"Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me" by Mary Oliver

Last night

the rain

spoke to me

slowly, saying,



what joy

to come falling

out of the brisk cloud,

to be happy again



in a new way

on the earth!

That’s what it said

as it dropped,



smelling of iron,

and vanished

like a dream of the ocean

into the branches



and the grass below.

Then it was over.

The sky cleared.

I was standing



under a tree.

The tree was a tree

with happy leaves,

and I was myself,



and there were stars in the sky

that were also themselves

at the moment

at which moment



my right hand

was holding my left hand

which was holding the tree

which was filled with stars



and the soft rain –

imagine! imagine!

the long and wondrous journeys

still to be ours.



~ Mary Oliver ~



(What Do We Know)

Update on My Back, Since You Asked

Several of you have written in and said, “Nerissa, you are supposed to be writing about your back pain. I haven’t seen that much about your back pain, and it hurts me not to get to hear about your back pain, because your back pain is my back pain!” Or just, “I can’t sleep another night without knowing whether you are really making those small changes you said you would.”

Thank you for your interest and concern; I am grateful for it. To inform those of you who are now saying, “Huh?” I started the month of May wondering whether making a commitment to changing something “small” like the way we stand, or adding some simple daily exercises can result in an increase in general well-being. I know it seems obvious that it can and would; I guess what I wondered was whether I would be able to sustain that work for a month and write about it while doing it.

Frankly, I thought this would be easy. I am good at this kind of thing. I frequently take up a commitment and run to the finish line, as if it were a baton in a relay race. But something about the tight focus on my own personal pain made me hesitate. I did the work, but I didn't feel like writing about it. An anonymous reader recently accused me of being self-absorbed and narcissistic, and what could be a more self-absorbed subject than one's back? But after weathering the usual storm of shame and angst that comes from a tough anonymous critique, I concluded:

1. It's true that I am self-absorbed. But only because I am so fascinating.
2. I am self-absorbed and narcissistic, but oh, well.
3. It's my understanding that on occasion blogs are a kind of online journal in which the writer writes about herself and her struggles, even if her struggles are about her boring back pain.
4. Those who don't want to read about me don't actually need to read this blog.

So here I am back to tell the tales. Though I didn't feel like posting daily, I did keep some notes in my journal.

May 17- Everything is worse. True, I am not doing my exercises as religiously as I want to, but I am in general mindful of slouching, using my stomach muscles to lift heavy children and guitars. But my S-I joint is much worse and Tom says it’s about an inch and a half higher on the left side than the right side (he learned how to check it last year when I was pregnant). I couldn’t see my PT today because our babysitter was twenty minutes late, and the appointment was half over by the time she got here. There’s no other time to see the PT until June. I am going to drown my sorrows and aches in Advil, though it’s beginning to give me a stomach ache.

May 19- Finally read Esther Gokhale’s intro and first lesson. As I have already written, I am totally inspired by the photos of young children and people from other cultures with gorgeous upright posture. Now wherever I go I notice how people are carrying themselves. My grandmother had such lovely carriage, and what Esther says is that it used to be taught by parents to their offspring. I vaguely remember this from TV shows from the 50’s. My other grandmother was a would-be flapper and even though she was a dancer and yoga practitioner, I think of her as trendily slouchy. But both her daughters––my mother and aunt Sarah––stand beautifully. Neither has rounded shoulders. Sarah used to study the Alexander Technique, which I tried once. Now she’s a Feldenkries devotee. Coincidentally, there’s a practitioner in town who for reasons I won’t get into here has offered me a free session. Perhaps I will take her up on it. I am feeling desperate.

May 20- I notice that for about four days after a gig, my upper back and shoulders raise a giant protest. I also notice that when I stand to play guitar, I shift most of my weight to my right foot and my hips hurt. I wonder if that’s why my S-I joint is off. I really should start playing a smaller, lighter guitar. The problem is (well, besides that I can’t really afford a new guitar right now) that I like a big bassy sound, and you just can’t get that from a parlor guitar or an OM or 00. You need a dreadnought. Dreadnoughts are heavy. Still, I want to see if there’s a perfect guitar out there for me that weighs at least a little less than my Taylor.

May 21-I have been diligently doing shoulder rolls and correcting my posture while driving (the key is keeping my upper arms parallel to my torso and only reaching with my lower arms. Makes for a very short armed person, and keeps me from overreaching, which is of course a powerful metaphor.) My upper back feels slightly better. But my hips are worse than ever. Taking 600 mg Advil two or three times a day.

Listened to a Speaking of Faith podcast, thanks to my friend Melissa who turned me on to this wonderful weekly treat. Now I have 108 podcasts on my iPod. Today I got to hear Seane Corn, cool yogini who said something I love, something like, “When I breathe consciously, I am calming down my nervous system. This I know, and it is fixed. When I practice in alignment, and don’t go beyond my range but just up to my edge, I know I will get stronger and that my edge will grow wider.” I love this. Today I will stay within my limits but go just up to my edge.

Seane Corn video

Seane Corn Demonstrates "Body Prayer" from Speaking of Faith on Vimeo.

May 22-Drove to the Adirondacks for the weekend, and took a lot of care lifting bags and boxes into and out of the car, ditto small children. I notice a lot of pain when I bend down to pick up toys, so I cleaned up the music room crawling on my knees, which Jay thought was hilarious.

On the way, we stopped in Saratoga Spring and I found a guitar shop. I forced my family to come inside and made poor Tom juggle the kids who of course wanted to play every single instrument in the joint. Saratoga Springs is decidely not the place to get a deal on a guitar. Nothing under $1600 sounded at all decent, and the best sounding guitars were the big ones, not the littlies. Rats.


May 23-Tom said I couldn’t carry Jay on the hike because of my back. I feel like my whole ambition in the month of May was to get to carry my baby on my back on a hike. My father says there are few things in life more wonderful than the feeling of your child slowly relaxing into your back as you are moving, and eventually falling completely asleep. I wanted so much to experience that.

Esther G says the kind of slings we use here in the Pioneer Valley are the absolute best for babies' backs (and their mommas’). At least I have been doing one thing right. I use a Sakura Bloom sling that was given to me, and I treasure it. Having the kid on the back of your hip, supporting her with your forearm and keeping your shoulder blades down using a ring sling looks so beautiful and graceful. I brought my sling with me and danced a lot with Jay on my hip.

I did the upside down pigeon stretch for three whole minutes, and when I got up and asked Tom to check my alignment, he said I was almost even! I did the stretch for another 2 minutes, and he said he couldn’t tell which side was higher! Hallelujah! It still hurts, but I think I remember the pain lasting a few hours after a successful alignment in the past.

May 25- I have been in alignment for two days. I can't believe it! It's still a little sore, but much better. My shoulders aren't so bad either. I have been doing about 5 minutes of strength training in the morning, first thing when I get up and about five to ten minutes of stretching at night right before bed. It feels lovely to bookend my day with this simple self-care ritual. I don't know if this is the final word on my back or not, but I wouldn't mind if it were, both because I want to be done with it and because it really does feel self-absorbed to write about my back when it's such a small issue, given that today North Korea told us they successfully launched a nuclear missile and that friends of mine are dying and dealing with real crap. I recognize I am in a distinct season of my life and that I am very very very fortunate.

Today is beyond beautiful in the Pioneer Valley and even the omnipresent Northampton mosquitoes are out of town. Meanwhile, we are home from a wonderful weekend and are having friends over for a cook-out. My children fill me with such rich and potent gladness and we are healthy. We want for nothing. I pray that when the gorgeousness comes our way, we can drop everything to stand still and take it in with big full eyes.

Arnold at 88

If prayer would do it, I'd pray
If reading esteemed thinkers would do it, I'd be halfway through the Patriarchs.
If discourse would do it, I'd be sitting with His Holiness every moment he has free.
If contemplation would do it, I'd have translated the Periodic Table to hermit poems, converting matter to spirit.
If fighting would do it, I'd already be a blackbelt.
If anything other than love could do it, I've done it already and left the hardest for last.

Stephen Levine in "Breaking the Drought"

Arnold Westwood turned 88 yesterday. He's been a Unitarian Universalist minster all his life; I believe his father too was a UU minister. He is not, however, our minister; ours is technically a congregational church, although one might not know what the heck it was if one happened upon it. There is no cross whatsoever to be found and Steve Philbrick regularly reads from Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao, and almost as often from The Baseball Book Of Wisdom. But last weekend was lay Sunday, and Arnold, retired for 25 years, volunteered to preach.

