Worlds

I hold in the palm of my hand

a fragment of your bone.

Pure white even with its tiny

gray pores,

on the other side, a dent of striations

where your marrow once was.

All I have left of you:

these ashes of gray dust and white fragments--

perhaps half a cup.

All you had to do was open your eyes,

start your heart to beating

in my arms

as we cried over your lovely face.

Last night I gazed at

your brother's sleeping face,

and thought he looked like you did

that first and last day with you.

The immensity of our cities, inventions, ideas!

And you so tiny, now tinier still,

but not in my world.

or the one of invisible, unknowable mystery.

Thankful for Longing

I take great comfort from this passage in Edwidge Danticat's memoir Brother, I'm Dying:

   When my daughter was born, her face blood-tinted, her eyelids swollen with tiny light pink patches that Colleen the midwife called angel kisses, her body coiled around itself as if to echo the tightness of her tiny fists, I instantly saw it as one of many separations to come. She was leaving my body and going into the world, where she would spend the rest of her life moving away from me.

   Groggy and exhausted, I asked Colleen, 'Is it normal for me to think this?'

   'Maybe you're one of those women who enjoys being pregnant,' she said.

It wasn't so much that I enjoyed being pregnant. I simply liked the fact that for a while my daughter and I had been inseparable.  

These words remind me that I had a bond with Elise while carrying her--one that will always remain undefinable by our experiences in this world, but a bond nonetheless. We separated when she was born too, but of course in a much more painful way--that final separation, skipping the togetherness of being daughter and mother on this planet. 

But that bond we had while I carried her inside me: we were as close as we could be, though we could not see each other and I could not hear her. She could hear my voice, and her papa's and her brother's, and she could hear my breath and heartbeat. But this whole experience took place on a subconscious level, invisible to us in our sense-driven existence. I take comfort in the connection we had while still mourning its lost potential. 

When I think of this closeness with my children that I lost with Elise, that slips away from me with each day Felix grows up, that closeness I cherish and mourn at the same time when Felix cuddles and kisses and says "I love you" to me, the words of Cindy Sheehan keep coming to mind. Cindy Sheehan was the woman who held a vigil against the Iraq war outside President Bush's Texas ranch in August 2005 after her firstborn son Casey was killed serving as a soldier. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with her actions, I once read of her devotion to her son that "he touched every part of me." She carried him inside her, gave birth to him, nursed him and bathed him and helped him grow up. That sensory intimacy with one's child is like no other for me, and missing it with Elise is what aches the most.

But it does not hurt anymore. It will always ache, but the hurt with its rage and devastation has faded away, thankfully. 

All of us long to be with someone we miss, whether they have passed away from us or live on another part of the planet. And all of us have some belief in the invisible, in some form or element. My relationship with Elise is invisible, subtle, not of this world. Much more awaits us after this chaotic, contradictory life on this glorious, crazy earth. 

A week ago, I visited a couple in Labor and Delivery as a Peer Companion when they lost their baby boy. On the same day I met the new baby daughter of friends whose firstborn died two days after her traumatic birth a year ago August. My heart swelled and swelled with relief and joy and sadness when I saw little Chapin in her beaming father's arms. She is perfect, beautiful--truly one of the most beautiful babies I've ever seen. I went to Frances as she sat up in bed in the recovery room and started sobbing on her shoulder. I wanted to keep crying like that, but thought I should pull myself together because this was her day of joy. Frances said she felt Emerson's presence at every moment of her pregnancy and delivery with Chapin. 

If anyone is familiar with separation and reunion, it is Edwidge Danticat, who learned of this kind of love from her father and his older brother: her two papas. She writes lovingly of her uncle, a pastor who raised her for eight years in Haiti after her parents emigrated to the United States.

'Death is a journey we embark on from the moment we are born,' [my uncle] would say. 'An hourglass is turned and the sand starts to slip in a different direction as soon as we emerge from our mother's womb. Thank God those around us are too blinded by joy then to realize it. Otherwise there would be weeping at births as well. But if we weep at a death, it's because we do not understand death. If we saw death as another kind of birth, just as the Gospel exhorts us to, we woudn't weep, but rejoice, just as we do at the birth of a child.' 

This is what I resolve to do: keep hold of life and death. Like laughing and crying at the same time. 

