Long Days

I hear the whispers outside the room in which I'm sleeping.  They float through my subconscious even as my body pleads, No, no, no it's not time to wake up yet, please no.
"Mommy, can I wake Cakey up yet?"
"What time is it?"
"Almost 6."
"Okay, but be gentle."

Tap tap tap.  I feel her feather hand on my shoulder and crack my eyes open to see her smiling face.  "Hi, Sage," I whisper sleepily.  She grins and flings herself in for a hug while I try to pull myself upright.  She is so grown up in daylight hours, eloquent and mature, and achingly in between childhood and adolescence, but at 6 AM on Thursday mornings, she is my sweet warm buddy again, crawling into my lap and telling me in excited whispers about her school's hiking and overnight trip she's going on today and do I want oatmeal for breakfast and how was my clinical yesterday and should we wake up June so she can see me too?

Half an hour later, June is still not awake.  I sneak into her room, where she is splayed across her mattress, naked except for her wedgied pink underpants, blankets tangled about her feet.  I stroke her back softly, whisper, "Juney-Bee, wake up..."  She turns toward me blearily, her hair in her face.
"Mommy?" she asks.
"No, sweetie, it's Cakey."
"Cakey??!  Is it really you?"  Her sleepy eyes wide open now, she pushes her bangs away, sees it's really me and scrambles her hot little monkey body into my lap and wraps all four impossibly long limbs around my torso and squeezes till my eyes tear up.  She lays her head into my chest and sighs.  "I'm so happy you're here, Cakey.  I love you."
"I love you too, sweetness.  I'm so glad you're mine."

We eat oatmeal at the table and the chatter washes over me while I pour milk and slice apples and we talk about what to wear for school picture day and hiking trips and their mother, a former boss, and now a friend, smiles at me over their heads while I mouth, Thank you for all of this, and she only laughs and shakes her head and wraps me in another hug.

It's a long drive to Massachusetts every Wednesday afternoon for a clinical shift in a tiny community sexual health center whose two exam rooms are each big enough to touch all four walls while you stand in the middle.  I cram myself by the door while my midwife preceptor wedges herself behind the exam table and moves mountains for her patients and teaches them about birth control.  I leave with my face hurting from smiling and my stomach rumbling its emptiness.  I drive to the home of the only nanny family I still keep in touch with, where I bask in the light of being loved and needed and welcomed and family, even while I miss my own family so much it hurts.  I drive the two hours home, shower in a flurry, drive to work and prop my eyelids open for the rest of the day, momentarily panicking when I remember I have a midterm on Monday, a test on Tuesday, an assignment due Wednesday, and a mountain of work before clinical next week.

But today I got to wake up to my two favorite girls and for now that is more than enough.

The Canyon Overflows

I spent the last six Thursdays with some of the sickest kids I've ever seen.  Tracheostomy tubes hooked up to ventilators, CPAP forcing in air that is 80% oxygen, twenty-four hours a day.  Continuous EEG monitoring because she had seven seizures in two days.  Cranial skull fractures so bad that the subarachnoid hemorrhage is causing his spinal cord to swell in its bony casing and he may never walk again.  Sick upon sicker upon sickest, and every single one had a mother.  I met them all.  I talked to them all.  I wrote my name on their white board, explained I was a student nurse and that I'd be helping out their little one that day, and I tried hard to remember their names so that I wouldn't have to call them "Mom" when asking questions or explaining procedures.  

Mothers who knew every medication their child had ever taken, who knew more about his G-tube feedings than I did (by a long shot), who could push an antibiotic and antacid cocktail into it with a smile on their face while they told me about the last 18 months of having a son born chronically ill.  

Mothers who sat anxiously by the bed of their toddler who had bounced around inside the car the night before, unrestrained by a carseat when they were T-boned at 2 AM.  Who rocked back and forth and yelled at me for not giving her baby more pain medication for the craniotomy she'd just had and then apologized in the next breath and told me it wasn't her fault and she was so scared because the DCF worker had just been here and what if she can't take her baby home with her.

Babies who fall out of third story windows.

Babies who weigh thirteen pounds at fifteen months old.

Babies who took too much heroin at their prom last night and may never wake up again.

Babies who haven't woken up in five years and who will never learn to talk or walk or smile or eat.

Mothers at their side, every single one.

Mothers who did everything right, and whose babies were born with illnesses they cannot pronounce.  Mothers who made every mistake in the book, and whose babies fell at fate's hands in the most unexpected way.

