My good friend, Stacy Pratt McDermott, writes at Being Mack’s Momma Bear. Every time she posts a new blog, I am blown away by her grace and determination to walk with the grief of losing her youngest daughter, Mackenzie. The thought of losing a beloved daughter terrifies any parent. Stacy, her husband, and their older daughter live with this loss every minute of every day.

Each essay posted on Being Mack’s Momma Bear, shimmers with love, loss, and hope–yes hope. Hope doesn’t mean that everything will be okay, or even that it should be. I believe that hope is, as Václav Havel wrote, “a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.” This is what Stacy does each and every time she posts an essay about her beautiful daughter Mackenzie McDermott–she hopes. I suggest that you go to Being Mack’s Momma Bear now and read all the posts, but first I would like to direct you to her most recent post.

 
I had dinner with Stacy the other evening, and we talked about her love of Facebook and her belief that Facebook is a place to connect with friends and look at pictures, to forget political differences and just rejoice in each other’s lives. However this weekend, she broke her political silence on Facebook to direct folks to her newest post. I implore you to read it. Like all of Stacy’s blog posts, it is measured and generous. It is, without a doubt, my favorite political essay during this election season, not because a person I love and admire deeply is the author, but rather because the author has hope in the great possibilities we can achieve together as citizens of the United States.

This is important friends. Read it, and then share it, and when you are done, go back and read the rest of the blog. I love you all!

Mack Memo #3:  Love Trumps Hate

I love summer.

I love to float in the pool with my arms thrown over the sides of an inner tube, or take long wandering walks in the heat, sweat streaking my face and down my back as my tennis shoes stick just a little to the tarry roads. I love to sit in a hammock (still don’t have one) in the back yard and read a good book. I love to grill pork burgers slathered with Cairo Bar-BQ Sauce (tangy) or Sweet Baby Rays, or follow little 1 1/2 year old Wonder as he dances around the back yard. I love to drink chilled Rosé or a homemade shandy  equal parts Mich Ultra and San Pellegrino Limonata on the back porch while swatting at mosquitos because they have an affinity for my ankles. I love to wake on a cool enough morning that the window is open; I can hear the birds bickering while the squirrels chatter. Hell, I even love planning and working on Isky’s wedding, and she will tell you with judicious restraint that her mother is at best a reluctant wedding planner with mostly terrible ideas and an inappropriate sense of humor–apparently booze, music, and food isn’t her preferred theme.

Here’s what I don’t love in the summer–taking Lucy in for an endometrial biopsy.

Lucy is my uterus. She has been a good friend for many years. I can’t say I was much aware of Lucy until she made herself known with a shot of blood when I was in the 6th grade although I’d read Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret at least 500 times by then, so I was ready for her.

Since that cold day in January 37 years ago, Lucy has been a conscientious and dependable partner. She did her part to make sure my own youthful stupidity didn’t end up in an unwanted pregnancy by being super regular and, I believe, somewhat hostile to invited but last-minute guests. By the same token, she welcomed each of the four little zygotes that made their way and burrowed into her nourishing walls.  She grew the most beautiful babies, full-bodied little chubs–two with full heads of hair and two bald as can be. For that alone, she deserves a YOU ARE THE BEST UTERUS! medal.

But she continued on, long after the babies were born, doing good work–creating a welcoming environment and shedding it with steadfast determination. When I turned forty, Lucy got a little cantankerous. Peri-menopause had its way with the both of us. I think she just wasn’t quite ready to give up the ghost, and who could blame her.

In my opinion peri-menopause was a helluva lot worse than actual menopause–did you know that menopause is just one freaking day–the day it has been a year since your last period commenced? I had no idea, so I guess I should say that peri-menopause was more difficult than post-menopause,  but maybe not for Lucy.

So why did I have to take Lucy in for an endometrial biopsy? Because I had a period while I was on vacation. A full-blown period with sore and tender breasts and cramping and blood–the likes of which I hadn’t seen for 19 months. Of course, you don’t have a period when you are post-menopausal. You have post-menopausal bleeding, and that has to be checked out because it could indicate cancer. Gosh, cancer is a scary word. I hate to admit that I am scared to say or even write cancer, but I do anyway because the sort of magical thinking that allows us to believe that ignoring something can strike it from existence is dangerous (but that’s another blog post, for sure).

