Pluff Mud Diaries

Surrender

2011-03-25T11:03:00.000-04:00

When I arranged myself facedown on Maureen’s heated massage table yesterday, I heard cardinals calling to one another in the tender slice of urban garden out the window. The lilting birdsong momentarily unlocked my breath and sent my clenched shoulders southward.

I had just unbottled a swirl of vulnerabilities to Maureen. The recent neurologist’s appointment, the upcoming MRI, the moment I felt so distinctly a parent – strong within all of my fragility – as I rubbed the wings of Jack’s shoulder blades that sleepless night.

After five years of monthly massage practice, I no longer feel exposed. And it has been practice, teaching myself to surrender on the table. Learning to let someone else soothe the stories both real and imagined that pool just under my skin. Stilling the overturned snow globe of my mind and sinking into the deep night of muscle memory.

Maureen came into the room, gently starfishing her hand along my spine.

“Now it’s my turn to rub your back and soothe your wings, just like you did for Jack,” she said. A safety net of spirit.

I felt tears surge against my shuttered eyelids. I thought of the massage table, the MRI table. Really not so different after all, as long as I remember to surrender.

Unnerved

2011-03-17T10:32:00.000-04:00

Jack called down the stairs an hour after his bedtime last night. Sleep couldn’t compete with thoughts of the mischievous leprechaun who might visit his classroom today. His excitement was palpable, a jittery halo in the soft glow of his rocket night light.

“Will you stay with me for a little while to help me sleep?” he asked. “You know the tricks.”

Settling beside him with the familiar opening pages of Flat Stanley read by flashlight to keep things cozy, my mind looped back to my own self-soothing tricks earlier in the day during a routine visit with my neurologist.

Because medication so effectively douses my chronic nerve pain, I get complacent in the six months between office visits. Lulled into normalcy one pill at a time.

After the usual physical assessments, the neurologist paged through the five years of my chart. Cranial Cliffs Notes. And then his thoughtful Southern drawl took the conversation in a different direction.

A need for an updated MRI to plot the course. He talked of slow-growing tumors. Aneurysms. Radiation. Surgery. He errs on the side of thorough and called these “mere possibilities.”

But those possibilities sliced my complacency in half, exposing a different sort of nerve under the fluorescent lights. The emotion that courses along the misfiring river of my spine.

I could feel the emotion surge again as I rubbed Jack’s back, soothing his shoulders in time with the Mozart broadcasting serenity from the CD player across the room. So many things that hide in the silty layers under the surface.

Jack wasn’t the only one who had trouble sleeping last night.

Love notes

2011-03-08T14:02:00.000-05:00

The notes arrive in plain sight. Balanced on the books that flood my bedside table. Tucked under a placemat. Perched on the chaos of countertop that holds my overturned purse and scattered lists.

So many missives multiply throughout the house that I wouldn’t be surprised if Jack’s heart, like his prolific love notes, is crafted out of colorful construction paper and Crayola markers.

I love you Mommy to the moon and back

Mommy you r The Best

My mommy is my love and my mommy

The phrases blend together into handwritten, wholehearted haiku. Words that caption and ground the elusive nature of days with a young child. With this young child.

Over and over, Jack draws me with a heart for a body, a permanent smile and an accurately squiggled rendering of my wild, curly hair. Even when I fall short, speak sharply, divert my attention in a dozen different directions, there I am taped on the refrigerator: all heart.

Lately, it seems all too easy to take these notes for granted. And I don’t want to be that careless or callous when someone hands me sheer generosity of spirit. I want to remember to hold it. Pocket it. Pass it on.

Well read

2011-03-02T11:45:00.001-05:00

Jack sits on the couch, ankles crossed casually as he opens the book in his lap. He asks me to sit next to him so that he can show me the pictures as he unspools the story on his own.

“I’ll ask you if I need help, but I think I can do it myself,” he says, fanning the pages. Easy reader, I think as I look at Jack’s curly, bowed head, an image of Morgan Freeman from his “Electric Company” days bubbling from memory.

Word by word, I sense how we’re trading places. I’ve become an audience of one, my silence a stage for his newfound storytelling. How unexpectedly easy it is to slip back into the role of being read to, to let someone else hold what happens next.

“Are you listening, Mommy?” Jack asks, and I nod, snuggling against him to enjoy one of the rare moments he is not in motion. But I know I’m paying less attention to the story than to everything I’m hearing as he finds his voice.

Floored

2011-02-24T09:56:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, when I peered through the windows flanking our front door, the view looked much like it did eight years ago when Derek and I first stood on the front porch, jittery with possibility.

An open plane of hardwood floors. A bank of sun-flooded windows. Snowy egrets daintily wading through the spartina grass in the backyard sprawl of salt marsh.

My footsteps echoed, tracing an impromptu labyrinth in the sawdust of empty rooms. So hollow without all of our familiar furnishings, temporarily stacked and stored in different parts of the house while the floors are refinished.

Unexpectedly, I felt as raw as the red oak beneath me, now erased of all of the scratches and scars that storied our life.

The worn spot against the wall where Maya absorbed the afternoon sun.

The scratched patch by the leather ottoman, where Beezus dug her back claws as she chattered through trembling whiskers at the hummingbirds and hawks soaring out of reach.

The dents and dings from the high chair, dropped rattles, train tracks, Hot Wheels and countless plastic space shuttle launches.

The desire lines of my daily world. Those paths I forged as our little family expanded and contracted, leaving tangible tidelines marking the continuum from hope to heartache and back.

A reminder of all the things that walk with me when I trust the floor will rise in greeting, wherever I am.

Fertile imagination

2011-02-16T09:50:00.000-05:00

After I planted the season’s first round of flowering baskets on the deck yesterday morning, I peered into the wilds of the side yard. Despite annual attempts to tame the tangled overgrowth, the sunny swath looks much like it did when Derek and I moved in eight years ago.

When we first toured this home, I fell in love with the coastal landscape as much as the layout. The house sits at the edge of a sandy salt marsh, surrounded by live oaks, palmettos and loblolly pines. The thriving mix of fuchsia oleanders and crape myrtles seemed exotic compared to our first midwestern garden.

I was accustomed to a calm palette of phlox, Shasta daisies and hydrangeas. That first garden in Fishers had an established ease, offering up armfuls of casual bouquets and a delicate haze of Monarch butterflies.

Island gardening lured me with the promise of something more wild and uncontrollable. The fantasy of a “Coastal Living” magazine garden, impervious to sea breezes, grazing deer or my own general ineptitude.

However, after years of severing tenacious vines and thrashing around in prickly undergrowth, I’ve realized my relationship with this intimidating plot is much like settling into reality after the steamy intensity of new romance. The quirks that were so alluring in the beginning are the same qualities that now make me want to toss in the trowel.

This garden wears my heart on its leaves. I’m aware that its current chaotic state reflects more about my frame of mind than I care to admit. I, too, could use a dose of new direction, learn to cultivate patience with imperfection, and crop the choked branches of my internal landscape to make room for possibilities.

When I think back to the Fishers garden, I tend to discount all of the months I spent on my knees, elbow-deep in the earth, churning and flailing long past twilight. I neglect to give myself credit for showing up and digging in, no matter what the weather. I forget that I left that garden – and the life attached to it – for a reason.

By now, I know enough to tend to the dreams curling out of a long-buried fertile imagination. I still may not be able to get a garden to grow this season. But there is always the chance that the garden will grow me instead.

On the rocks

2011-02-08T14:26:00.001-05:00

As I emerged from the canopy of loblolly pines along the beach path, I instinctively closed my eyes and turned my face skyward. A grateful sun salutation on the other side of five days and nights spent in the worried, neverland twilight with a feverish Jack. Head tucked to wing like the gulls flocked along the shore.

When I opened my eyes, I saw the white-tailed doe before she spotted me. She was improbably perched in the crevices of the rocky altar that hugs the dune line. Placid and poised in a way that suggested intention rather than a need for intervention.

Surely she belonged to the wily tribe that plunders my hopeful garden every spring. I expected to see her knee-deep in the buffet of my Mexican salvia, not channeling her inner mountain goat.

The deer turned her nose my way, both assessing and dismissive, before scissoring sideways to reach the small clusters of belled, yellow flowers still blooming in the shelter of weathered stones.

I want that.

The thought surged from an inner tide that I know will continually crest higher and higher until I am flooded in attention.

I want to simultaneously surprise myself and find my footing in an unexpected place. Hold my seat, as Jeannine says when she puts Georgia through her paces in the ring.

I want that.

A beginning, a recognition, there in the shadow of the deer outlined against the sprawling sanctuary of sea.

Between the lines

2011-02-01T12:00:00.000-05:00

Jack curled against me with a book curved in his hands. He laughed as he read aloud about a bossy young king who in the end is ordered to bed by his mother.

I love how Jack’s newfound ability to wade into simple sentences still surprises him, the fanfare of words drifting through his mind like floats in a storied parade.

This latest evolution of his bedtime routine surprises me, too. The way we now take turns reading. A conversation in pages. I hear Jack’s voice in a different way, listening to all that is blooming between the lines.

As he reads, I look at his bedside table, a mirror image of my own, overflowing with books. I remember my grandmother Betty’s coffee table, where Flannery O’Connor mingled with Erma Bombeck in a cascade of titles.

An afternoon with Grandmother meant a trip to the Baskin Robbins in Broad Ripple for bubble gum ice cream and a stop at Kids’ Ink, the neighboring children’s bookstore. I had the agonizing pleasure of choosing any book I wanted without censorship or judgment.

On the car ride home, I would clutch the peppermint-striped book bag and look forward to a deliciously silent stretch of hours spent reading beside my grandmother in twin rocking chairs that flanked a golf course view.

When my granddad arrived, shedding his starched white coat and stethoscope, he called out to his “girls,” asking what we were doing. “Swimming through pages,” my grandmother replied, capturing her place with a gold-plated bookmark.

That phrase echoed as I leaned my chin against Jack’s freshly shampooed head. Thinking of him bathed in words as he swims through pages. A baptism of possibility.

Carpool karma

2011-01-25T11:25:00.000-05:00

In the damp January gloom, the stream of children nudging each other through the school’s double doors looked equally dazed and crazed. The opposite of the uniform guidelines that seemed so stringent in August. Pony tails askew. Muddy knees. Jackets trailing the ground.

I remember that surging feeling of release at the end of the school day. The unencumbered freedom of the walk home from Mohawk Trails tethered to the steadfast certainty of my mother waiting on the other side of the back door. Only now do I understand how generously she allowed my rituals to define her days.

I scanned the mass of navy blue polos for a flash of familiar rocket backpack. But Jack spotted me first, the lone sedan in the swamp of SUVs. He waved with both hands, wriggling in a full bodied grin. How easily he carries the coltish unselfconsciousness of being six.

