We had five good hours after too many to count of the other kind. The day started with the grumpies and turned into the yelling and the kicking before the sun was even up. It was all scowls and meltdowns from there.
Bug was not the only one having them, I am ashamed to admit. We tried to save the day every which way, even letting Giovanni whisk us off to Manassas Battlefield so we could clamber over cannons and caissons in the unseasonably warm November light. Even so, the afternoon was all tears and grumbles and the push-pull of some unscratchable itch.
Then the child care fell through. Along with it, the evening plans.
At 7:00pm, generous friends found extra chairs and squeezed in two more place settings to make room for us as the table. Other children wrestled and played with Bug. My son turned sweet just minutes after we arrived. He stayed that way, more or less, until a little past midnight. He didn’t even turn back into a pumpkin. He simply fell asleep in my arms.
Without advance warning, friends shared their pasta and their hugs. They gave us five hours of noise and light, which was, in its way, five hours of peace.
The seller accepts my offer over all the others. Even cash from investors, higher bids from FHA borrowers, and promises of covering closing costs do not beat me out. It is a strong offer with 20% down, but the letter my realtor writes is the golden ticket. She paints a picture of Bug and me, growing up together there in that exact corner of the planet.
The record kicks up to 78 rpm. The lyrics are a high frequency tumult. The homeowner, gun shy because her last two buyers had their financing fall through at the 11th hour, is in a kerfuffle. She has something else waiting, it seems. This has taken her months longer than the overheated market promised. She wants the sale to be settled by the first week of December and to be moved out by the holidays.
Push, push, push. I take a breath and tell my realtor I’m sorry, but everyone will have to wait. I need to sit with this possibility for a day or two and let it work its way through my bloodstream. I also have to finish up my week at the office, pick up my son from school, and get some sleep. The homeowner needs an answer yesterday. I understand she is frantic, but she will have to wait a few more tomorrows. If she wants fast, an investor will fork over $200 grand in cash and then lease the place out to the next sucker who will pay twice the mortgage in rent. I don’t say this, of course. I just remind myself to be kind yet firm.
I am in a kerfuffle my own self. Buy now and take on the cost of the commute? Hold out for that phantom place closer to Tee and my work with half the square footage for a mere $40,000 more, all while risking losing out on these bargain-basement interest rates?
Between idealism and practicality, how does a person hit the sweet spot?
This place is cozy and light. It has big bedrooms, a fireplace, a yard with promise. It is on a bus line with transportation to my metro stop. It is near the Korean Spa that I love. It is walking distance to a supermarket, a library, and a park.
The living room is so narrow, I whine to myself. I want a place closer to the metro. Something with woods nearby. A basement. A guest room.
I slow down and consider what this new life is teaching me. Hell, my six-year-old has this stuff figured out already. Have I not learned anything in the past two years?
Wants: Acres of open land. A toolshed and workshop. A ten-minute walk to the office. A basement dance studio. Needs: A safe neighborhood. A quiet bedroom. A reliable way to get to work. A place for my son to learn, play, and grow.
Back and forth in myself, the longing for what is not (yet) within reach swings and clangs. The wanting makes me curl my lip at this beautiful opportunity to fulfill my family’s needs.
Between spoiled and growing up, how does a person hit the sweet spot?
We have the inspection scheduled for Thursday. She was pushing for Tuesday, but both the inspector and I carved out a few more days. Once we are finished digging around under the carpets and behind the hot water heater, I will have three days to make a decision. Barring any issues in financing, I could be on my way to home ownership by Thanksgiving.
Seven months ago, I was still sure that I was trapped in dire financial straits with no ladder in sight. The era of staying at home with Bug, following Tee’s vague career trajectory from one time zone to the next, and eventually divorcing had reduced my financial and professional foundation to rubble. I clung to an image of myself hefting one broken stone at a time back onto something resembling a wall with no blueprint in hand and all the pieces on the brink of toppling again.
