November

Um.

Has anyone noticed.

It's

November.

24 days from now, but who's counting?

Walking in the Wasteland: The Long Shadow of Temperament

the title above is attributed to Jerome Kagan, a developmental psychologist whose longitudinal studies on temperament and its effects was just profiled in a New York Times Magazine article by Robin Marantz Henig entitled "Understanding The Anxious Mind."

“Our culture has this illusion that anxiety is toxic,” Kagan said. But without inner-directed people who prefer solitude, where would we get the writers and artists and scientists and computer programmers who make society hum? Kagan likes to point out that T. S. Eliot suffered from anxiety, and that biographies indicate that he was a typical high-reactive baby. “That line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ — he couldn’t have written that without feeling the tension and dysphoria he did,” Kagan said.

***

My mother always told me the same stories about my childhood temperament. "You never cried" she will say. "I had to set the clock for feedings" and she tells me about the time she slept through a feeding and was certain someone was going to come and sweep me away -- I've always attributed this particular trait to my prematurity somehow. "You always gave your toys away" she will tell me how frustrating it was to see my big wheel roaring down the complex sidewalk driven by another child, or watch me empty my toybox of stuffed animals. "You must have been around two or so and we were at the pool and you scooped a ladybug from the surface of the pool and brought it to me 'kiss bug' you said, so sure that I could make it better, could save it. Your first sentence." My brother tells of how, the year he lived with us when his birthmother in Florida kicked him out -- he was thirteen and I was two. He tells me how his favorite part of the day was to come into my room where I was standing in my crib quietly waiting. I was the only girl in kindergarten invited to a party full of boys -- spiderman themed -- a picture of me from field day -- running in my overalls -- my blond braids flying behind me. Calling out to my mother from the diving board of the complex pool -- the balconies overlooking the central courtyard -- 'I can swim' I shouted -- and jumped off the board, not realizing I'd forgotten my snoopy floatable ring -- and I could not actually swim. I have a hazy memory of being underwater -- floating down, down, my arms in front of me -- and a neighbor boy swimming towards me, air bubbles all around us. The silence. There's no fear. Skiing. Talking to the girl in class who no one would talk to. On the audio tapes my father made on the weekends he'd come to town when I would stay with him at the motel -- he is singing and I am trying to grab the microphone. I am interrupting him. I am no shrinking violet. He always called me tiger.

I was thinking of these things as I read the NYT magazine's article on anxiety -- about the innate aspects of temperament in children --and in particular what Kagan's longitudinal study reveals about the brain and perceived 'high-reactivity' in infants and how it plays out in the child's life. Anxiety, it concludes, isn't always a crippling diagnosis -- watchful, cautious, vigilance -- all of these things can be integrated into an adaptive structure in a thriving and functional life -- highly reactive infants who go on to be young adults who cope well with solitude, whose tendency to worry about being late makes them punctual -- whose fear of public speaking makes them uber-prepared. Much of how this develops is connected to the child's upbringing. The article talks alot about the amygdala and the hypothalmus -- those structure in our brain that wire us to fight or flight -- and I began to think of my own journey with anxiety.

I don't believe that I was innately prone to anxiety -- or what would be termed the 'high-reactive' infant/toddler. I was easy-going, mellow, gregarious, talkative. I had little social anxiety. It's no surprise that the combination that a house shadowed by domestic violence, the glaring dichotomies of light and dark -- the memories I have of my parents in the daytime -- my mother's raw kindness, making daisy chains and picking violets in the shadow of a barn, looking up at the clouds, her reading to me at night, her heartbeat -- the ultimate in security -- my sober father -- set against the shadow of all of that -- mostly in the evenings late when they supposed I couldn't hear -- the school of thought then being what? That infants and toddlers couldn't absorb such things. Then of course what came later -- his violent end, her family's disintegration and the violence there -- all sharp and flashing and the true heart of threat -- what the amygdala is made for -- someone chasing you through the woods -- all of the things that did happen then -- her depression, the poverty -- materially, spiritually, the rage.

I did become cautious, wary. I was changed, but it wasn't what I was born to.

