Breaking the waters

The fact that Lila’s birth began with the very unexpected breaking of my waters seems like an apt metaphor for what I have so far (in my grand total of two whole weeks) come to understand about parenthood. I had been hoping to avoid what I grew up seeing all around me: parents blaming their children for ruining their lives and children blaming their parents for the same. Parents complaining that the children fed off of them like parasites and that they no longer had any time for themselves; children claiming the parents never really paid attention to them. One big blame game. But here I was with the facts: the amniotic sack ruptured. An act of God if ever there was one. Not my fault. Not Lila’s fault either, even though some people sent sweet notes saying, “She must have really wanted to be with you guys to come so early.” I myself thought she was eager enough to attend the shower that was scheduled for May 6, she might make her entrance early. But given that she had so much trouble breathing once she arrived on the scene, I quickly came to doubt that her early arrival was her own doing. It’s not like she had a Swiss Army knife in there, or even fingernails. No one’s fault; no one’s plan, exactly. It just was.

Lila arrived and immediately, my life turned inside out, like one of those silk scarves magicians use, with one color inside and the other outside. I felt then and continue to feel completely skinless, as if there is no amniotic sack protecting me from the incredible joy and incredible pain of the world. I look down at her lovely little face and the tears well up in my eyes at the thought that she and I won’t be together forever and ever, that I will die, that my parents will die, that she will grow up and have to go through the seventh grade, that she’ll get too heavy for me to hold in one arm, the way I can now (she’s just five pounds.) In short, I don’t want anything to change from this moment of pure perfection. And, as Anne Lamott stated so potently (and accurately) in her memoir of her son’s first year of life (Operating Instructions), if anything were to happen to her, “I would be f-cked unto the Lord.”

A daughter! A little girl! I have to say, I’m relieved. As all my psychic friends plus the majority of the old wives tales insisted me I was having a boy, I prepared accordingly, buying a blue rug with dinosaurs and eschewing anything pink. I love boys, and was looking forward to raising one, but a girl was what I always wanted, especially as my first child. I have two sisters, no brothers, four aunts and no biological uncles. Even my dogs were all females up until Cody. I went to two all girls’ schools, worked in two different girls dorms, taught mostly girls, wrote songs about mostly girls. I know girls. I figure with all the other curveballs parenthood will surely toss my way, it will be nice to be ahead of the game in this one respect.

What I was not prepared for was the overwhelming, physical love for my child which gripped me from the moment I set eyes upon her. She was placed in my hands and I instantly felt my heart grow at least three sizes, like the Grinch’s. Then she was whisked away and placed under oxygen to help her little lungs adjust to the world outside her watery womb. I didn’t hold her again for thirty-six hours, but once I did I haven’t let go, much. Tom gets to hold her (though we fight over whose turn it is constantly) but no one else. Hey, I never said I wasn’t selfish.

My friend Melany is a neo-natal nurse, and she explained the motherhood gig like this: you take in, you take on, you take over. I liked the sound of that, especially the take over part. So I diligently tried to learn everything the nurses told me to do, particularly in the breastfeeding department. As I was resting in the post partum room, one of the post labor nurses informed me that I was anemic following the delivery and needed to eat more foods with iron. “Beef, spinach and yams,” she said, and of course, wanting everyone to like me and think I’m a good little patient, I immediately began my iron rich regimen, complete with an iron supplement. Another nurse, whom Tom swore was an ex-nun, wielded her authority cleverly, by first telling you that all the other nurses were incorrect and/or liars, and only she really cared enough about you to give you the straight truth. Then she terrified you with the consequences of your doing anything other than what she recommended. Her method of making sure Lila was awake enough to breastfeed properly (an issue as Lila was 4 lbs 13 oz at the time) was to vigorously pinch her tiny ears and rub her head so forcefully that I was afraid she’d give my daughter whiplash. Initially. I took this in, and then tried to take it on once home, only to find that there were other more humane ways of getting Lila awake enough to eat. This same nurse also said the reason Lila was gassy was because of all the spinach I ate. “Iron,” she sighed, shaking her head. “Babies just don’t like it.” And again, I had to remember, no one’s fault; this is just one of those situations. And here’s where the parental transformation reveals itself: I immediately stopped taking the iron supplements (though I continue to eat spinach. The idea that spinach has a lot of iron is a conspiracy perpetuated by the creators of Popeye.)

I’d like to veer off topic for a moment to mention that my whole life is about breastfeeding these days. No one really tells you that your body completely stops being your body once you have an infant. I eagerly signed up for breastfeeding when I heard that breastfed babies have way fewer colds, flus, have lower obesity rates as adults, are more likely to be young Einsteins and Michael Jordans, can leap tall buildings in a single bound, etc. etc. Plus, the idea of spending thousands of dollars on formula didn’t appeal when the good Lord gave me plenty of what my child needs for free. But I somehow slept through the part about how you breast feed for a good half hour at a time and have to do a feeding every two hours, three max. Figuring into this equation the fact that premature babies don’t really want to do anything passionately besides sleep, there’s a good fifteen minutes devoted to rousing our teeny child for each feeding. This means, I really am spending more than half my life focused on feeding my baby these days. Once she is latched on and grooving at the job, I have huge impulses to multitask. I want to talk on the phone, check my email, read my Dr. Sears Baby book, have a meal, get Tom to entertain me, watch TV, listen to the new Bruce Springsteen Seeger Sessions CD (a blog topic in and of itself!) and fantasize about doing the laundry and rearranging all the furniture in my house. But if I do these things, I inevitably fail to notice that my baby has fall off the breast and is dangling, half asleep from her little nursing cushion (marketed as-I kid you not-“My Brest Friend.”) Yet another annoying lesson in the virtues of mindfulness.

In the novel I wrote called The Big Idea, there is a character named Rhodie Becket who has a baby named Margarita. Every time Rhodie, a member of a folk band, tried to pick up her guitar and practice a little, Margarita would wail, as if uncannily knowing that the guitar was her main competition for her mother’s attention. Sitting in my customary spot on the sofa with Lila at my breast, I gazed across the room at my own little Martin, once the apple of my eye, standing forlornly on its stand, completely neglected. Once or twice last week, I tried to pick it up. I got as far as tuning it when Lila began crying from her basket where I’d hoped she would take a nap. I had two songs written for her in the womb, which I wanted to sing for her, but she would have none of it. Until today. Today, Tom held her and I sang. I’d like to report that my child awoke, opened her almond shaped blue eyes and gazed at me with sudden recognition and devotion: “That’s the voice and sound I heard so close to my head for all those months in my watery warm little world, the world I inhabited, I thought, alone. But no! She was with me all along!” Nope. Lila just fussed and squiggled around as usual. Her mother, on the other hand, wept big old tears, fusing finally the song with the intended audience. She’ll hear it properly one day, when the time is right. I can wait till then.

On Easter, Being Two Places at Once and Global Warming

On Easter, I wanted to be two places at once. I wanted to be in Long Island with my father’s three sisters and their families. I grew up with these three women, and each one of them is a glorious, lovable and admirable person from whom I’ve learned much and who makes me laugh and think. Their children (I have six cousins) are interesting, funny, delightful people as well, and I don’t see them nearly enough anymore. Holidays with them are more and more rare: we used to spend every Thanksgiving and Christmas together, up until about the year 2000. Since then, marriages, new children, schedules and the general feeling that there are just too many people in the room at cocktail hour have conspired to keep us in different states for many of the holidays.

I also wanted to be with my sisters and their families, who were not into traveling to Long Island on Easter weekend, and I wanted to preach a sermon at my church. Our minister, Stephen Philbrick, is on a four month sabbatical, and we in the congregation are taking turns in the pulpit while he is away. In early March, when trying to make a decision about where to spend this particularly confusing and strange holiday, I realized that if I volunteered to preach on Easter Sunday, my parents would most likely be lured up from Virginia: a pregnant daughter preaching plus the promise of an Easter egg hunt with four grandchildren under the age of five was a sure-fire combination.

The word “Easter” comes from Eostre or Eastre, who was the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxon people in Northern Europe. Thank you, early Roman conquerors for utilizing pre-existing pagan holidays and incorporating the new Christian ones. Knowing this, makes me love Easter more than thinking of it as the painful, difficult story (to me) of Christ’s murder and resurrection. I’m a big fan of infusing Goddess energy into my Christianity. And, being nine months pregnant now, I appreciate the metaphor of early spring as Great Fertility season. I also had spent the Palm Sunday weekend at Kripalu, at a meditation workshop with Sharon Saltzberg. She had said, paraphrasing the Buddha, “When you put a teaspoon of salt into a glass of water, you will have to enlarge the container to dilute the salt.” So I had on my mind this idea of the need to NOT pack a whole lot of salt into my little container, but perhaps instead work on enlarging. Or, to jump traditions, to honor my loved ones, the salt of the earth, but recognize that too much salt overwhelms.

So I stayed, I preached, (sermon is at http://www.nields.com/blog/writing/) we had a fabulous Easter brunch at Katryna’s house, we took lots of pictures of adorable children, and I had one of those days I will never forget. It was certainly the right decision. Nevertheless, I missed my aunts.


Just now, I stood on the porch and watched the creeping green work its way into the trees in our backyard; everything is now green but the forlorn black branched cherry tree. Two years ago it was blooming, but last year nothing came at all; it was as leafless in June as it was in December. Still, it’s very beautiful, and it made me sad to watch Tom cutting it down. I am thinking about the two-places-at-once problem. We want to have a vegetable garden, and cutting down the tree will give us both the space and the sun we need to grow one.

When I called my aunt to tell her I wasn’t coming for Easter, I said, “I miss you. I miss all those years we spent having holidays with you. But I need to make time for my new family now.” With the birth of my two nieces and two nephews, not to mention the two brothers-in-law and my husband, my immediate family has grown by 240%. That’s a lot more salt, and none of us has a house that’s 240% bigger.

I’m the kind of person who hates to make a decision, hates to throw out old clothes, shoes, books, records (what DOES one do with those old, beloved, unplayable LPs?). I hate losing touch with friends; I hate the feeling that I’m not able to see people as much as I want to; I hate wasting food; I hate that fear that I might not have enough. I have four careers, and am contemplating starting a fifth one. My life, as a result, is stuffed; too salty. And I hate the feeling of too salty more than almost anything.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the notion of Global Warming has, as yesterday’s New York Times “Week in Review” section noted, “the feel of breaking news” all of a sudden. I’m not new to this issue; I’ve been one of those nervous Nellies who has felt guilty about using air conditioning, eating seafood and having a lawn since 1989. The article I read yesterday pointed out that it’s very difficult to make people change their actions unless the threat of punishment, retribution and/or disaster is looming in their faces. Another point the article made is that it’s becoming clear that the main source of the green house gasses, which contribute to global warming is not one simple factor. Our six million bodies, in addition to our cars, the heat we use to keep our homes warm, the cows who fart, and the fact that the destruction of the world’s trees and forests lowers the O2 to CO2 ratio, all contribute to this phenomenon. The sheer number of us and our many kinds of emissions; our huge appetite for consumption. And yet, it’s really hard for me to get my head around the notion that if I buy this one tube of lipstick instead of wearing my last tube (with a not nearly as exciting color) down to the nub, I am contributing to global warming. Harder still to think that if I choose to have a child, biologically, which I seem to be doing (5 weeks and counting to the due date), I am adding yet another being to this planet.

