my mother, my hero

i don't remember my mother being giant-sized when i was growing up.

i remember the chocolate chip cookies.
i remember saturday morning crepes.
i remember that one really bad goulash.
i remember books (the chronicles of narnia, the indian in the cupboard, the Bible, that other one i can't remember...).
i remember our cats.
i remember the time we came back from a weekend vacation to find that our closets (and all our clothes) smelled like the pot of beans she left on the stove...
i remember our "hunkering down" days, when she would unplug the phone (really the only way people could get in contact with you short of knocking on the front door, back then!) and draw all the window shades and we'd stay inside and do nothing but read.
i remember the pies.
i remember the big cups of water she'd take everywhere.
i remember her crying at all the sappy parts in movies.
i remember shapeless sweaters.
i remember her taking her glasses off to clean them on her shirt whenever she cried or laughed....so basically all the time.
i remember evening walks around the st. edward's university track.
i remember asking her to help me with my pre-calculus homework and then watching her sit down to read my math book (and then i took it back and did it on my own).
i remember, too, when she got remarried and started to become "domesticated" (to a degree...she still didn't cook dinner), which is probably all she ever wanted.

my mom made her own kombucha and dried her clothes on a clothesline in the backyard before martha stewart made those things popular again. she was a fan of natural products (or really, no products), simple living and simple pleasures, long before that was ever a thing. she loved cappuccinos before starbucks was a household name. she didn't wear makeup (at all) or much jewelry. her favorite perfume was chanel no. 5, but she hardly ever wore it.

my mom would not have professed to be "good" at many things. she was absentminded. she was a slow grader (high school math teacher). she didn't like to cook. she always fell asleep when i was baring my soul to her.

but she was extraordinarily good at laughing.

today i looked in the mirror and saw my mother's face. i think i have her eye shape. i definitely have her jaw and smile and hair type. maybe her eyebrows too. and, i got her freckly, smile-line-wrinkled skin. i loved the crinkles around my mother's eyes. i thought she was so beautiful.

growing up, my mother was my bedrock. she was identity, safety, security, love, joy. she was home. but she wasn't mythic or epic-sized. she didn't have wings. she couldn't do everything.

i don't think it was until i was grown up that she became my hero. now i can't even comprehend the amount that she could and did do.

she raised me to be strong, independent, to take care of myself. in some ways, i've always thought that it was being the child of divorced parents that made me like that. now, i see it was just her.

she taught me to do my own laundry and pack my own school lunch at 13. she gave me an allowance and taught me to save for what i really wanted. (and then she endured my ceaseless obsessive talk of getting a dog for years before i finally did.) she held us while we cried after she told us about our cat dying at the vet (our pets didn't ever got to "the farm"). she believed we could do everything, but she didn't push me to do anything.

even though i feel sometimes like i see my mother's face in myself, what i hope i'll see is her — the mother that she was to me.

i have no idea what i'm doing on this motherhood ride. sometimes, yes, there are days—when dinner gets made, the kids eat all their veggies and give each other spontaneous hugs, my chores get done and i manage to exercise and do a little something on this blog—that i feel like i have it together. but then there are the other days, more often it sometimes seems, when i realize i am getting it all wrong. when i realize if i should read more parenting books and pray more desperately. when i doubt i'm up to this herculean task called raising children.

my mother made it look so easy. i think from her i got the desire to have children in the first place. she made mothering look fun. and even though i could do without all the new wrinkles spots i see on my face lately, and even though it's just a face, i feel bolstered by the idea that at least a little bit of her is in me.

i've struggled all my life with what i want to be when i grow up. but i've finally realized — all i want to be is my mom.

she was the ultimate, the best, the most beautiful and wonderful mother in the world.

i hope one day my children will think that even slightly of me.

survival of a winter, herald of spring {an essay on grief}

the snow has melted. that is, i suppose, the way in which some people know that winter is over. for me, it happened on a saturday afternoon; the baby and i were driving from a nice afternoon at the fernbank museum—where we tried not to get stepped on by a myriad of small people who were all rudely using two legs instead of their hands and knees to get around (in real life i am never this sidetracked in conversation, you know. i hope??)—anyhow, we were on our way to meet up with the papa for some outlet mall shopping. the sun was shining on the downtown Atlanta skyline, the heater was off, i had no coat, and that is when i knew: winter is over! put away your groundhogs!

