Spring: such beautiful things and dead baby birds. I have spent hours each day walking the puppy child, our new baby, and listening to podcasts. That he has to go out, HAS to, has been a blessing. I'd been slowly descending into a muted-colored and muffled depression, the kind that for me comes in cycles related to the moon and the mood of the last phrase read, music absorbed through the skin, line in a drawing or slight from a family member who either doesn't care or doesn't recognize their callousness when I discovered the podcast, "The Hilarious World of Depression."* While listening to PLACEBO: A Conversation with Ana Maria Cox (5/5) , walking through an open field full of clover patches, dandelions and "wishes" I nearly tripped over one, then two dead babies. They were featherless, with bulging closed eyes that were black and blue. Their skin was 70s-band-aid flesh and their tiny beaks and claws looked like baby finger nails. They were so plastic and so still and so hopeless. The sight of them caused me to gasp and dart in another direction. I didn't want to stand by too long, to stare too long, to come so close that their lost hope might touch me. It was drizzling, preparing for rain, so I put up my hood and stared across the field. And then I walked back.
The day before I'd seen a bird and a squirrel quarreling above my head in my own yard. I'd never seen an interspecies battle like this so was drawn to all the desperate, violent chatter between the two of them. I understood, even from my vantage point, that something wasn't right. The blackbird was beside herself and the squirrel seemed so caustically aloof and reckless. I found myself getting annoyed with that damned squirrel. But the puppy found something more curious and interesting across the yard and I walked with him to find someone else's shit to roll in (yeah, I pulled him up before that could happen.).
Early the next morning, I'd raced behind Ivan as he bolted down the stairs and out the door to relieve himself after a long night of "holding it in." He was playful and fluffy and so early-morning baby sweet so, even though I was in my nightgown with a sweatshirt over it, pulled on haphazardly as I tried to protect myself from the morning's cold, I let him tour me through the open yards that sprawled behind ours and our neighbors' houses. As we left the wall that holds the creek that runs through town, he discovered what all the fuss had been about just the day before. Two babies had taken a long, miserable fall to the ground. Below the nest now lay lifeless a developing bird and the head of its sibling. Ivan licked the head and I pulled him more aggressively than I'd meant to get him away from it. I couldn't bear to look. And then I couldn't stop.
I studied the lifeless body, saw the articulation in its exposed wing, considered its fall, looked up to see the nests that dotted that tree and wondered from which it had fallen. I thought of the hysteria in the mother's cawing and flapping as the squirrel had teased and taunted. I wondered for how long an animal mourns or if it does at all. These two babies were dead but were there others? Could she love the others more fiercely because they'd survived or was she just meeting the task at hand, the imperative, keeping them alive? I remembered the first time I'd seen little baby birds, they'd been tiny chicks in an incubator, I and thought of their smell and the warmth that surrounded them and the peep-peep-peep of all of them hovering close to one another. I wished for that for this dead bird. Warmth.
Against my better judgment, I took my family to my parents' home in sunny Florida for spring break, the Florida weather promising a break from the bleak, rainy April we'd been having. We'd had to leave Ivan who'd not been with us so long and I considered for a moment staying behind. I have been torn to shreds by how much of a relationship I should allow between my parents and my children. On the one hand, I'd rather just suck it up and not have to explain the intricacies of dysfunctional family dynamics to two little girls who have felt the fullness of my love and protection from the moment we'd promised ourselves to one another, and on the other I am shattered to endure the aggressive, palpable disdain and contempt in which my parents hold me. It's only warm outside in sunny Florida. I'd fallen out of the tree.
While searching through old photo albums, I found my baby book where I learned that I'd not left the hospital until 18 days after I was born. Eighteen days in Vassar Hospital in the cold of a Poughkeepsie winter in January. I knew I'd been born prematurely and that I'd been placed in an incubator for care and protection in my early days but was told very little else. When I first learned as a child that I'd been in an incubator, I thought immediately of myself on a tiny tray, cuddled up trying to get warm and become strong enough to face this thing called life. I also thought about "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" (a movie starring John Travolta as "the boy" that I'd watched as a girl) because I imagined in my frailty and sickness, I could not and should not have been much handled. I sat in isolation with visits from my mother when she was dropped off at the hospital by my father each morning. And how did I miss her touch? How did I feel in that silence? Those first eighteen days have marked me, imprinted me as a fallen bird.