Mostly he talked about himself, about what he's learned from 88 years on the planet.

The really, really hard part for me is to truly begin to love myself. I’m discovering for me it all has to begin there. It’s sort of like being retooled. The amount of being loved by family and friends doesn’t do as much as what you have to do to keep on loving yourself – and it runs all the way from accepting all the complications and embarrassments that come with an overactive bladder to my no longer needing to call attention to my petty virtues and several accomplishments. I know I’ve done a lot. I just don’t need to tell others all the time. My chorus to myself is: “Westwood, leave it alone, you’re OK.”

So, at 88, I am still wrestling with my ego needs and expect I will until I die. And as death approaches I hope they will pretty much disappear. That will be heaven.

In conclusion, I suspect unconditional love must be akin to what so many others experience as the love of God. Love to draw upon when it’s the only love there is.

He said some other things that stayed with me. One was about the nature of prayer, and he said this extemporaneously, so I don't have the direct quotation (I asked him for permission to write about him and to use his sermon, both of which he gave me.) He said something to the effect that he doesn't believe in a God who answers our prayers to cure our great aunt Margaret; the God he knows is only effective in changing our own hearts when we ask for help. So if our intention is to pray for Aunt Margaret, the best we can hope for is that this act will sharpen our awareness of her and help us to better serve her in her illness or time of need.

And that's no small thing.

He also talked about his mother's love for him. She was 43 when she gave birth to him and he was her only child. "She bathed me with love," he said. "If anything, she loved me too much."

Arnold radiates love, as you can see by his photo. He says, "I love you," quickly and easily at the end of phone conversations. He shares his struggles and epiphanies with friends as they come along and never pretends to be the wise old man. He is a part of our community and gives hugely of his time and experience and insight. He lives his hero Emerson's statement: “The only way to have a friend is to be one.”

Why is loving so hard? And why do I get it into my head that it's more important for the next load of laundry to be done than it is to bask in the amazing miracle that is my family and choose to do laundry instead of participating with Tom and the kids as they play Pig Pile on Daddy?

I literally have to shake myself out of my habitual groove, shake myself down like a bad dog until I am awake to the gorgeous reality of what's going on in the music room. The urge to pursue my agenda is so strong. And what it really comes down to, as I said in the last post, is this insidious desire to be a good girl, to be liked, to be well-thought of. So that means the house needs to be functioning like the proverbial well-oiled machine. It means I go out the door at 8am for my 23 minute run, even when life is much richer on the carpet in my music room. It means I spend two hours, as I did today, filling out forms for Elle's preschool.

I don't mean to diminish the importance of these daily tasks. I know I am touching on the old Mary/Martha conundrum. I know that a big part of what I need to do as a parent is chop wood and carry water, work to make a living to put food on the table for my kids, stay healthy so they have a sane and functional mother, make a space for them to grow and flourish. And I certainly don't have any difficulty showing them my love. It's loving myself that's challenging sometimes.

A mom friend who has a five-year-old called today to remind me that ages 2-3 are really tricky. "They make you do things you wish you hadn't done," she said.

My friend the child psychiatrist wants me to adopt his mantra: "Don't expect that you should be a good parent. Just shoot for being a good enough parent."

But I read so many self-help books when I was in my twenties that say things like, "Unfortunately, most of us were parented so poorly that we're now incapable of _______." You can fill in the blank with "feeding ourselves," "standing up straight," "being instead of doing," "writing without a truckload of self-criticism." Didn't we all vow to do better by our kids, those little tablas rasas with which we've been entrusted? So it's hard for some of us to accept the idea of just settling for "good enough." I want the road to be easier for my kids. I don't want them to have to struggle. And I want my children to be bathed not just by my love but by the love of the whole world!

And that's just not the way it usually goes.

All this said, age three so far is my favorite age, next to nine months. Today Elle and Jay and I went to the co-op to get some butter for our trip to the Adirondacks this weekend. I'd given Elle a big cracker to nosh on in the store, but what she really wanted to do was feed it to Jay. They were riding together in the shopping cart.

"Here you go, baby," she said as he took the cracker from her hand. "I be your mama. Mama's here. It's okay. Mama's here."

Don't Buy Stuff You Can't Afford

Weekly Round-Up

I had high hopes of finishing and posting a piece I am writing on my friend Arnold Westwood, an (almost) 88-year-old retired Unitarian Universalist minister, but an email snafu combined with the pressures of the book proposal have conspired to keep me more in the realm of Twitterland.

I am not on Twitter. Should I be? I have never even visited Twitterland, so I don't know what I am missing. I like Facebook just fine, but people who seem to know much more than I complain about how it sucks, now that it has changed. How has it changed? I haven't noticed any changes, and I've been on it for over a year now. I will remain blissfully ignorant.

I have not been doing a great job on my back exercises, but I have been reading Esther Gokhale's book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, and I love her premise, which is that our back problems stem from cultural constructs and aesthetics started by those nefarious flappers in the 1920s who made slouching hip. In the western world, 90% of us report back pain by the time we're over 30. In less developed countries, even when people do arduous manual labor and carry heavy things long distances, the incidence of back pain is more like 7%. And if you look at young children and babies, and you look at the posture of those in these other cultures, you see that their posture is different. Yes, their shoulders are back, but more importantly, their pelvises are tipped anteriorly so that their rear ends stick out. We've been told to tuck our pelvises under, suck our tummies in, and this is what messes our backs up.

I always love the idea that once upon a time the human race had it all figured out, and then Christianity/Western Culture/the Industrial Revolution/the Flappers/Capitalism/television/strollers/the patriarchy/refined sugar/Richard Nixon came along and messed us all up. Because then, the solution is simple: go baaaaaack. Just go baaaaaack in time and do it the way they used to do it and everything will improve.

I would like to digress and opine about how some of the bad things that used to be, like Bubonic Plague, belief in witches, high rates of infant mortality and death from childbirth etc., have actually improved in our modern era; but there are equally compelling arguments to be made that life then really was sweeter and more pure and precious, but I don't have time to digress. As the Buddha said, "People with opinions just go around bothering other people." I am tired of pontificating, though I am sure I will again in the future. Instead, I want to drink in these moments when my children are so small and innocent and smiley and delicious.

Jay is about to be nine months old. A nine-month-old is sort of like a nine-year-old, in that in both ages/stages there's a certain mastery of the elements s/he has learned thus far, and there's a certain jubilation in both ages, a lack of awareness of any future summits needing climbing, or perhaps, total confidence in that future ability. Jay is in prime baby mode, exercising his vocal range by babbling all the consonants and exploring the other aspects of his voice, as in making occasional asthmatic gasps, which at first I took to be asthma. But fortunately, they are not. "He is just interested in that sound," Katryna said, and I remembered Elle performed the same scare tactics when she was nine months old. Jay has finally gained weight and has a respectable amount of pudge on his adorable bod. He snarfs his baby food and seems to like any and all kinds of nourishment. He just started climbing the stairs last night, so as of now, we are officially uptight and on guard all the time.



William gave Elle a drum kit which Katryna made. We were inspired by Scott Kessel of Rani Arbo and Daisy Mayhem who played his wonderful recycled rhythms at our May 2 DVD taping.

Just as I am trying to remind myself to roll my shoulders back and not hunch forward, I am working at calming down. But I can only be mindful for minutes, and I catch myself all the time in a C-curve and/or completely disregulated emotionally. Parenting is hard on the nervous system, especially for us nervous types. I felt really pretty much almost enlightened before I had kids, and now I can't believe how often I lose my cool. Mostly I have no cool at all. Sometimes I have some cool in the morning when Elle wakes us up by running down the hall shouting, "Surprise!" and jumping into our bed and snuggling with us. And sometimes I have some cool when my zen alarm clock gently awakens me at 6:05 and I creep down the stairs alone and have seven minutes to stretch my back. But then one of the kids throws mashed winter squash across the room or (today) whipped cream on the carpet (which George Harrison has been licking), or pees in her bed, or tells me that she is going to kill me with her "light flavor" (Crayola washable marker), and I lose my cool. I don't usually lose it out loud; sometimes I have it together enough to breathe and sigh and say to myself, "When she says 'kill' she really means 'connect.' She doesn't know what 'kill' means." But inside, the thermostat on my heart is like a bunch of firefighters flying up and down a pole, to mix several metaphors. I feel unsettled and cranky, and to add insult to injury, I wonder (meanly) why I am not like other mothers who can take it all in stride.

