Oleoptene

Mother’s Day Meditation

The Lanyard - Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

__

Had a lovely conversation yesterday at a party with another mother, and it was the sort of conversation that was punctuated by our children’s needs, including one where her daughter brought to her the smallest crumb of the donut she was eating and proudly declared “I have something for you.” I loved how this mother explained that when she accepted the crumb, when she accepted, as we all would, on Mother’s Day, the clumsily folded pieces of construction paper with “I love you Mom” on them, it was the expression on her daughter’s face that made the gift for her. And so I thought of this woman as I was accepting my tissue paper flowers this morning and looking at the very proud and excited face of my kindergartner. I am grateful that she helped me understand the gift I am given.

And, later I thought of her again, and how she explained to me that she had never done well with mother’s groups or playgroups, that motherhood has been isolating. And I understand this — I have been hurt by playgroups, and know how bad the dynamics in a group of women can be when driven by competition and envy and gossip. But as I contemplate the acknowledgement that I think Mother’s Day is supposed to be about, I wonder who but another mother can understand what a mother does?

I marvel at my mother friends, the ones whose marriages may not have been what they thought they were bargaining for, the ones whose children have challenges that are sometimes overwhelming for a grown-up to contemplate, much less a small person, the ones who haven’t had a real night’s sleep in more than four years, the ones who struggle — that is, every mother I know, the ones with whom I have the trust to have gotten to share the struggles, to give the hug to, and say “It’s hard isn’t it, and you’re doing such an amazing job.” Or even sometimes I think what they need to hear is “You’re doing a good enough job.”

What I want to acknowledge them for is the strength they have to keep going when it seems they have no choice, how they make a safe place for their children when they have no safety net themselves, how they find the courage to be advocates and protectors. I want to acknowledge the vertigo you can feel, being all that stands between a child’s helplessness and a world that seems indifferent, hostile even, and to know that your job is is to strengthen the child to be launched into the world, to not need you anymore. To acknowledge that when you’ve found the strength to stifle a hundred selfish urges an hour, to wake in the middle of the night again and again, to patiently explain again and again, to listen, to clean up, to discipline, to forgive, to look for the best qualities in your child when he is manifesting none of them, to make your own mistakes, forgive yourself, and keep on trying, when you’ve completed the marathon that is motherhood to find further strength to let go. And perhaps most amazingly that these women, these mothers do it all so seamlessly that their children, their partners may never even know the weight they are carrying, the strength that they have.

Maybe it’s that the scale of what a mother does is rather hard to wrap your mind around. It isn’t something you can take for granted. Plenty of mothers are terrible, and even terrible mothers may be overwhelmed by the love for their children. But the mothers who give me strength — the ones who I know understand when I feel like I am about to break, who reassure me that I won’t — they are amazing mothers, with amazing children whom I admire and love. And as much as my mother friends have helped me to survive motherhood, I owe the most to my own mother, a woman who solves problems and makes it look easy, who I know would fight for me still, a woman who still makes me want to grow up to be just like her.

Nothing I give my own mother will ever be more than the lanyard, the construction paper, and still the best part of my day today was getting to talk to my mother on the phone. I know she cannot see my face on the phone, but maybe the acknowledgement of one mother to another mother, of what an amazing thing she has done as a mother may stand instead.

My Mother’s Day isn’t lacy or flower-filled, no civilized brunch with linen tablecloths and polished silver, or picnic concert of pops favorites, it’s a fierce acknowledgement that this motherhood business can leave you aching and bruised, weary and longing for your own mother, and still when your own child looks up at you, you’ll smile with tenderness and put that child’s needs ahead of your own.

Bicycling and the End of the World

We blame Sarah. First she got me to read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle and think about where all my food is coming from, and now over at Cafe Mama she is challenging everyone to Car Diet, and ack, I honestly don’t believe in diets, but, well let’s just call it Car Trip Counting?