But the great joys of my life came out of that place too -- my penchant for solitude, my seeking out landscapes that soothed me, my immersion in words, my openness to meeting the pivotal people who changed my life, seeing the world through the lens of connection and currents of love rather than acquisition the things we gather around us (whether material or symbolic -- whether it be waterford glasses or peer-reviewed essays) supposing they will keep the worst at bay -- because once the unthinkable, the worst has happened you realize that all you have at your core is your ability to reach out in love to another person -- and heeding the inner voice that, when it counted, urged me forward.

I lost that thread when my anxiety reached its peak in 2002 - it seems like it crept up on me -- it began with two prior years of sleepless nights compounded by my dire circumstances after graduate school -- few real avenues for making a life for myself. The constant weight of financial fear. I'd moved home, been hired by a community college to teach composition on an adjunct basis -- piecing together courses here and there to create full-time work. I felt like I'd lost my path - coming home seemed like moving backwards -- but I knew that in order to truly write I had to make peace with who I was, what shaped me, my life here -- rather than running away and living out some idealized idea of what the West meant to me. It seemed like all the dread and fear of all the years I'd lived here before came to visit me then, finally. I hardly noticed that I was leaving my apartment less, avoiding people -- and then the panic attacks started -- and that year I walked through the gate to a plane taking me to visit my best friend in Florida I feared the enclosed space of the plane like I never had. Christmas shopping crowds made my throat go dry.

I found my way to a Buddhist Phd who was the first person to ever teach me the strategies of CBT -- which were, for me, a miracle. Between buddhist thought, yoga, exercise and CBT I was able to come back to life, into a life.

I've been thinking about it more because of the pregnancy. I actually have felt remarkably calm. I have felt whole. Don't misunderstand me -- I have had moments of panic and my mind can occasionally, out of habit, run on some negative loop (the h1n1 epidemic has been particularly challenging) but I am excited and confident about this next phase of life.

I still feel sheepish about certain things -- that my adaptive response to anxiety didn't involve the kind of discipline that meant actually finishing my novel -- I'll find the groove someday, but for now I have chosen this life -- G & me guiding W towards his future, trying to equip him with the tools he needs to thrive -- making a solid and happy home -- ignoring the undone things and trying to focus on the places where I succeed. It may not be impressive to the outsider -- but when I look back on my own beginnings I can think of nothing more important than a safe home filled with love.

The last section of the Wasteland is called 'What the Thunder Said'

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID


After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
D A
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
D A
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
D A
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

After a poem steeped in the disillusion of what humanity can come to after the horrors of WWI --this last section to me seems to be the rejection of the formal structures of Elliot's world (Christianity as he understands it, materialism etc.) and in the end he too leaves us with the only way he can make sense of it all -- a fable from the hindu scripture -- and its formal ending -- 'peace with passeth all understanding.'

So that is what I focus on -- not the structures (whether intact or crumbling) -- but the relinquishing of control into a sense of peace.

Shantih, shantih, shantih.

Joy

Annacyclopedia has some very wonderful news.

It fills my heart today.

The Early Dark

Last night we were all in bed by 8:00, the fall declaration that we set our clocks back in the morning had us crawling under the covers -- that and the fact that sunset this evening will be at 4:59. On December 7th through the 12th the sun will set at 4:31 -- and then the days blessedly start to lengthen again -- incrementally inching us through the long winter here.

I live in a one of the U.S. northern border states. We have two sizable cities that get lots of praise for their cultural amenities but the coming winter always wipes those things away for me as I steel myself for months of below zero straight temperatures -- and frigid windchills -- advisories telling you how many minutes until your appendages are in danger.

You get conditioned to it, living here. In childhood I vividly remember when it hit 40 degrees (F) we would strip down to our short sleeves and tilt our faces towards the spring sun.

G loves the bitter cold and for years he's made an annual winter camping trip farther north -- near the borderlands. He pulls a sled packed with gear up and down rocky portages -- sets up camp on a frozen lake where he and his friend pull the occasional lake trout from a augered hole, watch marten undulate through the snow, roast the occasional rabbit and climb into their sleeping bags inside the canvas tent where G stokes their woodstove all night. There's a part of me that sees the draw of the crystalline cold -- the way the sun hits the crust of snow, the absolute wintry silence -- but the other part of me thinks of those years when blizzards hit and I'd worry of him out there in the swirling relentless white.

