Lessons from the Dragon Mother

For the past few days, I’ve been spending what feels like every waking minute hunched over my computer, editing a video of three-year-old Pippa learning to ride her bike. This is my first time, and though it is time consuming and frustrating, like learning another language, it's also weirdly satisfying. I say weirdly because I'm not the most patient or present person when it comes to DIY, especially high-tech DIY (and anything involving speaker wires, hammers, or yardsticks). 

But as of this morning, after a 3.8 magnitude earthquake rumbled my writing loft, doing its best imitation of a furnace about to explode, and after I spent the next hour combing the web for reports of a quake, checking and double checking our boiler room for gas leaks, installing the carbon monoxide alarm that’s been languishing, forgotten, in our closet, I have a quasi-presentable little clip—set to music and not horrendously jittery—to show for my efforts. I taught myself how to do something. How novel. 

And how frivolous. 

That’s because, somewhere across town, right here in Santa Fe, a mother’s baby is dying of Tay-Sachs disease. If the story sounds familiar that’s because the mother, Emily Rapp, wrote an eloquent, devastating essay in Sunday’s New York Times. I began following Emily’s story last winter, after our mutual writer friend, Rob, introduced us on Facebook. She taught creative writing and had new baby and loved to hike, he told me. We should get together with our babies. We should be friends. 

But my father was dying, and I was preoccupied with grieving and traveling—specifically, grieving and traveling with a five-month old in tow. By the time I got around to following up on Rob’s introduction, it was January, and Emily’s Facebook page had a worrisome tone. I scanned back a few days, weeks and then forward, trying to make sense of what I was reading. There were mentions of doctor appointments and missed milestones, encouraging comments from concerned friends. Then, in plain black type, came the diagnosis: Tay-Sachs disease. A rare, fatal, genetic disorder without treatment or cure. Shocking that something so shattering could be laid bare on the screen, seemingly innocuous and unadorned.

I sat at my computer on that Saturday morning, as the world outside frosted over, feeling stunned. I didn’t know Emily. I didn’t know her son, Ronan, but I knew this terrible, final, irrevocable thing about her. I felt as though I ought to know her better, now that I held this terrible news, even while I knew with unequivocal certainty that we would not go hiking or go out for tea afterwards and talk about our favorite writers or new books we loved. Our friendship was over before it began. But what I didn’t know is that I would think of Emily nearly every single day since then, and marvel at her strength and bravery as a mother and weep for her dark-haired one-year-old son who might not live to be three. 

But many days when I thought of her, it was with despair and fear for my own children, for their fragility and mine. How is it possible to keep them safe, to keep us all safe? Last fall when my father was dying, I saw for first time how life hangs in a delicate balance, a spider web of hope, good health, and possibility strung from the ceiling, tenuous and easily swept away. Every irrational fear that could worm its way into my brain did, lodged there like an unwelcome, intractable houseguest. I spent many months in a deep state of anxiety. I had known, of course, that everyone eventually dies. But I hadn’t really known it. And now that I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, worrying about it, dreading it. Emily’s story haunted me, a devastating reminder that it happens to anyone, everyone, all the time: to fathers who are not so very old and children who are far too young and to mothers who love them madly. 

All winter and spring, I read her essays and blog posts, and watched as she grappled with Ronan’s illness and her own unscripted role as a mother of, as The New York Times put it, “a child with no future.” Her writing was eloquent and unflinching—reading her stories, I could tell that the act of writing was essential to her, a way to save her own life even if she couldn’t save Ronan’s. There was nothing extraneous—every deliberate word seemed to propel her forward into a new uncertain world, her world, like hands fumbling for a light switch in a darkened room. One step, and then another—words on the page a lifeline from this moment to the next. I felt this, viscerally, absolutely, and was filled with admiration. 

And guilt. How could I write about running or eating peaches or teaching my three-year-old to ride a bike or my one-year-old to sit still in a raft like a seasoned river baby, when another mother, whose baby will never grow to ride a bike, was wrestling with the biggest question of all: How do I help my child live and die with grace and dignity? If I really thought about it, it seemed possible, and perhaps preferable, to stop writing altogether. 

