Category: Introspection

. . . gazing inward, thinking too much, connecting dots.

Ukka, bukka

I said awhile back that I hadn’t been bored since 1983, which was when I graduated from high school. I loathed high school. I thought it was a giant waste of time because I could get straight A’s, even though I never took books home. (I did my assignments sometimes while the teacher took attendance or during my lunch hour in the library.) I had more Important Things To Do, though I hadn’t figured out exactly what those things were.

As it turns out, I understated how boring my days actually are. Repeating the same mundane tasks over and over bores me silly, as do the games and shrieks of toddlers. Washing twenty-seven glasses a day and folding clothes and stepping on Cheerios in the kitchen is dull.

Great stretches of my days are boring, leaving me with nothing to write about beyond, “I woke up at 7:43 a.m.,” and “the three-month old spit up in four places on my blue shirt and I’m still wearing it now.”

But, the boredom is peppered with funny little moments, like yesterday when my husband took our 7-year old son with him to the marsh to release the three captive frogs. My blond son gently freed the frogs and said wistfully, “I’m going to miss those frogs.” Pause. “They grow up so fast.”

My husband reported to me that he couldn’t tell if our son was joking. That boy can keep a straight face and sometimes you just can’t tell.

My daughter sings all the time. The tunes are familiar, but the words are often nonsensical. She belts out these words (to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”):

Swinkle, swinkle, little star;
How I wonder what you are;
Ukka, bukka, world so high;
Like a diamond in the sky;
Swinkle, swinkle, little star;
Ukka, bukka, world so high;
Like a diamond in the sky . . .

And so on. It’s the song that never ends. My favorite part is the “ukka, bukka.”

She ambles around the house, making up words to songs, cradling her babydolls. And every morning, she greets DaycareKid’s mom or dad with the cheerful promise, “Today, I will not hit [DaycareKid].”

On the way to the store tonight, she yawned and then piped up from the back seat: “I am not tired. I did not yawn.”

And before I put her to bed she says earnestly, “Tonight I will not cry.”

Really, it’s the little things I hope I remember, the sporadic dots of vibrant color in the gray monotony of my day-to-day routine. Because soon, she’ll realize that little stars twinkle up above the world so high and the ukka-bukka will be forgotten like so much dust under the bed.

Rushing Forward

I’m standing still and the world is rushing by at an alarming rate of speed. I’m lying on the ground watching the world fast-forward and I’m not sure if I feel the clouds skittering across the sky or the earth rotating at double-speed. I’m walking steadily, but people keep passing me, rushing, rushing, like whitewater over hidden boulders.

These last few weeks of summer erode the sand right off the shore, leaving me stranded, pining for the way things were. Except I never am content with the way things are, which tomorrow will be how they “were.” My eyes are always peering ahead or lingering on the rear-view mirror. It’s so hard to just be here, still, as the globe spins on its axis and the moon shifts in tiny but sure increments from a sliver to a shimmering orb.

Nothing stays the same, except perhaps for the pile of papers on the kitchen counter which are orphaned, doomed forever to wait for a real home.

Why is it that we mostly forget to feel the sands slipping through our fingers and yet, other times, all we notice are the particles of sand, one by one, drifting, falling, gone? These days remind me of that machine at the arcade where the Birthday Boy or Girl stands inside and tries to grab tickets that blow crazily inside. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? And in the rush to grab everything, the excited child can’t quite grasp more than a few?

The twins are almost my height now. My baby boy is heading to second grade, where he insists the kids will call him “The Cool King.” My baby girl will be three in a couple of weeks and when I scold her, she retorts in a teenage tone, “No! You stop it!” My husband’s gone gray and the leaves on those bushes by my front door are starting to turn fiery red. I look at my hands and see my mother’s hands instead.

Nothing I do can stop this headlong rush forward.

And I still need to dip my toes into the Pacific Ocean before the summer ends. My kids ought to dig in the sand and feel the whip of the ocean wind at least once this year. I promised to take the boys to the waterpark. I want to stroll through Pike’s Place Market.

Only a few weekends remain before we all climb back into our school routine and buckle up, just in case. I’ll bid farewell to the summer my children were 12, 12, 7 and 2, this fortieth summer of my life. And so we speed along, faster than I ever imagined we could.