Lately, I realized (again) that my whole problem in life is that I care so much what other people think of me. Probably most people do; certainly many artists do. But I hate it when someone tells me they don't like me, or even when I suspect that someone doesn't like me. Being an artist or a blogger means putting yourself out there for the world to beam tomatoes at you. I get my share, and when I don't, I invent some and/or take offense at the lack of attention (or tomatoes) coming my way. ("There's no such thing as bad press.") But if I take the time to do the Work on my fears, what I come up with over and over again is this.

There's a spirit in each of us that is absolutely perfect; the God in each of us, if you will. Or if you don't believe in God, it's that little perfect baby you once were. That little angel that smiles up at his/her parent knowing s/he is perfectly loved and reflecting that perfect love back at the world. When I am at my best, all I do is beam love out at people. It's easy, when the scared/cranky/exhausted part of me is calmed down. It's easy when the persona or Self that I am constantly trying to manipulate and project is down. When I'm not trying to do or be anything other than who I essentially am, that original shard of God can shine through my eyes, which means that my job is really that of a window washer. All I have to do is keep my window washed––keep my cool–– and let that Other do the rest. (Also, roll my shoulders back.)

Last night, Jay was restless. Tom had put him down, and he was still fussing seven minutes later. My rule is if the baby is still fussing after seven minutes, a parent needs to check back in. So I left Elle in her bed where I'd been reading to her and told her I'd be back soon. I picked up my crying boy from his crib. He was almost asleep; I cradled his head in my right elbow and though his eyes were closed, his mouth curled up in a smile. I felt my chest tighten, and I thought, why would I ever choose to be any other place than here? Why would I ever do anything other than hold my sleeping baby in my arms?

So I did for as long as I could stand to feel the intensity of that joy.

Arnold

If prayer would do it, I'd pray
If reading esteemed thinkers would do it, I'd be halfway through the Patriarchs.
If discourse would do it, I'd be sitting with His Holiness every moment he has free.
If contemplation would do it, I'd have translated the Periodic Table to hermit poems, converting matter to spirit.
If fighting would do it, I'd already be a blackbelt.
If anything other than love could do it, I've done it already and left the hardest for last.

Stephen Levine in "Breaking the Drought"

Arnold Westwood turned 88 yesterday. He's been a Unitarian Universalist minster all his life; I believe his father too was a UU minister. He is not, however, our minister; ours is technically a congregational church, although one might not know what the heck it was if one happened upon it. There is no cross whatsoever to be found and Steve Philbrick regularly reads from Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao, and almost as often from The Baseball Book Of Wisdom. But last weekend was lay Sunday, and Arnold, retired for 25 years, volunteered to preach.

Mostly he talked about himself, about what he's learned from 88 years on the planet.

The really, really hard part for me is to truly begin to love myself. I’m discovering for me it all has to begin there. It’s sort of like being retooled. The amount of being loved by family and friends doesn’t do as much as what you have to do to keep on loving yourself – and it runs all the way from accepting all the complications and embarrassments that come with an overactive bladder to my no longer needing to call attention to my petty virtues and several accomplishments. I know I’ve done a lot. I just don’t need to tell others all the time. My chorus to myself is: “Westwood, leave it alone, you’re OK.”

So, at 88, I am still wrestling with my ego needs and expect I will until I die. And as death approaches I hope they will pretty much disappear. That will be heaven.

In conclusion, I suspect unconditional love must be akin to what so many others experience as the love of God. Love to draw upon when it’s the only love there is.

He said some other things that stayed with me. One was about the nature of prayer, and he said this extemporaneously, so I don't have the direct quotation (I asked him for permission to write about him and to use his sermon, both of which he gave me.) He said something to the effect that he doesn't believe in a God who answers our prayers to cure our great aunt Margaret; the God he knows is only effective in changing our own hearts when we ask for help. So if our intention is to pray for Aunt Margaret, the best we can hope for is that this act will sharpen our awareness of her and help us to better serve her in her illness or time of need.

And that's no small thing.

He also talked about his mother's love for him. She was 43 when she gave birth to him and he was her only child. "She bathed me with love," he said. "If anything, she loved me too much."

Arnold radiates love, as you can see by his photo. He says, "I love you," quickly and easily at the end of phone conversations. He shares his struggles and epiphanies with friends as they come along and never pretends to be the wise old man. He is a part of our community and gives hugely of his time and experience and insight. He lives his hero Emerson's statement: “The only way to have a friend is to be one.”

Why is loving so hard? And why do I get it into my head that it's more important for the next load of laundry to be done than it is to bask in the amazing miracle that is my family and choose to do laundry instead of participating with Tom and the kids as they play Pig Pile on Daddy?

I literally have to shake myself out of my habitual groove, shake myself down like a bad dog until I am awake to the gorgeous reality of what's going on in the music room. The urge to pursue my agenda is so strong. And what it really comes down to, as I said in the last post, is this insidious desire to be a good girl, to be liked, to be well-thought of. So that means the house needs to be functioning like the proverbial well-oiled machine. It means I go out the door at 8am for my 23 minute run, even when life is much richer on the carpet in my music room. It means I spend two hours, as I did today, filling out forms for Elle's preschool.

I don't mean to diminish the importance of these daily tasks. I know I am touching on the old Mary/Martha conundrum. I know that a big part of what I need to do as a parent is chop wood and carry water, work to make a living to put food on the table for my kids, stay healthy so they have a sane and functional mother, make a space for them to grow and flourish. And I certainly don't have any difficulty showing them my love. It's loving myself that's challenging sometimes.

A mom friend who has a five-year-old called today to remind me that ages 2-3 are really tricky. "They make you do things you wish you hadn't done," she said.

My friend the child psychiatrist wants me to adopt his mantra: "Don't expect that you should be a good parent. Just shoot for being a good enough parent."

But I read so many self-help books when I was in my twenties that say things like, "Unfortunately, most of us were parented so poorly that we're now incapable of _______." You can fill in the blank with "feeding ourselves," "standing up straight," "being instead of doing," "writing without a truckload of self-criticism." Didn't we all vow to do better by our kids, those little tablas rasas with which we've been entrusted? So it's hard for some of us to accept the idea of just settling for "good enough." I want the road to be easier for my kids. I don't want them to have to struggle. And I want my children to be bathed not just by my love but by the love of the whole world!

And that's just not the way it usually goes.

All this said, age three so far is my favorite age, next to nine months. Today Elle and Jay and I went to the co-op to get some butter for our trip to the Adirondacks this weekend. I'd given Elle a big cracker to nosh on in the store, but what she really wanted to do was feed it to Jay. They were riding together in the shopping cart.

"Here you go, baby," she said as he took the cracker from her hand. "I be your mama. Mama's here. It's okay. Mama's here."

Anne Lamott Interview on Colbert Report

Two of my favorite people togetha!

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Brief

The interview I did with Dan Zanes last March is up on Babble.com. Check it out here.

Something good always happens. Either I get a good night sleep, or my kids wake me up and I get to be with them in the middle of the night. Last night was such a time. Elle woke us up at 12:45 and Jay woke up at 4:20. I've been acutely aware recently of how brief this whole parenting young children gig is, though our nocturnes did result in a very useless me midday. Elle and I were in the music room watching "Sid the Science Kid" and eating lunch. I was coercing her into finishing her bowl of tuna fish by bribing her with little whole wheat crackers while simultaneously modeling excellent Buddhist behavior by reading New York Times articles online, thereby barely paying attention to the theme of the show, which turned out to be teeth brushing.

"When this is over," I said, not taking my eyes off the computer screen, "You'll need to go up for rest time."

"Okay, Mama," Elle replied staring at her own screen and bending her leg backwards in her hand.

A few moments later, I followed her upstairs, Jay under my arm. Elle scampered directly into the bathroom. I thought she was going to take the opportunity to pee, which in itself would have made me happy, but what occurred instead blew me away. She climbed up on her little stool and grabbed her toothbrush, put the tiniest smear of toothpaste onto the bristles, sucked it off, brushed her teeth (not very carefully or thoroughly, but still), rinsed it, and then picked up one of those little wrench-shaped flossers the dentist gave us and stuck it between her teeth a few times. I stood next to her, my mouth open in pure astonishment. She gazed back at me inscrutably; but what I think I was seeing in her face was my future: See, Mom. I know how to take care of myself.