Nature is not sentimental. The fittest survive and the others perish. Animals and plants and we humans have to adapt and evolve or lose our one shot. The grass beneath the birds was so lush and green after weeks of rain, and pollen from all the beautiful flowers in bloom coated the world chartreuse and yellow. The green of the whole scene swallowed up those tiny bodies until I was right upon them. I felt a responsibility to them, a need to bury and protect their brief moment here. To honor their attempt to live their tiny lives. Perhaps they'd stuck their necks out too long to reach for their food or been knocked over by a squirrel or the wind. Maybe they'd arrived too early, when the spring thaw had not quite happened and it was too cold for them to survive and their mother had long abandoned the nest. Maybe their mother felt the environment too unsafe to risk caring for them where she'd built her nest or knew they were too weak to survive and had flown away.
When humans touch baby animals that have been lost or fallen or hurt they doom them to never be lovable or acceptable to their mothers. It had always terrified me, the thought of the baby animal picked up and returned to its nest or burrow or clearing, saved, only to be rejected by its mother and left in the world to defend itself and surely die. It seemed so cold, so callous, so heartless, and so unfair that a chance moment could change the course of a new life.
As the drizzling developed into a steady rain, I turned away from the birds along the path. The green of the spring dotted with the vibrant colors of the flowering trees and well planted tulips and other blooms gave my walk back an other-worldly haze. I stopped abruptly as the hosts of the podcast quietly uttered the pain around the suicide of one's brother and the failed attempts of one of the hosts. There was silence and grief and palpable pain. The silvered light of this grey day sharpened and I caught my breath. The sound of my gasp in my ears as my headphones shielded me from the noises outside of my personal space echoed and stilled me. I felt so suddenly alone. The emptiness of navigating the world alone shook me. I was vulnerable, unguarded, stealing oxygen for my tiny lungs. Motherless. I'd fallen from the nest.
And once you are out of the nest and find yourself alive you have to make a choice. I took a little longer at first to meet the milestones that are the bullets on any mother's checklist. I was small but met the developmental challenges easily. I don't remember much contact. I suppose one wouldn't but the continued lack of it throughout my life hints that there wasn't very much. It is as crushing to write this as it is to know. I have never had much emotional, psychic, or physical connection with my parents, often feeling indifference or active disdain. I have always believed it was because I arrived as imperfectly as I did, premature, small, fragile, and sensitive, because I fell. It has made me profoundly sad and secretive. I have hurt so deeply and so silently, have faded into life's lushness, felt small and frail and alone. I have listened to countless explanations and excuses from others as though what I feel and experience in my heart could not be truth enough. My heart that beats and mourns the tiny, dead baby birds along my dog walking route couldn't possibly know.
Now the rain was coming at a steady clip and even Ivan was ready to go home. It's warm inside. Our house has pillows and blankets, delicious smells, soft light, private spaces and nooks, communal tables and couches. It is plush like the swelling comfort of spring's garden and every place is safe. I finished out the podcast with my headphones over my ears, sitting on the floor of the kitchen with Ivan and his toys. I stroked his soft white fur and kissed him on his pink nose and let him lick me. The licks to my face and mouth that I swore I'd never allow now covered me. My puppy licked my salty tears and fell over on his back for me to rub and pet the fur on his belly. We'd found him in the shelter, in a viewing room with his sister. Though my husband had seen pictures, we'd never known his parents. They weren't with him anymore. We are his new family and I am his mother.
(c)Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
*"The Hilarious World of Depression" is a podcast hosted by John Moe that offers frank, funny, smart conversations with well-known comedians and humorists about their battles with depression and other mental health issues.