One Less Sunset

I went to pick up my 7-year-old son this evening, on the way to the pool. He’d spent the afternoon at his friend’s house, so while he was busy gathering his stuff, Friend’s Dad and I chatted in the driveway.

His yard is impeccable. He just built a deck in his backyard. I’ve seen inside their home and it’s lovely and meticulous, despite their two children. Everytime I stop by, he’s power-washing or mowing or trimming or building or painting. He began to lament the end of summer. “We haven’t even been anywhere,” he said. “We have a place up at Hood *Canal and we haven’t even spent a night.”

It seems like you have a choice. Would you like what’s behind Door Number One (House Beautiful, regularly dusted and maintained) or Door Number Two (Free Time, including sand between your toes and a sunburn on your nose). (Or, if you can find a paperclip in your purse, you can have what’s behind Door Number Three: Mystery prize!) Let’s Make a Deal!

I leave my house almost every day in some degree of disarray so my kids can cavort at the pool. Food drying on dishes or laundry waiting to be folded, dust on the coffee tables and a few toys scattered around for good measure . . . I can’t be bothered, really, for summer is fleeting. I want to live in a perfectly tidy house, I really do, but I just don’t want to be the one doing all the tidying. Especially with four kids wreaking havoc wherever they go.

My daughter spun around and around at the pool tonight, falling down in a dramatic heap. “I’m so busy!” she said, confusing “dizzy” with “busy,” but then again, maybe there’s not such a big difference.

Time’s flying! Get on board, quick! There is one less sunset at the beach as of tonight. Catch one while you can.

Without Plot

My dad and stepmom had a long-running argument about the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” My stepmom loved the movie while my dad held it in disdain, sniffing contemptuously that it had no plot.

Sometimes, I worry that the problem with this blog is that it has no plot. If I’d written it in other decades of my life, the suspense would be killing you. Where will she enroll in college? Will she survive a summer working as a nanny? Who will she marry? Does her dad really die when he’s 47? How does the whole infertility thing work out? Does a birthmother choose her? Pregnant? She’s pregnant? When–and where–will the baby be born? Does her husband survive his throat cancer? Will the family move across the country or stay in rural Michigan?

Yeah, well, this blog occurs during a plotless part of my life. And here’s a terrible confession–on dismal, cloudy days when I’m feeling trapped and suffocated by the laundry, I think of horrible occurrences that might shake up my life. Even as I permit these wretched thoughts to amble through my mind, I scold myself. How dare I do anything but give thanks for the blessings in my life–my home, my husband, my children, my health, my friends, my extended family?

The thing about a crisis is that in short order, your meandering, messy, mundane life immediately narrows into a sharp focus, like sunlight through a magnifying glass narrows into one red-hot point of light. You don’t have a yard full of sunshine anymore, but a single searing inch of scorched grass. (Or a slug, if my kids have anything to do with it.)

Laundry doesn’t matter.
The dust under the beds doesn’t matter.
Cooking? No way.

All that matters is The Crisis.

It’s completely sick, of course, to long for a crisis. And I don’t, not really. But when I read that “good” blogs have a plot, I realized I am sans plot. Plotless. Empty, devoid of plot. Plot negative.

Wouldn’t that be a great blog title? “Without Plot.”

Well, sure, I do have a plot of sorts, but it’s not the type of plot you’ll find in any book sold in the grocery store. It’s the dull “lead a responsible life and raise responsible children” kind of plot.

I wonder if some people keep making bad decisions because they long for a plot, for the excitement of a page-turner? The truth seems to me that life is less like a novel and more like a slide show, the kind that your dad used to show you in the darkened living room after he got home from Europe. One castle looked like the next and the Alps? Boring when all you really want to do is call your friend and check the rumor mills for juicy gossip. But your dad kept clicking the slides, giving a droning explanation of each one, “and there, if you look at the left, you can see the blah, blah, blah, blah, and on the right, see that speck? That’s blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

See? Now, if I had a plot, I’d just tell you breathlessly about the latest trauma or drama. But I have no plot. Tomorrow we’ll wake up after the sun rises. Shower. Welcome DaycareKid and CuteBaby–he’s crawling now, his mom says. Play, keep kids from shoving each other, start laundry, make lunch, settle little ones down for naps, check email and blogs, answer the inevitable “what’s for dinner?” question, fold laundry, offer snacks, play some more, walk around the block, wait for moms to pick up their kids, cook dinner, eat dinner, clean up, give baths, read . . . and another day will end. I’m a girl with no plot.

