This is the second day in a week when all four kids have been asleep at nap time in our own home. Glory, glory Hallelujah! There is nothing better than this. I can't go anywhere because the kids are asleep (actually I technically could go somewhere because my friend Phyllis is still here I think). I'm not driving around, getting the kids to sleep but getting no rest or break for myself. Even better, I am in Lily and Cyrus' room and told them I'm stay here the whole time. Hysterical with freedom! And when I turned around and saw my laptop sitting on the dresser it felt like someone snuck in a left me a present. The laptop is in here because we got some nightlights to replace the flashlight we'd been turning on for the Bigs these past few weeks at night and the new nightlights, though already loved, require either batteries or a USB cord that only plugs into a computer. Why is this a design? Do many children have computers in their rooms for such a thing? Or do many adults have the adapter thingies that plug into the wall and into the USB cord? Or do other adults read the fine print about the weird way things are made? I do not know.
So I'm trapped and my kids are angelic and I get to write and read through the dozens of articles I have saved on Facebook and my life is great right now. Naps! I just can't tell you in enough descriptive words how wonderful four napping children in their own beds is for a mama. I need to cover myself in exclamation points and caps and do a twirly dance and drink a martini and then take my own nap and eat some cake and get a massage and a pedicure and collapse smiling into a pile of down comforters and chinchillas.
As usual there is way more in my mind than I can ever get down on fake paper. This is what there is today.
Here is something I read today. I share it because I want to keep talking about racism in our country and what we can do to fix it. Eradicate it. And because I am learning and thinking about it all the time. Do you have something you think I should read? Please share.
Talk MLKs name out your mouth: An open letter to Clemson football coach Dabo Sweeney
About Me
- Hands Full
- Learning and trying to be kind and living my life as fully as I can stand it.
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Black lives need to matter too
I started this in July 2016, after the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Then I got self-conscious and scared and put it away. Unbearably, here is another opportunity in the aftermath of the murder of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed 40-year-old black man who was killed in Tulsa yesterday. Video in Tulsa police shooting shows black man was unarmed with hands up
The flea infestation in our house has not been cleared, We have bombed, sprayed, had the exterminator out twice, washed almost everything in hot water more than once. The dog died. The fleas still live. The last time the exterminator came he looked at me standing with four toddlers at my feet and said in all seriousness that it would work better if we took everything out of the house and washed it at a laundry mat. I stared back at him blankly. Ummmm. And we will do that how?
I sat in a chair for three hours this week, getting a $13,000 drug pumped into my veins through an IV chemo-like. This drug has silenced but probably not healed my ulcerative colitis. Insurance pays for 70% of it and I get it every two months. And I am so damn grateful to feel so much better that I don't even want to think about another way I could treat my illness right now. I'm going to enjoy the absence of pain for a while.
My marriage is buffeted by the normal winds of raising young children, of sharing space and responsibility and limited free time with another adult and trying to figure out how to even come close to thriving every now and then.
All of this and I do not fear for my life.
I started that list because it sums up my day-to-day life, the stressors that make it hard to be me. But I am not special in having personal shit to deal with. I am special in that when a black man my age gets shot and killed by police, I don't feel it in my gut and think "That could have been me." Never once have I thought or felt that. In my last post about race I used some stories my friends had shared about experiencing racism for the first time, when they were children. This is an exchange I had with one friend:
Me: Hi Friend, May I put the story you shared yesterday on Antoine's page in a blog post?
Friend: Absolutely! How are you and those beautiful babies?
Me: Oh thanks! We are good. I mean, they make me feel like a crazy person 98% of the time and I'm not sure my marriage will survive parenting this litter but aside from that good And you?
Friend:Four babies... you and your husband are rock stars! I have two and I sometimes wonder if my marriage will survive them. Keep going...one foot in front of the other!
That friend looks like Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and the many other black men who have been murdered in the past two years, except he looks absolutely nothing like them other than the fact that they are all black. So when he says that's all we can do, put one foot in front of the other, he is acknowledging that as spouses and parents and professionals we are working hard every day. He has a list similar to mine above, although probably without the fleas. A list that looks like daily life. But he also has to add worry and fear and despair what might happen if he ever has a run in with the police. Oh, there's the fear and sickness in my own gut. Even writing those words about someone I know and love made it real. The point is that none of us has time or energy to try to fix the systemic racism and oppression that is killing black and brown people every day, in myriad ways, in our country that we love. But some of us can turn away from it and some cannot. For those of us who have white skin, please let us join the conversation. Please let us find something, somewhere, to do.
My last post On Parenting and Privilege included an article that talked about PTSD experienced by people of color as a result of the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. A friend shared the post and someone she knew commented, taking some issue with the reference to PTSD. He said PTSD is a legitimate medical diagnosis and should not be taken lightly. That's the point.
The flea infestation in our house has not been cleared, We have bombed, sprayed, had the exterminator out twice, washed almost everything in hot water more than once. The dog died. The fleas still live. The last time the exterminator came he looked at me standing with four toddlers at my feet and said in all seriousness that it would work better if we took everything out of the house and washed it at a laundry mat. I stared back at him blankly. Ummmm. And we will do that how?
I sat in a chair for three hours this week, getting a $13,000 drug pumped into my veins through an IV chemo-like. This drug has silenced but probably not healed my ulcerative colitis. Insurance pays for 70% of it and I get it every two months. And I am so damn grateful to feel so much better that I don't even want to think about another way I could treat my illness right now. I'm going to enjoy the absence of pain for a while.
My marriage is buffeted by the normal winds of raising young children, of sharing space and responsibility and limited free time with another adult and trying to figure out how to even come close to thriving every now and then.
All of this and I do not fear for my life.
I started that list because it sums up my day-to-day life, the stressors that make it hard to be me. But I am not special in having personal shit to deal with. I am special in that when a black man my age gets shot and killed by police, I don't feel it in my gut and think "That could have been me." Never once have I thought or felt that. In my last post about race I used some stories my friends had shared about experiencing racism for the first time, when they were children. This is an exchange I had with one friend:
Me: Hi Friend, May I put the story you shared yesterday on Antoine's page in a blog post?
Friend: Absolutely! How are you and those beautiful babies?
Me: Oh thanks! We are good. I mean, they make me feel like a crazy person 98% of the time and I'm not sure my marriage will survive parenting this litter but aside from that good And you?