The weather’s been — well, nice is stretching it, but not miserable? And I have the bicycle and the trailer. And I know a couple of mothers who always bicycle to Søren’s school from almost my neighborhood, one of whom has been organizing a challenge to families to walk, bike or use transit to get to school. It it seems like a challenge I could handle just to ride my bike every day picking him up from school.

And I have, not the day I drove to Woodlawn to spend time with a good friend, and not yesterday when I had to rush the boys to a dentist appointment before violin lessons, but I’ve done all picking up otherwise on my bicycle, pulling the boys in a trailer. Today, when I was responsible for drop-off I even did that on my bicycle.

The first day it was a little nerve-wracking, wondering if I had my timing right, or if I was going to be confronted with hideous traffic and rude drivers. The second day I was a bit sore. By the third day I was shocked to realize I was looking forward to the time to go pick up Søren as I never had before. That the bicycle made me feel freed, and aware, deliberate and conscious. Driving makes me unhappy, traffic brings up antagonism, I waver between boredom and tension. On the bicycle I feel powerful and strong. My relationship to my schedule changes, I am not rushing so I can come home and squeeze in a few minutes by myself to exercise. I am more aware of my neighborhood, watching the pace of new construction, the change in what’s blooming in my neighbors’ yards because I am going at a pace that allows observation.

And if you ask me about riding my bicycle, those are the things I am going to talk about. I might mention hating that I can spend more than $50 filling the minivan with gas, but I am probably not going to say anything about carbon footprints or emissions of any sort. It’s not that I am not capable of anxiety over the environment, it’s just that anxiety is not a place where I can afford to live. Using fear of rising ocean levels and famine, the disruption of our whole way of life as a motivator is like using hating your body as a way to eat healthy food and exercise, focussing on fear of not being lovable and the deprivation instead of on finding yourself feeling good because of the way you are living, it’s a way to end up feel helpless and hopeless.

I do keep evaluating my life, are the elements I need in balance — time to connect with others around me, time to think about what’s important to me, time caring for my children, time caring for myself. What makes me happy about pulling my bicycle out is that it fits with my ideas of what the happiest life is for me. So maybe I ought to send Sarah a quick thanks for inspiring me.

Mommy is not About the Blaming, Mommy is About the Solving

This being the motto I made my older children write temporarily on the chalkboard on their bedroom door. Because it seems like the assigning of blame has lately been an obstacle to actually solving problems. And I will write about this as delicately as I can and let the child I am writing about read it before I publish, but not only did I have one of those moments where I felt like I was on my parenting game, able to see things from the kids’ perspectives and communicate my own insights in a useful way, but it turned into one of those moments where seeing things reflected in my kids’ life made me understand that I have the opportunity to grow a little too.

Mostly my kids are pretty peaceful, not unnaturally so, but we are lucky. They have a lot in common, are generally kind to one another and are busy enough not to have a lot of time to spend annoying one another. There are exceptions — my five year old’s sensibilities and desire to talk about things interesting to a five year old can get on both of his older brothers’ nerves, in a way that makes me suspect they’re slightly embarrassed to have once been five too… they’re so past Captain Underpants and that level of humor, and he’s developmentally just prime for it. We accept this, and if we’re parenting one-on-two, we try never to pair the oldest with the third child because it isn’t a pleasant combination. Still, even my optimistic self has picked up on a slight uptick in conflict between the older two boys, and unfortunately it mostly happens in the morning before school when I am too tired or too rushed to deal with it intelligently and creatively.

Which is why I was surprisingly grateful that the typical thing broke out Wednesday night after dinner. We’d gone for Indian food and our oldest son’s entree, samosa, and cheese naan had all come out flavored liberally with cilantro, and he is one of those people to whom cilantro tastes like nothing so much as soap, and his dinner was thus rendered pretty much inedible. I traded entrees with him, averting disaster, and even told him about ihatecilantro.com, which made his evening. So when we got home, he wanted to change the ninja/anti-pirate rhetoric on their bedroom door to reflect his loathing of cilantro. Only his brother doesn’t hate cilantro, and didn’t want the signage changed, felt betrayed that his brother was changing the rules of their room somehow, that he didn’t have the voice he though he should have in administration of their shared space.