Tomorrow will be sort of like today. And today was kind of like yesterday. It doesn’t make for exciting blog fodder, but it makes for a pretty good life. If you can stand the monotony.

I’m So Lucky

My daughter wakes up too early, especially when I don’t need to wake up early. This morning, I lifted her from her crib around 6:30 a.m. I shouldn’t complain–our twins routinely woke up at 5:30 a.m. when they were small. I used to vow revenge–I said I would wake them up early when they were teenagers by vacuuming outside their bedroom door and making a racket in the kitchen, but now that the reality of them actually sleeping in has arrived I savor the quietness. Sometimes they are still dozing at 9:30 a.m. Now I know why adults might choose to rise early–to outsmart the teens.

Anyway. Back to this morning. I was so annoyed and tired. I was curled under the covers while she sat near my feet, watching Sesame Street.

Every few minutes, she’d ask, “Whatcha doing?”

And I’d mumble, trying not to move my lips, “Sleeping.”

“And what I doing?” she’d say.

“Watching t.v.,” I’d mumble again.

When I finally gave up and headed for the shower, I suggested, “Hey, why don’t you go watch a video?” And she said, “No. I want to watch you.”

“I’m so lucky,” I said. But I didn’t really mean that. As the boys would tell you, “Mom’s using sarcasm again.”

I’m ashamed that I so often take my life for granted. I want silly things–solitude, thinking time, to shower without an audience and to brush my teeth without a certain small someone turning off the water before I’m finished rinsing. I look right past the blessings I have and concentrate on how crowded I feel, how stuck, how sick I am of having little people breathing on me and blocking my path in the kitchen.

My daughter, though, doesn’t know about that stuff. When I finished my shower, she was waiting for me and she gleefully hollered, “YOU’RE SO LUCKY!”

And I heard her. That time, I actually meant it when I said, “You’re right. I’m so lucky.”

I am so lucky.

Now Where Did I Leave My Brain?

You know when you are packing for a move and you end up circling a room, trying to figure out exactly what to shove into a box next?

That’s how I’m feeling at the moment. I’m trying to stuff all the loose ends into a tidy braid, but the braid is as long as Rapunzel’s and I can’t do it.

Remember how you felt in college when you couldn’t keep your eyes open another second and you finally declared, “Well, if I don’t know this material now, I’ll never know it?”

That’s how I feel now, which is why I’m going to bed. Tomorrow I can write a to-do list. I can work on attendance records for school-at-home. I’ll fold more laundry. I’ll wash more dishes. I might even mop. I’ll purchase Amtrak tickets.

Tomorrow, I’ll book that extra room at Disney and order that book from Amazon. I’ll pay the phone bill and remember to put chicken in the crockpot. I’ll send email to the decorating committee people for Vacation Bible School and I’ll remember to ask my husband to order that acacia tree for a prop.

I will write that letter to my volunteers. I’ll pull some weeds. I will fill the dishwasher and empty the counter. I’ll grocery shop. I’ll force the children to do history and literature lessons and I’ll worry that they aren’t actually remembering anything. I will rock Babygirl. I’ll match socks. I’ll write a check for the pool fee. I’ll look for swimsuits in the Lands End catalog.

But tonight, I’ll sleep.

Belonging

Pentecostals believe that speaking in tongues is the initial sign of being filled by the Holy Spirit. I grew up in such a church, full of hand-waving and tongue-speaking and swaying bodies and incoherent laughter and weeping. Although my mother wasn’t as strict as her mother (in their household, no playing cards, no chapstick, no secular music, no shopping or working on Sundays), we weren’t allowed to do things other kids did. For instance, “rock music” wasn’t allowed, so when we watched “The Donny and Marie Show,” when Donny began to sing “I’m a little bit rock and roll,” we had to turn the channel. We went to church three times a week: Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. We did not swear, not even “geez,” or “gosh.”

