Better Make It A Double

Limbs

(a poem, at Andromeda's request)

Limbs

My husband’s mother

Walks with the ghost

Of a marionette within her.

Multiple sclerosis

Her choreographer,

She chooses most

Of her own steps,

She will not

Dance them all.

 

She walks with the whisper

Of that ghost contained,

Marionette with strings

Unevenly stretched.

A limp, a thrust toward two-o’clock,

Her dance a lilt, a dirge, a jig.

She stares slightly

Off to the side,

Sometimes heavenward,

Or straight at you with a

Slightly cocked chin,

Never longer than a moment

Between points,

Between steps.

 

My husband’s mother

Moves on the axis

Of her own gravity,

Drawing the circumference

Of decades

Contained within her,

Extending around her

Through generations

Of children,

Through meals

Around long tables,

Faith shared

In bowed heads,

A worn bible,

And showing up.

 

Her stiff upper body

Moves as of a piece.

Thin hand outstretched

For firmness of wall,

Grip of a doorway,

The shoulder of

The person closest.

We know this.

We believe we are ready.

 

In this way we hold her up, slightly

Leaning into her, quietly.

The lines and muscles

Of her mouth betray her,

Straight and clenched,

Righting herself,

To be the light in the world,

How to serve, how to lean?

 

My husband’s mother

And I, three miles apart

We stir like a soup,

Entwine our roots, graft

To the long and the short

Of years;

Mix gardens, and meals,

Genes, worries,

Households and loves,

Milestones and memory;

Pain of body, world, origin.

 

In front of our house,

Marionette strings slacken,

And her hands open up to the sky.

Watching grandsons play,

Laughing, easily, she and them both,

She throws her head back

And laughs,

And only the tips of her fingers

Stay curled,

Watching those children

That run

With scooters,

Wobble, and glide.

Their young bodies

Growing stronger,

Unfurling into long, lean limbs.

 

Her arms recoil,

One reaching

Toward down,

The other folded

Over her chest,

As she chooses her steps,

Wobbles her own way

Down, bit by bit,

To the ground to bend

Over the untied shoe

Of her grandson.

Stay still, young man,

Stay still.

 

© All Rights Reserved

 

summer in the city

Our 2 little characters have been busy, busy, full of bug bites and scraped knees, sweat and dirt. We've had a nice stretch of gorgeous weather, and have been eating out of the garden, splashing in pools of all shapes and sizes, and generally enjoying all summer has to offer. I think I will always remember this summer as the summer the boys discovered that being a twin is really pretty awesome. They are best buddies, almost always together, and they'd be the first to tell you they like it that way. Their parents don't mind it either, because they play together for long stretches, amusing us with their games, and sometimes even letting us get a thing or two done.

(Mama's t-shirts to bed is a big treat)

N is a diligent bean-snapper.

I won't say the name of O's game here, but you can probably guess.

Raspberries are plentiful this year after an inch of chicken compost last spring.

The white chicken above turned out to be a rooster. When we brought him back to trade him for hen, the guy working at the feed store called to his co-worker to come help us by yelling, "Steve! Gussie's a Gus!"

The Farmer's Market playground (and the "twin slide"),

There are some very interesting cars at the Farmer's Market. There are a group of people who hang out there every Saturday morning and, umm, do things to their cars. Sometimes N or O will pick up a random object in the house and ask if we can glue it to our car.

The music is also always a hit.

As are picnics (coming home to a clean kitchen = awesome).

And wasn't it nice of these men to come and bring all their equipment and chop down a tree for our amusement? (Actually it was due to Dutch Elm disease, which is taking down all the gorgeous elm trees one by one). The tree had been marked with a orange "N", and when N asked what it meant, I told him I didn't know. He thought about it for a bit, and then said, "N, for no more tree."