3 Years and Forever

Three years ago today we said Hello and Goodbye to Elise. This morning before I got out of bed I thought to myself, "Today is your birthday, baby girl. I love you. I miss you. I will see you again." I thought of those parents who suffer the loss of their child at any age: miscarriage, hours after delivery, months into babyhood, childhood flu, in the line of duty as soldiers.

Felix woke me from deep sleep with a sob and a call for Daddy last night. I went to him and found him trying to get his pajamas back on after changing his pull-on diaper. He had never done that before--he sleeps very heavily, doesn't wake up to use the bathroom yet, and only every once in a while does he cry for us at night. "I want to cuddle with you Mommy," he told me after I zipped up his pajamas and dried his tears. 

He leaned his head against mine as he fell asleep. The sheer solidness of his head on my brow brought back the memory of him inside me in the weeks before his birth, when I could feel that hard little head like a weight in my lower abdomen and his little bottom would wave back and forth under my belly button.

When I crawled back into my own bed, I thought about checking the time: it was about 1am three years ago when I woke up to go to the emergency room because I had not felt Elise move inside me all evening. But I didn't look at the clock, thinking it was probably hours past that.

The first thing Dan said to me when he returned from his Saturday group run this morning was that he had checked the time when Felix called out. It was four minutes past 1. He calls it coincidence, although he was the one to note the hour. I said I wasn't sure what it meant, but it felt "cosmic." Maybe what I mean by that is that Elise's connection to us is deep in our bones, our beings. It doesn't matter how much time she spent with us in her physical body on this seemingly solid earth: she is with us, in our flesh, in the deepest recesses of our minds, in our spirits. 

The tears well up and pour from my eyes because my body cannot touch hers and my senses ache for her face (what would it look like?), her hair (would it be dark like mine and Felix's?), her soft skin (I love to stroke Felix's pudgy forearm, hold his hand), her voice (my heart melts every time I hear the high pitch of any child's sounds).   

"When a loved one dies, the process of grieving is a completion that allows us to honor that person's life and claim the wisdom we have gained through the relationship." So goes an entry for November in my Pocketful of Meditations book. What relationship did I have, or Dan or Felix, with Elise? At a Share meeting I attended last week, I listened to a woman who suffered an early miscarriage bravely say that she didn't feel "worthy" of being at the gathering because the rest of us had lost our babies later in our pregnancies, when we thought about them and carried them for months as they moved around inside us. But this mother had imagined a future with this child. "You had dreams for you and your baby," I said to her. 

A relationship with someone, "knowing" a person: what does that mean? When I think of a person I love, I recall glimpses of them, moments spent together, snapshots in time; their smile, my gaze upon them, the shape of their hand. 

This is my relationship with Elise. It continues, and its length and depth equal any other on this planet. Because all relationships are a series of moments we spend together and apart, feeling, dreaming, seeing, missing. "As we receive the gift of understanding, it transcends time and space, simultaneously gifting the soul of the one who has passed over." This body of mine aches for you, Elise. But the me who is more than just flesh is listening to you, who live beyond absence. 

Dying to Live

Ever since reading his 2006 book Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence, I find myself thinking of the wise and tender words of Matthew Sanford, a man in his 40s who was paralyzed at age 13 in a car crash that killed his father and sister. He went on to suffer the stillbirth of one of his twin sons, become a yoga instructor, and establish a charity he calls Mind Body Solutions.

We all experience different levels of dying throughout our lives--the process of living guarantees it....If we can see death as more than black and white, as more than on and off, there are many versions of realized death short of physically dying. The death of a loved one sets so much in motion: grief, a sense of loss, tears, anger, a transcendent sense of love, an appreciation of the present moment, a desire to die, and on and on.

There are also the quiet deaths. How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba? Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child, between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust. Feel your mature fondness for who you once were, and your current need to protect innocence wherever you might find it. The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is a most serious death, and yet is is necessary for the onset of maturity....

Life and death, silence and action, emptiness and fullness at the same time--these are inward features of everyone's life. They are truths that do not lead to answers. Instead, they invite us to believe in and appreciate our own experience. When we do, when we carefully listen to that experience, the next story begins, the practical one, the story of what happens beyond waking.

As for me, the waiting is over. I can breathe again.

