ElementalMom

I don’t even know where to begin.

How about Gratitude? I’ll start there.

Thanks to God(s). I spent so much time, and still am, handing stuff uphill because it’s too big for me to carry by myself. I questioned God a lot in my youth; who knew that’s because I’d get older, and really need to know who I was dealing with? I would never have guessed, back then, that I would become such a theist, but there you go.

Thanks to Jason. Never was woman so blessed. He held it all together, and never once implied I was imposing. Thanks to Rowan for asking when I was coming home every time I talked to him. Thanks to Kestrel, for adapting so beautifully. And thanks to Marc, for enabling so smoothly.

Thanks to my redoubtable little Honda, who despite hating altitude, managed 0-60 in front of insane truckers. Thanks to the Nevada Highway Patrol, who pulled up, saw me crying, and didn’t pull me over despite the fact that I was breaking the hell out of the speed limit in their Silver State. Thanks to the jacks and cottontails, for being an interlude of cuteness in the desert. Thanks to the Harrier, who reminded me that death swoops in when it pleases, no matter how cute we may be.

Thanks to the people and books, over the years, who taught me to breathe. And to attend to my posture, because posture controls your attitude. Thanks to the people who’ve encouraged me to keep up with Yoga, so that I could do asana in hospital waiting rooms everywhere, and keep my calm from being damaged. Thanks to those who’ve taught me Compassion. Because when you have waited and paced and breathed and stood up straight and done Warrior II until your legs shake and you can’t do anything else, you can hold the space, and fill it with compassion. Compassion is a verb.

Thanks to Mom, for being the living epitome of Grace Under Fire.

Thanks to Bear, for giving me the opportunity, yet again, to expose all my fine ideals to the abrasion of the real world, so as to polish them up a bit.

When I was young, my stepfather “The Bear” (who I have posted about before in this blog) was an alcoholic. Drunken giddiness gave way to drunken rage, and I spent many, many nights listening to the chaos on the other side of my bedroom door.

Ever practical, even as a child, I had a backpack ready, in case that door ever got opened. Clothes, books, the few trinkets I owned that really mattered to me, were all in the backpack, which was placed just outside my bedroom window, on the ground, to be grabbed on my way out. That way, I was totally prepared, no matter what.

I never had to use the backpack, and eventually it was brought in and retired for good. The Bear went through rehab, and has been sober now for a very, very long time. We’ve come to a mutual understanding about many things, including pain, insanity, and forgiveness. The further I progress into Buddhism, the more I recognize the whole thing as Someone Else’s Karma, and not My Wounded Childhood at all.

Last night, Mom called. The Bear has been fighting kidney failure for a long time. He’s lasted far longer than the doctors told him he would, way back when he was in the hospital, almost a year ago. But finally, it’s catching up, and his every-Monday bloodwork yesterday came back terrible.

He’s dying. Not that that isn’t different than every one of us drawing breath on this earth right now anyway, but he knows the face of it now. And it’s terrifying. Last night, he was deciding whether to head to the hospital for dialysis or… not.

Art Buchwald passed away last week. After refusing dialysis. The news hit The Bear hard. I called him as soon as I heard the posthumous interviews done with Buchwald, where he explained his thoughts about death, and about dignity. The Bear had heard them too. And they resonated.

So last night, The Bear was pacing the floor, making one of the hardest decisions a human being can make.

The doctors had said it might be quick. I’m five hours, in good weather, away from them. No need to come out now, Mom said, because he might go into the hospital, in which case it’s just a matter of pacing the floor. Or he might not.

So I spent last night packing a backpack, just in case Mom called me. Because again in our lives, The Bear is outside the door, again he’s in pain, and again, I’m listening, to figure out what my part in all this might be. I know it’s not my karma, it’s not about me. And this time, I’m older, I’m wiser, and I understand that the right response to pain is compassion. Course, it’s much easier to be in that place now, as an adult, than it was as a kid, where there was a lot more personal fear involved.