Wishing you lots of summer goodness.

reading and writing

Sorry – It’s Wednesday, and I’ve left you hanging. Well, as I told Caro yesterday afternoon at the kiddie pool, I got in the car Thursday afternoon and told myself that I have four hours of road trip and good company to get over it. Feeling guilty and intimidated is one thing, but letting those things wreck an amazing opportunity is quite another. And I did get over it, mostly, and  it was an amazing opportunity. I wrote for hours. We read poems and prose aloud, talked, ate meals together, and workshopped pieces, but when we weren’t doing any of those things, we pretty much wrote or slept.

The retreat took place in a beautiful setting, full of wildness, a place on the edge of the places people make their insistent mark. I could have done nothing at all there, just listened to the loons, swam, hiked. Instead I worked my ever-loving tail off.

On this high, surprisingly comfortable old bed, I made myself a cocoon of pillows propped myself up, and wrote and wrote and wrote. I brought my computer and I had the front porch to myself. I wrote poems and prose, revised and revised. I took risks. From the two instructors, both accomplished poets, I received inspiration, direction, and validation. I was challenged and I was encouraged, in just the right balance for this scaredy-cat who nonetheless wants to have her work honestly appraised and learn from that.

I am a much better essayist than I am a poet, I think, but I am just as interested in learning more about poetry as I am in learning more about writing in general. Sometimes I almost wish this weren’t the case. This is no small thing—there is just so much to consider, so much to learn. I am a beginner, and in working through that muck, I cannot escape having all my amateurishness laid bare when I dare write poems at all. I've been skating around the edges of this for a while now, and it is sometimes a painful place to be. I don't think it would be if I were 18 or even 25 but I'm 34, with no plans to go back to school anytime soon. For now, the only cure (partial cure) for that is reading and writing, reading and writing, along with finding ways to take a class or workshop here and there. I will be in this place for a long time, perhaps forever. I need to do it anyway.

I am easily intimidated. I still use writing to vent, to feel like somewhere I can make sense, have my complete say. But, since starting to write again three years do ago, something has changed. I started out needing to get some difficult and transformative experiences out of my system. A diary or journal wasn’t enough either, I needed to communicate about those experiences, connect with other people. I am so grateful for the fact that I was able to start writing again by blogging. Slowly though, I wanted to accomplish something more than just venting and commiserating, valuable as those things are. What’s changed is this: these days, my primary motivation to write is a profound enjoyment found in the work of writing itself.

And now my head is full of words, so many words that I am utterly distracted, perhaps even prone to walking into traffic, or, as I did yesterday, putting random objects in the fridge and leaving the faucet running. The words come to me in dreams,  in the car, in the grocery store, streams of black text and letters arching over my vision, entrenched in sensation and memory, rearranging themselves again and again, forming silently on my tongue until my fingers ache to type. I am distracted until I kiss my sweet husband, or fold my boys into my arms and read with them, feeling the weight of their little bodies against my chest. This, even the sweet normal, is the stuff of poetry and prose.

I am distracted until I stand in the garden at dusk and just breathe, or write again, late at night, forming the words, crafting the sentences, certain that I want few things more than to do this as often as possible for the rest of my life.  

retreat

On Thursday afternoon, I am leaving to go on a three day writing retreat at the edge of the Boun*dary Waters Canoe Area. It is being organized through a wilderness retreat center connected to my denomination (Mennonite). I hastily applied to go to this retreat before I left on our trip to the Netherlands, and while I was gone, I checked my e-mail to hear that they’d be delighted to have me. I was thrilled, elated, amazed I’d be granted this opportunity. Now, mere days away, I find myself as nervous as a schoolgirl – a bundle of intense insecurity and general fear of the unknown. That, and I’m overwhelmed by the mother guilt that comes unbidden at everything from leaving the work of childcare and the household to J and his mom for that long, to leaving the boys themselves (especially N, who is already declaring tearfully that he’ll miss me so much), to spending money on gas and the registration fee. I’m trying not to regret signing up, trying to believe that I deserve this time somehow.