And just like that, the summer is over and the girls are back in school. Sure, we will have a few more weeks of warm weather that will make getting up and spending the day at school complete torture, but the arrival of September means a new start and a season change to fall. As I got the girls ready for bed last night and for 5th and 2nd grades, the talk inevitably turned to my time in school, and specifically 5th grade as my rising ten year old expressed a little apprehension about it. Last year had been pure hell for her, and for me, as we tried to work our way through a difficult teacher and the anxiety being in her classroom produced. I'd stopped pretending 1/2 way through the year and told her that I agreed with her feelings about her teacher but that shit happens, for real, and that you can't stop striving because someone is trying to bring you down. I meant it. It is hard to learn that and as hard to teach.
What I remember about my fifth grade class are small fleeting moments. Memory is like that. I am not even sure that what I am remembering actually happened in fifth grade and is not an amalgamation of that heady late elementary-middle school block. My teacher, Mrs. S, was an old school, Southern, pinch-lipped, white biddy who wore skirt suits nearly every day. Drab colored skirt suits with skirts well below the knee and a mid-sized heel with pantyhose to make her legs look a beigy-tan. Her hair was coiffed like a cotton candy puff and sprayed so that not a hair moved. She spoke in that breathy, southern school marm tone that told you she had little time for your shenanigans, even if the shenanigans just meant asking to be excused to use the bathroom.
This woman brought little to no joy to my life (and I was still of the goody two shoes variety at that time). She seemed to revel in giving bad grades, marking papers in red, and sucking the life out of the room. I remember people getting in trouble, especially a boy named Derek who'd surely be diagnosed with ADHD today, and the creaky spot in the floor that I tried to avoid when I walked across the room to sharpen my pencil. My feet had grown so quickly that year that the only shoes that fit me were women's shoes and styles and I had this pair of wooden clogs with a heel that I wish to God I still had but don't. I remember that one girl in my class had reached puberty years ahead of the rest of us and that we all, boys and girls alike, obsessively watched her boobs doing what they do. I remember there were some fast booty girls that were rumored to have been caught kissing sixth and seventh grade boys and that I was both appalled and intrigued. There were combs in back pockets but I wore my hair in braids. And I remember for the first time that the school day seemed to go on forever. Mrs. S was no fun. In fact, she was as rigid and dry as her old pruney lips announced. I hated being in her class. And I hated her. After that year, thanks to puberty and beauty standards I couldn't meet and a sense of loneliness and isolation, I started to hate myself a little.
I watch my ten year old running up the hill to her elementary school with the other 3rd through 5th graders looking for signs of her sense of worth and value. I wonder if she pays attention to all the details that now seem my only memory of that time. All the kids look enthusiastic and eager and too young to think about any of the things I recall about fifth grade. My ten year old is all curiosity, rainbows, cute animal videos, and pop culture memes that seem to sometimes go over her head. She is still wearing ponytails and a tank top, no bra-lette. She is all legs and thanks to the crowning of the kids as king, she has age appropriate footwear and clothing even though her paws are getting big like a growing puppy. But she is also musical.ly and snapchat photos and silly little texts to her girlfriends on the phone we got her to stay in touch with us on her walk home. When I ask her if kids talk about love interests or care about their hair and clothing more than they used to, she rolls her eyes at me to tell me that my line of questioning is embarrassing and ridiculous because 'no' or more likely because she cannot imagine that I know how it goes.
Sometimes she tells me about something funny she has seen on line or an app her friends have shared with her. Other times she brings to me the most adorable, well-crafted stuffed animals that she knitted or sewed with no pattern or guide and I think about how amazing she is, about the talent she has that has absolutely nothing to do with me. At night, when her most anxious thoughts and fears creep in, she whimpers and whispers her self-doubt into my ear, tells me that she just doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up and asks if she really has to know right now. She wonders aloud why a girl in her class is wearing and wants to wear make up and stylish clothes "like an adult" and talks to everyone like she is grown. She tells me she feels woefully alone and is afraid not of the small details of her life but of the big picture. How we all got here. How do we discover what our role is to play on this planet? What if she just can't find her way?
