Remains

I marvel sometimes at the way grief changes; how it changes over time, how it changes those grieving. How it differs between the bereaved. I've had a lot of time to reflect this weekend with P out of town. My schedule hasn't really changed that much with him gone for a long weekend--study, dishes, laundry, run, walk the dog, Netflix, a few social outings with friends--but when I've been at home, I've been alone. With no one else to hear my thoughts, they've expanded, or perhaps maybe collapsed in on one another. I don't know which best describes it. Ballooning, or a rabbit hole fall?

With a big change just around the corner for us, I've naturally begun to take stock of the chapter of my life that very naturally feels like it is ending, with a new one awaiting me. I have been nothing but excited about this change. I've wanted it to come quicker even, wishing away months of my life, which I know is never wise. And this weekend, my unanticipated gift to myself was to wish some of that time back, to slow down, to appreciate where I am as the cumulative harvest of where I have been. To analyze what it has all meant. To remember.

I see my life very starkly now, BC and AD, or "Before Carol" and After Death. When someone tries to orient me to a time in history my first reflexive thought is to place it before or after my mother died. As I age and, my god, could this be possible?, I reach a point where I've lived longer AD than BC, I wonder if I will still do this. I wonder if it will still matter the way it matters now. It will always matter. But maybe it won't always be the moment by which everything is oriented.

As a moderately tattooed woman, I thought rather soon after my mom's death about what tattoo I would get to honor her. I have one for both of my parents, but I considered one in her specific memory, and to mark my surface the way my experience of losing her marking my being. I contemplated getting her signature tattooed somewhere. One of my fondest thoughts is of her meticulous, beautiful, nun-taught handwriting. But I could never make the commitment. I wondered why. For someone with as much ink as I, why was a small signature, what could be less than an inch wide, giving me pause? 

I discovered recently an online company that takes drawings or signatures and stamps them into a necklace pendant. Immediately, I pulled out my credit card. It was as I was taking the photo of her signature with my phone to upload, staring at her steady handiwork for the billionth time in my life, that it came to me. Somedays, it's just going to be too painful to look at it. Somedays, it's just going to remind me that I will never receive another card in the mail signed in her hand. And on those days I can leave the necklace in a drawer. 

If I can move beyond BC and AD, maybe then I'll be able to stare at her in such an intimate way each and every day. When I recognize with a heart drop and a stomach flip that I have already forgotten the sound of her laugh, I see why some hang on to their grief. It's what remains. 

The trouble with setting up a blog around a specific premise is that once you've said a lot of things about that premise, the blog becomes abandoned. Another scrap on the pile of detritus that was that issue, that topic, that moment. But it seems that few things in my life have been consistent enough to orient around, really. A good friend of mine writes The Feminist Midwife. She's in practice as, you guessed it, a midwife. She has consistent material. I was a want-to-be writer and corporate shill for a while, then went to grad school, and for a while I was my grief, and sometimes I'm a wife and a friend and a dog owner and a reader and always a feminist but there are so many people talking about that online so why not go back to trying to become a published writer with those existing sites?

Sigh. Deep breath. Swig of beer.

Maybe once I'm in practice as a social worker I can orient around that. Yet I am one now, albeit still learning and working for free. I often think there isn't enough time. But I've always known I am a better person when I make time for writing. I want to be a better person.

I have been exercising 5 days a week for over a month now and that makes me excited. The most obvious reason is the actual release of endorphins when I do it. But it also relieves my constant depression. That constant (and I mean constant) niggling in the back of myself that says I'm not good enough or doing enough and that everyone is smarter than I. It says that few things are worth all the trouble of life. It says I've had a hard road. It heard of Robin Williams' death and was sad for the reasons everyone was, but also because I can imagine sitting alone in a room with that thought before making that decision. The only thing to keep that in check is moving my body. I've made excuses in the past, and they aren't untrue. I have a genetic syndrome that limits the range of motion in most all of my joints, or causes stiffness and pain. But I have found things that I can do, at least 5 days a week. I find that deeply satisfying. I am a better person when I've sweat.

Tonight I'm getting some reading done for school, and of course my last semester is proving to be the most difficult and laden with words to read and write. But I love it. I love how I become giddy over an idea and want to explain it to the next person I see (sorry, husband, that you are usually that person). I think big and then the depression gremlin worries that I'll think so big that any job I get right out of school is going to feel small. Useless.

A friend told me her neighbors abuse their dogs and that has haunted me for about a week now. I love dogs. I worry about those dogs. I can't wait until she makes a report. This is why I need to run an hour a day to keep myself near functional: I worry about dogs I've never seen who live 300 miles away.

I hope to write more. The writing will take a turn from grief. I suppose that part of grief though--the next part. The part where it isn't the only thing.

And yet.

My husband brought a cake home from a coworker. It was billed as lemon bread but when I opened the Tupperware and smelled it, touched it, even before I tasted it, I thought of my mom. She made about a handful of recipes, and mostly from boxes. This was one of them. Her lemon cake. It was confirmed as soon as I put it in my mouth and a flood of cookouts and Fourth of Julys and her annual luau parties came flooding back to me and I calmly thought, I'm never going to see her again. Isn't that strange? Three years ago I would cry without prompt. I'd not get dressed for a few days in a row. I'd stay home from work. And now I can stand in my kitchen, undoing some of the calories lost during my mental health run, and think a very concrete and true thought, and hold it together. In fact, I don't even have to try. It's just there. It's a part of me, and it's just there.