As a meditation practitioner, I am also not new to this idea that the wanting mind is at the root of my (and the planet’s) affliction. The Buddha said there were three types of people: grasping (wanting, consumption), aversive (fearful, hateful) and deluded (clueless). I have aspects of all three, but I most identify with the grasping/wanting types. When you get right down to it, I absolutely love life and I want more. Last night as I was driving home, I watched the rain fall, and noticed how it is both visible and invisible at the same time, and I noticed the forsythia in bloom next to the fuchsia rhododendron bushes that line my street, and I felt such joy that my baby is going to know this gorgeous, mysterious, marvelous earth. I immediately thought, “I hope there will be springs when he or she is my age. I hope there will be springs when his or her children are my age.” I want more springs! And I want them forever and ever!

When it comes right down to it, the underbelly of the wanting mind is the desire to avoid loss and grief. I want a vegetable garden AND I want a cherry tree, even if it’s a dead one. I want to keep my two huge crates of old LPs AND I want to use that space in my music room for a bookshelf to keep all my books, and the books my child will surely accumulate. I want the earth to keep on producing beautiful cool springs, AND I want to stay cool on hot summer drives in my car AND I want to eat Chilean sea bass, AND I want to have a lawn, even though to do so is clearly not what my land desires. I let myself get too salty because the coolness and space of the flavorless water frightens me sometimes, leaving me face to face with an emptiness that demands my full attention. But letting the emptiness in—enlarging the container, accepting a little less salt—has always proved, over and over, when I am willing to do so, the most peaceful result. I want to spend Easter with my aunts because I love them and because I don’t want to lose them. It is really, honestly sad that I can’t be two places at once, can’t be with all the people I love at the same time, and that fact creates grief. Sometimes the right answer is just to accept that grief and feel it deeply. To feel the space they once occupied and honor it with presence and emotion.

Thoughts on Brokeback Mountain

Warning: May be something of a spoiler if you haven't seen the movie!


Being pregnant reminds me of swimming in the pond when I was a kid. Back then, my family lived at the top of a hill. At the bottom of the hill was a large pond-or a small lake-that the residents of the hill came to swim in, or later in my childhood, row the communal boat on. I loved the pond and ran splashingly into it in my pink and orange checkered bikini; it was alternating muddy and clear, with soft squishy sand on its bottom. I was allowed to swim all the way to the middle if one of my parents were nearby.
What reminds me of my pregnancy is the way the pond would become suddenly cold, suddenly hot, with no warning at all as I swam towards the middle. Later, I discovered this sensation was caused by hot springs. Some days I loved the surprise, seeing the whole swimming event as an adventure. Other days I wished I could just stay all warm or all cold. A swimming pool had the same water temperature throughout, and some days I just craved the sensation of uniformity. That’s still pretty much the way I feel.
Tom and I went to see Brokeback Mountain a few weeks ago, and yesterday I read the short story by Annie Proulx on which the movie is based. What struck me about the movie (though not the story) was not so much the homophobia, nor the tale of love. What struck me was the misogyny of the late twentieth century Wyoming culture.
When I was growing up, my sisters and I had the good fortune to attend the same church as the groundbreaking sex educator, Mary Lee Tatum. Mary Lee had been married to a gay man and had two daughters with him. When he came out to her, and admitted there was a man in his life whom he loved, they divorced, though they remained best friends. Ten years later, when he died in a hospital bed of AIDS, Mary Lee held one of his hands and his lover the other.
Mary Lee taught the most frank brand of sex ed, and volunteered to lead a class for us lucky church teens.
“Homophobia and misogyny,” she said. “Are two sides of the same coin. Hating the feminine in a man is no different from hating the feminine in a woman. It’s all the same fear and hatred: fear of the soft, the gentle, the emotional: the parts of ourselves that feel things deeply. It’s a mistrust of the heart; a ceding of all power to the head. And really it boils down to fear more than hatred. For the feminine is the most powerful life force on earth, obviously. We’re the ones who make life, who give life. When a man is homophobic, he is ultimately afraid of his own ability to give life.”
As I watched Ang Lee’s movie, I couldn’t help but see how right she was. Also, I had to notice the women in the film, who are largely absent as characters from Proulx’s narrative. In the movie, the women were flesh and blood, beautiful and oddly powerful, even in their powerlessness over Ennis’s and Jack’s affections. I thought Ennis (in the film version) was more crippled by his own inability to speak and communicate than he was by his homosexuality. To be a man in the American West is to be a man with extremely narrow choices. In terms of communication, these choices include simple, uncomplicated utterances, and the language of fists and tire irons: that’s about it. When Ennis and Jack say goodbye at the end of their first summer together, they barely acknowledge their parting. Yet five minutes after they split, Ennis finds himself puking in an alley, as if what’s inside of him needs to come out in whatever way it will. When a passerby sees him, Ennis threatens him with violence. Similarly, when his ex-wife, Alma, finally confronts him about Jack—and refers to Jack Twist as “Jack Nasty,” Ennis yells at her, gives her a “bruised bracelet” and stalks out of the Thanksgiving dinner to pick a fight at the local bar.

To be a woman, I am finding out, apparently means to feel things deeply. I always knew this; after all, one obviously does not need to be pregnant in order to be fully female. Yet being pregnant is a non-negotiable situation (at least at my hormonal stage of the game) and the issue of one’s biology overpowering one’s sociology is fairly undeniable. I swim through these invisible currents of hot and cold without a clue as to what the next sensation will be; I go from pouring rain to dazzling sunshine in the blink of an eye (although one could argue that that’s just the actual weather we’ve been having in New England this spring.). Watching and reading Brokeback Mountain, observing these two characters being plunged ignorantly into a relationship that is much more powerful than either of them ever could have expected, resonates with me. Love is like this, isn’t it? Before I met Tom, I really doubted that I could ever be a good girlfriend. I just didn’t believe I had the kind of time and heart-space I knew people are supposed to have for potential partners. I thought I was too selfish, too wrapped up in my music, my writing, my friends, my relationship with the Connecticut River. But then I met him and I fell head over heels in love. “For you,” I recall saying (obnoxiously) after our first date, “I’ll make time.”
And I’m assuming it’s going to be the same way with this little one who at the moment is kicking my right side. It’s hard for me to imagine any more space in my heart these days: my heart’s pretty full right now. So is my time. I think I wasn’t the only one in the movie theatre who wanted to slap the Ennis character when Jack drove fourteen hours overnight to be with him after Ennis’s divorce. Ennis wouldn’t make enough time for anyone, choosing to work and live in solitude over letting his older daughter move in with him; choosing to hide rather than make a life with Jack.
I think part of the reason I’ve felt like I’m swimming through currents of hot springs these days is that this lesson--that our time really is limited, that our time really is best spent loving the people we love-- is hitting me hard. That paradigm goes directly against the illusion that we are individuals, powerful enough to protect ourselves if only we work hard enough, do the right thing, make the right choices and marry the right people. But those are notions of the head; what I got from Brokeback was that we’ll never get any satisfaction that way. We need to cede our time to the heart, to the simple rhythms and laws of the body; to take off our watches and hand them to the ones we love and say, “Here. From now on you can tell me what time it is.” Because they will, anyway.