and here we are: the ground all soft and somewhat browner from its encounter with two snow "storms," our galoshes caked in mud, our dogs shedding early, and not one plant left alive inside. if i never see another bowl of oatmeal it will be too soon. you know what i mean. winter is a time for eating oatmeal and lusting after fur coats you can't afford and unsuccessful attempts to have your fireplace brought up to code and planning beach vacations. check check check check.

this winter was not so bad. i wanted to join in with the rest of the january/february-haters and say this winter brought the doldrums, but is that really fair? i mean, can i really blame a season for any apathy/tiredness/discontent? and was it really that bad? it didn't seem like it while we were going through it. but, the moment that springtime hit on saturday, i knew we had been under a bit of a cloud. a staying inside all day, playing with the same dull toys (albeit learning great, new and wonderful tricks like teething and crawling and standing and cruising and sleeping through the night!), eating the same bowls of oatmeal, marking the same terrible anniversaries kind of wintery gale.

don't get me wrong, all the newness of this baby turning into a pre-toddler has made it seem like we have our own private sun shining in our house every day, and we have had the best winter in years and years and years.

but i'm not sorry to see it go. i think we all need some fresh air. a chance to open the windows and breath deeply. a time to turn our face to the sun. to soak up some vitamin D and let it come out in words  we've been keeping inside too long.

here is what hit me on saturday, in the wake of spring: i am happy.

such a little thing to say. so vague. so presumed. so often not true, too. but in a larger sense than the immediate situation—which, if you are a parent (or a human being??), you know that the immediate situation changes startlingly drastically from one moment to the next throughout the day (can someone make a comic strip about that please?)—that is the kind of happiness i mean. a happiness that has nothing—and yet also something—to do with my immediate present. a happiness that i have very slowly found my way back to. i wrote a little about it here, a year and a half ago.

they say you change every seven years. maybe that's just your physical body, i don't know. but it has been seven years since that moment that i have not been able to talk about, which has yet informed all my writing, all my existing, and gripped me in an intractable embrace of silence and fear.

i think sorrow is not the word for it. sorrow is what you feel when you acknowledge it, and i didn't want to acknowledge it. instead, it was a continual drowning. a continual fear of the pain of sorrow. but instead of escaping sorrow, it became fear.

i read this essay recently and it struck me how much healing i robbed myself of, by not really letting myself grieve. i think mostly i was afraid to grieve. afraid of what it meant to acknowledge it, which is to let it be real. i didn't want to, and i didn't know how.

and yet, that didn't change its being real.

i think you have a choice. maybe you can either travel through the wasteland of grief, physically, painfully, forcefully, despairingly, but with acknowledgement and sorrow.

or, you can get lost in a wasteland, physically, painfully, forcefully, despairingly, but in denial and in fear.

and maybe you don't really have a choice. maybe you can only choose what you will choose because that is who you are. maybe it just takes some longer to acknowledge it, to accept the sorrow. maybe seven years is not even very long, comparatively, for a winter.

but i'm ready for spring.

2012

this new year has begun with that drizzly kind of rain that bears more resemblance to a cloud of gnats than the satisfying swoosh and fall of thunderstorms that i grew up with in texas. rain in texas, like all things texan some might say, is gloriously big and bold. it shouts and hollars and drops like all the heavens are descending, sometimes without warning. in constrast, the wet perspiration of these misting showers creeps up and clings to the neck, gathering under the nose and on the backs of eyelids like a faintly unwelcome memory. it is like the insides of me a year ago and the year before and a few more years before.

maybe i'm just remembering through my nostalgic-me glasses, but it seems like they just do rain better over there in the land of wide open spaces. in fact, it often seems like they do a lot of things better over there. i can't believe it's been three whole years since we packed up all our stuff into a moving van and drove it out here to the south. loverboy says it seems like we've been here longer, but to me, three years sounds real long. one of loverboy's three favorite sentences to say to me goes like this: did you ever think you would...(often followed by, "be married to such a cool guy?" or something along those lines—and no, i really didn't;) i also really didn't ever see myself living in the south. for those of you from the south, Texas is not The South. Texas is Texas. and i've kind of been missing it lately. maybe not just it, although i do miss austin with its manageable city size, informal people, amazing tacos, real coffee places, town lake that's really a river, and rain that falls with purpose...