Friend:Four babies... you and your husband are rock stars! I have two and I sometimes wonder if my marriage will survive them. Keep going...one foot in front of the other!
That friend looks like Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and the many other black men who have been murdered in the past two years, except he looks absolutely nothing like them other than the fact that they are all black. So when he says that's all we can do, put one foot in front of the other, he is acknowledging that as spouses and parents and professionals we are working hard every day. He has a list similar to mine above, although probably without the fleas. A list that looks like daily life. But he also has to add worry and fear and despair what might happen if he ever has a run in with the police. Oh, there's the fear and sickness in my own gut. Even writing those words about someone I know and love made it real. The point is that none of us has time or energy to try to fix the systemic racism and oppression that is killing black and brown people every day, in myriad ways, in our country that we love. But some of us can turn away from it and some cannot. For those of us who have white skin, please let us join the conversation. Please let us find something, somewhere, to do.
My last post On Parenting and Privilege included an article that talked about PTSD experienced by people of color as a result of the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. A friend shared the post and someone she knew commented, taking some issue with the reference to PTSD. He said PTSD is a legitimate medical diagnosis and should not be taken lightly. That's the point.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that's triggered by a terrifying event — either experiencing it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event. Mayo Clinic
What will it take for us to see that black lives do not matter as much as white lives in this country, in this time? That if any of us (myself included) do not viscerally feel the trauma of these men being shot and killed by police, we are living a different life than our fellow citizens?
What will it take for us to see that there are different countries within this country? That black and brown-skinned citizens watch people who look like them being killed on TV, by people paid to serve and protect, and nothing happens to the people who killed them. One of the most powerful things I read in the weeks following Alton Sterling and Philando Castile's murders was a personal essay written by 31-year-old Brian Crooks in which he wrote:
What will it take for us to see that there are different countries within this country? That black and brown-skinned citizens watch people who look like them being killed on TV, by people paid to serve and protect, and nothing happens to the people who killed them. One of the most powerful things I read in the weeks following Alton Sterling and Philando Castile's murders was a personal essay written by 31-year-old Brian Crooks in which he wrote:
"That is why Black people are in such pain right now. The deaths are bad enough. But having the feeling that nobody will ever actually be held accountable for the deaths is so much worse. And then watching as the police union, the media, and conservative politicians team up to imagine scenarios where the officer did nothing wrong, and then tell those of us who are in pain that our pain is wrong, unjustified, and all in our heads just serves to twist the knife."
I feel afraid when I even consider writing the word "murder" in my posts or my essays. I keep having to check myself--why am I afraid? Why don't I want to do it? This is what I've come up with, ranging from being generous with myself to hard/honest with myself:
-I don't think I've ever written the word murder before. It's not a word in my vocabulary, it scares me and I try not to do anything that brings me into the realm of using the word.
-It feels like a legal definition and by using it I'm stepping outside my sphere of knowledge. I feel okay about "killed" because I can see and read for myself that it happened. But murder? Am I sure?
-It feels so divisive, like I am taking a side. If I write "murder" people will think that I am anti-police and I am not anti-police so wouldn't it be better to use a safer word?
I'm afraid to hurt people or make people mad by what I write here, in this sacred space that I have finally created, where I put myself into words where other people can see them. I feel like I should start with a bulleted list that says I do honor the fallen police offers in Dallas and I'm also honoring the people killed in Nice and. . .do I need to say all that? Can we give each other the benefit of the doubt that it is not either/or?It is not either/or.
My chest is full of uncried tears for all the death, all the fear, all the anger, all the pain. The familiar desire to just yell what's the point anyway? It's too hard! What difference does anything I do make anyway?
Some tears came last night as I lay on the floor in the kids' room, having literally thrown my daughter into her bed after an hour and a half of trying to get them to go to sleep. I was so done and felt so powerless and I reacted by scaring this precious, innocent person who means the world to me because I was just so done and I didn't know what else to do. I lay in the dark, covered in shame, listening to her quietly talk herself to sleep, wanting to climb up and apologize to her, to make amends, but not wanting to mess with the quiet that was finally arriving. It was a day full of good, of effort, of togetherness. And I wiped it all out, at least within myself, with the final moments of the day.
I feel so tired. Every parent I know feels so tired. It is so hard and it is so tempting to turn everything off and fold into a private corner of my own space where I and mine feel safe. Even if it is an illusion. Because I can tell you--there is no safe. Living is not safe.
After my last essay about the racial divide in this country my friend wrote:
It makes me so angry that I will have to teach my son "Don't do this.. Don't say that.. Stand still if... ". I could scream and then I want to cry. Because it's so wrong, so very very wrong. This is not the life I dreamed for my children.
That is not the liberal media. I hope it doesn't even need to be any kind of "us" vs. "them". It is a real mom talking about trying to raise her brown son in this country we all want to be part of and proud of. I don't teach my children that lesson. Do you? If not, why not?
I'm going to keep writing about this. I hope you'll keep reading. I hope you'll reach out to me to ask questions or open conversation. I don't know how to write about parenting and my experience as a parent when parents right next to me can't turn away from this discussion just because they're tired. We can't stop talking. We can't stop trying. And for those of us who don't feel traumatized by what is happening, we have to ask ourselves why not?
Friday, September 16, 2016
A look back
Sometimes I think if I actually wrote about how hard it is to raise four kids under the age of two-and-a-half people would just start showing up at my house trying to save me. Or save us. I just started a sentence describing this past week, with a handful of sick kids and a sick mama and I got bored in the middle of it. Who really cares? Everyone has sick kids, every parent gets sick, everyone tries to keep their house clean, their bills paid, their dog's nails clipped. It's nothing new or special--it's just in bulk and it is relentless. But I think all parenthood is relentless.
I love these bright, beautiful children so much. I could stare at them for hours. It's the spilling, gate-smashing, screeching, bottle-spilling, whining, needing, door-to-the-bathroom-opening everything that makes it so hard. The projectile vomit just when I was already at a breaking point, making me burst into hopeless tears in the kitchen before taking the blue Ikea highchair out to the courtyard to spray it off.
Complaining feels at best lame, at worst risky. Like tempting the gods of fate to even think it's too hard.