Ain't Too Proud To Beg

“Whatever your worst demons are,” said my friend Phila, “They will present themselves while you are in labor.”
Labor. Can’t they call it something else? It sounds so, well, laborious. I am in my twenty-eighth week of pregnancy, and if things go on schedule, I won’t have to worry about labor for another twelve weeks or so, give or take. I shouldn’t be thinking about this now. I should put up my feet and sing “Que Sera Sera,” eat grapes and bon bons and fantasize about the nursery. But instead, for the past couple of weeks, I can’t seem to think about anything other than my birth plan.
Of course, the very term “birth plan” makes seasoned mothers cackle with amusement. “I had a birth plan all right,” said my friend Isabelle. “And I don’t think we or anyone at the hospital took one look at it. Nothing went as expected. And the more I talk to other mothers, the more I think that’s the rule not the exception.”
For those of you new initiates, a birth plan is a woman’s idea on paper of what her labor and deliver experience should be like. Right away, this is a set up. If you want to make God laugh, goes the famous saying, tell Her your plans. And nothing in the labor and delivery contract has any kind of teeth to make it stick. That baby didn’t sign on the dotted line, and neither did the woman’s body.
Also, experience has taught me that expectations are premeditated regrets. Expecting a nice home delivery? Sometimes it works great. If pregnancy is a natural event, which it’s purported to be, why not have your baby in your own comfy bed with your favorite CDs lined up on the changer? Hospitals, schmospitals. On the other hand, my friend Sara had the special birthing tub rented, a midwife on hand and ended up in the hospital with an emergency C section. The really tragic part is that she’s never forgiven herself for being deprived of the joy of witnessing her first child’s birth.
Rarely has a woman told me the story of her labor and delivery without saying at least once, “The one thing I regret is…” Some regrets are bigger than others, but so far I’ve heard few experiences that have been regret-free. And why not? This is an intense physical process. One of the two big ones in life. Why would we expect it to be uniformly glorious? And is it actually something a woman does, or it is something that a woman experiences?
I have dreaded giving birth since I was six years old, watching my own mother’s belly growing bigger and bigger. “How does the baby come out?” I’d asked. “Through your toes?” When I found out where the baby made her exit, and found out the answer to “does it hurt?” I vowed then and there to adopt. Either that or substitute kittens for children.
It doesn’t comfort me much to think I could just have an epidural, either. An epidural (once again, for the uninitiated) is a needle that has to be very carefully threaded into the mother’s spine. I suppose compared to the pain of childbirth, a little shot in the back is nothing, but then again, I’ve had a shot before and I haven’t had childbirth. Besides which, there’s the matter of all the bad-ass young mothers I’ve been hanging out with in my prenatal yoga class. (The class should be called “Spa Pampering for Pregnant Ladies with a Tiny Bit of Movement—But Only If You Feel Like It!” For the first twenty minutes, we lie on an elaborate set up of bolsters and blankets while the yoga teacher swaddles our bare feet to keep us warm. Then we chat about how our pregnancies are going, which takes another 20 minutes. All the women there are due in about a month, which makes me really nervous, because I suffer from abandonment issues and really don’t want them to go away and join the Post Natal class which meets 15 minutes after Pre Natal ends. Also, all the women have incredibly large bellies, which leaves me feeling completely inadequate and like a fraud. I know size doesn’t matter, but…)
“Don’t even TELL them you’ll CONSIDER an epidural!” they shout, practically raising their fists in a power salute. “You’ll give in! Just go in there and HANDLE IT!”
“The pains of childbirth are all in the mind,” says my friend Cindy, nine months pregnant and counting. She and her husband are planning a home birth and working with a hypno-therapist. “Once you recognize the difference between ‘good’ pain and ‘bad’ pain, you really can get through it.”
“But,” I said, “Maybe some women experience pain more intensely than others. And I think I’m probably one of them.”
“That’s a story you’re telling yourself!” says Cindy.
“No one experienced any birth pains before Christianity,” said a second friend, Lucy. “It just a cultural construct. Woman read that because of Eve’s fall we’re all supposed to feel pain, so we do. No one feels pain in non-Christian cultures.”
“But,” I argued. “One in two women used to die in childbirth in the Victorian era.”
“That’s only because of unsanitary hospital conditions,” says Lucy. “Childbirth is a totally natural process! Woman have been having babies in the bush since the beginning of time.”
This is true. But according to the Saving Women’s Lives website (http://www.savingwomenslives.org/Countdownmaternal.htm), one in sixteen of those women (in sub-Saharan Africa, anyway) still die in childbirth, whereas the statistic in western Europe is one in four thousand. I shut up though. I like these bad-assed women and I want them to have their home births and not be thinking about fearful things like something going wrong. We all have enough to worry about. They have delightful visions of grand epiphanies during labor, of mystical experiences, or possibly, as Alice Walker suggests in Possessing the Secret of Joy, orgasmic ones. At any rate, they are loyal to the sisterhood, and I love them for that, even as I feel somewhat out of that particular club at times.
Even though I’m scared of shots, I am more scared of pain, and most of all I am perplexed by the thought that this roiling little baby who is currently behaving like a pinball inside my uterus will someday come out of me. Honestly, I don’t care how it comes out. If I need a C section, that’s just fine, though I would prefer to be awake for it. If I have it the good old pre-Caesar way, I hope its exit from my nether parts will not cause too much hard feeling between the two of us over the years. Either way, I have come out of my denial of the facts, and am now ready to consider alternatives. So. An epidural it was going to be. Plenty of wonderful women I know had epidurals and had managed to stay bad-assed. It was settled. I would take the advice of my sister-in-law who said she marched into the hospital to register and said, between contractions, “My name is Mary Epidural McNamara.”
But then, one day last week, as I was practicing my prenatal yoga, I found myself in the classic squatting position. “This,” said the instructor. “Is the famous birthing position known the world over.”
And suddenly I saw myself, in the middle of labor (well, actually towards the very end of it) in this glorious posture, feeling like an Amazonian goddess, dancing on my tiptoes and giving birth to my beloved baby, joining a sisterhood the world over. “I think I’d like to try this,” I thought. And—word to the uninitiated—the epidural is not just one of those shots they stick you with and you’re done, like a shot of heroin. Epidurals are connected to an IV. Also, your legs go numb. No squatting for the pain-free.
For the first time I got bitten by the expectation bug. I got why so many of my friends want to have their babies at home, or at least in a birthing center like the one at our hospital, complete with horizontal poles to hang from while in the squatting position, birth pools to relax those weary laboring muscles in, giant balls to roll around on, or toss back and forth with your husband.
Furthermore, I read about how from 1850-1950 mothers used to be routinely anesthetized—totally knocked out—to have their kids. This isn’t done so much anymore because first off, moms tend to like to be present if not pain-free to witness the birth; and second, the drugs aren’t good for the baby. But what this fact of medical history made me realize is that when the mothers were knocked out, even though their minds were asleep, their bodies weren’t. Their bodies knew exactly what to do: they had contractions, and they pushed, and the baby came out. Therefore it’s the mind that gets in the way—epidural or no epidural. If I could truly see the birth process as one where my body is active but my mind is passive (present, but passive) I might be able to see the whole experience differently. I could see that it had nothing to do with my labor technique or mastery over my fear. I could just keep reminding myself that the ongoing commentary in my head was not really required. So maybe I could postpone the epidural. But maybe they could give me a little Advil to dull the pain?
I called my friend Phila, who had had her baby girl at home, and whom I’d been avoiding as a “Home Birth Nazi” for the past few months. I told her I thought I might have changed my mind. “I could have natural childbirth,” I said. “I want to squat. I want to really go for it. But the thing I really want to avoid is this idea that it’s about me and my achievements. If the birth is easy, it’s easy. If it’s hard, it’s hard. It won’t be about me and how well I planned or how pure I was or how much yoga I did or how Zen I got or how bad-assed I am. I just don’t want to feel like a failure if the pain is too much and I have to ask for an epidural.”
“You know,” said Phila after a moment. “I felt like a failure after the birth of my baby.”
“You?” I said incredulously. “Why? You had a home birth! You squatted! You let the baby tear you! You totally did what you set out to do! You were the queen of bad-ass!”
“Yeah, but I fell apart completely afterwards. I was terrified and an emotional wreck while it was going on. I saw my fear and I couldn’t stand up to it.”
We were silent for a few moments, together on the phone. She sighed. “I’m a perfectionist. And that was the demon I met in the middle of labor.”
“And I’m competitive,” I said. “I’m going to want to turn this into how tough I am, how well I did this. And it’s not about that. It’s about two people having an experience with each other. And we all know how unpredictable that can be.”

I went for a walk later that afternoon. I was listening to my iPod; to Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Bob Marley and Michelle Shocked. Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” popped on (as my friend, Sheila says, “I love it when God plays DJ!”). That’s the song he wrote for his baby girl right before she was born. It’s the song that my sister was listening to as her first baby came into the world. “Music will get me through labor,” I whispered to myself as I circled the park. “Bob and Bob, John, Paul, George and Ringo; Michelle and Stevie. They’ll be my birth coaches.”
And believe me, if that’s not enough, I’ll be singing “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” For an epidural, that is.

I'm Still Pregnant

Right now, the gender of our baby is written on a little slip of paper in an envelop in a wooden box on a shelf in our bedroom. Even though I want to be surprised on the baby’s birthday (“it’s the best prize in the Cracker Jack box you’ll ever get,” says my friend Andrea), I couldn’t resist having the information. Just in case. You know, in case someone holds a gun to my head and insists on knowing if it’s a boy or a girl.
I can’t decide if I want it to be a boy or a girl, not that it matters at this point what I want. I can see pros and cons to each. I wanted a girl at first. I’ve got two sisters and no brothers, 4 aunts and no biological uncles. Until I was fifteen I was kind of unsure that boys were actually human, what with their hairiness and seeming inability to put down the toilet seat. Now I like them fine, but it took me awhile. So at first I wanted a girl, the kind who liked pink and ballet and barrettes and Laura Ingalls Wilder. But then my friend Sandy said, “I had my daughter when I was thirty-seven. Do you know what that meant? It meant she hit puberty exactly when I hit menopause! Man, was our house a hormone haven for awhile there.”
So then, being 38, I decided I wanted a boy. Boys like their mothers for longer, or at least they seem to have a shorter window of that mid-adolescent rampant disgust where they insult your fashion choices and your favorite bands. But then again, if I have a son, he will have to worry about balding. My father is bald, and baldness is inherited through the mother, so my poor son will most definitely have that to contend with. And according to this week’s New Yorker, baldness will be completely obsolete by 2036 when my son starts to lose his hair. He will have to get a transplant in the same way kids today have to wear braces.
Also, the more pressing issue is that whole gun problem. Naturally, you can guess that I won’t be one of those parents giving my kid a gun, even a toy one. But from what I’ve witnessed, at a certain age, boys make guns out of really anything handy; a bread knife, a stick, their penis. The toy elephant.
It’s good that we are still a few years away from letting people chose the gender of their baby. And I think we will keep the little slip of paper in the box. I can wait.
Pregnancy is a long wait. Then again, if I were an elephant, I’d have to wait two years.

I have had what the doctors call a “high risk pregnancy.” This is because I am of advanced maternal age (38), have had fertility problems for 10 years, have had a miscarriage and have had a lot of bleeding and spotting. For these reasons, I was told not to exercise—at all—until given further direction.
“What does no exercise mean?” this old addict asks. “No bungee jumping?”
My kind midwife, Pam, a lovely woman with soft skin and smooth dark hair, says, “No walking, except when necessary, and try to park your car in the closest parking spot at the supermarket. No calisthenics or lifting things.”
“Can I do yoga?” I say, desperately.
She smiles. “Maybe a couple of minutes of very mild stretching, but if you are still bleeding, you’ll need to stop. Just enjoy this time of being still. Think of yourself as hibernating.”
And so, from mid October to mid December, I hadn’t so much as walked around our small city park. My husband brought the grocery bags in from the car. I reached for glasses on tall shelves and surreptitiously got a good stretch along my obliques, but other than that, I eschewed exercise, taking this abstinence on as a spiritual practice.

What I missed most was the sky. I missed going for my morning and afternoon walks and smelling the way the air changes, depending on the weather and the season. I missed watching the clouds form and change, watching the way the sun interacts with them. Whenever I was outside during my two-month spiritual practice (which was rare) I stopped and just smelled.


I am now in my second trimester, which, as you know if you’ve been close to a pregnant woman, is purported to be the trimester of joy and laughter, where food tastes great, sex is unbelievable and your energy returns in spades.
“The second trimester is one long celebration,” my friend Julie says.
“What do you mean?” I say. Julie is now the mother of an eight month old. I call her periodically, clinging to her every word as though she is an oracle. First time pregnant women are like this: they drill their friends with detailed questions. Usually the response from the friend, who is of course now a mother, and therefore somewhat preoccupied, is “Hmmm. I don’t really remember if I felt mild tuggings in my uterus at week 15,” or, “No I can’t recall the exact moment when I stopped feeling nauseated.”
What Julie does say is, “I just felt great about myself, hopeful about the future, everything fell right into place.”
I’ve been experiencing this too. At about fifteen weeks, my nausea went away—just like that. Poof! No more nausea. I couldn’t believe it. I felt so good, which made me amazed at how bad I must have felt before. My energy returned in a surge and I wrote, and sang and made phone calls and generally felt like a great Colossus striding about the earth. Not only that, by week sixteen I was given the go ahead to walk and do yoga, after my two month kibosh. My body began to feel like my body again, only with a gigantic annex. My appetite returned with a vengeance, although it’s still mostly for weird things like mustard, vinegar and pickles. Best of all, the week before Christmas I felt the baby move for the first time. It felt like someone with tiny fingers drumming on the underside of my belly.
I am full of joy these days. My baby thumps at me regularly, reminding me that he or she is there, a compassionate witness to my journey perhaps, or maybe just a bored passenger. Either way, I have company. I am reminded of this so often that finally, the pregnancy seems real to me. And what a wonderful unique moment of life, to be so utterly in love with another being, and not even know if it’s male or female. Aside from God, who else do we love like that?