When spring finally arrives here -- months after it has reached other places in the country -- (I always think of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved -- when Paul D is fleeing slavery and is told to follow the blooming trees -- from full bloom to breaking open buds, to tightly closed knobbed branches -- and how there we are -- farthest north with our trees branches studded with the promise of a someday spring when the daffodils are blooming all over New York.

The cycles of nature are stark here and I used to dread the growing barrenness of this time of year -- trees stripped of leaves, browned grasses, every house shut tight against the cold -- and then something happened.

Last night I made fish chowder and left the warm pot on the stove. The lights were on and the football game was playing on the radio in the garage as I pulled out and drove past the park where G & W were throwing a football under the Hunter's Moon. I barked out some directive 'soups on the stove, breads in the freezer' - because I was feeling cranky and trapped in my body -- not comfortable enough to amble up to the park and lower myself onto the ground to watch them toss the ball back and forth. It was such a beautiful night. The neighborhood was quiet, the porch lights on -- leaf piles diligently raked to the edge of the yards. Everyone tucked into their houses. I remembered the first neighborhood I lived in in the city after we moved here, how the neighborhood was filled with children my age and we'd take over the streets at night before the first snow fell -- playing kick the can and other such games into the evening before mothers started just calling out into the streets from the doorsteps. By the time I was W's age we would move to a child-restricted complex where the only other person my age was the boy who lived round the corner who I wrote about the other day. I was thinking this as I went to go pick up Lucy's dog food at the vet's office which was to close at six, the sole vet tech sitting behind her desk in the lit window who looked startled as I walked in. I was feeling sorry for myself that W & G were off doing their thing and I was alone -- something they probably supposed I wanted -- but I find that my speed and W's especially at this age -- always hurtling himself towards a ball at full bore -- is so at odds -- any suggestion I would have -- a leisurely walk say, would have been met with a dejected shrug and grudging acquiescence. I find I want to read or curl up on our bed among the pillows. I also was busy lecturing myself as I drove home -- telling myself that this, for them, is a fleeting time -- the last time when it will be just the two of them. I felt sheepish then when I walked in the house and G had put the bread in the oven and they were watching the football game. I felt like the admonishing mother calling out sharply into the dark.

X had called earlier in the evening while I was finishing the roux for the soup -- whisking in the half and half and pouring it into the chowder. She asked how W's homework had gone -- that he'd called her for help when I was just downstairs doing laundry, something I was unaware of -- by the time I'd climbed the stairs he'd exclaimed that his homework was hard, but done -- and I was pleased -- his resource book out -- signs of working somewhat independently -- I'd checked in of course, to see if he needed any help -- but he declined. X said he'd called frustrated and when she tried her best to walk him through what she could -- but she was at a get-together -- people all-around and not seeing it in front of her...and, according to her he said "thanks for nothing" and more or less hung up on her. "He DID not" I said, horrified. I'm at a loss sometimes with him -- the times where offers up help so far and few between -- didn't I want to help as a child? It seems to me that I was always offering to help -- but then again perhaps it was my mother's instability and rage that, as a young child anyway, led me to forever be trying to find ways to 'make it better', or 'be a good helper.' In some ways perhaps it is a sign of complete normalcy that W doesn't feel compelled to help, or when the dog is whining to get out and he only raises himself up from the couch when I've already made my way halfway there -- and he's quick to say "well I saw you were halfway there already" -- to which I usually reply that he give me a break as it was crystal clear he was unwilling to dislodge himself from the couch -- and he usually gives me a slow smile and says "how could you tell??" He'll call from half a room away for me to fill his orange juice glass -- which I did when he was younger --and something I'll only do on rare occasion now -- but usually I'll just say "are your legs painted on?" On the weekday mornings he will crawl into bed between us, something that could be sweet and family building -- but inevitably he wants to wrestle with his father -- and I get his spine pressed against me and I have to say "don't kick me. Be careful of the dog" until any hope of resting lazily in bed are gone and I just relinquish my space.