I still have days and moments where I miss her so much it hurts and the unfairness of it all piles on me and it too is detritus but now I reach for my sports bra, I run it out, I kick box it out, and I am able to enjoy the memory of cake and Midwestern deck parties and the sound of a burbling hot tub underneath her laugh.

I'm starting to forget her laugh.

Birch

I had a dream about you last night. It was very corporeal. I woke up realizing that the loss of your form is something I perhaps have not death with, and not even realized that I must.

You were my mother. And our relationship was--no, is--essentially corporeal. As I witness my female friends yearn to carry children under their hearts, and see that burden change their bodies and their philosophies, I realize how my presence in you changed your body and your self. And now your body is no longer. The one that I altered with my existence. The idea that you yearned for that transformation is comforting, oddly, and yet also makes me miss you more.

When you were born, you were born with a piece of me already there. And so was your birth mother with a piece of you. The fact that she gave you up for adoption, that the two of us never met her, does nothing to disrupt the Matryoshka path to her, or the women before her. One after another, tumbling out of one another after the creaking, stubborn release that makes ones face twist with effort. And it's hard to conceive of something that is so mighty yet delicate as thin birch.

"Oh earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you!"

I took a lot of time off the last week.

With P out of town, I hunkered down for the weekend and watched hours and hours of Netflix. I took naps. After my bad knee gave out on me Saturday, I even had a reason!

The outside-my-body-voice was monitoring the situation, asking if I was sliding back into a major depressive episode. I have felt nostalgic and a bit sad the past couple of weeks. Friends in my hometown are having babies, buying homes, and I want to be there for those things. I've had many days where all I can think is that I need my mom's advice. The winter is coming, and I am hoping that my internship will let me pick up more hours when the semester ends, as I can't have a month of down time without spiraling.

Am I already spiraling?

What I've learned about depression is that you have to be ever-vigilant. And I haven't been exercising, really, which is key for my mental health. And I've spent a lot of time alone. An alcoholic does not go into bars, if they want to remain sober. Similarly, I need to commit to stay ahead of the spiral.

I think I needed this weekend off before the real craziness of the semester hits me. But then sometimes I wonder if I am just lazy. Or maybe I will always struggle with depression. And it's scary because I see evidence throughout my life, starting around age 6, that this is the case. But when I have good stretches, it's easy to think it's over. But I have to believe that it never will be, in order to hold it at bay. It's a strange thought experiment.

I've been weighing a big decision heavily during this weekend of solitude. I keep thinking, "Once I decide, then I'll be happy." But I know that isn't true. I think of my clients, refugees, who can't do much to change their circumstances. And yet, they find a way to rebuild. And my situation is nowhere as precarious and traumatic as theirs. I need to find a way to be happy today. And I backslid this past week.

At the end of one of my favorite plays, Our Town, Emily asks, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" The answer, actually, is tattooed on my arm. This struggle to appreciate the present has been a constant for me. My arm, and Thornton Wilder, respond to Emily with: "The saints and poets, maybe--they do some."

I used to think that depression meant they you could not "realize life." But now I think that maybe, we realize it too much. Maybe that's the trouble.

Choosing my Choice: Explaining Women, the Wage Gap, and Passion

This weekend, known feminist rabble-rouser Hanna Rosin published an article on Slate declaring that the gender pay gap we all fret about is, actually, not real. My husband sent me the link thinking I was going to lose my mind. But really, as soon as I saw the piece title, I thought "I bet I know where she's going."

Rosin makes use of lit reviews and analysis of the information that conjured the statistic that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. When controlled for numbers of hours worked, age, education, and union affiliation however, that number broke down. Turns out, women aren't doing so badly when all factors are controlled. While we're not at 100%, we're at about 91%. In fact, women have been becoming more educated than their male counterparts for a while now. There is mostly good news here. But what about those 9 percentage points?

"The big differences are in occupation and industry. Women congregate in different professions than men do, and the largely male professions tend to be higher-paying," Rosin aptly explains.

This research, and Rosin's wrestling with it, perhaps unsurprisingly resonated with this social worker and freelance writer. I have the kind of career that illicits comments such as, "Well, you don't get into that for the money" or "Bless your heart. We need people like you." If I get the feeling that the person commenting has the wrong idea about social work, I've been known to respond, "No, I think you misunderstood me. I'm not a volunteer. I am educated at the Master level and work in a licensed profession. I am trained to work in politics and policy, as a resource broker for others, and in psychotherapy and mental health diagnostics." I find that this is news to most people. 

But to Rosin's point, I think the comment, "We need people like you" is particularly interesting. Why, exactly, are most people "like me" also women? I have attended task forces, coalitions, and summits of mental health professionals to find that all the social workers are women, while the psychologists are usually about evenly split, but the psychiatrists are mostly all men. As the pay scale rises, the number of women drops. Most teachers? Women. Childcare providers, domestic employees, housekeeping staff? You guessed it.

Last week, a blog post, "Just a Nurse," made the rounds on social media. The writer reflects on her place in the medical community, and the credibility she garners. When asked "Are you a doctor?" she would reply, "No, just a nurse." But then the writer carefully considers her training, her subsequent knowledge set, and her daily work. 

" I am often in a room with a small child on a ventilator, multiple intravenous medications infusing through central lines keeping the vascular system constricted or dilated. I monitor blood gases and adjust ventilator settings accordingly. If the blood pressure goes too high I adjust the medications related to these values. I keep my patient adequately sedated and paralyzed, for their safety, without over medicating them. It is often my responsibility to determine this balance."

No "just" about that to me. 