I love that this is what they were fighting about, because it is sort of silly, and sort of not, and mostly easy to dissect, and we could talk about it and the absurdity of it made the discussion a little more fun. And while my oldest son should have been more sensitive to his brother’s feelings throughout the whole thing, he was already feeling respected and listened to enough that he could be mellow instead of escalating the conflict.

One of the dynamics that has been tricky in our family is the fact that I, as an oldest child, often get our oldest son’s perspective, and Raven as a youngest, generally gets the younger sibling perspective above all others. It’s an ideal of mine to see every conflict as having two sides and to honor both perspectives, but I know we don’t always achieve all of our parenting ideals.

One interpretation of many of the conflicts going on lately is that our second son is sensitive, both in the sense that he is aware of and takes care of the feelings of everyone around and also in the sense that he will read into others’ behavior much bigger meaning than was intended. This is one of those double-edged things, and as much as I treasure the first part, I need to accept the second part, but sometimes our oldest is bewildered at how he has triggered an intense reaction in his younger brother and will try to defuse the situation with his sense of humor, only times it badly and it gets taken as not taking his brother’s feelings seriously enough, or even taking pleasure in his brother’s frustration, and it makes his father really angry at him. Am I too charitable in interpreting his behavior? He does, probably, sometimes, enjoy the power to make his brother crazy just as his brother enjoys the power to get him in trouble, and yet they’re both pretty thoughtful, idealistic kids who I believe (optimistically?) enjoy the getting along better than the inflicting.

With a few iterations, the conflict between the two boys starts coming between Raven and me, each of us reliving the minor traumas of our own childhood families, and our second son learns to play up the victim role a little bit more, his older brother looks a little more defiant and misunderstood and angry at us.

So when we started trying to figure out how we could make the decision about the shared chalkboard, it started to play out by the same exact script as every other conflict lately, one child asserting, the other child retreating, and was about to land in the same place where one child looks like the victim of his brother’s dominance over everything, and it occurred to me that while each had found power in the role he always played, each was also trapped by the same role. And we kept talking about what was happening and I wouldn’t let our second son give me the same old version of the story, insisting instead, that if he wanted something he had to honestly ask for it, not complain about not being listened to before he had even really asked.

You think this is taking forever to write about, I was in their room for about an hour, asking them to really listen to what was being said. I had to use all the lightness I could muster, one child would retreat, hurt, and I would cajole, tickle, reassert that I wasn’t taking sides but trying to find a solution, making them repeat our new mantra, write it on the chalkboard. And I worry that our second son could think I am picking on him, that I am asking him to do all the changing, but, truthfully, I am a little excited that he has this chance to grow, to leave behind something that, carried into adulthood, makes relationships really hard (she speaketh from experience here!) That as I inventory how many times I have spent more energy on locating blame than on solving problems, this is something I want to work on too. And so asking him to see this, to let me stand by and help him with it, felt like a gift I could give him.

Penguin Love

Practicing viola with Xander yesterday, he got frustrated with the same brush-y bow stroke he’s been working on for weeks now. I understand the frustration but need him to keep practicing anyway, and I try to speak lovingly of how when he practices he works through problems, but I catch this sort of trying to cheer himself up, asking “So am I learning faster than other kids my age?” which may be the cry of a child who has a brother two years older that he feels he will never catch up with, has a younger brother whose every accomplishment is fussed over and praised. I think of how he was visibly aching Sunday morning when he and Aodán both played with a group for some friends and there was voluble praise for Aodán’s playing and I had to pull him aside and say “When someone compliments Aodán they aren’t insulting you.” But I don’t know.

So I ask him if it’s important to him to be doing better than other kids his age and he tells me how he had cried that morning at getting a C on a math test and then had to remind himself that this was an algebra test and other third graders are working on learning their multiplication tables. And I feel like I am getting a C on some sort of parenting test. Because I really, truly believe that what matters is doing your own best and not how you’re doing in comparison with others, but I see that as being one of those almost taboo double-speak things in our society, where people say that and then compare you. In my heart of hearts, I know I am enjoying the reflected glory of my children’s quick learning. And I have a horror that I am more complicit than I admit to myself, too, compare the boys to each other or make them feel like how much love they’re going to get depends on how they achieve, how they make me proud. I remember childhood’s need for attention, for making the adults in my life proud, I wonder if it is possible to not pass this along.