When we visited the dentist for her first check up, the dentist said, "Brush twice a day." Elle has since repeated this to me, as in, "Mama! Don't forget! We need to brush twice a day!" And even so, I do forget. I am fairly good at reminding her father to brush her teeth after her nightly bath, and I do brush my own teeth, and I even floss if I happen to have the floss near my bed and some good reading material to entertain me while I do so, but I am utterly incapable of remembering to brush anyone's teeth––hers or mine––at any other time in the day.

I come by this honestly. I don't think my parents ever brushed our teeth for us. I don't think I owned a toothbrush until I was in seventh grade when peer pressure linked with fear of bad breath compelled me to improve my hygiene. I have a distinct memory of Kim Hedberg, one of our babysitters, teaching us to conserve toothpaste by only dabbing the bristles with a smidgen. I'd previously believed toothpaste to be a kind of dessert, and that any less than two inches couldn't possibly be effective at fighting cavities.

My parents did a lot right, but basic hygiene was not really on their radar. They were young; 23 and 24 respectively when I was born, and they'd gotten married even younger, at 19 and 20, and there was always a sense in which we were witnessing their transformation through adolescence as we ourselves were growing up. (Let the record show that they are paragons of self-care today. They are always on the up and up around issues like Omega 3's and fiber and the ratio of aerobic to non-aerobic activity. But this is now. That was then.)

Speaking of hygiene, I just found the remnants of an M&M on the counter. The mouse has eaten all the color coating off and just left the chocolate innards. What does THAT say about the predilections of rodents?

Elle and I weaned when she was 13 months old, but ever since Jay's arrival, she likes to indulge in her breastfeeding habit every once in a dull moment. Jay was sleeping in, and I decided it was high time for him to show his face and join the family fun, so Elle and I climbed the stairs to wake him up. This is her favorite thing to do, even when it's not sanctioned by her family. Often she wakes him by screaming in the halls when we have just succeeded after 45 minutes of rocking and cooing and singing "Hush Little Baby" to get him down, and at these moments we are not happy with her. Anyway, today she hung on the bars of his crib and spoke to him in a tiny little voice, "It's okay, Jay. It's okay, Buddy." I picked him up and lay him down next to me on the bed. Elle immediately wanted in.

"Can I have this breastess, Mama?" she said pointing to the available right one.

"Sure," I said, and lay on my back, a child on each breast. This moment; this moment I will always remember.

After a few minutes, Elle jumped up to do something, I forget what––maybe brush her teeth. As she was on her way out the door, she turned and shouted, "Save that breastess for me, Mama!"

I was talking to another mom today who has a heartbreakingly adorable two year old.
"How do you even stand it," I murmured, looking into his big green eyes and porcelain skin.

She laughed and pointed at my son, snug against my side. "How do you?"

"I don't," I say. "My whole problem is that I am tortured by my intense love for my kids and simultaneous total exhaustion which is a direct result of my being a mother."

We both laughed. She said, "There's your answer. That's how we stand it. We're too tired to take it all in, and if we could, they would kill us with cuteness."

Worms

Yesterday, I came across two pictures of myself. In the first, I am eleven, standing between my two little sisters. Because I'm so focused lately on my posture, I noticed immediately how good it was back then. Yet in the second picture, taken only six months later, I am already slouching. Puberty? Sudden Knowledge of Good and Evil? The onset of The Largest Book Bag in the World?

I carried the Largest Book Bag in the World for the latter part of my school career, from seventh grade through college. For some reason, I was convinced that if I arrived at any place––class, library, someone else's room where I might want to study––without each and every one of my textbooks, accompanying composition notebooks and three-ring binders, the world would promptly end. That or I would be bored, and I wasn't sure which eventuality was worse. My father would occasionally pick up my backpack full of books (in order to move it off the kitchen table so we could eat dinner) and remark on it with tremendous originality: "What do you have in here? Rocks?"

Sometimes I also carried with me my Reader's Encyclopedia, a two-volume set that had anecdotes about all the (western) authors who had ever written a sentence of literature. I think my left shoulder was permanently rendered lower than my right as a result of this habit.





Yesterday, Tom and Elle spent all day in the garden. At some point, a Ziplock Tupperware appeared on our dining room table full of dirt.

"What is this?" I asked.

"A house for worms," replied Tom. "Elle is curious about them, so I thought I'd make a terrarium and we could watch them do their worm thing."

Great, I thought. A box of dirt in my house with worms–– soon to be dead worms, most likely. A perfect addition to the clods of dirt being kicked into the house, the rat turds, Jay's little puddles of spit-up, the somehow-melted-remains of the corn syrup painting Elle did in March which has dripped down the wall on which it had been displayed.

"She's going to lose interest in it soon," said Tom noticing my lack of enthusiasm for the worm box. "She's three. She can't stay focused on anything for more than a day or two."

"Let's just be sure that when she does, we liberate the worms. I have enough guilt on my head from ordering the extermination of the rats. I don't want the worms' death on my head in addition."

So Tom took the box of worms outside and left it in the middle of the garden, as a sort of peaceful no-man's-land kind of compromise.

I am having one of those days, by which I mean one of those days in which no amount of caffeine can perk me up. Jay woke me at 4am to nurse and I feel like my body has been trying to get back to the dream state I'd been in ever since. I have been hyper-aware of how poorly I use my arms and how every little thing I do seems to aggravate the pain between my shoulders, like writing with my right hand, reading anything; and in a moment of self-pity I had the thought, "Everything I love to do in the world I am going to have to re-learn!" and that made me cranky. I had to go across the river to do our weekly grocery shopping and return the friendly mouse inhibiting sonic devices that did not work at all to Target. (They referred to me their as a "guest.") When I returned home and collected my children and paid the babysitter, Elle ran outside, and I followed her with Jay into our new garden, complete with chicken wire fence, In the middle of the garden was the Ziplock with the dirt in it and supposedly the worms. Elle shrieked and ran for it, scooping up the box as if it were a kitten, clutching it to her breast.

"These worms are very special to me, Mama," she cooed, and she ran into the house with her prize in hand, promptly dropping it on the dining room table and moving on to the drums in the corner where she immediately performed a percussive version of "When The Saints Go Marching In."

A old friend of mine is dying. He's just been told he has only two months to live at the most. He's in a hospice near his daughter, and he's calling everyone he knows to say goodbye. He had been a big cheerleader for my band The Nields when we were first starting out, bringing us to the attention of anyone and everyone with whom he had any influence. I spoke with him today, asking him how he was feeling both physically and emotionally, and the answer was: pretty good. I wanted to ask him what it was like to know you are dying and that you only have two months. I wanted to tell him how much he had meant to me, and not just because he had helped our career. He is one of those people you just want to talk with because he is warm and spacious and funny and honest. I hadn't had a conversation with him in over ten years, so a big part of what we talked about was me and what happened in my first marriage, how the band stopped touring. My story. I kept stopping to say, "Is this really what you want to hear about in your last two months of life?" And he kept assuring me it was. Sometimes people like to hear about other people's troubles, so I tried to keep it entertaining. At the end, right before I could ask him something real, like "What do you think about right before you are falling asleep?" He said, "I can't talk long now because I'm worn out but I'll call you again. Or you can call me. I love you."

"I love you too," I said, and meant it, and as he hung up, I heard him mutter, "Aw, beautiful."

One of the things this friend of mine and I happen to have in common is the college at which we matriculated. We both went to the same Ivy League School where people with lopsided shoulders from carrying The World's Largest Book Bag abound. Somehow we both managed to find our way into the folk music community where intelligence and knowledge are rewarded almost as surely as they are in academia. But what is special about my friend is that he always valued the heart over the head. I may be wrong about this, but I think he liked my band not for my inscrutable (at the time) lyrics but for the way our voices sounded, especially Katryna's. In fact, he said today, not attempting to spare my feelings, "Your sound, man. I just love your sound. Some people find it grating, but not me. I just think it's...wow."

I really hope I get to talk with him again before his two months are up. I want to tell him again that I love him and I want to try to make him laugh. I want to tell him about Elle and Jay, about how Elle is collecting worms. He will probably make some sick joke about how he will be their next meal or something similar. For my part, I want to learn from him how to be in the moment, to drink in each minute as if it were my last, because then I could finally shed this pack on my back, this heavy bag of boredom-relieving insurance that I've been carrying around since I was twelve. I want to be like Elle, clutching my beloved to my chest for the moment, and then dropping it the next so I can sing my song.

