in almost all its forms. My poor watering system is probably a good representation of my inconsistency in maintaining discipline in my own life. And so the garden is where I learn about me.

I quite enjoyed the book,The Shack. Thanks to CS Lewis, I am a lifelong fan of the magical, supernatural journey. On the journey through The Shack, the part that I liked the most was the representation of the Holy Spirit as a delicate asian woman who worked the garden with expert care. I found the use of a big black woman as the God figure a little hackneyed but the Madame Butterfly of the Holy Spirit was a wonderful visual tool for me, given the myriad lessons I have learned in the garden of my heart and my own back yard in tandem parallel.

As I read back, this might seem like theological mumbo jumbo, what John Steinbeck described in East of Eden as a mixture of “haints and faeries and Old Testament Jehovah” (my editrice Jessica helped me remember this quote better), so let me give a concrete example of how God has spoken to me recently in my garden. In 1997, when my husband and I first started renting the home that we would eventually buy, there were three well-established wisteria plants at the corners of the front facade of our home. The owner before us was a botanist who had planted and trained the vine around the eaves of our house. Every year, around Easter, the wisteria bloom in a one-time pale lilac riot of hanging bunches. As I walk out my front door, the scent is, literally, heavenly. Each year, this miracle of rebirth reminds me of grace. For me, the definition of grace is undeserved favor and the wisteria are the physical manifestation of this grace. I didn’t plant those plants, I didn’t train them, I don’t even actively have to water them because they are fully established. I have never fed these plants, not once. The only thing I have ever contributed to the existence of this gracious bounty is some severe pruning three or four times a year. Every year, the blooms say from God, “Meghan, look at what you’ve been given; not because you’ve worked hard for it, not because you earned it. Not through anything you’ve ever done do these blossoms bloom and yet here they are.” Grace, hanging from the doorway of my home.

This year has brought some different weather patterns to the bay area. It was unseasonably warm around February which provoked my wisteria to poke her delicate blooms out in an untimely dare. Just as the tender petals began to hope against hope, a violent wind storm came and stripped the vines bare. I walked out one morning to the broken remnants of flower buds all over my driveway and deck, fragile purple grey corpses everywhere. This might sound dramatic to the reader, but, as I said, the wisteria have come to signify a dialogue of grace between God and me. What could this loss signify? As I mentioned, the wisteria only has one full, lush bloom every year. There are some stragglers that mix in with the foliage over the rest of the season, but the riot of grace only comes once.

I was sad but figured that God had a different way He wanted to speak to me this year. After all, He doesn’t stand on ceremony and tradition and sometimes He comes at me in a totally different way so that I can hear Him new and fresh. Then one day, right before Easter, I saw new buds peeking out. I was going to blog about my “Easter Wisteria Miracle” because I was so excited about this “second chance” that the vines had received, so reminiscent of the million second chances I receive when my tentative signs of growth have been stripped away by the violent windstorm of my own creation. After a few days, though, I realized that the new buds were not flower buds but leaf buds, the tender reddish purple of the new leaves tricking me into anticipating flowers. I thought, “I’m glad I didn’t embarrass myself by claiming this Easter Miracle in writing, talk about your haints and faeries.”

So I moved on. Grow up Meghan. The greenery of the wisteria is a lovely addition to the eaves of my home, so why complain? Maybe I’m supposed to learn about maturity and something about unmet expectations, right?

Then, it happened: without notice, amidst the new green leaves, in an unprecedented simultaneous display of flowers and foliage, the inverted pyramids of purple appeared everywhere. Though I had lost faith in the miracle of second chances, I was wrong. Though I had been ashamed of my childish hopes, I was wrong. Though I doubted God, I was wrong. This lavish and new display spoke to me in a new language: it spoke of God’s creativity, His ability to overcome all obstacles, His faithfulness despite my faithlessness, His desire to show me something new.

I do realize that this might still sound like haints and faeries to some. That’s okay because I know what I’ve heard. I would encourage those of you who are so inclined to open your ears, open your hearts and listen for what God has to say to you. He is waiting in just the place where you can understand Him and has a secret that He wishes to whisper that’s just for you.

Post Mother's Day Blues

I would like to put a word into the management that the Monday after Mother's Day should never be gloomy. Already feeling a little...what's the word?...ooglety about the whole "my mother is dead and my children are ingrates and though my husband is exceedingly generous with flowers and dinner at fab restaurants, that's not really a reflection on me as a mother", I could have used a bright sunshiny day to coax me out of doors to do some gardening, exercise and put the whole fabrication of Mother's Day behind me.