But I didn’t. Emily inspired me. I kept muddling through, even when the hollowness of my own stories, the seeming inconsequential-ness of them, felt like a deliberate slap in the face to this Santa Fe mother whom I didn’t know but who had been generous and open enough to let me feel as though I did. 

Like most writers, I write to make sense of the world, and my own life. Sometimes when I’m very lucky, the world and my little slice of it overlap in serendipitous ways, and I remember again how important it is to always keep my heart and eyes open, that inspiration comes from remarkable places, and that everything leads us to a new place. When this happens, it feels as though we are pieces in a larger puzzle that is slowly forming, fitting itself together, revealing itself gradually, in increments, until we can see a new picture in its entirety. This is how it has felt reading Emily: uncomfortable, terrifying, tragic, humbling, illuminating.

Now, after reading "Notes from a Dragon Mom," I see my fear and self-doubt in a new light, with more patience, acceptance, and compassion. “Parenting, I’ve come to understand, is about loving my child today,” she writes. “Now. In fact, for any parent, anywhere, that’s all there is.” These words are a gift, and consolation, to us all, but at such an unbearable cost. 

So I will keep racing after Pippa as she wobbles around the basketball court on her pedal bike. I will hike on Tuesday mornings with Maisy on my back, up to the same ledgy overlook with all of Santa Fe sprawling out below me. I will spend ridiculous, untold hours editing scrappy little homemade movies, and I will keep writing, about raising my daughters to be fiercely alive, outdoors, in the wind and the sun, crashing their bikes and getting back on again. This is OK. This is more than OK. This is what I do today. This is how I live now. This is all there is. 

Ode to Peaches (+ bonus recipe!)

I have been meaning to post about peaches! Of all summer fruit, a good peach is my absolute favorite. When I was little, my grandmother would arrive at the cottage bearing old-fashioned wooden bushel baskets full of Niagara peaches, the kind with actual fuzz that squirted juice when you bit into them. I could eat two or three in a row, and the only rule was that we had to sit on the front steps with a paper towel tucked under our chin, preferably wearing only our bathing suits, and hunch forward so that all the juice would run off our chin straight on to the verandah, sparing our clothes, because as my mother announced every single time I ate one: “Peach juice stains!” 

Ontario peaches come from the Niagara escarpment, fertile farmland southwest of Toronto on the shores of Lake Ontario. This is where Frieda had her farm. Frieda worked as a live-in housekeeper for my grandmother in Toronto in the 1950s and 60s. She was from Estonia but had immigrated to Canada and moved into the sprawling attic in my mother’s childhood home on Russell Hill Road. Frieda bought her peach farm on the Niagara escarpment in the late 1950s, and every August she would take her vacation, move out to the farm’s one-room cabin, and work in her orchard. She did all of the spraying and harvesting herself, and each morning a truck would come by and pick up the day’s harvest and take it to be canned. 

By the time I was born, Frieda had sold her farm, but my family had been spoiled on fat, furry peaches, and it was impossible to eat one without thinking of her. In the early 80s, when I was old enough to have my own memories of Frieda—her blondish grey bun, sensible beige, belted dresses, and her retirement apartment in a balconyed high rise along the highway—Frieda was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died some months later, leaving a peculiar vacuum, though maybe only peculiar to me. She was not family, not exactly, but she had been a fixture in my mother’s for so long that when she was gone the idea of her seemed to shimmer hazily like heat on summer pavement, always just a bit beyond my grasp. 

Ontario peaches ripen in August, so if you are at the cottage that month, you can boat over to Leahy’s farm stand at the marina and buy them by the bushel and eat at least one while you drive home, leaning over, of course, so that the pale pink juice runs off your hands and onto the hot metal seat or, even better, over the gunwale and into the lake. They are as sweet as nostalgia, and too good to waste in pies.

I was at the lake in July this year, not August, so I missed the peach harvest, and missed imagining Frieda on her farm in her dungarees with a kerchief tied over her head. Here in New Mexico, peach season is quite short, and if you are lucky you might have two or three good reliable weeks of peach-buying at the Farmer’s Market, but you have to get there early before the farmers from Velarde and Rinconada and the Upper Rio Grande Valley sell out. A late frost last spring killed most of the fruit. As peach summers go, this one was shaping up to be a bust. 