Mother's Day

A photo Elle took of me which I think I already posted, but I am showing it again to demonstrate my characteristic hunch over my computer which most likely contributes to my back pain. Also because it's Mother's Day and I am so happy to be her mother.

A reader sent me a link to a Google Author's YouTube clip which is long (53 minutes) but excellent. The author is Esther Gokhale and her book is 8 Steps to a Pain Free Back which I have just asked my local independent book store (Broadside in Northampton, MA) to order for me.



So now I have Esther's voice gently admonishing me whenever I find myself in the C curve shape.

What I find particularly compelling about her talk is the observation that kids walk and move and orient themselves with their "behinds behind them." I have noticed this in all children, my own included, and it goes against the prescription we Western girls all grew up with: tuck in your tummies, tuck in your butts. One of my grandmothers resembled a ruler, and everyone always pointed to her as the paragon of posture. But when I started studying Pilates in 2000, I noticed that my instructor, who was absolutely lovely and had great posture, did walk with her behind behind her. And that this looked great. Gohkale uses lots of photos of correct posture which she took when visiting indigenous cultures where people labor physically long days, yet where only about 7% of the population reports having any back pain (here it is more like 90%). I can't help but think that there's something to the connection between chronic back pain and the desire to reign in one's sexual parts. Wiggle that behind, sisters!

As I write this, my back is killing me. All my good work at the end of last week was trashed on Friday and Saturday when I packed for me and my kids, helped Katryna load stuff in and out of the van, carried my kids around, played guitar for two shows, slept all night long with Jay, breastfeeding intermittently (when I sleep with him, I am usually curled up around him holding him to me for fear that he will fall off the bed otherwise) and knitting. I am sure knitting does not help my shoulder pain.

Also, I failed to do my exercises while I was away.

And I failed to do them last night when I returned. Instead, I was feted. Some readers have commented that Tom always comes across as perfect in this blog. He is not. He has a tendency towards spaciness that includes, most recently, leaving boxes of matches on the counter where Elle finds them and says, "Mama what is this fer?" He gets cranky and unreasonable when he has spent too much time working followed by too much time parenting. He often says, "Between you and I." He does not adore the Beatles. And he doesn't understand why, if left to my own devices and unlimited funds, I would eat salmon at every meal. But last night showcases one of the many reasons he deserves his good reputation.

Katryna dropped us off at quarter past five yesterday afternoon. Tom had spent the whole day with his own mother, who is a master gardener, and together they had transformed our yard, his mother providing us with lots of pots of plants that will be ground cover when they grow up, and Tom prepping our vegetable gardens (one in the backyard is now twice the size as last year's, and one in what used to be our front lawn). There was salmon and asparagus toasted to a delectable crisp on the grill, a big pot of Basmati brown rice, and a bowl of salad of fresh spinach from our farmer's market. The table was set with new candles and a card each for me and his mother at our place settings. He had bought two hanging pots of flowers for our porch and given me a Starbucks card in the hopes that I would take some "me" time and go there to write in my journal.

I was not brought up to honor Mother's Day. My grandmother (the one shaped like a ruler) did not believe in it and called it "a holiday created by Hallmark." My own mother foolishly handed down this belief to her three daughters, and it is only now that we are direct beneficiaries of the Hallmark Holiday that we regularly remember her on this day. So I have no preconceived expectations of what my husband "should" do for me on this day; only delight that he does anything at all. My father said to him this morning the equivalent of, "Go easy, dude. You are making it hard for the rest of us."

So far, I have had a perfect day. We all slept till almost 7. We made no plans. Elle and Tom have mostly been playing in the garden, except for a mid-morning sojourn during which we all went to the garden center and bought starters: many varieties of lettuces, cauliflower, broccoli, sugar snap pea seeds, and a purple metal (not plastic) watering can since our last one (which was plastic) got run over by one of our cars (my car––but Tom, manifesting another example of his non-perfect spaciness, had left it in the middle of the driveway). Tom dropped me off a few miles (okay, 2) from home and I ran the rest of the way, listening to a This American Life podcast about the Gwartney family (a Mother's Day cautionary tale which I highly recommend). I got to read the New York Times while eating lunch and then take a nap. Meanwhile, Tom has put all the plants in the garden.

But best of all, I wrote a song for my own mother and got to sing it to her via Skype. After playing it once, Elle said, "Play that again so I can play too." She picked up her drum mallets and scooted over to the music corner. I tilted the computer's camera so that my parents could watch their granddaughter while I played my Mother's Day song again.

My mother said, after our concert was finished, "The best Mother's Day present you could give me is that you love being a mother so much yourself."

I said to Tom today, on the way to the Garden Center, "Happy Mother's Day to you. If 'mother' can be a verb, then you do it very well."

"I have to say," he replied. "That whenever Elle mistakenly calls me 'Mama' I am flattered." [Which she does a lot, as well as call me 'Dada,' and it has occurred to me on several occasions that I would have made a better father than mother.] I can't begin to list what was the best Mother's Day gift out of all the gifts I got, and I can't begin to list the best gifts my own mother gave me, but way high up there is the contagious one that I do seem to have inherited. I love being a mother in the most surprising and unexpected way, and I want to thank mothers everywhere for what they do for the planet. Have a great day, and don't forget to keep your gorgeous motherly behind behind you.

Congenital Weaknesses

Katryna reminded me that we all had great posture when we were kids. Her eight-year old daughter holds herself beautifully, as did I when I was a young one. Our aunt Sarah, a musician who studied the Alexander Technique, used to comment all the time on how straight I used to sit, how well I rode a merry-go-round horse. So this ability to carry ourselves naturally and well is our birthright. How do we find it again?

Yesterday my back hurt so much that I paid a lot of attention to it and corrected my posture every three minutes, did yoga twists, engaged my abs, was basically a model back citizen. The night before last, even with two Advil, it kept me awake, and I lay supine, asking myself, "What IS that crinkly crunchy stuff in my muscles? What is it made of, anyway?" When I did shoulder rolls it sounded like popcorn popping, or those plastic bubbles they used to use for wrapping and packing delicate items that kids everywhere love to pop. Today, it feels better and I am tempted to ignore it as usual. Fortunately, I have made it (my back) the centerpiece for my blog for the next month and so I have to stay focused on it. I just don't know how much I'm going to have to say about it, though. You might say I've backed myself into a corner, har har.

But seriously, it's gotten me to thinking about congenital weaknesses of the spiritual/emotional kind as well as of the physical kind. Seeing that I have had a lifelong weakness in my upper body, and fingering that as the culprit behind my chronic upper-back pain has been extremely helpful. It just means, from a practical perspective, that if I want to be pain-free, I need to do certain things everyday: these easy exercises and an overall attitude of mindfulness (which it would behoove me to maintain in any case). I know from experience that when I did my seven-minute Pilates routine in the morning, I was able to help load in and load out my rock band's multiple amps, guitars, bass drums, etc. every night before and after a performance without injuring my lower back (and when I didn't do my seven-minute routine, I always felt it there the next day.)

The emotional weakness is slimier, of course. But I am getting incrementally better at observing my weak spots. Here is one.

Tom and I had date night last night. Date night has become non-negotiable, budgeted into our lives in terms of time, money, calories as well as babysitting capital. (Babysitting capital is a complicated equation that involves not only the money spent on the sitter but also the limited amount of time the parent can get away with leaving her children with a non-parent.) It was a beautiful evening, just cool enough so that when Tom offered me his windbreaker, I felt grateful for his chivalry. But that didn't stop me from tripping into one of our habitual areas of discord. We spent the first half of the dinner dueling about who was more tired, who had it worse, who had done more parenting lately, who had neglected to wipe off the counter that might or might not contain vestiges of rat poop. I am about to leave for the weekend for gigs in Framingham and I am bringing both kids with me. Doing this requires a lot of planning, foresight, remembering to bring Pillowface, making a run to the co-op for jars of babyfood unless I can get it together to boil some peas and carrots and mash them in time to leave. And it requires me to ask others for help (which I hate to do), namely my sisters and a babysitter I've only met once, and Elle who might have to be convinced to go along with the program at some point. From my point of view, bringing my kids to our gigs makes the experiences of performing and parenting exponentially more difficult than either would be by itself, and so activities that deplete me anyway completely knock me out by the time I get home, and all three of us need a couple of days minimum to recover. But instead of explaining all this to Tom, I just said, "I think this is the last weekend I'm bringing the kids with me. From now on, I am going to pump a lot of milk and leave them with you."

