MamaStories

My grandfather passed away a few weeks ago, after a prolonged illness. Again I couldn’t be in Belgium for the funeral, nor could I fly over to see him during those three weeks that he was in the hospital. But I did call him at the hospital every other day. Usually the conversation was very brief, because he was short of breath, or tired, and because he dislikes the telephone.

But our last conversation, the day before he died, was longer. He asked how the garden went, and could I email pictures of it to my dad, who could then bring them on his laptop. My grandfather was a gardener too – the only gardener in my family , in fact, till I took up this crazy business, recently. He grew many vegetables, apple and pear and cherry trees, and a compost heap (I remember the hilarious experiments with worms).

I wanted so much for him to see how well all my vegetables and herbs are growing. I didn’t get to send the pictures – even if I had that moment, it would have been too late. Then it rained, and rained. But here they are, some pictures I took on a brighter day:

The old cold frame (lights removed, fenced in with, yes, repurposed shelving) with cherry tomato, lettuce and chard, and day lilies, and path to the garden.

Potato towers in forefront, more potatoes in beds in back.

Beans on a gloomier day  no luck with the lentils, in front, they’re not growing. Notice the big pile of stones to the left: that’s not half the stones we dug out of the ground. In the background to the left you can see the scaffolding for the tomatoes. I have no close-up pictures of it, though, because… it started raining. Sigh.

{UPDATE} Aha! A couple of hours after posting this entry the clouds cleared and I could run out to take a picture of the tomato and eggplant beds:

• Grosbeak

In the early morning I passed by the window without my glasses on and spotted something colorful at the bird feeder. Something very colorful and unfamiliar, though hazy. I rushed to get my glasses: it was a new bird, and I guessed that it was a Grosbeak. I got the camera and the bird obliged, visiting for another ten minutes.

When I sat down in the sofa with my bird book Amie immediately imitated me, getting her animal book, sitting down right next to me, and finding the animals she was spotting. It was incredibly sweet. Turns out it was a Rose-breasted Grosbeak. It’s a summer resident.

• Eggs

A week ago I also found some eggs in the garden where a tree was cut down. One was broken, the other two intact, which I took inside and put into one of my bowls, thinking I might find a way of preserving them. Then I flat forgot about them, until today, when I found one broken (or rather, burst) open: it had a half developed little chick inside.

I threw them in the compost. Anyone know what birds these eggs belong to?

• Robin Hill

You’d have thought the Robins would have chosen a different spot for their nest this Spring – no longer the rafters of our carport, where last year they had to fly off each time someone approached. They did choose a different spot… about a foot away from the old nest! It’s tough to photograph them – I don’t want to use a flash. Here’s a glimpse:

There were four little robins at first, and then there were only three. One fell out of the nest, it was lying dead on the pavement next to the car. I took pictures, of course – dead wild animals afford that rare close look – and then disposed of the body for some lucky fox or cat. It’s part of the great cycle of life, but how sad.

It’s not that I chose not to tell Amie, it just didn’t come up. She  climbed on the ladder to see the remaining three chicks and was wowed.

Next year, if they choose to grace us with their presence again, I want to install a live webcam.

I have been looking for a name for our tiny homestead. We’re on a hill and have lots of chipmunks, so I was thinking “Chipmunk Hill”, but in honor of our Robins we’ll call it Robin Hill – I like the Robin Hood connotation!

(It’s that dead bird again)

Well, at bedtime Amie again asked to talk about the dead baby penguin. Again she wanted to know why there was no blood. Was it really dead? I explained that it died because it was too cold. Probably its heart stopped working. I explained that our blood needs to circulate – go round and round – in our bodies and that the heart is a big pump that does that, and we listened to each other’s heartbeat (it will be a new game; she also loves to put her ear to my jaw when I eat crunchy things, which makes her laugh out loud). Then we slowly came to the heart of the matter, for her, on this evening.:

- If you’re a human, do you have to be a grown-up to die?

- Well, sometimes children die too, but not so often. They’d have to be really sick, or in an accident.

- But if S [friend at school] died, I could no longer play with her. I could still play with C and E, though [more friends at school]. But not with S anymore.

- Well, mostly, in this country, children grow up to be adults.

- But I was really sick, and I didn’t get dead.

- That wasn’t sick enough. Much sicker.