As I waved in response, I thought of Toni Morrison’s quote about how children always look to see if their parents’ eyes light up when they enter a room. I strive to be that parent, lit from within by the spark in my mother’s eyes. Reflecting the glow in my son’s gaze.

“Do you realize how lucky you are to have such a happy boy?” asked the head of the lower school, ducking her head in the door as she helped Jack with his seat belt.

Such unexpected gratitude in the tedium of the everyday. Carpool could be a daily practice for something much greater, if only I let it.

Possibility

2011-01-18T12:08:00.000-05:00

“All the time I was growing up … I wanted to live on an island with two (two!) parents who were best friends. Now that’s where I live, only I’m the parent, living with my husband, who has turned out to be my best friend. God only knows what my own children will grow up wishing for, but I profoundly hope they get it, at least for a while, at least eventually.”

~ Claire Dederer, Poser

Lately I am aware how much the light of my marriage exists in the shadow of my parents’ divorce.

I am months away from turning 40, the seismic age that signified the implosion of family as I knew it. This is how my younger self recorded that year, its seasons seemingly snapped in half: My mom had a surprise fortieth birthday party in the spring. My dad moved out of the house that fall.

Every family has its physics, waves of actions and reactions spilling across generations. At the time my parents divorced, I was so intent on varnishing a veneer of goodness – good daughter, good student, good all-around emotional anchor – that I don’t remember allowing myself to think about what was possible in a family. I only knew what was impossible.

Over the weekend, the passage from the epilogue of Claire Dederer’s powerful memoir, Poser, pulled me from the page, into memory and back again. “Listen to this,” I said to Derek, who was nose-to-iPad on the couch.

I read to him, but it felt like I was reading across the channel of my 17-year marriage to my younger self. Promising her that what she wanted from her parents she would be able to create for herself. On this island with this surprising man, a husband and father who stays and sparks the sustenance of possibility.

Handiwork

2011-01-12T13:01:00.000-05:00

When Jack burrowed into my lap for a back rub, it initially felt like one more request in an entire day that had been hands-on. One activity after another as the sleet sluicing the windows iced our cooped-up afternoon in early twilight.

My thoughts were already skipping ahead to the algebra of the refrigerator, trying to fashion an answer to the looming dinner equation. But here was this boy, shrugging out of his robot t-shirt, leaning into the trust of my touch.

Jack’s smooth stretch of spine is both timeline and template. I remember how it glowed in the ghostly otherworld of the ultrasound monitor. How it felt as I soothed his swaddled self, rocking us both across months of 3 a.m. thresholds.

Breathe, I told him. Breathe, I told myself, as I traced the familiar Braille of his freckled nape, the fragile wings of shoulder blades.

I closed my eyes and surrendered to the memory of the countless Saturday nights my grandmother offered me a dime to scratch her back before she tucked herself into the twin bed beside mine. I remember comparing my Lanz flannel to her blue silk nightgown, wishing for her elegance by osmosis. Feeling her smile in the slope of her shoulders. Inhaling her signature Shalimar, which still smells like home to me.

Past and present twined under my fingertips as Jack bowed into my arms. An unexpected namaste in the gray terrain of my mood. The privilege of being trusted to hold someone in my hands.

Illumination

2011-01-05T06:00:00.001-05:00

I come from a line of women who played with fire.

Whether on linen-lined holiday mahogany or everyday butcher block, candles clustered across the dinner tables of my childhood.

I have continued the tradition – from our first shoe box of an apartment in the Florida Keys where a lone taper lit the counter top and plastic patio chairs we pulled up to it, to our current island home that has pillars and table space to spare. After the fuchsia flare of sunset sinks into the salt marsh all too early these days, hurricane lanterns provide post-solstice solace.

My mom always said candlelight softens wrinkles and soothes young children during the twilight witching hour. I now know the encompassing glow also sparks stories, memories lit from within and passed one to the other like hand held candles at a Christmas Eve service.

There is something about the flicker and flow of light over faces that encourages ephemeral intimacy. Within the span of a lingering meal, a recitation can turn into a reckoning. A sanctuary of flame that inevitably disappears in the glare of the kitchen lights.

Lately, I continue to wrestle with learning how to transcend the limitations of our stories, how to stop striking the same match again and again. I keep thinking about the glimmers along the path, luminaries lighting the way to new stories we can tell ourselves, about ourselves, even when no one else is listening.

I am running into a new year

2010-12-31T06:15:00.002-05:00

i am running into a new year

and the old years blow back

like a wind

that i catch in my hair

like strong fingers like

all my old promises and

it will be hard to let go

of what i said to myself

about myself

when i was sixteen and

twentysix and thirtysix

even thirtysix but

i am running into a new year

and i beg what i love and

i leave to forgive me

~ Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), from Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980

Christmas in-between

2010-12-16T10:10:00.000-05:00

If you look, you will find with some certainty that joy is in the spaces in-between.

~ Written on a Christmas ornament designed by Leigh Standley

When I quietly walked into Jack’s room, aglow with Christmas lights, he sleepily smiled and reached for my hand.

“Good morning, Mommy,” he whispered. “I love that you are here at the end of my dreams.”

Time bent for a moment, and I could see Jack’s six-month-old self grinning and gurgling with singular morning grace. Nearly six years later, he greets the day in similar fashion. He is a sun salutation in flannel jammies.

“I can’t wait to see what Sweetie was up to last night,” he said, now fully awake and already leaning into the day.

Sweetie is a stuffed snow angel that hangs on the armoire in our great room during the holidays. According to our family tradition, once we decorate the Christmas tree, she becomes infused with magic and flies at night. Each morning, she settles in a different spot, waiting for Jack to find her.

“Sweetie, what did you do now?” Jack giggled when he saw her perched in his breakfast chair, holding a cereal bar. He placed her back on the armoire before shuttling over to the advent elf to clear another day on the path to Christmas.

Nine days left and yet I wholly felt the holiday there in that in-between space, with thoughts of winged snow angels silhouetted against the sunrise blushing pink clouds across the marsh. And a boy flush with belief.

Such unexpected joy tucked into the crevices, lingering in plain sight if only I stop and look.

Lullaby to life

2010-12-14T12:21:00.000-05:00

The first letter from Jeannine arrived days after Jack was born. Holding it now, I can feel who I was then in the slanted light of those early hours, unmoored in the ebb tide of new parenthood. Although she wrote the letter to Jack, I felt cradled in the comfort of her words. Both life line and love letter.

“We’ve not yet met, my lovely godson, and I already feel like I know you so well. You see, you have been weaving your way into the lives of your mom, your dad, and thereby me, for the past nine months – and longer, if I think back to when your parents first started thinking about the possibility of you …”

Beginning with the fateful day we met in high school, to my first kiss with Derek that she and I celebrated across an ocean, to my phone call to her from the hospital’s maternity wing, Jeannine wove humor and heart into her thoughts on how Jack evolved from a notion to a newborn.

“You were no small project, sweetest boy,” she wrote, with an additional wry postscript: “You may want to read this letter frequently between the ages of 13 and 21 years. Trust me on this one.”

Every year since then, Jeannine has crafted a birthday blessing to Jack. The priceless pages stream memories of meeting her godson for the first time, making drip castles, cherishing his mispronunciation of her name, sitting in the audience of his preschool play, offering a meditation on the art of letting go.

With each letter, I hear the song between the lines. A lullaby to life. The chorus we all want to hear: I see you and believe in all that you are.

The unconditional, unparalleled gift of posting memories to his future self. In Jeannine’s recent words, a benediction: “Through it all, you will be loved beyond measure. And I am always just one ‘hello’ away.”

Kick start

2010-12-08T10:33:00.001-05:00

When I arrived to retrieve Jack from karate, his instructor waved me into the room. Seven boys sat silently on the floor in front of her. Backs straight, hands on knees, eyes trained on hers.

I’ve seen the boys’ puppyish push-and-tumble routine in the hallways and on field trips. Respectful silence is not a default setting. I was already impressed.

“Gentlemen, it’s time for Jack to break a board,” she said, her serious Southern drawl pulling their spines full north.

Jack turned to me and wiggled his eyebrows, his entire body arrowed with excitement. I winked in response and tried to hide my incredulity.

Break a board?

Over the past several months during this weekly introduction to karate, Jack occasionally demonstrated a few kicks and arm thrusts at home. I overheard the bass thump his hearty “hi-yas” made when he practiced in the shower. But I never imagined his readiness to splinter plywood.

As Jack stood and bowed to his instructor, I bowed to my own failure of imagination. How often I limit myself to the fenced pasture of my perceived abilities. This lesson returns to me over and again, bearing different disguises for the same core truth.

Watching Jack’s confident concentration, I realized he does not have a nattering inner voice questioning his skill or potential. He simply dwells in the fullness of possibility.

“Show me your focus,” the instructor said, as Jack turned his back to the board and raised his fists to his chest. “Let your focus guide you.”

Jack eyed his target and swiftly kicked his Keen sneaker through the midpoint of the board, snapping it in half. He did not even look surprised, only celebratory as his instructor raised both halves to show the cheering boys.

“Gentlemen, that is how it’s done,” she said, bowing as she presented Jack with his accomplishment.

He ran to me, both student and teacher in the fluidity of the moment, and placed the talisman of plywood into my hands.

Six

2010-12-01T14:02:00.000-05:00

Dear Jack,

Ever since you turned five, you yearned to be six. You imagined some secret sorcery in life after five. An entire world without training wheels.

However, now that you are days away from turning six, you suddenly seem reluctant to relinquish five. I understand and even brush against that hesitation.

But the secret is that you get to carry all that you are with you into your new year, your next evolution. So that we both remember, I want to share a portrait of you, five years into your journey.

You overflow. With questions, compliments, non sequiturs and laughter. You steep in fullness: Hope-full. Joy-full. Thought-full. It’s a wonder your lanky, forty-pound frame can contain your spirit.

You believe. In the glow of Rudolph’s nose outside your bedroom window. In Santa and the Easter Bunny. In your daddy. In me. Without conditions or judgments. You reside in optimism and assume good intentions. You pull me into possibility.

You wonder. At sunsets, stars, rainbows, tidal pools – and zombies, skulls and iPads. You become especially philosophical in your car seat. You ask how everything works – galaxies, God, garage door openers. You outgoogle Google.

You engage. We barely get through the grocery store with all the conversations you spark. You talk to butterflies and dolphins. You sing in the bathroom and hum yourself to sleep. You dance fearlessly in public. You hold beachside funerals for horseshoe crabs. You tell jokes without punch lines and laugh maniacally. You are the first to hug your friends when they cry.