So I was excited when a friend of a friend told me about Marguerite, a Santa Fe woman who imports peaches from Colorado. Every week starting in mid-August, Marguerite drives seven hours north to Palisades, a farming community on the Western Slope of the Rockies, to buy peaches. She fills a truck with fruit picked that day, or the day before, and then turns around and drives home again. A few years ago, when I was reporting a story about organic farming outside of Aspen, I discovered Colorado peaches. They are huge and sweet and are as close to Ontario peaches as any that I’ve tasted. I called Marguerite to get on her list. 

A couple days later, I drove out to Marguerite’s horsy property just out of town and walked into a darkened, chilly garage filled floor to ceiling with larges boxes personalized with farmers’ names and logos. This was the real deal, a major score. There were so many peaches, it felt almost illicit, like a covert drug den, only not. Marguerite showed me boxes of organic and lightly sprayed peaches, in gorgeous, as advertised, hues, with tantalizing names: Crest Havens, Glo Havens, Sun Crests, Angellus. I bought two boxes for $32 each, less than $2 a pound, and staggered out to the car carrying 36 pounds of peaches. Other people were already crunching up the driveway to get in on the stash. 

I gave one box to a friend, and let ours ripen on the counter for a few days before digging in. They were perfectly ripe, fuzzy, and sweet, just like Frieda’s. We polished off the box in less than a week: peaches on cereal, peaches for snacks, peaches on ice cream, peach cobbler. I made my girls take their shirts off and eat them bare-chested on the front steps. Just as I was beginning to hoard the final few, I got an email from the peach lady, saying she had more. I drove out to her place and picked up my fix. 

This went on for a number of weeks. Steve stopped snickering about the enormous quantities of peaches that kept appearing on the counter. The first week, he’d defied me to eat them all before they rotted, and I’d risen to the challenge. He hadn’t known he was dealing with a professional who came from a long lineage of peach-eaters, but now he did. He shut up and ate them, too. 

Pretty soon it was Labor Day. I began to get ominous emails from the peach lady that peach season was winding down. “This might be the last week,” Marguerite told me one Friday morning when Maisy and I showed up in her garage. The boxes towered over the room, as always. It didn’t seem possible that this ridiculous peach bounty could ever end.

The peaches were so good, they required zero culinary skills. I could slice one and stick it in my daughter’s lunch box and look like a genius. But we’d had so many weeks of peaches, I was beginning to get cavalier with my supply. I brought half a box to a friend’s baby shower. I thought about blending one into a smoothie. Heresy! When Margureite emailed a recipe for grilled peaches, I decided to get creative. Or, correction: I decided to let Steve get creative. He selected a few tender ones from the top of the box and got to work. 

If you’d told me that, by the end of the summer, we’d be eating peaches for dinner, I’d have laughed in your face. But now we’d had so many for so long, it seemed to be the next logical step. I wasn’t tired of peaches, far from it, but the sheer abundance filled me with an invigorating sense of freedom, bordering on recklessness. Barbecue peaches! This was what life had come to. 

Steve put them on the grill with organic chicken breast he’d marinated in olive oil and lemon. Both chicken and peaches came off tender and juicy, the sweet of the peach a perfect complement to the tart lemony-ness of the chicken. We served them with arugula and mustard green salad, harvested by headlamp from the garden that very evening. Frieda, I thought, would be proud. 

A few days later, I called the peach lady to see if she had any left from her last delivery. I’d been fantasizing about peach ice cream. “Nope, sold out,” she said. One lone peach remained on the counter. I picked it up and held it in my palm. It was perfectly round and fuzzy and felt almost warm from its ripeness. It seemed almost sacrilegious to eat it, the last vestige of a wonderful summer. But I could see a small grayish dent beginning to form on one side—it was now or never. I ran it under the tap, took it out to the front steps, tucked a paper towel under my chin, leaned over, and bit into it. If memory has a taste, it would taste like that last peach: sweet and sticky, oozing juice, a dozens of happy summers packed into one perfect bite. Peachy.

Marguerite’s Grilled Peaches:

Cut peaches into quarters and marinate in good balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt & pepper.

Get the grill hot, put them on, and turn down to medium heat until they are beginning to brown around the edges.

