Let the Light in

  
Don’t marry someone just because dating them has been super exciting; it’s not always going to be. Sometimes you’ll be holding a bowl in front of them, waiting for vomit, and wondering how long until your own will come up.

Don’t search for a partner based on the life he or she can provide you with, it could all be gone in an instant. You know that.

It’s not about the ring (though mine brutally kicks ass), the baby count, or the square footage. It’s not the clock ticking, the race to the finish line, or the prepping to take the world’s most beautiful photograph.  

It’s about finding the one person who is willing to show you who they are, when the chips are down. 

It’s about them knowing you’re going to tell them the truth when they need to hear it most. And it’s okay because it’s why they asked you to begin with. 

You don’t have to always be up together and you don’t need to be always down together, and I’ll be damned if one more person says the best way to do this hard part of life thing is to just “take turns.”

Do it because of love. Do it because you laugh at the same stupid stuff and because you can freely admit you hate how the other one chews or breathes or folds their shirts. 

Do it because when the world suddenly goes dark and you find yourself furiously slapping the wall trying to find the light, you’ll know that’s the moment when nothing else matters.

And do it for the moment when the light suddenly switches back on, and then watch the scene in omnipresent distance; as you both tip your heads back in laughter. And relief.

Do it for the light.

  

The Story of Who I Am (now).

The words. All the words. And the sentences they belong in. I need to find the matches.

But they’re all over the floor.

They’re piling up against the wall, falling over on top of me even while I sleep. I don’t have the time to sort through them so I keep shoving them and stacking them back up; desperately holding out a disciplinary hand and asking them to “just stop! Stop!” moving. They glance at me quickly, with the sass of an undisciplined child that I know too well, and hop on their word-tushes and slide down the stack at an angle just precise enough to smack me right in the face.

The words, they have a story to tell. And I’m sorry to say, the story isn’t for you.

It’s for me. 

And before I share it, let me just also say; I don’t know what the story is yet. I want to be clear about this because it’s a little secret I’ve known my whole life but only just discovered; I don’t know what I’m going to say until I read it. And I’m pretty sure that’s true for you too, maybe you just haven’t realized it yet either. And this is important, because writing is as much about the reader going on the adventure as it is the writer leading the way.

So I’ve got the words in my bag (I had to grab a trash bag because they wouldn’t all fit into a purse with any kind of dignity). Here we go.

I asked my eighty-year old self if it had anything to say to me this afternoon. Okay no, this is what really happened. The kiddos were napping and I was reading/writing, while keeping close tabs on their restless but settling little legs banging against their cots, their need to feel a hand on the small of their back just one more time before drifting off to sleep, and surveying the scene to see if anyone needed to be stared at uselessly by me while they coughed. So once they settled, this is what I wrote-

Dear Lisa, from 80 year old you.

(Pause. Hesitation. Brain freeze. Uncertainty about everything I’ve ever done and said in my life… and then finally-)

“You were afraid, weren’t you; that I wasn’t here. That the truth would come out that it actually all made no sense in the end. Because that’s the real threat, isn’t it. That it all wouldn’t just be a series of twists and turns in a life of purpose, but rather; a straight up loss. Straight up mistakes, straight up failure, and straight up shame. You were afraid I wasn’t here watching, but I am.”

And, that was it. Like a visit from a long-lost loved one in a dream, she was gone. Just like that.

But something weird happened right after this. I turned to a blank page in the back of the book I was reading, and I added this-

I have always been a compilation of who I’ve been. Nothing changes that. The story belongs to me.

I have something to learn, wherever I am today. And if I don’t see it, it’s because I’m afraid to.

I used to think the hardest thing was to take a step back. To bow out for a while from the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are. But here’s the secret that hides beneath that; every time I step back I have a choice to make. Do I fight against this, with all my might. Do I yell and kick and scream that this doesn’t fit The Story of Who I’ve Always Been. Or do I sit my ass down, take a look around, and listen. The hardest part isn’t when you disappoint yourself. The hardest part is when you realize you have been the one building the walls that surround you.

Why is this brick here?! Who’s been mixing cement?! Who’s in charge here? Hello? Can I speak to the owner of this establishment please? There are bricks all around me! And they keep getting higher. Yes. I know. It’s perplexing to me too. Would you look at that, now there’s cement on my hands, I demand to know what’s going on at once! There is a wall growing higher around me, I’ve got cement all over my hands, on my clothes, in my hair, and all I was doing was standing here. Telling everyone about how smart I was. And how seasoned. And experienced. And accomplished. Someone needs to remove this wall immediately. This is unacceptable!

I look around.

I’m alone.