You love. You still ask me to marry you. You press your freckled nose into my neck when we snuggle. You idolize your daddy. You begin and end your days with the words, “I love you.” You cast your heart again and again, and trust the river will rise to meet it.

Quite simply, dear Rabbit, you make me a better parent, partner and person. I am lucky to know you at any age. To fully see and hear you, and adore you just as you are.

I love you to the moon and back,

Mommy

Spirit line

2010-11-29T10:56:00.000-05:00

Every story in life worth holding on to has to have a spirit line. You can call this hope or tomorrow or the “and then” of the narrative itself, but without it – without that bright, dissonant fact of the unknown, of what we cannot control – consciousness and everything with it would tumble inward and implode.

~ Gail Caldwell, Let’s Take the Long Way Home

This is not the story I thought I would tell. It feels like the story beneath the story. The bass line as sure and steady as the drumming of my heart.

*********

A little over a week ago, my grandmother and I laughed until we cried. We were wrapping up an hour-long conversation, and the bowl of our laughter filled the thousand miles between us.

“I can’t remember the last time I laughed like that,” Dodie said, reaching for a tissue. “Call me next week, and we’ll do it again. I love you, babe.”

I clutch those words now, sliding each one along a ribbon of memory. Remembering the easy assurance that there would be a next week, an entire calendar of conversations on the horizon.

*********

What comes next loses linearity. The images slip and fold together in a kaleidoscope just out of reach. Shards and shades of grief and disbelief.

*********

Dodie in the hospital. Animated delusions that took her back to Meridian Hills Lane and my grandfather, her mind a geode glittering with emotional touchstones.

The hollowness of no response, her body shuttered and locked.

My dad, weeping in a way I have not heard in eighteen years.

Doctors discussing the beginning of the end. But the end became a new beginning instead.

Defying medical explanation, Dodie re-emerged. The shock of laughter when she asked for a Coke from Steak ‘n’ Shake.

Her voice on the phone yesterday, a lullaby I thought I might not hear again: “I love you, babe.”

*********

This is Dodie’s story, not mine. I stand in witness and wonder, tracing the arc as she threads her spirit line again and again.

Believe

2010-11-18T10:11:00.000-05:00

At one time, most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I have grown old, the bell still rings for me, as it does for all who truly believe.

~ From The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg

On a recent vacation day, I took Jack to see “The Polar Express” in 4D.

Our seats shook as the train hurtled across glaciers. We smelled simmering chocolate when the onscreen children sipped hot cocoa. And Jack nearly tipped out of his seat with excitement when snow flew through the theater, a dose of the North Pole on Charleston Harbor.

“Is this real?” he kept whispering, his senses overloaded as he squeezed my hand.

“Do you believe it’s real?” I whispered back.

“I think Santa can make anything happen,” he said, eyes wide as reindeer pawed the sky.

On the brink of turning six, Jack’s belief is entirely whole and potent. A nearly palpable halo hovering in the darkness of the theater. It cradled the two of us in that moment, holding hands and holding space for all of the possibilities Santa provides.

Uncharted

2010-11-15T11:16:00.000-05:00

Drifting along the sun-sparked Edisto River yesterday, Seabrook Island looked uncharted.

“What island is that?” Jack asked several times, disoriented by the new perspective. A native without a compass.

The elbowed end of Pelican Beach served as a backdrop to the dozens of bottlenose dolphins feeding and frisking around us. They porpoised in trios just beyond reach of the bow, occasionally spyhopping to gaze back at us. The curved grins of their opened mouths parodied our stunned expressions.

This familiar landscape still surprises me. The dualities: salt marsh and open ocean; beach and maritime forest; island and mainland. A constant lesson in cradling the divide, remaining open to the magic in the mundane.

Under the surprising warmth of a November sun, Jack seemed as nonplussed by his surroundings as I was amazed. He stood with Harvey at the wheel, learning to navigate the waves as they talked about pirates, sunken fishing boats and fuel gauges.

Later that evening, I watched Jack on our back deck, absorbing one of the searing sunsets that frame our marsh this time of year. Pink to purple to navy blue.

“Mommy, I see the first star,” he said through the screen, too excited to keep his wish tucked to himself.

“I wished for another day just like today,” he whispered in the twilight, revealing the wonder that was there all along. “And I hope I dream about dolphins.”

Relativity

2010-11-08T10:37:00.000-05:00

In the rear view mirror, I see Jack watching the teenagers in the school parking lot cluster around a battered BMW with their bags of breakfast biscuits and oversized Red Bulls.

Jack calls them the “big boys,” a gangly, flip-flopped tribe who elbow and shoulder one another with self-conscious physicality.

Their laughter and one-upping putdowns filter through the sunroof in a language from another lifetime, a dialect I never spoke. Sixteen is its own country.

“I can’t wait to be big,” Jack says from his car seat as he clutches his rocket back pack and waits for the teacher on duty to open his door.

Three months ago, he felt big beginning kindergarten, but now he senses the divide. An introduction to the theory of relativity via the carpool line.

As Jack leans over the front seat for a quick kiss, I can see all of his ages layered under his constellation of freckles. A pentimento in the planes of his face.

And then he jumps out of the car with confidence, leaving me in the shadow of something bigger than I am ready to imagine.

In a fog

2010-11-04T11:30:00.000-04:00

Although I always look for the omen of dorsal fins, I didn’t expect to see dolphins today. Fog hemmed the beach up to the ruffle of sea oats in the dunes and distorted the sound of the waves into a surge of static.

“Mind yourself in this weather so that you don’t get lost,” said the only other beachwalker, her pop of pink jacket glowing in the gloom.

I wasn’t worried about losing my place. I have navigated this marsh-rimmed curve of sand for so long now that it reset my inner compass. This haven forever feels like true north.

As I walked, the fog channeled my view to the few feet surrounding me, shadowing everything else in opaque mist. Forcing me out of my hopscotching head and into the moment. A mapless cartographer, simply holding space.

The dolphins arrived then, so close I could see their dark eyes eyeing me. A mother and calf sluicing through the gray, the fog muffling their explosive breaths into hiccups.

They disappeared as quickly as they had arrived, making me wonder if I had imagined their fleeting presence. How easily I rushed to chalk the moment to magical thinking, forgetting the dolphins were likely still there, like so many wishes, hovering below the surface but within reach.

Eavesdropping

2010-11-02T10:27:00.000-04:00

I heard Jack’s laughter filtering down the hall, so sunnyside-up even before a leisurely morning of pancakes and “Shaun the Sheep.”

I put on my robe and stood outside the guest room, where Jack and Buzz Lightyear were perched in bed between Ma and Grandpa, who were visiting for the weekend.

The words floating through the door found me like birds on a telephone wire, dipping and lifting with effortless ease. Pulling me back to Meridian Hills Lane, where Dodie and I stood in her sunny bedroom doorway on countless Sunday mornings, giggling to wake up Papa.

“McGillicuddy, I hear you in my dreams,” he would say in his gentle rumble, eyes still closed as I clambered over the yellow quilt to snuggle against him. “Come give me some sugar and sweeten my morning.”

Even now, the sensory memory skims just under the surface. Feeling tousled and treasured as I tucked myself in between my grandparents. The sanctuary of feeling wholly seen and heard.

Listening to Jack felt like eavesdropping on my past and his future. Standing so fully in the intertidal space between generations, a reverent witness to the ever-widening wake of unconditional love.

Voice lessons

2010-10-25T10:21:00.000-04:00

Jack recently received his first report card, a comprehensive compendium of his kindergarten skills. From language arts and science to work habits and personal conduct, dozens of checked boxes scatter across the page in a Rorschach of his elementary evolution.

Jack’s teacher noted that the only area that needs extra attention is his ability to control his talking and take turns while speaking in a group. Just three years ago, I never could have imagined how happy I would be to put limits on his loquaciousness.

Even now, I can still summon the skein of worry I wove through a year of speech therapy when Jack was two years old. As I wrote here:

While his finger-painting preschool colleagues amassed words by the dozen, Jack's speech was trapped in what I imagined to be an unmapped canyon in his brain that allowed only vowel sounds to echo off the walls of his throat.

Everyone from my parents to the pediatrician said not to worry. After all, Jack was otherwise developmentally sound and used a blend of rudimentary sign language and sheer engaging personality to express himself.

But sometimes you can sense the careening curve of a detour before it presents itself. Unflinchingly, you know before you know. At the time, it wasn't lost on me that I was a writer who worked to conjure words, and my son didn't have any.

What once sounded like a guttural foreign language became a fully fluent voice. From the naturally caffeinated way Jack calls good morning through the bedroom door to the soft lilt as he sings himself to sleep, he fills the bowls of his days with words. He is a hypothesis of a boy, streaming ideas and a limitless range of questions.

“Let’s sit down and talk a bit,” Jack will say with the charm of a mini Matt Lauer. Or lately, he seems to be channeling Papa with his gentle anachronisms: Holy smokes. Oh bother. Geez Louise.

I want to channel these chatty years to memory. Soon enough, I realize he will talk with his thumbs and steep in adolescent silence. But I will listen as long as he lets me.

Requiem and release

2010-10-20T11:15:00.000-04:00

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

~ Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

Over the weekend, Jeannine and I were an audience of two in the poetry section of Garrison Keillor’s – or “GK” as the sales staff called him – bookstore in St. Paul. We lost track of linear time as our hearts and hands paged through Mary Oliver’s existential expanse of words, sharing lines with each other as tears pooled in our eyes.

Whether in laughter or lament, tears rivered just under the surface of our gentle strand of days together.

They began with Jack’s weeping goodbye the night before I left, his words echoing even now. “This is the worst day of my life,” he sobbed, softly hiccuping as he pressed his head against my heart.

Reminding me again of the countless ways of letting go that love requires. The necessary collusion of connection.

I cried when I saw the photo of Maya – sleepy-eyed and silver-muzzled – that Jeannine’s mom left for me in the guest room. Just when I thought I had sealed the grief over her summer death, Jeannine’s trio of easygoing greyhounds softened the scar.

For timeless spans of minutes each day, Tuuli, Griffin and Rook took turns leaning against me, sentinels of spirit as they needled their narrow noses into my pockets, under my knees or into the beckoning cup of my hands. Affection without expectation. And as they leaned, I began to lean, as well – into requiem, release and possibility.

I wiped away tears out at the barn as I watched Jeannine work with Georgia, guiding her around the ring under a blaze of blue sky. Georgia trotted in circles that began to resemble the whorls of a labyrinth, Jeannine so sure-footed at the very center. Even when she is not able to see herself that way, I see that in her. Unconditionally and without judgment. We have done that for each other for more than half a lifetime now.

Tears sparked as I hugged Jeannine goodbye at the airport, the bookend to our days of conversation. Not so much an ending as a pause. A postcard we can pocket and pull out again and again, written in our wordless, emotional shorthand. The sentiment of feeling entirely seen.