Course, even that is kinda specious. There’s personal fear involved here too. I’m trying hard to hold it together, and to be some kind of strength, because they both need me to. I’m trying to keep an eye towards the practical, and assist Mom in the little ways I can, long-distance.

And I’m looking at the backpack, hoping again that I’m not too late, that I can make it out the door in time, if I really need to.

I‘ve been studing extreme sports pretty much since I got told that I was participating in one (freediving), and decided that our culture’s view of “extreme” is ridiculous.

I can tell you that, judging by what gets written about the things people do to themselves in the name of sport, the human body is astonishing in what it can go through, and heal from. Astonishing. There was one motorcyclist, his name escapes me, but in one wipeout, they had to staple his face back onto his head. Very frankensteinian. I read an interview with his mother, who basically said that she’d relaxed years ago, and just kept up good medical insurance.

In the name of sport, people shred themselves in all kinds of fascinating ways.

And yet never, not ever, will you hear someone be told not to get back in the ocean, not to get back on the bike, not to climb the mountain, just because a few years back something went all weird and pear-shaped on them. They broke, they heal, they keep coming.

And yet if you’ve had a cesarean, they’ll tell you you can’t birth any other way, that trying is too risky, that you must at all times be safe safe safe, and of course being safe happens to be doing what they tell you to do, which is to get another cesarean. Why? Because there’s a chance the scar on your uterus will rupture. You know, because it’s a scar.

I really do think that our culture wants to control birthing women, and iconicise athletes, without recognizing that the human body is a constant form. Being a birther doesn’t change how you heal, being a biker doesn’t change how you heal. So unless a single injury starts banning men from the sports they participate in, I think it’s absolute crap that an injury (and a surgical injury at that! Darn sight easier to heal from than having your face ripped off your skull!) should ban a woman from the birth she wants.

Oh sure, increased stats for risk of blah blah blah Charlie Brown’s Teacher blah blah blah. When extreme athletes pick themselves back up and keep going, we idolize them. No one would dare chide a downhill skier for getting back on the skis, but somehow, we’ve let them do it to us.

Nearly two years ago, when we went to New Zealand, we discovered the joys of the Trampoline. Our gracious hosts, Liz and Sarah, had one for their four kids, and we thought that was incredibly cool. Then we discovered that trampolines are pretty much ubiquitious there. Maybe because of the weather, maybe because the Kiwis are just seriously clever that way. Rowan was entranced.

Thanks to a lot of legwork for a few months, the wisdom of some folks on one of my mommy lists, and the luck of the draw on Craigslist, I managed to score a 14′ trampoline for Rowan for Christmas. He’d fallen asleep when we went to pick up the parts, so we managed to get it home without him knowing. Then, Christmas morning, Papa arrayed the pieces on the lawn. Rowan kept asking “what is it?” and we kept saying “guess!”. Then…

…my Mom handed him one spring. Just one. His eyes lit, and he yelled “It’s a trampoline!!!” Clever kid…

He proceeded to supervise construction…

…involving himself in every step…

Until it was time for the test jumps!

Well, it started out to be for Rowan. It’s now quite clearly for the entire family. This is my favorite picture from Christmas:

That’s two teenagers, and two toddlers, all laughing and bouncing and flying and just being happy. That’s Christmas. And the best $45 I ever spent.

There is something about jumping that just makes everything right with the world. There is nothing better than a 10 minute bounce when work is stressful. Or when you’re tired. Or to get the creative gears turning. Or when the kids are crabby. Or when the spouse is crabby. “Go jump!” is becoming one of the tools in our Family Toolbox of Coping. I wish I’d bought one sooner…

I was going through my emails, and found this old gem from an email to a friend. Thought it was worth ressurecting. It’s from nearly three years ago.

