He Came for the Penguins, Too

(photo courtesy of my sister, penguin lover extraordinaire)

Away

The girls and I spent last week in Chicago with my parents and sister.  We are home now, enjoying our first snow day of the year.

I will write soon.

Broken

When my sister was in nursing school she worked as a phone counselor for The Women’s Medical Fund.  The Fund, as she called it, provides low-income women and girls with the money they need to get abortions.

Sometimes she would tell me the women’s stories.  They were women who had other children they were trying to support and women with abusive husbands they were trying to leave and young girls who had hid their pregnancies well into their first (and sometimes second) trimesters.  I remember one story about a young girl (14 maybe?) who had been raped by an adult in her family and was in her second trimester.  I don’t remember all the details of her grim story, but I do remember that by the time she came to The Fund the only thing left to do was to sent her, on a bus, to Kansas.

The people in this country who, through both violent and peaceful acts, seek to bring an end to abortions believe that God does not want women to have abortions.  I think that they are not entirely wrong about this.  I also think that God does not want women to be raped, especially by men in their families.  I think that God doesn’t want women’s lives and bodies to be so devalued that they are continually and systematically denied access to reliable birth control.  I think God doesn’t want babies with profound disabilities to suffer, especially in this world that so deeply fears illness and disease and disfigurement.  I think God doesn’t want humans to turn their backs, again and again, on the poverty and abuse and violence that millions of children experience before they even learn to walk.

We live in a broken world, and abortion is but a part of that brokenness.

But because we live in a world where people like to keep things simple, abortion is the part of the brokenness that tends to get the most attention.  When you are trying to save a pregnancy, all you have to do is wedge yourself between a woman and her body, and we’ve been doing that since the beginning of time.  It is not hard to convince people of a fetus’ innocence (and therefore its right to life) but it becomes harder to convince people of much of anything about a child once it has been born.  Once a child is born there are so very many people and beliefs and systems and offices to blame for its struggles and eventual demise.  Once a child is born it’s not hard to forget about her.  We’ve been doing that since the beginning of time, too.

The pro-pregnancy people have made a movement out of dwelling in the promise.  But I don’t think God really wants us to dwell in the promise, at least not for too long.  God wants us to dwell in the here and now.  God wants us to roll up our sleeves and fix the lives of children who can draw breath and speak and who –if they could speak loud enough, and if we would listen– would tell us that they need clean air and food and somewhere safe to go while their mother is at work.

Dr.  George Tiller wasn’t wearing his bullet proof vest on Sunday because he was in church, and I suppose he thought he was safe there.  But as it turns out, he wasn’t safe anywhere.  When I heard about his murder I thought of that young girl on the bus from Philly.  And I thought about Grace and June.  What if they need a late-term abortion someday?  Who will help my daughters then?

Who will help yours?

To find out more about the National Network of Abortion Funds and to find a fund near you, go here.

Mother’s Milk

A few years ago, before  I was even pregnant with June, Chris and I took a trip to Rhinebeck, New York.  What I remember most about the trip was the size of the bed in our hotel room and this most amazing banana chocolate almond creme brulee cake-thing we had after dinner one night.  I also remember that we spent an afternoon at Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s home, and that I cried when the tour guide showed us her desk.  I cried because I wasn’t working much then, and I wanted to be, and I didn’t know how to begin.  The tour guide showed us lots of things in that house and told us lots of stories about Eleanor’s life at Val-Kill and the people who came to visit her there.  One of the things she told us was that Eleanor never learned to cook, so when important people were in the house on the cook’s night off Eleanor fed them scrambled eggs.

Eleanor Roosevelt making scrambled eggs.  Great image, no?  It illustrates both her privilege (how lucky she was that she was never responsible for feeding herself and her husband and her children) and her intelligence (how smart she was never to learn a task that would keep her from her work).  It reminds me of that old women’s movement advice about how a woman should never know how much milk there is in the refrigerator.  To be the keeper of the milk is to be hopelessly tangled in the kudzu vine of domestic life.  Avert your eyes from the sell-by date, train yourself to ignore the extreme angle at which you must hold the carton as you fill that last cereal bowl, and you shall be free.

Suffice it to say that I know exactly how much milk we have.  As I write this I am sitting in a library 15 miles from my refrigerator, which I opened only once this morning.  And still I can tell you that we have about a quarter of a gallon of whole with another to replace it when it’s gone, and half a gallon of skim.  We are just one full sippy cup away from the end of the goat milk kefir, which is too bad considering it’s the only thing June drinks and I have to go to Whole Foods to buy it.  We also have some half-and-half that’s dangerously close to solidifying and some almond milk that I keep forgetting to take to the dump.

