On Children lyrics interpreted by Sweet Honey in the Rock (Kahlil Gibran author of original text) Your children are not your children; They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you But they are not from you And though they are with you They belong not to you. You may give them your love But not your thoughts, They have their own thoughts. They have their own thoughts. You can house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in a place of tomorrow, Which you cannot visit, Not even in your dreams. You can strive to be like them, But you cannot make them just like you. Strive to be like them But you cannot make them just like you On Children from the group Sweet Honey in the Rock song played from the car’s CD player when my now 18-year-old* was a baby. I have recited these lyrics to myself, read them, and played the song many times since those early days. The lyrics are true every time, becoming truer with each repetition, helping me navigate what it is to be a parent. Some days the revelation fills me with awe. They explain some piece of their mind to me or write a poem or a new chapter in their novel or show compassion to a friend, and I know for certain they have their own thoughts and that I can only strive to be like them. Other days, that awe converts to frustration for the exact same events because their independence proves that they are not mine even when I want them to be. *uses they/them pronouns in English, elle in Spanish
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Growing up I learned how to keep track of contact information in an address book. Along the way addresses got crossed off, but never fully erased until was time to transfer everything into a new address book. I have never really set up a good system my contacts in the new world of perpetual data. I know that I have been in the digital age for a while now, but keeping track of people is something I thought I would be better at doing despite proving myself wrong time and time again. Somewhere in my computer I have a spreadsheet that I started. It only lists family members from a singular attempt to send holiday cards. Probably half of those addresses are now out of date, but I keep the list just in case. I have a lot of addresses in my phone contacts, of course. Others are hidden in an email trail. No ragged pages tell me that I need to take stock of my contacts and figure out who gets transferred and who gets left behind. No one system keeps them all in one place. I am not sure I can really call what I do a system. It is my version of throwing my hands up in the air. The result? This means that my grandmothers' addresses are still on that spreadsheet even though their eyes will never again read a card. A few days after my father died, I picked up my phone to text him something or other. It was probably something about his funeral which makes no sense but grief is like that. Is there a protocol for what to do with these digital reminders? To delete them causes discomfort yet to keep them seems morbid. Even when I do hit delete, I know that they are still with me and they leave their echoes. One of those moments happened today. When mom didn't pick up on her cell, I called the land line as one does. Dad's voice is still on the answering machine. He told me that he was not available to come to the phone right now and that I could leave a message. “Ooh, he made a deal with the devil. There is no way he is your father, he is your brother.”
No, he is my father. His hair stayed put and the grey waited to grow in. So young, but his heart did not know. His heart grew and grew in ways that a heart is not supposed to grow. In medicine, a good rule of thumb is to avoid being an interesting patient. That is the largest heart I have ever seen, the doctor said. My father is an interesting patient. Great for the doctors, not so great for him. The small grandkids gallop around and chime in with occasional sadness. “I know you are going to die.” one of them says. “That is a big thing to know about someone,” he replies. “I am going to swim in the pool now!” You start to really make deals near death. Anything to hold it at bay. Well-meaning folks send health advice. Friends ask in hushed voices, “Are you sure there is nothing else?” He knows he is dying. He wants to live but not if this is living. At the same time, death is so very final, you know. What is he waiting for? When everyone gets home? That will be tonight. When it is his birthday? That’s Tuesday. When we all head home leaving our echoes and forgotten articles of clothing? For now we sit around the bed looking at him, looking over him to the pond, birds, and occasional deer. Sit and wait. This is the longest memorial service I have ever been to, someone jokes. We joke in sadness even though most of the jokes are not any good. We whisper and then we try to talk matter-of-factly about what comes next as if we were making a grocery list. I look outside and see the grandkids, the best of what he leaves behind. I look inside the medicine cabinet of rows and rows of pills. Unused catheters and bandaging materials. He leaves these behind, too. Once the difference between life and death, no longer effective at separating the two. I promised myself to write while I am on break. Even if only for five minutes. I can do anything for five minutes. Except, man, I have to pee. I will be right back. I think I am hungry even though I just ate some lunch. Is there any chocolate anywhere? Maybe I should check Facebook again or was it Instagram. Oh, yeah, I wanted to see what was new on Twitter. What was I doing? Right, I was writing. Andi said that if you write for one hour you can usually write four pages. She did not promise four good pages, but simply some pages. A page would be good for me, even a sentence or two. Hey, look, there they are. If you are reading this then you know I wrote some sentences. Probably now is the time to apologize for wasting your time. Nevermind. Forget the apology, no one forced you to read this far down on the page. Besides, if you have read down this far, you are probably procrastinating, too. Listen to that, do you hear the voice from the kitchen? There is a question forming and I am the only person who can answer it. It could also be answered by Google, but why try the obvious when you can bother me with a question that I probably won’t know the answer to so that you can wait for me to try asking Google, #LMGTFY. I guess my annoyed voice is soothing. I can spend hours in my home and no one talks to me. But, let me sit down with my computer in my lap and suddenly I am the most popular person in these four walls. Next time I feel lonely or ignored, I need to remember to put a computer in my lap. Does it work if I want to be disturbed or do I put out different wavelengths when I want attention? Wow, look at that! Two whole paragraphs. Except maybe you could ignore the previous paragraph of whining because now the voice from the kitchen is offering to make me some tea. Maybe I do want attention when I put a computer in my lap, only I have unwritten rules of the kind of attention I want. I am almost always happy to receive the offer of a cup of tea kind of attention. And, no, not the consent cup of tea. That is a metaphor or was it an analogy? I am talking about a genuine offer of a warm cup of tea. Okay, so maybe I won’t make it a full hour. After all, I need to sip on my tea. Until recently, I've avoided being near death rather nimbly.