Comfort trip

2010-10-13T11:01:00.000-04:00

Jack frowned into his spaghetti last night as snowy egrets traced lazy figure eights in the twilight. For the last few weeks he has fretted over my upcoming long weekend with Jeannine.

“I don’t know why you have to leave me,” he pouted, sounding more like a jilted lover than a wilted kindergartner.

Because Derek travels so often, Jack understands the cycle of departures and homecomings. How absence pools into new tributaries of appreciation.

However, I suspect Jack is less worried about my absence than his shifting sense of presence while I am away. After all, he is accustomed to the way I rudder his days, serving as both north star and nudge.

Like the acorns and shells that spill from his pockets, Jack trails pieces of himself and trusts me to reassemble them into a reflection. Or as he recently described it, “I want you to know these things. It makes everything seem for real.”

I understand this liminal divide. The untethered transition from mother to other that takes place when I travel alone. I feel its keel on takeoff, when the familiar islands anchored along my river-fed coastline look more like shifting spines of migrating whales than the solid ground of home.

I pulled Jack into my lap at the dinner table, comforting him after the words ran out. As he nestled against me, I thought how this trip is less about leaving him and more about leaning into myself. A reminder of all of the possibilities that linger for both of us in the reunion on the other side of letting go.

Memory

2010-10-07T10:48:00.000-04:00

"I'm starting to think I should keep a list of things to tell you," Dodie said during one of our recent phone conversations. The weekly calls may last for ten minutes or bloom into the fullness of an hour, depending on her stamina.

At 93, my grandmother is beginning to feel the fault lines of her memory. Without warning, seismic synapses collapse a trail of thought or an entire span of years into rubble and revelation. She stands witness, recognizing what she can’t remember.

I resisted the urge to placate, to say I, too, would be lost without my clutter of lists. Instead, I simply asked Dodie how she feels about the sieve and slip of her memory.

“It’s like searching for something in my pocketbook that I know is there, but I just can’t find it,” she said. “But sometimes I find something I wasn’t even looking for.”

And with that, she told me how she had just remembered the day more than sixty years ago when my grandfather issued an ultimatum after repeated proposals of marriage.

“Dorothy, either you marry me at the end of March or not at all,” she mimicked and then laughed, remembering how rakishly exasperated he was, how nervous about marriage she had been until that moment.

“And then he kissed me,” she paused, pulling me back to her parents’ living room along with her. Reminding me that the heart has its own chronology.

“I still remember that kiss was my yes.”

Wishing well

2010-10-05T11:01:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday morning, Jack tapped a code on my bedroom door. Three soft knocks followed by a pause. Then three exuberant knocks before he opened the door and stretched out on Derek’s side of the bed, his freckled nose inches from mine.

“Do you know what I was saying with each knocking sound?” he whispered. “It was a secret message. I. Love. You.”

I squeezed his hand three times in response as we curled together, a family of two for the weekend while Derek was out of town.

“You are my beautiful sleeping mommy,” he whispered again before launching into an ode to pancakes.

I thought of another mother’s incredulity the day before at a birthday party, surprised by stealthy sweetness when Jack snuck up to kiss my cheek for no reason.

“Is he always like this?” she asked. I told her I wished I could bottle this big-hearted boy who brims with undiluted affection and compliments, the ultimate balm to a 39-year-old’s self-esteem.

As Jack and I listened to the laughing gulls trill their wake-up calls in the glow of the marsh outside the open window, I remembered the dark contrast of our first solo stretch of days together when Derek traveled during the handful of weeks after Jack’s birth.

The bottles lined up on the counter, stark sentinels in the bleary-eyed numbness of night. My fumbling sense of isolating ineptitude in what felt like a skewed parallel of my former life, unsure of nearly everything except a fierceness of love. Gripping the phone as I cried to Derek, cried with Jack, cried myself into the abyss and back again.

“I don’t even know what I don’t know,” I managed to scrawl in a journal, a solitary line in a shuffle of empty pages, the hollowness echoing even in the fullness of this moment.

I wish I could knock on the door of memory and send a reassuring code to the mother I was then. Slide a photo under the crevice of time of Jack and me later that Saturday after our lunch date, standing in front of the wishing pool at the marina.

Jack clutched his penny and wished aloud. “I wish everything could always be as great as right now.”

I tossed my penny along with his. I couldn’t wish for anything more.

Runaway

2010-10-01T12:09:00.001-04:00

I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring ...

~ W.S. Merwin, "The Love of October"

I ran away from home twelve Octobers ago.

In the span of a single frenzied month, Derek and I evacuated our lives. We quit our jobs, sold our suburban house, and moved a thousand miles away from our hometown in the heartland to this barrier island tucked against the wings of the Lowcountry.

Poised on the edge of the Atlantic, it’s the kind of place that is so far from carry-out conveniences that most people marvel at the commute required to do just about anything. But I’ve learned that being miles from the mainstream rarely matters. I would rather be five minutes from a sandbar than a strip mall.

The leap remains one of the most exhilarating, freeing and defining decisions we’ve made as a couple. Destiny by way of geography.

Derek and I walked to Captain Sam’s inlet this morning, the luminous, sand-packed sanctuary that divides a sweeping hush of salt marsh from the rollicking open ocean. We’ve navigated this curve of beach for sixteen years now, and it never loses its luster.

Seeing the marsh begin to shrug into the golden hue of a new season sparks my own sense of transition. Because of my sea change a dozen years ago, October now feels like my personal new year. An internal equinox of reckoning and reflection.

And just now realizing that instead of running away from home, I was running toward it all along.

Redundant and reverent

2010-09-28T10:53:00.000-04:00

As we stood knee deep in the sun-warmed waves of the receding tide, the dolphins outnumbered us.

Derek, Jack and I were the lone audience of three on the wide swath of beach, blissfully empty of summer visitors.

The pod streamed close enough that we could catch flashes of eyes and hear the syncopation of forceful sighs. A singular sound that still makes me hold my breath in response.

The dolphins porpoised into the air, fluid sine curves of flukes as they foraged and fished just beyond the sandbar.

"Look, Jack, most people never get to see wild dolphins like this," I said, reaching for his hand. "And here they are, practically in our backyard."

In typical five-year-old fashion, Jack was more interested in the bloated remains of a jellyfish, with all the visual appeal of a soggy sandwich bag. As an island native, dolphins are as common to him as the crawdads I lured out of the trickle of Cool Creek as a child. More redundant than reverent.

I wonder if any of this will splash from his memory someday. If dolphins will be a touchstone that triggers the larger arc of his coastal childhood.

Or if this moment is simply mine to hold, savoring the dolphins spiraling in the sun. My family and theirs, sharing the same sea.

Monarchy

2010-09-24T10:33:00.000-04:00

This morning, the jasmine that consumes the front porch glowed orange under the wide eye of the harvest moon. Monarch butterflies nested there overnight, wings shuttered until sunrise.

On an island that doesn’t subscribe to traditional seasonal triggers, the annual Monarch migration heralds fall to me. They descend as quickly as they disappear. Hovering in the lantana by the crab dock. Swirling in the sea oats before soaring over waves. Even alighting along the knobby spine of the lone alligator glowering in Palmetto Lake.

Yesterday afternoon, when the sun flamed over the Bohicket River, leaving our back deck in breezy shadow, Jack sat quietly, hoping one of the fluttering flock would land on his finger. He looked like something out of an animated Disney film, a patient prince prepared to charm the creatures in his salt marsh monarchy.

Through the open window, I heard him murmur to the butterflies. “Hi there, little guys. I am your friend.” Still such sweetness coexists with his karate-kicking, zombie-chasing veneer.

Staring up at the clouds, Jack didn’t realize a butterfly landed on his shoulder, doing its shuffling soft shoe along his sleeve. I startled him when I whispered through the screen, and the butterfly winged skyward.

"I didn’t even know it was there,” he said, slumping in disappointment. “I missed the whole thing.”

But I witnessed his wish come true with a certainty and clarity I lack in my life. Wishes hovering on the periphery, just beyond sight. It’s so easy to forget that sometimes it just takes a loving gaze to see what was right there all along.

Daughter of the bride

2010-09-23T08:30:00.000-04:00

More than nine years ago, I stood by my mom’s side when she married Paul, hope and happiness soaring in the soft May air. The pleasures of pledging vows when the future seems to ribbon toward a gentle horizon.

Over time – and especially during the past week – I’ve witnessed those vows translated into the countless small acts of courage and connection, haplessness and humor that form a marriage as unique as the two people in it.

We all know the words, the honoring and cherishing in sickness and in health part. But it’s something else entirely to watch two people choose one another again and again through it all. The dailiness of I do.

When I wrote the following essay to commemorate their wedding, I had no way of knowing the love between the lines would be even truer today than it was then.

*********

My mom announced her engagement on my answering machine. It was one of those rare middle-of-the-night phone calls delivering good news, and I missed it. Submerged in a flu-induced New Year’s Eve hibernation, my husband and I had turned off the phone ringers that evening and called it a year.

I played the message the next morning, expecting to hear loud greetings from a missed party. Instead, I heard my mom’s happily tearful voice announcing the perfect introduction to a new millennium: She was getting married after more than a dozen years of single parenthood, self-taught independence and dating misadventures.

I immediately phoned home, hating the hundreds of miles between us. This kind of news is best relished in a kitchen counter conversation. A lengthy, looping, mother-daughter discussion held while perched atop the kitchen counters, preferably with ice cream.

When my mom answered the phone, I let out a celebratory shriek and burst into tears. It’s an inherited response. Wordless joy, overflowing pride, abundant surprise – all tear-worthy in our emotional shorthand.

As my mom described the evening’s events that led to Paul’s proposal, memories clicked like so many slides across a silent screen. A progression of shifting relationships that define personal evolutions.

I remember my mom curling into bed with me the night she and my dad announced their separation, anchoring me in love even as she spiraled into unknowable grief.

I remember telling my mom about my own engagement as we waded in the balmy curve of currents off the Florida Keys, hugging and laughing under an October sun.

I remember driving my mom to her surprise fiftieth birthday party and watching her walk into a room of women who were family by choice, friends through school and weddings and babysitting club and Lake Michigan summers and unexpected transitions.

I remember watching my mom speak at her mother’s funeral, now a motherless daughter after years of tackling the daily, open-hearted tasks of parenting a parent.

I remember my mom preparing for her first date with Paul, wary of yet another endless dinner with a stranger who might drone about himself through dessert and then calculate her share of the bill to the penny.

Instead, the dinner opened a relationship that encompasses past lives, laughter, loss, grown children, compromise and hope. I listened long distance to my mom’s giddiness and incredulity at meeting such a gentle, thoughtful man. Especially now, a beginning after so many endings.