That was not what was happening, of course. Six months ago, I began to realize that the story I was telling myself was doing a better job holding me back than my circumstances were:
If my paycheck is sufficient to support Bug and me in our own place, I might actually have to get off my frightened ass and make the leap. I claim I ache for a home. A Place of Our Own is my official Red Ryder carbon action 200 shot range model air rifle. But maybe I don’t entirely trust myself to manage alone. If I wake up to find that possibility under the tree, will I shoot my eye out? Having enough would, after all, mean the end of this recuperative chapter in the suffocating security of my parents’ nest. Might it be that the truth of my terror is not in being stuck but in becoming unstuck?
And so. The bank agrees to loan me many thousands of dollars, my department pushes through a small raise, the realtor helps me squeeze into the two-day window when my crush of a house is back on the market, and BOOM!
“I wish we could fast forward through the whole year,” Bug says. We are in bed and have just finished three books and our first song.
“Yeah? How would that work?”
“We would go all the way through fall, past winter.” He floats his hand through the air above our faces. “And come out after springtime.”
“What for?”
“We could fast forward to a vacation,” he says. “A summer vacation.”
How many of us long for the same thing? I smile and touch his palm suspended up there. “But then you might miss a lot of the good stuff.”
“Like what good stuff?”
“Like all the cool things you get to learn in school,” I say. “How you are just now starting to learn to read. And seeing your friends in class. And playing at recess.” I turn and slip my arm around his middle. “And all the cuddling you’d miss. Think about that.”
“But we could come back all the way around to the beginning,” he explains.
“And do kindergarten all over again?”
“Mmm hmm,” he murmurs. He is fading. “Some kids do it twice.”
I brush my lips over his cheek and begin the next song.
The wind is in from Africa
Last night, I couldn’t sleep. . .
As I walk through the night with the dog over the same quiet neighborhood streets, I notice my mind has retreated again. I have slipped back to the Colorado mountainside or into our Lake George cottage or alongside the San Andreas fault with Bug in my belly. The nostalgia is an open wound. It bites and aches. I miss those trees so much. The dry summer sage. The creek snaking right outside our door. I miss watching Tee drape the house in white twinkle lights as soon as the nights began to lengthen. He would split the logs himself, stack them in the garage and carry up just enough to last through bedtime. Bug always wanted to play with the matches and help bring the fire to life, and Tee always had the patience to let him. I miss walking back through the moonless pitch on those crisp winter evenings towards that glimmering beacon haloed in woodsmoke.
I had no concept of the perfect loveliness of everything right in my hands.
Then I remind my hands to unclench. I whisper to my mind, beckoning it back to me.
You know it sure is hard to leave you, Carey,
but it’s really not my home.
The wound is not real. It is only a series of thoughts. I call myself in from those faraway wilds, giving myself the gentle nudge to attend to this here and now, this quiet stroll through a neighborhood with my lop-eared pooch who stops every 36 inches to snuffle in the leaves.
The time will come when this is the sweetest memory. It might be ten years or it might be tomorrow, but it will come. I will call up this night, the bones of these bare trees, this sleeping boy breathing in the mist and leftover lullabies, and I will ache for the perfect loveliness of this.
Let’s have another round for the bright red devil
Who keeps me in this tourist town
There is no rush and nothing to be gained from hurtling past the winter and right out the other end of spring. Do-overs are not allowed in this game. Getting to the promised land faster means you have only failed to inhabit your footsteps as you are taking them. As ill-fitting, bothersome, and wrong as this chapter may be, this right here is the story of you being written.
But let’s not talk about fare-the-wells now,
The night is a starry dome
And they’re playing that scratchy rock and roll
Beneath the mantle of the moon.
The end of this act is already coming. Whether you recognize it or not, whether you hurtle yourself towards it or fight it every step of the way, you are already on your way to the next unrecognizable incarnation. Someday soon, this will be the hard candy you suck until your teeth hurt. This will be the nugget you cannot spit out. You might as well pause long enough now to place your lips on whatever is here before you. Foul, sweet, and anything in between. It does not matter. It is yours. Take a good, long taste.
I say, oh, you’re a mean old daddy,
but I like you.
—
Thanks and apologies to Joni Mitchell for “Carey” from the glimmering winter night of an album, Blue.
The boy fell asleep tucked sideways into my arms during the final verse of “Baby Beluga.” I filled the froggy humidifier for the first time this year and clicked on its cloud of cool mist. A low hum, a quiet breath. Snow might fall tonight.