As my boys grow older and we’re moving solidly out of the baby and toddler stages, I find myself interested in a bigger world than the one I was living in a couple of years ago. It is a world that contains a more expansive definition of motherhood than all the milky, heavy labor that goes into the first couple of years or so, one that also desires engagement with people who aren’t necessarily in the exact same stage of life. I find myself thinking more about spiritual matters these days, about the natural world, and about issues and politics. Contrary to how that might sound, this isn’t a way of moving further away from my children as it is of the three and sometimes four of us all being in a place to move into that wider world together. Poems, and God, and nature, and even simple politics are a part of my children’s’ experience now, and so it feels right to engage in learning about those areas again with and without them. Going on a retreat, though, is about me. There’s no way I can justify this as being for the family somehow. True, I’m saner if I get my own needs met, but that doesn’t really require a 4 hour trek north to be with renowned writers does it?

But. J only really has one full day extra with the boys, and my MIL isn’t doing too terribly much either. I’m prepping meals, making arrangement for when I’m gone. The cost was sliding-fee. One of the facilitators of the retreat is a poet I really, really admire, and there is a focus on spiritual memoir in some of the sessions, which I’m so interested in exploring further. I feel drawn to both poetry and memoir in an intense way lately, and there are so many areas of my own messy faith story that I’ve never written about at all. And that scares me too –my unconventional faith story is quite likely going to be very different than that of a bunch of people who are most likely both cradle Mennonites and way more credentialed, or at least formally educated, than I am. There is an indignant, almost mocking voice within me lately that says, “What the hell do you think you’re doing, anyway?” There’s another voice inside me, sometimes only slightly louder, but louder all the same, that says, “You couldn’t stop writing now if you tried, if you had only a stick and sand, if the tide wore away your words every single day”. And I know that this is true.

All the same, one can’t have everything, especially not all at once. I’ve already been on one retreat this year –a silent retreat a few months ago. I worry that my intense desire to have real time to write and be alone, and also to interact with writers, is not in balance with all the roles I have to play in life right now. J’s needs aren’t getting met in some real ways –he doesn’t have the time he needs for the things he cares about either. I need to figure out a way to give him some of that. I just don’t know how to make it all work except to say no to some of these things, and I kind of wish I’d never looked at the brochure handed to me in church and then later dug out of my diaper bag.

 

Superman

I know. Maybe I don’t come across as the type that would put her two kids in Superman costumes. You know, crunchy, pacifist, no TV or licensed characters, etc., etc. But I'm neither as rigid nor as virtuous as I might come across sometimes. As I sit here eating from a 98-cent bag of marshmallows, I don’t quite know how to explain it, but seeing O put on the cape we got from a friend and then the costumes to go with it was different for me somehow. O just loves costumes, and he loves the idea of superpowers and men that fly, and all the parts of the story I’ve dared share with him. I think he thinks of Superman as some sort of powerful do-gooder, there to save the day through kindness and superior abilities. “I saved you from the water!” he says. “I just flew right in and did that – you almost drowned!” Today he said, “There’s a kitty in that tree! Don’t call the fire truck – I’ll fly up and get it down!” Being more shy than N, O is so often in the shadow of his exuberant and socially confident brother, but with his cape on, he has just a little more spring in his step, a little more confidence. He appreciates the extra attention he gets, and he’s quick to add that he can fly when people greet him as “Superman”. He 's worn  just the cape as often as not for weeks, even in Europe, and we've just let him.

We have Superman costumes in both 3T and size S, and today, both boys put them on—one costume too small and the other too big—and we went around the block on their scooters. N was mostly disinterested after the initial excitement about matching. He was more busy exclaiming over the wonders of balloon flowers and counting all the green tomatoes. O, on the other hand, was in his glory, scooting along faster than he ever has before, telling me before bed that night that he’s Superman even in his pj’s, because he can fly in his dreams. Just don’t call him Superboy. He doesn’t like that one bit.

three year olds

Three year olds are extremely emotional, moody, and demanding. They can be clingy, saucy, and defiant. As our pediatrician gently pointed out at our three year appointment, anyone who thinks that this all ends with the “Terrible Twos” has another thing coming.  She put it this way: three-year-olds are smarter two-year-olds with a year of experience. And I love this age best of all so far.  