Last night, after dinner I took a bath and they had been in the living room watching football. I had turned on both bedside lamps and turned down the bed -- I thought that tonight, perhaps, I'd get a book and read -- baths aren't as comfortable as they were and I'm getting to the point in pregnancy where I'm uncomfortable -- a ligament issue in my knees not allowing me to kneel or lunge without an unsettling burning sensation, my feet slightly swollen so that most of my shoes are tight, a true challenge to turn from side to side in bed -- the only recurring back pain I've had has been in my upper back at night -- beneath my shoulder blades -- and recently a searing tenderness on the skin stretched over my sternum. I track the baby's movements -- but the anterior placenta has always made that a bit muted -- and sometimes it's only in a quiet moment in bed when I really feel her move. My bath was as expected in our shallow bathtub with my giant belly rising above me where I tried to splash warm water over it...I hoisted myself up from the tub, toweled off, brushed my teeth and washed my face and walked to the bedroom only to find the boys sprawled on the bed. W sprawled completely in my spot. G said "you don't like us being in here do you?" And it wasn't that -- it's just that if I felt they were coming to join me -- bringing their books and crawling in next to me to join whatever it is I was doing -- but to arrive in a bed already occupied and Nickelodeon's spongebob on in the background. *Sigh*.

I don't really know what it is I'm trying to work out here. This blended family is on the edge of change -- and I find my patience isn't what I'd like it to be all of the time. I know that this transition is tremendous for W -- and I had a dream last night -- I don't remember all of it but what I was left with was my taking W in my arms and giving him a long and loving hug. I hate that I'm judgemental of his playing 'So.ulja Boy' on youtube, or that I'm always harping on him that he can't just surf wherever he wants on the Internet -- that he can't close the computer when I come by -- that one of the rules of the house is that what he does is an open book -- as unfair as that might seem...don't ripstick in the house, be careful of the tree (an Australian Pine which then does get knocked over), and the fact that in lieu of any regular chores -- he is just asked to comply when his help is requested -- it is not without slumped shoulders. We've just gotten test results back from standardized tests which rank him very high in Math -- 93rd percentile, but low-average/average in Reading -- one of the components being as low as the 38th percentile -- and for a child with such verbal agility it's puzzling. I keep having the sense that he's slipping from us -- school wise...that something isn't engaged. He did come home last week excited because he'd been praised during his reading session -- and the work we'd done at home put him ahead of the game. It gave me hope.

And he's not eating his vegetables.

I guess nearly ten is the new nearly twelve.

Everything he and his mother have together is so big -- they fight big and she smothers him with affection -- it is a relationship of extremes. I have always felt that in comparison to her gestures that I must seem so closed and miserly with my emotions -- I am just not prone to grand gestures. I always tell him that I love him. If he's made me angry I always say "you know I adore you but when you do _____ it makes me crazy." Or "you simply can't talk to me that way, you understand? I won't allow it" and he's usually respectful and contrite. I make him a snack after school, ask after his day -- we talk a little -- he'll tell me stories about recess or something funny that happened at school.

When he was sick last week and at his mom's house I wrote him an email at his new email address (mother monitored and everything.) I wrote:

Hi Sweetie,

I don't know if you are checking your email since you are feeling so yucky -- but I wanted to tell you I hope you feel better soon!

Thinking of you,

Love you kiddo,

Pammy

And the next day, in my mailbox, I found this:

im better i love you

As I think of all this, the winter coming on, I'm struck by the sense that one can't fight the cyclical nature of things. I can no more control W than I can control the seasons, or anything really other than my own heart.

Once W was off to bed last night and G taking a shower the phone rang. It was X -- and though she'd already called and we'd settled it that he didn't have to call back -- she asked if he was sleeping -- and I said he'd just gone to bed and that he indeed might be asleep by now -- there was some edge of panic in her voice as she said "well can you go check, I want to say goodnight" -- and so, there I was stranded on my back in bed -- and maneuvering myself out of bed "hold on" I said, "I have to get out of bed" -- and I walked with the phone to his bedroom -- where he was tucked high into his loft, blankets around his head --only his face sticking out -- "are you awake I whispered, I see your eyes are closed...oops a little flutter" and X said "just tell him Mama loves him" "Mama loves you" I said -- "Do you want to say anything to her -- she's on the phone -- his eyes still closed "I love you" -- and she sighed audibly on the other end, appeased, and said good night.