So post-vacation and post-menopause, I took Lucy to the doctor for a check-up. I wasn’t planning on having an endometrial biopsy, but my doc thought it necessary, and so we proceeded. Have you ever had one? It isn’t pleasant. I’m pretty sure that Lucy was pissed and rightly so. It entails a practitioner trying to squeeze a long pipette in through the cervix right into Lucy. She tried to protect herself. Who knew my cervix could be so wily, all moving around in there, dodging the pipette. You would think I’d have known just how capable my cervix was; she’s been a real trooper my entire life. But I was surprised and a teensy bit dismayed when my doctor said he was (at this moment) clamping my lovely cervix in place. What?

And oh boy, he did. Ouch. That shit hurt. And it hurt when the pipette inched its way into Lucy and scraped around. I could feel it–the scraping. I’m not exaggerating when I say it was the least amount of fun I’d had in a long time. And poor Lucy. Scraping.

I’m a worry wart. I hate the word biopsy. I don’t want anything bad to happen to Lucy. I don’t want her to be sick. But I also know that there could come a time when we may have to say our goodbyes. Lots of women do.

The biopsy was benign.

I suspect that I just had a period. I imagine that Lucy lovingly continued, long after that period 19 months ago, to create a warm and welcoming space just in case new life burrowed once again into her flourishing walls. It probably took her much longer, in her advanced age, to create this space, and finally she had to let go.

It sure is hard letting go, isn’t it. Even when I think I’m learning how, I find out that my body is struggling in the very same way. It’s news to me all the time, that I’m not in some mortal fight with this strong and competent body of mine (losing weight, gaining weight, staying fit, growing muscle or babies), but that we–my body and I–are one and the same.

I guess I’m in Lucy, and she’s in me.

Hello from vacationland! As promised, I have a treat for you from my super-talented singer/songwriter cousin, Gordon McKinney who is a collaborator extraordinaire.

I have never been much for collaboration, not a group person. In fact, a group project more than once stirred up my anxiety enough that I had to drop a class. I’m a big loner in most of my endeavors.

But I’m learning thanks to a whole host of smart folks that collaboration–reaching out and receiving, holding hands and taking hands–is where it’s at; it’s our destiny, in fact, and we shun it at our peril.

A couple of weeks back, I fell down hard on an unforgiving concrete patio in my sister’s back yard. For days, my face finally matched my insides–all scarred and weepy with rough scabs and tender patches. In the ensuing days, I was so worn out that I had no choice but to accept over and over again simple kindness. It changed me.

When my cousin Gordon contacted me about collaboration, I shriveled up a bit. It’s the truth; it’s scary, all this receiving. He wanted to write music to one of my stories. (I really am lucky as hell) But even though I was scared, I said yes.

Oh, I am so glad I said yes. It’s the most beautiful song I have ever heard. Here he is, my cousin Gordon, with a gift for you and me.  Thanks so much, G.

It’s been two weeks since I’ve written here. Each day I neglect to write or post a blog the likelihood that I will never post one again looms like a failure I’ve been expecting. This gets my committee going, and they are a mouthy bunch when they get a whiff of failure.

You’ve tried to blog before–like 700 times. You’re a big planner, sitting and talking and planning for hours and days on end, but doing is another thing, doing is your problem. You’re just not a doer, Bridgett. No get ‘er done for you.

It’s not that the past two weeks haven’t been busy, I think to myself. Two graduations with parties, two birthdays with parties, one First Communion with party, a short trip to visit friends, and laundry, grandchildren, weddings to plan, school-less children on couches and in beds, eating, drinking, and generally taking up space where before there were hours of silence if you don’t count the licking, scratching pugs with their scrunched up faces and their clouds of dander and flying fur.

It’s difficult to begin again. I’m more of a getting done sort of gal–on my way to some magical point in the future where all the work is done. And because I am not overly ambitious, that particular future point  is most often little more than a couch, a blanket, and a good book.