If women are valued primarily as nurturers in our cultural context, it isn't shocking that some of us gravitate to and feel more naturally talented in caretaking roles. And, given that we are the bodies that can house new life, and feed new life for months after birth, our careers often take a different trajectory than those of men. And I don't think any of these are the problem. The problem is that word: just. You just gestated new life, and fed it with your own body? You just control a room of 30 first graders all day, despite their various behavior problems, learning disabilities, and unknown family life? You just find ways for refugees to obtain housing, English language skills, employment, and medical care four months after they land in the States? 

Put that way, it sounds pretty ridiculous.

This is part professional identity and pride, yes. It's also part of the work still left for the feminist movement. And just as past feminist gains have been good for everyone, regardless of gender, changing the deeply ingrained value structure placed on our professions will raise status , wages, and benefits for the men performing this jobs as well. 

Rosin ends her article by saying, "you have to leave room at least for the option of choice—that women just don’t want to work the same way men do." I believe that extends to any of us who took a career knowing we would not be buying a lakehouse with our Christmas bonus. We have to redefine success to mean fulfillment.

Self care for social workers and all

One of the first pieces of jargon I learned in the social work world was "self care."

"If you can't take care of yourself, how are you going to take care of your clients?" Indeed. Absolutely. I'm with you. The insistence on it, however, leads me to believe that it's often forgotten in practice. That maybe professors of social work are hoping the next generation does better with this.

I have to be on campus three days a week. Given that this is only the second week of class and we also had Labor Day in there, I'm not too busy yet. I slept in until 9am, then laced up my sneakers and leashed up the dog. A Chicagoan for nearly a decade, I know that the likes of this mild sunny September morning will soon be gone to winter's harsh wind. I poked my head in my room mate's bedroom and asked him to walk to the bird sanctuary with us. We talked as my dog sniffed and munched on grass, and listened to birds tweet and skip among the wildflowers.

When we got home, I got to work in the kitchen. For about an hour, I sang along to Annie Lennox and prepared a healthy soup to eat off of the next few days. I felt happy. I thought about the packaged processed frozen food I used to eat when I was single, how I let P take over the cooking when we met, and how I eventually taught myself. I thought about how my mother never really taught me, or seemed to get joy out of it the way my family does now. As I tasted at various stages of progress, I tried to imagine what P would like or dislike about it. I thought about what friends I might invite over who would love this soup. I thought about the farmer's market trip to procure the kale I was ripping, and I thought that it would be so nice to share a meal I made with my mother. I thought about how shocked she would be.

I was, simply, enjoying myself. Sure, preparing food for my family is productive. Walking the dog is necessary. But today, I decided to do them with grace. With joy.

It occurred to me that teaching self care to social workers isn't enough--that maybe if we taught everyone self care, we wouldn't need as many social workers. How healing it is for me to spend a Sunday afternoon, as I did last weekend, canning 12 pints of marinara sauce with friends? It does more for my mental health than scrutinizing labels of jarred sauce at the store and finally deciding on the one with the least sugar and preservatives. I have had many mornings before, and will have more ahead, where all I have time to do is run my dog out long enough for him to do the necessary business, and then drag him back upstairs so I can leave. When we can enjoy the day, we should.

City life has made me live in fast forward. The rhythm of the city sort of determines it. And I have to fight against the impulse to wake up early and run on the eliptical in the dark workout room of our building, staring at a blank wall. To then run upstairs, grab a quick shower, run the dog outside, run him back, run to my to-do list. Instead, I walked a few miles, staring at whatever beauty caught my eye. I let my dog lead. We meandered home and I made soup and sang loudly. And I feel whole. How many of us don't feel whole? It seems that whenever someone shares that they enjoyed some leisure time it's met with "Must be nice!" or some other comment that basically means: That doesn't count. If you're not working hard, you're being lazy. But I refuse to feel guilt about enjoying life. I refuse to be made to feel less than when, actually, I am whole.

Urban Violence, Domestic Violence, and Vicarious Trauma: Part I

I've been thinking about violence a lot lately. As a social worker, as a Chicagoan, as a feminist.

Last week, I was in Indianapolis, Indiana, my hometown, visiting friends. Monday, my best friend, husband, and I venture to south central Indiana and spent the afternoon at Oliver Winery.

photo credit: www.in.gov

I sat in the sun and laughed with my best friend and my husband. The next day, we journeyed home to Chicago. And the first headline I read when I fired up the Chicago Tribune was that within walking distance of my home, a gang shooting has claimed one life and critically injured four while I was listening to a waterfall and eating cheese. I don't often walk that intersection, and actually even try to avoid it as a bus route, because it's pretty dicey. So it sort of feels removed. But it is also, in actuality, walking distance from me, one el stop north of my el stop, and in my zip code. 

We bought our current home in March of last year, so almost a year and half ago. In that time, there have only been three shootings on blocks that I actually frequent: blocks I take on my daily commute, to walk my dog, to my local coffeehouse. And I realized recently that saying "only three shootings" makes a lot of sense in Chicago where some neighborhoods experience daily violence, but to utter those phrase in south central Indiana, or even Indianapolis proper, sounds ludicrous. Indy of course has an inner-city, and the same problems any major city faces. But the body count in Chicago is unrivaled. We are now known nationally for this. And when I walk to Montrose Harbor and in one glance can see Lake Michigan stretching out like a great ocean to the horizon, a sandy beach of picnics, a bird sanctuary, and the gleaming skyline in the distance, I can almost forget that just miles away, some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the nation exist. And in the same zip code as this inspiring view that fills me with emotions every single time, gang shootings are perhaps not as regular, but still not unheard of. 

photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

Nothing illustrates our city's violence problem better than the documentary, The Interrupters. The film follows CeaseFire, an organization operating in the most violent areas of the city. Violence Interrupters mediate potential incidences of violence. If a shooting has taken place, the Interrupters try to stop the retaliative violence that will undoubtedly occur. Most of the Interrupters are men and were formerly gang members, or have served time for violent crimes. They understand why the violence happens, and they are respected by those perpetuating the violent cycle. The documentary is one of my favorites. I've made donations to their organization since, and have real respect for all the men and women who work to quell some of the violence in my city.