As months went by, I felt like a junior high school confidante, an eager accomplice in the unfurling he said-she said girl talk that somehow makes a relationship feel more real. I even fell a little in love myself. How could I not adore the man who so clearly complements my mother?

And now my mom is getting married. This time, without the veil, trousseau or parents to give her away. While she’s quite capable of giving herself away, I somehow feel responsible for my mom’s heart. For better or for worse, I am a maternal daughter. Taking care, watching out, keeping the peace.

As an unmatronly matron of honor who has a 30-year history with the bride, I feel I am giving part of the woman I know to Paul. This woman who loves chocolate éclairs, golden retrievers, and late afternoons at the beach with a vodka tonic and a good book. This woman who is the first to ask what she can do for you, roots for Indiana University basketball, and instinctively knows the difference between who and whom. This woman who sleeps too little, gives too much and has a gift for hearing what is unsaid.

I think a certain amount of grace is inherent in any transition. For so many years, my mom has been that grace for me, propelling me forward with unconditional love. Now it’s my turn. Next month, when my mom says, “I do,” I always want her to know that I do, too.

Heart to heart

2010-09-20T10:54:00.000-04:00

I guess we’re all one phone call from our knees. ~ Mat Kearney, “Closer To Love”

It was the kind of call that normally comes in the middle of the night.

The shrill alarm that divides the darkness into dream and nightmare. The revelation that pulls you out of bed and onto your knees, clutching the phone, your heart, your disbelief.

But my mom’s call came on a sunny afternoon last week. From a thousand miles away, I immediately heard the catch in her voice, a hollow undertone. The knowing before the knowing.

A routine medical procedure for my dear stepdad turned into a transfer to the cardiac intensive care unit for a hidden heart condition. An internal riptide threatened his arterial ebb and flow. Simultaneously menacing and manageable.

“I was really doing just fine until I heard your voice,” my mom said, as my tears flowed with hers.

Because that is what our voices do for one another. That unconditional voice that is ally and anchor, mirror and messenger.

When I was four months pregnant with Jack, I remember calling my mom during the relentless weeks I waited for amniocentesis results regarding suspected severe spinal damage. Hers was the soothing voice I internalized when I cried in the cavern of the shower, on my knees in supplication. Hers was the voice that celebrated with me five months later when I traced the flow of Jack’s spine, the vertebrae as supple as a strand of prayer beads.

I feel the overwhelming privilege of being that voice for my mom during these recent days of crisis and this morning of celebration as my stepdad returns home.

I lift my own voice with gratitude for the trusted chorus that surrounds me, the voices that bridge countless canyons and deliver me, sure-footed and certain, into the terrain of not being alone.

About face

2010-09-15T10:14:00.000-04:00

I noticed the woman as soon as I walked in the medical office complex downtown. She stood beneath the soaring Betty Anglin Smith painting of a technicolor salt marsh that always soothes me in this otherwise gray space.

With her elegant plume of white hair, impeccably pressed beige linen suit and pearls, she reminded me of my grandmother. Shoulders curving as she clutched her handbag, the woman slowly approached me as I waited for the elevator.

“I hope I’m not bothering you, but I have a favor to ask,” she said, her voice steeped in South of Broad softness. “There is something about elevators that terrifies me, and I wonder if you might ride along with me since my daughter isn’t here yet. I’ve watched a dozen people go by, but I thought you had such a kind face.”

Such a kind face.

The words startled me out of the kinetic clutch and clamor of thoughts that always accompany me to the neurologist. That morning, I thought of my face as a liability. The nerves misfiring in a spontaneous subterfuge. Less of a face than a manicured mask for everything skimming just under the surface.

I offered the woman my elbow as the elevator doors opened. She grasped my arm and closed her eyes as we settled into the small space. Silent strangers in kindred collusion. Part trepidation, part meditation.

We reached the fifth floor. Oncology. I quickly realized the elevator was only the beginning for this woman.

“Thank you, dear,” she said, patting my arm before walking into whatever came next.

Alone in the elevator, I thought of the countless kind faces that bolster and buoy me. And how grateful I was that morning not to be just another face in the crowd.

No cause for alarm

2010-09-10T10:36:00.000-04:00

In her dreams she saw them, as large as mountains and bluer than the sky. In her dreams she heard them singing, their voices like the wind. In her dreams they leapt from the water and called her name. ~Dyan Sheldon, The Whales’ Song

Jack came home from kindergarten on high alert yesterday. He participated in his first alarm-blaring fire drill, as well as a discussion of “school lockdown,” which he cannily interpreted to mean “what to do if a bad guy enters the building.”

Such a sea change from my memories of elementary school, where the only lockdown came during the annual tornado drill. I remember the entire class tucked nose to knees, as if blessing the ground in our unlikely communion by the coat-stuffed cubbies.

Throughout the afternoon and into dinner Jack kept returning to the what-ifs of worst case scenarios, all of his questions hovering in a cloud that surely would rain nightmares by midnight without intervention.

When alarms go off in my life, I head for the waves and scan the horizon for dolphins, the totems in my personal mythology.

After Papa’s death eighteen years ago, when I returned to work at the Dolphin Research Center, I walked the coral bridge to my favorite dolphin’s lagoon. In greeting, Annessa spontaneously flipped flukes over fins in the air before meeting me by the floating dock.

When I knelt down, she placed her scarred rostrum in my palm and then ran it along my forearm. While whistling her signature strain, it seemed as though she traced my pulse to soothe my muffled heart. I’ve never felt anything like it.

Last night, I chose to calm Jack with a lushly illustrated book about humpback whales that sing to children who dare to listen. We talked about the way whales call to one another across miles, whether in alarm or in love. How they watch out for each other at depths we can only imagine, bound together by song and sea.

Later, seeing Jack curled in the lambent glow of his nightlight, my thoughts skipped from lockdowns to the lullabies we share with one another. All of the ways we ward off the night. And I hoped that in his dreams, Jack heard the whales call his name.

Better at hello

2010-09-07T16:11:00.000-04:00

“I wish we never had to say goodbye to anyone,” Jack mumbled on the drive to school this morning, still sitting in the shadow of his farewell hug to his aunt who stayed with us over the holiday weekend.

Unwittingly, he gave voice to my inner chorus over the past few months, this summer quilted with a lining of lingerings and laments. One goodbye after another that rendered me both open-hearted and empty-handed.

Watching Jack’s freckled frown in the rearview mirror, one of my favorite lines surfaced from Out of Africa, “I’m better at hello.”

It reminded me of the sprawling notes my mom and I tuck under pillows and into purses at the end of each visit. The immediacy a rush of words provides, a tangible way to prolong our time together even as we draw apart. And how in the following days, we return to those envelopes again and again, unfolding the comfort of hello.

By the time Jack and I arrived at school, he had zippered his regret along with his backpack. Our goodbye was swift and easy, now the familiar ritual of daily departure.

Through the sunroof I heard his lilting greeting to his teacher, piping a double emphasis skyward, “Hello, hello!”

2010-09-02T07:22:00.000-04:00

This is for all of the women who nurture me with such tenderness and generosity of spirit. And for all of us who are mothering families, dreams and new ways of being.

Bundle of nerves

2010-08-31T11:43:00.000-04:00

But you've still got a crack running up your side, big enough for a sapling to grow out of. Only no one sees it. Nobody sees it. Everybody thinks you're one whole piece, and so they treat you maybe not so gentle as they would if they could see that crack. ~ Rebecca Wells from Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

I rarely feel as humble as I do in my neurologist’s waiting room.

Inevitably, I arrive fretting the usual frenzy of superficial details, my mind skittering from the packed parking garage to the perplexities of insurance coverage.

But when I turn from the reception desk to take my seat, novel splayed in my lap, I become aware that I am the only one there alone. Without a caretaker. Or a wheelchair. Or a computer-generated voice.

My monkey mind somersaults to mindfulness. Although my condition hides itself well, I am connected to everyone in the room by virtue of a nervous system gone haywire.

I am a literal bundle of nerves, trying to decipher the daily Morse code of my body. The diagnosis on my sheaf of insurance forms says trigeminal neuralgia, which is a formal way of saying that without medication, it feels like someone is tracing a lit Fourth of July sparkler along the right side of my face.

But we all have something – or hapless bouquets of somethings – don’t we? Hidden faultlines and exposed frailties. The scars and cracks and breaking points that continually rearrange and redefine wholeness.

Each of us is a waiting room.

I think of the half a dozen turtles I saw communing on a log in Palmetto Lake this morning. Their delicate heads arched toward the sun. The uncommon beauty of their warped, cracked shells. Open to the sky, letting in the light.

Sun salutations

2010-08-26T19:54:00.000-04:00

“Good morning and salutations, chickens!” Jack called to the bustling Rosebank Farms flock as we drove by on the way to kindergarten. It’s been months since we finished reading Charlotte’s Web, and I laughed when the savvy spider’s singular greeting somehow surfaced from his memory.

Like the surrounding acres of sunflowers nodding skyward, Jack is perennially sunnyside up at this time of day as he searches for animal shapes in the clouds, reveals snippets of last night’s dreams and waves to the caffeinated crew in the passing fire engine.

Now that Derek takes Jack to school most days, I've missed this morning ritual that feels less like a commute and more like a communion.

While the pick-up routine morphs more into a car seat confessional of the day’s checks and balances, the drop-off is prelude and promise. My gentle reminder that there are many ways to greet the day.

As we turned into the school’s parking lot, Jack reminded me that I was not allowed to get out of the car, as we did at preschool.

“I’m a big kid now, and I walk in by myself,” he said as he gathered his gear on his own. Although thankfully, he’s not yet big enough to be embarrassed to lean over the front seat for a hug and a kiss goodbye.

Truthfully, he does look big jumping out of the car in his uniform with his rocket backpack and R2-D2 lunch bag. Greeting the teacher on duty before walking through the entryway into whatever comes next.

I paused a moment in the car, no doubt stalling the well-oiled drop-off process behind me as I watched Jack, briefly holding onto exactly who he was this morning.

And just like a big kid, he didn’t look back.

Fearless

2010-08-24T06:00:00.001-04:00

Jack and I waded through the sun-warmed shallows of the sandbar to reach the shelf of waves pulled into plumes by the approaching full moon. This is the first summer he has ventured this far from shore without a life jacket.

Recently, Jack’s swim instructor warned me about his newfound fearlessness in the water. He has just enough of an idea of what he is doing to have absolutely no idea what he is leaping into at any given time. Which is to say he is one of us.

I watched as he faced the waves with 37 pounds of swagger, a pint-sized Poseidon who still lets one hand bridge the current to hold mine.

