Dark Days of the past

In 1998, I was a young mother. 28 with three small children. After two boys I should have been happy and excited to have my little porcelain doll daughter, but instead I was terrified. The therapist told me that I shouldn't feel any more overwhelmed to be a role model for a daughter, because I have already been teaching my sons how to view women. Great. She also tells me that I should look in my childhood to find the roots of my problems. Seek out my parents mistakes. Somehow that doesn't reassure me that I can be a good mother either. Our sessions didn't continue for very long.



I have never been easy to get along with. I am moody, irritable, a worrier. So if my post partum emotions were a little intense, it still didn't seem that much worse than usual. Ten years later, the details have blurred, some perhaps too dark to see, some blocked out in self-preservation, most memories just faded by time. I do remember fighting (about the pies, of all things!) with my in-laws when they came for . . . either Thanksgiving or Christmas. There were some Saturdays where I couldn't drag myself from bed, and spent the day crying. Church was one of the hardest parts -- pretending for three long hours that everything was okay, because I couldn't admit that it wasn't. There were many days that were just pretty much normal, though everything felt harder, and sort of clouded over.

I remember the feeling that by the end of each day, my children had consumed me -- sucked everything right out of me, and left me a pile of dry bones.

And I distictly remember the dark of night, awake, and changing diapers, with cold light slicing across the changing table, lifting my little angel, and whispering, "don't be like me. . . don't be like me . . . "

My husband first realized that something was truly wrong in the first week of January. He was desperate to get the Christmas decorations put away, and I couldn't pull myself together to get it done. He confronted me, begging me to work on it, saying that he would do it himself, only he knew that he wouldn't be able to do it to my exacting standards. Packing away the Christmas decorations is one area in which I am a perfectionist. Everything is carefully wrapped, boxes are labelled. But I remember that year, looking around, and realizing that I did not care. I felt so dead inside that I couldn't feel anything about these precious memories anymore. And I could not imagine another Christmas. The future was so black, I just couldn't see that far.

Dark Days

Today I am in quicksand. If I struggle, I will only sink faster, so I hold. Very. Still. I hardly move, hoping maybe to float, but it sucks me slowly down. The laundry piles up around me; dirty in the laundry room; clean, spilling from baskets, in the family room; folded piles tipping haphazzardly in stacks on the stairs. I move enough to feed my family, to keep the baby from crying, to help the toddler reach the potty before she pees. But today I just can't drag myself from the pit, and it sucks me sucks me down.

bumping

I feel the words bumping around in my head almost constantly now. Little words and phrases trying to get out. I try and try to order them into a story that I can tell. A story of someone else in another place. But in the end, there is only one story that I know how to tell. Or many little stories that make up the one true story. The story of me. For many years I have felt the words now and again, start to agitate and press, sometimes oozing out into a few lines of poetry. Something that can ease the need for a time. I kept waiting for the crisis, the denoument. Waiting for something important that will mean something to someone outside of me. But now the words are too persistent. I wake in the night with a restless baby, and the words are there, waiting, restless too. I cook, I clean, I play, and mingled with my ordinary daily thoughts, the words insist -- it is time. And so I begin to write.

All my life I have traveled along a thin line. The darkness waiting on one side to swallow me up, and my blessed life, full of laughter, hope, and above all, light, waiting on the other, hoping to embrace me. I've tried to choose the light. And mostly I've succeeded. There have been dark days, laying on the bed, looking through the cracks in the slats of the blinds, and seeing that there is light somewhere outside of me. But at least I have seen that there is light. I have dragged myself through days where I felt that I was pushing through water to get even the smallest things done. But I know of others whose days feel like dragging themselves through peanut butter. So I travel that line. One foot in front of the other, balancing, balancing. Always a little afraid, but mostly just concentrating so I don't lose my footing.

It sounds so dramatic that way, so I should mention too the times of sheer joy. The delight I feel in the embrace of my tiny children. The happiness I find in caring for an innocent baby, the contentment, and pride in helping a child with a project for school. The pleasure in my husband's loving arms. The fun in playful moments shared with friends, or family. Belly laughs, light laughter. Light.

For Emily

new favorite moment
to file away
to bring out
when you are grown:
nap-time snuggles in your new big-girl bed
face to face so close
I can smell your dorito breath.
I reach to caress your sweet chubby cheek
and you in turn pat mine
with your little warm hand.
My heart with that delicious ache
of almost bursting.
For a moment we both fight sleep:
you, to avoid the dreaded Nap
me, so I can creep away when you sucumb.
"I love you Emily"
"Love you too mom-mom. Soso much."
And then you roll away
snuggling deeper into your pillow.
Mission accomplished.
But this time I find myself
almost wishing
you would beg for a story
one more song
just to prolong
this tender moment.
I stare a few seconds at your little back
then, before I miss my opportunity
I go to tend to laundrydishesbills.