At 99, my maternal grandmother, so skinny that all the blankets were too heavy for her form lost interest in food and drink, common in the dying according to hospice and a puzzling concept for the family. She scolded us to leave rather than watch her die. Certainly not how she wanted to be remembered as we stood around, grasping onto her last breaths. My paternal grandmother, at the young age of 93, took a turn for the worse while we were together on a family vacation. That she was rambling somewhat oddly about things was not unusual. She did not always have the same sense of reality as the rest of us, after all. However, When she lay down and promptly got up because she couldn't breathe, we realized that perhaps we missed a crucial detail. Despite our poor attention, we did get her to the ER in time for her to give us a few more memories. Now I know what dying can look like. It is exactly the same and very different than I assumed. Confession time. I am binge watching Grace and Frankie on Netflix. The show follows two families as they realign their definition of family when the two fathers, Robert and Sol, admit their twenty year love affair, divorce their wives, and get married. At one point Robert calls Sol out for reading from a bridal magazine which Sol points out was placed in the bathroom by Robert. That got me wondering if there were magazines for same sex weddings. Because if they did not exist, I knew what my business start up needed to be. I went to the google machine and typed in "are there wedding magazines for gay couples." Of course, someone had already beat me to the punch. What I did find were a set sites with delightfully touching wedding photos. For your own peek: NewNowNext links to 4 such possibilities I especially liked the photos on Equally Wed. If there lingered a doubt in my mind on whether or not legalization of same-sex marriages made the world a better place, a short perusal of the photos put that worry to rest. The multiple positive images of people in love did the trick. I am glad that someone else already jumped my business plan since I think weddings can too often be overwrought and overly staged affairs. This attitude would probably hurt my chances for success if I were to delve into that line of work. I have never been so relieved that someone stole my idea nor so happy to stumble upon it. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to get back to my show. After 9/11 I saw our laws change, I had a vague feeling that we were giving away our freedoms and that things were going to get worse before they go better. I am not a great student of history, but if I were, this sense of unease might have been even stronger. Only a month or so after 9/11, I asked my husband to apply for his American citizenship. I was afraid. I was afraid that someone could plant drugs in his car and that he could be deported, for example. I wasn't paralyzed afraid, but I had several vivid scenarios plotted out where things could go terribly wrong, and emerging ideas of what I would do if... He got his citizenship a few years later - the immigration system in the US is not known for its speed and, luckily, we were not in a huge rush. He was sworn in by the Jefferson Memorial. It was a good day. My father took the train to DC to be a part of the day with us. My husband was proud. He has always been impressed by the rule of law in this country and the relative lack of corruption. Now he could claim it as his own. Meanwhile, I invented new fears. Without a green card, his only ID would be his driver's license. I made a copy of his passport and put them in the car glove-box. New fears and worries emerged of an overzealous police officer confronting my husband whose English might not be a match for high stress moment. Not too far fetched. I live near a town where the Minute-Men, a self-appointed anti-immigrant vigilante group gets to march in the 4th of July Parade. In our town the KKK left a pamphlet on our front steps inviting us to join. I guess they had not seen my husband. Anyway, background fears that I carried around seemed more reasonable on some days than others. This last month the fears have started to resurface. You see, my husband was planning to take a train ride into northern Virginia and then onto DC. Now, I generally like trains. I think they are a good mode of transportation. However, trains are also public spaces. As a woman, I know first hand that public spaces are not always safe but usually I am not worried about the police in those spaces. Hearing about ICE pulling people off of buses, reminded me again about the danger of public spaces. I assume ICE pulled of the brown skinned people. Let's call it a hunch. When my husband decided to cancel his trip, I was relieved. Then angry and then relieved again. Relieved that I would not have to worry. Angry that I had been worried and angry that I was in a situation that a cancelled trip caused me such relief. When policy makes the lives of everyone more dangerous than it was before the policy, the policy