[long post disclaimer: feel free to skip to the end]

recently i realized—as i started sobbing on the way to the mall—that what i really miss is people. i miss family. i miss friends. i miss the community i had for so long that was mine and was comfortable. i miss having family that i felt close to (geographically and otherwise). and i miss the communal, group-centric life i had during college and especially while spending two years at bible school after college. it was a constant hum of people and togetherness. and actually, i fought it in a way, at the time, because i was emotionally hobbled from various experiences and was mostly unable to just enjoy it. i was closed off and inaccessible, even to myself. still, so many people came through the cracks in my shell, even if they didn't realize it. even if i didn't dare venture out to theirs. and when six years ago i graduated and came home from school, and life changed in an instant, it seemed like i also slowly lost that community. friends got married, moved away, left bible school to go back to their own home towns. it felt like everyone was moving on except me. i may have moved on outwardly, getting married and moving. but inwardly, i felt like i was standing still, alone.

loneliness has been my shadow, an ever-present companion even on the most promising of days for what now feels like both forever and no time at all. i guess six years is pretty long. but during most of those six years it felt like no time was passing at all. as if those years never existed—and yet continue to exist. i know it doesn't make sense. there are still days when i'm in that vortex of bleak and tormenting confusion over how i ever got here in what feels like a stranger's life.

i used to think that i would one day wake up and things would return to how they were before. maybe they wouldn't outwardly be the way they were before. but i, at least, would be the same me i was before. i would be the me i recognized. i would be the same kind of happy that i was and the same kind of hopeful. and maybe i wished and hoped that a lot of my life would look similar to how it was before. of course that's impossible. but my struggle to accept that has been long and slow and disorienting. it felt like life itself had become alien to me. it is a thin feeling. a feeling of having lost myself. of being a ghost in my own life. i was constantly treading unfamiliar territory without even the cognizance that that was what i was doing. so surprised was i to even be this person i was with this life i had, that i wasn't really able to even recognize that things were unfamiliar. it was like being reborn. like i appeared out of non-existence, with no past experience of life to draw from—as if i'd sprung fully formed into the world—and discovered that i was alive and an adult woman to boot, but without the truth that i hadn't been this person before. because i was still me, just a me i didn't recognize.

but i guess what i'm trying to say is that i'm starting to recognize it, to recognize the deep longing i have within to be with family, friends. and also the need to accept and embrace the me i've become.

the truth is, i've experienced a huge amount of healing, a regaining of family and friends, here in the south. as much as i yearn for texas, most of the people i miss aren't there anymore. season by season, and with great strides within the last year, i've begun to climb out of that intense well of loneliness. happiness is something which i've begun to feel again in these last three years, since moving here. and i have to cling to that, to acknowledge it and bookmark it for all those many moments when i feel like i'm not really here.

but today, even though it is dripping like my nose outside, i am reminded that things are very, very good, here and now. i'm so thankful that we're going to be a family of three. and i'm thankful for the families and couples and friends we've gotten close to here in atlanta. i'm thankful for our friday night small group gatherings. i'm thankful for friends who get to visit from other states from time to time.