I don’t love it every day, and certainly not every hour, but oh, there are so many good things about this age despite the challenges. I can’t remember ever being so exhausted by their demands and also completely in love with my boys at the same time. Maybe when they were babies, but I think I love interacting with preschoolers even more than I love spending time with babies. Every parent seems to have a stage that they like especially well, and I think this is mine, at least so far. I love the conversations we have, about how things work, places we’ve gone, what they’ll be able to do when they get older, what my life was like when I was a little girl, and how our extended family fits together. I love the sweet, almost shy way they share their affections, with words to back up their devotion. We are still so physically connected – so constantly in touch with each other, more so, in fact, than when they were two. While the clinginess can be overwhelming at times, I mostly love their cuddliness. There are worse things than to be completely adored by two sweet little boys, to have long, sometimes sticky arms always reaching for you.

I love the fact that the books we read now have plots, that they love funny poems (and try to make up their own), and jokes. I love reading a story after naptime, the three of us snuggled under a blanket all in a row—my lap is too small for two boys now—a warm boy on either side of me, leaning against me with my arm around him and helping finish the sentences of the story. I love their enthusiasm for music, mostly children’s folk songs with daddy and hymns with me, many of which are requested by name. I love being privy to their intense and loving relationship—watching the two of them play “storekeeper” or “sailing to America” or any of the many elaborate games they play, saying “I love you, brother” at bedtime. Watching them negotiate with each other, and being able to just wait a moment longer to work things out between them. Far more often than not, they do, using the skills we’ve taught them. They lose their tempers with each other on occasion, getting too bossy or rough, but their motivation is overwhelmingly just to be together, to play in relative harmony. At mealtimes, in the car, or just sitting together, we often talk about important things, about God, the world we live in, what we can do to make it a better place for everyone, what it is to be a friend.  Most of the time, they initiate the conversation. They are starting to show real empathy, for me, for each other, for crying kids at the park.

They amaze me all the time right now – that they know so much, are learning so fast, can do so many things. They climb like monkeys over the biggest playground equipment, run full-stop, somersault, hop, leap, and they jump off anything they ca, landing on both feet, fists clenched in concentration. They are so proud of themselves when they succeed and get so much pleasure out of simple things – watching a tree being cut down, a tractor sweeping the beach, an anthill, a bumblebee, a book full of pictures of sea creatures, a couple of laundry bins and a few feet of rope. No Disneyworld could be better than any of these things.

When we’re not having a day that completely overwhelms all of the above, filled with tears and fits and general crabbiness (and these days do happen), I love being with my three year olds better than anything. Lately it just feels like it’s going so fast, like they’ve grown overnight. I confess that most of the time, I haven’t felt like I wanted to stop time, preserve the stage they’re in. I’ve loved them all along, loved things about all the ages and stages, but I’ve also been pretty excited about the prospect of being able to ditch the diapers, get past the tantrum stage, have a real conversation, be able to run errands more easily, finish a sentence with another adult, and get a break now and then through preschool or school. But right now, I do feel that way. I sit on the couch with the two of them wriggling around me, and I just want to stay like this, just like this, for just a little longer.

 

Compact Update

I’m probably overdue in giving an update on how the Compact is going.  We are still going strong, over halfway there now. With few exceptions, it has become an ingrained habit to buy used, go without, or wait. We did buy a brand-spanking-new rain barrel the other day. It was through a county program that saved us over half off the retail cost, and since re-directing our rainwater is a worthy thing to be doing for the environment and a rain barrel lasts a good long time, we thought that made sense. We bought a wireless router for $50 – the exact one we needed was unavailable, and we can’t get internet access without it. We spent a bit of money in the Netherlands. . It was technically a gift, as a family member gave us some Euros. We bought a few mementos, some authentic “Made in Holland" clogs for the boys to match the ones J and I received before our wedding, and a used bell to be hung by our back door. Other than that, we’ve stuck to the plan. It’s nice to know that this is possible for so long – that we can live with adding so little stuff to our house and using so few resources compared to before. J and I haven’t made any decisions yet about whether we’ll continue after January, but I have a possible plan forming in my mind. I’m thinking that maybe we could spend the whole “compact year” making a careful list of what we might eventually need to buy new, and then take advantage of the sales in January to purchase those items, like new shoes, or a computer part we can’t find used. Then we could do the compact for the rest of the year. I’ll have to see what J thinks about that.