Once I tucked myself back into bed my mother called -- and in her sing-songy "I've been pleasantly overserved" voice -- asked me why I was in bed so early -- mock surprise etc. etc. Because I'm NINE MONTHS PREGNANT...didn't come out of my mouth but should have -- she called to have me say goodbye to my godmother which I did "your shower was like your wedding. All your friends are so nice" she said "I'll just replay it over and over." -- and I wanted to say something -- to tell her that I loved her, though really I don't know her all that well -- just a presence whose always been in my life -- I wanted to tell her that I thought it was unfair -- that she always wanted children and life didn't hold that for her -- and my mother, well -- my mother. I can't say she never wanted children but I will say that having children infinitely complicated her life.

Life.

To quote Greg Brown

"Like a thump-ripe melon, so sweet and such a mess"

Soul Places

Whistler 2004

One of the many reasons I love G is that his heart is in the mountains too.

Do you have a soul place?

The Next Best Place *edited*

I was just going to quickly write a disclaimer about the end of this post where I address my own journey with IVF/infertility -- I fully understand that my reaction to this journey is my own -- and in no way do I mean to suggest that once you have begun to build the family that you imagined that one is healed of 'infertility' -- but simply the hope, for me, that it will be.

I wasn't going to blog today and then I read this post by Eden.

I ripped my last contact and then couldn't find my glasses and I can't see anything without them. I rarely wear them. I left them in the pocket of my coat once and closed the car door on my coat. Oops. These same pair have Lucy chew marks in the corner from her puppy-hood.

I spent lots of my adolescent years when I couldn't afford contacts and refused to wear my old ugly tortoise-shell glasses (think Sally Jesse Raphael) -- I would be out with friends and boys would pass by and I'd hiss to my friend "is he cute?"

God. Weight gain, braces, cutting your hair short to an ill-advised 'Princess Diana' cut AND getting glasses -- that was my fifth grade year -- what, I was about ten turning eleven?

Then I just got angry. I left my elementary school and that year that I transferred at twelve, seventh grade -- it was the first time I got drunk. I never wore my glasses. I stole my mother's cigarettes. Watered down her gin. Bought snuff at a tobacco store uptown where the proprietor would give me a knowing wink and say 'this is for your mother, right??' Wore clothes I found at ragstock, a second-hand clothing store filled with barrels of old kimonos and army fatigues. My hair was short and spiky then. My best friend had a mohawk and cleopatra-like kohl-darkened eyes -- elaborate lines that curled down her cheeks. I walked alone alot. I listened to the Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks. The Clash. Walked around the lake we lived by. Sat on the swings, watched the first crust of ice form on the lake in the late fall. I remember the boy who lived around the block -- my first crush really -- who predictably fell in love with my best friend -- the two of them dancing to Madonna's "Crazy for You" at a school dance -- and I think I was a little in love with both of them -- though I could never articulate that at the time -- it never would have been part of my vocabulary. His mother was an alcoholic and he brought screwdrivers to school in a thermos.

I remember so clearly feeling myself to be the person I am now -- then. I had less power, of course, didn't really know what I was meant to be on this earth for, but I felt things to deeply, was so aware, constantly processing.

He and I would smoke my mother's pot in one of the abandoned basement rooms in my old apartment building. He made a pipe from a coke can. My mother would later claim that the hookah and little film canisters were supposedly from ten years before.

I remember a get together before a school dance at a local pizza place uptown -- a part of the city within walking distance from where I lived -- a place of old warehouses turned to retail spaces and ethnic restaurants -- at the time it was a place filled with skateboarders and punks -- when there was still such a thing -- to see it now you can hardly imagine -- the streets so thick with BMW SUV's and designer handbags. I remember vividly kids pouring alcohol into the clear plastic pitchers of pop.

Where the hell were our parents? All of our parents? There was no soccer for me, no practices of any kind -- no afterschool programs.

That boy and I would walk in the dark and I remember that heavy feeling -- what I can recognize now as the youngest burgeoning of sexual tension -- but really what we both had in one another was someone who understood.

And I thought about our childhood selves and how we both faced the same kind of pain -- the kind of pain that will allow you forever after to see people, strangers on the street, and recognize something in them.

I think of these things a lot now as W gets older.

The best thing my mother ever did was to make the decision to transfer me to a private parochial school when I was thirteen. Of course it took me failing nearly every subject to do so.