Enjoy as dessert or serve with chicken and a salad:

Arugula and fresh mozzarella cheese with a simple lemon juice and olive oil dressing.

Crossing Over

It’s been grayish and cool for a few days—an eternity for Santa Fe’s climate—and so when I woke this morning to see the sky scrubbed clear of clouds and cornflower blue, I knew there was only one thing I wanted to do: go for a run. The clarity was a gift; often I feel so torn between motherhood, writing, and adventure that I can’t decide how to spend the free time I have. Am I an athlete today, or a mother or a writer? Should I be working, playing, or hovering around the house with the babysitter, to compensate for all the times I do leave? I miss the predictable rhythms my days used to have before the girls were born, when activities fit in neat little boxes. First you work, then you run, or vice versa. Multitasking was something that harried mothers with spit-up on their shirts and food in their teeth had to do. Now I’m that mother, and figuring out how to fit it all in is its own task, a time-suck I can’t afford. 

So I was psyched this morning to be able to so clearly visualize my day. First I run, then I write, then I mother. My heart and mind knew exactly what to do. But my body didn’t. The minute I stepped out of the car at the trailhead and slid my toes into my Vibrams, I knew something was up. The soles of my feet protested the thin layer of rubber beneath them. I was the Princess and the Pea—I felt every pebble in the parking lot pricking at my heels. I’ve spent the last six months running in my five-finger shoes, building up thick calluses on my soles. But today everything hurt: the long, reptilian crack in my right heel, exacerbated by four days on the river. The sometimes-tender spot between my big toe and its neighbor. My right Achilles. 

But I ran anyway, limping through the first downhill, with the awkward gait of a just-born foal, my limbs moving in opposition to each other, my feet reluctant to fully settle on the ground. I thought if I could get through the first descent and start climbing, my body would know what to do. But even after my gait eventually normalized, I still felt like I was running on knives. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so sticky and sore, my body fighting itself and the normal paces I put it through, the very thing that usually brings me such strength and joy. 

Then I came out of my myopic little pain cave and remembered. 

A year ago today, my father learned he had kidney cancer. I don’t know how he got the news that day; I never did ask him. But as I hobbled along, I could sense his shock, the stoicism and disbelief that would follow, the dread at having to acknowledge this truth, the private way he must have held it at first, this knowledge of how little time might remain and the tasks that lay before him. His wife would have been top of mind. And his farm. And his unfinished work. And then, when the news settled a bit, how to make the necessary phone calls, to make it real, to set this new paradigm loose on the world, on us, his daughters. 

He called me two days later. It was a Sunday, hot and sunny, summer still clinging hard to us, and vice versa. We decided to go rafting on the Rio Grande with some friends and their son. I knew it would be the last raft trip of the summer. I didn’t know that it would be the last raft trip before my father died. 

My phone rang just as we were about to drive into the Rio Grande Gorge. A minute later, and we’d be swallowed up by the canyon walls, with no service for the rest of the day, but he caught us on the cusp. “Hi, Katie, it’s Dad.” His voice always used to rise on that last syllable, audible excitement mixed with golly-gee surprise that I picked up the phone. 

“Hi, Dad,” I said. “We’re going rafting. We’re about to go into the Gorge. I’m probably going to lose you. Is everything OK?”

“No, not really.” Those words, a body slam to the chest. 

I don’t recall my response, just that I lamely assured him that I’d call him as soon as we got off the river and out of the gorge. I felt the blood rush to my head and looked up as we passed the gas station and the fruit stand and the creepy abandoned motel-looking adobe and the glazed pottery shop and met the Rio Grande on our left and saw that it was still clear and flowing and that we would have a good float, regardless of the words I had just heard but had not yet uttered or dared to make real. 

The canyon was the threshold between knowing and not knowing, between life as it was and life as I didn’t care to imagine, ever. I didn’t know the details, but I knew. Uncertainty rippled over me in waves, and dread sat down to stay. It was bad, I knew. 