i'm thankful for 2012, even though parts of it have been the hardest in the last six. although i didn't really do a very good job of documenting most of it, 2012 was a big year for us:

first, we went on a special new year's eve adventure. then, we had a fun, frozen, long weekend in nyc. i had a miscarriage and spiraled into a scary place of fear and desperate sadness. i got braces (and never smiled in a photo again). we attended my sister in law's beautiful wedding (and three other weddings in three other states that same spring!). i dreamed of tacos and rambled my way through my last quarter as a grad student. i finished my mfa in writing at scad which i didn't post about because i was really going through too much to talk about anything. we visited the most beautiful beach in isla mujeres, mexico for our fourth anniversary and thought that was the end. i started to recognize myself again. we watched some fireworks on the fourth of july. i went to london to pass out free bibles during the summer olympics. i spent the rest of the summer sitting on the couch in nauseous misery but i couldn't talk about it because it was the most wonderful, mindblowingly awesome secret! but before you knew about that, i got a job and then turned the big 3-0, while apple picking which is not the worst way to head into a new decade. we also visited family in raleigh for thanksgiving and demonstrated how to (not) babymoon in the north carolina mountains. and finally, we celebrate the second anniversary of fête.

it didn't always feel like much was happening (especially last night while i was sick and we continued our tradition of not really being prepared for celebrations). but really it was a lot for one year. i'm thankful for it, but i'm so ready for 2013!

happy new year!

we are party decoration challenged:/ we know. we're working on it...

xx

B, loverboy, lars & baby

documenting summer//a reading list

some of my summertime memories—so indelible that i can still taste the salt and sunscreen in my mouth, still feel the waft of air from the ceiling fan over my overheated skin, still remember the omelette K made by dumping things from the fridge into a skillet (the girl who saw her mother baking plenty, but cooking, rather less often, watched agog with wonder at this)—are inseparable from the books i remember reading at the time.

they were pivotal, monumental summers. summers which led me to believe that perfection lay somewhere between a tragic romance and the juice of an orange running down one's arm, the perfect tan and the musical genius of carl davis, midday summer rain, God and black coffee. and i am convinced it had not a little to do with the books i was reading at the time. i can almost map out the last decade of my life by what i was feeling while reading these books.

 anna karenina :: "where love ends, hate begins." 

becomes true, while sleeping under the stars and the open sails of a schooner sailing the u.s. virgin islands, learning about addiction, discovering freedom, eating carribbean food, beginning the morning coffee habit, coming to decisions, enduring the abomination of dominos or kfc every night during that week of vacation, moving on, and moving out.

the knowledge of life :: "our experience of Christ can transform us until we are like Him"
is a life-changing revelation, while back at the ranch there is a french class by correspondence, a spare room, krav maga, tennis lessons, solitary bike rides, midday thunderstorms, new red sheets, the memphis belle, lipstick drawings on mirrors, seeking God, working out, road trips, house-building, running from demons, and hamburger eating.

love in the time of cholera :: "we have killed the tiger"
but not before house-sitting, reruns (watched for the first time) of sex and the city late at night, mini powdery donuts, bubble bath jacuzzi parties, love letters, pantry-pilfering, recipes for the perfect martini, tan lines from pool-cabana-server shorts, giant ice cream cookies and camping trips.

jane austen's complete collection :: "if things are going untowardly one month, they are sure to mend the next," and "there is nothing like staying at home for real comfort" (Emma)
for awhile, while one is also showing visiting friends around austin, taking in dr. seuss art, frequenting coffee houses, juicing oranges by the bushels, looking for real work/working the 6am shift at B&N, drinking coffee-black, learning to write again, having family tea parties, discovering starbucks chantico and double-shot, short americanos with lots of room, watercoloring, and convalescing at home.

bonjour tristesse :: "it seemed to me that my heart stopped beating"
and yet, there was nyc in may, forgetting, a love note, long movie nights, freshly picked flowers, the back of a car, a Georgetown play, brick walls, angry geese, a three-day orange kitten named thor, fourth of july fireworks from the summer architecture studio, short hair, a strange bird, sweetish bakery in the morning/quacks at night, love and photography.

the fountainhead :: "naked at the edge of a cliff"
while learning to draw, going vegetarian, the late night merchandising shift at the san marcos j.crew outlet, sunbathing on the balcony (earrings and sheets make good screens in a pinch), stargate atlantis and battlestar galactica, celebrating what you don't have, a stars and stripes cake, the best sushi on our first anniversary, and choosing to believe that life is a metamorphosis.