I have never witnessed a loved one struggling with a fatal diagnosis who waits for their death while still hoping to live. And I hope anyone reading this who has, does not take offense at my comparison. But this feeling I have right now brings such a situation to mind. For 2 years, 3 if you count the months I carried Elise and we looked toward the time when we would begin our lives with her, we've been waiting for another child to join our family. Today again, after trying another treatment and hoping this dream will finally come true, grief struck me down.

But at least the anxiety of wondering and worrying is finally over.

Felix has some mail-order caterpillars in a plastic jar. Every morning since they arrived a week ago, he has awakened with a smile of excitement on his face and urged me to come with him downstairs to see how much they've grown. In one week they probably tripled in size. This morning he forgot to check on them, maybe because I crawled into bed with him to tell him we were not going to have a baby because "the eggs in mommy's tummy didn't hatch."

I let him see my tears and told him he was our favorite boy in the world and we are so happy he is our big boy. At first his mouth curved down in that frowny face I find so endearing as he listened to my bad news. It made me think of the days and months after Elise died when I would burst out crying, and in his 2-year-old sensitivity and confusion he would cry too, perhaps scared he had lost his mother to some place he couldn't go. But this time he said, "Now we can play tackle again" because he didn't have to worry about being gentle with me and the "eggs."

So later this morning we did. And he kept holding on to me after he tackled me to the ground and said "I love you, you're my favorite girl in the whole world."

When we'd come downstairs, Dan told Felix his caterpillars were starting to hang upside down on the lid of their jar, getting ready to spin their cocoons. I used to look at the creatures and think of our microscopic embryos, growing and maybe wiggling their way toward a life outside.

Now as I look at the caterpillars, some of them quietly suspended, others getting their last nibble of food and crawling around looking for just the right place to start their next phase of life, I think, that is where I am now: beginning again. It's not such a bad place to be, even if I have to die a little first to take that next step. Even if I need to drag myself kicking and screaming, until I know for sure there is no looking back.

Elise's Birthday

At this hour two years ago, I was trying to get to sleep while feeling anxious that I hadn't felt Elise moving inside me. Usually she got active just as I settled into bed to read. Sometime after 1AM I woke up and still didn't feel her moving, so I phoned the doctor on call and was told to go to the ER.

As I write this I just had the realization that I also arrived at the hospital at a little after 2AM the morning Felix was born, and that was the same time two years later that the ultrasound technician in Labor and Delivery confirmed that Elise's heart was no longer beating. While waiting for that damn technician, who had fallen asleep with her beeper on vibrate and kept us in dread for 45 minutes while the L and D nurses tried--and tried and tried--to find a heartbeat with the Doppler, I was silent, not wanting to say or feel anything. I did want to shout at the nurses to go away with their useless Doppler, stop pretending you might find a heartbeat when you know there isn't one but don't want to be the ones to tell me my daughter is dead. For some strange reason I felt a flash of relief when the technician finally did show up. Maybe it was because I was going to get an answer.

I couldn't look at the monitor. Then, "There's no heartbeat," my doctor said. I burst into tears as Dan sagged against my chest, burying his face in my neck.

That was the last definitive answer we ever had concerning Elise: the certainty of death. I ask myself, the universe, "Why?" But even getting an answer would not bring her back.

I write about the moment we learned of her death because it is a chapter of her life and, more relevant to those of us on this planet, a chapter in our own lives; a chapter that will be written for us all eventually, whether short story or long novel. In Elise's case, I suppose her story might be the length of a haiku.

Two years after her death felled me, I can say I am on my feet again. I've been brought to my knees again and again over the months, but one of the best things I've gained, which some people might think very strange, is that I am able to cry, sob, wail whenever I need to. I haven't cried like that since I was little and my family called me a crybaby. I used to laugh at the memory of being a crybaby. Now I know I cried because my heart is tender, and I suffered for not being seen as tenderhearted, and for wanting to seem tough and self-sufficient. I am all of these things when I cry the gift of tears.


My friend Shirley, pictured here with Felix, lost a son in 1978 when he was killed in a car crash at twenty-one. She adores Felix, and will babysit him tomorrow night when Dan gets home from a week-long trip and we go out to be together and remember Elise on her birthday. As I spoke to Shirley on the phone tonight, she told me some more fond memories of her beloved husband, how handsome he was, how fun-loving, how they were "like boyfriend and girlfriend again" when their grown children moved out. I knew from previous conversations that he had died in 1984, and mentioned that next year, 25 years will have passed since his death. "He seems frozen in time," she said. "And I can't imagine my son Howie as a 51-year-old. He'll always be a young man in my mind."