Their love was fierce, and it filled the room.  It fought for its right to exist and hold sway in this strange place of plastic and metal and tubes and beeping monitors and no privacy and none of us knowing their child the way they do.  It made them protective and questioning and demanding and sometimes difficult and utterly incomprehensible but it was holding us all in an orbit around the tiny body in the bed and it made me stagger in the face of its enormity, every single week.

And every week, I would escape to the medication room and lean my head against the racks of IV fluids and think to myself, somebody loves you like that, too.  What do you do with a love that big?  Every braid, every bath, every school form signed, every batch of brownies stirred with her hands over mine, each one a hospital bedside vigil.  Every act as filled with a canyon of love as the next.  Sometimes I lay awake at night and wonder, panicked, if she knows how much I love her.  I want to fly through the night air home to hug her and whisper in her ear that I love her bigger than the moon and the ocean and the dirt and the trees and how I can never say it enough and please don't ever leave me because you won't hear it enough times before then.

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers of the world.  But especially to mine.

Who Knew Us When

Two seconds before I took this picture they were cuddled together, sharing a bath.  Then they switched to a wrestling match that ended with Lucy running away and Tucker curling up in a smug little ball at my feet.

A friend and I had coffee the other day and the topic of family came up.  My friend was feeling pretty frustrated and I asked why.  I heard about how my friend's parents feel a certain way about an issue - an issue that is admittedly, something that would be extremely difficult as a parent to adjust to - and the way that they feel is - for all intents and purposes - pretty openminded and accepting.  Still, it's not how my friend wants their parents to feel and this is causing a lot of upset and hurt.  Now, I am not my friend (nor am I my friend's parents) and I make no claim to understand the complexities of the emotions on either side.  But in an attempt to offer some objective perspective on the whole thing, I gently suggested to my friend that from what I could hear about how their parents felt, it sounded like they were really making an effort.  And I added to that observation a kind of universal truth - that there is a perpetual gap between who we might want our parents to be, and who they actually are.  Just like how there is a forever and continuous valley between the person our parents want us to be and dreamed we would be, and who we actually turn out to be.  

The point seemed to hit home (in spite of the clumsiness of the metaphor).  I sometimes think about how with all the moving around I've done and the way I've lived my life, I don't hardly know anyone outside of my family who has known me for more than a few years (if that).  The people that watched me grow up, that knew me when I was small and still know me now, people that perhaps took a guess or had an idea or an unspoken wish or even a whole host of expectations about who I would grow to become - what do they think now?  How wide has the valley grown?

Lakeside Christmas

Don't let the sunshine fool you.  It's 30 degrees, even colder at night.  Windy enough to knock you over if you're not careful.  But inside it's warm and cozy, cookies are baking, and family is gathered round.  I hope everyone is enjoying the shortest days of the year, and the holidays that come with them - if you celebrate.

Love to all.

Family Ties

My family is big.

My siblings and I.  Aren't they all ridiculously tall?  In this picture, I am wearing three inch heels.  And they still tower over me.

I love them.  But my family is also this girl:

And these girls:

And the boy.  He's included now too.

* * *

Family can be blood.  But it doesn't have to be.  Family is this:

Family is the people that care.  The people that give a shit.  I'm lucky to have so many.


30 Days Hath November
Day 01: A place I'd like to travel.
Day 02: A favourite movie.
Day 03: Something I never leave the house without.
Day 04: A friend I adore.
Day 05: My hometown.
Day 06: A book I'm reading.
Day 07: A song for the day.
Day 08: Three inspirational quotes.
Day 09: A close-up of my day.
Day 10: A favourite recipe.
Day 11: Three years ago today.
Day 12: The last item I purchased.
Day 13: Something I'm proud of.
Day 14: Style inspiration for the season.
Day 15: Three blogs I always read.
Day 16: Someone who inspires me.
Day 17: My family.

A Long Way From Home

Not giving up on 30 Days Hath November.  Not, not, NOT giving up.  But now that my last exam before Thanksgiving break is over, and my brain can start oozing out of my ear canals a bit more, I feel like I can catch up.  Prepare yourselves, people.

* * *

There is a familiarity to my hometown that I feel is etched into my bones, even from hundreds of miles away.  My parents don't live there anymore, but I will still periodically drive through it, either for fun, or if I'm on my way to see my one remaining friend from my days there.  The shops change a bit, the roads might be repaved, but it's like running my hand up the same bannister to the same staircase that I've been climbing my entire life.  You anticipate the slightest groove or bump, but think nothing of it.