“That wave was serious business!” he yelped, sputtering salt water as he catapulted into my lap.

I am beginning to teach Jack how to body surf. How to angle into the brink of white water between trust and fear. How to channel physics in his favor.

I remember so many summers ago when my mom taught me the same lessons in Lake Michigan. I would hold my breath as surf subsumed her, waiting until I saw her arrow toward the tideline. I instinctively trusted her strength. I still do.

And now Jack looks to me as a talisman of trust. “How do you know which wave is the best one?” he wonders.

I tell him it has to do more with feeling than fact. That he will never really know until he gets carried away and still lands on his feet, laughing.

Deliberate gracelessness

2010-08-20T09:51:00.000-04:00

I was the lone person in a parade of pelicans at the beach this morning. Dozens upon dozens soared and swooped into the rush of retreating waves.

The pelicans skimmed the water with military precision before catching wind currents, gaining lift into sunlight and then spiraling head first into unsuspecting schools of fish.

They sleuthed in silence, without the squawk and squabble of the fussy cliques of gulls that guard the tideline.

I noticed how the pelicans fished with a deliberate gracelessness, becoming feathered cyclones of tumbling wings and flailing webbed feet. One crash landing after another before shuttling skyward, streaming rainbows from their wings.

I have always been more like the flittering flocks of sandpipers, so tidy and tightly wound as they endlessly maneuver themselves two steps ahead of the waves.

But during this morning’s avian air show I wished for the gift of internal gracelessness, the letting go that precedes a limitless liftoff.

First day of kindergarten

2010-08-18T09:55:00.000-04:00

At the school open house on Monday night, with adults folded knees-to-chin in kindergarten chairs, Jack’s new teacher distributed information sheets for parents to complete.

In addition to the standard recitation of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, she asked us to use five words to describe Jack’s character strengths and challenges.

The exercise felt like a personality haiku, distilling a spirit into syllables. Think about it – how would you lasso those you love most in a handful of words?

Derek and I created a thesaurus of a list before settling on the following strengths: curious, empathetic, kind, creative, sunny. And primary challenge: staying in the present moment.

The list leapt into our bed this morning, looking like Billy Elliot in stripy Gap pajamas.

“I can’t wait for kindergarten!” Jack crowed, bouncing with adrenaline. His mind already rocketing past breakfast to get to the new toys in the classroom.

As he snuggled in for a fleeting hug, I thought about those ten words. An essential life list. And although Jack is the one beginning kindergarten today, he is teaching me about the kind of person I most want to be.

Radiance and shadow

2010-08-13T10:51:00.000-04:00

The world spins as it spins.

Your life is on that same axis,

half shadow, half radiance

and turning, always turning.

~ Maya Stein (with thanks to Patti Digh)

Jack opened our bedroom door this morning with tears in his eyes. Before feelings became words, he folded against me, both small and large at the same time.

“Do you need a cuddle?” I asked, trying to anchor the morning melancholy with familiar physicality.

Jack climbed into my lap, pretzeling his lankiness until his head tucked under my chin. Only then did I feel him loosen and relax against me.

“Did you have a bad dream?” I whispered against the nape of his neck, beginning to unravel the skeins of his sadness. Wondering if this last day of preschool is weighing on him.

“No, I was just crying a little for you, because I missed you,” he replied.

“I’m here right now,” I answered, hugging him. “I’m always here for you.”

“Yes, but you’re not always here the same way, doing all the same things,” he said. “Sometimes I just want you to stay with me, always the same.”

Later, as I dropped Jack off at preschool for the last time, watching him do his skip-hop of happiness as he carried celebratory Toy Story cupcakes to the kitchen, his earlier words pooled along with my own tears.

The radiance of the certainty that he is ready for this transition twined with the shadow that he will not stay with me, always the same.

Accidental zen

2010-08-11T12:30:00.000-04:00

When I arrived for preschool pickup yesterday, as always, Maddie came running toward me with her hair bow flailing and arms outstretched, a hug in motion.

“Your mommy is here, Jack!” she squealed, as the other kids circled and swarmed, eager to share the day’s paintings and playground squabbles. Determined to delay nap time as long as possible.

Jack lingered in the reading corner, on the edge of the fray. He prefers to wait until we’re in the car to unpack the morning. His daily car seat confessional, scattering words out the window.

“You’re going to miss this rock star status,” Meredith laughed, as she handed me Jack’s backpack. An unexpected grace achieved through the simple act of open-hearted presence, a lesson that flows over me again and again.

Already, I feel nostalgic for this cartwheeling cohort. I’ve held their hands, their skinned knees, their secrets. Witnessed this finite intersection of play and personhood, the communion of continual becoming.

And I don’t get to see what happens next. Again, the nudge of not-knowing, the lure into the liminal divide.

Or, as the children chant, “You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.”

A dose of accidental zen. I’ll take it.

Beginning's end

2010-08-09T11:42:00.000-04:00

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

~ From “Closing Time” by Semisonic

As Jack begins his last week at preschool, I am starting to pack away piles of his artwork, adding a new layer to the archaeological dig in the attic.

A painted lobster with a footprint body and handprint claws. A stained glass butterfly fashioned out of wax paper and melted crayons. A tipsy, tissue paper snowman crafted in honor of last winter’s five minutes of snow.

Penciled love letters blur across a construction paper kaleidoscope. I love you, Mommy. You are my best mommy. You are my Molly.

The papier-mache heart feels like my own right now, cracked at the seams but holding together at the center. Equal parts glitter and grit. A reluctant valentine.

I felt the same way four years ago when I dropped Jack off at school for his first morning. Wrenched by transition, the letting go that love requires.

As I walked to the parking lot in tears, another mother touched my shoulder. “I promise it gets better,” she said, the reassuring reprise passed and pocketed from parent to parent. “He will really grow here.”

She was right, of course. At the time, I never expected how much we both would grow more fully into ourselves. How preschool would teach me a new kind of presence, a graham cracker-fueled meditation on being in the moment.

A Montessori mindfulness played out on the playground – from temper tantrums to transcendence, all before lunch.

Now putting the lid on Jack’s paintings and Play-Doh pulls me to a bittersweet brink, the bridge of this beginning’s end.

Bonus dad

2010-08-04T11:47:00.000-04:00

“I wish I had a bonus dad, too,” Jack sighed as he crafted a thank you note to my mom and stepdad yesterday. “You are so lucky.”

I hesitated for a moment, hovering on an internal zipline between no and yes. Although I don’t wish for Jack to endure the fallout of a fractured family, I love that he recognizes our incredible good fortune to have Paul in our lives.

Paul is so much more than a stepparent stereotype that I call him my bonus dad. A father by fate.

When my mom married Paul nine years ago, in my mind the wedding moonlighted as a Father’s Day celebration. The day I became a daughter again at age 30.

While we don’t get to choose our families, I feel that Paul was chosen for me. Or maybe I should say we chose this relationship with each other, this entirely uncomplicated connection. A filial friendship between a second father and a fifth daughter.

Paul makes it easy. He is a fierce hugger with a gentle soul. He is the first to extend his hand, his heart, his offer to help. He hums with good humor, even when he is elbow-deep in dirty dishes or on his knees assembling Thomas the Train tracks for the five hundredth time.

He frequently voices his affection: I love you. I’m proud of you. Drive carefully. When his blue-eyed gaze meets mine, I feel seen, just as I am.

And isn’t that what we all want? For someone to truly see us and love us in spite of ourselves?

So when Jack wishes for a bonus dad, I understand. I attach my wish to his, the hope that he experiences the joy of finding father figures when he least expects them.

Farming philosophy

2010-08-02T12:59:00.000-04:00

A recent family field trip to see the resident creatures and characters at Rosebank Farms reminded me of the summer six years ago when I went to visit my best friend, Jeannine, in St. Paul.

One evening, we traveled to the farm where she had honed her abundant skills in animal-assisted therapy as part of her social work graduate program. Windows down and conversation at our usual full throttle, we pulled into a gravel driveway, welcomed by bleating sheep, a lively tribe of mismatched dogs and an offer to herd grazing horses into the fresh nests of their stalls.

I quickly learned the appropriate hostess gift when you are invited for dinner on a self-sustaining farm. You set aside your own ineptitude and pitch in, trusting the animals to guide you. After all, these gentle-spirited horses were trained to work with children and families in emotional turmoil – surely they would forgive my clumsy manners and missteps.

What did I know about herding horses? It seemed as likely as herding the river otters that scamper through the soupy high tide of my backyard salt marsh. But even then, Jeannine had an instinctive equine equilibrium, that uncanny sixth sense that serves her so well now.

After the horses were slotted in their stalls, we headed off to meet the humans by the grill, but were sidetracked by a shout that Matilda the sheep had jumped over a newly installed fence to graze in a tall buffet of grasses.

Apparently, Matilda was the wily one of the group, prone to fits of culinary mischief that inevitably left her bloated and belly-up in the fields of her choosing, too satiated to move. I instantly liked her. It took four of us to coax Matilda back into her pen, her nose tilted toward the sky as she scissored her hooves like stilettos.

Animals in their places for the moment, we humans clustered together and set a small bonfire to ward off the mosquitoes that were rising with the moon.

Looking back, the rest of the party falls away, and I see the two of us shadowed in firelight and lit by the uncertainty and unnecessarily high self-expectations that have plagued us since we met at 16. The reckoning redux that defies rationality.

Now poised on the brink of 40, I think Jeannine and I could use a master class in Matilda, a free pass into far-flung pastures. A reminder to fret less over minding the rest of the flock and focus more on shaping a spirit that refuses to be fenced in.

Leave taking

2010-07-29T12:34:00.000-04:00

Jack still likes to hold my hand as we walk under the live oaks that line the preschool parking lot. He swings my fingers as he downloads his day, a walking Wikipedia of batik painting, cloud formations and underwater volcanoes. He learns more in one morning than I do in a month.

When we reach the car, I unlock the door and deposit his back pack and an art project that sheds a layer of glitter over the ubiquitous sand box that is the back seat.

Before Jack climbs into his car seat, he turns to me and says, “You may leave now.” Pause and a small bow of the head. “Your majesty.”

I get the “your majesty” a lot lately, a comical, courtly remnant from last month’s classroom focus on fairytales. But the “you may leave now” is new. And a little startling, even though he says it with a guileless smile.

Preparing for the kindergarten carpool line at his new school next month, Jack has learned to buckle his seatbelt by himself. He no longer needs me to vault halfway across the sedan to do it for him, a graceless, skirt-flipping Cirque du Soleil maneuver that I’ve performed for the last five years.

You may leave now.

The words continue to echo as I think of Jack’s unspooling independence – pouring cereal, brushing teeth, setting the table. The seemingly small tasks that shape a larger sense of self-satisfaction.