How many times have I said to myself or to my husband or to my kids, “I just want to get done.”

What comes after done? And why are we in such a hurry to get there, running willy nilly as if we’re being chased by a gaping-mouthed monster who will suck us into its jaws if we slow down. And then done moves off into the future when we are so close. We never arrive. As fucking elusive as the magical isle of done is, we still run toward it. We don’t want to talk about what done really means though, do we. I’m nearly 50, and the number of funerals I attend each year increases. I went to a visitation Tuesday and a funeral on Wednesday. Done does exist, folks.

***

One evening a few years ago, before his father died and his mother was confined to a wheelchair, my husband visited his aging parents. His mother, Grace, was then a tiny slip of a thing, her body bowed by Parkinson’s disease. While my husband sat on the couch and talked to his dad about sports or John Wayne movies, Grace swept the floor.

At one time, Grace could have swept anyone under the rug. That woman was brilliant with a broom, a champion sweeper, a clean-floor aficionado whose son can also vacuum and sweep rings around anyone I know due to her expert tutelage. She not only kept the cleanest floors on the planet, but she taught her kids to do the same, and I am the lucky recipient of that great gift.

However, Parkinson’s Disease can really mess with one’s ability to efficiently sweep a floor. That night, Grace pushed and scooted the broom across the floor in the small kitchen of their assisted-living apartment. She shuffled, and the broom jerked in her unsteady hands. Maybe the broom hit his foot and that’s why my husband put his hand on his mother’s drawn shoulder and said, “Mom, why don’t you sit down?”

“Because I need to get done,” she said. “I want to get done.”

My husband told this story when he got home that night. It was late, our kids were in bed, heads heavy on their pillows. A cool breeze blew through the house, pulled in by the attic fan’s loud buzz. He shook his head when he repeated his mother’s words.

“I told her,” he said. “I told her, ‘Mom, you don’t really want to get done, do you? I mean, what comes after done?’”

The night my husband told me this story, I got out of bed and wrote it down. I wanted to remember.

I want to remember that.

***

This is what I tell the committee to get them off my ass. Fuck getting done. I’m a beginner.

I’m not the world’s best meditator, but I think I’ve finally realized that beginning again is what meditation is about. It’s not about achieving some sort of transcendent trance, but rather the act, the practice of beginning again.

Beginning is where it’s at. Beginning again is like taking a big huge breath, the sort that opens your chest so wide, you are surprised by your lungs’ capacity for air. When I’m focused on getting done, my chest is so tight I don’t know where my next breath will originate. Why in heaven’s name would I choose getting done over beginning again? Beginning again is a flower unfolding. That’s what I want.

Beginning again happens right now. It requires us to pull ourselves back to the moment at hand.

Beginning again can feel tedious, just like life. You fold the shirts, and in a day or two you fold the shirts again unless someone else does it which isn’t likely. Each night, you pull the covers down just so, crawl between the sheets, turn the fan on, and in 24 hours you do it all again. You push the broom across the damned kitchen floor and in a day or two (or an hour if you live in this house and love pugs who are at this moment humping each other on the bench outside the window) you grab the broom again because you’re never really done sweeping the floor.

But what a gift that tedium is, every moment new and ripe.

To hell with getting done. Let’s begin.

Again.

I lost the tassel.

I removed it from the tiny plastic bag ensconced within a larger plastic bag which contained a thin blue robe folded around a cardboard square doubling as a graduation cap. I held the tassel, a royal blue tuft of dangling and corded threads, in my hand and looked around my 8th grader’s crowded bedroom (crowded is a very nice way of saying that he inherited from his father the need to keep anything he has ever loved or used) for a resting place.

And then apparently I blacked out because that is the last time I saw it.

I didn’t think about the tassel much until the other morning when I needed to send it to school with the 8th grader who would be wearing his cap, with its dangling tuft, and gown to the all-school graduation mass.

Tuesday morning, I get up earlier than usual because I know I must gather the graduation gown ready along with some nicer than usual clothes and this stresses me out. Yes, that is what I said–any veering from the regular morning schedule stresses me out (I don’t like change or graduations or proms or baby showers–you get the drift). I set my alarm an hour early, shower, even apply make-up, for heaven’s sake, and then I can’t put my hands on the fucking tassel.