A year has passed since I wrote the words above. Not exactly a year because a year ago today I was in the hospital for a colitis flare that wouldn't end and I wasn't doing any writing in the hospital. I was resting and ordering meals from food services. I broke, physically in a way that got me hospitalized, but I know that physical break was caused by the mental and emotional breaking that had been going on for months. That and the stupid colitis that I wasn't ignoring so much as was just gritting my teeth and bearing it because I didn't think there was anything I could do to make it better. Except for maybe entirely change my diet to eat only whole foods and no dairy and no gluten and no sugar and. . . no. On some level I want to try that because I know it would be good for me, even if it didn't entirely heal the colitis. On the other levels the only way it could happen would be if someone would shop for me and cook for me and pack lunches for me and then provide me therapy when all of the emotions that get cuddled up in all the food I eat come raging out to devastate the earth around me.
What is really possible? I don't mean in the sense of "Anything is possible if you try" though I guess I do mean it in that way. The truest of true ways which for me comes down to what will you give up or change in order to do the thing you need to do? If you can even figure out what the thing you need to do is.
Months ago I picked up a Brene Brown's book Rising Strong for the third time. It hadn't been meeting me where I was up to that point, though I'd loved her earlier books. I picked it up because it was in front of me on the table and I brought it with me on BART on my way to see a play at the Berkeley Rep. The chapter grabbed me, because it started with a personal story and because it ended with her therapist asking her "What if everyone is just doing the best they can?"
This question sent the author into a rage and she fought it, the idea, for weeks. She asked everyone she came into contact with, coming up with her own qualitative data about what it means if you believe that is true about people and what it means if you don't.
I usually don't. And I haven't believed it about myself for most of my life.
I put the book in my bag as the train pulled into my stop and walked up the stairs into downtown Berkeley. As always, the energy of a city, of people walking quickly around me, dressed in different styles, talking about different things, pulled my heart up and out into the world. It's one of my best mes, the city me. Also the alone me. My god do I love to be alone. The best alone is alone in a sea of people. My favorite. I walked to the theater and met up with my younger brother. Better and better.
The play was Aubergine. It was exquisite. It was about grief, which I wasn't expecting, but was welcome and timely as I had just started my new role at work where I'm learning to specialize in grief. The characters were quirky and bold. And at one point one of the people in the show asked "What if people are just doing the best they can?"
Zing! Okay, god and the universe. I am listening. This message is meant for me today.
So I've been carrying that idea around with me for months, holding it up as a lens when I need it to see others in a different light. It helps. More than that, I've been wrapping it around myself as a cozy blanket when I need it. Maybe I'm just doing the best I can.
Right now, with what I have. With the energy I have possess, with the mental toughness available to me in the moment, with the truth surrounding me, the what is actually happening surrounding me. I've started to understand the concept in a different way. That it's not exhorting me to do the best I could if everything else cleared away and I could just focus on doing my best at this one thing. Because let's be real, I can do lots of things really really well and I expect that of myself. Expect it to the point that if someone says I did great and lists ten things I did well, I shrug as if to say but yeah that's what was expected. But if someone says one thing I could have done better, I wear that like a mantle until I can force myself to stop thinking about it. Because all this time I've been interpreting Do your Best to mean--imagine the most wonderful way in which this thing can be done and then get as close to that image as possible, whipping yourself for missing the mark which will almost always happen.
Sheesh. It hurts me to write it out. So very hard on myself and often on others. People have said that to me about myself for years and it has pissed me off more than anything. What does that mean? Or I know! But I didn't really know. I knew because enough people said it that I thought it must be true even though I couldn't feel it to be true. I didn't know how to shut it off.
What I learned last year in the hospital was that I could not trust my own self-assessment when it came to my physical health. I would simultaneously feel like I needed to do better/work harder even as my body was breaking down to the point where two doctors would look at me eyebrows raised and said This is going to take months to get better because your body is so messed up right now. I have become an expert at living, even impressing others, while in the pit of desperation. In crisis mode all the time. And my body paid. My heart and my mind have paid too but I'm still unpacking that damage.
Three weeks ago I took my four kids and my dad to a hospital where I was going to meet with my financial advisor. My kids looked cute and as though I'd scooped them out of the gutter where they'd been hanging out with PigPen in their pajamas, brushing each others' hair with Brillo pads. We shuffled our way into the lobby and past the security guard, a black woman a few years 5-10 years younger than I am. She said Are those all your kids?
Yeah, I said.
How did you get your body back?? she asked with admiration.
I didn't know how to respond. It felt good to hear, as much as it surprised me. Mostly I wanted to say, and would have if I'd come up with the words sooner, I'm getting myself back. It shows on the outside.
I love these bright, beautiful children so much. I could stare at them for hours. It's the spilling, gate-smashing, screeching, bottle-spilling, whining, needing, door-to-the-bathroom-opening everything that makes it so hard. The projectile vomit just when I was already at a breaking point, making me burst into hopeless tears in the kitchen before taking the blue Ikea highchair out to the courtyard to spray it off.
Complaining feels at best lame, at worst risky. Like tempting the gods of fate to even think it's too hard.
A year has passed since I wrote the words above. Not exactly a year because a year ago today I was in the hospital for a colitis flare that wouldn't end and I wasn't doing any writing in the hospital. I was resting and ordering meals from food services. I broke, physically in a way that got me hospitalized, but I know that physical break was caused by the mental and emotional breaking that had been going on for months. That and the stupid colitis that I wasn't ignoring so much as was just gritting my teeth and bearing it because I didn't think there was anything I could do to make it better. Except for maybe entirely change my diet to eat only whole foods and no dairy and no gluten and no sugar and. . . no. On some level I want to try that because I know it would be good for me, even if it didn't entirely heal the colitis. On the other levels the only way it could happen would be if someone would shop for me and cook for me and pack lunches for me and then provide me therapy when all of the emotions that get cuddled up in all the food I eat come raging out to devastate the earth around me.
What is really possible? I don't mean in the sense of "Anything is possible if you try" though I guess I do mean it in that way. The truest of true ways which for me comes down to what will you give up or change in order to do the thing you need to do? If you can even figure out what the thing you need to do is.