Well, in May, one of CeaseFire's founder, Tio Hardiman, was arrested on domestic violence charges.

Hardiman was convicted of beating his wife, Allison, though she dropped the prosecution of these charges in July. He was also convicted of domestic violence against his ex-wife in 1999. Ceasefire let him go after this recent conviction, which I applaud. 

This is problematic for the obvious, right? Anti-violence activist is violent. I've been mulling this all summer. And it makes me physically ill. I re-watched The Interrupters this week, and hearing Hardiman talk about violence in his community was so difficult, knowing that he has also been a perpetrator of violence, and recently. Is violence against women not violence? Does it matter less?

When Trayvon Martin was killed, and George Zimmerman not convicted, many of us wondered, Do black lives not matter? When someone shoots up an elementary school full of white children, the NRA publicly declares that teachers should arm themselves for protection. No such declaration was issued to black men after Martin's death.

This is not the Oppression Olympics, because nobody "wins"--intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality, and class don't allow for it. It's all bound together. So I am not suggesting that women are worse off. Clearly, we have a problem with violence when the biggest threat to mortality for young black men is being killed in violent crime. 

But when you search "Tio Hardiman" on Google, none of the first hits are about his recent violence against his wife. In fact, one of the first hits is an article he wrote for HuffPo about urban violence--with no mention of his own actions. 

I'll dissect his article in HuffPo in a later post, as I think it is a very telling example of how we think of violence against women as separate and different--and of course, in ways, it is. But then, not really at all. 

In the meantime, I'll vacillate between escape and engagement: for my own mental health, do I retreat to a safer place on the earth? It doesn't make the violence go away, but it removes it from my immediate, daily experience. But, does staying help anything? Does exercising my agency to leave insult those without it, or honor it?

Now it is later.

I had a dentist appointment yesterday, in my old neighborhood of Edgewater. I don't have occasion to visit it much, so I made a point to arrive early, and walk past my old building.


Peering into that wrought-iron gate was strange. I did a lot of hurting and healing in there. It was the first home I owned. I brought my dog home here when I adopted him. I prepared for a wedding, and then hid during a divorce. I cried a lot. It was on that back right window where I sat and stared down at this court yard all night when I learned my mother had died. It was to this home I returned the night of her burial, my world changed. And then a few weeks after that, on the back porch, I asked the love of my life to marry me.



12 weeks later, we stood in the court yard, on the way to our wedding.


And after five years of hearing the red and purple lines clamor past my little slice of the city


We packed it all up. For more space, for a safter neighborhood. For the next step.


I have been doing a lot of hurting and healing again, lately. I have friends right now struggling with great stress and pain: the death of a spouse, another with a bad breakup, some with money troubles, and one saying goodbye to a dying dog. It feels heavy. I received my own bit of heartbreaking, though not devastating news, yesterday. And as I come to terms with what it may mean for me, and for P, I think about that small home I had by the train tracks. I think of all that those walls held for me. Books shoved into window sills when we ran out of shelf space, and had no room to put another shelf. A storage unit in the basement full of things we were saving for "later," when we had more space. Later is now. We have a guest room. We have a den. We have a living and dining space. Two bathrooms. And luckily, as I traverse new griefs and new joys in "later," I find that the love that seemed to fill my old home to the bursting point did not dissipate when it had more room to flow. It only grew.

"I think everything counts a little more than we think."--The National, "Ada"

I'm sure that in the day-to-day of raising children, you don't quite know what is sticking. What will become a memory?

In a little over a week, my mother will have been gone for 2 years. That seems impossible, but here we are. If ever there was proof that Freud has some things going for him, it's the way my grief manifests as I move further from the last time I saw her face and heard her voice. Rather than a conscious thought, "I miss her," I find myself talking about her more. Searching through old photo albums and lingering longer on her face. And, listening to show tunes, particularly The Sound of Music.

I grew up on the movie The Sound of Music. I likely recognized the voice of Julie Andrews around the same time I recognized those of my parents. I believe I have posted before that my eulogizing of my mother was based on the plot of the movie. It meant that much to her, that it's a huge part of what keeps me connected to her.

I bet she didn't know that would be the case, on rainy weekdays as we snuggled on the sofa watching Andrews throw open her arms to the mountain sky.