I know what the swings feel like in the playground outside the now closed elementary school where my two best friends and I used to go and swing under the light of the moon, late on weekday nights when we should have been asleep.

I know where the road dips and turns on the ramp up to the one lane bridge over the Erie canal that I had to cross to get into town or to get home.

I know how heavy the side door is to the Catholic church I attended for more than a decade.  And the faint smell of incense and candle smoke that fills the air inside is so familiar that it could make me cry if I let it.

The people in my hometown refuse to be reduced to some simplistic version of small-town folk that the world might want them to be.  Indeed, it took me years to stop reflexively criticizing or making fun of my hometown because of its arbitrarily small population size.  Small does not mean stupid.  Few does not mean powerless.  And I am forever grateful for the help and love that my neighbors, friends' parents, teachers, coworkers, bosses, and long lost friends surrounded me by while I was growing up there.  

They helped make me into the person I am today.


30 Days Hath November
Day 01: A place I'd like to travel.
Day 02: A favourite movie.
Day 03: Something I never leave the house without.
Day 04: A friend I adore.
Day 05: My hometown.

The Very Best Dad

On my fifteenth birthday, my dad told me that as a special present, he was going to teach me how to start the car.  Now, before you laugh, I should say that in my defense, my family only ever owned cars with standard transmissions so starting a car was - albeit, only slightly - more complicated than turning a key.  Gleefully, I scampered outside in the frigid February air and practiced holding the clutch and the brake with my slippered feet, turning the ignition, moving it into neutral, and pulling up the parking brake.  Now, my dad quipped, I had an entire year to practice coming outside to warm up the car before I turned sixteen and he would actually start teaching me to drive.

Fast forward a couple of weeks to me doing chores in the rapidly descending winter darkness between when I got home from school and when my parents got home from work.  Somehow, one of the buckets of firewood that I needed to haul into the house from the garage had gotten wedged just under the bottom of the car.  Tugging on it made no difference, and red-faced and sweaty from the effort, I suddenly remembered that I had a solution.  I could turn on the car, let it roll forward just the slightest amount, and it would release the wedged bucket.  I could turn on the car!  I could do this!  I had skills!  I'm sure you can see where this is going.  I hopped in the car, I pressed on the clutch, I turned the key, and the car started to roll.  Panicked, my mind was utterly blank.  Years of driving teaches the muscles in your feet and legs how to slam on the brakes.  I had no such experience and before my brain could figure out what was happening, with a soft thud, the front of the car slammed into the back wall of the garage...a shared wall with my dad's workshop...that he had just finished re-drywalling two days ago.  All I could do was turn off the car.  The last thing I was about to attempt was backing up.  Panicked, I got out of the car and started to bawl as I saw the three foot section of cracked drywall I had just busted into my dad's shop.

The next hour until my dad to got home from work was a very long (and tearful) wait.  These were the days before everyone had a cell phone and so there was no opportunity for the softer confrontation of a phone call confession.  When he pulled into the driveway, I flew outside to tell him before he could barely step out of the car.  The last thing I wanted was for him to see the damage first.  Voice shaking, I valiantly tried to hold back more tears as I told him what happened.  I'll pay for the new drywall, I said.  I'll help you put it up, I said.  Mostly, all I said was, "I'm sorry."  Over and over again.  Until he smiled, gave me a hug, and told me it was no big deal.  He ambled into the garage, turned on the light, and bent to inspect the damage.  "No biggie," he said as he stood up.  "I'll just re-park the car and then let's go in for some dinner."

If this story ended here, I think we would all agree that my father is a pretty fantastic guy.  Not reaming your idiot teenage daughter out for running the car into the garage?  I'd drink to that.  But, sadly, the story does not end here.  Because three months later...

I did it again.

And the fact that my father was calm, and understanding, and still not angry?
The second time I ran the car into the garage?
After he'd already repaired the wall I broke the first time?
 
THAT is what makes him the Best Dad in the World.

Guess who always, ALWAYS starts a car with her foot on the brake now?  This girl.

Happy Father's Day, Daddy.  I love you more than you know.