Here's the thing about Mother's Day, it is just an opportunity to be disheartened over your children's general lack of enthusiasm over you as a mother. At least when they were littler, they would bring home some sweet confection of handmade love. In fact, Mother's Day comes just before or after "Teacher Appreciation Week", so in a reciprocal agreement of mutual understanding, Moms and Teachers ensure that elementary school age children never fail to send strong signals of enthusiastic gratitude to each side of this partnership.

Somewhere around Middle School, the blush starts to fade off the rose. I have a child in sixth grade and she symbolizes for me that last tenuous strand of Mother's Day enthusiasm. On Friday, I walked by the computer and she quickly shut the window of a young child and mother in silhouette and put a hand over the paper she was drawing on. I pretended that I was upset with her for hiding what she was doing on the computer, telling her "That will not fly in my home. If you're ashamed of what you're doing on the computer, you shouldn't be doing it." She seemed to want to keep her card-making a secret so I thought I would play along....after all, this might be the last time we get to play this little game. On Saturday, knowing she would be playing an early morning soccer game on Sunday, (btw who made that schedule?) she tried to make me a Mother's Day Breakfast. Although I wasn't hungry, she made me a lovely fruit salad, desperate to find some way to express her love in some material way.

I'd better enjoy it while I can because just two short years later, my eighth grader is completely disinterested in the overt displays of "I Love My Mommy" expressed in construction paper and glitter. I have it on good authority that she and I are grand friends and yet I could tell by the block lettering on the stark white sheet of the card she made me that Mother's Day is no longer a priority. Seriously, I have seen her put more creative effort into a note she passed in science class. Where are the coupon books filled with unredeemable promises? Where is the flower yanked carelessly from the garden outside? Where is the hand-painted yardstick that can never measure our love for each other? In her defense, she did give me a rock. "Ooh a ring?" you say? No, a ROCK. A Mexican River Rock that she took from her sister. Why a rock? Does it have special significance? You are my rock, Mamá? Not so. The rock was chosen because it was within arm's reach when she was quickly searching for something to hand me on Mother's Day.

And it just gets worse. My boys didn't even say Happy Mother's Day to me on Sunday morning as they were preparing to go to church. I know they thought the fabulous dinner that their father had taken us to the night before was sufficient HMD for the weekend but they thought wrawng. I feel guilty thinking complaining thoughts as they get ready, on their own, to participate in the musical worship at their church. "Really, I have so much to be thankful for", whispers into the back of my mind as I yell, "HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY TO YOU TOO!!!!" to the space around the boys who have failed to greet me properly after several pass-bys in the hallway, kitchen, den and bathroom.

Here's my ultimate problem with this day of opportunity for mutual failure between mother and child: Have I not done enough to teach them to be grateful and gracious? Have I coddled them too much, making them spoiled and unable to count their blessings? Am I such a shrew that they actually don't like me enough to use this day to tell me how great I am? Am I losing them as they grow up and grow away? Why don't they spontaneously want to clean my car for me? It's just another opportunity for me to analyze in a gillion different ways, my failure to produce the perfect children. GRRRRRR.

On top of everything, my Mom is dead so I can't call her and tell her how much I appreciated (too late) everything she'd ever done for me. I can't commiserate with her and make up for all those years I didn't buy her an orchid corsage from the Bellport Florist that she could wear proudly at Mary Immaculate Church on Brown's Lane. I can't hear her assure me that, one day, my own children will call me and be in awe of what an awesome Mom I was and still am. By the time they realize my awesomeness, I might be dead!

My husband, knowing I have MD issues, tries to do his level best to make it a beautiful weekend. You should see the flowers he bought me: they were absurdly extravagant (try as I might, my photography skills fail to capture their beauty). But here's the thing of that: HE'S NOT MY CHILD. So basically his wonderful behavior just highlights what a good job of mothering his mother did and again how I have fallen short in the teaching of graciousness. Frown. Not to mention, my kids think that everything he does is credited to their account. Not even close. I know I shouldn't be keeping accounts but that's the insidious nature of Mother's Day. I didn't make the rules.

So basically, despite a reasonably lovely weekend, I am happy to have Mother's Day behind me. Except the gloom of the Monday after has left me sulking on the coach, minding and reminding my feelings of inadequacy and marginal sadness. I guess I'll just have to break my blog silence and purge this particular bit of bleccch.

There, I feel much better. Maybe now I can get something done today.