I stop moving and think. I close my eyes because everyone knows this enables stronger and deeper concentration. I remember holding the tassel in my hot little hands, turning it over, letting the long blue fibers run through my fingers. I remember knowing this is an object that could easily be lost. I remember casing the room for a safe place to lay this adornment with its fake gold 2016. I remember, kind of, putting it somewhere. . .

on the bed next to the cap?

on the dresser?

in the wad of trash I stuffed into the garbage can? Oh surely I didn’t accidentally scoop it up with the plastic packaging and dump it into the trash can because that trash is out at the curb right now, waiting for the gobbling blue truck that lifts the matching blue plastic trash cans and dumps them down its gullet as if it’s chugging beers.

I search everywhere. Under the bed where the dust could be mistaken for a wool blanket. In the Legos bin because the grandkids were here; maybe, just maybe, they shoved the missing tassel in with the blocks. On the top bunk of my son’s bed where the tassel could be lost among the 1500 stuffed animals, old practice jerseys, Lakers basketball gear, a couple of track ribbons and some bouncy balls. I lift the mattress because if I were a tassel (or illicit reading material), that is where I would be. By the time I start opening dresser drawers, I’m sighing, breathing heavily,sweating, and muttering about the stupidity of tassels. I am no longer clean and fresh.

It isn’t even 7AM (yes, I know that this is not early for lots of people, but it IS early for me) when I call my sister the principal with the sort of question she hates–do you have another tassel?–and email my son’s teacher who says she will look. By the time I glance at the clock, not only is my extra hour–for drinking coffee, looking at emails, and driving myself crazy with all the stupid Donald Trump posts on FB–gone, but I’m late.

Thankfully, Peanut’s room is also a haven for previously used items–not because she is sentimental but because she shoves everything into drawers when I ask her to clean up. And there in one of those overstuffed drawers is her own 8th grade graduation tassel. Yes, it’s the wrong date, but it will do in a pinch. By the time I am triumphantly holding high the 2013 tassel, my son is sitting on the couch, eating a chocolate chip Pop-tart and calmly drinking a glass of whole milk.

This is when my helpful husband arrives on the scene.

“Do you remember when you had it?” he asks oh, so sweetly.

“He won’t want to wear that old tassel,” he says while wrinkling his nose just a bit at the lack of shimmer in the 2013 on this reusable tassel.

“Did we look under the bed?” he wonders in my direction.

This is a man who once looked beneath a single sheet of typing paper for a USA Today, who loses his keys on a regular basis, whose clothes I find shoved under the couch or up high on the book shelf.

As if he doesn’t notice that I am in a state, he muses as he looks at our son, “Hmmmm, those pants look a little wrinkled.”

He looks at me and asks, “Do you think he needs a nice belt?”

My husband is at this moment, wearing a “belt” he created out of a shoestring he pulled from an old sweatshirt in a giveaway bag. He wears jeans he owned in 1989. They aren’t so much wrinkled as ruined. I’m thisclosetoblowingskyhigh!

We are standing in the front room, looking at our skinny 8th grade graduate, and what I want is for my husband to say, “It’s a fucking 8th grade graduation tassel, for God’s sake. Chill Bridg.”  He doesn’t.

We stand there for less than a couple of seconds looking at each other, and what goes through my mind is how much I suck for losing the tassel, how much my husband sucks for passively and aggressively pointing it out, and finally how much we suck for giving a shit about something so trivial, something so small. That’s when I say, “It’s a fucking 8th graduation tassel, for God’s sake. What are we worried about?”

How did I get here again? I mean, I care about big things like poverty and illness and racism and the myriad of ways that women are raped and abused and tortured worldwide. I think about consumerism and global warming and chemicals in the water and the coming implosion of capitalism. I DON’T GIVE A RAT’S ASS ABOUT GRADUATION TASSELS. So what gives?

