Mother's Day

My writing group isn't meeting tonight, because I got invited to hear Sandra Tsing Loh read at a friend's house. She has a new book out called The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones. Though I'd generally rather write with my writers than almost every other activity, I wanted to say yes to this invitation. I don't know from raging hormones (yet) and I like to be prepared for such eventualities. But what I want to write about today is Mother's Day.

I feel guilty saying this, because I know how hard Mother's Day can be for those who have lost theirs to either death or illness or painful choice; or for those who yearn to be mothers and aren't, or who were mothers and suffered the cruelest loss. But I have come to appreciate this holiday, and not just because my kids made me beautiful cards, gave me the day off and just plain exist. I hated it as a child, and in our family it was almost universally ignored until the three daughters became mothers ourselves and started getting cards, flowers (or resenting the lack thereof). Now we regularly thank our own mother. Now we get it.

In church yesterday, Steve said, "Every day should be mother's day. We owe a debt we can never pay back." And all of us had a mother, however imperfect. My life was changed when a wiser woman (not a mother herself) shared her own breakthrough: "I realized that the sometimes mean, sometimes crazy alcoholic mom I had was exactly the mother I needed to become the person I am." That statement set me free as a mother. Whenever I worried that I was wrecking my kids, I thought of this: the mother you get is the mother you need. For better or for worse, my kids got me. And mostly, it's for better. I have to trust that even when it's not so lovely--like when I ignore them for my iPhone, or yell at them for not showing up for violin practice--that somehow, someway, God can turn this to good: compost becomes flowers.

More about Sandra Tsing Loh tomorrow.

Between Friends

Lilacs about to burst, three weeks before they usually do.

My friend Andrea Raphael died on Good Friday. My writing mentor and teacher Anna Kirwan died on Easter Sunday. Two dear friends got diagnosed with cancer last week. My husband Tom turned 50. And our new CD The Full Catastrophe came out. It's a liminal time, the Mayan apocolypse notwithstanding, and once again all signs point to salvation resting in being awake to the here and now. I wrestle with this every moment of the day. A strange, firm undertow constantly drags me into my thoughts, my thoughts, my clammoring thoughts. My fears about the future, my curiosity about everyone in the world which sends me to Hell (AKA Google) over and over again. I wish I could say that these many wake up calls--the deaths, the diagnoses, the birthday parties, the one movie we managed to see (over a period of 2 days), the imminent work of promoting an album--had worked to wake me up fully. In a way they have; perhaps we can only be as awake as we can be in any given time. Today, I am sobered, but still sleepy.

The movie we saw was The Tree of Life, an amazing film my Terrence Malik about life, death, the big bang, heaven, and a beautiful, doomed, brave, typical, unique family in the 50's in Waco TX. All of this made me think that this week's Song of the Week should be "Between Friends."

I wrote this song during February Album Writing Month 2009, right before I took a self-imposed leave from my life coaching practice in order to spend more time with my family. I blogged about this period of my life from March 2009-May 2009. I was then trying to be as present as I could be to the miracles of my two children, then aged 2, and 6 months. The fact that I blogged every day no matter what speaks to a certain terror around the idea of taking a real rest. But I tried, and I do still feel really great about that period of time. I still find art projects around the house that we made together in that particular window. This song came from that experience.

Andrea's funeral was today. The Log Cabin was completely packed, SRO. I am terrible at ball-parking numbers, but it felt like a thousand of her friends and family gathered. The service lasted two hours, and we needed all two of those hours to hear from loved ones, and still I wanted more. She was such a dynamic, real, funny, passionate, optimistic, loving, brilliant person (read her obituary to learn more). I have known her since we were teenagers; our parents are friends. She was three years older than I, and when we ran into each other in the mid 90s when I was in the midst of my music career, she took my phone number and proceeded to invite me to her dinners, events, parties and friendship circles; taking care, I thought, of her old family friend. Like me, she lived life fully. Unlike me, she seemed to have time to breathe. I at times, forget how, or at least that is what I can tell myself.

It has been said that the perfect is the enemy of the good. I don't know about that, but I can say for sure that perfection is my own personal enemy. After seeing The Tree of Life, I was left with this searing fear that I was wasting my time doing anything other than following my two children wherever they go, soaking up their every comment, their every gorgeously long eyelash, their every chuckle and screech. I won't tell you why so as not to act as a spoiler, but suffice it to say, life is brief, and the events of the past couple of weeks have hammered home to me that we don't get to know just how brief. This is a familiar fear of mine: I am missing it! I am going to be like the Dad in The Cat's In the Cradle, that old Harry Chapin song. Woe is me! Attend, earthling, attend!

Andrea suffered greatly from Lyme Disease, and one of the other things that's been on my mind much is climate change. Lyme Disease, which has also robbed much from my beloved aunt (who's had the disease for at least 22 years), is a direct result of changing climates, changing eco-systems and the rise of creepy horrible illnesses that leave doctors so baffled that some of them prefer to tell their patients that their symptoms must be all in their heads rather than admit they are stumped.