But here is my secret hope. In the movie March of the Penguins, all the mother penguins arrive back at the nesting grounds where the baby penguins have hatched under their father’s care during the mothers’ absence, and the mothers identify their own babies by their unique songs. It isn’t that a baby has to have the loudest song, or the most beautiful song, or the most accurate pitch, it’s that the song is uniquely their own that makes them identifiable. I want my kids to feel loved that way, like I treasure each of their songs not because I compare it with the other baby penguins, but because it is his own.

Static

PreScript: So I know I have a habit of way-over-prefacing things without getting to the point so you have no clue what you’re reading or why until the second or third paragraph. I wish I could say that was going to change, or that I was going to come back and edit this paragraph out of here. But it’s my blog. No, wait, I don’t really believe that, or I do, but I also believe that it’s your time, and I am grateful you’re spending some of it reading this. But still I’ll argue that I sometimes have to write in the way thought spools out rather than in a punch-y, following the rules for getting and holding attention way, because the way thoughts spool out and develop over time is sometimes more interesting than the thought itself.

Take the way fantasy has been popping into my life. My friend Jenny had this lovely blog post she wrote after an ultrasound showed that she might have to have a cesaerean or at least a hospital birth because of where the placenta is with this pregnancy, and I had talked to her on the phone right after the ultrasound, crying and laughing with her, and was so in awe of her ability to talk about the fantasy she had been holding about the homebirth they were going to have, and her acknowledgement of it as a fantasy and her own need to grieve the loss of the fantasy instead of having to jump straight to being happy that the baby is healthy and so on. And somehow talking to her made me understand how fantasy is very useful for motivating us and keeping us moving through difficult stuff, like morning sickness, but in the end we have to let go of fantasies, as much as it hurts, to make room for reality, which is messy and uncomfortable, but, you know, real.

Then there’s the whole set of thoughts that went with the Shapely Prose blog entry on the Fantasy of Being Thin. Initially I thought the problem with that fantasy was this whole postponement of happiness for something that might never happen. But I’d still have a problem with the fantasy, even if magically every person had the body they had fantasized about. There was on Studio 360 this week, a story told by Elna Baker about the childhood fantasy she had of being a grown-up going on a date with the most popular boy, wearing a dress of her grandmother’s that she tried on when she was seven and, obese, didn’t fit into. So, many years later, after much dieting and much compensatory personality development because the dieting wasn’t working, she developed the mantra “I am what I am” and started liking herself anyway, and liking herself, caring about what she eats and how she treats herself, visiting a nutritionist and learning to eat and exercise better until she is thin and her grandmother gifts her with the dress, and she even gets the date with the popular boy she wants a date with. Only he says, on the date “I cannot tolerate fate people” which just pops the whole fantasy. And I loved the way she told the story but hate the little myth inside it “Accept yourself and you will have the strength to change (because you really need to change, don’t you hate yourself?)” And worse, I wonder about a woman in her 20’s still trying to live out a fantasy she had as a first grader. But worst, I guess, is how we can carry fantasies that are worse than unworthy of us, they are damaging to us, with their hidden message of “My worth is dependent on my appearance.”

Which made me contemplate how fantasies are really static things. You have an image in your head of a magazine lay-out house or a perfect plump-fisted baby and forget that the baby may fuss and keep you up all night, grow into a child who colors on the walls of your dream house, leaving toys and crumbs and stickiness everywhere — not part of the fantasy. And it isn’t that you picked the wrong fantasy, or that you can’t form another fantasy to get through that moment’s discomforts, swinging from from one point of suspended hope to another like a child crossing monkey bars, but if you think that the fulfillment of fantasy is where happiness lies, then happiness becomes an every other day, a jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today kind of thing.