I like to think I know better, but when it comes to my kids, I get drawn up in wanting everything to be perfect for them, and I can’t help but think that we do our children a grave disservice with our overzealousness in regards to their perfect well-being. If  you are not a nut job who likes to believe she can magically think her child into adulthood, I’m sorry. It makes me feel better to use “we” instead of “I”, so if this doesn’t apply to you, you can disregard the inclusion.

If it does apply to you, I hear you. Oh how I hear you, and I know your pain. You and I can be kooks together with a whole lot of other folks, but we can change too. We can start small, like maybe not congratulating our children, or ourselves, so often with ceremonies and trophies and medals and certificates and pizza parties. We can be proud of them without banquets or t-shirts that say “Sheldon’s Mom.”  We can stop believing the huge lie that if everything isn’t just right, we will have failed.

You know what? Our kids are going to get hurt. They are going to fail and fall with or without our incessant hovering.

We want to believe that our lavish efforts will be rewarded with happy, successful children. That the logical outcome is brilliant and good children who become better and brighter adults. But what if our efforts have the opposite effect?  What if we are turning our children into praise-junkies?  What would happen if we just expected them to work hard, to be good, to do good, because they are human beings with a responsibility to the world they live in, because that will fill them up in a way that praise or awards or tassels never could.

I think it’s worth a shot.

Don’t get me wrong. I am proud of all of my kids. I was so proud at the graduation mass the other day that I cried. My kid is smart and funny and handsome as hell, and I don’t think he gave a shit about that tassel. His teacher did find one though–a shiny new 2016 tassel that he wore on his cap proudly.

In the case of the missing tassel–I have yet to find it. The pug’s been wheezing, so I’m on the lookout for royal blue threads in the spit he coughs up all over the house. As of today, there is no evidence to convict him of any wrongdoing.

I’m one week into May. Did you know that May is a nightmare month for those of with dreading-disorder? Mother’s Day, prom, graduations, last day of school, first day of summer, the list goes on and on and on. May is a veritable cornucopia of activity for the socially inclined.

For those of us who prefer to sit in the back yard hammock (I don’t have one, but Mother’s Day is this weekend, Eric) with a good book and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, these first few weeks of May can feel a tad bit full which is a nice way of saying like a cluster fuck.

The Annual Women of the Parish Celebration (formerly Mother/Daughter banquet) was Wednesday evening. My sister, sister-in-law, my daughters, and I attended with my mother who is a bit of a social butterfly and on the event’s committee. While Mom modeled her grandmother’s apron waving at folks as she walked up the center aisle of church–one of a group of mothers and daughters who modeled old aprons, I scanned the program to make sure that this year’s event didn’t include any icky pro-life materials (it didn’t).

I’ve never grooved to the whole virginal/vessel/paragon/church woman bit that the “fathers” of the church try to perpetuate. So the Mother/Daughter event tends to rub me the wrong way. But like I said, my mom likes it, and she is one of the great loves of my life, so I go along and offer the same enjoyable experience to my own daughters.

Here they are enjoying their fried chicken.

Isky and Peanut after a delicious fried chicken dinner.

Spring is here. The Lilac we planted 13 years ago blooms tall along the fencerow that separates the back yard from the hospital parking lot. With the sliding door open, the scent blows into the house on a light breeze. The dogs are on the chair behind me, snoring piggishly instead of licking each other’s privates–a new activity they have taken to with gusto. The sky is a deep and clear blue splotched with white puffy clouds. The tornado spotted a few days ago did not barrel through our tiny town and blow the roof off of this or any house.

It’s been almost three weeks since I had resurfacing work done on the left side of my face by way of a bottle (or two) of red wine and my sister’s patio. My sister and I laugh about it. “When are you going to have the other side done?” she says and then adds, “You had macrodermabrasion instead of microdermabrasion.” She’s a real card.

I am healing. Up close, you can see three swathes of pale pink skin where two weeks ago were scabs. With my fingers, I can trace the fresh patches if I’m looking in the mirror, but I can no longer feel my way around the wounds because the perimeter is smooth. Every day, I dot a drop of oil on each patch and then cover them with sunscreen to protect the new skin from the bright sun.