possession ::"our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life...never take for granted"
crunchy mexican tacos, a breeze on the wrightsville beach, the best vacation ever (although this summer's vies for that spot now), nighttime photography, our third anniversary, a summer movie class, beginning my novel, late nights, unbearable heat, a fourth of july picnic inside, a movie about bedtime, lots of good books, running my first 5k, and moving into an almost house.

i'm convinced that there is a perfect summer in each of these books (and i highly recommend them all). and also that there must be another perfect summer waiting for me in a book somewhere, if i can only find it.

what is one of your favorite summertime memories? did it have anything to do with what you were reading? any favorite summer books?

this is not a comprehensive list of my favorite books...but those are for another season.

once there was a girl

on I-85 around 3:30pm on a dry, hot, summer day, approaching midtown and saturday traffic from the north, on the way to sample the Sublime Donuts we've heard so much about, listening to a cd of young people singing hymns i remember from my own days of being a young person in Summer School of Truth some 15 years (oy!) ago and opening my mouth to sing along, finding the words float up out of memory as easily as dandelion seeds, i felt it: the ghost of a girl who i haven't known in a long time.

it was like bumping into a very old friend who you haven't seen in a long time and them smiling at you and saying something like "the price on these apples, huh?" and shaking their head as if they've seen you just yesterday and nothing's changed, except that maybe their hair is thicker and they haven't got any slight crinkles at the corners of their eyes and there's a certain something—a knowing—in their gaze that's missing. they're young, innocent. and yet, they still like you.

there in the passenger seat of a silver nissan altima, as i let the 100 degree atlanta air scorch my face and warbled to the dear loverboy beside me who i never knew back then, i look at her in the side mirror and say: hello. with some surprise because i haven't seen her in a long time, and i'm shocked actually that i remember her at all.

i do remember.

i remember that she was happy. she liked singing loudly in the car back then, too. but not loudly in a goofy way, just loudly for the pleasure of singing. she liked soccer, but not practicing, which was kind of how she felt about most pastimes. she liked papa john's pizza but not as much as pizza hut stuffed crust. and she thought apple pie was best eaten cold for breakfast on one's birthday.

and i realize that we still have some things in common. i still love reading more than almost anything else. furry babies (animals that is) still make me drool and also make me feel like my heart might break at the sight of them. i still love the piano and i still can't play it. i still dream of having bunches of kiddos and living in europe and speaking french to them. i still love to scribble nonsense in notebooks and i still don't like anyone looking at them. autumn is still my favorite season and the airport is still one of my favorite places.

but there's so much that's changed. for a long time i haven't believed that girl still exists. i haven't believed i could ever be happy and carefree like that again. over these past ten years or so, i've felt so many things, but happiness wasn't among them. 

it was such a normal little saturday outing. we were making a rare trek over to home park for coffee at octane and donuts at sublime (actually i had been there that morning for a little 5k run. yeah, no biggie. wheeze, wheeze), and afterwards we wandered over to the humane society, because i can't ever be on howell mill road (where we met mr. wolf larson in march of 2010 and stars collided) without at least just looking at about a hundred and one doggies and kitties begging us with their eyes to take them home—especially one sad and pathetic little black lab with the saddest, most knowingest of eyes and shakiest of front legs who stole loverboy's sad-pathetic-things-ever-loving heart. thankfully, my heart, much more stalwart and impervious as it is, could see that she would probably be mopey and needy, and really, i think we've got more than enough needs going on as it is in this house, so we left empty-handed.

and then driving home, i looked down and saw that my legs were nonchalantly propped up on the seat, not clenched rigidly together as usual when mr. loverboy drives. and there was something quiet and small, but real and living, inside where once there had been a hole, a darkness.

and oh! just those few minutes in the car. it gave me such hope. hope that i'll once again come upon that girl from long ago who dreamed up imaginary pet wolves, who was most entranced in a wood full of fog at dusk, who believed that nyc was perennially covered in snow and that running for the sake of running was fun, that pen and paper were enough to keep a friendship going, that nothing was more romantic than the french language and also luke skywalker. the girl who first danced to the spice girls' wanna be my lover in her best friend's room in junior high while applying dark red lipstick. the girl who didn't understand pain or sadness or bitterness, not really.

i remembered that once there was a girl. and she gave me hope.