Months ago I picked up a Brene Brown's book Rising Strong for the third time. It hadn't been meeting me where I was up to that point, though I'd loved her earlier books. I picked it up because it was in front of me on the table and I brought it with me on BART on my way to see a play at the Berkeley Rep. The chapter grabbed me, because it started with a personal story and because it ended with her therapist asking her "What if everyone is just doing the best they can?"
This question sent the author into a rage and she fought it, the idea, for weeks. She asked everyone she came into contact with, coming up with her own qualitative data about what it means if you believe that is true about people and what it means if you don't.
I usually don't. And I haven't believed it about myself for most of my life.
I put the book in my bag as the train pulled into my stop and walked up the stairs into downtown Berkeley. As always, the energy of a city, of people walking quickly around me, dressed in different styles, talking about different things, pulled my heart up and out into the world. It's one of my best mes, the city me. Also the alone me. My god do I love to be alone. The best alone is alone in a sea of people. My favorite. I walked to the theater and met up with my younger brother. Better and better.
The play was Aubergine. It was exquisite. It was about grief, which I wasn't expecting, but was welcome and timely as I had just started my new role at work where I'm learning to specialize in grief. The characters were quirky and bold. And at one point one of the people in the show asked "What if people are just doing the best they can?"
Zing! Okay, god and the universe. I am listening. This message is meant for me today.
So I've been carrying that idea around with me for months, holding it up as a lens when I need it to see others in a different light. It helps. More than that, I've been wrapping it around myself as a cozy blanket when I need it. Maybe I'm just doing the best I can.
Right now, with what I have. With the energy I have possess, with the mental toughness available to me in the moment, with the truth surrounding me, the what is actually happening surrounding me. I've started to understand the concept in a different way. That it's not exhorting me to do the best I could if everything else cleared away and I could just focus on doing my best at this one thing. Because let's be real, I can do lots of things really really well and I expect that of myself. Expect it to the point that if someone says I did great and lists ten things I did well, I shrug as if to say but yeah that's what was expected. But if someone says one thing I could have done better, I wear that like a mantle until I can force myself to stop thinking about it. Because all this time I've been interpreting Do your Best to mean--imagine the most wonderful way in which this thing can be done and then get as close to that image as possible, whipping yourself for missing the mark which will almost always happen.
Sheesh. It hurts me to write it out. So very hard on myself and often on others. People have said that to me about myself for years and it has pissed me off more than anything. What does that mean? Or I know! But I didn't really know. I knew because enough people said it that I thought it must be true even though I couldn't feel it to be true. I didn't know how to shut it off.
What I learned last year in the hospital was that I could not trust my own self-assessment when it came to my physical health. I would simultaneously feel like I needed to do better/work harder even as my body was breaking down to the point where two doctors would look at me eyebrows raised and said This is going to take months to get better because your body is so messed up right now. I have become an expert at living, even impressing others, while in the pit of desperation. In crisis mode all the time. And my body paid. My heart and my mind have paid too but I'm still unpacking that damage.
Three weeks ago I took my four kids and my dad to a hospital where I was going to meet with my financial advisor. My kids looked cute and as though I'd scooped them out of the gutter where they'd been hanging out with PigPen in their pajamas, brushing each others' hair with Brillo pads. We shuffled our way into the lobby and past the security guard, a black woman a few years 5-10 years younger than I am. She said Are those all your kids?
Yeah, I said.
How did you get your body back?? she asked with admiration.
I didn't know how to respond. It felt good to hear, as much as it surprised me. Mostly I wanted to say, and would have if I'd come up with the words sooner, I'm getting myself back. It shows on the outside.
Wednesday, September 7, 2016
Little blurb
Sometimes my kids look so relieved to get to Stephanie, our babysitter's house, that it's impossible to miss the change in them. Sometimes I wonder what that means but today I just accept it and feel grateful for it. Relief in any form must be good.
It won't go on any resume but today I ordered four new-cubby photos to be printed at Costco, took all four kids there, got groceries, wipes for the Bigs' new school, five hot dogs and five drinks and walked out with five happy, fed, entertained people enjoying each other and I felt like a damn super hero.
Related to that, we got two of my favorite comments today. The check-out guy remarked upon how well-behaved the kids were as they sat in the cart having food loaded around them. A woman we passed said, without looking shocked or aghast, "You have four small children? Bless your heart."
If I had a choice that would be the only thing anyone ever said when they see us.
We got two new kittens, Posey and Cow also known as Cowie. I named one, Lily named the other. It is a relief to have cats.
Last week I worked Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and then had the kids Thursday and Friday. On Thursday we went to the San Francisco Zoo where we met up with our beloved Phyllis. On Friday we went to Aquatic Park in Berkeley where we met up with our beloved Nana. By 3pm on Friday I was a burnt-out husk of a person. The exhaustion and ill-feeling throughout my entire body and my mind were total. Complete. There was nothing left in me. I was a wash cloth with every drop forcefully, mercilessly, wrung out. It made me feel better, actually, to experience that feeling and remember feeling like every single day back when my main job was taking care of my kids. It made me feel sad that I'd gone on like that for so long, a wisp of myself trudging through days as though I was doing anyone any good. Sometime soon I will get down on my knees and thank every heavenly being I believe in for helping me survive that period of my life.
I wish I could write in more detail about my work, about the families I meet and the stories I hear. You would be better for knowing about it, about them. People all around us are somehow getting through the day with broken hearts and they don't wear signs so it's hard to pick them out in a crowd.
I will be forty next year. I used to wonder what people, especially women, meant when they told my younger self how much they loved their 40's. I don't wonder anymore. I am opening up, putting down burdens, understanding that not only can't I be everything to everyone but I don't want to be. I want to be me. I like me.
I miss this blog when I don't write and I have so many half-written essays, so many half-discovered ideas that never make it onto a page, that I sometimes feel sad and frustrated at all that I'm not able to write down for you to read.
The gladness I feel when someone tells me that something I've written touched them in some way is gladder than almost anything I've felt before.
I've got a cat purring next to me on the couch, a house cleaned by other people who are good at it, kids sleeping at someone else's house and a new book that I can't wait to dig into. My heart needs all of that right now, just as it needed to sit for a minute and write to you.
September, somehow still the start of a new year so long after I stopped being a student. Now I'm the mom to little students. I love the freshness, the breezes, the promise of this time of year. I hope you have some or all of those things in your pocket or around the corner.