Of course the way my brain works I have to draw giant columns labeled static and dynamic:

Static Dynamic
Fantasy Living
Wedding Marriage
Birth Child
Clean house Livable house
Book tour Writing
Popularity Friendship

And I continue reading about the nature of happiness — generally happiness is one of those subjects I will pick up any book about, from Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness to Eric Wiener’s Atlas of Bliss, and it runs as a minor theme in Mary Pipher’s Letters to a Young Therapist, I am especially fascinated by our misconceptions about happiness, and all of these books bring up the studies showing that people who have experienced either great good fortune or terrible misfortune generally end up back at their baseline level of happiness before too long.

I think the first time I started to really understand that happiness is not about circumstances was when I was twenty and getting a divorce from the man I had married at nineteen, and I went from blaming him for my unhappiness to thinking nothing could ever make me happy again to being happy despite pretty miserable circumstances. But the happiness-is-not-a-circumstance epiphany was not one I could have once and then walk around blissful the rest of my life, I have needed to be reminded of it again and again.

So this morning I was back journalling about happiness not being the fulfillment of fantasy, to thinking about envy, how envy is like fantasy, can motivate you in a way that could be useful. And, honestly, please forgive me, it came out as a little Socratic dialogue:
Mara’s Intellect: What do you envy?
Mara’s Emotions: Her appearance, his lifestyle, that possession, the respect everyone gives her.
MI: Why do you envy?
ME: Because I feel like someone has something missing from my life.
MI: What does this missing from your life mean?
ME: Duh. That with these missing things my life would be better.
MI: And what is your definition of a better life, if attractiveness, relationships, ease, status are means to a better life?
ME: A happier life.
MI: So you think that a change in circumstance would make you happy, despite the evidence of all those studies?

At which point my emotional self punched my intellectual self in the mouth.

The experience of knowing something rationally and intellectually and that not changing how I FEEL happens often enough to make me think. Instinctively I have this making-fun-of-Spock response that being rational/logical all the time would be
1) not conducive to my happiness
2) irritating to everyone around me
3) not true to my own nature and thus impossible.

So scrub the lopsided Socratic dialogue. Maybe, my emotional self would say, if given more than a straw man, wimpy voice, envy does serve a purpose, much like fantasy, for helping clarify goals (break into some sort of musical Gotta Have a Dream number here).

And I don’t like feeling like emotional and rational are this divided thing, my nature at odds with itself. I suspect, that really, it’s more like having binocular vision, each reaction can give me information about my circumstance if I can get enough into balance to listen to both. But I am working on not letting one side express contempt for the other.

So, long and rambling. I warned you in the first paragraph, right?

Call Me Penelope

Not that we are keeping score, but Raven’s been out of Portland 13 days out of the last 25, and I mostly function ok except for missing him and not having figured out how to get a good night’s sleep when he’s not here. Hence lots of keeping my hands busy, watching movies after the kids go to bed and knitting:

Please understand, I am not complaining. I appreciate that the interacting with people is the part of his job he’s good at, the part of his job he loves, despite the travel, and I appreciate being able to be at home with the kids because he’s good at it. Still, it’s different from how I grew up and it’s sometimes a little hard on all of us.

Anyway, too tired for a smooth segue, but I swear there’s a connection, I would like to mention having followed one of the Unreliable Narrator’s links to the wikibook Hearts and Minds: How Our Brains Are Hardwired for Relationships by Thomas David Kehoe and skipped straight to the section on archetypes of relationships where it was clear to me, that of all the types Kehoe describes, Raven best fits the Hermes model (for being in technology, he’s all Gemini, all communication) and how I am living very much the Hestia model. And you know, she’s just not the most glamorous of goddesses, and even if domesticity is the path I’ve chosen, it’s easy to wish for a slightly more exciting archetype.