We’ve gotten through some gift-giving situations pretty well so far, I think. It helps to be able to just tell people what we’re doing. For Caro’s daughter’s 3^rd birthday, we grew her a basil plant from seed and put it in a nice pot we had, and made her a nice batch of homemade play dough (which, by the way, is vastly superior to the “real” stuff, and easy to make, even if it does require a dust mask for gluten-intolerant me). We put it in a yellow Tupperware container and decorated that, and made her a homemade card. It all seemed to go over fine. I’m already thinking about Christmas. We’ll probably be at my parents’ house in New York,but even if we’re not, we’ll need to bring gifts for whoever we are with. I’m not the craftiest person. I might see if I can dry some of the mint and chamomile in my garden and find some pretty way to make gifts of tea. Maybe I can sew some nice bags for it out of extra fabric I’ve had sitting in my closet for years. Thankfully, we can buy “consumables” as well as charitable gift certificates and services. Some combination of those will probably work – maybe some nice soaps in a basket we already have, shaving cream, a donation to the Heifer Project, a massage gift certificate, etc. Just nothing that ultimately increases the “stuff” most of us are getting buried under.

I’ve been actively working to increase the amount of trading, borrowing, lending, and bartering I do with people, and the biggest challenge seems to be making “equal” trades. I am making progress in swapping childcare and "date nights". A friend from church and I are now doing this on a regular schedule, and we live  close by, so  we can either drive a short distance or walk. A few people have been amazingly generous when it comes to lending or even giving us needed items when they’ve heard about what we’re doing. I have also been able to pass a lot of stuff onto other people, as well as lend items so that people don’t have to buy them. I don’t expect anything in return when I give something away – I figure I’m “paying it forward” – but I do struggle with not giving anything in return to the folks who’ve given us stuff. I have to take it on faith that they feel just as I do when I pass on stuff – happy to get it out of the house and to someone who can use it. I don’t know why that’s so hard, but it is. It’s pride, really, but I do think we’re better givers (or Servants, in the Christian vernacular) when we are humble enough to be receivers too. Allowing the give and take of giving and receiving, trusting that if we are humble receivers and generous givers it will all work out in the end, is part of creating a community. That’s much easier to believe in principal than in practice though. The cultural forces that tell us that we’re all on our own, that we should never receive anything that we didn’t earn ourselves, are powerful. 

temperament

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the personality traits that my kids have. One very nice thing about having your kids get a little older is that you can start to more clearly see the difference between temperament and development. N, for instance, likes order and control. This has persisted beyond the fussy ones and the terrible twos – it’s just part of who he is. He has specific ideas about where things should go, what order they should be done in, and how long it should take. This can make transitions with a preschooler very difficult. When those traits are combined with the typical developmental needs of the age, such as craving independence and playing with power, it can be maddening to, for instance, get out the door on time and with everyone’s sanity intact. Even O gets impatient with N. Upon leaving somewhere, N will want the shoes in the entryway to be lined up just right, or his bunny to be tucked in just so, or want the blocks put away the “correct” basket. He has the negotiating skills of a pint-sized litigator, and sometimes we just have to pick him up and shut the door behind him in order to get anywhere. Easygoing he’s not, and never has been. Often, though, I find that if I’m just a bit more patient, and give him an extra minute or two to think things through on his own, he will cooperate willingly. It’s easy to mistake his need for order for defiance. Giving him lots of choices about things that don’t matter as much is a very helpful tool with N, as is giving him lots of warning that we’re leaving. As much as they drive me crazy sometimes now, I do think that some of these traits will serve him well in life. I think that N is extremely interested in how the world works, in how things are organized. He’s very imaginative, and dramatic, and he’s starting to tell us more and more complex stories. The ability to create a story and the desire to control one’s environment are probably part of the same thing – fiction could be seen as a form of complete control, after all. N has the capacity to get totally lost in an activity, lost in the world of learning, and imagination. He sings and rhymes all the time. I think it’s quite likely that he will also be an organized kid. He already likes his room neat, and often, after I’ve closed the door and tucked him in, he’ll get out of bed before naptime, clean up his room a bit more, and then go to sleep. So transitions are hard now – that’s just the price we pay for having such an intense, creative, persistent little thinker on our hands.