It won't go on any resume but today I ordered four new-cubby photos to be printed at Costco, took all four kids there, got groceries, wipes for the Bigs' new school, five hot dogs and five drinks and walked out with five happy, fed, entertained people enjoying each other and I felt like a damn super hero.
Related to that, we got two of my favorite comments today. The check-out guy remarked upon how well-behaved the kids were as they sat in the cart having food loaded around them. A woman we passed said, without looking shocked or aghast, "You have four small children? Bless your heart."
If I had a choice that would be the only thing anyone ever said when they see us.
We got two new kittens, Posey and Cow also known as Cowie. I named one, Lily named the other. It is a relief to have cats.
Last week I worked Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and then had the kids Thursday and Friday. On Thursday we went to the San Francisco Zoo where we met up with our beloved Phyllis. On Friday we went to Aquatic Park in Berkeley where we met up with our beloved Nana. By 3pm on Friday I was a burnt-out husk of a person. The exhaustion and ill-feeling throughout my entire body and my mind were total. Complete. There was nothing left in me. I was a wash cloth with every drop forcefully, mercilessly, wrung out. It made me feel better, actually, to experience that feeling and remember feeling like every single day back when my main job was taking care of my kids. It made me feel sad that I'd gone on like that for so long, a wisp of myself trudging through days as though I was doing anyone any good. Sometime soon I will get down on my knees and thank every heavenly being I believe in for helping me survive that period of my life.
I wish I could write in more detail about my work, about the families I meet and the stories I hear. You would be better for knowing about it, about them. People all around us are somehow getting through the day with broken hearts and they don't wear signs so it's hard to pick them out in a crowd.
I will be forty next year. I used to wonder what people, especially women, meant when they told my younger self how much they loved their 40's. I don't wonder anymore. I am opening up, putting down burdens, understanding that not only can't I be everything to everyone but I don't want to be. I want to be me. I like me.
I miss this blog when I don't write and I have so many half-written essays, so many half-discovered ideas that never make it onto a page, that I sometimes feel sad and frustrated at all that I'm not able to write down for you to read.
The gladness I feel when someone tells me that something I've written touched them in some way is gladder than almost anything I've felt before.
I've got a cat purring next to me on the couch, a house cleaned by other people who are good at it, kids sleeping at someone else's house and a new book that I can't wait to dig into. My heart needs all of that right now, just as it needed to sit for a minute and write to you.
September, somehow still the start of a new year so long after I stopped being a student. Now I'm the mom to little students. I love the freshness, the breezes, the promise of this time of year. I hope you have some or all of those things in your pocket or around the corner.
Sunday, August 21, 2016
A way of being
I am a Family Resource Coordinator with the local OPO which stands for organ procurement organization. My job is to support families in their grief when someone they love, or loved, or never liked, has died or is about to die, in a hospital. My job is also to talk to them about organ and tissue donation, to explain the process and answer questions, to help them get the information they need to make an informed decision about whether this person who has died or is dying would have wanted to donate or whether donating this person's organs feels like the right thing to do for the decision-maker.
When I tell people about what I do most look at me with some version of horror on their face. Fear. Afraid to even imagine being in that situation--either in the position to be with someone they know dying in the hospital or the position to have the job that brings them into the room of strangers in those moments. "I don't know how you do that," many say.
"I don't know how you do that" is what a lot of people said to me and say to me in my non-working life when they see the mass of toddlers twining themselves around my legs.
I am learning many skills in this new role, so that is one of the ways I do it. I know a lot about donation, that is another. I am comfortable in hospitals, in ICUs. That is another. I feel honored to be allowed to do it, that is another.
Beyond the skills and the traits and the life experience is something I've written about once before--the way of being somewhere with someone. Of being very present and very open to sit with someone in acute, baffling, violent grief and stay seated. Not run away. It takes a lot of energy, sucks it out. It is confusing to go back and forth, from the sunshine in the parking lot to the hallway walking past a mother who has come to the hospital in her bathrobe for the second day in a row. She is praying so hard for her son the young man to survive and I know he won't. Not because I don't believe in prayer but because I know enough about the human body and what it can sustain to know that his has been broken beyond recovery. It is hard to hold those two truths in my heart and not to get sick with the ache and dread of it. It is hard to invite myself in, not to where she is because I can't go there and I shouldn't go there, but I can go to a conference room adjacent where I can lend my hope and quiet and energy to the process she and he and their family have unwillingly entered.
I feel it in my body. I feel some of the pain and sorrow in my skin. My hands. My heart. My gut. Not always but often. And that is one of the many, many reasons I wanted to do this job. Why I probably needed to do this job. There's not much I feel in my body. Due to some combination of my own medical trauma, my own mental strength, my refusal to go to my own anger and fear and sorrow and grief for so many years, and our culture's lack of focus and training on how to be present with and slowly heal and recover from the trauma we all experience by being alive my body is often numb and, when it does try to talk to me, I have mostly shut it the hell up and ignored it. I want to change that. I need to change it.
The laughter comes as sweet relief. I am always grateful for it. Because at some point, eventually or immediately, there are moments of laughter. Will they always come?
I hope so.
What does this have to do with parenting, one child or four? The way of being needed to do the job I get paid for reminds me of the way of being needed to parent. I can't be this way all the time--it's too hard. Too much. Too raw and too painful and too tiring. In some ways it is the realest of the real, in other ways it is something rarer and more special. A place to go sometimes. The edges of the day-to-day. I will keep practicing. Stepping in and stepping back out. Finding the laughter. Allowing for escape. Trying hard to forgive myself for the great failures. Finding rest.
When I tell people about what I do most look at me with some version of horror on their face. Fear. Afraid to even imagine being in that situation--either in the position to be with someone they know dying in the hospital or the position to have the job that brings them into the room of strangers in those moments. "I don't know how you do that," many say.
"I don't know how you do that" is what a lot of people said to me and say to me in my non-working life when they see the mass of toddlers twining themselves around my legs.
I am learning many skills in this new role, so that is one of the ways I do it. I know a lot about donation, that is another. I am comfortable in hospitals, in ICUs. That is another. I feel honored to be allowed to do it, that is another.