To get a hug is to give a hug, right? In the interest of sowing a few happy seeds in the community garden, I made a late-night, earnest commitment to hug at least one somebody every day. This will be a breeze when I have a night with Bug. Hell, I can gorge on a few dozen hugs when Giovanni comes around. On a normal day, though, this will require a little extra attention. My fellow metro commuters may not take kindly to an uninvited squeeze. Also, I am apparently not the same gauze-draped sylph of my youth, opening my bejeweled arms to every new acquaintance upon introduction. I no longer expose my vital organs to folks until I have given them a good sniff.
A hug a day. Yes. I went to bed satisfied with the quest.
Daybreak chased the promise right out of the ol’ noggin. I woke early and raced off to volunteer at a manual work day at Bug’s school. I dug post holes for the new jungle gym and lugged wheelbarrows of gravel with complete strangers. After we had stashed the shovels back in the shed, one of the other moms said goodbye, pulling me into a spontaneous hug. Oh yeah! I was going to do that! What cozy niceness, that smile unfurling down my spine. In that little meeting of our arms and tummies, a fellow volunteer became a potential friend.
Also, I had kept my promise without even trying!
I managed for two more days to give a few squeezes. Then the commitment wandered off again. Working life has a way of elbowing aside the mammal hunger for closeness. Who hugs, anyway? I mean, in the quotidian clip of commute-office-meeting-supermarket-commute again single parenthood, who does such a thing? Nobody hugs. At least, nobody hugs me, and I don’t seem to remember how to manifest that spontaneous warmth the way my fellow digger did at the work site.
Tonight, I had a chance to give a hug (and get one in return. . . How lovely that would be!) to a friend. I blew it, neglecting to recall the commitment or its desire until I was already aboard the metro and well on my way home.
I may have missed my chance, but I can’t abide breaking my promises. I got to the house, dumped my stuff, and hugged the dog instead. I threw in a deep under-the-collar neck scratch for good measure. I dug in there until her leg started pedaling and I knew the dopamine was surging. She even groaned a little. It was super fluffy sweet.
This was not quite what I was aiming for, but a dog-cuddle will do in a pinch. The goal tomorrow: a grownup hug with a human. I can’t wait to find out who will make me smile!
This must be what the snake feels
when her skin starts to peel
back from what has been
tucked away
asleep.
Which of those coiled
selves will push
aside the rest, confine
them to another dormancy
while it becomes
the whole of what the living
thing knows
of stone and meat and predator
and mate
(and, of course, all of what they know
of her)?
Only one
will feel the next rake
of earth
against fresh belly.
Such a crap shoot.
She has so little say.
The manner, perhaps,
and place,
but not the timing
and certainly
not the fact
are hers to choose.
No wonder she goes
so still
when the husk
makes its intention known.
Who in her will suffer
the singular pleasure
of being
born?
Now think for a second. Suppose you are gored by an elephant. You may feel a certain absence of pleasure afterward, maybe a sense of grief. Throw in a little psychomotor retardation – you’re not as eager for your calisthenics as usual. Sleeping and feeding may be disrupted, glucocorticoid levels may be a bit on the high side. Sex may lose its appeal for a while. Hobbies are not as enticing; you don’t jump up to go out with friends; you pass up that all-you-can-eat buffet. Sound like some of the symptoms of depression?
Now, what happens during a depression? You think a thought about your mortality or that of a loved one; you imagine children in refugee camps, the rain forests disappearing and endless species of life evaporating, late Beethoven string quartets, and suddenly you experience some of the same symptoms as after being gored by the elephant. On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract negative thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor. In this view, people with chronic depressions are those whose cortex habitually whispers sad thoughts to the rest of the brain.
Robert Sapolsky has, once again, hit the nail on the head in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Granted, this excerpt would not generally fit into the “happy” category. Today, it tops the list.
