I had a good day: built a garden bed, then spent 3.5 hours on the phone with Mom. She filled me up with new stories of Anna Hilda, and Hilda Louise, warrior mothers in my matriline. I am grateful for receiving some loving messages despite closing the comments. I am grateful to be able to sometimes remember it’s possible to be okay even when things are not okay. Back to the writing studio (an early version at Nana’s house pictured here.)
I’m not here to tell anyone to be happy today. I’m at a pretty low ebb in my identity as a mother – am I even a mother if my son has spent over a year not with me? I’m on a two week social media hiatus so I don’t have to look at everyone else being happy today. I consider it self-preservation at this languid, eroded stage in the pandemic. I’m not looking for a pity party, or answers to my rhetorical questions, but I’m also going to put this here to be real with myself, this still hurts. I still miss my son and I still miss my mom.
There don’t seem to be very many photos of just Mom and I, but I have found a couple over the past year as I have been scanning batches of family photos. Both of them happen to be taken in the Adirondacks, one I suspect taken by Nana, and one I took myself. I’d like to get back there one day, and I’d like to take Quinn there to see a place that was so important to my childhood, and Mom’s. For now, it’s another item on the list of things I miss.
Sending love to all who are experiencing missing today.
~4-23 to 5-23~
Quadratic and executive functions
Executing school tasks took some additional remote mama support this month. He found the format of electives for school to be uninspiring. However, I talked him into doing one of the robotics options. Once he was convinced, he lit up while telling me the steps a robot would need to take to reach the Hogwarts kitchen from the front doors.
For language arts, Quinn was assigned to read The Outsiders but was putting it off. Once I found that out, I told him I thought he’d really like it (he was of course surprised I was familiar with the book), and encouraged him to read me the first paragraph. He grumpily obliged and discovered the teen male protagonist with green eyes and long hair. He came around quickly after that, read to me through chapter two, and read the entire rest of the book in just a few sittings.
Then there were quadratic functions. Quinn started caring deeply about parabolas as a freshly minted eleven-year-old, and has read an entire math curriculum through calculus in his spare time. He is not often thwarted by new math concepts, and had been quite self-sufficient learning quadratic functions, the math magic of the parabola, with only online lessons. However, two weeks before school ended, his teacher contacted me to let me know he was on his way to earning an incomplete in algebra. As usual, I only understood more about what happened in hindsight (2020) and it amounted to being stuck on one sub-concept, not seeing the obvious available ways to solve that (ask his teacher, ask me, consult textbook/video, google it) and just not doing it, or any of the following lessons. He stayed stuck and started blowing off everything, but then ended up caught up in a lie and that only added to his anxiety about the whole thing. Once I found out, we got him sorted out on completing the square, (we used khan academy and life of fred and fred is who ultimately got him there; by which I mean he was right back to doing it all in his head the instant he grasped it). I asked him afterwards if he felt relieved to not have to continue the lie, and I could see the relief written all over his face when he said “yes.”
He was overwhelmed and said he thinks about the pandemic even when he’s not thinking about it.
I wanted him to know I heard him: that he felt like no one was taking him seriously (because he has said “I can’t work under pandemic conditions.” He did try to let me know he was struggling.
I am trying to coach him through handing in enough to earn a Pass when he feels like this, but it is hard when he is just seeing the pile and is stuck in overwhelm.
He did a programing in scratch assignment and a video tour of Iceland for his elective; in Iceland he enjoyed how they drill into magma to harvest energy. The morning after the teacher clued me in, I sent him the mp3 of his favorite song seven nation army and a ten minute meditation and he listened to both. We spent more time together on google hangouts just so I was “in the room” if he needed support. He watched a Smithsonian zoom about octopuses, something he had planned on attending prior to the math debacle. I liked watching him watch it and seeing his face light up at certain parts. I wanted him to do these other things that feed him, because we were also talking about the importance of self care in keeping up our ability to handle tasks. He is now also signed up for both dinosaur discoveries and ancient seas online camps. He had been hesitant on the dino camp because a) he already knows a lot about dinosaurs and b) he wasn’t sure the end of June would feel like enough time out of school, but in the end I told him there were 2 spots left and he wanted in. Then we did talk about the math concept, but it was sandwiched in between those lighter topics and our quality time (reading aloud). Maybe life is a little like a parabola, you have to get to the bottom of it at some point, but you can look forward to it going back up on the other side!