Beyond the skills and the traits and the life experience is something I've written about once before--the way of being somewhere with someone. Of being very present and very open to sit with someone in acute, baffling, violent grief and stay seated. Not run away. It takes a lot of energy, sucks it out. It is confusing to go back and forth, from the sunshine in the parking lot to the hallway walking past a mother who has come to the hospital in her bathrobe for the second day in a row. She is praying so hard for her son the young man to survive and I know he won't. Not because I don't believe in prayer but because I know enough about the human body and what it can sustain to know that his has been broken beyond recovery. It is hard to hold those two truths in my heart and not to get sick with the ache and dread of it. It is hard to invite myself in, not to where she is because I can't go there and I shouldn't go there, but I can go to a conference room adjacent where I can lend my hope and quiet and energy to the process she and he and their family have unwillingly entered.
I feel it in my body. I feel some of the pain and sorrow in my skin. My hands. My heart. My gut. Not always but often. And that is one of the many, many reasons I wanted to do this job. Why I probably needed to do this job. There's not much I feel in my body. Due to some combination of my own medical trauma, my own mental strength, my refusal to go to my own anger and fear and sorrow and grief for so many years, and our culture's lack of focus and training on how to be present with and slowly heal and recover from the trauma we all experience by being alive my body is often numb and, when it does try to talk to me, I have mostly shut it the hell up and ignored it. I want to change that. I need to change it.
The laughter comes as sweet relief. I am always grateful for it. Because at some point, eventually or immediately, there are moments of laughter. Will they always come?
I hope so.
What does this have to do with parenting, one child or four? The way of being needed to do the job I get paid for reminds me of the way of being needed to parent. I can't be this way all the time--it's too hard. Too much. Too raw and too painful and too tiring. In some ways it is the realest of the real, in other ways it is something rarer and more special. A place to go sometimes. The edges of the day-to-day. I will keep practicing. Stepping in and stepping back out. Finding the laughter. Allowing for escape. Trying hard to forgive myself for the great failures. Finding rest.
Monday, August 8, 2016
The reason my kids still drink bottles
My kids are two and three. If you're new to the blog it bears mentioning that we have two two-year-olds and two three-year-olds. It hasn't gotten easier yet although people keep saying it will.
These toddlers each drink a bottle of milk before milk. Our babysitter thinks we should have kicked this habit long ago. In fact, when the kids spend the night with her they don't drink bottles. That's one of many differences in how they are with her and how they are with me, or with us. At her house they take naps. Not just one but two. At her house they go to bed easily, without fighting. At her house they don't get up from the table until everyone is finished eating. At her house they have structure. The last few times she's been with the kids and with me she's looked at them with eyebrows raised and asked "Who are these children?"
Because with her they behave and with me, with us, they go nuts.
But that's not why they still have a bottle. That's a brief commentary of some of the challenges that come with sharing the raising of your children with someone else. It's not just hard that I dread bedtime and I know that were they at her house they would go straight to bed, it's hard knowing that we seemingly could change the routine in such a way as to improve bedtime. And yet we can't. It's not them, it's us. Or it's probably them with us. Sigh.
My kids still drink a bottle at bedtime because they love it. They go soft and relaxed, their little hands curved around the plastic bottle, their little lips pursed around the rubber nipples. We usually all sit on the couch, which we're rapidly outgrowing, and they drape themselves on limbs and under blankets, and we enjoy the ending of the day in some type of quiet. Then the bottles are empty and we get ready for bedtime which is in no way impacted or made easier by the bottles. It still takes over an hour for the four of them to settle down and one or both parents is tight-lipped and menaced by the whole procedure. So why keep the bottles anyway?
I thought I would be a breastfeeding mama but I was mostly a bottle-feeding, pumping mama. That was one of the first departures from my idea into the reality of what parenthood would be and is for me. During the decades of wishing for a baby and hoping to someday be able to get pregnant, I imagined not just the physical changes of carrying a baby inside me but the intimate moments of looking down at their sweet littles heads as they suckled, feeling the closeness, the quiet sighs, the connection between a mom and her child. What happened instead was my babies came early and went straight to the NICU where their intake was measured and commented upon and we feed them with the smallest nipples and bottles out there. That was after they graduated from the gavage, where my milk was dripped into their mouths and down their throats in the early days when they were still figuring out the suck, swallow, breathe combo that early preemies are two underdeveloped to know how to do on their own. I spent every two to three hours in the little pump room, experiencing my first session of mom failure as I compared my output to the moms around me and blamed myself for not pumping often enough, for not eating the right foods, for being two old, for my body being too messed up from all the meds over the years. Although I occasionally breastfed my eldest daughter, they were mostly bottle babies.
Those first several weeks even Lily would stop breathing when she drank. We referenced As and Bs, the asystoles and bradycardia preemies go into when they forget to breathe because they're focusing on sucking or swallowing. Those fucking monitors would go off and we learned to stop and wait for the baby to start breathing again, on occasion needing to rub a body or a head to get them going. Those were the bad ones. I'm used to the ICU more than most, both from personal experience and from work, but it still got to me, that being on high alert and learning what every sound meant.
My son came home on a feeding tube, taped to his little face and threaded up one nostril down his throat and into his belly. This was two months after he was born and he still wasn't efficiently eating enough on his own to be allowed to come home. It often took an hour of holding a tiny bottle to his mouth to get even the lowest acceptable amount into him. My husband was so patient, trekking up to the NICU for as many feedings as he could, coming up with the complicated dance that was needed to get Cyrus to keep drinking. Put him on your lap but don't touch him. Unswaddle him when he starts to lose steam. Undress him and change his diaper when he needs to be re-stimulated. I think there was some head rubbing. I did not have the patience. I was holding in screams of frustration at needing this baby to eat so we could leave and feeling disappointed by this tiny human when he didn't eat enough. We finally told the team we needed to leave and they taught my husband how to insert the feeding tube and we got to go home. He was still a bottle baby, just not really that committed to the bottle yet.
Their babyhood was a combination of me pumping, trying to nurse Lily, trying to nurse Cyrus, trying to get Cyrus to drink from his bottle, and giving Lily a bottle. They started getting formula in the NICU the day after the night I chose to sleep a few extra hours while others cared for my newborn twins. Their demand outpaced my supply after that and I felt awful. Like I wasn't doing enough.