Everyone has gone home for the night. I’m the one standing in hardening cement, by myself, throwing an ego-laced tantrum.

When you’ve got the chance to let yourself down, do it. Then wipe the crap off your hands, the egg off your face, and clear the page for a new chapter; The Story of Who I Am Now.

 

 

 

Writer’s Un-Block

  
Something short of the precise opposite of writer’s block is happening to me. I was originally going at a manageable pace that I could bang out one of these pieces between one to three times a week, but now I’m just inundated with mental word piles. It’s a little like racing home when you’ve really got to go to the potty. 

Yeah. I just wrote that. 

So now, while I try and figure out which the heck gasket is leaking in my brain, I’ve been just making notes in my phone instead. I don’t want to lose a thought, but these are not quite ready yet. They still need to sit in a bowl in the fridge with a towel over them.

I have about fifteen towel covered bowls in my brain fridge right now. 

I didn’t even know I had a brain fridge. 

This morning I did my daughter’s hair for the first time since Christmas morning.

Alright calm down. I bathe her. Ok. Her hair gets brushed. I just leave before dawn and my hubby has learned to do the low pony tail and I don’t get to really do it anymore. 

And I missed it. And I miss her. I now work the longest day I’ve ever worked since she was born. I had it really, really easy there for a good long while. 

But now we smell each other when I get home. I’m sure this is fine. It’s biology. It’s motherhood. Or something. But we do. I drop my keys and sit down on the floor in basically the garage, and we just hug.

And then she takes off across the house to the kitchen, and loudly submits her application for something in the fridge that daddy has already repeatedly told her “no” about. 

The (brain?) fridge is like an endless list of options but with vaguely defined rules. 

Some kind of dough is rising in there. 

But for now I’m just gonna turn out the light and go to bed.

The Boys do all the Pooping. And you know it.

1). I have the worst cut near the underside of my pinkie toe from stepping on a cookie cutter that was on the floor in the kitchen.

2). Kindergarten registration is a week from tonight and whenever I begin to mentally formulate any word that begins with “ki,” I let out a convulsive gasp followed by hair trigger weepiness. It happens so fast and takes me a good fifteen to twenty seconds to recover.

3). For efficiency, I’ve been trying to run through that entire process while I’m taking a potty break at work. The only part that still needs hammering out is how to make the tears on the front of my shirt dry by the time my hand is back on the door handle. 

4). Damnit air.

5). Today I found an unexpectedly comfortable seat on a spot of soft grass on a tiny hill on the playground and I felt so guilty about enjoying it that I kept calling kids over to talk to me so I could still “do the teaching.”

6). Today while changing diapers I said to a coworker- oh my gosh- I just realized I always expect the boys to have pooped, and never the girls. I feel so bad. 

7). When, in ten to fifteen years, this generation of boys is angry at us for accusing them of doing all the pooping, you’ll be able to trace it back to this post.

Above All Do No Harm

I was ten years old, standing on my cousin’s bed in New Jersey. For the record we were only standing so that we could see our slouch socks in her mirror, carefully layering them to make sure they were perfectly fluffed. The pink on top and yellow on the bottom on the right foot, and then the yellow on bottom and pink one on top on the left. We wobbled a bit, balancing on the twin sized bed. The sun was setting behind us in the window, casting a shadow across the bedroom that forced her to turn on the light. There was still time. 

We looked up. Ran a quick check on our bangs, and we were good.  “I’m going to be a doctor or a scientist or a mathematician,” she said to me with confidence, “What do you want to be when we grow up.”

I plopped back down onto her bed, “I’m going to be a psychologist,” I told her. I imagined myself brooding over textbooks and autobiographies of famous psychologists. She leaned back on the pillow and probably envisioned drawing complex math problems on a university wall.

We looked at one another and nodded in agreement. It was a plan. 

Before I go forward; the funny thing, the funniest thing of all- is that it turned out we were exactly right. 

I dragged my dad to old bookstores and begged him to buy me books on psychology. He showed me names I had never heard of, who created theories I would soon rattle off of my tongue for the rest of my life. I read as we walked out of the store. I read on the car ride home. I read with the rain pouring down the window in my own room, and I felt the stirrings of something good. Something real. Important. Admirable. Brilliant. Dusty worn out pages do that to a young kid. It had been decided. I was going to spend my life thinking about thinking. But really- thinking about people. And my heart soared.

I could spend pages talking about heartbreak. But I don’t need pages. I only need one.