His paleontology camp community continued their zoom lecture series for camp alumni through May, and Quinn participated enthusiastically. He was proud because, “I asked a question!” He asked, if I understood correctly, about how they tell things about a prehistoric animal based on eggs; and got answers about how environment determines a lot about egg shape, whether an animal is aquatic or terrestrial, and where they place their eggs in order to keep them moist or from being submerged or dry. He is so quull!
He had a paleontology text flurry with his camp friends and they apparently have a conspiracy theory that, “all of the birds died in 1986 when Reagan killed them all and replaced them with spies. They are in league with the bourgeoisie.” A couple of the other camp friends consistently show up for the lectures. It is such a nice balance of getting to be nerdy and getting to be weird teens together.
The flavor of video calls this month – physics and fantasy
A friend mentioned she and her husband have been doing madlibs so I printed a dinosaur one for Quinn. It is logistically tricky to play games over hangouts so I take all good suggestions very seriously! Quinn then picked some out to do for me. Some of our favorites were, “What happens when a unicorn poops”, one about pizza, and another about how to hatch a dragon egg. We ended up with 3 new species of dragons; chartreuse dragons, butterbeer dragons, and flibberty-gibbet dragons.
During recent video calls we have continued to read Zero, do a daily logic puzzle, sometimes a vi hart video, and usually some talking and cat gazing.
Zero has been good fodder for discussion and vocabulary (new word: carom): Quantum leaps, general relativity, etc. It sends us on other tangents. One day we looked up Dr. Katie Bouman who photographed a black hole successfully in 2019, based on spinoff conversations from the book. Quinn’s imagination was quite stimulated, and I managed to convince him to speak one of his ramblings into a document using the speech-to-text function:
“First get two black holes, a star, a spaceship capable of moving at 90% of the speed of light and with a fuel cartridge big enough to hold a star in, and a very heavy object. Then get the star into the fuel cartridge of the spaceship (the spaceship must run on helium). Once you have a spaceship running on a star, connect your two black holes via 4D space-time Continuum breaking and attach one end of the wormhole that results to your spaceship and the other end to the very heavy object. now take your nearly light-speed wormhole with a very heavy object on the other end and wait 46 years because you will have messed up the space time continuum, you will have effectively ruined mathematics to the point where one year on one end of the wormhole is 2.3 years on the other end of the wormhole so after 46 years you go through the wormhole and bam you’ve gone back In time by almost 46 years. some problems are: 1. it is currently impossible apparently to define “very heavy object” in my sources. 2. it is currently impossible to go at 90% of the speed of light in one spaceship. 3. it is currently impossible to obtain a star let alone to stick it in the fuel cartridge of a spaceship. 4. it is currently impossible to collect two black holes and connect them via four dimensional space-time Continuum breaking. 5. it is currently impossible apparently for you to actually go back in time to the point where you are before your own birth and keep living on to infinity by traveling back in time infinitely and going forward in time infinitely after that so that you have infinite life-span at the time of your birth and live forever because your star even though it will last for like 8 million years is still finite so you can only become 8 millionish years old but hey, even then you are older than Yoda so…”
Tom Gauld
I also convinced him to share the document with me and he did, with the note, “I’ve invited you to comment.” Well, thank you for inviting me!
My comment:
“I don’t know if you understand why I ask you to do things like this… and that is okay! I am thankful that you humor me, and do it when I ask. It may not seem like a big deal to you to be able to speak this kind of complicated thought in such an organized manner, but this is a skill not everyone has. It’s a skill I’d love for you to continue to nurture, and it’s a skill that I think will really help you build up your writing ability as well. Being able to speak a story or an essay is the same as being able to write it – if you use the right tools. I think the speech-to-text tool is potentially very useful for you and I hope it helps empower you to do more writing, more recording of the amazing ideas and stories and lines of thought that you have inside you, waiting to get out into the world. One day you may look back at these and really treasure them! I know I will.”