The good Dr. Sapolsky has illuminated a connection between stress and depression that we all may intuitively know but can’t quite articulate. After reading this passage last night, re-reading, it, then going back for thirds, something clicked into alignment. The mind (and thus, the body) cannot differentiate between actual threats and psychological ones. The stress to the system is the same. A psychological battering wears on the brain and the body’s limbic, cardiovascular, digestive, reproductive, and other systems in much the same way as being gored by an elephant. Throughout his chapters, Sapolsky demonstrates the ways the burst of activity in response to a threat or injury is a survival mechanism for all of us in the animal kingdom, and that the eventual removal of the stressor returns the body and mind to a more centered state. The elephant thunders off into the brush, after all, and the wounds heal. Alas, the cognitive stressor is not so distractable. Ruminating on worst-case scenarios just keeps on digging at the ol’ gut. Enter the long-term health problems stage right. Yes, there is depression, falling into step between hypertention and heart disease.
So, what is a person with perennial despair to do? Suggestions abound, but first is this: notice that stress is created within the mind.
Quit running. Quit covering your head. Quit nursing imaginary wounds.
You can take a breath and even rest easy for the moment.
You are safe.
There is no elephant.
—
Sapolsky, Robert. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. New York: Henry Holt, 2004.
At the Fairfax County Education Summit earlier this month, Dr. Ronald Ferguson from Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative shared “18 Research-Inspired Tips for High Achievement Parenting.” You can find Dr. Ferguson’s list here. As a mom who reads three books to her kid every single night, I was particularly interested in numbers 6 and 7:
6. Discuss reading materials with children in ways that encourage them to enjoy learning.
7. During bedtime reading, ask both easy (build confidence) and more difficult (but not stressful) questions about the story (the more difficult questions help with comprehension). Do it lovingly.
Over the six years of Bug’s life, I have been reading him increasingly complex books. However, I have not adjusted my approach to reading. The model is pretty straightforward. Whether it was Goodnight Moon or Harry Potter, I recited the words on the page and he listened. Bedtime reading has been our chance to bond and ease into sleep, not to practice comprehension.
Since Bug started school and I began working full time over two years ago, our opportunities for exploring books together during the day have dwindled to nothing. These three bedtime stories are often our only chance to read together. This means that some days, they are our only chance to settle into a shared act of intentional learning. Dr. Ferguson’s suggestion to discuss and ask questions piqued my interest.
Since the summit, I have tried a new approach to bedtime. While I read, I slow down and ask questions. “How do you think she feels?” and “Why do the prairie dogs bark at each other?” and “Which of those guys has the toughest job?” I weave a light thread of inquiry through the stories. Bug loves it. He comes up with all sorts of speculations and novel perspectives. His goofy explanations are often designed just to get a laugh. Even just two weeks of talking through the stories has revealed numerous layers of meaning inside the stories (and the mind of my child).
It is sometimes hard to slow myself down long enough to explore a book in this manner. We arrive home after dark. Once dinner, homework, and bath are done, we are both drooping. I could let myself off the hook, what with that unfinished pile of laundry waiting. I have persisted, though, taking a deep breath and letting myself be with my boy in the open place of a story. “Hmm. Why did it turn out like that?” I ask. Or “Uh, oh! What do you think will happen next?” Bug pays much closer attention now. He looks into the drawings, asks me questions, and sometimes turns back pages to think through the possible causes of a scenario.
In reading this way, we bond more completely than we do in the parallel universes of reader and listener. As we make meaning from the book together, we are crafting our own shared experience. We exist within but also separate from the words on the page. In this new mode, time seems to slow down and stretch wide open. I become lost inside the narrative much the way I do when I am reading my own much more complex grown-up books. It is a wonder to see my own son developing not just a love of the written word but a fascination with story. All that richness, all that mystery, is right there inside our relationship with each other as we read together. It won’t be long before Bug can open a book and find his own way into that magical place.
My pirate boy races down the neighbor’s driveway with his ninja friend. Light from paper bag lanterns dances low against blacktop. The two disappear into a pool of ink oozing from hedges. For all we know, they have slipped into the underworld. Silence. Dark. After a beat, the knock and the sing-song “trick or treat” drift back up towards us. The door closes and a gauze ghost billows from clothesline. The boys cut behind the houses, gone into night. We call and call but they do not respond. A few moments later, we hear them again, chattering as they clomp back up the hill. “Mommy! I got a soda!” Comparing the heft of their booty and ogling their matching ring-pops, they wind dizzy circles around each other. Candy measured, they break to spar with foam swords before charging off towards another doorway ringed with bones.
Shannon E. Williams 