Did I enjoy their babyhood? I don't think so. I got pregnant when they were four months old, we found out when they were six months old. The closest emotion I can come up with to describe the feeling in our eyes as we looked at each other with the news is despair. The big twins were just starting to sleep more at night and we were just starting to think that maybe there was a light at the end of the tunnel. . .and then we fell into a new, darker tunnel that we'd have to navigate each with a baby on our backs. The pregnancy explained why my milk supply had dried up, though I know some moms who are able to still nurse while pregnant. Not me. I was not enough.
The little girls were born when the bigs were just a year old. They came early too and went into the NICU. They drank bottles too. Each of them nursed right away, the first day I held them, and I felt hopeful. This time I was determined to pump more diligently and be able to feed my babies. I saw the lactation consultant. I tried a nipple shield. I did produce more. But I didn't live in the hospital this time, because I had two other babies at home. I wasn't there for every feeding and it took coordination to be there at the right time in order to try to nurse and also be able to pump. They did better with the bottles. I stopped pumping when they were three months old and the relief was deep.
By that time I was taking Zoloft for PPD. The idea of being left alone with my four babies made me feel so anxious and hopeless that I never let it happen. Our babysitter came five days a week and she fed my little girls more often than I did. Those moments I dreamed of, of gazing down into my baby's eyes as I fed him or her? They almost never occurred.
We propped lots of bottles. You're not supposed to do that, according to. . .I' not sure who. The experts. I think it's not safe or they might choke or something. We did it all the time, propping bottles on folded blankets. Some of it started because my son preferred to not be held while he ate. And some of it was because the times the babies ate were times when we could . . .not hold babies. Take a break. People often asked and ask us how we do it. How do we have all these children around the same age. Lots of shortcuts. Lots of doing what works. Lots of lowering of expectations. We just do it because what else is there to be done?
I knew some moms stopped nursing when their kids were around one, and I briefly considered stopping the bottles for the bigs at that time. But they suddenly had two baby sisters and they were still so little themselves and I didn't see the need to take them away, even though they also drank from sippy cups by that point.
I thought about it when the bigs turned two. But it didn't seem fair to take the botttles from the littles after only a year and there was no way we would be able to give bottles to two of them and not to the whole crew.
So now they are two and three and they still each drink one bottle of milk a day, before bed. Sometimes more if we're travelling because a bottle on a road trip is a better guarantee of a car nap than a sippy cup.
These babies came so hard and so fast that I hardly had time or energy to enjoy them. I look at my kids now and marvel at the fact that they are long and lean, that they are kids. Not babies. I have never once wanted time to slow down since becoming a parent; I've been keeping my head above water and trying to make it through the day. I have never had a moment of "Oh, my baby is getting bigger, maybe it's time for another one." It happened too fast for those windows to open up.
I know I won't have another baby and I do not mourn that fact. I have enough children. And they are still little and still exhausting but they are growing and changing all the time. They are aware of the world in new ways, as evidenced by the questions the big ones ask and by the way they all act. They aren't babies anymore. But for a moment each day they snuggle in and drink a bottle and relax in the safety and coziness that comes from being little, being cared for. They will grow up fast enough and I'm not ready to take the bottles away yet.
These toddlers each drink a bottle of milk before milk. Our babysitter thinks we should have kicked this habit long ago. In fact, when the kids spend the night with her they don't drink bottles. That's one of many differences in how they are with her and how they are with me, or with us. At her house they take naps. Not just one but two. At her house they go to bed easily, without fighting. At her house they don't get up from the table until everyone is finished eating. At her house they have structure. The last few times she's been with the kids and with me she's looked at them with eyebrows raised and asked "Who are these children?"
Because with her they behave and with me, with us, they go nuts.
But that's not why they still have a bottle. That's a brief commentary of some of the challenges that come with sharing the raising of your children with someone else. It's not just hard that I dread bedtime and I know that were they at her house they would go straight to bed, it's hard knowing that we seemingly could change the routine in such a way as to improve bedtime. And yet we can't. It's not them, it's us. Or it's probably them with us. Sigh.
My kids still drink a bottle at bedtime because they love it. They go soft and relaxed, their little hands curved around the plastic bottle, their little lips pursed around the rubber nipples. We usually all sit on the couch, which we're rapidly outgrowing, and they drape themselves on limbs and under blankets, and we enjoy the ending of the day in some type of quiet. Then the bottles are empty and we get ready for bedtime which is in no way impacted or made easier by the bottles. It still takes over an hour for the four of them to settle down and one or both parents is tight-lipped and menaced by the whole procedure. So why keep the bottles anyway?
I thought I would be a breastfeeding mama but I was mostly a bottle-feeding, pumping mama. That was one of the first departures from my idea into the reality of what parenthood would be and is for me. During the decades of wishing for a baby and hoping to someday be able to get pregnant, I imagined not just the physical changes of carrying a baby inside me but the intimate moments of looking down at their sweet littles heads as they suckled, feeling the closeness, the quiet sighs, the connection between a mom and her child. What happened instead was my babies came early and went straight to the NICU where their intake was measured and commented upon and we feed them with the smallest nipples and bottles out there. That was after they graduated from the gavage, where my milk was dripped into their mouths and down their throats in the early days when they were still figuring out the suck, swallow, breathe combo that early preemies are two underdeveloped to know how to do on their own. I spent every two to three hours in the little pump room, experiencing my first session of mom failure as I compared my output to the moms around me and blamed myself for not pumping often enough, for not eating the right foods, for being two old, for my body being too messed up from all the meds over the years. Although I occasionally breastfed my eldest daughter, they were mostly bottle babies.
Those first several weeks even Lily would stop breathing when she drank. We referenced As and Bs, the asystoles and bradycardia preemies go into when they forget to breathe because they're focusing on sucking or swallowing. Those fucking monitors would go off and we learned to stop and wait for the baby to start breathing again, on occasion needing to rub a body or a head to get them going. Those were the bad ones. I'm used to the ICU more than most, both from personal experience and from work, but it still got to me, that being on high alert and learning what every sound meant.