- If we die together, like in an accident, we could hold hands and still love each other. If you die first, I will still love you. But I will still have Baba and S and C and E at school to play with. That will be ficient [sufficient]. But I will still love you even though you’re dead. And I could still hug you, if you die with your arms open a bit [demonstrates]. Not if you close your arms [narrows her arms], then I wouldn’t fit. We could hold hands then.

- Usually, though, when someone dies, they take away the body, because it gets all smelly and rotten, because the blood no longer circulates through it and so no longer keeps it fresh. So they bury it in the ground or burn it up in a big, bright flame.

- I will still love you then, even though you’re not here.

Then the conversation turned to whether all her friends, E and C and some others (note: not S anymore) could come and live with us, and where would be put them to sleep and where would their Mamas and Babas sleep.

None of this – and nothing in our earlier conversations – was said morosely or sadly. It was simply matter-of-fact talk. She is trying out the concept of death, lingering mostly at its fringes: the poses we die in, would there be blood. Sometimes she gets at the heart of it, like today, when she considered what it would be like if her friend or I died, what she would do, if it would still be sufficient for her. But even then it is a trying-out of the thought of it, not the feeling. That’s why I am not worried: it is safe. And being so open about it, answering all her question without flinching, safeguards that safety and her trust in me.

In the evening Amie watched March of the Penguins. We had shown it to her about half a year ago but she wasn’t interested then. This time she was, going “oh so cute!” and so forth, but really paying attention when the little chick dies of exposure and the mother mourns over it.

- what happened to it?

- it died because it was too cold.

- but no, it didn’t get dead. Look, it’s moving, like this. [makes sad little movements with her head]

- no, sweetie, it’s dead.

- what is the mother trying to do now?

- the mother is so sad she is trying to steal a chick from another mother.

- stealing isn’t nice.

- see, the pack doesn’t allow it and the chick is back with its mother.

When we went to bed she wanted to sit in the pile of blankets to keep her egg warm. Then she wanted to talk about the penguins.

- I especially want to talk about when the chick got dead. I liked that.

- you liked it? Do you mean it made you happy?

- no.

- so you mean you are interested in it.

- yes. It’s interesting.

I had to explain again why the chick had died.

- but I didn’t see any blood.

- it wasn’t wounded, it was just too cold.

- can I have a baby penguin? It’s not too cold here.

- it’s too warm here. Penguins like it cold, but not too cold.

Seconds later:

- promise me we will die next to one another? [this while holding my head, her nose nearly touching mine, her eyes locked to mine]

- I can’t promise that, sweetie. We don’t know when we’ll die. It’s mostly not in our control.

- we could die in an accident.

- yes, or when we grow old and it’s time.

- but we don’t die on the cross. Only Jesus died on the cross. What is Jesus’ Mama’s name?

- Mary – not the Mary we know. A different Mary.

- What’s her last name?

- I don’t know.

- Jesus died and then Mary died too. They went far away. As far as… Auntie R. That was a long drive.

A little later:

- Mama, can we have another baby? But I want it to be a girl. We can call it Amie.

- but you are Amie. So we couldn’t call her Amie!

- but what if I die? And I still want to pinch your arm? [arm pinching is a leftover from nursing: she does it when tired or sad and when falling asleep]

I was dumbfounded. A weird thing, that statement: “Amie” (II) would still be pinching my arm, and that seemed to make her feel better about dying. Such a strange concept of identity, such fearless exploration of what death is and what it means to her! She soon fell asleep.

I’ve written about how I want to communicate to my daughter about death here.

I had three very strange conversations with Amie today.

• Part one

Out of the blue (we were washing hands) she said:

- Pooh Bear is very fluffy so he will never die again.

- So you think if you’re fluffy you can’t die?

- Yes. But I am not fluffy, so I am going to die. Some day. And you are not fluffy, so you are going to die too. We’ll lie down together and lie next to each other and our crosses will be next to each other. And the body goes away, right? And only our bones are left over.

• Part two

Later I asked:

- Which crosses were you talking about?

- Like Jesus’ cross.

- But we don’t usually die on the cross like Jesus. We die when we’re very sick or very old, or in an accident. It could be we go to sleep and just don’t wake up.

- When we lie down? We can die when we lie down, or when we’re holding something, or even when we talking?

- Yes.

- They say you can come back after you die.

- Oh, like Jesus you mean? Usually though when we die we don’t come back. Jesus was an exception.

- No, all of us.

- O yes, some people believe that. I don’t know, though.

• Part three

Ten minutes later I asked if we should put some music on. She asked:

- Do we have any Jesus music?

- How do you mean?