"Whoa," said Tom opening his eyes up extra wide and taking a swig of his water, which I am sure he wished were a Pale Oak. "Can we just enjoy our date please and not get into that now?"

My eyes narrowed and I sat back and stewed silently and passive-aggressively, an activity at which I excel. Tom went on to point out that this would represent a huge change in the way we handled child care, that he had agreed to my taking gigs based on the understanding that I would often take the kids, that from now on we would have to negotiate every single gig before I could say yes, and also that he knew he was being extreme, but that's what I get for bringing up a touchy subject when he was at the end of a long day and we were supposed to be relaxing and enjoying each other.

Our dinner arrived without silverware, and I stood up to fetch us some. For some reason the men at the table next to us asked me to get them silverware also. This was good, because it broke the spell, and it's actually a couples therapy technique I was taught as part of my life-coach training: when you are in the middle of a habitual argument, do something––anything––differently from what you normally do. In my case, I prayed like hell and gave myself a little talking to. "Okay, Nerissa, here you are in that place that you hate. You want Tom to give you credit for working your ass off and being a great mom and also earning money for the family, and you think he's not doing that right now. You think you will die if you don't make him see your point of view and treat you better. You are not seeing how burned out he is, which he must be. Why don't you try not arguing and not stewing but acting as if you love him?"

I handed our neighbors their silverware and some napkins and one of them joked, "I can't believe I just asked a mother to get me something. How awful. And it's almost Mother's Day."

Tom must have breathed and taken a broader view too, because when I returned he was not so polarized. In fact, we were able to talk about the other incredibly helpful tip about couples work that I learned: whenever you find yourself in an argument, recognize that there is a little part of each of you that actually wants what the other person wants. In this case, there is a part of me (not so little) that wants to bring the kids with me to all my gigs. And there is a part of Tom (also not so little) that wants the kids to stay home with him. When we can acknowledge this, the fight gets diffused and, like my tight shoulders, that crinkly stuff gets massaged a bit; air and space can infuse the area and the pain lessens.

"The truth is," I said. "That we both don't like it when one of us goes away."

"Because it is so much fun to parent with you," Tom said, leaning forward and looking at me squarely. "The other night when we were just hanging around and strolling around the neighborhood on a sweet spring night? That was just the best."

"I hate that I am going away tomorrow," I admitted. "I know I am going to love the gigs, and I am going to love being with my sisters, but I am really going to miss you."

"Really?" Tom said.

I laughed. "We go through this every time! Yes! I am going to miss you!"

He does need to be reminded of this, as if, again like my congenital weak upper-body and the push-ups I need to do daily to strengthen it, if we don't exercise this part of ourselves––our mutual reassurance of our love and devotion in the face of outside interests, like vocations and other family members––it stops doing its job. Use it or lose it.

The rest of the dinner was the kind of restorative situation that gives date night a good name. Arms around each other, we strolled through our little town, saying hi to acquaintances and remembering that we have a bond that precedes our parenthood. We arrived home to the babysitter holding Jay and watching Elle as she rode her new little bike up and down the walkway. Tom led Elle around the block while I took the baby and nursed him on the couch on the porch. I spied a robin red-breast on the branch of our maple tree. She looked straight at me, unmoving, and I wondered at what point of her nest-building process she was in. Had she finished, and was just taking a moment to survey the neighborhood? Had she not even started yet? Or was she taking a break in the middle of her labor of carrying twigs or hunting for worms for her babies? I won't ever know, but in that moment, my own little one snug in the crook of my arm, I winked at her.

The Small Changes Experiment

Me last year at this time. I am singing "The Harvest Table" in honor of the opening of River Valley Market, our local co-op which just celebrated its one year birthday on April 30, Katryna's birthday too! Notice my grimace. This is because of my S-I joint pain. Also that it was about 40 degrees.

My aunt Laura, by far the most practical member of our family, told me when I was in my late teens that she didn't believe people ever really changed. She said it matter-of-factly when I was telling her about some friend's father who had left my friend's mother but was working on reforming by going through a bunch of therapy, changing his diet, practicing meditation--you know: the whole "reinvent yourself" kick that life coaches like me exploit to pay our grocery bills. She said, "I don't think people ever really change. I think they are born a certain way and they may lean in one direction or another in an attempt to change, but they never really do."

I found this attitude depressing and scary, and also convincing, given what I'd seen up to that point. Certainly, it seemed true for myself. I was always trying to improve myself, specifically to be nicer, more generous, and to have thighs like a young colt instead of the curves God gave me. Deep in my heart, I knew my thighs were supposed to look the way they looked, but that didn't stop me from buying every magazine that had an article displayed on the cover purporting to give me thin thighs in thirty days. (Yes, I also had that famously horrible book, too, the one with a pink background and a shot of a woman's rear with upper legs that resembled Bambi's.)

Yesterday I went to my physical therapist to check out why the pain in my sacro-illiac joint had returned. I had developed this pain at almost this exact time last year when I was about six months pregnant. It was so bad when it first came on that when I tried to walk with Tom and Elle around the block on the first warm night of spring, I only made it a quarter of the way before I had to hobble back. It was so bad, in fact, that I contemplated crawling back. I had to stop picking up Elle, carrying anything heavier than a plate of food and any form of exercise other than this one stretch that the PT had me do. (It was lovely. I got to lie on my bed with one leg stretched out and the other dangling backwards off the edge. I got to count to three hundred in this position. I love any exercise that I get to do on my back while lying in bed.)

Every time I went to PT, they would adjust me, and for two months straight I could feel the adjustment go out of whack within twenty-four hours of my treatment. Then, all of a sudden, it stuck. And I was fine.

This whole event––loose joints that go in and out of whack–– is fairly common in pregnancies when the ligaments stretch and loosen to prepare for the Big Push, when something the size of a large grapefruit has to get through something the size of a drinking straw. As the PTs dismissed me sometime in late June, they cautioned,"Be sure to come back after you have the baby because you'll stay loose for awhile, but after six months or so you'll start to tighten up ,and after that it will be much harder to adjust you."

This I know. I have a dear friend who has miserable S-I problems and has to see a chiropractor weekly, and for exercise she has to swim. I hate swimming.

So anyway, the pain has been threatening to return, and by that I mean every once in a while when the weather is moist and clammy, I get A. a migraine, B. pain in my left foot which I broke in 1997 falling of the stage at the Music Farm in South Carolina, and C. now, pain in my S-I joint. So because I don't have enough to do, I called and made an appointment to see my old friends and get checked out. Partly I wanted to show off my kids. So I brought them along, forgetting that it was 1:45 pm and their nap time. Also forgetting the diaper bag, so Jay was drenched from the waist down. Nevertheless, they had a blast riding up and down on the mechanical bed (Elle) and crawling around underfoot and barely avoiding getting rolled over by the stool on wheels (Jay).

The PT told me that I was indeed misaligned, and she fixed me, but she also tested my core strength and determined that I have weak lower abs (still recovering from the pregnancies) and abnormally poor upper-body strength as the result of carrying way too much tension in my upper shoulders. This is because I spend most of my life hunched over in a C position: playing guitar, typing on the computer, breastfeeding, driving, knitting. She gave me four exercises and helped me get my wet and tired children out of the hospital and told me to come back next week.

I've had poor upper-body strength my whole life. I've always had great lower-body strength, thanks to my non-Bambi-like thighs (which I now love, by the way). My mother and sisters were those kids who could do fifty pull-ups on the horizontal bar in PE class. I was the one who couldn't even do one. I still can only muster about ten push-ups, and only when I am doing the cheaty kind on my knees. I go to bed every night with pain between my shoulders, and it it definitely worse these days from carrying two kids up and down the stairs, pushing a double stroller, sitting on the floor and creating Duplo Princess castles, and of course breastfeeding. Many nights I take two Advil to dull it before sleep. Yes, I get massages, but while they feel great in the moment, I am even more sore the next day.

But here's the thought I woke up with this morning: What if I really try to change this aspect of myself? I don't need to become Strong Lady; I just want to have less pain. What if all it takes to improve the situation is a little more mindfulness and a devotion to these four exercises my PT gave me which are:
-lower leg lifts for my lower abs
-the lying-on-your-back side twist you all have probably done in a yoga class at some point
-the Swan (that's what it's called in Pilates. In yoga it's like upward dog, only you do it five times in a row without your hands helping you, and you do it over a big exercise ball)
-simple shoulder circles.

Plus, to just stand up straight and pull my shoulders back and my milkful chest forward whenever I think of it.