We floated the Rio Grande that day. The river was low but still passable, the day warm and gorgeous. Our friends borrowed our canoe and got excited and accidentally ran it into some willows on the bank, which scratched their son’s cheek. There was some drama, but none compared to the horrific scenarios in my head. I told my friend about the phone call, and she said, “Don’t worry until you have reason to worry. There’s no point,” and her advice sounded good, so sound and rational. I threw myself into it, that sensibility and level-headedness, to no avail. Steve rowed and I held the baby and wrestled the two year old and I worried. I knew. 

the river that day

The rest of the day was a blur, except for this part: When the gorge spat us out again and I saw that my phone had service, I actually thought about not calling. Fear had me in its clutches, and rather than surrender, I was going to avoid it, ignore it, as long as possible. Fortunately my husband was more sensible. “Just call,” he said. “You never know.”

I did know, but I didn’t know, and then I did. I called and my father told me. Malignant tumor on his kidney. What he didn’t tell me was how long he had, or how big the tumor was, only that he felt relieved to know, relieved that the pain came from an irrefutable source, not just from his head, not from fear. This seemed to give him some comfort, even though it was the worst kind of news to receive, and deliver. “Stay positive,” I said, as much to myself as him, and for a moment I latched onto my own advice, as I had my friend’s. Yes, no reason to panic just yet. 

So it began, the season of denial (mine) and despair and dying. When I visited him in Virginia a week and a half later, he said to me, “You know when your body is trying to tell you something. You know when something’s wrong. Listen to it.”  I knew he was talking about his stubbornness and fear of going to the doctor, to get his lethargy and lack of appetite checked out. But instead, he’d pushed through for months, out of denial perhaps, or out of an uncanny certitude of what lay ahead. Perhaps he knew but he didn’t want to know, just as I hadn’t wanted to know. Perhaps he thought he could just push through, until he couldn’t anymore. 

I didn’t think about all this while I ran this morning. I thought simply about my dad, and of being on the cusp of this season again, and not being ready for it. I thought about stopping, of sitting down on the pine needles and really thinking about what had happened, but instead I kept running. I pushed through. I thought that if I could keep running, I could shed my pain, which was his pain, really, and send it out into the ponderosas and the sky that was clouding over and the air that smelled like fall. I felt like I could push through, and I did. 

Thresholds

We made it to first grade this past week. And, let me tell you the anticipation was immense for me. I felt such a mix of emotions as I watched him go from our long summer days of togetherness to the fall days where he is at school for most of the daylight hours. Well, maybe I am exaggerating a bit but for a huge chunk of them. Last year he went to half-day kindergarten and that felt like enough, now he is in full days, and while he was scared of them, he comes back saying that it was “awesome.” And then the first few mornings woke up and asked to only go half-day. 

However, this shift to full days is larger than first grade, from now on he will spend more and more time at school and less and less time with us. And, well, I love this kid, I love to hang with him, and talk with him, and do art with him and play with him. And now I have to share him more and more with others. I will miss him, and as my neighbor’s husband said when her babe went off to full day school, “He’s still mine, and there is still a lot of parenting left to do!”

Amen to that! 

*First day of school picture to follow…still trapped on my camera!

Getting a boost!

Last Tuesday I got a shot of penicillin in the arse. Yep, 36 years old and I donned my never saw the sun skin to a nice medical tech or nurse, not sure which he was, Andy, and gratefully received that long needle in my right cheek. 

You see I was dragging! Vicious headaches, raw sandpapery sore throat, aches everywhere for five days, until finally after my hubby’s urging I went into after-hours care to see my daringly talented neighbor, who also happens to be a doctor, who swabbed my throat and proclaimed STREP! 

I awoke this morning, still sick, but with the promise of getting better, to this quote from the Dalai Lama as one of my first facebook feeds. It was a gift.

“In daily practice, reflect on the benefits of love, compassion and kindness, then reflect on the disadvantages of anger. Such continuous contemplation, the growing appreciation of love, has the effect of reducing our inclination towards hatred and increasing our respect for love. By this means even anger can be diminished.” 

You see, I have been feeling maxed as I shared a few posts back and when I get maxed, anger creeps in. This is not fair to those around me. It affects my relationship with my husband and the littles, when mean momma raises her vicious head. You see I loathe anger in myself. A friend of mine made the connection between her sleep habits and her resort to anger as a tool for kid management. She brought what was lingering beneath my consciousness to awareness. An Aha moment you might say. Thanks Jenni, and, now I too am joining the sleep make-over. 