Holidays and family visits have always sort of made me anxious. The expectation to have fun, to make memories, to make this "the best Christmas ever" is a tall order. And, after all the hype, cross-country travel, and money spent, it often can't live up to the expectations set. SImilarly, with so many organized activities that take up children's days, and highly choreographed vacations to sanitized, pandering-to-the-masses places like Disney World, I hope that people are also making time for what usually sticks: ourselves. Over years of screenings of The Sound of Music, I learned more about my mother each time. She had seriously considered becoming a nun; she had wanted many children; she used Maria's wedding march when she walked down the aisle to marry my father; she had been a musician since the age of twelve. The list went on and on. Each of these facts spun out into more facts, more stories, of a life before I existed. Of the life that existed now, with me. I don't think she planned these lessons. It was just what came up. She just answered the questions I asked. And when I look back on those conversations, and singing loudly in the car with her, and seeing her meet the actual von Trapp family in person, these are the things I remember. These are the ways in which I know she was real. The vacations are there too, and the birthday parties she planned for me. But those were about me. And I am so profoundly grateful now that she also chose to make my childhood a bit about her. When I think about raising my own kid(s), I wonder what will stick with them. And then I try not to over think it, as I think that is exactly the point, right? Just be. Just be with the people you love.

What likely began as a way to keep me occupied and stationary so she could relax became the thread I can pull when I need to unravel her.

Easter

Today is Easter Sunday. Family-oriented holidays are strange for me, given that my "family" is made up of a husband, and then a random assortment of close friends scattered around the Midwest. There is no usual, no tradition, and each year is different. As an atheist, I don't care. Holidays generally are more gloom for me than celebration. They remind me of happier holidays, or holidays where people who are now dead gathered. And while there is much liberation in getting to choose each year and each holiday how I will spend it and with whom, there is also a feeling of instability.

There is a popular psychologist who says that too much choice and freedom is bad for us. At the start of his teaching career, he said his students didn't worry about much--they knew they would likely marry their high school sweetheart, settle in the same hometown in which they were raised, and their kids would attend the same schools. Now, everything is up for grabs. There is something delightful about that, but also something so unsettling. Nothing is assumed, nothing is for sure, nothing is forever. Limiting, and freeing. Constricting, and inspiring.

I took a quiz online that was supposed to compile my interests and concerns and tell me the best places in the US for me to live. 4 out of the top 5 were in Oregon, which makes sense, I suppose. When I imagined a new life there, I thought about my friends-like-sisters in Indiana. Would I want to be so far? Could I manage only seeing them once or twice a year? Don't I want my kids to know them? Everyone I care enough about to factor into this decision lives in Chicago or Indianapolis. Would the quality of life outweigh all of that?

I suppose I feel that since I am sort of unmoored, and only moored to some people by choice and not chance, that I can do whatever I please. That I would be perfectly happy with P and any children we have, creating my own little tribe anywhere. My little family, my dog, my coffee, my books. Some place cheaper, so not all of our income went to mortgage and property taxes. Some place with a decent school system. Some place safe.

After 8 years, I feel the weight of this city life, and no wonder, as the cost of living, as well as the violence, has risen dramatically here in my tenure. It's all a lot. It feels noisy. It feels limited. Perhaps all I need is a vacation. Perhaps all I need is a beer. But after 8 years and no family to stick with, and "family" who is also spreading out and understanding of this need to see and experience and explore, I'm curious. And I'm restless. And I miss the Easter basket cupcakes my mom used to make every year, with the dyed coconut flakes as grass, three jelly beans for eggs, and a bent pipe cleaner for the handle. And I suppose if I can't have those no matter where I live, I also suppose it doesn't matter where I live. No matter my zip code, I'll constantly, as always, be making it up as I go.

One of my favorite memories is of my mother and I on a park bench in Paris, France. It was the last city of our three week tour through Europe and after breakfast of croissants and coffee, we sat on a park bench to decide how to spend our day. I ended up asleep, my head in her lap, the cool early summer breeze funneling through L'arc de Triomphe and over us, ruffling my mother's frosted feathered hair.

Fancy meeting you here

I admire bloggers who stick with it. Honestly, I do. Posting day after day. I suppose I have things to say every day, but I've come up against two things. For one, I began grad school last month. I am five weeks in and totally in love. The thing about it is, you aren't ever really done. If you are caught up on reading for this week, you better work ahead for next week because there is also probably a paper coming up, or a professor will email you extra reading, or there will be some event happening on campus during your scheduled study time. I've had a really difficult time putting down my work to see friends, watch a movie, take a run, et cetera. Most days I spend at least six hours on school work. After doing that this past weekend and waking up with a headache today, I gave myself permission for a "day off." I still worked for three hours. And the worst and best part is that sometimes this happens because I can't distinguish work from play. Grad school has just put an intense focus and rigor to the things I already found interesting. So if I'm assigned reading and writing on the 1996 PRWORA, I do it... and then I Google and read more about it. And then before I know it I'm down a rabbit hole, watching a documentary and emailing my congresswoman about something that pisses me off. And it's all school work. And I live and breathe it right now.

Secondly, this blog began with a narrowed focus: grief. Living with death. Continuing to forge an adulthood while healing childhood wounds. I've felt less inclined to write about these things recently because, as stated above, I'm busy. But also, I've been doing a great deal of healing. And unlike last summer when I started this blog, I don't feel like every day is a battle. My depression has greatly decreased, and not every incident seems to be related to my mother's death. All good things. But good things often don't make good writing. It may have been Hemingway who said something about creative geniuses all being a bit melancholy (that sounds very Hemingway, anyway). There is some truth to that, I believe.

Sometimes I think about how much I want my children to have. And then I think, "But what will they write or paint or dance or compose about, if I give them a perfect childhood?" Is that insane?

I think blogging will never really be the perfect platform for me. I write when I'm moved to, and I don't care enough about traffic to fill the space with a silly cat video if I don't have anything to say. I just don't write. But I do miss writing for the digital abyss. So maybe I'll try to come around more often.

The senate passed VAWA today. My faith is a bit restored.