Yes, we are who we are, and one of the most powerful things I've learned is that acceptance of what and who we are can be one of the best, most amazing gifts we can give ourselves (and our children). But I also know there are things we can change. I've seen it too often to continue to agree with my aunt. The life coach in me has seen so many people set and achieve goals that I firmly believe that if we can set our intentions (deliberately, humbly) on something, we can manifest it. And even though I will never be a marathon runner or very fast, I get to call myself a runner today simply by virtue of the fact that I show up for my 23 minute run. Even though I will never be Martha Stewart or Amanda Soule, when I set my intention to declutter my house and do crafts with my kids, I can do it. Parenthood has been a wonderful teacher along these lines; six months ago I thought I was a terrible storyteller to my daughter; that I was incapable of play. It's still challenging for me, but today I show up for it and do it imperfectly, but I do it consistently, and I do it. Maybe what my aunt meant was that we couldn't go from being a no-talent loser to being Maria Callas, but I no longer need to be Maria Callas. I am happy to just be me.

So this month, I want to do an experiment. I want to see if by taking small actions (these four exercises) and adding mindfulness (reversing the C position when I notice I'm in it) I can lessen the pain I am in. And you will be forced to witness this. You can thank me later. Feel free to write in about any commitments you want to make to yourself in terms of change, and I will witness you too.

Swine Flu, Pillowface Cat, Molly the Donkey and Other Critters

The Nields and their CrackerJack Band at the University of Hartford TV Studio recording their Family DVD on May 2, 2009. Photo by James Levine.

I am reminded today about the essential dilemma of every would-be mindful mother on the planet: it's hard to fully appreciate the miracle of a healthy, delicious breastfeeding baby while simultaneously trying to clean your house, write your yearly birthday letter to your daughter, get said daughter ready for a playdate, and figure out in what order to do these things: change baby's poopy diaper, feed baby some much needed solids, call the doctors about yearly check ups, call the exterminator about the (large!) mouse that has made several appearances in your kitchen, oh, and finish an extremely tattered book proposal. There is so much to do and the requirements for management of a household--even bad management–– are legion. And require forethought, which to my mind is kind of the opposite of staying in the moment. Though I may be wrong about that.

And yet, Elle's birthday, which was yesterday, brought to mind in such a fierce, stark way, the truth, which is that these kids are growing up so fast it makes my teeth hurt. I am aware that I may only be breastfeeding this sweet, delicious boy for a short time (I plan on breastfeeding until at least kindergarten, but he might have other ideas. Most babies in our family seem to self-wean around 2.5). I am aware that with each passing day, Elle's vocabulary grows by leaps and bounds, and while I applaud that (literally), it makes me sad that she now says, "More" instead of "mur" and "hospital" instead of "hostibal." Yesterday her cousins gave her a hand-me-down bike with brand new training wheels, and her uncle informed me that she took off right away, with virtually no learning curve. Later in the day, we pedaled over to the farm, and as cute as she was in her bike helmet and as awesome as her little pink and purple bike is, I felt some grief that the tricycle days are over. Already!?

Meanwhile, Jay really is skinny, and now for the first time I am worried. Tom and I both noticed around the same time, which was yesterday. This coincided with us feeding him on and off all day long. In one day, he consumed three jars of babyfood, about half a box of "Purely-O's", some Italian crackers, all of Elle's portion of sweet potato, and copious amounts of breast milk. Perhaps he is exercising his new tooth, which no one besides me believes exists. But that's just because no one else is willing to stick their fingers into his mouth and feel around his gum line. I feel it clear as day, and I can see it in those rare seconds when he keeps his mouth open long enough for a viewing. It is a translucent little promise of future chewing power. Also, he is a cruising machine, which is probably why he's suddenly so hungry and skinny. When he is awake he is never still. When he is supposed to be getting his diaper changed, he is practicing his impression of Harry Houdini, and when he is left to his own devices, he is doing crawl laps around whatever room and climbing on top of anything he can find to mount. Including but not limited to the dog and our laps, which is really cute.

So yesterday I postponed Elle's party, which was a good move since both she and I were way too tired and cranky to be social with anyone besides Katryna's family (and we weren't that cheerful with them, either, though we were very grateful for the visit and the bike.) I spent the day playing with her, and when she woke up from her nap, as I said, we put Jay in the front pack and biked over to the farm in search of Molly the Donkey. Last Saturday we filmed our DVD at the University of Hartford and I am not sure I will ever recover from the stress. Actually, it was not that bad. I assuaged my fears which I discussed in a previous post by buying a tube of Preparation H which is purported to cure the dreaded Eye Puff (which I was dreading.) (Everyone in my family, including Tom who is technically not related to me, suffers from particularly sensitive eyes which turn puffy at the mere suggestion of soy sauce or less than 8 hours of sleep per night. Even Jay and Elle get Eye Puff. But don't worry, I promise not to daub them with Preparation H.) As it turned out, I was having a good eye day and didn't need it, but just the feel and weight of it in my knitting bag was enough to calm my fears.





See? No bags.

Speaking of knitting, here is the finished Pillow Face Cat.

Elle has been most appreciative. When she unwrapped it, she gave a little gasp and said, "My very own Pillowface!" She hugged it and then said to Jay, "This is very special to me. I'm not going to share it."

I am glad Swine Flu has turned out not to be the horrifying terror we once believed. I myself was mostly scared because I thought the injunction to wash hands obsessively would lead to the end of the world as we know it as the result of dried-up water supply and deforestation (all those paper towels). Also, I feared no one would ever come to any of our shows again. Nonetheless, we were unable to find Molly the Donkey at the farm because all the barns were locked. As the result of Fear of Swine Flu.

Finally, back to that large mouse. I say "large mouse" because I am optimistically hoping it's not really a rat. The evidence which rodents leave behind (like that euphemism? As if I've never said "poop" in this blog) is, in this case, rather huge. I bought those little tone thingies that are supposed to deter rodents by making a high-pitched sound, but all they did was annoy me (I can most definitely hear the high-pitched sound which is purported to only bother rodents and not dogs or people) and there was even more scat on our counter the day after we plugged them in.

Forgive me, Lord, for I must kill. Or ask Minuteman to do my dirty deeds for me.

Katryna's Birthday Party

Our shows at the University of Hartford where we recorded the DVD were much better than I expected. I feel like I just finished a semester at college or something; I am that relieved for it to be over. Well, almost over. Ed wants me to film the real Molly the Donkey at the farm, so tomorrow I think I will take Elle over for an organic farm visit. It will be her birthday, and I wanted a special mother/daughter outing anyway.

By the way, I think Elle has overheard me talking about how I changed her name for the purposes of this blog. Tom just said that as he was putting her down for her nap, she said, "I want to change Mama's name, Dada."

"Why?" said Tom. "I like Mama's name."

Elle looked around the room and fixated on her John Lennon quilt above her bureau which has his fanciful designs of African and Australian animals all living together in peace.

"I want to call her...Elephant!"

I haven't been writing about food activism for months now, and it doesn't exactly fit into the Ven Diagram of motherhood and the arts/music, but this whole thing with swine flu has me focused on the topic again, so forgive me while I rant.

Apparently the pork industry is up in arms because its product is getting a bad name. They want to make sure everyone knows that you can't actually contract swine flu from eating pork. Which is true. But still, the industry totally deserves to have a virus named after it. My understanding, based mostly on the writings of Michael Pollan is that these animals are raised on CAFO's (Confined Area Feeding Operation) which are essentially cities comprised of one kind of animal: cattle or swine, and are stuffed to the gills with foods they wouldn't normally eat (mostly corn and soy products which have been subsidized by the US government and themselves grown in conditions that don't support the land or water) and create huge lakes of their waste, which they sometimes swim in. These conditions are ripe for viruses (virii?) and bacteria to mutate and create strains that are resilient to the antibiotics the animals are perpetually kept on (because their conditions are so unsanitary that if they weren't constantly on antibiotics, they would all be too sick to eat.)

If this disturbs you so much that you want to become a vegetarian, I say fabulous. I love vegetarians and am grateful for them. Eating commercial meat gives you a higher carbon footprint than driving a car. But I don't think it's necessary to give up meat or fish or fowl entirely in order to live sustainably (or without guilt, which is always my bent). I don't buy or order commercial red meat at restaurants, and I try to do the same with poultry. I try my best to eat sustainably farmed or caught fish, too. We are lucky in that where we live there are several grass-fed cattle farms that sell hamburger at our farmer's market in the summer, and at our co-op I can buy local organic chickens. Yes, they're more expensive, but that helps me to eat less meat, too.