My sleep makeover began last spring when I was still pregnant and Katie pointed out to me that working with a computer or iphone in my room late at night is not good chi, and does not promote good sleep, Then, Katie visited me when my fourth was ten days old and raved about her sleep system, eye mask, ear plugs, white noise and zzzzzzz, it helps take the edge off. She even went as far as mailing me my own sleep system. Now after being sick for five days, (something I also loathe, and do not have time for,) I realize even more with school around the bend I need a boost and it is not just through penicillin in the bottom or sleep alone, but also prayer. I’d been neglecting my prayer, which I have a hunch will make me slow to anger too. So this time when I kneel it will be for grace and not just an antibiotic makeover. And instead of letting myself get so run down to the point of needing an antibiotic boost, I'm going to get a sleep boost and hope that makes my immune system naturally balanced and healthy! Bye bye strep! And with school around the corner who couldn't use a few more zzzzzz's.

My sleep pledge: I will shoot for 9-10 pm bedtimes, no iPhones or computers within reach, and last thing uttered on my lips prayer and the first sounds spoken grace.

Post Script: boosters do hurt and if you want to do your littles a favor rub the spot out after they get a vaccine!

Grousing, Vindicated

A story after my own heart,  from NPR's Alan Greenblatt, in which he says that there are many days when parenting just plain sucks, but we're not supposed to talk about it. As a friend of mine told me last week, about mothering, "Sometimes I hate my job and just want to quit. But I can't!"

Here's an excerpt:
Parents: Let's make a deal. Let's be honest with each other, or at least one friend, that there are times when the whole enterprise feels like a bad idea. Let's be less alone with this and maybe even laugh about it, putting aside for just a few minutes the earnest need always to say, omigod it's so great.

It seems only fair. The one thing we all do is complain about our parents.

Deal!

Walk, Run, Sit.

You have to walk before you can run. At least this is the manta I kept telling myself as I tried to run for the third time since my fourth boy. This time from my house, down the Summit boulevard trail to the monument at the river. The path, a worn, dirt one, hugged by clusters of pine trees, some with large enough bases to be a fort for a 6 year old in the winter. Sun and welcomed shade graced my face, as I wove between the trees from a run, to a jaunt, to a walk back to a run again…it’s humbling to say the least as I grasp for breath. All the while I envision myself running these two short miles with breath full and bold circulating all the way into my sacrum and pelvic floor, not pausing at my neck where it seems to be stuck on a loop. 

I approached the last leg of the trail before it hit the River Road, I was stopped by a small boulder that had a plaque on it dedicated to the Junior League Women of St. Paul in 1977 for the reforestation of the city; those trees that lined my path placed by dedication to beautify. I paused with my hands cupping the rock, and behind me a bench invited me to sit on it with the morning dew still present. 

(I wrote the above paragraphs on Monday, it is now Wednesday and I am just now getting back to this, to that moment.) 

You see something happened in that moment I chose to sit in stillness with the wet dewed bench soaking my god-awful yellow running shorts. I felt my spine grow tall, my shoulders open up, my mind settle downward, and I tuned into my breath, I imagined it moving from my neck to my shoulders down to my stomach settling and circling through my sacrum and pelvic floor. An occasional car, or barking dog would punctuate my sitting meditation and I would notice them, even at times glance their direction, but then I would return to my breath. To feel the rising sun’s rays, slant cross the boulevard, and dance across my face. Gradually, with each breath I was more and more in my body and less outside of myself. I finally turned to go back on the trail I had come from instead of going the last fifty paces to the river, I realized later the importance of this, the river holds trails I walked as a child with my parents, but those old paces hold things I no longer wish to hold for myself. And, just like that I was ok with stopping short of my goal, the monument, and grateful for that small plaque on that small boulder, that invited me to sit and still myself. 

As my feet hit the trail, I was in a different place. My mind felt clearer, calmer, and I felt more in tune with my body. My shoulders down and back, my hips more open, my feet more purposeful in their walk, and my walk became a walking meditation. And while I wished for the trails of the mountains I once hiked, I settled for the plains of the Midwest and I was ok with that.