And I answer. All of the questions to the best of my ability. And we talk about the anxiety and self-doubt that she is predisposed to thanks to me, and how she can best navigate it. I tell her that kids of her generation do things much sooner that we did and we laugh together and agree that yes, she got the teacher that nearly broke her spirit one year before I did. I tell her about Derek and the girl who developed early, about Mrs. S's sullen way of presenting almost everything. About how still and quiet and lonely that room felt to me. I tell her about the clicking of my adult sized clogs on the floor and the dreams I had staring out the window. I told her that I started to believe I couldn't be anything I dreamt of that year, that I started to believe I was not enough. That the way this teacher spoke of me to my parents and that they did not tell her to 'fuck off' made me wonder if I really needed to work that much harder or if they were just not "getting me." (At the time I went with work that much harder but now I am not so sure that was the right answer.)
This morning, though I'd offered to let her wear her mane of hair, now blond and brown from the sun, down, my 5th grader still chose ponytails. She wore high tops and a blouse-y purple top that has a built in tank top so she didn't have to sport an undergarment. Despite feeling a little under the weather, she decided not to miss the second day of school. Though she is a little shell-shocked from last year, she is willing to go forward feeling hopeful, accepting this new path and direction. She knows what she is ready for and what she is not quite yet. As I pulled up to our drop off spot, I wished her insight and guidance and goodness on this second day. I told her I'd tell her how I loved her from inside the car so she would not have to be mortified by my beaming pride once out in the real world. She grabbed her backpack and tightened her safety patrol belt and said, "I want everyone to know that you love me." She closed the door and got on her path. I watched as long as I could see her, hoping she would turn to look just one more time.
And she did.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
As the story goes, when my father was born, his grandmother wanted him to be named Stephen after her father. Though he'd already been named Jesse, he was called Steve or Stevie by everyone growing up. I know a childhood friend by whether they call him Steve or Jesse. I am called Stephanie after his secret name, a tiny, little seed planted at his roots in an alternative, dream landscape. He is a hearty and strong succulent perennial, only an occasional flower, low growing, sometimes called the liveforever or sempervivum. I am the flower.
We are so alike, my father and I. There is depth, order, control. We are protective, strong, and quick to anger. I love him. I always have. I respect the man he became and all that he has accomplished in this life. I know that if I am in danger he will come. If I am hurt he will come. If I need he will give. But in order to protect himself from the slings and arrows, knives in the back and punches to the gut, he has had to encase his heart in thorns and booby traps.
I woke up this morning at 5:30. That's too early for me. Though I tried to go back to sleep, as soon as my eyes are opened I find that nearly impossible. My racing mind started tracing lines to all the people I know who were probably awake. Many living abroad where the day was already in full swing, friends on the West Coast who may be having a bout of insomnia or a late night of excess, and my dad. Now that he is in his seventies, 5:30 is pretty early for him too, but the early mornings are a space where I always see my father. Walking the house in quiet, breathing in life in a space where no people means no mask, rising with the sun as he did as a boy when he had work to do. You can take the boy out of the country, but not the country out of the boy. My dad is still a country boy.
A country boy whose parents told him and his four siblings how to survive, and gave them everything they had, which was not much materially but was full to bursting with love, guidance, and support. They told those beautiful, black children how to get out of the poverty they'd been born into and to keep marching forward despite the expectation of the America that they were born into, that they were 'less than.' Education, character, drive, ambition, and familial love and support would help each lift the others. Racism and segregation shaped my father's sense of himself and no matter his successes, he has remained haunted. I can only imagine how he endured the assaults on his character, his intelligence, and his basic rights. Like me, he is sensitive, easily wounded, and anxious. Like me, he hides and protects his heart. Unlike me, he has not found too many to share it with. And that includes me.