You know I don't remember many specifics of those years except I do remember the Vice Principal of the school, Sr. Colleen. She seemed like she was nearly six feet tall with a shock of silver hair, an upright carriage -- and tough, but smart. She saw something in me. And can you believe that for awhile I wanted to be a nun? Really. I thought that if I could devote my life to making other people's lives better -- giving to the poor, the kind of Dorothy Day school of Catholicism -- that was something I could get behind.

Where the hell am I going with this?

I think I was thinking just about our own personal evolutions -- how we become who we are in this moment staring at the computer screen. My life is so vastly different than it was ten years ago, but I am, at my core, the same person.

I still feel there is power in the written word and believe that some part of what I'm meant to do is to be found there. I still find the most solace in wild places that I carry around with me. I still am happiest listening to my alt country and folk-y music while chopping vegetables for soup or making bread. I still marvel over a well-written passage of prose and can just sit there with it. Parties still exhaust me and silence rejuvenates me.

G and I interviewed a doula last night and in talking she asked what it was that we did and I explained how I had been a teacher, that my goal was to write, but I'd taught at various Universities and community colleges for nearly ten years before I left. I explained to her how all-consuming infertility was -- and how it almost seemed a dream to look back and think that I left my tenure-track job in pursuit of our pregnancy -- there were other significant reasons of course, W at the top of the list -- but to realize how much of living -- truly living -- was surrendered to infertility.

I realized that not only was I clearly elated at the prospect of meeting our child -- but too the prospect of re-entry -- into life. Into the next best place.

Raising children. Returning to my work. Returning to my body. To myself.

"Many of my IVF clients" the doula said "it isn't until after the birth that they realize, truly realize, that the pain of that journey is over."

God willing.

P.S. I just had to laugh at Natika's comment about how my glasses are so similar to Eden's old ones -- so I had to pull out an old photo to show that I swear I didn't just buy them ;) This is Christmas of '05.

My Mother, Myself

I don't feel very blogworthy right now. Blppphhft.

My best friends from high school threw a shower for me on Sunday. I, true to form, right before we were to open presents, got all mushy and cried -- seeing these women I'd known since we were 12 or 13 -- their mothers -- women whose houses I'd been in and out of.

I know one friend's mother more than the rest -- it sticks in my mind for some reason coming to their house in the evening and she and her mother were playing scrabble at the table in the kitchen by the back door where their springer spaniels would always scratch in and out. It's funny because of course where I admire their relationship she says her mother drives her crazy too.

On my mother's suggestion I'd invited all the usual suspects that she used to gather around her for Thanksgivings -- the friends she'd come to know in our old condominium -- sweet, kind women who probably aren't that much older than me -- when I was in high school they were in their mid-twenties --and now the age difference doesn't seem so vast -- fellow teachers of hers, I'd invited my greek neighbor, the woman my mother's age who I get along with so well -- and my mother in law, of course -- who was uncharacteristically quiet -- normally so vivacious in her own household and comfort zone. My mother's best friend from high school came from Michigan, my godmother, a retired elementary school librarian -- who my mother has always said was brilliant, a latin scholar who wanted more from her life than perhaps what unfolded -- she married late to a man who'd already had children and didn't want any more, though she did. She is funny and quiet and sharp. I always wish I could take her aside and ask her what she thinks of my mother's behavior -- like I always want some reassurance that the things I notice about my mother aren't all in my head.

Take yesterday. My mother called late in the afternoon and asked if they could come over so K could see my house. I excitedly show them the nursery and there seems to be a silence from my mother. She usually zeros in on things she's given me -- but is strangely subdued about all the hard work Gerry's put into the nursery.

She walks to the kitchen and asks if I have a soda. My mother then proceeds to take out a flash drive and ask me to upload photos to a bookmaking website she's been unable to access at home with my brother's hand-me-down first generation apple, piggybacking on the neighbor's Internet connection...she's called me frustrated a number of times in the last week and I've said I would help her at some point. She's decided that point is now. She sits at the kitchen island as I do the tutorial -- and she points at which picture she wants me to upload, zoom in on, crop, no not that one, how about that one...she labors over the text she should write -- reads it aloud. Her friend asks me gently if I need to get dinner ready (I do) -- and I start taking vegetables out of the fridge -- going down to the freezer for a baguette...I have a headache. I've been doing housework most of the day and am tired and just want to sit down. I don't have the energy to run through her entire project from her trip to Spain and I wonder, as she's sitting there, if she doesn't just want to do the whole project right that minute.