Unpacking

Pretend your parents are dead.

No, but seriously.

Or any loved one, really.

Pretend they are dead, but talk to them. Go through boxes and photos and journals with them. Ask your questions.

The last time I saw my mother was two years ago this week. I went to visit her in Indiana for a pre-Christmas celebration. We went to the symphony holiday show, something we had done most every year of my childhood. We bought the same cookies in the same lobby. A tradition that endured, and there is something poetic and almost foreseen about us going to the show together one last time, for her last Christmas. I know that I'll probably think about her death every July 1st for the rest of my life, but I wonder if every year I'll remember that it's been 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 25 years, since I last saw my mother. What parts of grief endure?

Wanting to feel close to her this week, perhaps, I thought I would start going through some of the boxes P and I took from her house earlier this year. I didn't get very far, but I did find a journal she had written during the trip on which she met my father. I scanned it for mention of him specifically, but along the way found reference to friends that had been on the trip, a priest that had been along, cities where they had stopped. I had so many questions about who these people were, what she had thought of my dad the first time she saw him... and I won't get any answers. And I wished that I had stumbled upon this when my mom was alive. I wish we could have talked more about this trip. I wish I could ask her the names of people in photos found in the box.

But then, no matter how much of this I had been allowed, there would always be photos unaddressed, memories unresolved, and an argument to be made that I needed more time. So I am trying to be content with what I do have, knowing that I would have never hit a maximum fill line, requiring no more of her.

I could have asked her questions forever.

On Eagles Wings

For some reason, once in a while, I will get old church hymns stuck in my head. These were family favorites, the ones my father sang most robustly during Mass, the ones my mother chose most often as a church organist and choir director. There wasn't much need for her to practice, especially these old favorites, but if she had to sing rather than just play, she'd practice. And I have many memories of her at the piano downstairs, making music, that I could hear clearly through my bedroom door.

One of the most missed aspects of religion (and, really, perhaps the only one I truly miss) is tradition. Tradition is comfort. It is a collective memory that says you are not alone. Or, even if you are, that it was not always so, and that thousands or millions of other people know the same prayers you do, the same hymns. That you could walk into any Catholic church and follow along, the contents of the Mass unchanged. Though P grew up in an Italian/Czech family in Pennsylvania and I in an Irish family in Indiana, it is like we have some shared memories, or notions, from childhood. I jokingly say that I had wanted to find a formerly Catholic, currently atheist man. I found one, much by accident. So as this man who had not met many of my friends or family sat next to me during my mothers funeral, he sang along, he knew when to sit, kneel, and stand. He squeezed my hand when the priest uttered words he knew I would find offensive and worthy of an eye roll.

This week, we are two atheists with a seven and a half foot Christmas tree, garland and stockings on the mantle, and a manger scene. We've done every Christmas since we've been together. We both like the lights and sparkle, the ornaments with a story, the excuse to dote on one another with gifts. Each year I mentally refine a bit more how we will handle Christmas when we are parents, raising atheist children. Each year I become a little sad, remembering the god father who gave me that manger scene, gone eleven years now; the father who helped me build a stable for it, gone nineteen years now; the mother who gave me most of these decorations, gone not even two years. And when I think about how I will tell my children that some families believe in the myth of Jesus, that it gives their lives order and meaning, that they celebrate this story at this time, we take this time to celebrate love and family. We take the days off work to visit loved ones or to help people in our community. We take the long cold nights as opportunities to drink hot chocolate and read together, to eat a little less healthy than the rest of the year because sometimes, it's okay to splurge. We take the time to celebrate another year that we've had together.

While my children may enter a Catholic church as I would a mosque, respectful and unsure, they will know tradition, and they will know community. They will perhaps even know the old hymns that penetrating the floor boards of my childhood bedroom, as, like a nonsense meditation chant, the songs will sometimes come to me as a focus for my brain that is trying to drift away; an anchor about which I do not have to think but merely drop and feel safe against the waves.

I hope they have less waves than I did as a child. I hope they always feel safe.

A little friend

The symptoms of my emotional breakdowns look like a bad flu that suddenly becomes a screaming match that is entirely one-sided. For days I sulk, I wallow, I even start aching and coughing, actually. And then one thing sets me off and I start yelling, a lot, or crying, or both, and screaming into pillows like a banshee muted behind several closed doors. These episodes have likely caused my husband and other loved ones to wish for several closed (and locked, and heavily guarded) doors between us.

The days following the death of D were in keeping with my model. I actually felt ill. The novice I was several years ago would have thought I was actually fighting a virus, but the seasoned me knew that it was grief. I had just done research on it not that long ago, in that lull between my mom's death and D dying. I learned that the body sometimes does not know how to handle shocks to the emotional system, and sometimes the physical is affected. For days I woke up each morning unrested, feeling like something was sitting on my chest, feeling like my neck and shoulder muscles were on fire, feeling like putty moved through my sinus system. But I pushed through: there was the important meeting at work that I really ought to attend, the memorial service to plan, the memorial service to attend, the dog to be walked, the breakfast my growling stomach needed. Something usually pushed me out of bed.

But the disease held firmly finally, unshakeable, too heavy, one day. Shackling me to the bed as I tried earnestly to get up. As I weighed the pros and cons in my head, as I tried to care what the HR department or my clients would say, I reached for my cell phone to check the time. I was hoping to learn that I had ten more minutes to decide. But what I learned was so much sweeter.

One of my oldest friends was a new mama.

His name, the name of this new human, was followed by the date and time of his arrival. I was told he was doing well. I was told my friend was doing well.