Chris–God love her half as much as I do– hasn’t a clue about the milk.

I try not to know about the milk.  I try to plead ignorance when Chris asks me if I know where the ketchup is or if we have any olives or an open container of hummus. I want her to know something about the inhabitants of that vast Nordic landscape called our fridge.  But more than that, I just desperately want not to know.  I want to free some real estate in this downtown Tokyo called my mind.

Yesterday a small satin rosette fell off of one of Grace’s doll dresses.  She was bereft.  “Can you fix it?  Can you sew it?”  she asked, over and over.

“I don’t really know how to sew,”  I told her.

“Then I’ll send it to Reboo.  She knows how to sew.”

“Good idea,”  I said.  “We’ll send it to Reboo.”

The truth is I do know how to sew, or at least I know how to sew well enough that I could get the rosette back on baby Bella’s romper.  But I can’t know how to sew.  I already know how to do too much.  And while I can never go all the way to scrambled egg dinner parties, I can draw the line somewhere.  So I’ve decided to draw it at sewing.  And even though it will take more time for me to package up that dress and drive it to the post office than it would for me to just sew it, at least it’s time I can spend thinking of other things.

Like the fact that I really should stop by the store and pick up some milk.

A Good Sale

One of the stores in town that I love has a sale twice a year and during that sale the owner puts out basket after basket of beautiful children’s clothes and sells them for what my friend Alisa refers to as “Old Navy prices.”  I wait all year for those two sales, often just casually stopping by the store when the owner (who I know) isn’t in and asking one of the Smith girls who work there if the sale will be happening soon.  I don’t like to ask the owner about the sales because I don’t want to admit to her how profoundly cheap I am.  Of course she knows how cheap I am, of course she knows how cheap everyone around here is, but still I like to pretend that I buy more than just wrapping paper from her at full price.  (OK, I’ll be honest.  I don’t buy the wrapping paper at full price.)

Anyway, the sale started last week so I arranged my day without the girls to allow for some shopping.

There is so much inventory at these sales (Did I mention how cheap everyone here is?)  that you could spend hours going through all the baskets.  It takes a long time to unfold each piece, hold it up to an imaginary baby, and refold it.  But the clothes are so soft and colorful and smell so good that sorting through the baskets is actually rather relaxing.  Soon enough the whole process becomes something of a ritual and it is easy to do it–to decide if this shirt has enough purple in it for Grace or if that dress will still fit June when she’s walking–while you are talking a mile a minute to the other shoppers.

This time I am chatting with the store owner and then a woman, who I will call Gaby, comes into the store.   It is clear that she and the owner are friends.  Gaby has some news to share.  Her baby, who I will call Rosie, has arrived.  She has arrived early.  She has arrived 16 weeks early.  Sixteen weeks.  Which means that Rosie was born at 24 weeks gestation.  Which means that even though she has been alive for nearly two months she is still two months shy of her due date.

There is much sighing and “oh my God”-ing and “Oh Gaby! How hard for you!”  And then there are pictures on Gaby’s iphone and questions about how much Rosie weighs (she is up to three pounds) and there I am, standing right next to Gaby, folding and unfolding while she folds and unfolds and tells her story.  And then she starts talking about the nurses in the NICU and I can’t help but say something.

“My sister was a nurse in that NICU,”  I say.

Gaby turns to me, a huge smile on her face.  “I love those nurses!”

“My sister took care of lots of 24 weekers,”  I tell her.  “Lots.”  This is my way of telling Gaby that I know something of what it means to have a baby at 24 weeks, that I know that 24 weeks is the edge of the cusp of possibility, and that her baby is as fragile as spun sugar.

Of course I don’t say any of those things.  Instead I hand her a 3-6 month purple sundress.  “My girls wear those all winter,”  I tell her.  “You can just put a long-sleeve onesie and some tights under it.”

She puts it on her pile.

Then she tells us about a trip to Boston for heart surgery, and about the four hours a day she spends holding Rosie.  She tells us about the cable channels at the Ronald McDonald house where she and her husband sleep, and about how she didn’t know she was in labor until just a few minutes before Rosie was born.  All the while we unfold and fold.  She tells us that her husband doesn’t want too much pink and I tell her I think it’s smart to steer clear of pink in the beginning because eventually it’s all Rosie will want to wear.  Gaby tells us that this is the very first time she’s bought clothes for Rosie, and I wonder what it is about this day that makes the risk of the grief these clothes might bring her someday worth the joy that choosing them is bringing her today.  Because clearly she is happy.  She is happy to be standing here talking about her baby’s body and her baby’s preferences, yet to be revealed.