- Music with Jesus?

- We don’t have a recording of Jesus, but there is music about Jesus. You want that?

- Yes, Jesus music please.

~

Later I was on the phone with DH, who was working late, and mentioned this strange conversation.

- Ah, he said, I think I know why.

Turns out that yesterday, when I was at my pottery class, Amie had said that her Pooh Bear (her stuffed bear) was dead.

- He died, she had said.

DH had explained that Pooh Bear couldn’t die, because he was just a toy bear, and not alive to begin with. He had said:

- He’s just made of fluff. He doesn’t even have any blood.

- Do we have blood?

And that had lead to a conversation about the body.

Aha. “Made of fluff” and “fluffy”… It’s the mind of the three-and-a-half-year-old!

Why do I even look at the news – my “consumption” of which is out of spiritual necessity minimized to reading the headlines in Google News? 8-year-old boy shoots himself in the head at a firearms expo, 7-year-old boy kidnapped then shot to death, Neo-Nazi plot to assassinate Obama.

The places where my jawbone fits in its sockets floods with hot anger. My spirit rebels against the hard and cold instances of brutal despair for the individuals and their loved ones, but my mind quickly makes a getaway into the general meaning of such instances. We are supposed to have biophilia, an affinity for the earth, for rivers, for other creatures, for life.

Quickly put on some Bach, open again David Orr’s Earth in Mind on the environment and education – book seem so innocent compare dot the internet, but that’s a illusion – with Amie on my lap “fishing” while she sings about the Whoop-Dee-Dooper Bounce. From the corner of my eye I also stalk the new bird that has been frequenting our feeders, the Red-Bellied Woodpecker. I’ve been wowed by its red hood, its novelty and most of all, I admit, its rarity here in the North-East. I feel shamefully proud that it is here with us and to make things worse I’m intent on stealing its soul with my camera. Why this need to possess its image? Well, here it is anyway:

I also “caught” the Carolina Wren, who has been around all this time, but whose presence at the feeder is new. Here’s the bird in its box:

I am well aware that the presence of a lens between myself and these birds only distances us further, and that that is an arrogant statement. “Us”, as if the bird cares about how distant I am (as long as it’s at least ten feet). “Further”, as if I can ever bridge even those ten feet. And as if I could feed wildness so I could take a picture for a reward.

Why wasn’t it enough to just see it? The same with the book.  I often find my character has been ruined by my education in general but especially by academics and my “specilisation” in philosophy. It is addicted to sentences and abstractions and  incapable of spontaneously undergoing awe and joy at a natural instance. Such moments of simply being-in-the-moment are too rare, such moments like yesterday, when I cleaned out some of our gutters and marveled at how this wet black soil came to be in them, ten feet away from the ground. Then I thought it’s not soil but decayed leaves and pine needles, and then but that’s what soil is and I nearly fall off the ladder.

Back in the living room I read Orr quoting Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac):

One of the penalties of an ecological eduction is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

I write “for Amie” in the margin (it is something I need to equip her for), close the book and plot the making of bread and this entry.

We’re all sick.

Amie came down with a cold on Friday. She often has a bit of a runny/sneezy nose in the mornings, and Friday morning was no different, except that she didn’t want to go to school. She loves her preschool, but only gets “fully committed” when she is actually there, or after she has come home. Getting her ready and over there and especially over the threshold – especially when it’s me who’s doing the drop-off – is a less enthusiastic affair.

I asked her: “Are you feeling sick?” She said: “Yes”.  She had no fever, though I caught her shivering a bit – but then this was the first really chilly morning of the season. Was she “faking it”? I doubted she could. Can they, at her age (3.3)? I explained to her about lying, and about how important and fun school is, and how much it costs and Baba needs to work for paying for it, and that Mama also needs to work in the mornings. I explained what “feeling sick” means. Etc.  She still said she was sick.

By that moment in the conversation we had reached the school gate and the teacher  was inviting us in. Amie did the usual thing of clinging to me, but unusually she didn’t let herself be persuaded. I decided to bring her home.

On the way back home I was torn: was she faking it not to have to go to school? Or was she sick? Either way, I realized, I was sunk!

I remember faking it myself. I did that quite often because I didn’t have a happy school life for the most part.  I remember also the despair of my mom on those occasions. She sort of seemed to know, I thought, or at least I persuaded myself so I didn’t have to feel too guilty about it. My woes at school always seemed to legitimize my duplicity to myself, but still there was always my mom’s quiet sadness. Was it because she had work to do at home and I would be in the way, or because she knew the sad reasons for my faking it, or because in the end it meant she had to be unsure now whenever I claimed to be sick, and it made her judgment of the real situation so perilous…

Driving my child back home from school, I finally understood.