So I have to confess, I love the power of stories thousands of years old to explain emotional truths. And I probably have been warped by my fascination with the Greeks, that I cannot tell if the emotional truth is there or I look at everything through the filter of the truth of these stories that have been part of my consciousness my whole reading life. I remember early on, my dad asking me for any of the mythology-referenced clues in crossword puzzles because I had them down young, graduating from D’Aulaire to Hamilton to Ovid. And it is surprising how the whole system has stuck with me, the clustering of certain qualities, the inevitable consequences of certain behaviors.

Thus, I know that as much as Hestia, I feel like this knitting me is a Penelope-like waiting spouse. Of course, knitting seems to strangely mirror the pages I fill in my journal, row after row, line after line, ravelling and unravelling, forgive me the glibness, text and textiles, fabrications and fabric. Going off on a different mythological tangent, I see following the yarn as Theseus using Ariadne’s spool to get out of the labyrinth. But lately, my very favorite myth/metaphor is Scylla and Charbydis, the sea monsters Odysseus had to sail between, one a rock-dwelling six-headed people eater, the other a whirlpool belching water sucker. The narrow strait between two treacherous places keeps applying to absolutely everything where I must find an unnatural-to-me middle way, tread between frustration and despair, the clashing and the sucking, the passive and the aggressive, even the nature of attachment, having to think of your children’s well-being all of the time without letting them become your whole world, having to have plans enough to get yourself moving, but flexibility enough to be open to new opportunities.

Conversations with Inanimate Things

Ugh. Know what I hate about having the sun come out after weeks of modestly keeping to itself behind the clouds? I see all the accumulations of dust and griminess that I could ignore when the light was a little dimmer, and after being compelled to wash the kitchen curtains, I’m dusting the top side of the window frames which nobody can see anyway, and I run the dust into the high corners where webby things proliferate and over the smoke alarm in the kitchen and that bugger starts beeping and saying, yes, in words “Replace batteries in the kitchen.”

And that’s a cool technology, right? There are some things that are distinctly nag worthy, and batteries in smoke alarms count. However, we have built some redundancy into the system, with smoke alarms in every room (including one with the unfortunate feature of being testable with any remote control in the living room where small people aim remote controls rather wildly) and they all take 9 volt batteries which I never have extras of stocked up and I am home with a sick kid not really into taking him shopping (which may be what got me into the cleaning things that really didn’t need cleaning anyway).

So all morning I listen to the smoke alarm beep and and repeat “Replace batteries in kitchen” thinking I am stubborn and can outlast its dying batteries, and start fantasizing the things the small appliances in my house would say equipped with the same technology. My coffee maker cutting me off, the television gently suggesting I watch something education for a change, or maybe go read a book. The refrigerator telling me that that salad mix I paid too much for with the best of intentions last week, remember that? Well it’s now or never, baby. The dishwasher politely requesting emptying. You know the technology exists, but that it would quickly turn us all into small-appliance-bashing luddites. I guess I am going to go look for some batteries now.

Suspiration

While on the death musings, may I share with you my fantasy of the first thing to happen upon my demise?

I want to be handed a greatest hits album of the breaths I have taken in my life. The contented sighs, the breaths taken to help push each of my sons out into the world, the big, clear breaths that follow a good cry. The yoga breaths tat fill the empty spaces, pulling shoulders down and back. A long, savoring inhale of the air after a rain when you strain to catch the delicacies of the smell of living earth, tender green-ness and you suspect that blade of grass there has just breathed in your carbon dioxide, gratefully, and repaid you by exhaling some oxygen in your direction. The breaths taken in performing chamber music, synchronizing your music with another players as you inhale and come in together. I coach the boys to breathe before we start solving problems, and my sister teaches her ‘cello students how breathing is a mysteriously important part of making music. There’s an intimacy to breath — I hear the performer breathing in my headphones as I listen to a recording of the Bach Cello Suites and find myself breathing with, conspiring, and aspiring. But for all the intimacy of breath, these indestrucible oxygen atoms — who else’s lungs have they entered, what other blood streams have they coursed through? Am I breathing in Abraham Lincoln right now? And may I not long for assurances the planet will continue past all of its current travails, that many subsequent generations may know good air to breathe?