Oversized Tinkerbell

Pregnant. The very word sounds pregnant with meaning. It is onomatopoetic in its juicy fullness, its plumply dignity.

Before I got pregnant, I imagined pregnancy would feel a lot like having a good idea for a story or a song: a sort of dizzying energy in my head that causes me to glow from within and move about my day with energy and purpose. I imagined myself, sort of like an oversized Tinkerbell, fluttering from room to room, straightening this, rearranging that, doing the marvelous nesting thing about which I’d heard tell. (Finally, I’d organize my CDs! Finally, I’d purchase window dressing!) I imagined I would be giving birth to the mother within, as I was literally giving birth to the sacred Other. God in my womb! I proclaimed, I am a sister of Mary!

Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Pregnancy instead began on the Falcon Ridge Fan Club Cruise last September, when I joined my sister, Katryna and her family, Patty our manager, Pete and Maura Kennedy and Susan Werner and about thirty-five folk music fans on an exciting adventure to Nova Scotia. I felt funky from the moment I set foot onboard, as my symptoms multiplied. I mistook morning sickness for sea sickness, fatigue for boredom, and a sudden aversion to fish to some kind of proximate sympathy. Also, I blamed my bloatedness on the excellent cuisine.

We got off the boat and the nausea remained. So did the bloatedness. I seem to be one of those women whose stomach pops out from the moment sperm and egg start flirting with each other. I began to wear loose fitting clothes. I wasn’t sad about this. I was happy. I have wanted to be a mother since I was six years old and my own mother was pregnant with our little sister, Abigail.
“Don’t you want a brother, now?” said Mrs. McSherry, our babysitter in her Irish brogue. “Sure and ya do. Nothin’ but girls here.”
“No way, “ Katryna and I said, folding our arms. “We’re going to have a sister.”

Fortunately for Abigail, we got our wish. Abigail was leagues beyond the Baby Alive doll I had wished for for Christmas. Unlike Baby Alive, who was purported to be able to eat and drink (where the food and drink WENT after the six year old parent spooned it into her perpetually open mouth, no scientist has yet been able to determine), Abigail was warm and squirmy and smelled like new apples and fresh cut grass. Even her poop smelled good, and Katryna and I fought over who got to change her diaper. I was responsible for helping to feed her, braid her hair, and I took it upon myself to educate her in all matters concerning music, movies, fashion and hand gestures. I would become very confused when my mother would take her away from me with plans of her own, like, for example, kindergarten. To me, Abigail was my baby. So to be participating in growing a baby of my own--finally, at the age of 38--is my fondest dream come true.

Another pregnancy myth that crashed and burned was the idea that I’d spend these nine months studying how to be a parent. I thought I’d be one of those mothers-to-be who blasts Baby Mozart CDs and walks endlessly around art galleries. (Did you hear the one about the pregnant woman who wanted her baby to be cultured, so she walked endlessly around art galleries? The baby was born with flat feet.) As soon as my pee test turned blue, I raced out and bought a book by Jon and Myra Kabat-Zinn, famed meditation teachers, about how to be spiritual, in-the-present-moment parents and how to raise conscious kids with raised consciences. That book has languished by my bed, and instead I seem to be inexplicably drawn to my tenth grade history text book. In the past three months, I have read about the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Aztecs and Incas, the birth of Hinduism, the spread of Buddhism and Islam, the empires of Rome and Persia and the Song dynasty, the miserable Middle Ages, the relief of the Renaissance, the Ages of Exploration, Exploitation and Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions, and now I’m about up to World War I when it really gets kind of violent.

Perhaps I have some kind of pregnancy craving to revisit, understand and accept what kind of world my new child is coming into. Perhaps I have a craving to understand this miracle that is both so ordinary and extraordinary that people have been doing it since the dawn of people, and yet still, for each new couple experiencing this, it feels like the very first baby who ever got conceived in a night of passion.

About cravings. I don’t know what to think, except that it’s clear that I must obey them. Never have I operated so assiduously from a part of me that is somewhere between instinct and gut-level desire. Fortunately, my cravings have been for things like cucumbers, brown rice and Paul Newman’s salad dressing, reading my old history book and watching sappy romance movies. My aversions are just as powerful and bewildering-to sweet foods, to the smell of fish, to the new Capote movie, which I am dying to see in theory, but can’t stomach in practice.

And the most amazing facet of pregnancy so far is the way in which it makes me stop in my tracks. I go from being a pleasant, communicative, engaged woman with a slightly rounded belly to being completely speechless, brain dead and supine in the space of five minutes. When I need to nap, there are no negotiations. I am completely at the mercy of the five inch benevolent despot in my growing uterus. A friend recently commented, “It seems like you’ve signed up for a kind of advanced surrender.”

This is perhaps the most useful spiritual lesson so far. I seem to be able to do, in a given day, about forty percent of what I used to do. And yet, the house has not fallen down around me (although it is covered with dust bunnies and suspicious odors, and poor Tom has done all the house work for fourteen weeks now). I seem to be writing songs as a steady clip; I’ve been able to show up for my gigs, and last week I sent my agent the most recent draft of The Big Idea, the novel I’ve been working on since 2001. In between these gargantuan feats, I slink around the house, I meditate in the pathetic way I’ve always meditated, I chat on the phone, I “cook” meals (mostly with cucumbers), I watch chick flick movies like Little Women and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and hope that Tom doesn’t catch me sniffling at the especially tear-jerky parts. (Recently, ALL parts are tear jerky.)

Maybe I am giving birth to a mother. Maybe this nausea and lethargy are changing me, shaping and molding me, fashioning me into exactly what and whom I’m supposed to be to support this baby. Maybe it really is the baby who’s running the show-saying no to Baby Mozart and yes to Mesopotamia; no to sweet potatoes and yes to brown rice; no to vigorous walks around the park and yes to long languid naps. I am not quite myself, and the more I accept that I too am in a kind of cocoon-like state--in a womb of my own--the more I accept the reality of advanced surrender, the more pleasant my pregnancy becomes.

Now could someone pass the cucumbers?

Good Artists Borrow; Great Artists Steal

When I first started to write songs, my efforts not to copy, borrow or steal from any other artist, brought me to the point of despair over the fact that there were only eleven notes in a scale, not to mention that all the best songs had already been written using the same three chords. Nevertheless, I set out to be a total original--with pretty humorous results, writing songs with chord progressions that would make Schoenburg wince. Not only that, I tackled such subjects as Ireland's first female Prime Minister (Mary Robinson), ragweed allergies and the ever popular Ballad In Twenty Four Verses: Phyllum Schizomicrophaeda. I couldn't figure out why people weren't singing along right away.

And then I discovered Bob Dylan. At the age of 14, I wandered into the kitchen on a June evening to find my father playing the guitar. This was not unusual—my father plays the guitar at almost every opportunity, especially when he is running a bath or sitting alone in the kitchen. That night he played an impassioned, thrilling song, singing at the top of his tenor range with warmth and feeling, “ There ain’t no use to sit and wonder why babe/ If you don’t know by now.”

“What’s that?” I said, not recently keen on my dad’s song choices (Waylon Jennings and The Clancy Brothers at that time).
“It’s a song by Bob Dylan,” he said. “’Don’t Think Twice; It’s Alright.’”
“Who’s Bob Dylan?”
“Oh, he wrote a million great songs. But he wasn’t much of a singer.”

I was on the case. A week later I went to tennis came in Sun Valley Idaho where I spent half my time mooning over a camp counselor named Tom Van Dyne who was an unimaginable seven years my senior, and the other half writing letters to my dad asking for more lyrics and chords to Bob Dylan songs. I had brought my little nylon string along and nightly regaled the other kids in my dorm with the five or ten Beatles songs I knew how to play. The letters came from my father bearing strange hieroglyphics which Tom Van Dyne, a Dylan fan and guitar player, helped me decode. By the end of my three weeks I won the camp talent contest singing the Beatles “All I Gotta Do,” and officially gave up my tennis racquet for the acoustic guitar. I saved my pennies and one by one bought Dylan LPs, pondering them and playing along.

Having gone to a grammar school infused with the English folk song tradition, I noticed that many of the songs Dylan claimed to have written sounded either vaguely or specifically familiar to my well trained ears. For example, “Girl from the North Country” was clearly a version of the old “Scarborough Fair.” In a biography I read, Dylan grumbled about the fact that Paul Simon had stolen the idea from him, when in fact, I knew that “Scarborough Fair” was written in medieval times. (Moreover, it’s more likely Simon stole the “idea” from Martin Carthy whom he met over in England.) Yet, Dylan’s song, “Girl from the North Country” evokes in this listener a new melancholy I hadn’t experienced either singing the song in school in its original form nor in Simon and Garfunkel’s prettified (and contemporized) anti-war version. Bob Dylan, through the grit of his performance, slightly unusual harmonization, and a few changed lines, really had made the song his own. I play it when I am home and lonely, reveling in the minor seventh chord he uses, enjoying the way he brings the tune from one octave down to another.

On the recommendation of my friends, Pete and Maura Kennedy I am reading Positively Fourth Street, a telling of the intersecting lives of Dylan, Joan Baez, and Richard and Mimi Farina. One theme that keeps popping up, over and over again is: Good artists borrow; Great artists steal. Joan basically stole her entire repertoire from those around her in Cambridge in 1959, and she unabashedly admits it. Dylan presented himself so much a Woody Guthrie clone that locals were offended when they detected Dylan even mimicking Guthrie’s ticks and shudders, brought on by the disease Huntington’s Chorea which was killing him. And yet, through their bold stealing, they each fashioned a completely unique and new presence in American folk and pop music, greedily garnering influences into a personal melting pot and producing something fresh and new.


As I grew older, writing about one song a month since 1987, I learned how to let go of the tyranny of originality. Once one becomes dedicated to a writing practice, it is actually very difficult to rip someone off; one’s voice becomes too distinct, which was the case with “Girl From the North Country,” a song which smacks so much of Dylan, I would know its author even without the singing voice. By the mid nineties, I was not so much interested in writing original songs as in writing classic, timeless songs, in trying to stamp them with a distinctive voice while at the same time hoping they would be or could be anonymous.