The love was tough, survivalist. It wasn't precious or adorable. It wasn't indulgent or demonstrative. There were few hugs and smothers of kisses and compliments and praise. There were high expectations. When one fears failure, when failure in a system set up for you to fail means life or death, there is little time for pleasantries. The hurt of his youth nourished ours and our blooms were sprinkled with his pain. But mine is a fragile bloom. My roots are strong, but the flower is so desperate for the light, desperate for the watering and the nutrients, seeking warmth from real and artificial light sources. I cannot always tell the difference.
My father is the first man for whom I was ever too much. I could tell by the way he looked at me since the beginning of time and shook his head. I wasn't easy because I'm not. I'm all of the things one has to work on, work towards. Work. I was compared to other girls who achieved better and far more than I. Girls who were poised and demure and knew the code and followed it. They were good girls. They weren't wild and didn't talk back or fight or question or practice magic. They were practical and organized and good. There is a part of me that is like that too. Remnants of my attempts to please.
My father is the first man whose love I could feel dangling in front of me but could never reach. My father loves me, but it sparks like an electrical short and cannot sustain itself long enough to provide light. I chase the falling embers, hope it will help me find my way through the tunnel but I I do a lot of feeling around in the dark.
My father is the first man I tried to impress by dancing all around him, literally dancing all around him, who was distracted and saw only a flash and felt a slight breeze from all my efforts, and wondered to himself, 'What was that?' as I whirled past. I still don't think he has ever seen me.
But I am not done with him. I am nothing if not persistent. I am the flower. And I continue to bloom in his face. I remind him that without our roots neither of us would thrive. That it does no good for the succulent to resist its flower. The plants are so gorgeous, have always been some of my favorites, whether they have a bloom or not. But the blossom is such a sweet surprise sometimes taking years to finally bloom. It is more. It is the hand to God, the reaching, the longing, the magic expressed. It is working through the fear and the shame of wanting and needing to be loved. It just is. And we both need it, the light and the love.
As the story goes, I was born so prematurely that I was so tiny you could hold me in one hand. There was a fear that I might not survive, that the cold winter and early arrival might be too much for my tiny body. But my roots dug in deep and I called on everything I knew. The sempervivum, I was going to live and he knew it. So he gave me his name, the one he should have had. I fulfilled the promise of this family name and we are tied. Liveforever.
Happy Father's Day to my dad.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Our vacation was almost ruined before it started by my anxiety, the collapsed ceiling in our hallway that fell hours before our flight, and the miserable failure of XL Airlines and the absolute breach of professionalism and trust by this new airline. Were it not for a few Xanax in my pocket, the Minnow would be lost. After a night of sleep stolen on the uncomfortable chairs in JFK Airport's Terminal 4, we got on a new airplane commanded by the incredible Omni Airlines and Virginie promptly vomited into my hand. In the end, she was just tired. At the moment I wondered if we were doomed. We weren't and we made it into the air and to Charles de Gaulle Airport by 7 pm France time, only to get into the car with the French husband's brother and head 5 hours to Bretagne. The brothers chatted in the front seat, the French husband surely delirious from a lack of sleep and tortured resting positions, while the girls and I passed out in the backseat, twisted and contorted but salvaged by animal neck pillows. It was crazy getting here, but we were now in France.
They say when you marry someone, you marry their whole family. Unless they are estranged, this is true. You want to make a good impression on everyone involved and you hope that you find you are also interested in some, if not all, of the family. When I married the French husband, someone from another country, and sometimes, it seems, another planet entirely, I felt that to know and love France would help me to know and love my hoped-to-be-husband.(I mean, the French got it down this love of country and pride of people.) I got the Rosetta Stone, brushed up on my history, listened to him wax on and on about the superiority of his culture to pretty much all others. He meant well. I know this. It wasn't so much arrogance as a cock-suredness that, frankly, was pretty damned sexy to this American broad.