And I got up.

It may have been just the morning before his birth that I had dropped the shampoo bottle on my toe and retaliated by picking up the bottle and bashing it against the wall of the shower, in actual anger. But the morning I knew that some little person was having his first morning, ever, I showered with a smile. I bounced around the house through my morning routine and called my friend's mom on my way to work to giggle and congratulate. Just ten days out from Ds death, my co-workers were still a bit somber around me, still asking with those eyes you only get for divorce or death, "How are you today?" So when I skipped into the office that day shouting "GUESS WHAT!" I think a few assumed the worst. But soon they were showing me the best baby toys on Amazon, and we were talking about our favorite children's books.

When M told me she was pregnant, I was sure her little one would be my buddy. I hoped that though we lived in different states, the kid would think I was cool, and maybe we'd have some "thing"--we'd go to the same ice cream place whenever I came to town, or I'd give them a cool nickname.

He seems to like me alright. Granted, he's 7 months old so his preferences are not very discerning at this juncture. I don't know what he will end up thinking of me, or if he'll relish the thought of having a "thing" we share, but I know that each time I see him, whether in person or in a photo text message, I think about that morning after his birth. I think about being too despondent to cry anymore, I think about wondering how I was going to get through losing two parental figures in less than a year. And then, with one piece of information, a smile. Some news to share that was good. A reason to travel that did not call for a black dress and sensible shoes. No speech to give, no thank you cards to write, no faking of grace when a distant relative says the wrong thing. No pitying eyes. So for now, that is our thing. Our thing is something he won't be able to remember, but I hope one day I can tell him that his first morning was my first morning of coming back around to myself.

I hesitated writing this for a while, because I kept thinking, "This baby and this birth are not about me. Why do you always have to make everything about you?" But I think I realized that the beauty of it all was that, for the first time in a long time, it wasn't about me. It wasn't about who I'd lost or how I was coping or how long it had been since my last panic attack or the last crying jag. It was about someone else, and about life rather than death. It was about everyone other than myself. And suddenly, my world again became bigger than my grief.

Thankful

It's Thanksgiving Day, and the streets are empty of people. The usual hustle of my neighborhood is only a trickle of couples carrying bottles of wine and casserole dishes to turkey dinners; the nearly constant gusts of laundry steam coming from basement windows are replaced by wafting poultry. The most crowded buses are only ferrying ghosts. The city is quiet. It is still.

My adopted father is coming over for dinner tonight, and it is our first Thanksgiving without his partner, my other adopted father, D. It is my second Thanksgiving without my mom. It is the 20th Thanksgiving without my birth father. It is the third Thanksgiving without my ex's family. And so on and so on.

I am not sad about this, though. Thanksgiving has never left me feeling very sentimental.

But my city does.

This city has been my home for seven and a half years now. And though I've lost family, friends, jobs, as I've evolved and changed, my city is here. And it is vibrant and the same. My feet hit a certain rhythm on these sidewalks that they carry nowhere else. Fallen leaves are rained on and then crushed underfoot and leaf-shaped stains look like intentional stencils. But they are not so conjured. They are real. My city is real. And so am I, in it.

Last night my mother-in-law was talking about a fancy wedding. She said she had heard that the couple wasn't really in love, and it was about the show of the thing. "How could you marry someone you aren't in love with?" asked my brother-in-law. Everyone else nodded in agreement.

"I did," I said.

That's awkward. But it's part of my history and, subsequently, part of who I am. Part of the person they have come to love. So I said, "I did. I did that." And it got awkward. But I told them I had really married his family, it was his family I had loved. They sort of seemed to understand that, at least intellectually.

I can so clearly see the dining table, usually so casual, fancy for Thanksgiving. I can see the tiny kitchen buzzing with activity, all of us buzzing with alcohol, Gordon Lightfoot or Tom Petty or James Taylor the soundtrack to it all. Dogs whining for food. Three people sharing one chair, giggling.

Maybe I do get sentimental. But unlike missing my mother, which is crippling, today I find myself wanting to bundle up against the chill off Lake Michigan and take my dog for a walk around my absurdly quiet and absurdly beautiful city.

Shift

My mom would have been really proud of me this weekend.

This may be the first time I have thought that and been happy, instead of having it make me sad.

Electing

There is a really wonderful collection of suffrage-era advertisements right now over at Collectors Weekly. Comprised mainly of post cards, the collection is truly astounding.

I never knew a time when I could not vote. Obviously. I'm not over 92 years old. At the age of 26, I haven't been able to vote too terribly long. This year marked only my third presidential election. I am so happy that I was old enough to vote in 2008. Living in Chicago the day Barack Obama was elected president was momentous. It was a palpable joy. It felt like it mattered. Something was changing. Something was going on.

I just made the cut-off to vote for Kerry in 2004. I wasn't a huge fan of Kerry. And I was just starting to understand politics at the time. All I knew was that Bush seemed unintelligent. He seemed to want a theocracy. He seemed war-hungry. He didn't support gay rights. While Kerry didn't show overt support to my LGBT friends, no one was at the time. But a lack of outright slander of my friends would have to do for progressive politics.

In 2008, Barack Obama stood in Grant Park, on the lakeshore of my home city, and addressed his supporters. And that's when he said it: "gay and straight Americans."

...

Wow.

I cried. And though he was slow to act on policy, Obama did repeal DADT. He rescinded the Mexico City Policy just two days after taking office. He eventually came out publicly in support of gay marriage. He signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. He supports Planned Parenthood. When Hilary lost the nomination, he thanked her for making way for his daughters to achieve.