In a couple of hours it became clear she was really sick, so though I felt very sad for Amie, I also felt relieved.

It quickly deteriorated into something worse.  Yesterday I thought we might have to run to the ER because her breathing was very shallow and rapid, and the wheezing and rumbling in her chest was alarming. I watched her closely as she slept for most of the day. When awake she was so fully invested into getting enough air into her lungs that she didn’t speak all day, not a singly word except for “tissue”, until after a nap at 5 pm. Then she suddenly perked up with a feverish energy, and she couldn’t stop talking and singing for a while, in a high-pitched, trembling, short-of-breath voice that broke my heart. But she was breathing easier, and today, though she is still sick, and vomited up what little she finally ate, I know she has turned the page on this one.

Not so hubby, who lies moaning in bed. And I also have a runny nose. I’m fighting it, though, by frenetically vacuuming the house, cleaning the kitchen, doing the laundry and turning over the compost while Amie is asleep. Which she is now, on the sofa next to me,  rumbling and snoring away while I blog.

How about you? How does it make you feel when you suspect your child is faking it? How do you remember it from your own childhood?

I’m reading an interesting book called Talking with Children about loss, written by “Good Grief” counselor Maria Trozzi and co-authored by Kathy Massimini.

I’m always picking up books like those. I read Hope Edelman’s Motherless Daughters, for instance, when I was pregnant, and got many comments, mostly in the vein of “how can you read that now?”. But I am unashamed, because I’m a writer. It gives me the license to “imagine things” without having to be embarrassed about it. So, yes, I’ve imagined the worst for Amie: what if she died, what if I died, what if her father died? I’ve “lived” through these scenarios, and would like to, one day, write a novel about one of them and really explore such an event.

But I read these books first of all because, as any mother, I want to know what to do, or I want DH to know what to do, if Amie experiences a loss. I want to be prepared. Being a bookish person I naturally reach for texts, and find there my knowledge and my hope.

One of the first tasks of mourning, writes Trozzi, is understanding: understanding what death is. Not “going to sleep”, “passing away,” “going to heaven” or “being lost. Death is a physical process that ends everything that we call “human” that attaches to a person’s body. A child needs to understand that, and we need to stop using euphemisms. If a child doesn’t understand the most basic meaning of death, he or she will never be able to deal with loss, will never be able to mourn.

As I read that, I realized I had already started this task with Amie. For one, as I wrote earlier, I don’t want her to be ignorant of where her food comes from: that beef was a cow, that sausage was a pig, the wood in the hearth was a tree, etc.

But it has gone further. Many months ago Amie had repeated nightmares about a dinosaur. She woke up screaming and often would refuse to close her eyes again, because there was a dinosaur in the room, or it was coming. The way we helped her through this fearful time was by simply telling her that the dinosaurs are dead.

“What’s ‘dead’?”

“Dead means the dinosaur can’t move, can’t walk. Dead means he can’t talk, or listen, or look. Dead means his body is lying in the ground somewhere, buried, often even crushed to pieces. So he can’t get up and come here.”

She was quite resourceful. She said:

“But this dinosaur isn’t dead.”

“That’s not possible. All dinosaurs are dead. That’s why we call them a special word: ‘extinct’. ‘Extinct’ means that all the dinosaurs, without exception, are dead. So no dinosaur can come here.”

Sure, she was the only 2,5-year-old who knew the meaning of (and could pronounce) ‘extinct’. But hey, I believe in the power of words (and of their definitions, and of their correct application to the things in the world). And this was one clear-cut example of that power. Amie’s nightmares stopped.

Amie is ill again. She has “upper respiratory problems”. One child sniffs > Amie gets a cold. Our trip to the Science Museum was fun, but by the evening I could see that we had brought home more than a bunch of good memories.

Yesterday she spent the day glued to me. She slept until noon! On me. DH took this sweet picture of us on the sofa.

I look so sleepy, don’t I? It’s not the book I’m reading  though. Try staying awake with such a warm, sleepy body weighing you down!

The book is actually really good. It’s Rick Bass’ Where the Sea Used to Be. I love Bass’ short stories and novellas – I think I’ve read most of them. This was his first full-length novel. I must say I didn’t like the first 31 pages of it: they didn’t speak to me at all. Luckily I don’t give up on books so easily. I was on the verge of feeling very sad and disappointed when, on p.32, the book finally opened up to me, the characters became alive, the language beautifully evocative.