But religious upbringing aside, I felt like an outsider at school. I was the tallest girl in my class. The teacher’s pet. I wasn’t familiar with contemporary music. I didn’t take ballet class. Small things.

Then my parents divorced at a time when divorce was a rarity. From one year to the next, my world stopped spinning and then reversed directions. Everyone else was going west to east–eye make-up, boys, parties, dances–and I was going east to west, hibernating in my room, tending to my wounds, reading books, dreaming. The girls I had played with on the playground were now riding in cars with boys while I was trying to figure out my place in my reconstructed family.

When high school ended, I couldn’t move far enough away. I figured no one would ever marry me, so off I went to Bible College. After graduation, I fully intended to suffer for Jesus in some far-flung land. My theology was a bit wacky in those days and I thought that’s how God worked.

Even there, though, I didn’t quite belong. I couldn’t quite fluff my hair up like the Southern belles. I didn’t want to take a class for “Pastor’s Wives”–I wanted to learn homiletics (preaching). I wasn’t religious enough. I balked at using the spiritual slang expected of me. I grew cynical and suspicious and even a little hostile.

I wasn’t there to get my “MRS” degree–I was trying to find God’s plan for my life. I graduated feeling like I didn’t quite fit in the denomination. I couldn’t swallow what they were spoon-feeding. I didn’t want to play, didn’t want to network my way through the church hierarchy. I’d sit in (daily required) chapel and make lists of Christian curse words to amuse myself.

Years later, after abandoning the denomination of my youth, I’m the Pastor’s Wife. I shrug off that title and go so far as to “forget” to mention my husband’s profession when I meet new people. I’ve heard maybe a dozen sermons in my almost 18 years of marriage. I’m the cobbler’s children without any shoes. I’m a Christian, a devoted follower of Christ, but I don’t sit in the pew and I’m not quite one of them. I don’t really belong. And I can’t really identify with the pastor’s wives, either. They all seem so together, so holy, so obedient.

Our family lives in an affluent town where people buy property just to tear down houses so they can rebuilt extravagant homes with a view. People own second homes to vacation in. They drive new cars and own boats. I don’t fit in. I don’t have a career. My hair will simply not behave.

The past few days, I’ve heard pundits and politicians and analysts speak and I’ve thought, they don’t speak for me. I read articles about mothers and I rarely see myself in the descriptions. When I hear about modern families, I wonder who these people are, because they aren’t us. They aren’t me. On television, I never find a representative of me. I don’t find myself in novels, either. I’m certainly not in the movies. I’m not even on the religious channel.

I feel isolated in so many ways. Where do I fit? Isn’t it pathetic to wonder this at the age of forty? And yet my wondering these days is not fueled by angst, but by a gradual dawning. I suspect everyone feels like an outcast on some level. We’re either the wrong color or the wrong height or too fat or too skinny or we live on the wrong side of town or we never did memorize our multiplcation tables or we don’t “get” the hype over American Idol. We just don’t fit in.

What I love about growing up is that you get to create your own little world. You can populate your world with people who recognize you, who understand you, who make you feel not quite so alone.

And along the way, you discover that it’s all right to be the tallest girl in class, the one who is a Republican (even though it’s so not cool), the one who likes Barry Manilow and bypassed the whole college-drinking thing.

I don’t really belong anywhere. And rather than feeling alone, I feel liberated, the way you feel in a strange city where no one knows you. Throw caution to the wind, because you’ll never be back here again.

[*UPDATE and CORRECTION* “Seafoam” asked this: I’m curious as to why you’ve only heard your husband preach about a dozen times in eighteen years. Have you always worked in the nursery during the church service?

I wondered that myself, so I started thinking back. First of all, my husband’s only been pastoring for 15 years, though we’ve been married for 18. In our first church, I was in charge of the children’s church, so I taught children during the sermon. In our second church, I taught two-year olds during the sermon. Then we adopted twins, so I really had my hands full. In our third church, there was no nursery or class for my then-almost-2-year old twins. I sat with them in a makeshift nursery. Eventually, I started teaching the preschool class. Then I had a baby, so I was back in the cry-room with him.