Upon finishing Zero, we discussed quintessence theory. As you do.
Then we got started on re-reading Fellowship of the Ring! The day before mother’s day, we read about when the nine leave Rivendell, and their fight with Caradhras, when they turn back and the men have to carry the hobbits through the snow, but Legolas can walk on top of the snow to bring hope back to all that the journey is one they can endure.
I end up reading most of the time, but since we both have copies of the trilogy, he has been reading to me as well.
When the fellowship were departing from Lothlorien and Galadriel gives them each a gift, Quinn became quite absorbed with the gardening box that Sam is presented. He brought it up several times thereafter, and it gave me an idea. I ordered a plain wooden box and some gray wood tint so I could make him one like the description in the book. I planned to mix some flower seeds into it for him so he could spread it out somewhere at his dad’s house to grow.
still trending: quokkas (mama attempts her first memes)
On mother’s day, I had a lovely extra visit with Quinn. He showed up at noon after sending me Sierpenski’s triangle mother’s day card, freshly showered, and wearing a button-down shirt. He dressed up for me.
We also started an email story where we each write one line and send it back and forth. It began, “Once there was a boy who lived in a land where the only things were a chain of islands and the ocean.” I’m excited to see where it takes us!
In other vocabulary news, I learned of Quinn’s pronunciation of onerous “one rus” and we both chuckled when he was reading aloud about a “biplane” in our logic puzzle which he mispronounced with a short i.
We like it when the logic puzzle is about particle accelerators and one of the researchers is named Dr. Quinn.
Subatomic particles
I listened to a nature news podcast and learned all about pions, and then Quinn and I discussed various subatomic particles, learned that we should call them elementary particles instead, and he is pretty into particle physics after our last book, but he wasn’t even aware of all the particles that have been named and identified… he particularly liked the ones named after pi and tau, of course. I think I fairly blew his mind when I told him that Ender’s Game had been written well before many of these had been discovered to exist. In 1985, electrons were still the smallest known particle, and I remember a big deal being made about quarks back in the mid 1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_particle_discoveries
The podcast also talked about Galileo, so it was easy to convince him to listen.
Life skills
Quinn said he used the lawn mower to mow the yard so they could move their kayaks. It is a battery mower. Certified lawn mowing technician!
Music
Aragorn sent Quinn two guitar tracks he had recorded, and Quinn has added a drum track to them. So rad!
Saturday 5-9
I am grateful for a beautiful day. Rich worked, but he didn’t go in until 8 so we slept until it was daytime instead of “still nighttime” as I describe normal 4:15 wakeups. After he went to work, I meditated, worked on lifelong learner (13th birthday edition) and then spent an hour in the garden, arranging dahlia bulbs, black eyed susan roots, and moth mullein and chrysanthemum seeds in the freshly weeded yellow terrace. Then I drove to pick up my veggies, stocked the fridge, did some more writing and some more gardening, and got on the video call with Quinn. We read about when the nine leave Rivendell, and their fight with the snowy pass on Caradhras, when they turn back and the men have to carry the hobbits through the snow, but Legolas can walk on top of the snow to bring hope back to all that the journey is one they can endure.
Rich came home mid-day and then we spent the afternoon together in the yard. He mowed while I transplanted pansies, verbena, monarda, nicotiana. I planted some more seeds out in the red terrace – hollyhocks, cosmos, scarlet sage. I found him on his knees in the rhododendron bed we planted a year ago, weeding. I joined in and did the perimeter where lots of new columbines are joining the herd.
Sunday 5-10
While I made breakfast, Rich played George Harrison’s album All Things Must Pass disc 2, which we had pulled out because Sheryl Crow played such a lovely version of Beware of Darkness the other night. We hadn’t played George’s version yet, but I woke up with the song in my head, and when it came through the speakers when Rich pushed play on track one, it merged seamlessly with what was already in my head. Synchronicity.