Last month, I succumbed to Starbuck’s marketing campaign and bought both Dylan offerings: Live at the Gaslight, a very early recording of his first year as a busker in Greenwich Village, and the soundtrack to No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s recent documentary. Even though I meticulously set my VCR to tape the thing, I watched the documentary the nights it was broadcast, so glued to the set I didn’t get up once to get a drink or go to the bathroom. After watching the Scorsese documentary, I hatched a new project. Katryna and I are scheduled to record our next CD this January, and so far two thirds of the songs are written. All the songs are based on an earlier song, but revamped so they can breath twenty first century air. For example, my new song “Moonlighter” sounds a bit like Dylan’s “Moonshiner”—again, not a song he wrote, but an old Irish drinking song. But “Moonlighter” is about a woman who pines for her beloved Albany, the lord of the land. Is it a throwback to the fifteenth century, or is it a modern allegory? And “Ain’t That Good News,” a pseudo gospel tune refashioned from a choral piece Katryna and I learned in high school, is a kind of doubter’s anthem, a vision of heaven for those weary of contemporary life.

This is not to say I am a great artist because I am unabashedly stealing. It’s just that I’ve come to believe that recycling is more than a good thing to do for the environment. It’s the way we humans pay tribute to each other, stay connected and perhaps even diffuse our egos, recognizing what Native Americans call the Great Soul or Jung calls the Collective Unconscious. My favorite professor at Yale, Fred Robinson, showed us the way poets talk to each other through the centuries: Aeneid spoke to Homer; Dante to Aeneid, Donne to Dante, Shakespeare to everyone (now there’s an artist who knows how to steal!), and TS Eliot to Shakespeare.

This is to say, I don’t call it stealing anymore. I call it friendly.

Floating Las Vegas and the Cajuns

Dave Chalfant calls the boat a “float-el.” A Dad joke. He has the right; sitting next to him at the dining table which overlooks the sunset (when we’re heading south) are his two children, William who is crowing like a pterodactyl while dispersing his little pile of cheerios, and Amelia who is twisting in her seat and refusing to eat more than one bite of her macaroni and cheese. She is more interested in watching to see if the orcas are going to blow.

We are spending five days at sea on a Fun Cruise. For a band who used to think of our van, Moby Juan Van Kanobe, as a boat taking us from one port of call to another, there is something surreal about this experience. We are here because of the Falcon Ridge Fan Cruise, which means people pay for the cruise and a little extra to see a couple of concerts by us, Susan Werner and the Kennedys. As a Bodhitsattva wannabe, I am having some issues and doubts that I will ever become enlightened; in fact it might be a miracle if I get off the boat next Saturday without causing myself or others bodily harm.

Cruise ship culture is alien to me. Start with the faux Greek décor; the purple walls and plastic marble columns in bas relief mixed up with the casinos in rooms named “Venezia” and “Fierenze.” There are the people half a generation older than my parents in ball gowns snapping their fingers awkwardly to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and “Let’s Do The Time Warp Again” and other hits from the ‘80’s which are on continuous loop twenty four hours a day. There is something vaguely obscene about being on a luxury cruise when just seven days ago New Orleans drowned in waters not far from here. Everywhere, people are talking about it, blaming the government or the levees or the people who chose to make a below sea level washbowl their home. We talk about the flood and then we choose between the pork chop in the balsamic reduction and the grouper in Hollandaise sauce. And secretly, shamefully, I have this to confess: the vibe on this cruise ship reminds me more of that Crescent City than any other place I’ve played in my years on the road. There is the same high rolling spirit, the same gaudy giddiness, even some of the same fashions. But on this cruse ship, there is absolutely no sign at all of the blues.

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a little problem with my attitude, and the longer I am on the boat the more persistent the question pounds in my vaguely sea sick brain: what the hell is wrong with me? What makes me incapable of enjoying what so many others clearly see as a heavenly and economically reasonable pleasure trip? Why don’t I like shuffleboard or cards or drinking or ballroom dancing or sunbathing or swimming or sitting in a sauna? Why am I this bookish freak whose idea of a good time is burrowing in her puce colored cabin (or State Room, as the Fun Ship calls it) with my laptop and my novel on Microsoft word? Don’t I know how to have fun or even what fun is?

On Wednesday, we all disembarked to visit the town of Halifax, a new destination for me. I took my iPod and listened to new songs by Ben Folds, Dar Williams and M. Ward while I explored the town. I found out almost right away that Halifax was the seat of the largest community of Acadians in the 17th and 18th Century. In 1755, the Anglos from Nova Scotia began what is known as the Grand Degagement, which is a fancy French term meaning deportation. Families were split up as the Acadians were sent all over North America. One contingent was sent to Boston, but the colony of Massachusetts refused to take them, and the whole boatload arrived back in the Maritimes. A large group was sent to Louisiana and carry on today as Cajuns (Acadian/Cajun turn out to be the same thing.) With a jolt I remembered that just the other day Massachusetts had offered to take refugees from the Hurricane and house them on Cape Cod. Tom and I had begun to collect clothing to send out there. Sweaters, warm things for folk who might not be used to the Atlantic wind in mid September. What a strange unbroken circle if some of the Cajuns ended up back in the North Atlantic.

Grumpily, I wonder how much fossil fuel a boat roughly the size of the Empire State Building uses. When I come home, I will have to atone. I will start a club called Conservation Is Cool. I yearn for 1989, when my class was graduating from college, when Earth Day was a fresh, lovely April holiday, when the nation was becoming disenchanted with the first George Bush and his gulf war, when young people shamed their elders by resurrecting the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle rhetoric. It wasn’t hard to raise people’s consciousnesses just a little. And even a little goes a long way. I might consider forgiving George W. Bush his excesses and his exaggerations (and outright lies) if he would only sincerely call on the American people to conserve and put some fiscal muscle behind the appeal. I promise I won’t tease him for wearing a sweater like they teased Jimmy Carter.

Last week, Dick Cheney called conservation a “personal virtue.” That just about sinks my club, doesn’t it? Instead of doing something because we have to, we are being told, “It might make you a better person, but if you don’t do it, you can still be forgiven, my prodigal child.” I know a ninety-year old Republican who recycles because it’s her “patriotic duty.” She lived through World War II and she remembers the importance of sacrificing for the general good.

I doodle on the daily Fun Cruise itinerary: What are some ways I can atone for the amount of fossil fuel burned by this boat?
1. keep the thermostat at 67 all winter and gain five pounds of insulation, and/or wear a couple of wool sweaters
2. ride my bike to the Stop and Shop
3. Put change into a jar to save up for a biodiesel or hydroelectric car
4. eat whole foods and lower on the food chain, eat “locally” to discourage the transportation of produce. Remember how much fuel it took to get that mango from Mexico to my bowl. Eat apples and pears instead.
5. Buy recycled products or better yet, buy less, reuse what I have
6. use cloth napkins
7. Steal Katryna’s clothes

The problem with rabid environmentalists, I muse as I wander judgmentally through this floating Las Vegas, is that we tend to take the fun out of things. No one wants to be told to give up their SUV by a self –righteous Honda Civic driver with pursed lips. How do we make environmentalism fun? It’s sort of like trying to make dieting fun, isn’t it? We could do it a la Weight Watchers where we get Fun Points for doing good and have weekly weigh ins to see where we’ve slipped. We could email each other our progress. We could focus on the joy of giving our grandchildren a planet that is almost as green as ours is now. But that’s not so different from dieting in order to one day fit into that size four in the back of the closet.

The fact is, we’re all living on credit right now. We can’t afford the life we’re living; we can’t afford the country or government we’ve inherited. We’re not paying enough in taxes, and I say this after I practically had to take out a second mortgage to pay my last tax bill. Even if you subtracted the unbelievably expensive War on Iraq, we still aren’t taking in enough money to shift our energy policies toward better fuel efficiency or alternate sources. And as the hurricane proved, we don’t even have the necessary troops to deal with the unpredictable disasters that come from the sky or the ocean, let alone from our dangerously fractured and unequal society. I’m not even talking about health care or education, or social security or any of the liberal wish list. I’m talking about infrastructure and national defense. Given what’s come before, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bush and co. called for another tax cut to deal with the crisis; more supply side economics to raise the tide as it were. But we’ve seen what high tides can do.

I am on the deck of the ship, walking in circles to try to get my daily exercise. 11.3 loops equals one mile. When is it going to be time to sacrifice and surrender, just a little, I wonder, passing a couple who each have a copy of the new Harry Potter tented over their sunbathing faces. When is it going to be time to pull together as we did in the depression, as we did in World War II? Have we forgotten that sometimes sacrifice and surrender feels good because it’s the right thing to do?

I sound like the pursed-lipped Honda Civic driver, the introverted writer scowling at the blackjack players, the tee-totaller frowning at the Mai Tai drinkers at the Oxford bar. I stop mid stride, turn my back on my fellow passengers and lean out over the North Atlantic Ocean. Earlier this morning, I watched the sun rise from my cabin window at ten minutes to six. The sun was a gaudy orange pom pom through the haze, and it came like a flare over the eastern horizon just slightly to the north. The night before, I’d watched the sun set from my dining table, the light too strong to view head on, but from my eye corner, seeing it go “bloop” into the sea. I don’t want to be a pursed-lipped scowler anymore. Is there a way I can see the positive of this cruse AND make amends for the fossil fuel it burned when I get home?

Carnival, it turns out, sent seven of its fleet down to New Orleans to rescue the victims of the hurricane. I learned this at the hootenanny we had later that afternoon, the one where we sang “The Times They Are A Changin’” and brainstormed about ways we could help the relief effort. Four of us meditated for peace and healing. I noticed, with grudging admiration, that there were absolutely no paper products on board the ship. I also noticed that the passengers on our boat represented a breakdown of the demographics of our country pretty faithfully. At $500 a week, a Carnival Cruise is a way a family can afford to take a holiday in an era where gas prices and hotel prices and food prices continue to climb steadily.

I began to notice the water. Just the water. It was so beautiful, and I realized I could stare at it all day and not get bored. I was enjoying the gentle rocking of the boat. I appreciated the fact that in my time on board, I not only finished a draft of the Big Idea but also almost completed a proposal for Effelia, my new Young Adult book. Ships make excellent writing retreats. Apparently Aldous Huxley wrote all his books on ships.