Grandpa

It's crazy how you can miss someone almost daily once they are gone, when you only saw them about annually when they were alive.

The last time I saw him, he was standing with Grandma on their driveway, waving goodbye, after one last hug. I'd said, we'll come in the summer. But we didn't. When I came, it was for his funeral.

I guess I'd known, even when I'd mentioned another trip, that we wouldn't make it out to Utah that summer. But I was trying to make myself believe that this wasn't the last goodbye. He'd slowed down so much in the last few years, that every goodbye worried me. On the other hand, he was doing fine. He still had a sparkle in his eye, and actually, conversations had been easier since he'd gotten better hearing aids.

It was on Justin's 12th birthday that I got the bad news. We had been spending the day celebrating . . . breakfast of kolaches (his favorite), shopping for the birthday leopard geckos and all their paraphenalia . . . and were home briefly before heading out for a late lunch, when I decided to check in on the family message board. And found Grandma's message that Grandpa was very sick. Leukemia.

When we got back in the car, much subdued, to head out on the next birthday adventure, the song that had been last playing came on. It was a Mickey Mouse CD version of "If You're Happy and You Know It," blaring loudly. We all laughed a little at the irony, at how suddenly inappropriate the song was . . . and then cried a little too. Because we were sad, and we knew it, and there isn't a cute little song to tell us three easy things to do to express our sorrow to find out a beloved Grandpa is dying.

Later in the day I called my mom, to tell her how much I love her, and how sad I was about her dad, and she gave me some more details, including the fact that she and my dad were heading out to be with Grandma and Grandpa in a week; that Grandpa was out of the hospital; and the doctors didn't really know how much time he had, but certainly no more than a year. It was sad, but it also gave me hope that I could work it out to fly out for one last visit.

In the end there was no time for one last visit. By the time Mom got there, they knew Grandpa was within days of dying. I was suddenly faced with a miserable choice: fly out immediately, hoping that I would get a few minutes to visit while he was coherent; or wait to go to the funeral. It broke my heart, but I chose the funeral.

In a way, that's what life is all about. Trying to make the very best choice out of the miserable options we are given. Or sometimes we're given really great options to choose from, and are faced with choosing what we think is best, and the trial is never looking back and saying "what if . . . ?"

I just hope that Grandpa thinks I chose well, that he understood that I was honoring the best memories by not seeing him at his worst. One of his regrets in his last days was that he had never made it out to see our newest house. But I know he has seen it now, because I can't imagine that Grandpa, given the opportunity, is not watching over his family. He loved us all so dearly. I just hope in his last bad days, where I didn't show up to see him, he knew how much I love him. Hope he knows now too. That he sees my choices and is proud of me.

Because Grandpa always chose the best. He was good, kind, tender-hearted, honest, generous, faithful, living a life close to God. In the days where I was struggling with his imminent death, my husband, who is not verbal with his feelings, said (in essence) "I know that this is really hard for you. You will miss him so much. But it is only for this life. You know you will see him again. Your Grandpa is one of the best people that I know, and we both know that if anyone will go straight to the Celestial Kingdom, it is him." Which in a way, was my husband expressing to me that he knew that I was one of the good ones too -- that someday I'll be with God again. And with Grandpa.

Instead of that one last visit, I'm looking forward to that first visit.

And I'm trying to choose the best, so I'll be there.

Tortured Artist

I usually only write poetry when I am depressed; yes, I am a horrible cliche -- the tortured artist.

And sometimes reading a book will inspire me and I will want to write. I will have words bumping around in my head trying to get out for days. Sometimes I will write some of them down, but sometimes they will just bump and bump until they give up, and my brain goes back to thinking the "normal" way.

But I suddenly feel like a switch has been turned on inside my head, and everything is prose trying to arrange itself on the written page. I wake at 1:30 am to feed my crying baby, and I am composing lines about her tiny hungry mouth at my breast. Not that the 1:30 am stuff is any good, but the point is that I can't seem to turn it off. So I thought instead, I would try to actually get some thoughts put down. Little stories, poems, etc that come to mind.

Your Eyes

Sweet little child, what do you see
with those brown-green eyes
looking up at me?
When I don't hear your cries
what crosses your mind?
When I walk too fast and leave
you behind?
When I can't ease your pain
do you know I hurt too?
Though I feel so deeply my failures
do you feel my love for you?
Sweet little child what price
do you pay
When I'm broken and seem to
have lost my way?
I see a worn-out mother
frazzled, half-dead --
But you look deeper and see
divinity instead.
In your eyes I find I can
almost see
The one you adore,
the mother you believe me to be.
When you reach out tiny hands
around my neck holding tight
Suddenly we're
both bathed in God's loving light.