Psychology was my first love. And it broke my heart. What began as a beautiful thing got so quickly watered down. Now, ok, hang on. Everyone who has ever wanted to help others knows that their heart is true. It’s why you’re there to begin with. But as the years rolled by and the pages turned and my coursework piled up, it didn’t become stronger, it became looser. By the time I got to college my love had strayed so far from its original roots. And my heart ached for the loss. Do I think Freud had it right at go? Ha. No. Not even. He just took a stance and helped us get the ball rolling. I wrote papers upon papers agreeing and disagreeing with every God given theory I had ever come across. That was the journey, it was the process. It was to make inroads in my mind until I found the place where it all made sense for me. And it was beautiful.

But we shredded it. We watered it down. We supplied no money for the field to grow to accommodate the changing times the way we needed it to. And now, I’m not proud of it anymore. Now I hear myself saying condescending things, I hear myself echoing vacant comments when loved ones are going through the worst times of their lives. I find myself using the verbiage and the theory to shield myself from the real time pain others are feeling. 

A grief counselor told my husband last week, “Now just remember…!!! You need to be modeling how to grieve, for your daughter!!!” 

In medicine they say, “Above all, do no harm.” 

Now that statement up there two sentences ago, no matter how well-intentioned; did harm. 

We talk about taking care of our bodies, but our minds deserve to be taken care of with equally careful measure. 

I stepped away from this work because it had been my first love, and it had broken my heart. I didn’t grow the way my clients deserved. I didn’t feel that I was doing justice to this work in the paperwork high, insurancely motivated world we live in now. And I stepped away. 

But we know the truth- our hearts and our minds ACHE. And our hearts and our minds impact our bodies. We know this. And we have got to do better. Because this work isn’t just for the early traumatized child anymore, it’s for every damn one of us. 

Good Grief

The things I’ve learned about grief. Not an exhaustive list. Just a few things.

1). When you bring food: it’s not just about getting us fat, or taking something off the plate of the mourners. It’s about something even deeper. When you bring a meal to a grieving family, it gives them a space to come and sit down together at the table. If you give a grieving wife a meal, she’ll share it with her kids and her grandkids. The kids and the grandkids may come to the table. Sitting together, they’ll talk. And cry. And laugh together.

2). When you send cards or well wishes: it helps fill a bowl of comfort near those mourning. Maybe you don’t know what to say. Do we ever know what to say? But when you say something, anything, it’s heard. It’s felt. It gets added to the refilling of the heart pile. You know and they know it replaces nothing and no one. But what it does do is spread love, and holds space.

3). Mourners are scary to the outside world. They are a walking reminder of the thing we all live in fear of. And for a moment in time, they are living it. Their homes become places we used to love to visit, now are maybe doors we find ourselves shaking while knocking upon. The tasks they have to do, the phone calls they have to make all remind the outside world what we know; it’s inevitable. And someday that pain will be mine. And someday after that, that pain will belong to my loved ones. But if they let you in; go. If they want to share pictures and stories and empty spaces in closets; go. Grieving exposes a gaping wound; take a deep breath, and join them.

4). Grieving makes you miss everyone and everything you have ever lost. It’s cumulative. I believe that’s why the wave it brings roars only louder and louder as the days pass. It reminds you of all that loss, of all the unexpected change you’ve had to face. I guess that’s just part of the process of it all, and there’s no use fighting it (there’s no use fighting anything, really). You lean in. And you hang on. And you cry.

5). And also; don’t try to stop the mourner from crying. Crying is a bizarre gift. When I was a kid I was somehow put under the impression that it was bad. That it was holding onto pain. But my gosh, crying releases pain. It’s just so hard to watch sometimes. So keep an eye on each other. Comfort the loved ones of the ones who can’t stop crying. Comfort the ones who can’t seem to start crying. Whatever goes. Not being able to soothe your next of kin is the hardest thing I’ve ever faced in this life so far. So take care of the mourner and also take care of those taking care of them.

6). And finally- grief is surprisingly stupid silly in the moment when you realize sometimes it includes a crap load of laughter. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard before. Or cried so hard. Or felt more loved. Or felt more sad. It’s just, all of it. It’s all of it. Just make sure no one you know is having to do it alone.

Your Legacy

Today we lost my father in law. He had been battling cancer for such a long time now that I truly mean it when I say that I am so glad his pain is gone. To quote my mother in law this afternoon, “I’m not sad for him. I’m sad for us.”

He left behind a family, extended family, god family, and lifelong friends who will forever love him so dearly.

When I first met him, he asked me what I did for a living. I said proudly, “Infant/Toddler Mental Health!” and he just looked at me. And I looked at him. 

And he looked at me. And I looked at him.

And then he smiled. And I shrugged.