is bad. The current so-called zero tolerance policy makes life more precarious for citizens of this country, too. That's bad policy. Misunderstanding mother for ‘nother, I was always excited to meet someone named Marge. “Wow, ‘Nother Marge, isn’t it great that there is another Marge?”, I would exclaim. Maybe the Marges tried to correct me, but likely they enjoyed my confusion and did not think an explanation necessary. I was very upset when I saw the dwarf stealing her bed from the house on Lenola Road. Why did none of the adults notice? Could they not see what was happening? Later on, I realized that this memory was of the movers doing their job. I don’t know if one of them was a dwarf or not. ‘Nother Marge and Granddaddy moved from next door or across the wall to Main Street. After they moved, I learned the phone number by heart, 234-3xxx, and would call to let her know that I was going to sleep over. She would always ask if my parents knew of my plans. I did not really understand why they needed to be consulted. I did not imagine that she would ever turn down the opportunity to have me over. There were plenty of sleep overs and visits to Main Street. It was on Main Street where I learned to play cards with endless games of crazy eights and memory. Games that we somehow always won. On Main Street there were always cookies in the cookie tin. I was particularly enchanted by the squashed fly variety, aka the Currant Biscuit. The house had a long driveway that sloped downhill. From the steps she would instruct us to fly. We would put out our arms and start to run. She thought that, if we were not constrained by the cynical adult mind, we would take off. Even if we never noticed our feet leaving the ground, it was fun to run for a cause. She taught us that kissing your own elbow will cause you to change genders. And, when you reach your hand over your head and can touch the top of the opposite ear, you are ready for Kindergarten. On a walk through the woods, she would name all the trees, not understanding why anyone would be impressed by this knowledge. It is good that she believed in the impossible, especially in these last years. She pondered how her bedroom moved sometimes even though the pictures on the walls did not change. She was frustrated by the visits from her mother and sister because they would not talk to her. We nodded knowingly since these things happen sometimes. Looking out at the trees on Pocono Lake this summer, she puzzled over when they had grown. Trees grow in 93 years, we decided. As her youngest great-grandchildren ran around the beloved cabin, playing, she admired them, “Aren’t they wonderful?” Yes, they are. There will never be another ‘Nother Marge. Thank you for all the magic. I am pretty good at putting my head in the sand as the world turns around me. After t and p were elected, I cried off and on for several days. In live in an area where t is very popular, so it was not that I did not consider it a possibility. I knew very much that it was possible. I still cried. I hated being right. I kept telling myself that I shouldn’t be so pessimistic. I hate being wrong. I also told myself that it was about time that I take stock of things.
First steps? Speak from the I perspective.
This weekend I tried to imagine myself as a character in a novel.
WARNING: Unless you have an over-inflated or, at a minimum, a very healthy sense of self, don’t try this exercise at home. Why? Watch and learn. As my sister-in-law pointed out, we are now middle-aged. (Thanks, M.) I don’t mind my age, it is just the term middle-aged that weighs me down maybe because it reminds me of bleak descriptions from sixth grade history class of the time period bearing a remarkably similar name. That’s where my character sketch started, and it went something like this: White, middle aged woman, breadwinner, mother and wife. Dressed in sensible, though expensive, shoes and sensible clothes of a more economical variety. Overweight, having not regularly exercised in 20 years, which she is quick to point out are the same number of years as she’s been married. Read whatever you’d like into that coincidence of fact. Since we compress the memories of the past, her younger years are remembered with great fondness. Adventure and travel filled, with a sense of wonder and fearlessness. Childhood teasings and awkward teenage years now only a blur. Carefully edited memories stand in stark contrast with the now endless monotony of adulthood. Past dreams of making world peace a reality discouraged daily by reading news feeds and the inertia of inaction. She remembers reading about such characters when she was younger, solemnly swearing never to go down that path herself. Oh, did your eyes start drooping? Sorry about that. It would keep going, but the author just told me that the publisher has put a hold on the project. Footnote: Maybe next weekend I'll be a more positive protagonist. FYI: It is very cathartic to write about oneself in the third person. |
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