My mom's friend says she wants to go home. She is more perceptive than my mother.

My mother always says "if you need anything you just have to call me." "If you want me to help with that, you just let me know".

But when I see her she doesn't ask me things -- except perhaps to ask me how I liked her gifts -- though she generally asks how I'm feeling. At the shower -- I wore a maternity dress I bought at the gap with a cowl neck and these deep orange stockings -- my mother looked at me and asked if I was dressed for halloween. She remained silent with a smile frozen on her face when anyone asked about the name -- because she's hurt by my not choosing a family name -- and when someone asked about a middle name my mother said sharply " Oh, she knows, she's keeping it a secret".

She presented me with a cradle I'd slept in as a child -- filled with my old dolls, a layette her mother had brought her home in. It was saved for last and, of course, I cried -- she'd exclaimed in disappointment that the card hadn't made me cry -- and then it was her moment -- to explain about my birth, have all the women ask again how big I was..etc... and then, the strangest thing, she gave them the wrong birth weight. I know for a fact I was 2 lbs, 5 oz. -- as the story has been told over and over so many times since I can remember...she said '2lbs 4 oz' -- and it struck this strange false note in my head and I thought to myself how strange that seemed that she would get that wrong. "Oh I know my daughter mentioned that once you were all out to dinner and someone mentioned how terribly sentimental I was..." -- she said, voice sing-songy -- and I said "oh Mom, it was said in a GOOD way -- how you are so thoughtful about such things" I said.

Someone else's advice card was about how I should enjoy the little girl stage because there would be a difficult time with little girls -- and my mother pulled out her standard line about how she wanted to give me away when I was twelve...

My blood always boils when she gets to that point. I think of how she treated me. Her rages. That environment -- and how I was throwing myself against the walls in my own mind -- trying to just get out. I remember locking myself in the bathroom once trying to imagine how I might end it. Banging my head against the tile floor. Those teen years, my mother always jokes lightheartedly, you just want to give them away.

And I smile at her and I try to find tenderness in my heart. I try and try and try.

"Was my mother acting strangely" I ask my friend who made the whole thing possible -- and I loved it -- seeing my friends' mothers -- their firm and loving embraces -- the smiles on my friend's faces -- and their cards filled with such joy for me -- you could just see in each of them how genuinely they cared.

"No, not really" she said -- and I realized that it's the distance I feel from my mother -- did she create it? Did I? She reaches out to me in sentimentality -- that's true -- almost every place she meets me in emotionally is tied to something in the past -- not the present. There are moments - I think of a lunch we had in her garden a month ago -- and how fully present she was then.

She's still reeling from the visit with my brother probably. She doesn't look well, or at least she didn't look well to me.

"I should be more forgiving of her" I said when I got home. G leveled a look at me.

I want a mother who comes to see me -- even if I don't always ask -- I want a mother who stops by with warm wishes and kind words.

After their fight when my mother was retelling the moment with my brother "I mean, you can't just rage at someone like that and then pretend it never happened"

Thank God I was on the phone because I just stared into the middle distance, frozen, looking out at the early snow, the dark.

I've been praying lately, something I rarely do because I feel I need guidance. There's the little things of course -- worrying about the flu and the last month of pregnancy and the waves of worry -- can I do this? What was I thinking? How will I get done what I need to? Will this strain what G and I have -- I realize how he is everything to me -- I even worry about Lucy -- how will she adjust.

Give me something to worry about and I'll run with it. Strangely the act of birth frightens me less than it did prior to pregnancy -- perhaps in part because my body has been so sturdy up until now -- NOW I know what good all that running and skiing did me -- even if it didn't make my thighs thinner -- it made them capable of bearing this weight :)

I just want to be a good mother. I want to be loving and present and supportive. I want to give guidance and positive direction. I want to introduce her to a world that is full of positive and beautiful things.

So. That's why I'm so reclusive these days. Tucked into my little blog cave...