The last night onboard, I returned to the deck and waited for the moon to rise. Flanked by Jupiter and Mars, it finally appeared: a proud crescent. New Orleans will rise again, I thought. And no one knows what it will look like, how it will rise, who will make up the population of the new New Orleans. But the spirit of the delta can’t possibly die. The spirit of the blues is here, as much as people may want to pretend it’s not. And alone on the deck, I sang a slow mournful version of “Will The Circle Be Unbroken,” Aaron Neville style.

Thank You, Music

This summer, I have been trying my best to practice what I sometimes preach: talk less; listen more. And most of all SLOW DOWN, (you move too fast. Got to make the moment last.) It hasn’t been as hard or nasty as I thought it would be. As readers of this blog know, I got married in May, went on a glorious honeymoon to the west coast with my husband, Tom and have generally been living in that kind of marital bliss which doesn’t want to be distracted by the pokings and proddings of the outside world.

A few weeks ago, a pair of robins built a nest right outside our dining room window underneath the eaves of the porch and we watched transfixed as the nest grew, the mother sat still for days and eventually two little bald blind heads poked up, yellow beaks vertical. Those baby birds grew black feathers so quickly and it wasn’t more than ten days later that they flew away.

Like the robins, we’ve been nesting. We have been painting our old Victorian and growing blueberries in our garden. Tom built a kayak and I’m learning to cook Thai food. In short, it’s been a lovely time, but not one that lends itself to the kind of introspection one wants to share with a bunch of people one mostly doesn’t know.

That being said, all honeymoons must come to an end, and now with the cool breezes of September almost upon us, I feel like spreading my wings and checking out the big old world again. I feel like I have things to say again. First of all, and I hate to break it to you if you are just now rubbing your eyes Rip Van Winkle style coming off the Cape or back from the Hamptons (or just out of your air conditioned office), it has come to my attention that Bush is still in power. I was sure somehow that if I stopped paying attention, something would happen over the summer to end his hegemonous oligarchy, but no such luck. I was hoping the high gas prices would keep people off the roads or lead us to buy grease cars, investigate biodiesel and hybrids, but the SUVs are ruling the roads and traffic was at record highs this summer, according to AAA.

As a student of Buddhist psychology and Christian theology, I feel the need to point out (at every chance I get) that this over consumption of limited resources is a manifestation of greed and delusion; that violence begets violence, that Islam is a beautiful religion dedicated to peace, and that Al Qaeda and its allies are uneducated proponents of a rogue branch in much the same way that the Ku Klux Klan is nominally Christian but acts in every way but. Every time I see images from Abu Graib I practically lose my will to continue living in this country, which is why I spend so little time watching TV or listening to the radio or reading newspapers. But I also realized that I have all these nasty attributes myself. Did I turn off the air conditioner on the hottest weekend of the year? No. I cranked it and sat in my office and read the new Harry Potter book.

I am a notorious control freak, and a big part of my summer was spent working on my novels, The Big Idea and Effelia and in general keeping so busy I barely had time to listen to music, all my resolutions about slowing down notwithstanding. But music, as always, is the spirit that gets through the cracks in my armor, the armor that tries to protect me from having to feel that sadness about American atrocities, Rwandan atrocities, Al Qaeda atrocities. The armor of busyness is my preferred protection since it denotes respect and sometimes amazement from my friends and family. When people see how hard I work, I can hardly be faulted for tuning out the pain of the world, right? How could I work if I am always weeping, right? But then I hear a song, a silly song like Simon & Garfunkel’s “Punky’s Dilemma” and I lose it in the kitchen as I am chopping carrots. Who knows why? (It’s not like it’s “America” or “Bridge over Troubled Water.”) And here’s the blessing: I finally slow down enough to ask myself Why are you working so hard? Isn’t it more important to stand still and let yourself be moved by a song?

Thank you, music. Thank you, music. Thank you, music and musicians!

Music is wordless and irrational. I like to live in the top of my head when at all possible so as to avoid the pain of the body, the feelings and sensations that come up when I’m “down there.” But music wrecks all that. I’ve been listening to books on tapes on my iPod—wonderful books-Middlesex, Gilead, The Life Of Pi, The Kite Runner, The Brothers Karamazov, and of course, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince—that keep me up in the attic of my rational thoughts. But every now and then an Aimee Mann song sneaks into the narrative and I’m back in the world of feeling. I remember that I am a musician first and foremost and that this is my heritage, my brothers and sisters waking me up and saying, hello! You are alive.

So when I am at my most well, I pick up my guitar at these junctures and play along, even though it means singing through tears.
++++++++++++++++

I drove to Bennington Vermont this June to retrieve an ancient trunk full of old 16mm reels of film taken by my great grandfather, George Franklin, a man about whom I know this: he was a very successful and wealthy lawyer. He died in McLean Hospital from depression when my grandmother was only 19. I had the films turned into DVDs and have been watching them over the past few weeks. I listen to the Beatles as I watch them, because there is something unnerving about watching old movies and not hearing that familiar whirr that the projector makes. No whirr on a DVD. I also should say, I don’t know for certain whether or not my great grandfather was the movie maker, but I think he was. The footage is all of scenery. No shots of his wife or son or daughter. Somehow in my gender-biased way, I believe that if my great Grandmother Elsie had wielded the camera, she would have been more interested in the people than the landscape.
It’s eerie, watching the world of 1920 go by. My ancestors were in Italy (on vacation as tourists, no doubt) for much of this filming, and I wonder what it felt like then. I don’t know what year the films were taken exactly; was it before or after Mussolini took over?

Watching the films, I am reminded of a bit of wisdom I learned from the poet David Whyte. He says, "The language of poetry takes us outside of our small selves and calls us to look at ourselves and the world with open eyes." I would argue that the same is true for filmmaking, novel writing, songwriting, gardening; anything that brings you out of your Habitrail thoughts and into a fresh experience. These films were my great grandfather’s way of doing that. They are crude, and behave more like still photography than what we think of as motion pictures today. But what is interesting is the way in which he seems fascinated with what he is seeing. He holds the camera on an image for far longer than a cameraman would today. He holds it long and longingly, as if making love to it. Perhaps he was.


The grass is green for one more day.

The news will always be bad.

If you share what you have, you will never be hungry.

If you share what you have, you will never be alone.

-Nerissa Nields

Read Part I First

Part Two: Wherein I meet Anne Lamott

Did I mention I was sick during my honeymoon? Which was another thing about expectations. “How can a person be sick during her honeymoon?” I wailed to Tom, in the manner of George Costanza’s mother, Estelle Harris. Fortunately, I’d just had Handy Life Lesson #25 about expectations and letting things be exactly as they are, so I wasn’t too sad. To tell the whole truth, I was thrilled to be sick; I had exhausted myself in the weeks leading up to the wedding, working full throttle on life coaching, teaching writing workshops, writing Effelia, revising The Big Idea, and along with Tom, planning the wedding, overseeing the renovation on our house and frantically losing the battle to alphabetize our now merged CD and book collections. When I get busy like this, the kind of busy where I find myself listening to War and Peace on my iPod while simultaneously watching the movie version of it on the television while also folding the laundry and painting my toenails, some still small voice within whispers, “Nerissa, my love, perhaps you are overdoing it.” And a slightly louder voice says, “Wouldn’t it be great to get sick? Not terribly sick: just a mild cold. Yeah.”

This is frightening, because every time that louder-than-still-small-voice speaks this manner, I inevitably succumb to some illness or other. Take now, for example: I am sitting with my left leg up and an ice pack on it, because yesterday I twisted my knee after stubbornly attempting to move a large piece of furniture by myself. (Yes, I know. R.I.C.E). I seem to have a self-timer within me, an alarm clock that goes off to keep me from burning all my fuel and taking off into the stratosphere only to be marooned up there. (Since I lack an appestat--the internal mechanism which tells a person when she is hungry and when she is full—my theory is that this self timer is God’s consolation gift to me in its place.)

At any rate, being this kind of compulsive workaholic, I had made a deal with my darling Tom: we would have a honeymoon, yes we would! Only couldn’t I do just a teeny book tour while we were out on the west coast? Say up in Portland, Seattle? And, being wonderful, he agreed. We would have six divine blissful days of honeymoon nothingness and then the Saturday after the wedding, I would appear on both West Coast Live (an early morning live radio show; San Francisco’s answer to A Prairie Home Companion) and a solo show at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley. On the same day.

I woke up that Saturday morning seriously regretting my wicked workaholic ways, cursing that part of me who looks at a blank calendar and rapidly fills it with activities, meetings, gigs, lunch, dinner and coffee dates, clients, workshops, retreats, boxing workouts, meditation sittings, professional trainings, astrology readings and the like. All I wanted to do was loll in bed with my new husband, maybe rising at eleven to saunter down 24th St. to the coffee shop to read our Russian novels.

Instead, we woke up early (by this time, our jet lag had worn off, and 7am California time now felt like, well, 7am.) We realized that the venue had moved from delightful Fisherman’s Wharf to less delightful downtown San Francisco. The venue was now in a red velvet cabaret room off the lobby of a hotel. It smelled like the fifties, and not in a good way. There was no dressing room; just the back hallway of the hotel, and I was advised to keep a close eye on my guitar and knapsack which was full of Emergen-Cee, Airbourne and various herbal teas. I clutched a box of Kleenex in my hand like some hypochondriacal security blanket.

Also, I was tired, which for me usually translates as “scared.” It was the first time I was to read my book on the air, the launching of my book tour, and on national radio no less. When I get scared, I get sleepy. Seems to me like a reasonable reaction. I gazed up at the Xerox the stage manager had posted on the door of the little backstage room that housed the coffee and crudités.

10:38-Nerissa Nields.
10:59-sponsor announcement/break
11:03 Anne Lamott.

Anne Lamott!! Anne Lamott, whom I had discovered in 1998 and who had ferried me (via her books and audio tapes) through the most difficult time in my life; who had taught me to be a woman of grace and dignity, and who was not too dignified to laugh at herself; who showed me how to be both writer and writing teacher.

I dropped my box of Kleenex.

“Don’t get excited,” I said to myself, shaking with excitement and nervousness and no longer the least bit sleepy, “She lives around here. She will waltz in at 11:01, do her thing and skiddaddle back to Marin County. I won’t even meet her. And she certainly won’t see me sing.”

Sedge Thomas is a gifted interviewer and a funny man, but his biggest talent is his uncanny ability to make the person he is speaking to seem far funnier and more clever than she actually is. I have benefited many times from his excellent interview style, and I always enjoy being on his show. This time was no exception. I sang “This Town Is Wrong,” and then he asked me a bunch of questions about the writing process, the singing life, my new marriage, the honeymoon…and at one point I gazed out in the audience. There, in a golden glow (really! The light made a halo around her blondish brown dredlocks) sat my literary hero, my wise writing teacher mentor, my favorite “spiritual” writer! AND SHE WAS BEAMING AT ME!!!!!