And while some of his talking points may just seem like so much lip service to frustrated activists, I think that lip service is important, too. While generally defined as being mere empty words, when the words are those that others are too afraid to speak, speaking them in activism. When the president of your country makes a video for the It Gets Better Project, before he even enacts any policies to back up his rhetoric, he has made an impact. When the president addresses "non-believers" in his inaugural address, those of us who do not believe choke, recalling President George Bush Sr. denying our citizenry.

My mother voted Republican her whole life, except twice. For Kennedy, and then for Obama. She had gay friends. She had gay family. She had a daughter who depended on Planned Parenthood for healthcare during a difficult time. It's difficult for people to change. I admired her ability to do so.

My mom won't be voting in this election. This thought falls under the strange "Grief Brain" that forms after a significant loss. Seemingly innocuous things seem laden with meaning. "This is the first election for president in which my mom will not vote," isn't like the anniversary of her death, her birthday, or Mother's Day. But this week I'm remembering a woman who unknowingly led me to feminism by being herself.

Boiled and steeped

As I hunched my shoulders against the 30 degree air this morning, I remembered that a year ago today I was in San Francisco on my honeymoon.

The air was a bit chilly there, especially on the ferry from the wharf to Alcatraz. But I got by with a sweater. My human radiator of a husband got by with just a button down shirt. Because he is a Martian.

Though P and I had been living together for over a year, I still had a giddy newlywed feeling. The most amazing man alive, in my estimation, had chosen me. We'd gathered our closest friends and family into one room--something that we'll never get to do again--and we said, Sure. We said, I pick you. We said, It's been rough and it may be rougher. But I want to do it with you.

I hadn't been that happy in a long time.

We were both making more money than we ever had, and the kitchen in our rented guesthouse sat unused--save the mini-fridge, which held wine and cheese. We ran all over the city, eating all the seafood we could, and trying ethnic cuisines that not even our sweet home Chicago could offer. We fell in love with the plant life there. We cursed the city we loved and called home for it's inability to support a jade bush outdoors.

Like most things in my life, the best parts of the trip were unplanned. Google all you want, but stumbling upon a tea store with a tasting bar manned by a guy who know everything about tea? Nothing gets better than that.

What I didn't realize until we were flying home, watching California fade below us was that for almost a week, I hadn't been sad. It had been four months since my mom died, and four months of intense sadness. As happy as the wedding had made me, it also reminded me that my mother was not there in attendance. But the honeymoon was a week off. I couldn't believe that I'd been able to go 5 days without crying. The tears came on the plane, as I wished I could call her when we landed to tell her about it all. I cried realizing that when I got home, my mom would still be dead, I would still be sad, the first holiday season without her was approaching, and that the week had been an exception and not a new chapter.

A year later, I am spending my day reading and writing, and drinking a puerh tea, aged a year. It's dried wrinkled leaves sit shriveled in a glass canister on our tea shelf. It tastes like the earth. It smells like outside. It is not blended over with a fruity infusion, and it does not take honey or sugar. No getting around that you are drinking a plant.

Perhaps that week of exile from grief was indeed the beginning of the next chapter, a flip of the page. I had someone with whom to grieve, yes. But white dress and open bar or not, P would have been there with me. What began in San Francisco and evolved all year was a keener sense of reality than I'd ever had. Like a good puerh tea, a good life is gnarled and cultivated, ugly and steeped. Sometimes, tea is just tea. It tastes like the earth from which is came and there is no need for cranberries or cardamom. And sometimes we desperately need a fruity distraction from reality. 

I still enjoy both varieties of tea. It's learning to live with both and not knowing which you'll be served when that gives me challenge.

As You Can See

There are things you do when someone dies. One of those things is to call everyone, seemingly, in the world, and keep ruining people's days with the bad news. I had never done this until my mom died. The people who are close, that are really upset, are difficult people to tell. But maybe more difficult are the people you haven't spoken to in years. 

My godmother was one of these people. We sort of lost touch somewhere in there. She lives in Virginia and she was my father's best friend. She did a wonderful job after he died of keeping up with me, but as I got older we lost touch a bit. But I wanted her to know that my mom had died. I only had an address, so I wrote her. She wrote back quickly with her number and we spoke on the phone shortly after that. We've been corresponding ever since. It's been really, really good. She knew my father before my mom  did, and she even met my grandmother--my parents met after my grandmother died. She still calls my dad "Danny" and referred to him as "one of the greatest men I ever knew." She said he was the one you'd call when you needed something, and he'd be there. Car trouble, family trouble, whatever. She told me the story, from my dad's perspective, of my parent's meeting. She has brought nuance to stories and vague remembrances. In her eyes, my dad was a real person. I don't remember enough of him for him to be real to me. 

She's been going through photos and has been sending me some of my parents, of me as a baby, and of her. There were several of my mom sitting at a piano, playing while everyone sang at a Christmas party. This was before I was born. When I look at that I think that the years I am living right now are the years my children will never know. These are the mystery years that are a part of me but that will never really be real to my kids. And I'm just old enough to understand, I think, that my parents were people before they were parents. 

I got a card today from my godmother with more photos. At the end of her note she says, "As you can see your mom has a problem, while pregnant, with swelling." There is a photo included of my mom with her legs propped up, ankles swollen. And I thought about how I won't have her to call when I'm pregnant and swollen. But I'm hoping to take advantage of the relationships I do have, like with my godmother, and other women in my life.