O similarly has traits that tax our patience now but might serve him well later in life. He is extremely persistent and stubborn, and has an unrelenting desire to take things apart and see how they work. This can be frustrating and even dangerous, and he’s gotten himself in some scary situations. Sometimes I feel like it’s all I can do to keep him safe, though this is slowly getting better. He knows some things are off limits and consistently leaves them alone. Still, I can’t leave him alone with anything new that’s electrical or with knobs, or he’ll attempt to take it apart to see how it works. His capacity for risk-taking in general scares me, as he climbs up walls and hangs off anything he can. (and actually, this is true for both boys). It’s as if the question in his brain is always some version of “I just want to see what happens when _____”. But, as he gets older, and develops a bit more impulse control and common sense, and is able to share more of what he’s thinking, I am gaining more respect for and shedding some of my annoyance with these tendencies.  He asks the most amazing questions: “Who made our house? What’s underneath our basement? Why do airplanes fly when their wings don’t flap? Where is the very top of the river?” He has an incredible memory, and so often shows evidence that he’s picked up information I had no idea he was paying attention to. He’s starting to be able to verbalize or research some of the questions he has without pulling everything apart. A few miles west of us, there’s a workshop for kids called Le*onardo’s Basement. You can register your child for a few sessions at a time based on age, and they can, with proper supervision, do everything from building electrical equipment, to dismantling machines, to welding. I can so see O being at home in such an environment –too bad they have to be at least 5 years old. O is extremely persistent when he’s trying to learn something, and isn’t easily discouraged. He is already learning that if he keeps trying, he’ll get it eventually. I remind myself continually that the desire to take everything apart will likely be followed by a desire to put things together. Only God knows what form that might take, but it could be interesting. Meanwhile, the best way to get through a rainy afternoon with O right now is to take of the back of the toilet tank and spend 30 solid minutes talking with him about how everything in there works. So I have to keep a careful eye on O, and spend a lot of time teaching him on what he can and can’t get himself into. It’s the price we pay for having such a curious, creative kid who stubbornly sticks to things until he figures them out.

Obviously, discipline is an important part of what we do with young children, but at the end of a tough day with them it is so easy for me to resent their inborn tendencies, tendencies that are part and parcel of the gifts God has given them, because those tendencies are inconvenient to deal with in young children who need so much attention. It’s probably much more helpful to try not to see these traits as the enemy, even when they test my patience. May God grant me the wisdom to take the long view, to trust that we can help guide them to use their gifts to the fullest capacity someday..

Ultimately, I think that the not knowing what shape that will take is one of the gifts of parenthood. That part isn’t up to us – we are only guides and teachers, doing the best we can, and letting go just a little continually, from the time the umbilical cord is cut to the time they leave the house a couple of decades later. We tell our boys that their job is to be safe, respectful, and kind. All the rules and limits we have for them basically stem from those three things, and I don’t think that basic idea will change as long as they live under our roof. I do suspect that N and O will be interesting, thoughtful, good people someday, and that they’ll be better off if we don’t try to make them into something they weren’t meant to be. I suspect that someday it will seem like that was a very small price to pay for the privilege of being part of it all.