I’m not glad I fell down. I don’t believe the fall was some cosmic lesson handed out by a puppeteer God with a crazy sense of humor and a bullish way of teaching lessons, and I don’t believe there was a glitch with my vision board (I don’t have one), and I certainly don’t believe that it was bad karma for some past misdeed (if it were bad karma, I would have broken bones). I just lost my balance and fell.

I am glad for a few things. People were so kind. My sister applied a wet cloth to my face and dabbed and dabbed and dabbed at the blood and my tears while cooing, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” My daughter, Isky, a mother herself, pulled my pajamas over my head to protect my face, daubed antibiotic ointment on my skin with sheets of gauze, turned the fan on, and tucked me into bed with a warm towel for my head. Later that night, when I woke up at 3AM and saw anew the damage to my face, my husband wrapped his arms around me, while I wept into his arm pit, and murmured that it would be better in a week, and he was right.

I hate being vulnerable, folks. I hate it so much. I do not want sympathy, empathy, or pity. I don’t want you to look at me and say, “You poor thing.” I want you and everyone else to see strong Bridgett, impervious to hurt. I like to be a healer, not the healed. But healing is fucking hard. I didn’t like it at all, but when my right eye swelled shut, and the wounds on my face wept, I couldn’t hide. I couldn’t hide from kindness.

I was sad (and vain for sure). Every time I looked into a mirror and saw reflected back, my swollen beat-up face, I was sad, too sad to hide. So when someone reached out. When someone put her hand up to my face as if to touch it, I did the weirdest and most backward thing I could think of.  I leaned in. If you asked me what happened; if you expressed empathy, I turned into Opposite Bridgett (anyone remember that episode of Seinfeld) breathed deeply, relaxed, and accepted whatever kindness was offered.

I couldn’t control how quickly I healed or how people perceived me, and I quit trying. Don’t get me wrong. It didn’t happen overnight. I considered other options–lying, staying hidden in a dark house with the blinds shut. I considered pretending to be a hothead who got into a major skirmish with a bully, but in the end, trying to control the story was too much work, so I just told the truth.

I realize that this incident, this injury isn’t on scale with the really bad shit people go through. There is so much suffering in this old world–war, poverty, severe and unremitting mental illness, cancer, a myriad of losses I cannot even imagine having to withstand–and still this is what I have this week, a story about healing from a couple of superficial but painful wounds.

Here’s the thing, I could let those comparisons shut me up. I could wallow in shame–shame that I fell down, shame that I am sad about my face when others have it so much worse. Or I could own it. I could own my story.  I could stop trying to control this and maybe I’d stop trying to control 1000 other situations. I thought I had learned the big lesson on lack of control when my daughter, Peanut, was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, but it turns out there was more to learn, dammit.

Healing is hard work, and I couldn’t go it alone. I couldn’t control the process, the time line, any of it. A week after I fell, I was in the computer lab with the fifth graders at the school where I work a couple of days a week. The kids were both appropriately grossed out by the injury and interested in my recovery.  “How bad was it,” they asked when I told them it was much worse. I pulled up the pictures on my phone–my own documentation of the healing process–and was rewarded with lots of oohs and ahhs. One of my fifth grade buddies–a fellow with dark brown hair and the sweetest voice–asked me with genuine interest, “How bad did it hurt, Mrs. Jensen? Like did it feel like ten tasers were shocking you at the same time?”

I stopped and thought about it for a minute. How bad did it hurt that night and the days following? I told him that I’d never been shocked by a taser let alone ten, but that I imagined the ten tasers would have been much much worse. I asked him if he’d ever scraped all the skin from his knees, and he said yes.  I told him that my face hurt like that–like a badly scraped knee.

My friend completely understood what I was getting at. After all, he has had millions of scraped knees. And he remains interested in the healing process. When I’m at school, he never fails to stop me, take a long look at my face, his eyes wrinkling as he assesses the still visible damage at which point he makes a pronouncement about how much better I look. Just yesterday, he waved me away, “Your face is so much better, Mrs. Jensen. You can hardly see where you were hurt.” 

I want to remember that.

You see, I think the soft pink patches on my face will eventually fade away, but I hope I don’t forget that we all fall down.

Getting up is much easier when you take a hand.