Lately I've found solace in Barack Obama's book Dreams From My Father. At one point he writes:

I remember a conversation I had once in Chicago when I was still organizing. It was with a woman who'd grown up in a big family in rural Georgia. Five brothers and three sisters, she had told me, all crowded under a single roof. She told me about her father's ultimately futile efforts to farm his small plot of land, her mother's vegetable garden, the two pigs they kept penned out in the yard, and the trips with her siblings to fish the murky waters of a river nearby. Listening to her speak, I began to realize that two of the three sisters she'd mentioned had actually died at birth, but that in this woman's mind they had remained with her always, spirits with names and ages and characters, two sisters who accompanied her while she walked to school or did chores, who soothed her cries and calmed her fears. For this woman, family had never been a vessel just for the living. The dead, too, had their claims, their voices shaping the course of her dreams.

I never heard Elise's voice or saw the color of her eyes. But these things are merely audible and visible with the senses. I do long to hold her, but again, I console myself by remembering that she is much more than her physical being. My senses cannot define or contain her, nor can my intellect. But she is with me, with her Papa, and her brother, as we grow and change, and she remains forever our sweet baby.

Gifts

"Life and death are a continuum and this is revealed in initiation: that the end and the beginning are back to back, that life is circular. A great trust is required, often in the face of tremendous doubt or skepticism, for we have been well indoctrinated by the fear of the unknown and our own inner voice of guidance may be the last we are used to heeding.

....Facing our worst fears and meeting these powerful and often painful points of transition in a human life is to consciously connect with the mystery, with the order of the cosmos, with existence itself, and to be opened by its infinite potential.

To call on this greater power is prayer. To make ceremony to invoke it is ritual. To connect with it so deeply that it passes through you and leaves you irrevocably changed is initiation."

--from the www.Shematrix.com website


So many words, and yet so few, can describe how I feel upon my return from my weekend retreat on Whidbey Island: transformed, empowered, opened further than I ever thought possible. Every time I experience The Gift retreat, I am amazed, and this time I was on the organizing team and discovered more of my gifts (pun intended? no pun intended? doesn't matter!) by doing such mundane tasks as writing letters, talking on the phone, joking with the team, cutting and arranging flowers, replacing toilet paper rolls and wiping the bathroom sink, washing dishes and slicing cantaloupe. I grew up believing that whatever I did it wasn't enough, either for myself or for the one whose approval I sought. The day before the weekend when we all rushed around in frantic preparation, and the first day of the weekend when we welcomed 15 participants into a space where they could feel safe in their vulnerability and pampered with food and beautiful surroundings, I fretted over my ability to deliver.

All of us bring an intention we want to fulfill for ourselves to the weekend. I lit a candle to my intention to "feel into my power": not hide myself, speak what I needed to speak, be silent when I needed to, go with my instincts and trust my gut. By the second day of The Gift, I was there, and continued to blossom.

We formed a circle for talking about ourselves, and when each of the women spoke, they had my full attention. When I spoke, I felt heard by every one of the other 22 women there. This dynamic swelled into a compassion and companionship with every participant, whether during their rite of initiation or on a break when we could casually chat while marveling at the abundance of delicious food.

We all created this abundance through potluck and catered meals: chocolate, dried cherry muffins, granola-yogurt-cantaloupe parfait, fresh mango and pineapple, strawberries and raspberries, banana chocolate chip bread, lemon bars, deviled eggs, tomato and fresh mozzarella salad, chicken satay, smoked salmon, all the tea and coffee we could drink, all arrayed before us, for us.

I could walk outside or to another room alone on breaks to get some reflective quiet. Some breaks we took in silence as a rule. Then we would come together again and I would feel lifted up.

I've called on my strengthened sense of self through this work many times. I can let myself feel as much as I need to in times of upheaval. When it was time to deliver Elise, my doctor asked me if I was ready. I said I was scared, and she asked what scared me. "I'm afraid I'll die of heartbreak," I told her. I was scared also to look at Elise after she came out. But as soon as she did, I wanted to see her and hold her. When she came out, I screamed at the top of my lungs. I wanted all of the Labor and Delivery ward, the whole hospital, the whole world to hear me screaming my rage and grief.