I haven’t been able to put it down since, but the new Orion Magazine arrived in the mail yesterday, so now I struggle to divide my time between the that, Where the Sea Used to Be and The Magic School Bus. And my own novel, and this blog, and some letters I need to write. And playing with the zoo, and the paints, the doll houses and their various assortments of denizens. And the dishes, and laundry…

I’m sitting in the living room, it’s 9:30 pm. And I am listening to Amie screaming that she wants Mama to lie next to her and that she wants to go see Mama.

DH has been ill for a week so he has been sleeping in the guest room/study and has also not been putting Amie to bed at night – I usually do the nap. This evening is the first time he is putting her back to bed and she is hysterical.

The first time she climbed out of the bed I heard him say: “Mama will be angry with you.” This seemed to stall her – the thought of angering me?! – and she stood in the corridor, at the bedroom door, screaming pathetically, not knowing what to do.

I went to her, gave her a hug and explained calmly that it was Baba’s turn to take her to bed and I was right nearby. I carried her to the bed and she resumed her crying. Baba was a bit upset that I hadn’t been angry like he had said.

I felt I shouldn’t be angry with her. I wanted to be supportive (“I know you can do it”) and sympathetic (“I know how you feel”), but also decisive (“I am not coming to bed, you have to go to sleep with Baba”).

I feel Amie and I have become very close this last week, perhaps due to Baba’s semi-absence, perhaps due to her having a high-fever flu over the weekend and spending a lot of time close to me. She comes to give me hugs and kisses more often, more intensely too – harder squeezes, bone-crushing snuggles, softer kisses, the expression on her face always almost one of pain and worry. I hadn’t thought she would also have separation anxiety. Her babysitter came this morning and she let me go off to work without a thought…

Now she is coming out again and I am resolved to sit here in the sofa and not give her a hug. Can I smile

…

I didn’t give her a hug, kept a neutral face, and told her to go back and no, not climb onto the sofa next to me. Baba was right behind her and for a moment we were at an impasse. Amie sobbing in the middle of the living room, me on the sofa trying to keep my cool, Baba in the corridor looking in not knowing what to do.

I could tell he didn’t think I was being firm enough. I told him to pick her up and hug her – as I was evidently prohibited from doing – and to carry her up and down the corridor a couple of times.This seemed to work: she calmed down, probably because she could see me each time they passed by the living room. But then she began to insist she sleep next to me on the sofa – which she did when she was sick – and we were back at square one.

Baba carried her back to the bedroom and closed the bedroom door. She is now screaming even more hysterically and I heard her pulling on the doorknob but Baba must have brought her back to the bed.

Now it’s 10:10 and she is still crying, but calmer, or more exhausted. It reminds me of along period months ago, when she was having such separation anxiety it was almost debilitating to herself and all around her. She screamed when she was dropped off at daycare, when Baba tried to put her to sleep, even when I left the room, and we couldn’t get a babysitter…. She screamed so badly at nap in daycare that we changed her to a mornings-only schedule, which helped tremendously (sleep seems to be a factor here). We stopped the Baba every-other-day bedtime to an only-Baba-bedtime, and after a couple of bad evenings (never as bad as this), it became her routine. We went to Singapore and India where she was kind and open to so many people… When she came back to daycare they called her “a different Amie!”

She needs to be up early to go to daycare. The practical part of me says to just go in and take over and, exhausted as she is, she will be asleep in 5 minutes. The wife part of me feels for Baba – though it is also somewhat upset at his berating me for being too soft – and wants to respect Baba’s belief that if I do that, it will give her the message that screaming will get her what she wants. That’s a belief I subscribe to… but in this situation? The Mama part of me says: just go, go! Then: no, wait! If you go you might precipitate another bout of separation anxiety…

Now she is quiet. Is she asleep?

How to love and nurture your child and also make sure that her love is not so exclusively of you? I want her to love others, for their sake, of course, but for hers first of all. Because what if something happened to me? What if one day I’m not there for her, and the only way she could stop crying is from exhaustion? I think of that possibility every day. I know it happens. But why do I feel that I have to be prepared for that – that I have to prepare her for that?

Why is it is so damn painful! How can something so soft be so damn hard!

It’s 10:20 now and still quiet. Can I go in yet and hug her?