Finally the time comes when I cannot in good conscience stay any longer.  As it is I have lost my chance to go to the grocery store or take a shower before I have to pick up the girls.  I scoop up my pile and say my goodbyes.  I thank the owner for the sale, and I turn to Gaby.

“I’ll be thinking of Rosie,”  I tell her, “and maybe this summer I’ll run into you on the street and she’ll be sleeping on your chest and we’ll remember this day.”

“Oh I hope so,”  Gaby says, and I know her hope is for the baby sleeping on her chest and not the running into me.  I think she knows mine is, too.

On the way out I grab something I have folded and refolded a dozen times.  It is a yellow onesie with a small green bird silk-screened across the front, sewn out of the softest cotton I have ever felt.  I hadn’t been able to think of a single baby in my life that it would fit, but I also couldn’t put it down.  I hand it to the girl at the counter.  “This one is for her,”  I say softly, pointing to Gaby, who has her back to me.  “Will you wrap it up and give it to her when she is ready to go?”

The sales girl smiles and tells me that I have made her day.  “Just for that,” she says, “I’m giving you all of this for 50% off even though some of it is only marked for 25%.”

But of course that’s not the real reward, even for a cheapskate like me.

Happy Birthday, Grace Mae

There is an old shed in our yard whose sash window frames have been stuck open from both the bottom and the top since the day we first saw this house five years ago. And four years ago today a bird flew into the space between those frames and could not get out.

Reboo, who was just Rebecca then, saw the bird first and then Chris and I saw it, and heard it—heard the strumming of its wings against the glass, saw it tossing between the panes, scooting itself a few inches up then sliding down, not able to make it to either opening. Rebecca tried to slide the swollen window frames away from each other, tried to keep them staggered so as not to crush the bird. “Up!’ we coached, “ the other one! “No, no, the other one!” It seemed like that bird was never going to get out and then all of the sudden it fluttered over the top of the splintered wood frame to a perch in the lilac bush a few feet away.

I had two contractions during the 10 minutes it took Rebecca to free that bird. I don’t remember who decided it was time to go to the hospital then, but we did. An hour later I was naked in a tub of water trying to make my way through contractions that were separated by less than a breath. And then, after 15 minutes of pushing, the frames of my body slid apart and our baby was born.

On Gracie’s first birthday I took her blueberry picking and when we got home I saw that there was a bird stuck between the sashes of that very same window. If this post were a piece of fiction I would not be able to tell this part of the story because it would seem too contrived. But it really happened. I set Gracie and the blueberries down on the grass and I freed the bird. There was probably a bird stuck in that window (why didn’t we ever close it?) many other days of that first year with Grace, but I never saw it. Maybe I saw that one because it had been a year since I saw the other, and I was looking. Maybe that is what birthdays are for.

Friendship Group

“I don’t like holding Carrie’s hands at ballet. They’re squishy like rubber bands. I only want to hold Ella’s hand.”

And so it begins.

“Well, if you are standing next to Ella, you can hold her hand,” I reason. “But if you are standing next to Carrie, you have to hold her hand, otherwise,” and here is where I feel myself wince at what I am about to say, “Carrie won’t have anyone to hold her hand and she might feel left out.”

When my sister and I were in elementary school, we were both chosen to participate in “Friendship Group,” a brainchild of the school counselor which served to bring together children who had trouble making friends with children who didn’t. Essentially it was a social skills group, operating under the assumption that the more socially adept children could model positive friendship behaviors and, essentially, help the less adept children become more, well, likeable, I guess. My sister and I were chosen because we were strong friend material, although I really think we were chosen because we were thoughtful, empathic and prone to taking on responsibility for the feelings of others— often to our own detriment. And if Friendship Group served to make the other children more friendship proficient, it also served to intensify our feelings of responsibility for the happiness of others. Just a few weeks ago, my sister–a nearly 30 year-old NICU nurse and graduate student at an Ivy League university–called me in tears because she was consumed with guilt over her intentional exclusion of a classmate from her high-powered study group. The group couldn’t handle the logistics of another member’s schedule, it was functioning well and simply needed not to be altered. “I feel awful,” Rebecca wailed. ” Now who is she going to study with?”