I told the women in our circle last weekend that I left my job and all its stifling expectations behind because Elise showed me the way. She shows me the way to myself, in my writing, guitar playing, yoga, walking, in SEEING and connecting with those around me.

When I returned from the weekend, it was dear Felix's 4th birthday. That morning as the sun warmed me, I ran with Genki on Peet's Hill and stopped to take pictures of Genki and of a brilliant red cotoneaster. The song that Felix's classmates sang to him as he walked around a candle lit to represent the sun echoed in my head: "The earth goes round the sun, tra-la, the earth goes round the sun. The earth goes round the sun, tra-la, another year is done." A sweet, simple ceremony, invoking such power.

Dressing for Fall

PHOTO at right: a drawing of Mama and Papa
BELOW: "Now I'm going to add a kid--that's me!"
Felix is wearing one of his "gowns," as he terms them: this is the spaghetti-strap one, held up with a clothespin so the straps don't fall down.

Monday Sept.22nd: The first official day of autumn is here. Mornings have been chilly, 30s-40s, for weeks, but on this morning I'm sitting at a picnic table surrounded by lovely potted plants and flowers: the outdoor seating for a downtown restaurant (only open for lunch and dinner). I'm waiting here while Felix is at a Kindermusik class.

Felix was particularly lovely this morning. He came out of his room after waking and ran down the hallway to hug me before I got dressed. He pinched the squishy flab around my belly button with both hands and giggled. He played his kiddie
music in the kitchen CD player AGAIN--"The More We Get Together," "Michael Finnegan." I have to admit I couldn't bear hearing that same CD again and went upstairs to the guest room until it was time to leave for Kindermusik class.

Ten minutes before we had to leave, he called up to me: "Mom, I'm ready to go-oh!" But he was still wearing the over sized pink velour "gown" I bought him at the Salvation Army store (yes, I bought them for him myself. You can call CPS now, or wait and see how he turns out as an adult. Obviously I'm betting he'll turn out to be a FABULOUS grownup). So I told him he needed to change into shirt and pants before we went. Earlier he was saying he wanted to wear his dress to class. "Dress-up is for home, Felix," I told him. "Why can't I wear my dress to Kindermusik?" he asked, thankfully without whining. I hesitated. I didn't want to put the kibosh on his gender playfulness, his un-self-conscious 4-year-old joy. After all, he likes the way the skirt of a dress twirls around, flips up, flaps against his legs. "Here's the thing, Felix," I sat down and looked him in the eye. "For some reason, where we live, girls wear dresses and boys wear pants." "Only girls wear dresses?" "Yep, for some reason, that's how people dress where we live. So when we're at home you can wear your dress, but outside you need to wear pants and shirt." Was I squashing his creativity? Encouraging secretive, shame-filled cross-dressing instead of fun? Caving in to conventional ideas about gender, or protecting him from a future of bullying and ostracism? The likeliest scenario is that he'll grow out of it. But if he didn't, I wanted him to know society's rules, arbitrary though they may be.

Like a true 4-year-old, he wore his dress until it was time to change. Then he put on some blue long underwear and a gecko T-shirt his uncle Jeff gave him last year. Perfect: his uncle Jeff is a hero of creativity and the spirit of Be Yourself, his Claire de Loon alter ego a fashion plate of fun and exuberance. I wouldn't have chosen the long underwear for him to wear in public on an 80-degree day either, actually. But as our friend Shirley said the other day of Felix's pink dresses, "If I'm gonne be four I'm gonna have fun doing it!"

Knowing

It seems as if autumn is suddenly upon us. Today is chilly, and a light rain is falling. More sunny days are in store for us before winter though, I know.

I'm sitting with a lot of pain in this world lately. I attended a Share meeting the other day, the first time in a while since we stopped going as regular participants last winter. There were many in attendance, many faces of grief: one couple who have no living children because of half a dozen miscarriages and a stillbirth 5 years ago; another who lost their pregnancy at 14 weeks, just when they thought the pregnancy would work out and they started buying baby things; another whose 2-week-old son died of SIDS a year ago; and a couple new to the group whose son was fine and healthy in utero, but had a horrifically botched delivery at term and died 2 days later.