We don't know how much time we have. We don't know how present we get to be for the time we have either. And we don't ever really know another person's struggles. I should know by now never to judge my insides against someone else's outsides. (And Harry Chapin died before his kid grew up.)

"Go and live your lives fully," said the minister at the end of the service today. "Andrea wants us to do no less." And we did so, pouring out into the mountain top overlooking the valley where so many of us live and breathe every day. But we lingered, grabbing the hula hoops Andrea's family had placed out there in her honor and trying to make them fly around our middle-aged middles. We held each other warmly, wept and shared kleenex packs, marveled at how the kids are growing.

"Rest," Andrea's mother told me when I found her to say good-bye. "Andrea would have wanted you to rest and not work so hard."

And somewhere in the middle of these two heavenly directives, I live every single day. One of the gifts Andrea left me, a gift she seems to whisper to me as I go about my everyday tasks-- chopping the carrots, ordering the kids' summer pajamas, calling a friend--is the knowledge that we're all at any given time doing the best we can. And at any given time, our best might look radically different. One day my best might be crossing every last item off my to do list, even the one that says, "publish novel as e-book" and "set up non-profit in Holyoke," and another day it might be taking the compost jar to the pile in the backyard. Or maybe my best might just be managing one smile for my husband. But what freedom it would be to trust that. What freedom it would be to believe our friends are trusting that about us--our deep insides as well as our carefully managed appearances. I am breathing. I am living fully. I am resting. I have given much, and I have received much more. Thank you.

I have a friend who says
The earth cannot afford us
We have to grow up and not expect her to support us
We could give her something back.

I have a friend who has
A view of the Hudson River
He works all week just to enjoy his little sliver of view
Sometimes he forgets to look

Everybody’s banking on a world that never ends
Can’t you see I’m always working hard to make amends...
What’s a little trouble between friends?

I have a friend who’s scared her man is going to leave her
She’s reading books in bed like she’s got some kind of fever
To cure their marriage woes
He reaches for her and she gives him the cold shoulder
In just a minute she will think to let him hold her
But the minute comes and goes.

Everybody’s banking on a world that never ends
Can’t you see I’m always working hard to make amends

What’s a little trouble between friends?

I have a friend who has a job that doesn‘t pay her
She hates the paycheck but she loves the way it saves her
To do it her own way
She has a field of time to play with her son and daughter
She chops her firewood and they help her carry water
They live all day.

Everybody’s banking on a world that never ends
Can’t you see I’m always working hard to make amends

What’s a little trouble between friends?

Nerissa Nields
March 14, 2009

Dreaming of the Dead

(My grandmother)

Last night I had a dream about my grandfather, a man who died in 1981 at the age of 66 from esophageal cancer. When he died, I was thirteen, and I had just discovered him. For most of the overlap of our lives, he was grouchy and clearly regarded his three granddaughters as a noisy nuisance at best and competition for his wife's attention at worst. He regularly yelled at her, and occasionally at us, so we hid from him, spying on him from behind open doors. He was mostly deaf and completely so when he didn't wear his hearing aid. He had a bad back, and I'd watch him stretch it when he thought he was alone. It made me feel strange to see him looking so vulnerable, back against the wall, lifting his arms like the Romper Room lady, wearing funny long white underwear.

He was a fire-breathing monster before his first drink. He yelled at my grandmother in public if dinner wasn't on the table by 6:30. We never ate before seven. Also, my grandmother didn't actually cook the dinner. So I am not sure what that was all about, but at any rate, I was afraid of him, and so were many people.

For Christmas 1977, after years of letting my grandmother handle the gifts to the grandkids, he gave me a stereo--a real stereo, with high quality hi-fi speakers, a synthesizer and a turn table. It was the best present I ever got, and that system followed me to college and to my first apartment, or pieces of it did anyway. He loved listening to music more than anything in the world; he worshiped at the church of Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert, filling the house with music played so loudly the house shook--remember, he was deaf. The next year, he gave me a Swiss Army Knife with every attachment imaginable. I felt seen. The last summer he was alive, I came to stay with him and my grandmother for a week in the summer. In the still-sunny evenings, he'd drink his soup--the only thing he could eat anymore since his tracheotomy--and ask me what I was reading. When I told him I loved Agatha Christie novels he smiled conspiratorially. "But just the Hercule Poirot ones, right?" And I fell in love with him.

His children deny his alcoholism. But my sister said to one of them, long after he had died, "But they had to pour whiskey into the feeding hole in his stomach every day. I think that means the doctors understood that he was an alcoholic."

Today I joined the Y. I should say "rejoined" since we are foul-weather members, always quitting in late May. Tom and I thought long and hard about joining. We don't know how much we'll really use it since we both prefer to run, walk, bike and do outdoor activities over indoor ones. I have a fabulous yoga studio, so I don't intend to bring my danurasanas there, either. But the kids love it. They need a place to swim and to learn to swim. Everyone I know is a member. And I want a Y two blocks from my house, so I see our membership as neighborly support in part.