It was the same with the Austrian for whom I tried just long enough to figure out how to conjugate a sentence or two and then was reduced to tears. I drank beer, ate wurst, supported their teams, even recognized the Habsburg jaw. With the Spaniard, I took 4 semesters of post-graduation Spanish and spoke to his parents, my friends' parents, anyone in my broken Spanish. I ate everything, wanted to learn flamenco, loved that Spanish guitar. I have cheered for all of their futbol teams. Sure, this reporting is stylized and reduced to the most obvious cliches of each culture, but trust, I was deep in. I still am.
Thanks to my anxiety, I still want to make a good impression every time, to marry them ALL all over again, to prove to them that marrying this crazy American girl was a good choice. But I was so tired and grumpy and crazy and tired that I nearly tore my poor French husband a new one when he tried to help me get through the security line while I held our sleeping five year old. Though this trip had been planned for months, we still found ourselves jamming things into a duffle bag at the 11th hour and racing out the door, sadly, without the girls' headphones but WITH my dance shoes and our library cards. :-/
We made such good time on the drive we were sure our luck had turned until we arrived at the airport to the gate of some airline called #XLAirways which has discounted fares to France. I'd heard about the airline just once through a new French friend in my dance class and recalled the many times we'd flown overseas without incident on a variety of airlines. Well, at Terminal 4 at JFK, a crappy early 80s design flaw of a place anchored by all the Middle Eastern and Israeli airlines as well as Caribbean Airlines, there was not one representative from XL Airlines, but there was a young woman in an unmarked blazer slowing passing along the bad news that, though none of us had been informed, there would be a delay in our flight time of 6 hours. Thank you very much and please stand on this line against the wall on the other side of anything civilized. Food, bathrooms, and escape were on the other side of the door. We slept on the floor. It was like the Wizard of Oz except not only are the memories of the start of our trip in black and white, but in slow motion.
On the other side, when we opened our eyes, was France. I love being here. I love attempting and trying to convince myself that I actually speak French. I love that my husband and I, who have been struggling with connection as many parents of time/energy/affection-sucking small children do, have time to look at each other. I love that there is discovery and adventure for all four of us and that the places where we roamed as we fell in love the first time in his country are now shared spaces. We showed them the beach where I first sunbathed topless, shy and embarrassed though no one else was with us, and they went topless too (though of course with decidedly different results than a grown woman bearing it all). The girls climbed the rocks leading to the Cote Sauvage where their father played as a young boy. We ate countless croissants, celebrated the iconic monuments of Paris, and drove from West to Central to nearly southern France squealing with delight at castles/chateaux, cows, sunflowers, horses, and vineyards.
And as much as they loved every one of those moments, they were happiest with their family. Their cousins, their uncle and auntie, their Papi, a surly, French, 84-year old fountain of wicked truth telling and a crazy crotchety Gaul. I married them, married them all. Because of my children, I am infinitely tied to this place. It is a part of them that it can never be for me as I am not OF this, no matter all my attempts. When we left Paris and my parents, who visited with us for a few days, I took the last Xanax (save the one for the return flight), closed my eyes, and let it all spin around me. There is too much wine, too much bread, too much cheese, and staying up too late for the under 8 set. But I feel good about it. I even spend a moment or two with the tatas out on the beach. The French husband gives it hard, he can be relentless in his superior posturing, but sitting with my toes in the sand, eating baguette and cheese, flipping through the glamorous pages of French Vogue, with the sun beating down on my naked stuff, I let go.
My trip was nearly ruined by my anxiety, by the stress that I ooze before I finally let go and just be in the place, whatever the place. Right now we have no idea what time it is or what day. We eat baguette and croissants every morning and sit in the garden with lavender all around. We walk to the sea, we eat good food, and we broken Franglais-speak with anyone who will listen to us try to describe this crazy beautiful moment. I say it every time, right before it's all over. We should do this more often. Travel. Be in the world. Be impressed and make impressions on people. I have to remember how I tied myself to that moment when I am home fretting about the hamsters and the bills and the school and the play dates. I have to remember that all those crazy, beautiful, hectic, wicked, scary, freaky, lovely moments are all part of my life. Even when I am not eating a baguette on the beach in Bretagne.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