“Beware of darkness
Watch out now, take care
Beware of the thoughts that linger
Winding up inside your head
The hopelessness around you
In the dead of nightBeware of sadness
It can hit you
It can hurt you
Make you sore and what is more
That is not what you are here for”
Gardened all day on Mother’s Day. Nothing to do but power through. I added ten buckets of compost in the front garden, where the slugs have been preventing any poppies or nicotiana or lilies from growing. I’ve been on regular patrol, and now I have Lauren’s grape poppy seeds on their way to me in the mail to start again. I had a lovely extra visit with Quinn. He showed up at noon after sending me a Sierpenski’s triangle Mother’s Day card, freshly showered and with a button-down shirt on. He dressed up for me.
Monday 5-11
I am grateful Mother’s Day is behind me.
I gardened hard from 6-8am thinking it would rain any second… got lots more compost spread around and seeds are ready for a good soaking. At 3pm there was not really much rain yet, but a wee sprinkle.
Picked up groceries and filled my tank. Just shy of two months on one tank of gas.
Four wilsons! In the bayou. A whole wilson family! And more hummingbird bayou visits to the twinberry.
Tuesday 5-12
Quinn and I started an email story where we each write one line and send it back and forth. It began,
Once there was a boy who lived in a land where
the only things were a chain of islands and the ocean.
I’m excited to see where it takes us!
I am grateful to be starting to learn not to explain myself.
Rich and I went on an errand date to pick up more garden hose, lightbulbs, cat litter, whiskey, and coffee beans, and put gas in the highlander. Then I made nachos, of course. Always grateful for nachos.
Wednesday 5-13
I have been through the abundance meditations twice now and picked favorites. Number seventeen with the flowing stream and bird sounds, “I move through my days lighthearted and carefree knowing all is well,” is good for me to repeat.
Also cathartic is my walk around the rainy yard sacrificing slugs. I’m grateful for balance. Water sounds always help, even if it’s rain. I’m happy about this rain as it is timed very well to soak all the flower seeds I just planted, though I, and the seeds, will be ready for sun again soon!
Yelling also feels good. Playful laugh yelling at Rich’s mischief, yelling at the butthead deer who eat my flowers. Lighthearted and carefree is easier after a good yell.
Thursday 5-14
Grateful for music and literature. One of Quinn’s favorite bands, Ok Go, put out a new song called all together now, and I love it, as well as what they wrote. The song references Rebecca Solnit’s piece where we are melted down in the chrysalis, which I also love.
“There’s another analogy that comes to mind. When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity. May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.
“But this is also a time of depth for those spending more time at home and more time alone, looking outward at this unanticipated world. We often divide emotions into good and bad, happy and sad, but I think they can equally be divided into shallow and deep, and the pursuit of what is supposed to be happiness is often a flight from depth, from one’s own interior life and the suffering around us – and not being happy is often framed as a failure. But there is meaning as well as pain in sadness, mourning and grief, the emotions born of empathy and solidarity. If you are sad and frightened, it is a sign that you care, that you are connected in spirit.”
~Rebecca Solnit
I’ve been thinking about how being able to live with my choices includes not just my decisions about where I go, how I behave, what I do concerning Quinn and our physical safety and the physical safety of others around us, but also how I speak, write, react, how I treat others. It’s not unique to this time, but right now there seem to be so many opportunities to put this into practice. It helps when I can remember The Four Agreements, to not take personally what is coming from other people. My integrity is based on me being responsible for me.
For me, fear is not weakness; bravery is not absence of fear; delving into emotions is not the opposite of courage. I’ve definitely been swimming in the deep end, emotionally. Anything can make me cry; tonight it was the encouraging note from Quinn’s algebra teacher, for example.
But I know that for me, the alternative to stringing these weekly beads of emotional intensity on a continuous strand, is to let the strand tie me up in knots. There is a certain amount of tension in the line I must maintain; too much slack and snarls start to form. I am grateful for the tool of writing, for the way the strung beads can sometimes reflect light when the sun shines again to remind me when I look back over its length.
Friday 5-15
The sun is coming out, and it lit up every spider web in the woods as I went for an early morning walk. Everything is still wet from the rain, and the wet edges of things allow the light to refract so the edges are visible in a new, crystalline, gossamer way. I love the fresh new beginning of the sun after a three-day rain. I love spotting the spiraling new beginnings everywhere around me, bending the light.
Mercies are new every morning.