I also saw that they have a class at 4:15 called Family Yoga. I have been fantasizing about bringing my kids to a family yoga class since before Elle was born. It's never worked out timing-wise. But today, I saw it would--I am officially looking for something to do with the kids during what is in our family lo-o-o-ong witching hours of after-school to dinnertime.

We started out eagerly enough, each of us choosing a different colored yoga mat from the closet. We set our mats up in a row, with mama in the middle. Elle was terrific, able to do every pose. Jay was predictably hilarious, sitting in half lotus, jumping around on a one-footed tree, inventing something that looked like table pose with one leg up in the air, perpendicular to the floor. Eventually all that devolved to the kids running around the room. I was told that this is usual for this class. The whole thing was a half hour. I was in heaven.

And then we stepped out of the class to put on socks, shoes, winter coats, scarves, hats--all in triplicate. And it was as if I had scalded them with hot water. "That was too short," Elle whined.
"Oh, I am so glad you liked it!" I said. "I wish it were longer too."
"Not longer, Mama! I hated it! We didn't get to run around enough. I wanted to go swimming." And she threw herself down in the middle of the hallway sobbing. Meanwhile, Jay screamed at me when I tried to put his socks on him. "Why do you DO dat, Mama? You are SO MEAN TO ME!!!" And he ran away down the hall.

As I write it now, it's pretty funny. But in the moment, all I could think about was my disappointment that my fantasy about family yoga was going up in smoke; and also that the class that had just started in the yoga room was listening, eyes closed, wishing for a peaceful pre-OM silence, to the sounds of kids berating the World's Worst Mother. So I acted like one. "I'm leaving," I announced. "See you in the parking lot." And I marched off, their coats and hats and shoes in my hand. The kids followed me screaming, "Why are you so mean, Mama! You are being SO MEAN!"


In my dream, someone said, "Granddad has come back." And I saw him first in a wheelchair, many years older, bald and round, lost-looking. But then he stood up and was transformed. He rose to a towering height, and shone like an angel. Perhaps he was one. He was the most handsome version of himself. His hair was silver and gold, and his skin shone gold, too. His eyes were clear and peaceful and kind. I came to him and put my ear to his chest. He held me for a long time. I pulled away and looked up at him. I didn't know what to say. I needed to say something--because I thought he was dead. So I finally looked him in the eye and said, "Should I be worried about you?"

He took a breath. "Well, I am abstinent," he said. "So no. But I haven't beaten cancer yet."

"You will," I told him.

I woke with the sweetest feeling about him. Even now, writing about it, I have tears in my eyes. My friend Judy, an author who writes in my Wednesday group, recently said, "When we dream of dead people, these are not really dreams." Of course, I see myself in this dream, in a very dream-like way, so I don't know. But I also feel as though I had the most wonderful visit/visitation imaginable.

I told the kids on the car ride home that I was sad we had joined the Y because of how terribly they had behaved.
"We didn't behave terribly, Mama. YOU behaved terribly."
I thought about this. They were right.
"That's true," I said. "But it doesn't solve the problem. I think we all need to just take a big break from each other between pick up from school and dinner time. We're all too cranky."
"I'm not cranky!" screamed Elle. "You're cranky! I want Dada!" And she collapsed again on the floor sobbing.

I gave up. I started to make dinner, pulling food out of the fridge with one hand, texting Tom with my other. "Please do not go to the store. Just come home now."
He texted back: "Need to not come home. Need time to myself. Need to come home after you feed the kids dinner." It was a conspiracy. He was going to leave me with them, me whom they hated. Possibly they would have killed me by the time they got home. No, that wasn't realistic. They wouldn't have killed me, but they would probably steal away in the middle of the night to marry men from the motor trade like the girl in "She's Leaving Home."

I started to pray. Help, help, help, like that.

At that moment the phone rang. It was my father. I took the phone into the bathroom, burst into tears and told him briefly about the bad afternoon and then about the dream about my grandfather, his father. As I sobbed, Jay came in and threw his arms around my legs, patting the backs of them consolingly.

"That's wonderful," said my father. "You're lucky to have had that dream."

"Daddy's home!"shrieked Elle, and sure enough, in came Tom to the scene of chaos, me with a tear stained face and the kids attached to my legs, my father under my ear. And I knew we'd all be ok for the foreseeable future.

My grandfather believed in God. I didn't see this myself, and when I learned as a teenager that he was the believer and my saintly grandmother was the atheist, it threw my straight Protestant concepts for a loop. But now I get it. Saintly people don't need God, they don't need church. It's those of us who wrestle with our rage, who look for Spirit in a bottle, who fall down again and again in our relationships, and who are saved by saying we are sorry--we're the ones who need church, just as the sick are the ones who need a hospital. And on good days, we are the ones who see angels.