We never talked about our differences. Our viewpoints, our distinctions. And why? Because quite frankly, it never mattered. Without words, he solidified for me the one thing I think I’ve always known; it doesn’t matter. Because when miss Lily was born, he took to her like sprinkles on an ice cream cone. They laughed together, played together, caused trouble together, and napped together. He loved her with so much sweetness that I finally surmised that there were in fact no differences between us at all. It was all about family. And always about love.

He bragged about all four of his grandkids endlessly, even and especially behind their backs. He poured his heart and soul into teaching them everything he could; whether it be building or gardening or fixing something up like the visual genius that he was. 

He raised two of the most loving, honest, and loyal children of his own. He held to the standard of till death do us part, and he lived two lifetimes of all this before I ever got to meet him. 

My deepest personal sadness is for Lily, that she will not have a thousand more memories of him smiling at her, hanging her upside down while she shrieked, or holding her tightly in his arms until she finally succumbed to naptime. 

Thank you for living your life with such zest and honor that it makes it so hard to say goodbye. Thank you for raising my husband to be such a good man, and for showering our baby girl with the sweetest and most genuine love.

Please go on over and meet my grandparents. Tell them I miss them so much.

The way you loved and nurtured your family is your legacy. And I’m honored to have witnessed it. 

Reading Rainbow Ninja

In all my professional life, nothing has given me more joy than the moment I had yesterday; reading a book aloud to a room of 4 and 5 year olds. 

I had no idea the hidden magic behind the story-reading process. It’s one thing to read to Lily but to an entire class of eyeballs and half open mouths, it brought me a feeling I’ve literally never had before. 

And speaking of being present in the moment, I felt SO present. It was as if time slowed down and any nerves I had settled.

I think there should be like reading aloud therapy for when people could use a pick me up. Like how we have pet therapy and laughter therapy; now reading therapy.
Of course, you’ve got to have a great book in your hands too. In this case, it was Ninja Red Riding Hood by Corey Rosen Schwartz. Not having read it before and having no idea what was going to go down gave me the chance to be open and innocent along with them. 

SPOILER: The Big Bad Wolf gets the lesson of a lifetime and finds inner peace. I’m not kidding. It’s hilarious. 

Namaste’. 

And name me some more great children’s books I need to wrap my hands around. 

Party of Three

#parenting: We talk more about Jesus during hair brushing than any other part of the day. We also talk about, “for the love of God.”

#talkingaboutschool: “Tell me about this work you did.” “It says hundreds, tens, and ones. And look, what’s this little squiggly over here? (she giggles).” “It’s a EYEBALL!! Hahahaha!”

#teachinghardthings: “Lily, Daddy has been feeling extra grouchy lately.” “Why?” “Because sadness is at his console.” “How come sadness is at Daddy’s console?” “Because Grandpa’s body is really tired and that makes Daddy feel sad. We need to give Daddy extra hugs and kisses okay.” “Okay Mommy.”

#marriage: “Hey.” “Hi.” “How are you.” “Tired. How are you.” “Exhausted.” *PAUSE* “Okay, so today-” “No wait, I need to get it out first-can I go first this time.” “Okay but I have so much to talk about also. Alright go first. I’ll write my stuff down real quick so I don’t forget. You ready?” “Yeah go ahead. Wait! I just need to pee. And finish this muffin. Can you hear me from in here?”

#spirituality: Walking through the bookstore, “Hey Mommy! (she hushes and points) Who’s that?” I look over, “You know who that is.” “Yeah,” she replies with confidence, “It’s the Buddha!!” (Three nearby moms look over at me). I smile.

 

Work it, Mama

 
Signs you finally work long enough hours to miss your sassy 4 year old-

1). While at work you see kids are crafting letters to their parents, you consider cutting out a heart and writing “I love you Lily” in red crayon and glitter.

2). When you miss the way her head smells. And she’s almost five.

3). When you walk in the door at night and the embrace is so dramatic it could be the backdrop to 80% of country songs.

4). She tears up when you tell her how much you missed her. And she asks what you did today.

5). When she sits on you and you hold her tighter instead of clammoring for space.

6). When you see another kiddo wearing an outfit and you ask her if her mom got it at target. And “recently? do you know by chance?”

7). When you get home and ask where “the baby is” and you find out she’s with Grandma and you want to go get her.

8). When you haven’t styled her hair in weeks because you leave long before she wakes up. And you’re craving braids.

9). When you both just need to embrace at random times, like at Target, reaching over the layers of stuff in the shopping cart.

10). When she sees you and she can’t get out of her car seat fast enough to get in your arms.

11). When you just hold her and smell her head. And she tries to get away and you hear yourself say, “No but just let me love you!”

12). When a kiddo at work falls into your arms in tears, telling you she misses her mama, and you start tearing up and tell her, “I miss my baby girl too.”