We spoke a lot about how to acknowledge our children when others react thoughtlessly or awkwardly. "You can have another one," "You have other children," or clamming up completely. At first I used to tell people who asked if Felix was our only child that we had a daughter who died in my 8th month of pregnancy. Sometimes it felt right, sometimes it made me angry when the reaction made me feel like a freak. Every so often I talk about Elise to someone who asks, but for the most part I keep her to myself, like a special hiding place I don't want anyone to violate. And that feels right too. I'm protecting her because I am her mother. And I'm protecting myself above all.

I think of Elise and all the loved ones who have gone as existing in another realm, where we the living can't see or hear them. Just as we are ignorant of so many things in this existence--who we really are, what another is thinking, why the world is so messed up--we simply can't fathom those things that aren't right in front of our faces. But we can feel them. I feel Elise with me all the time. This morning as I ran with Genki through thickets of aspen and cottonwood by Sourdough Creek, I thought of the places I'd been with Elise while she was inside me. We went to Hawaii for her cousin's high school graduation, to Tokyo where I had such fun visiting old haunts and seeing grad school friends, to Lindberg Lake where we camped and swam. She heard the voices of her papa and her big brother, and all of my family members when we visited Hawaii and they came to visit us that August.

I felt Elise moving inside me for the first on the way home from Tokyo. I was sitting sleepless on the plane, crying about my aunts not wanting to see me. My attention immediately focused on her when I felt that ripple in my belly from her. "You know what is most important," she seemed to say.

Blossoming

Elise's rose bush is flowering. It's not the "official" rose we planted at her memorial, but even as a replacement for the one that didn't make it, it still represents hope for me.

We had planted two rose bushes at the memorial: one that we bought, and another my friends (then colleagues) at the Modern Languages Department gave us. November 10th was rather late in the year to plant, even though the weather was relatively warm for mid-autumn. The soil where we planted it is not the greatest either, since it was formerly gravel driveway and thus full of rocks and clay. And to top it off, we don't really grow roses and don't know much about their care. So both the rose bushes didn't make it the following spring.

But I had saved the receipt from the Department's gift, and got another rose from the nursery that had guaranteed the original for up to a year or they would replace it. When I returned from the nursery and planted the replacement, Dan said he was glad I could bring myself to do it, because he was feeling too demoralized.

I completely empathized with him. At the same time, I somehow felt driven to grow roses for Elise, even if they weren't the ones we planted at her memorial. I wouldn't be defeated by death, dammit: I had to prevail, no matter how small the gesture of my determination.

The soil is not the best, as I said, but the rose blooms have good company: the aspen we planted five years ago seems to grow before our eyes, probably 3 feet or more since it started out in our garden. The lilac that last year seemed plagued by mysterious black spots on its leaves is in full, fragrant flower. Along with its twin on the west side of the house, it never flowered much in all the years we've lived here, but this season we can scent its loveliness every time we open our front door.

So we live in the mystery, not knowing much except for one certainty: that flowers follow snow, which follows flowers, and so on.

Messes

What is it about weekends that I can really relax into whatever it is I'm doing and not worry about time or To-Dos? After all, I'm not at a paying job, not having to clock in anywhere or fill any quotas during the week. Maybe it's some Protestant-work-ethic, go-out-and-make-something-of-yourself American socialization.

Whatever the reason, the best part is that I can enjoy myself with Felix and Dan on weekends. Especially one like today, clear and sunny at long last. Today's sunshine has an effect like childbirth: the agony of cold, rainy weeks vanishes at the sight of the first warm, clear day.

This past week I felt irritable and impatient with Felix, even after I had time to myself while he'd spent hours at his grandparents' or at preschool during the day. He has fits of whining for candy, where I try to sympathize while telling him "not today," but after listening to his broken-record "lollipop...lollipop" or "gumdrops...gumdrops" a few hundred times, it's like the opposite of hearing a soothing chant: I finally yell, "STOP! I DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOUR WHINING!" I try to balance my tone of voice between This Is Your Last Chance authority and I Am Not Mad At You. Whenever I get abrupt with him, he bursts into tears, which I think is partly manipulation and partly that his feelings really do get hurt, which induces instant guilt in me.