The Ring that Matters

One year ago today, on a bright, chilly day in New York, Alix asked me to marry her.  With shaking hands, she awkwardly placed the ring I had picked out onto my left ring finger where it felt so foreign, so heavy, that I couldn't resist holding it in place with my thumb, as if it was going to spontaneously fall off of its own accord.  Now, that ring is tucked in a black box, deep in the recesses of my bedside table drawer, behind the lighter I use for my lavender candle and the piles of prescription bottles that I dole my doses out of each evening before going to sleep.  The ring that I do wear every day is this:

This ring belonged to my father's mother, my grandmother Helen, who died before I was born.  She wore it every day, and when my parents asked the coroner if he'd found it on her body when he came to take her away, he said he hadn't seen it.  Devastated, the family believed that this heirloom was lost forever.  Years later, it was discovered that Helen had passed the ring on to her sister Lizzy before she had died.  Then, as Lizzy ailed and knew her own death was imminent, she gave the ring to her other sister, the last of the three girls still kicking.  My great aunt Marian wore this ring of a dancing lady until the day she died.  My father's cousin Mike gave this ring to me last January, when I went to Aunt Marian's memorial service.  I was speechless.  I couldn't believe that I was being given such a precious, meaningful gift that contained and represented the love, strength, and fortitude that my three ancestors shared.  Those three women lived through wars, through depressions, through difficult marriages, poverty, raising children, moving homes, and a myriad of other hardships that I'll never know.  In spite of it all, they persevered, loving each other and their families until each of them died.  I wear this ring with pride, knowing that the love and strength of each of those amazing women is always at my hands, guiding me and giving me hope when all seems lost.  Keep dancing, I think.  Always, always, always - keep dancing.

A Vacation of Sorts

Not only did we clean, we bought flowers!

Anyone who says they don't scour their apartment before their parents come to visit is either lying, or should be.  Even - and perhaps especially - when said parents say things like, "Oh, we don't want you to feel like you have to clean up before we get there!"  Right.  Well.  Let's start by removing the dirty laundry from the kitchen table, the ice cream cartons from the TV stand, the sneakers from the counter top, and the dog bone from the bed.  And then maybe we'll get to some actual cleaning.  And incidentally?  Cleaning makes you really, really dirty.  Which then necessitates showering.  All of which Alix and I were frantically doing on Friday morning before my parents arrived for their much-anticipated visit.  Since I had the day off from work, we had essentially let all housekeeping duties slide until that morning and planned on getting everything done before their arrival at 2 PM.  We fueled up on coffee by 9 AM and then set to work.  When they arrived at 3:00, Alix and I were panting, breathless, wet from our showers, but oooh lemme tell you, our house was CLEAN.  It shone.  It sparkled.  Things had found homes that they never knew before. (Yes, empty flower pot, you now live in a closet, not on the living room floor.  Ahem.  Not that I'm saying I actually kept a flower pot on the floor for three months.  Purely hypothetical.)  And I did not do that whole nonchalant oh-why-thank-you-our-place-always-looks-like-this dance.  Nope.  We took full credit for our clean home and had the bloodstained thumbnail bed to prove it. (Well, at least Alix did.  An unfortunate incident with a wicker basket occurred in the bedroom.)

No longer do coats live on the kitchen chairs.

Clean apartment and all, we had an amazing long weekend with my family.  My talented father fixed twenty million things around the apartment that needed fixing, including making my closet doors open and close, making it so the bathroom door can close and lock (this is big news, people), hanging a coat rack, hanging a hook for Rupert's leash, installing an indoor clothesline (remember this problem?), and - most impressively - building and installing a removable gate for the bathroom door that allows Tucker to jump in and keeps Rupert out.  In exchange for all his hard work, I made my dear father a grilled cheese.  It was the best I could offer. 


The weekend also included a blueberry pie (made by yours truly), my brother pulling his badge on a taxi driver, Alix's dad and my parents meeting (also big news, everyone), a whole lot of coffee, a whole lot of wine, and one spectacular job interview.  I want to work for this family so, so bad but it involves me finding another part-time nanny job since they only need me part-time as well.  We'll see what happens, but it's a big step in the right direction.  Did I mention they live a block away?  And that they have three little boys?  And that I love them to pieces already?

With the house empty now, and it being only 7:45 PM (and since I'm not exhausted from baking cookies all day), I find myself a little...bored.  Maybe I'll start drafting a resignation letter.  Or maybe I'll enjoy my little vacation for a few more hours and do something wild and crazy like...read a magazine.