The two of us have only one thing to say to each other in response to situations like this, and so I said it to her. “Fuck Friendship Group,” I said, as I have countless times over the years. “Fuck Friendship Group” is our mantra, and we say it to remind ourselves that we can’t be held responsible for the feelings of others at the expense of our own. We say it when one of us wants to end a relationship, assert herself at work, decline an invitation, or make any one of a number of tortured decisions that might negatively impact other people’s psyches. We say it to remind ourselves that sometimes the person you are killing with kindness is yourself.

Which is why I stumble with my responses when Gracie tells me, as she does more and more now, that she doesn’t like this person, or doesn’t want to play with that person. “You don’t have to like so-and-so,” I tell her, “but you must be kind to her.” But what does “be kind” mean, exactly? Play with her even if you want to play with someone else, someone who you feel a rare and wonderful connection with, someone who makes your heart sing? I just don’t know. What I do know is that Gracie was born into a broken world, a world that is brimming with anger and hatred and competition and getting what you want when you want it. A world that values beauty and wealth and able-bodiedness and turns its head, again and again, away from the sight of imperfection and ailment. What I do know is that I feel I must, somehow, impart to her the essential truth that we are on this planet to try to ease each other’s journeys, when we can.

Yesterday Gracie came to church with me, and because she didn’t want to go down the hill to Sunday School, and because it was the first Sunday of the month, she had communion for the first time. She stood next to me in the circle we all form by coming out of the pews and standing in the aisles of our old and beautiful one-room church. She held my hand, and then she held her bread, and ate it, and then she held her tiny goblet of juice, and drank that. Our minister and dear friend, Steve, reminded us of many things during those fleeting moments of protestant ritual. He reminded us that the atoms inside the wheat and water and berries we receive are as old as time. He reminded us that people made the bread, and made the juice, and that we are grateful for their labor. And he reminded us that Jesus asked us to love one another as he had loved us. I fail at this. I fail at it every single day. But despite Friendship Group and all its lingering damage, despite my desire to raise a self-assured and emotionally healthy daughter, I still hear those words and believe they are instructions for a meaningful life. Which is why I will continue to insist on kindness from Grace, all the while trying to figure out for myself exactly what that means.

At the Beach

We truly had the most wonderful time at the beach.  A week of brillant sunshine and dry air, a full moon rising over the ocean, amazing boogie boarding (my wife is a tireless and most graceful wave rider), a daily walk along a sandy road to Duck Pond where Reboo and I swam and swam while Gracie and my parents played in the shallows, the beloved Cape smells of salty air and pine trees warming in the sun. 

Now we are home, my parents are back in Colorado, Reboo is back in Philly.  Grace has been the first child to arrive at school every morning out of sheer excitement to be with her friends again.  I am (finally) feeling better.  Gracie spends much of her time picking up leaves for her collection (a pile in the bottom of Summer’s stroller) and we’re headed to an apple orchard later this week.  It was 80 degrees yesterday, but a cold front is expected to blow in tonight.  This summer of sun and water, peaches and peanut butter toast, birthdays and baby-making, is just about over. 

To friends and family who have been asking for photos of Gracie’s and our faces, just write me an email or make a comment and I will send you my flickr link.   

Copping Shart

Whenever I ask Gracie what she wants to do today she says: “I want to go to the museum for kids at Reboo’s and play with the copping sharts.”  I think it might have been the best day of her life. 

Outsmarting The Secret

My sister and I are having a phone conversation.  I have just finished reading (skimming) The Secret and I am trying very hard to speak in Secret-friendly language.  Those of you who know what The Secret is and know who I am can understand the challenges this poses. 

“So,”  I say to her, “it turns out you can’t even say ‘I am infertile,’ because all the universe hears is ‘infertile,’ and that makes you infertile.”

“I don’t think that makes you infertile.”

I continue, ignoring her pragmatism.  “What you have to say is: ‘I am fertile.  I am rich.  My child sleeps until 8 a.m.’  You also have to imagine that all your bills are checks and you have to white out the balance on your bank statement and write in what you want your balance to be.”  This last directive is a real problem for me considering I have no idea where our last bank statement is and we don’t own any white-out. 

The problem is that when I talk to my sister on the phone I don’t want to say that I am fertile and rich and Grace slept until 8 a.m.  I want to worry and complain and make self-deprecating jokes and stay on the line until she makes me feel better.  But  I also want to try the positive-attracts-positive thinking of The Secret, I really do.

My sister has an idea.  “When you really need to tell me something, just turn the stereo up really loud.  That way the universe won’t be able to hear you.”