Attributing positive intent to my child is gonna be really really important, going forward. It’s so easy to think of misbehavior (which is simply my own societal impression, and not a real yardstick) as having bad intent, when so often it’s just them trying to get you to do something that they can conceive of, but don’t have the skill to tell you outright. Take yesterday…I leave him in the shower after I get out, so he can play in the water, hang with his toys, etc. I got out, got dried, did my routine, got dressed, and he was still hanging out in there. I came, opened the door, and asked him to get out. He said “NO!”, and threw a washcloth at me. Three. Deep. Breaths. I pitched the washcloth over his head, back against the wall. He squealed with delight, grabbed it, and tossed it out of the shower again. So I pitched it back over his head. He gestured at me with his hands…aha! The light finally goes on. He wants to play *catch*. So I put my hands carefully out, and he heaves the washcloth directly into them. Again, just beaming with pride, and laughing like a demented thing. We sat there and played catch for about half an hour with this wet washcloth. He finally said “finished!”, and got out, dried off, and dressed. ::whew!::

I could have seen that as being willful. I could have seen that as being a pain, or as a “terrible twos” thing. When what it was, at its heart, was my son wanting to engage with me in a game he’s just learning how to play. He has zero concept that catch isn’t usually a shower game. He has zero concept that catch is usually played with a firm object, and not a wet washcloth. He has no concept of time, no idea that we were heading someplace. There was zero malice there at all…it just occurred to him that now would be a good time to do this cool thing, and because so few of the facts of the situation concurred with what I generally perceive to be the context of “a game of catch”, I almost missed it.

Can you imagine how utterly devastating it must be to be little, to not have the words, or a real firm grasp on the facts, but to desperately be trying to engage the Center Of Your World, and have them react with yelling, or impatience, or frustration??? Dear god. The thought boggles. And yet there I was. Way more in my world than in his.

Thanks to the efforts of my pal Dana, this blog, my other blog, and my more professional writing stuff now have a permanent home on the web. You can now find us here:

It’s still got some fine-tuning required; the RSS isn’t working yet, and we’re tweaking some stuff, and migrating my old blogs from here to there (thus the funkiness you all have been seeing lately). But I’m really excited to have our own domain, our own skin, and, well, another tangible marker of progress along our adventure.

Thanks for your support…

This article hit the news a few days ago.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=2762171
“Medical Group Recommends All Pregnant Women Get Tested for Down Syndrome”

The main reason: Tests far less invasive than the long-used amniocentesis are now widely available, some that can tell in the first trimester the risk of a fetus having Down syndrome or other chromosomal defects.

It’s a change that promises to decrease unnecessary amnios giving mothers-to-be peace of mind without the ordeal while also detecting Down syndrome in moms who otherwise would have gone unchecked.

I can’t speak for every woman, of course, just for me. But I know, without a shadow of the slightest bit of doubt, that the moment I knew I was pregnant, that was my baby. Flesh of my flesh, and all that. It was mine. I think a lot of us feel this way, else why would the dead baby card be so effective? You’re entirely emotionally invested in this new little person you’re growing.

Peace of mind? Where in the world is there peace of mind in this kind of testing????

I’m not expressing myself well at all. It’s this huge emotional ball for me. But in my heart, prenatal testing is an ordeal, no matter what your answer is. The testing is an ordeal, the false positives and false negatives and true negatives and positives. How do you remove the ordeal from that? There is no way.

In a normal birth, you meet your baby for the first time when the bonding hormones are raging, and you are utterly primed to unconditionally love that little thing, no matter what it comes out like. I don’t think it matters if it’s disabled or abled or male or female or whatever. The work, the real work, of pregnancy, is preparing for the results of that unconditionality.

And all their damned poking and prodding and testing won’t ever make it any easier, or any better. No matter what decision a woman makes with the information she gets, there will be a toll on her. There will be an ordeal. The only thing we really can control is the grace with which we handle the circumstances we find ourselves in. It’s bigger than us, it’s bigger than medicine. It’s the dance of life, and I choose to call my own steps, thanks. As I take them.