But today is Saturday. Because it's Saturday, I happily indulged his wish to make banana bread, for probably the third time this month, even though it's a mess of an undertaking. In earlier bake-offs, he liked to whisk the flour mixture, crack the eggs, turn the mixer on and off. Today he reached Jamie-Oliver-like accomplishments: he held the measuring spoons while I poured salt and baking soda into them; and he cracked the eggshells AND dropped the eggs into the bowl. He shouted with glee at his egg-cracking feat, especially when I exclaimed that he hadn't let any shell fragments get into the bowl.

Of course there are the gooey bowls and spoons and mixing blade to wash. There are the counters to clean, especially where Felix insisted on using "the big spoon"--the tablespoon--to scoop baking powder. I got a bowl out for him to scoop and dump all the baking powder he wanted instead of wrecking the banana bread with an overdose of baking powder. Of course he got a lot of baking powder on the counter, and left an extra bowl for me to wash.

But the sun is out. The clouds have finally buzzed off. That means today is for making a banana bread mess, especially the batter on the face from licking the mixing blade. Today is for getting covered with sand while making "cakes" in the sandbox. Today is for muddy hands and knees from digging for worms. I couldn't ask for a better day.

Peace, Joy, and Pink Princesses

I think I can say Mother's Day was tranquil for me this year, even though Felix and I are on our own: Dan is out of town until day after tomorrow for a six-day work trip. It was tranquil even though Sarah invited us over for a brunch that was also a belated party for Anna's 4th birthday. She warned me in advance that it was a "princess" party and there would be two other couples with two daughters each, for a total of six little girls plus Felix. It was sweet and thoughtful of her to let me know. Actually, it doesn't hurt anymore to see little daughters these days: I used to take it as a personal affront to have families with a pregnancy, or a new baby, or an older boy and younger girl, or daughters, in my space or within my range of vision. Now they don't seem to exist solely as a taunt from the universe; it just feels like they are living their lives, and I am living mine. I enjoy them when they are at the same gatherings as I, and what better way to celebrate the idea of Mother's Day than a party full of princesses? Even Felix wore his pink ballet dress with matching patent-leather flip flops.


Today was tranquil because while I weeded the front yard, Felix plucked fistfuls of grass from the lawn and watched the wind blow it out of his hand.

My friend Linda drove up while we were in the yard to give me a "Tutti Frutti" geranium with gorgeous fuchsia blooms and serrated leaves. Linda's son died in December of 2004. "I think the hardest thing mothers have to do is to let our children go," she wrote in her card. So lovely, and ironic: as a single parent this week, Felix has been a joy for me, but also somewhat overwhelming. He probably asks "Mommy?" about 300 times a day, usually to say something like, "Gordon the train goes fast, so he's the express train." It was a relief to talk to another mother at the party today who said that some days, the more time she spends with her older daughter, the more her daughter demands of her. The other day I had to ask Felix to hold off on the chatter and "Mommy?'s" until I could at least finish eating my dinner. Last night he was so excited to have the babysitter come over, pulling her by the hand to show her the toys he had up in his room. But when I got home, she told me Felix said, "I miss my mommy" and got a little teary at one point. How is that possible? I said with a stare of surprise at her. She thought it very endearing of him.

We had spent all that Saturday together with no television interruptions (i.e., plugging him into a video while I do something else). We went swimming at noon, picked up a personal pizza for him and picnicked at the MSU duck pond, he rode his bike with the neighbor kids, then we dug for worms (i.e., weeded the garden) in the front yard.

My present to myself was to go out on a Saturday night to a cafe with a DVD (appropriately, Vera Drake) and laptop to watch a full-length movie I can never watch after Felix's bedtime because he falls asleep too late. Pathetic perhaps, but I didn't feel the least bit sorry for myself, nor the least bit envious of the three guys I saw dancing in the open window of the 317 Bar across the street, their jeaned butts wiggling over the sidewalk.

And I didn't feel the least bit of regret over leaving my job while on campus with Felix at the MSU duck pond. It happened to be graduation day, and I pointed out the robed graduates to Felix while they posed for photos nearby with their families. "PROFESSOR GUGGENHEIM!" I heard someone shout behind us from the plodding line of cars on 11th Avenue that were leaving the ceremony. It was a former student of mine, and I congratulated him saying, "You look really happy!" He said he was "elated" and going to Japan on the JET program soon. In my vanity, I count his going to Japan as a personal victory: his other major was German.

On that bench with Felix and our pizzas, I felt elated myself: I was exactly where I wanted to be.