Happy Happy Birthday Baby

My Mom died yesterday. On her birthday. Ten years ago. According to Webster an anniversary is the annual recurrence of a date marking a notable event. So yesterday was the anniversary of my mother's death (or deathiversary as some of the more Tim Burtonesque in our family have dubbed it). In a perfectly bookended piece of poetry, it is also the anniversary of her birth. So what does that mean? I don't know. Here's what I know: the day and days leading up to this deathiversary leave me with a dull, empty feeling, like something is amiss, like I have a project due that I haven't even addressed, like I can't get that little piece of abrasive grit out of the eyeball of my soul. Yesterday, all day long I had a faint desire for some sort of monumental "moment" in which homage would be paid to my mother on the tenth anniversary of her death and sixty-ninth anniversary of her life. Somebody should say something shouldn't they? Actually a few people in my family sent out emails that failed to hit the spot for me. As Randy Jackson would say: "It just didn't do it for me dawg." The grit remained in its secreted niche.

And then I was watching Lost. I love that show. My siblings and I have a private chatroom in which we discuss the literal, moral, and mostly spiritual significance of the various bits and pieces of Lost. You'd have to understand all the ins and outs and twists and turns of this show for me to set up the scene that gave me my much awaited "moment". Instead of giving you a synopsis, I'll just throw out the briefest of a context. A woman (I still don't even know this character's name) is sobbing over the death of another character Jacob. Holding a gun to Jacob's murderer, she tells this character named Benjamin, "He is the closest thing to a father I ever had." Her heart is clearly broken and she is about to exact her revenge on Benjamin by taking his life in return for the life of her beloved Jacob. Knowing he has done wrong and been wrong and has failed completely, Benjamin begs for mercy to be allowed to run away. The mourning woman asks, "Where will you go?" Benjamin tells her his plans to take up with a character that epitomizes evil because, after all, "He's the only one who will have me." In an act of sudden and surprising mercy, she lowers her gun and tells him, "I'll have you."

This briefest act of mercy reminded me of my Mom and all she stood for, all she taught me, how she lived her life and ultimately The One after whom she modeled her life. And I got my momentous occasion. Tears washed away that nasty piece of grit as I contemplated the life of a merciful woman.

My son Antonio was born today. On his birthday. Eighteen years ago. My mom used to joke about how, if the doctors hadn't tried to stop my labor because he was three weeks early, Antonio would have been born on her birthday. I am eternally grateful for those doctors today because, with her death, March 9th became a very crowded day. Still, this reprieve only allows me one short day to recuperate and pull up my happy pants to celebrate the birth of my eldest child. Every year I feel guilty for the shadow that is cast over his day. The year my mom died, we travelled on Antonio's eighth birthday back to Maine to attend the funeral. In a complete daze, I hoped that visiting with his multitude of cousins would constitute a party of sorts. My brother Tom got him a wooden train with the block letters Toño spelled out in train cars. Sweet of him because that was the only celebration Antonio got that year...that I can recall. Every year thereafter, I have wondered if he is affected by the whiff of sorrow that surrounds his day.

Last night's Lost, again, brought me some thoughts on this matter. There is this character, a woman named Sun. I love her and the way she has developed into a maternal, nurturing, giving, supportive and ultimately strong woman over the course of this series. She is a steadying influence. Last night her friends returned from being missing for a period of time. As they walked onto the beach, the joy that radiated from her face was beautiful. The wide embrace with which she greeted these "lost" loved ones reminded me, again, of my mom. I imagine if she met my Antonio again she would be so delighted to see him. She would run across the sand to throw her arms around him and tell him how she had missed him so. She would touch his hair and tell him how tall he had gotten. She would tell him how thrilled she was that he loved to sing songs and play the guitar. She would listen to all of his songs and then insist he teach her to play. She would slip her arm into his and walk with him along the water and tell him funny stories about herself and ask him all about what had happened to him in the last ten years. She would ask him about his girlfriend....she would want every detail because she loves romance. She would ask him about his plans for the future. She would love him so much. She would be so proud of him. And then she would play him a game of "gotcha last". He doesn't even know about this game, it's one of things he's missed out on. But she would show him how to play and they would run and play and laugh and fall into the sand in a tangle of exhausted hilarity when she finally won.

When I feel sandy grit of my mother's death, it is the missing of these moments that abrades the most. And yet, I have a hope that there will be a reunion and all the missed moments will be made complete. Strange how a show like Lost can remind me of that hope and help to wash away the grit of another year. And so I can pull on my happy pants and be the mother who is celebrating the eighteenth year of her son's life.

Happy Birthday Antonio. I love you. Bunny would be so pleased.