I stood rinsing the dish soap off of the strawberry dinner plates and setting them in the drainer this morning, letting water run over my hands, I pondered whether I would write a mother’s day post. The strawberry plates in my hands were a mix of those that actually belonged to my mother’s mother, and those that I bought from a vintage etsy shop for my birthday this year, to replenish the stack that had dwindled to only three. An eight-by-ten-inch swatch of Nana’s strawberry wallpaper hangs to my left above my sink. Dish washing is not my favorite chore, but it is mine to do, and I try to keep my sink area cheerful with reminders of the reason behind the love labors. Part of mothering is washing these dishes, and I am thankful to have the chance to mother, and grateful for the long line of mothers who washed the dishes before me, and all of the other mothering they did to bring me here.
I chose this photo for my mom’s card this Mother’s Day, originally because heart-shaped flowers seemed right for the tenderness of mothers, and the way these hearts lined up, with the long line of our grandmothers in mind, stretching into the past. My own heart has bled during this season of separation from my son, another layer to the flower’s symbolism, one that is common to the hearts of all mothers, I imagine. I know there have been seasons when my own mom’s heart bled for me.
Mom has taught me so many things throughout life, and most of them I have not rejected, although her habit of reading the last chapter of a book first to determine if it is worth reading the rest is one I never adopted. Mom does not like to sit with uncertainty, not even in a work of fiction. Even though I start stories from chapter one, right now I am finding it a daily challenge to live with so much uncertainty of how this story of world chaos ends. How the story of my separation from my son will resolve itself finally. Here I sit on Mother’s Day, without my child, and knowing so many who sit without their child or without their mother, and wonder if the holiday is worth the trouble of the grief it cannot help but bring along in the celebration of mothers? The older I get, the more I realize what a tough holiday it is, and that for so many good humans, today’s status is, at best: it’s complicated.
I busy my hands in the garden, working to achieve my 2020 garden goal of more flowers for butterflies. I add compost to the front garden bed, seeding scarlet sage, seashells cosmos, and black hollyhocks in a freshly weeded area, and spend a while weeding around the bleeding hearts on the edge of the yard today as I ponder, and try to keep from pondering, all the hard topics of Mother’s Day. My mom is having a lackluster Mother’s Day herself, and she makes me feel better in the solidarity when we talk on the phone.
I lean heavily on the butterfly metaphor lately, at the risk of cliché, but I find it coming to mind again, when it comes to not writing the ending of the story before it can be lived. I am holding out hope that we will emerge in a more beautiful form than we went into this darkness, transformed into beings capable of things we could only have imagined in our wildest dreams, Before.
In one November gratitude post I wrote about how I am grateful for overlapping generations, unlike the monarch butterflies who never know their parents at all. Still, I can’t help noticing that our nature is not that different from theirs; I know my own mother, and I knew her mother briefly, but the long line of mothers that stretches back in time before her, I never knew. A few have names to me, Patricia Ann, Anna Hilda, Hilda Louise, Anna Louise, but beyond my great great grandmother even names fade out of memory. I repeat their names today, as I began to do on my first mother’s day as a mama, another string of rosary beads I work through my hands, these hands that wash the strawberry plates, till the soil, make the lasagna according to Mom’s recipe, these hands that resemble the hands of the women whose names I utter. Despite not knowing them all, I am tied to them by that soul heartstring which is much too elusive to describe but irresistible to try to capture in words. Tied by apron strings longer than centuries and as impossible to pin down on the page as a butterfly’s fluttering flight.
These names are in my blood even if I can’t know the women who bore them. Their meanings include noble, grace, and warrior. A quadruple helping of warrior, in fact, with two of Hilda and two of Louise among my recent maternal lineage. I can only hope that the triple helping of grace (Anna/Ann) will help me through the times I grow weary in my warrior capacity. I believe that grace and gratitude are related in their roots, and default back to this trusty tool of gratitude that I carry in a prominent place, like a sword that I wear as part of my warrior armor. I look down at my hands, the hands of my mother, my Nana, of each noble warrior mother walking ahead of me, as I pull it from its sheath once again.
Today I am grateful for the hearts and hands of mother warriors.