After my interview, the stage manager told me to go over to the table set up by the local independent bookstore. “Take a picture of that,” I whispered to Tom, pointing at the stacks of Annie’s books adjacent to my own little Plastic Angel. “I already did,” he whispered back. Annie was at the table signing frantically. I assumed she wanted to go home to her house in Marin, perhaps to Sam, her teen age son, perhaps just to lunch. Either way, I didn’t want to bother her, even to tell her how much she means to me. But she came to me, took my hands, looked me in the eye and said, “Bless you!” She hugged me and said, “Matzel Tov on your wedding!”

“I love you!” I blurted. “I think you are amazing! And we’re coming to your church tomorrow!” I immediately regretted saying that, lest she think, as Tom had suggested she might, that we were some kind of spiritual stalkers. But she just looked slightly nervous and said, “Good. I think I will be there.”

And Tom and I hugged each other. He beamed down at me and said, “Guess this wasn’t so bad after all?”
And then we drove off into the sunset…or rather, into the midday San Francisco Saturday traffic and onward to the ER.

Wedding, Honeymoon and Anne Lamott Part 1

I used to be afraid to fly, but it took too much energy, what with the adrenaline, the feverish praying, the re-visiting my entire past. These days I toss my bags under the seat in front of me and stick my nose into a novel. I have been reading voraciously recently; oddly, I have been obsessively reading the great Russian novels: Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov. Solzhenitsyn is next on my list. Ever since the last election, I find myself withdrawing further and further into this foreign world, this world of pre-Revolutionary Russia, where the upper classes spoke French and everyone had about five different names. Where an autocracy just came out and admitted it was an autocracy.

I am flying now, with Katryna, our first flight together since The Great Maternity Leave/Polyp Challenge—and the first flight since my honeymoon. Excuse me, I mean Honeymoon/book tour, because, being me, I couldn’t just go out to the west coast and be with my brand new husband, showing him the sites and enjoying his reaction to his first west coast visit. Nay. I had to piggyback a book tour—my first book tour—on top of all this. Oh, and also I caught my nephew, William’s cold which incubated during the wedding but manifested wickedly the first morning we woke up in California. As a result, there was a lot of Kleenex, Emercen-Cee, Airborne and Zicom, not to mention one visit to the San Francisco ER. But more of this anon.

Expectations are premeditated resentments. And resentments, I have learned, while fun to harbor, especially in small groups of people, late at night over a bottle of wine or package of Oreos, are fatal to OSA’s (Overly Sensitive Artists) like me. There’s nothing like spiritual growth to kick the air out of the tires of good old fashioned gripe sessions. It seems whenever I find someone else irritating the hell out of me, and I then complain about that person to another person, or group of people, I feel righteous and justified for a good hour or so and then I begin to feel the symptoms of emotional hangover: kind of queasy, sick to my stomach, increased irritation. Sort of like how coffee gives you energy but then you crash, or how sugar feeds your hunger for about twenty seconds before it makes you starving. Or if you have poison ivy how it feels good to scratch the itch, but eventually it just itches more and has turned bloody from the scratching.

All right, all right, so over time I’ve learned this. What I haven’t fully learned is that when I even expect someone—let’s take myself, so as not to offend anyone else—to behave a certain way, and then they don’t, I am frustrated, confused, irritable. Why is this person behaving so inappropriately?

Exhibit A: It’s my wedding day. My favorite people are gathered around me. I am marrying the man of my dreams, my soul mate for whom I’ve been waiting my whole life. My family is thrilled: they adore this man, and they love me too--I can see that. I am surrounded by love, flowers, good food, large wrapped packages. I am about to go to California on a two week honeymoon. So why am I in such a bad mood?

Well, there really was a good reason, theoretically. When in doubt, blame the weather (at least if you live in New England). During the week leading up to the big day I was mysteriously compelled to keep checking the weather forecast, like once an hour. When, last September, Tom and I chose May 14 as Le Grand Jour, we knew the weather could be iffy. Sometimes in New England, it’s 90 in May; other times it’s in the low fifties. I had no idea if I should buy a strapless dress or wear fake fur. Ten days out from the wedding, both AOL Weather and The Weather Channel predicted 62 and raining. We planned on an outdoor wedding, with tent, but with the knowledge and accompanying trepidation that we might really, deeply and muddily, regret it.

The morning of May 14 it was 58 and raining. To make matters worse, my head felt like it was being compressed in a vise, the familiar symptoms of a soon-to-be raging migraine. I was, to put it politely, in a mild passive aggressive fury at God as well as at myself for not being more spiritually evolved so as to rise above the unfortunate circumstances. I called some friends and met them in the morning, and as they sat with me and listened quietly and calmly, I raged, bawled and sobbed. Then I went up to Goshen to get my hair done. I thought I would feel better with my up-do, ringlets and all, but instead, looking in the mirror, I felt like the fat old duchess from Alice In Wonderland and not like the dainty wisp of a bride I wished to be. Next stop was the minister’s house where I was to meet my family for a final luncheon, my last meal as a single chick.

As I drove up, I cried some more. Why did I feel so bad? Why would I be cursed with a migraine on today of all days? And why did God hate me so much that He would make it be 58 and raining? And why, most of all, did I care about such trivialities on such a momentous spiritual day? It was going to be fine; I knew that somewhere. Why did I have to have such negative aversive feelings?

I put a tape into the tape player of my car: Martha Beck’s The Joy Diet. Martha trained me as a life coach, and I think she’s hilarious and brave. Somehow I had a sense that her wry sense of humor might lift me out of my current pit of despair.

“Laugh 30 times a day,” she admonished. Minimum. If you need external stimulation, fine: rent some Christopher Guest videos or hang around your funniest friends. But more importantly, learn to laugh

“without any discernable cause. During my Joy Diet research, I was startled to learn that there is a legitimate system of yoga (like Hatha or Kundalini) that focuses almost completely on laughter. It’s called-I swear on my grandmother this is true—the Ho Ho Ha Ha Ha method. According to the literature, practitioners start this yogi strategy by learning how to laugh for at least a minute with no provocation whatsoever.”

And so, having nothing to lose and being alone in the car, I let it rip. I laughed from the deepest part of my belly, with the same fervor with which I would have practiced ashtanga yoga. And wouldn’t you know it? It was infectious and addictive. I continued to giggle the rest of the way up to Cummington.

I’ll never know for certain whether it was Yoga Ho Ho Ha Ha Ha or the fact that the sun came out a half hour before the ceremony, and that for the rest of the day it was 69 degrees and lovely, but my migraine and bad mood went away. My niece Amelia dropped rose petals before me as I walked down the aisle. My mother was my maid of honor. My father escorted me while my Aunt Jenifer played Schubert’s Ave Maria, singing like an angel. My beautiful, heartful, soulful groom, Tom, stood waiting for me. Tears streaming down both our faces, we were carried—or so it seemed—by the gentle humor and wisdom of the “big hearted” Stephen Philbrick, our minister, and by an old Shaker song I sang with Penny Schultz and my father. My whole family joined together on “Wild Mountain Thyme”; Dar sang “You Rise and Meet the Day,” and Michael Biegner read a poem he wrote for the occasion.

After we exchanged our rings (Stephen punning on the last lines of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which happens to feature my name,) Tom and I exited the church to the congregation singing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah.

And then, Tom and I rung those church bells. I took hold of the rope and pulled with all my might. Dong! Went the bell. And the rope pulled me up, off my feet, high up above the ground, and there I hung, for just a second or two. Enough time for me to laugh and laugh.

Twelve Days to the Wedding

"There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” So says my friend Bill by way of Hamlet. Or, put even more elegantly by Bob Marley: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery/none but ourselves can free our own mind.” So, I reason, change my thinking; free my mind. Soon and fast, please. Reading my thoughts the other day, a friend sent me a passage from some kind of life-coachy thing: a piece about how, as we grow into (it is to be hoped) wiser and kinder people (which is for me, the goal, at least occasionally, on good days), we begin to choose our friends and partners and intimates not so much on the basis of attraction but on some other factors as well. Like, can they pay the rent, or at least not punch a hole in your wall each month so that you’re adding construction costs onto your monthly mortgage? Or, are they enough aware of their own narcissism so that when your beloved fourteen-year-old cat has died after a protracted battle with her liver, they do not say, “Hey, cheer up—it’ll be fun to get a new kitten!”

For readers following this blog, you know that around Easter I became obsessed with finding a small animal, namely a bunny, to hold. Not to keep—just to hold for a while. Believing, as I do, that the Devil is in the grasping and God is in the letting go, I did not pursue this particular desire, to the relief of Tom and (I’m sure) the bunny and its mother. But life has a funny way of speaking to you.

“Hey, Nerissa,” Life said—or at least a voice of some kind woke me from my post lunch nap. “I’ve got something to show you.”

In this case, the Voice of Life was Tim, the insulation man, who had come to pump insulation into the new room in our house. I followed him out the door, barefoot and shivering, my hands crossed over my chest rubbing my upper arms. The tulips and daffodils we planted last fall shocked me with their reds and yellows as I squinted into the midday sun. Tim is older than me, with a fringe of grey hair that hangs well below his blue Red Sox cap. I followed him silently around the side of my house over to the fence, which separates my yard from our neighbor’s.

“Look,” Tim whispered, pointing to a mound of grey insulation fluff packed up against the fence. I tiptoed around the new hosta plants, poking their staffs up from the earth. I peered into the hole and saw a shiny black rabbit eye, winking up at me, surrounded by soft brown fur, the backs of his two siblings. Three baby rabbits snuggled in a rabbit hole.

“They really do make rabbit holes,” I whispered back. I don’t know what I had thought, in all my Alice in Wonderlandish contemplations, but I guess up until that point, I thought the proverbial rabbit hole was just that: proverbial.

I am preparing for my wedding. My second wedding, I should say. And as joyful as Tom and I are at having finally found each other, as much as we are looking forward to celebrating the big day, and the marriage for (happily) ever after, we are also looking back down the rabbit holes we emerged from, and a piece of that involves the last partners we sallied down the aisle with.

It’s a well known psychological saw that we tend to be attracted to people who will help us work through our problematic issues with our families of origin. Some say this is the very essence of what we like to think of as “chemistry” between two people: it is simply the stunning recognition of emotional attributes our parents or older siblings possessed that caused us pleasure and pain. There is nothing wrong or stupid in being attracted to these people; it’s just hard wired into us. The trick, say the smarty pants sociologists and psychologists, is for us to pick people who are emotionally healthy, loving and who don’t force us to sit with them and watch reruns of “Married…With Children.”