I understand the goal of this life-altering gig is to teach Jack how to leave me again and again, to step forward into himself. To teach myself how to say, “You may leave now.”

And if I learn the grace of letting go, I hope he will invite me to stay.

Calling card

2010-07-28T08:45:00.000-04:00

“Well, Molly, I was just thinking about you,” my grandmother says every time she answers the phone and hears my voice. Those welcoming words have greeted me for as long as I can remember.

Throughout my childhood – in the days before caller ID – Dodie and I developed a calling code. I would dial and let the phone ring once, then hang up and call back. She always responded with a smile in her voice that channeled her unique, unconditional delight that made me feel wholly heard.

“How did you know I was thinking about you, little gal?” she would ask, stretching the cord of her red rotary phone to the small desk in her kitchen, where she could watch cardinals dart around the backyard feeder out the window. “Let’s sit down and have a good visit. Tell me everything.”

Although a thousand miles separate us now, our weekly phone conversations still have an easy, around-the-corner camaraderie as we unpack our lives for each other.

We laugh about the cliques in Dodie’s retirement community that remind her of her Queen of the May college years at the Kappa house.

We reminisce about our vacations together on Long Boat Key and Marco Island, where we would walk and talk for miles as we searched the shallows for sand dollars.

We share the wonder and wherewithal of being the mothers of boys. Dodie relishes my stories about Jack, and she relays vivid memories of washing cloth diapers by hand in the basement’s gloom and traveling by train to introduce my infant father to my grandfather, who was stationed in Texas during the war.

Lately, we talk openly about loss. Loss of beloved people and pets, loss of independence, loss of daily details that skitter and slide just out of memory’s reach.

The lost and found labyrinth that coils through our lives – and the lift we receive from one another.

This is my birthday card to Dodie, who turns 93 today. My confidante and co-conspirator. My second mother. The person I can’t wait to call, just because I’m thinking about her.

Fan mail

2010-07-26T07:00:00.001-04:00

My grandfather was a champion letter-writer, deftly capturing the present moment and posting it to the future. I treasure the stack of letters he sent me at DePauw and remember how each envelope eroded the homesickness that permeated my first few months there.

Papa always used a blue felt-tipped pen on heavy white stationery left over from his staid legal days. The bold, embossed return address read “Charles W. Hulett, Attorney-at-Law,” but he drew a squiggly line through his former occupation and replaced it with “Molly’s Biggest Fan” or “Retired Old Goat.”

The loose, nearly indecipherable scrawl sprawled across pages with words crossed out and arrows to help guide the way in place of paragraphs. “Honey, my heart writes faster than my hand,” he noted, writing just like he talked, with a soft-spoken gentleness and a generous eye for the small details that layer a larger life.

While I adored my grandfather, growing up I naturally gravitated toward my grandmother, hoping to emulate her easy elegance as we painted our nails, roamed shopping malls and tucked ourselves into the guest room’s twin beds to watch “Love Boat.” Papa was our partner in crime – the one who painstakingly snapped all of the photos, played the organ for our impromptu family room fashion shows and chauffeured us for chocolate sodas on humid summer nights.

But Papa’s letters introduced me to him as an individual, separate from the perfectly matched set of his marriage. He relayed conversations he had on the golf course, described the manatees that fascinated him on an island vacation, and occasionally shared a bawdy punch line from a joke told at his monthly men’s club. (“Don’t tell your grandmother I told you that!”)

One of my favorite letters recounted the time a fraternity brother asked the then gawky, unassuming Papa to entertain his girlfriend at a party while he was out of town. “He never suspected that I already had my eye on her,” he wrote, trailing the sentence with a string of exclamation points. “I’ve been entertaining her for almost 50 years now, and your grandmother is still the loveliest woman I’ve ever seen.”

I remember casually pulling these letters out of my dormitory mail slot, assuming all of the other slots were filled with similar missives from doting grandfathers. At the time, I didn’t realize that kind of fan mail was a lucky gift, a tangible reminder of my assured place in the world from the first man to tell me from a young age that he thought I was smart, beautiful and talented beyond measure.

Because I grew up with that kind of unconditional love, I couldn’t imagine its absence. I didn’t understand what it was like for the girls boxed around me in the dorm, searching for ways to fill what wasn’t already there.

The letters stopped arriving 18 years ago. Papa died in the spring of my junior year while I interned at a marine mammal facility in the Florida Keys. He and my grandmother had just visited, and he later wrote, “Those dolphins seem to smile as much as you do, sweetheart. I am a proud Papa.”

Papa’s birthday is on Tuesday – the day before my grandmother’s – and I wanted to mark it with this love letter of my own. And a promise that I will one day share his words with Jack, a storied bridge to a singular voice that supports me even now.

Questioning the past

2010-07-21T09:36:00.000-04:00

Divorce was not on my mind as Jack and I walked in from the beach trailing wet towels and empty juice boxes. Still marinating in a sludge of sunblock and saltwater, I was focused on a shower and the alchemy of crafting dinner out of whatever was in the refrigerator.

But I have learned that Jack’s life questions always seem to arrive when my head is somewhere else – in this case, at the bottom of the beach bag.

“What happened to you when Pops and Mimi got divorced?” he asked as I tried to wrestle him out of his swim shirt. An unintentionally sprawling question about my parents, my childhood and the terrain of my internal landscape that I tried to answer as simply as possible.

“Well, Pops moved into an apartment, and my sister and I lived with Mimi,” I explained, somehow reducing the fracture of my family to the basic equation of living arrangements.

“No, I mean what happened to you in here?” he said, putting his palm against my heart as I knelt in front of him. “Were you sad?”

When I said I was very sad at the time, he laced his arms around my neck.

“I feel sad about the child you were,” he mumbled into my neck. “I would have been friends with little Molly.”

In that instant, I was back in my parents’ closet on the September afternoon more than 25 years ago when my dad moved out. I remember feeling as empty as the rack that once held his Brooks Brothers suits. Proof that absence is tangible.

If only I could push through the screened door of memory to show the girl I was the sweetness of the barefooted boy now in my lap. A tether anchoring past to future. The promise of the family I created for myself.

Back seat beats

2010-07-19T13:25:00.000-04:00

Kylie Minogue nearly pushed me out of a moving car and into the Bohicket River.

On the drive out to lunch yesterday, Jack played car seat DJ and requested Kylie’s latest single “All the Lovers,” which currently is in hot rotation on Derek’s synth-happy iPod. As Jack sang along, I could tell that Derek’s gleeful inner 15-year-old was thrilled to share his pinup crush with the next generation.

Like the countless times I’m left puzzled by poop jokes, I distinctly felt my place as the lone female – The Other – in this tribe of boys. I am the one who gravitates toward singer-songwriters – Shawn Colvin, Grace Potter and Neko Case. I am a Live from Daryl’s House groupie, thanks to the teenage years I spent behind a microphone at adult contemporary radio stations.

It makes sense that the Lilith Fair loyalist in me cringes at Kylie and her long-running locomotion.

I have always understood that Derek would share his canon of Brit pop with Jack – the trifecta of Pet Shop Boys, New Order and Morrissey. After all, nothing says lullaby like the grimly apocalyptic “Every Day Is Like Sunday.”

One of our first dates in college involved a group road trip to Chicago to see Erasure and a blatantly bare-bottomed Andy Bell in leather chaps. So, I knew what I was getting into and married Derek anyway.

Over time, Jack has learned the difference between what he calls Mommy’s music versus Daddy’s music. But sometimes there is acoustical confusion.

Recently, Shawn Colvin’s “Live” CD soared in the background as Jack and I puttered and played.

“Is that a real guitar or a computer?” he asked, already a Moby-in-the-making.

Clearly, I have my work cut out for me.

Geometry of a boy

2010-07-15T15:30:00.000-04:00

I watch as Jack performs the rare feat of tucking a navy polo shirt into the crisp khaki shorts that comprise the new uniform he will wear when he begins kindergarten next month. I can already tell the belt is going to take some practice, an affront to his typically untucked existence.

He shyly admires himself in the mirror, hands loosely looped in his pockets. He seems all neck, knees and elbows, so suddenly the full geometry of a boy.

Recently, Jack’s preschool teacher gave me a picture taken when he was two. The photo captured him piecing together a puzzle. Dressed in overalls with embroidered frogs hopping out of the pockets, he was a sine-curve of softness – full cheeks, a rounded tummy and pudgy hands.

I still carry the plush, physical memory of Jack at that age. The way he would burrow and cuddle against me after a nap, his curly head damp from the depths of his dreams.

These days, his long limbs fold into origami in order to fit on my lap. But underneath the sinewy, sharp angles, a softness remains. And I am grateful to hold the duality of who he was and who he is becoming.

Hold the door

2010-07-13T10:40:00.000-04:00

“Whether you’re coming or going, always hold the door for the next person,” my grandfather used to tell me. A perpetually smiling sage in loudly patterned golf pants who could hold doors, hands and hearts with equal aplomb. “After all, you never know when you’ll need someone to return the favor.”

Papa’s gentle suggestion pulled me from past to present as I heard the frantic scramble of paws on the porch of the vet’s office. I saw the nervous spaniel through the glass door, her ears, eyes and tongue darting in different directions like a panting Picasso.

“It’s okay, it’s alright,” said the soothing voice on the other end of the vibrating leash, the reassuring refrain of caregivers everywhere. The promise that someone else sees a calm well pooling inside of you, despite your frenzied façade.

I reached out to open the door for the woman and her dog. “Let me get that for you,” I said, smiling to smooth the catch in my throat. “Your hands are full. I remember what that was like.”

As I turned to close the door on my way out, I shifted a paper bag from one hand to the other. The small, plastic urn inside was heavier than I expected. As if I could ever gauge the true heft and weight of a life. Or anticipate the surprise of arriving at this threshold, with all of the unseen doorways still to come.

Empty nest

2010-07-09T11:17:00.000-04:00

Despite the sheltering swell and sway of live oaks that canopy our home, the chickadee chose to build her nest in the narrow newspaper slot attached to our mailbox. A spartan space so tiny that it seemed the equivalent of our first apartment in the Florida Keys.

Thinking back to that transformative adventure, I understand the appeal of feeling enveloped. Perhaps not enough room to stretch your wings, but plenty of space to hatch a new life.

For days, I watched the bird sail and swoop around the yard, gathering pine straw, ribbons of jasmine and spartina grass from the marsh. On her own, she fashioned a perfectly round nest within the sharply squared footage. Shabby chic meets mid-century modern.

And then she sat, a Buddha in a birdhouse with more meditative muscle than I ever could muster. Weeks later, I went to get the mail and found three gaping beaks blindly peering back at me. A plumage of hope in such an unlikely place.