The Good Death

My friend, the unreliable narrator, wrote today about wishing that human beings came with simple power off buttons for the end of life, that we might, “experience a painless natural uneventful cessation of function, dying without shame or stigma or elaborate mechnical/chemical ruses.” And of course I don’t know what was in her head, but I took it in the context of these portraits and stories in the Guardian’s website of people before and after their deaths, and her own experiences with someone she loved dying. And still the idea of the button made me want to shout “No, no, no! Of course not!”

And then I had to examine why I thought the idea of the cessation of life being so simple and clean bothers me. It’s not just that I fear it would be abused by people I deem obligated to continue living for whatever selfish reasons I have, or even that I fear death made easy would not leave room for second thoughts and doubts. Further down, I think I like the messiness, the way I liked it with my sons’ births. I think there’s some big psychic principle about us valuing things as we pay for them, and the fact that pregnancy and birth, dying and death are weighty and not to be done thoughtlessly, gives our lives these anchoring points. I like thinking about how the most annoying person out there still represents this act of love and sacrifice on the part of the mother who went through the indignities and discomforts of pregnancy and birth, and I can summon respect for that even when I am driven insane by a behavior. I like that we keep brushing up against reminders of how we are conceived, how we are born, how we must die, that, if we are paying any attention at all, can serve to render life sacred, even outside of the formal religious assertions of this.

Another thing. I believe birth and death are messy for a reason. That there can be a dignity, a grace, that slips into the space opened up by pain, by dependence, an awareness that one goes through these perhaps ultimately alone, but also supported to exactly the point where the aloneness must start. I believe in support. I believe in the comfort of the right hand rubbing your lower back, I believe in a friend who holds your hand and cries because you are crying, who doesn’t try to get rid of her own discomfort by lying, “it’s all going to be ok,” or by minimizing, “it isn’t that bad,” but who rocks with you, “I know, I know, I know.” And these can be the most vivid and intimate of moments, the moments of deepest connection, and I am glad we don’t have, in our fear, easy ways to circumvent them all. I believe in learning to tenderly hold someone who is hurting, open to their pain, with faith, without even thinking how someday when you need that hand it will be there for you.

I was impressed enough with the little snippet from Wiener’s Geography of Bliss that happiness comes from thinking about death five minutes a day that I put myself on the waiting list for it at the library and am now halfway through it — or course it’s much more about happiness than about dying, but I do give the good death a lot of thought (and am I happy?). My fascination with hospice and home-deaths flowing naturally out of joy in discovering midwifery and home-births. Getting to be present at a friend’s birth was such a gift, but I don’t know what it will be like when I inevitably am with someone I love at their dying. My parent’s experience of my mother’s parents’ deaths gives me great hope that the experience will be more than the gaping void that is opened up I imagine life on this planet without any of the people I love most. I suspect that there are also parallels between the sort cultural images we have of birth — medicalized, anaesthetized, something best gotten out of the way quickly and painlessly with professional intervention, that only crazy crunchy granola types would embrace the idea of a ‘natural birth’ — and the taboos and fears that we surround death with, that if we just are healthy/virtuous enough death can be forestalled, hopefully indefinitely, but please let’s not TALK about it. So I am not into respecting taboos, at least not the ones that try to plaster over an irrepressible reality, and I want to talk about dying.

Published!

In the monthly parent-oriented magazine, NW Kids, here’s a link.

And real blog entries are percolating, honest. I know it’s been a while. We’ve just been through a couple of rounds of germiness and lots of Raven getting on and off airplanes and my life feels about as interesting as watching paint dry — oh, wait, I did do a pointing! But it’s a present for a friend and so I am not posting an image. But if you’re just jonesing for my inimitable way with words, there are a few. And I was surprised how much I liked working with an editor, having someone take my first draft and say, “So, what’s your point?” and having to sit down and take another stab at it until I was surprised by my own answer at what the point was, and realized I had just written what I needed to read. Which makes me wonder if Raven would be willing to pay for me to hire an editor for my blog, someone who would suggest topics and give me deadlines, and make me re-write things with appropriate questions…