My son came home on a feeding tube, taped to his little face and threaded up one nostril down his throat and into his belly. This was two months after he was born and he still wasn't efficiently eating enough on his own to be allowed to come home. It often took an hour of holding a tiny bottle to his mouth to get even the lowest acceptable amount into him. My husband was so patient, trekking up to the NICU for as many feedings as he could, coming up with the complicated dance that was needed to get Cyrus to keep drinking. Put him on your lap but don't touch him. Unswaddle him when he starts to lose steam. Undress him and change his diaper when he needs to be re-stimulated. I think there was some head rubbing. I did not have the patience. I was holding in screams of frustration at needing this baby to eat so we could leave and feeling disappointed by this tiny human when he didn't eat enough. We finally told the team we needed to leave and they taught my husband how to insert the feeding tube and we got to go home. He was still a bottle baby, just not really that committed to the bottle yet.
Their babyhood was a combination of me pumping, trying to nurse Lily, trying to nurse Cyrus, trying to get Cyrus to drink from his bottle, and giving Lily a bottle. They started getting formula in the NICU the day after the night I chose to sleep a few extra hours while others cared for my newborn twins. Their demand outpaced my supply after that and I felt awful. Like I wasn't doing enough.
Did I enjoy their babyhood? I don't think so. I got pregnant when they were four months old, we found out when they were six months old. The closest emotion I can come up with to describe the feeling in our eyes as we looked at each other with the news is despair. The big twins were just starting to sleep more at night and we were just starting to think that maybe there was a light at the end of the tunnel. . .and then we fell into a new, darker tunnel that we'd have to navigate each with a baby on our backs. The pregnancy explained why my milk supply had dried up, though I know some moms who are able to still nurse while pregnant. Not me. I was not enough.
The little girls were born when the bigs were just a year old. They came early too and went into the NICU. They drank bottles too. Each of them nursed right away, the first day I held them, and I felt hopeful. This time I was determined to pump more diligently and be able to feed my babies. I saw the lactation consultant. I tried a nipple shield. I did produce more. But I didn't live in the hospital this time, because I had two other babies at home. I wasn't there for every feeding and it took coordination to be there at the right time in order to try to nurse and also be able to pump. They did better with the bottles. I stopped pumping when they were three months old and the relief was deep.
By that time I was taking Zoloft for PPD. The idea of being left alone with my four babies made me feel so anxious and hopeless that I never let it happen. Our babysitter came five days a week and she fed my little girls more often than I did. Those moments I dreamed of, of gazing down into my baby's eyes as I fed him or her? They almost never occurred.
We propped lots of bottles. You're not supposed to do that, according to. . .I' not sure who. The experts. I think it's not safe or they might choke or something. We did it all the time, propping bottles on folded blankets. Some of it started because my son preferred to not be held while he ate. And some of it was because the times the babies ate were times when we could . . .not hold babies. Take a break. People often asked and ask us how we do it. How do we have all these children around the same age. Lots of shortcuts. Lots of doing what works. Lots of lowering of expectations. We just do it because what else is there to be done?
I knew some moms stopped nursing when their kids were around one, and I briefly considered stopping the bottles for the bigs at that time. But they suddenly had two baby sisters and they were still so little themselves and I didn't see the need to take them away, even though they also drank from sippy cups by that point.
I thought about it when the bigs turned two. But it didn't seem fair to take the botttles from the littles after only a year and there was no way we would be able to give bottles to two of them and not to the whole crew.
So now they are two and three and they still each drink one bottle of milk a day, before bed. Sometimes more if we're travelling because a bottle on a road trip is a better guarantee of a car nap than a sippy cup.
These babies came so hard and so fast that I hardly had time or energy to enjoy them. I look at my kids now and marvel at the fact that they are long and lean, that they are kids. Not babies. I have never once wanted time to slow down since becoming a parent; I've been keeping my head above water and trying to make it through the day. I have never had a moment of "Oh, my baby is getting bigger, maybe it's time for another one." It happened too fast for those windows to open up.
I know I won't have another baby and I do not mourn that fact. I have enough children. And they are still little and still exhausting but they are growing and changing all the time. They are aware of the world in new ways, as evidenced by the questions the big ones ask and by the way they all act. They aren't babies anymore. But for a moment each day they snuggle in and drink a bottle and relax in the safety and coziness that comes from being little, being cared for. They will grow up fast enough and I'm not ready to take the bottles away yet.
Saturday, July 9, 2016
Family person
With my new job I work three twelve hours shifts each week. On a work day I find out at six thirty or seven in the morning which cases have been been assigned to me for that day. I open up our charting system and I read the notes about a patient, sometimes two patients, to find out the cause of events that have brought this person into our sphere of awareness. Reading the notes I enter a little bit into a different way of being--imagining this stranger's last day of life outside the hospital. Imagining the family or friends who are at the bedside or travelling from far away. Imagining what they already know or what they have yet to find out. Holding them in my heart for a moment. Then I get dressed, drink coffee and help get the kids ready if I have time. Head out into the world, onto the highway, into California or Nevada towns, into ICUs where I sit and wait to see if I will be talking to any family members that day.
My body and my mind and my heart feel different, depending on what I am doing. It is a bit like leaving one person-suit and stepping into another person-suit. I am comfortable and easy when I am in problem-solving mode. Not clinical but..fixed and firm and clear. It feels good to think critically and assess situations. To talk to people about making a good plan or about addressing a need or fixing a problem. This is not family resource coordinator mode.
If I am going to talk to a family I don't leave my body, I don't become someone else. I do. . .quiet myself down and step to the edges so I can make room for what is going on. To make space for the reality that death is in the room and that people are slowly or quickly emerging into a new skin, with new eyes, in the new world that no longer has their son or father or brother or wife walking around in it. When I worry about saying the wrong thing or finding a way in to ask these people I've just met to let me support them, I try to remind myself that none of this is about me. I am here because I have chosen to be, because I can be, and because people need other people to be there. It is hard. And scary. And so holy.
I can't stay in that mode indefinitely and I can't be in it if I am doing other things. Problem-solving or doing my expenses or filling out forms. It is hard to switch back and forth and I am new at this so I am learning how to be both. How to be all the things that I am and need to be, at different times. How to carry a family's story from afar but not drown in it.
Prayer helps.
There is so much pain in being a person. So much devastating, confusing, gut-clenching pain. I can't take it away and I try to remind myself not to try, even when it is so uncomfortable to be next to the hurt and suffering. We need people to be there though. To be next to us when we are hurting. To listen. To receive the gift that is the story of someone they have loved so fiercely as they try to figure out how to say good-bye.
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