The passage (by Melody Beattie, I later discovered) said, “No matter who we find ourselves relating to, and what we discover happening in the relationship, the issue is still about us, and not about the other person.” That’s the good news and the bad news. No one out there is going to fix us, and we aren’t going to fix anyone else. No one out there is going to rescue us nor are we going to rescue the other guy. If I’m annoyed with my partner, it’s usually because he is behaving in a way that reminds me of my own annoying qualities. Or because he’s watching “Married…With Children.”

Martha Beck likes a little slogan called “You Spot It You Got It,” and I mutter it under my breath sometimes when my partner ruminates for the millionth time that week about what he wants to be when he grows up or changes his mind three times about where he wants to go for dinner. There’s another teacher I like named Byron Katie whose basic premise is that we all live by stories we create, stories that can keep us trapped and miserable. Stories like, “I am fat,” or “ I’m too old to go to graduate school” or “I could never afford to go to Spain,” or “my husband doesn’t really love me.” The Work she suggests we do is to continually ask ourselves, about these stories, “Is it true?” And then “what am I getting out of this story? How do I feel when I chose to believe it?” If you can see that the story is really serving to make you miserable and may not actually be 100% true anyway, you can see if a different story seems just as true or truer. She works with “turnarounds” which allow you to see how the story you’re beating yourself up with might be better told in a different way. So “Tom can never make up his mind about where to go for dinner” has a few different versions. One is, “Tom can make up his mind about where to go for dinner.” (Because he always eventually does.) Also, “I can’t make up my mind about where to go for dinner,” is actually just as true. I can’t, often. And if I could, I might tell Tom where I really wanted to go and then maybe he wouldn’t have a problem. Learning to work with these turnarounds helps me to forgive the other person for being, ahem, human, and more importantly, to forgive myself. The longer I go along here, the more I seem to get it that Life, God, Humanity, Goodness, all that we want and love (Love, for that matter) is about connection. Meanwhile, addiction, the Devil, disease, “Married…with Children” and all things Bad are about disconnection. For me this manifests in a myriad of ways: making little lists of numbers add up (or not) in columns in the margins of a notebook, counting calories or dollars or some other quantifiable metaphor for turning life into rungs on a ladder.

When I do my real work, which is connecting with myself, with a compassionate truth (like, “Nerissa, you are lovable”) rather than a conditional truth (like, “Nerissa, you were late again today”), I get a lot back. To wit: my ex-husband and I did the best we could. He is a good person and so am I. And: I think the whole point of this human life is to learn how to love and how to be loved. Lately, in the past few weeks, a number of people have talked about the love of worrying, as in “she loves to worry.” And I realize that’s true of me: I think I hate it, but if I really hated it, why would I make lists of numbers? Why would I worry about how many calories I ate or how much money I make? Doesn‘t Jesus say something about the lilies of the field and how we can’t add one cubit to our stature by worrying? And yet, when I think of a relaxing activity to do tonight, I think about making a budget for May to make sure I meet my expenses for June. And what I really need to do is page through Brides’ Magazine to choose a hairdo for my wedding in two weeks.

We have a hard time celebrating in this culture. If you don’t believe me, look around you the next time you’re at a wedding or a party. If it were so easy to celebrate, why is it that people overeat and get drunk? Real celebration is about real connection. Engagement. And sometimes life feels too complicated to show up and engage. Sometimes we’d rather check out. We go down our rabbit holes. We act out our early patterns with our current partners. We hang on to them and ask them to be other than who they are. We blame and we self-destruct. Why is it so hard sometimes to dance?

I don’t believe in wrong moves anymore. Or at any rate, I think we can always turn around.

In order to do this very difficult thing called loving and letting ourselves be loved, we need first to separate before we connect. We need to have a Self before we can surrender it. We need to be single and strong, our own best beloved, before we can become engaged.

So back to the bunnies. The day after we discovered the rabbit hole, we came back to check on the baby rabbits and found it empty. We had assiduously kept Cody, our Aussie Shepherd from nosing around there, and I find it hard to believe that some other predator could have gotten them. And besides, it’s my story. Maybe what we discovered was not really a rabbit hole but more like a rabbit birthing nest. I am hoping the bunnies have made a new hole, possibly in the loose earth beneath our barn. We see their mother hopping about at night, collecting food for them. We don’t need to hold them. We know they are with us, sharing the land. And I can say the same for David and Tom’s ex wife. When we walk down the aisle, they will be there in spirit, giving us away.

There is this question of ambition.

When I was in high school. Our wonderful headmaster, Charlie Saltzman, a grey haired character who read us the King James Version of the Bible and drove a bright red Harley motorcycle around campus, opened assembly one April with ee cummngs’ “In Just- Spring.” I was taken to a place I’d never visited before, and later that day in English class Mrs. Thomas read us the poem again, this time all of us following along on the page. I got to see the way the poem was laid out, how unusual the bettyandisobel, how delightful the wee baloonman. The language literally pulled at my heart and I understood in a three dimensional way what poetry actually is, what poetry can do. I felt it with my ears, I played with it with my mind, and it flooded me with memories of my own spring days and weeks, internal and external. I felt sad and happy and excited and wistful all at once. I felt.

At the time, I was divorced from my own poetry, the songs I’d been writing. I’d traded in my guitar for a set of color coordinated composition books, one for each subject. I stopped trusting poetry, or at least I stopped trusting that I could dare to believe that I was one. Poetry was hard. Poetry demanded a connection to something otherworldly, a muse outside of myself, and for the moment, I was in the process of fleeing all that. I was hungering for letters I could subjugate, sentences I could diagram and verbs I could congregate. I wanted numbers that added up, proofs I could brandish, equations that would balance. I wanted something outside of myself to tell me I was good, like a big red A on a paper, or an acceptance letter from an ivy league college. I didn’t have any faith in the murky, marshy world of music making, the topsy turvy world of fiction; unless of course, it involved my writing a five page essay describing the theme of livestock in As I Lay Dying or the color white in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

“I am not a very good artist, “ my friend Avery confided to my reflection one day as we were washing our hands at the girl’s room sink. “But I am a fantastic critic.”
“Lucky,” I thought. “I want to be a critic. Much safer.”

By the time I got through college, the role of student, theme chaser and critic had lost its appeal, and I once again felt confident enough to write my own material again. Either that, or my brief foray into the working world convinced me that I was not cut out either to wake up at 6am nor work for anyone else, and being somewhat unemployable anyway, I dove headfirst into a career in music, with the desire to do what ee cummings had done for me that day in April in the assembly meeting. I wanted to write something that would make someone think in three dimensions. So I started a rock band.

Fast forward four years to five musicians, one sound engineer and an enthusiastic tour manager driving around the belly of the United States in a sixteen passenger van. The enthusiastic tour manager, who basically sees this as one long extended post-college road trip, says the names of the signs out loud as she passes them, in that half-conscious childish way people do. “Akron,” she says dreamily. “Men at work.”
The rest of us allow her to be the cheerful enthusiastic one, just as we allow our guitar player to be the details man, AKA the designated worrier. I have since learned that every social group unconsciously hands out these two positions to whomever applies first for the job. It allows the rest of the group to be apathetic and detached as well as to take copiously long naps and sneer at anyone who gets her hopes up that we might actually be getting somewhere.

“Which would you rather be,” says the tour manager. “Rich or famous?”
“Rich,” say the guitar player and the drummer.
“Famous,” say the singer and the bass player.
“Neither,” I say without missing a beat. “I don’t care about money at all. And it’s not that I want to be famous. I want to have influence. I want to make a difference. I want people to know my work. I want Power,”

“Well, honey, that’s ambition,” says my friend Effelia today when I tell her this story.
“What do you mean?” I say. We are walking along the river in just spring. The ground is still brown and the forest floor is covered with leaves, and if I close my eyes and listen to the sound they make, I might be tricked into thinking it’s fall, except my sense of smell won’t let me. It is simply too rich right now to be anything other than the most potent, life giving of seasons. And strange plants whose names I may never know are poking up from the ground, strong stem green scrolls that look like they mean business.

Effelia points to the scrolls. “That,” she says. “Is ambition.”

This is what I learned from my years in the van, the years of trying to simultaneously play critic and artist. I learned that artists do not get paid for their work but for their effort, and even then they frequently don’t get paid. To be paid is nice--it’s gravy--but if that’s why you are doing what you are doing, you might want to think about another line of work. I also learned that some people make it and others don’t and if you line up the artists in terms of talent, it makes no sense at all. I learned that the very best part of the whole experience in the moment you get to put pen to paper, fingers to strings, voice to air, feet to stage. No one can put a price tag on that experience in either direction—what you paid, what you get paid-- and we certainly ended up paying more than we were paid.

And I’d pay it again.

At one point in our career, we hit a wall, a critical junction where it looked for a time that we would lose our record company, lose our van, lose our booking agent, lose in short all the trappings that made us feel successful—lose the big red A on the paper, the letter of acceptance from the Ivy League college. And on that day, I turned to the bass player and said, “We can still play. We can always still play.” And from that point on, I was free, or so I thought.

I have a book coming out in a month. My first novel. It was exhilarating to write and very very hard work. I just heard from my publicist that the publisher is dragging its feet about getting galleys to magazines for reviews and to book stores for readings.
“Oh, no,” I thought. “This is terrible! My one chance at immortality! My book is going to perish! It will languish in a warehouse somewhere and no one will read it! And I will be laughed at and criticized and hung up to dry.” My stomach roiled, my brow furrowed, and answering my email stopped being fun. I went to bed and wrote in my journal, angry letters I will never send. Then I began to laugh and pretty soon I’d stopped caring about the publisher. I picked up War and Peace, which I shall be reading possibly for the next year and a half at the rate I am going, and soon I was back in the world of the war of 1812 and sleigh rides and wolf hunts and Pierre and Natasha. I felt so grateful that such a man as Tolstoy had taken all that time to write such an amazingly vital story, and had no interest in either criticizing it nor trying to write a better book myself. I just felt happy.

“What if I stopped caring about being published?” I said aloud. “What does it matter?
And then I thought of those plants by the river, those scroll-like bottom feeders poking up like river crocuses, intrepid and resilient. I always thought I was like a crocus, and I thought that meant I had to assert myself somehow onto the world, let them know I’m here, damnit! I am me! I am important! I have something to say! Listen!

But maybe I’ve been looking at it the wrong way. Maybe I did, maybe I do, who knows. Maybe the point is not the statement, nor is it the product. Maybe the point is just the action, the beautiful action, the poking up, the assertion, the first one to celebrate spring. And once that message is delivered, to relax and unfurl and watch the rest of the parade go by.