But back to poop. Did I mention that George Harrison eats his poop? And our kids' diapers? So today, Elle came downstairs with the inner portion of her potty seat, filled with the contents of her digestive system. She apparently wanted us her mom and dad, to see what a good job she had done. Which she has. I can't believe that a month ago I was in despair about her ever becoming toilet trained. Anyway, as she carried the little plastic bowl carefully through the dining room en route to the downstairs bathroom where it would be dumped in the toilet, she turned to the dog and said, "Don't eat it, George!"

We had a party for Elle this morning, which was really just an excuse to get together. My parents were in town for the third weekend in four weeks, so they and Katryna and Dave and their kids came over for brunch. At first I thought I had nothing in the house to serve them, but in the middle of the night I remembered I had one can of chick peas and an unopened jar of tahini from the pleistocene era. I also had garlic and lemon juice and salt, and therefore all the ingredients for hummus, plus a half box of Triscuits for dunking. My basic hummus recipe is:
-find a recipe online, any recipe that has these ingredients and little else
-multiply the amount of tahini by 8 and garlic by 3 but otherwise follow the recipe exactly

Also, just to remind you that I am not a vegetarian, I found three frozen chicken breasts, a package of frozen cod and some frozen wrapped catfish in the freezer and a jar of Trader Joe's Korma sauce. I marinated all three together for an hour and then baked for another hour. I steamed a lot of asparagus and heated up the leftover Indian rice from our take-out dinner on Friday, and voila! A fancy and delicious luncheon.

Overheard as I passed the children's table. (Note: "Bill" is what I will call Katryna's son. Note also: he is not a dog.)

Elle: No, Bill, don't stand up! Sit, Bill, sit! Good boy.
Bill: Elle, I am taller than you.
Elle: Yes, you are.

Last night after the DVD taping, our whole family gathered at a restaurant in town and celebrated Katryna's 40th birthday. We rented a private room in the basement. At one end, the kids gathered to watch DVDs on a portable DVD player: "The Little Mermaid" and "Finding Nemo" which Elle called "Grinding Nemo" and pronounced, "Just a little scary, but not too much. If I'm scared I can hide my eyes." Which she demonstrated.

Katryna is so generous that she insisted on sharing the birthday cake with our twin niece and nephew who just turned five last week, and with Elle whose birthday, as I said, is tomorrow. Katryna even let the kids blow out the candles.

Here's the song I "wrote" for her: it's to the tune of "What A Wonderful World."

What A Wonderful Girl (For Katryna on her 40th birthday)
C Em F Em
A baby was born to our family
Dm7 C E7 Am
Lovely and strong; we called her “Tree”
Ab Dm7/A D7 C / C+ / Fmaj7 / G7 /
And I think to myself, What a wonderful girl.

C Em F Em
You grew and bloomed, we sang and played

Dm7 C E7 Am
Life lessons learned; dear friends you made
Ab Dm7/A D7 C / C+ / Fmaj7 / G7 /
And I think to myself, what a wonderful girl

G7 C
The way you draw a picture, the way you sing a song
G7 C
The way you show the children how they can sing along
Am Em Am Em
Are the ways that you share the gifts God gave to you
Dm7 Edim7 Dm7 Edim7 Dm7
Are the ways you tell the world, "I love you."

C em F Em
I have known your smile, and I’ve known your tears
Dm7 C E7 Am
I love you more with each passing year
Ab Dm7/A D7 C / C+ / Fmaj7 / G7 /
And I think to myself what a wonderful girl
Dm7 Dm7 G7b9 C F6 C
Yes I think to myself, what a wonderful girl.

The Soil

The problem with taking a day off is that you have to come home to a household that didn't have you in it for a day. And the problem with getting away from it all is that you take it all back home when you return, plus it's all dirty and you have to unpack it. I need a day off to recuperate from my day off.

Also, I continue to be exhausted, which I am sure everyone including me is sick of hearing me say. Yesterday, we walked home from HooteNanny midday, which is my lowest point energy-wise anyway. I was pushing the double stroller up a long hill, hungry and tired, and Elle and Jay were refusing to fall asleep like they were supposed to.
Instead, Elle kept saying, "Mama, can I walk?"

Now, what kind of a mother doesn't let her cute, enthusiastic almost three-year-old exercise her cute little legs on a perfect spring day? A tired hungry one who wants to get home as fast as possible, that's who. So I said, "When we get to the top of the hill you can get out." The top of the hill is a mere five blocks from our house, which is still more than I'd have liked to give her. I would have liked her to walk up the stairs of our porch, but I was feeling magnanimous and also guilty, so when we got to the top of the hill I released her from her bonds. She them proceeded to practice her tightrope act on the curb, examine every new blade of spring grass and grill me on what is apparently her new obsession:

Elle: Mama, are worms good for the soil?
Me: Yes, worms are good for the soil.
Elle: Are caterpillars good for the soil?
Me: Yes, caterpillars are good for the soil.
Elle: Are cats good for the soil?
Me: (pause) No, cats aren't very good for the soil. (Unless they are dead, I thought but didn't say.)
Elle: Mama, are people good for the soil?
Me: No! People are bad for the soil! Well, except I guess some people are good for the soil, if they're paying attention (or dead).
Elle: Oh. Why, Mama?
Me: You'll find out when we go to our farm. I'll tell you then. (Meaning the local organic CSA we just joined.)
Elle: Mama, is grass good for the soil?
Me: It depends. If it's raggedy and tall, then yes, it's probably good for the soil. But if it's cut and bright emerald green like that over there (pointing to someone's manicured lawn) it's not good for the soil.
Elle: Oh. Why, Mama?
Me: Because someone put chemicals on it to make it look like that.
Elle: What are "emicals"?
Me: Chemicals. Um. Well, what nature makes and what God makes is usually better than what people make. Usually. And chemicals are people-made. Elle, hurry up!

At this point, she was lying on the sidewalk waving her feet in the air. "Hurry, hurry!" I shouted. "We're in a rush." Which was only half true. I was in a rush. She was not. And if I weren't me in my hungry tired skin, I would have been routing for her version of the way events were unfolding. What's so wrong with a little kid outdoors exploring nature on a beautiful day?

Recently, I feel sad most of the time because I wish I were spending more time with Tom. I also wish I were spending more time with Elle. I also wish I were spending more time with Jay. I also wish I had more time to write, more time to see friends, more time to play my guitar.

So what's wrong with this picture? A friend of mine, another mom, said, "It's like having an avalanche of roses. Your life is filled with so many good things. But even an avalanche of roses would hurt."

Tomorrow we are recording our family DVD at the University of Hartford. This is a veritable dream come true. And it came about as one of those "The Secret" manifesta-ramas. Katryna and I were talking about how we really should have a DVD, and wouldn't it be great if our friend Ed McKeon would produce it, and oh, remember how WGBY wanted to show a live film of ours as a fundraiser, and then out of the blue, Ed emailed and said, "You need a family DVD and I want to be the one to film it!"

Dream. Come. True.

But dreams require a lot of elbow grease. Katryna has been like one of Santa's elves making magic at her house, designing and creating a set for the show, driving back and forth to Hartford to check out the space. Dave has been practicing his many instruments and organizing the band. I have done nothing, but I've worried a lot about how I'm going to get through a day of performing and recording without sizzling with anxiety. There's a lot of pressure one has to contend with when one is handed one's opportunity on a platter. I have a million fears:

It won't be good and we will have wasted everyone's time.
Everyone will be good except I will suck.
I will be too tired to even strum my guitar.
Everyone will be mad at me because I am not breastfeeding them/telling them a story/allowing them to have a Saturday off.
It will be wildly successful but I will look ugly in it and everyone will say, "Oh, the Nields--that's two sisters, a pretty one and an ugly one."

Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just live safely within our margins and not probe the edges? This is why I am glad we just spent a few days at Kripalu. Whenever I am there, I am always reminded of the basic yoga teaching, "Go to your edge," and the corollary, "Grow or go." I could live safely, but that would not be good for the soil.

Today, Jay's very first bottom right tooth poked my finger when I wiggled it around his lower gums. "Your first tooth!" I howled with glee, and he responded by laughing and doing knee bends on my lap. He truly seemed so pleased with himself. He is growing. I don't know whether he has any choice in the matter, but I do. For myself, I will choose to grow, too.