Now, the nest is empty, coiled and hollowed like the inside of a whelk. It reminds me of our home now, the comfortable shuffle of rooms radiating a stark sense of absence without nails clicking against hardwood, a lap drowsily draped with dream-twitching paws, or the welcoming wag and thump of a black-tipped tail greeting each day.

I am trying to sit within the emptiness and pay attention to the stillness. Nesting and waiting for what comes next.

Maya (1996-2010)

2010-07-07T09:24:00.000-04:00

There are kitty-cat biscuits and squirrel biscuits. Ice-cream biscuits and ham-sandwich biscuits. Every angel who passes by has a biscuit for a dog. And, of course, all God’s dogs sit when the angels say “sit.” Every dog becomes a good dog in Dog Heaven.

~From the children’s book Dog Heaven by Cynthia Rylant

When I think of Maya, I remember her framed in the front window, a retriever beacon with crooked ears and a furrowed brow, increasingly tinged with white. Whenever I left the house – whether for a quick run to the grocery or an extended day at work – Maya watched my departure behind the screen, backlit by the mourning of the one left behind.

Yesterday morning, Maya’s hind legs gave out before her spritely spirit. She bent into the delights of her breakfast dish, as she had for 14 years, and wound up splayed and confused on the hardwood floor. For months, I had been waiting for a sign-with-a-capital-S, and this was the mile marker I never wanted to reach. The knowing before the knowing.

On the way to preschool, Jack silently gazed out the window from his car seat. “I have a heart inside my heart that is broken for Bee,” he finally said, remembering our tabby cat, who died only a month ago. “And I have a heart inside my heart that is worried about Maya.”

I swallowed my tears and nodded. Because isn’t that the way it feels? A heart inside your heart halved in two pieces: before and after. The before of the frenzied Humane Society puppy who failed obedience training to the after of the lizard-chasing, marsh-grazing elderly dog who sleepily followed patches of sunlight around the house.

And now I am the one left looking out the window. Holding space for the solace of making the right decision and the tidal wash of grief that flows from being the one left behind.

Fourth of July

2010-07-03T14:28:00.000-04:00

I watch Jack as he cranes over the curb to see what is next in the island’s Fourth of July parade. It’s a patriotic patchwork of bicyclists, golf carts, family-made floats and Sidi Limehouse atop his tractor, channeling Jerry Garcia underneath his Seussical Uncle Sam hat.

Jack claps and waves, eager for candy tossed from convertibles and the honk and thump of the fire engine finale. His freckled face always seems to lean forward into a true north I wish I could see. I wonder what spools onto his memory, what he will carry from this day.

Thirty years ago, I braided red, white and blue ribbons into my barrettes and wound streamers through the spokes of my Schwinn for the Cool Creek neighborhood parade. More than anything, I remember my mom and Glenda laughing in the afternoon sun, holding Sally and Chad on their hips as they talked and swayed in a maternal rhythm that now is so familiar to me.

Today I am older than they were then. Looking back through this prism, I feel protective of the women they were, knowing the sweep and arc of loss waiting in the wings of a future that is part of my past.

I want to keep them cradled in my memory, murmuring long into twilight as they lit dozens of sparklers so that we all could write our names in a blaze across the sky.

Swimming with dolphins

2010-06-30T09:22:00.000-04:00

Jack stood hip deep in the pool, focused on his swim teacher despite the shrieks and splashes of the water-winged brigade surrounding him.

“Like a dolphin,” she said, quickly demonstrating a fluid curve of movement, porpoising headfirst into the water to encourage Jack to swim for the first time without her hands belting his waist.

I flashed from the shade of the pool deck to a floating dock in the Florida Keys where I used to work. I remembered how Theresa, a raucous Roseanne Barr of a dolphin, executed a front flip an hour before she gave birth, rocketing her 600-pound girth into the air with all of the grace of a flying ironing board.

Exuberance over form. Action before thought. Instinct thrumming like a pulse. So many ways to be a dolphin.

Jack flung his arms forward and leapt face-first into the water, legs churning as his arms windmilled in his own joyfully chaotic choreography. His teacher cheered as he thrashed his way across the shallow end.

When he reached the wall, water spilling from his smile, Jack immediately turned to see if I had witnessed his passage.

“I am so proud on my insides!” he shouted, as I laughed and clapped, cupping the moment, as if I could ever capture it.

And then Jack turned and dove again before I was ready to see him go. Just like a dolphin.

Nesting instincts

2010-06-28T11:00:00.000-04:00

Twenty minutes into the simmering heat of this morning’s beach walk, I stumbled on loggerhead turtle tracks. An unexpected omen that resembled the rutted path of a determined miniature bulldozer, leading from the tideline to the dunes. I placed my hand in the sandy hieroglyphics, grateful this turtle didn’t have to brave a tsunami slick of oil to lay her nest.

I noticed a small group of island turtle patrol volunteers kneeling in a cluster of sea oats, measuring and marking the nest with one of several red signs that now dot the dunes. Exclamation points in waiting. When everything else seems to operate at hurtling high speeds, what a relief to know there are people who patiently wait for turtles to arrive in their own time – and then do all they can to ensure the scrappy offspring will be able to return to the comfort of the waves.

Two of our neighbors are part of the turtle tribe. They also are soon-to-be grandparents, awaiting the birth of their first grandchild. They know what it means to tend a nest. Thinking of them, I realized this is what families do, even when we are not part of the same genetic soup or species. Whether it’s a family connected by the frequently complicated tangle of biology, cobbled together by choice or built on a basic love of sea creatures, we know the unspoken rules. We return to familiar shores year after year. We help each other move our nests to higher ground. We wait and watch and wonder. We hold our breaths, hold our hearts, hold onto hope.

The proposal

2010-06-25T11:37:00.000-04:00

I received a naked marriage proposal last night. And it wasn’t the first time.

As I dried Jack after his bath, he cupped my face with his pruney fingers. “I wish you would unmarry Daddy and marry me instead,” he said, looking at me with such hopeful, Oedipal intensity that I knew not to laugh.

Jack hasn’t proposed to me in months. Many times last year, I was the object of his open-hearted, 4-year-old affection. Particularly at bathtime, which always seems to smooth the edges of the day and encourage wandering conversations.

Water streaming down his elbows, Jack would reach for my left hand, pretending he had placed my wedding ring there. When I gently explained the reasons I had to decline his generous offer, his face would cloud over, shoulders slumped with such resignation that I could imagine he would unpack this moment decades from now in therapy.

Jack had the same reaction last night, sighing with all of the existential angst of a 16-year-old. My own Holden Caulfield in Transformer pajamas.

“How will I ever know the girl I’m supposed to marry?” he fretted. “How do I know what’s supposed to happen?”

There it was, cloaked in a bath towel, the underlying issue I, too, continue to wrestle with regularly: How to navigate the not-knowing? How to lean into the unseen with a semblance of trust? How to stay present through it all?

As we tucked in to read Mo Willems, I felt grateful that Jack could risk venturing into this lifelong proposal of asking the big questions. And that I could say no and yes at the same time.

Jumping Jack

2010-06-23T10:27:00.000-04:00

Jack stood shivering at the side of the shallow end of the pool, despite the 90 degree summer soup surrounding us. His long legs flamingoed in his baggy Buzz Lightyear trunks as he curled his toes on the concrete. Hands clasped in that universal symbol of imminent surrender.

My 5-year-old started swimming lessons last week, and he is learning how to jump into the water. The art of letting go, navigating the velocity of freefall and trusting the water will be there to catch him. A chlorinated baptism into the depths of trusting himself.

I crouched in the water, my arms outstretched toward my nervous boy. Up until this moment, he held my hands when he jumped. But now my hands were just out of reach.

Over and over, we reviewed the physical mechanics of the maneuver, the logistics of leaping off a ledge and finding your feet again in an entirely different space. He knew the how of it. Now he faced the divide between knowing and doing.

I almost caved in and offered Jack my hands. It was getting late, and my mind began to drift and downshift into domestic mode and the daily routine of dinner-bath-books-bedtime.

“I believe in you,” I said, the words slipping out before I knew I had said them. Words I wish I would remember to say to myself more often. Words that can propel like no others.

Jack looked into my eyes and took a deep breath.

And he jumped.

Starstruck

2010-06-21T12:15:00.000-04:00

“There’s often a tendency for us to hurry through transitions. We may feel that these transitions are ‘nowhere at all’ compared to what’s gone before or what we anticipate is to come. But you are somewhere … you’re ‘between.’” Fred Rogers

When I climbed down the boardwalk stairs last Thursday at low tide, I noticed the shoreline seemed to ripple, as if a fault line ran under the surface of the receding waves. There were hundreds of starfish splayed in an earthbound constellation on the packed sand. I have walked this stretch of beach for more than 15 years and have never seen anything like it.

Instinctively, I wanted to whisk the starfish back into the waves, wishing I could pull the blanket of the tide over their loose-limbed limbo. I feel the same way when I face my own sea changes, wanting to minimize that feeling of soul exposure. Again and again, I discount the transition itself and battle with the “between,” as Mister Rogers so gently describes it. Even though I know I have to fully live the transition as much as the transformation.

This morning, that same ribbon of sand was empty, except for the usual scattering of crushed shells. It’s up to me to hold space for the starfish.

Wading in

2010-06-17T10:18:00.000-04:00

I always thought I was a creature of the waves.

Growing up in a manicured, midwestern suburb, boxed in by cornfields and clusters of strip malls, I craved spring breaks spent splashing in the Gulf of Mexico and summer vacations tucked into a cottage porch overlooking Lake Michigan, falling asleep to the reassuring rush and release of wave after wave.

And then I met the marsh.

I remember my honeymoon overlooking a tidal marsh cradled by live oaks on an island thumbprinted off the coast of Charleston. A river-cut swath of golden green grasses, bookended by beaches and inhabited by laughing gulls, snowy egrets and blue herons calling to one another in their creaking door code.

And underneath it all, the pluff mud – a pungent, primordial ooze that fuels this light-shifting, life-affirming limbo between land and sea. It’s the way I view my internal landscape at the moment, the middle ground straddling motherhood and writing. Sometimes mired in muck, sometimes propelled by unseen currents. All the while trying to remain open to unexpected grace.

Like that first night after Derek and I moved to the island a dozen years ago. A bellyflopping splash beyond the open window snapped me from sleep. Blinking in the dark, I recognized the unmistakable, explosive breath of bottlenose dolphins fishing in the creek. I shook Derek awake, and we padded out to the moonless deck to hear their ethereal chirping and churning, a midnight benediction.

Isn’t this how the best conversations begin, with a memory unfolded and passed between friends? We have plenty of time to talk. Come kick off your shoes and join me on the crab dock.

The tide is turning.

Welcome.