When we moved to our current church, my baby boy was less than a year old and hated to be left, so I stayed with him in the nursery. When he was two or two and a half, I began to leave him in the nursery and I remembered tonight, as I pondered this question, that I actually did sit in church for some months. I did not teach Sunday School. I did not have nursery duty. I sang in the choir and I listened to the sermon. So, I have to retract my previous “12 sermons in 18 years” statement. I must have heard fifty sermons (a year’s worth) before I gave birth again to a clingy, noisy baby who still won’t stay alone in the nursery without having a nervous breakdown. She’s two and a half and the day will arrive soon when I will be able to leave her.

And then I’ve been recruited to teach a brand-new preschool class starting next fall.

Thanks, Seafoam. I stand corrected and hope that answers your question.]

Sharks, Loss and Snowflakes

Remember that story about the girl from Hawaii who had her arm bitten off by a shark? I realized today that I feel like that girl. I’m missing parts of myself. Every loss, big and small, has taken a piece out of me, until I’m like a paperdoll with tattered arms and legs, missing feet, rips and gouges. I’m no longer whole, no longer unrumpled.

And I’m not the only one. I thought of my friend whose baby died last year, just two weeks before her due date. My husband called at dinner time to let me know he’d be late because just five minutes before he arrived for a scheduled home visit, the fifty-year old woman he was to visit died. I thought of 2-year old child I know whose parents are divorcing. It seems that everywhere I turn, people are facing loss, some small, some heartbreakingly enormous.

We have all lost someone or something irreplaceable. All of us, everyone. We all have holes and gaps and empty gaping wounds. Loss is part of life from the moment we come squalling into this cold world, having lost the safety of the only warm place we’ve ever known.

The vacant spaces define us. I saw myself primarily as a child of divorce for many years. And when the pain of that began to fade, I lost my dad for good when he died just a couple weeks after he turned 47. I was 24. Then I became a girl without a dad.

I became a woman who could not get pregnant. I became the writer who could not get published. I became the lonely outsider in a small town. What I didn’t have framed me, rather than what I had, what I accomplished, what I was. Do we all try to hide the wounds and disguise our empty spots, while we secretly despair over the ripped out parts in our lives? Or is it just me?

This morning, when I contemplated myself as destroyed paperdoll with missing chunks, the unbidden image of a paper snowflake fluttered into my mind. I realized that the missing parts, the losses, the empty spots are part of a greater design. Look at the snowflake. The cut out parts don’t destroy it. The scissored out triangles and circles enhance the beauty of the snowflake. They make it what it is.

When I think now of the empty spaces in myself, I won’t concentrate on just the ragged scars. I’ll see a snowflake, shaped by loss, but not destroyed. The losses feel random and unfair sometimes, but I have faith that God has a plan, an intricate, one-of-a-kind design for my life.

I’m not the holes in my life. I am wholly in the hand of a loving Creator. I am whole, despite the missing pieces.

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Do You Hear What I Hear?

When the toddlers woke from their naps, we went for a walk around the block. We did not wear jackets, except for DaycareKid who cried for his coat. He was bundled up completely, zippered and snapped into his heavy coat. But the sun shone brightly, the sky was the exact shade of the Crayola sky-blue crayon and the air was filled with the humming of lawn mowers. We passed a gray-haired man sitting near a flowerbed, digging in the dirt. He called out “Spring fever!” A few houses down, a woman was hacking at random weeds which had sprouted through her rocks. Her yard used to be filled with gnomes, but suddenly, it’s gnome-free. Babygirl stood at the edge of the yard and said, “Oh no! It’s all gone!” Then she stole a rock.

After two laps, we returned home, had a snack and then went into the back yard. Babygirl and DaycareKid played while I snipped old shasta daisy stalks and cut ivy and dug dandelions out of the cold soil. I filled our four-feet tall yard waste bucket with compostable debris. I tried to stop TwinBoyB from smashing three crocuses, but he strode through the flowerbed without noticing my stuttered “Hey, hey, hey!” The kids really have no horticultural respect.

Then, he said, “Hey, I smell gasoline,” and perhaps that’s the surest sign of spring–fuel for lawn mowers mingled with the odor of decaying leaves and wet dirt. Add the unidentified flying bugs that insisted on hovering over Babygirl’s blond head and the slick, shiny slug-tracks and you have spring in the Pacific Northwest.