Tag Archives: one unbroken line

burning on the inside

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Skeins of geese are weaving wavy v’s across the sky as I unravel below.

There is nothing “unprecedented” about me unraveling in the fall. In fact, it is so predictable I have had trouble putting words into posts because the inner critic keeps telling me, “nobody wants to hear that again.” I have sparred many rounds against the inner critic this year, pummeled into weeks of silence until I finally place a good kick, then I unleash a flurry of posts as I race to get current with my own process while she’s briefly subdued. I catch my breath but then the critic comes back swinging.

There is no end in sight of my son’s self-imposed isolation. His regard and concern for others I will defend with the teeth and claws of a mother bear’s fierce pride, but that does not assuage my grief at this ongoing separation, and all the uncertainties of its duration. Just before school started, Quinn suggested that he and I go backpacking together and spend the night in the woods – separate tents, each carrying our own food and gear, still with masks and no hugging. It has been a long time since I went backpacking, but I got myself geared up, excited to embark on this new shared activity with my son. I sewed a lightweight tent out of fabric I scavenged from broken-zipper tents discarded after a festival years ago, treated myself to a cheap new pack and inflatable sleeping mat. Then the forests caught fire and by the time the smoke cleared, school had started, and backpacking was backburnered.

The rain has returned, and the soggy soil makes it hard to imagine anything was ever on fire, that our whole state was burning, that some places still are. Talking about the mop-up stage of wildfires, Rich explained, “they have to check all the root systems… some of those old trees, like our spruce tree? They could be burning on the inside and you wouldn’t even know. They can look completely fine on the outside…” There are times when I feel like that. When asked, “how are you?” I sometimes say, “fine,” when it isn’t the truest answer. The inner critic burns from the inside, “nobody wants to hear how you really are. Just be polite and tell them what they want to hear.” Of course, there are a few fellow earthlings who take care to check the root system, and I’m grateful.

There have been mercies this year, and because they’ve emerged amid wrecked fields of disappointments and loss, they shine like singular, luminous wildflowers. The nests of baby birds that made it were rivaled by the nests full of baby birds that did not. The longed-for visits with loved ones were stressful or canceled. The rainbow webs have begun illuminating my garden again, but I watched the other day as a dragonfly met its demise in one of them. The sound caught my attention first – sizzling like a pot of water boiling over on the stove. I couldn’t tear my eyes away as it struggled, but the silk thread held strong, and after a long battle, the dragon was defeated.

On the other hand, I have my husband who climbs up on the roof to clean the chimney and gutters, who lights fires in the woodstove for the kitties and I to worship, who brings me popcorn in my Wonder Woman bucket on Sunday night, who waged an ivy-removal campaign on our bayou trail this summer that has made our trail walks even more magical than before. We still have each other, we still have our jobs, we still have our home, we still have our health… we still have so many reasons to be grateful.

During 2020 I have maintained a solid gratitude practice for more of the year than not (unprecedented!), a survival skill in a year such as this. Just when the geese are about to make off with the unraveling thread of my being, gratitude will help me grab hold of it, tie a knot, hang on for dear life.

~summer shorts~ reclaiming

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Have you seen me lately? is the title of one of my depression songs. I hardly ever listen to the Counting Crows anymore, but the feeling that I have gone missing lately is a little bit accurate.

When I go missing, when I need to retrieve myself, the ocean is where I go. During a pandemic, it may mean going to the ocean at 6:30 am on a Monday, and it may mean going less frequently, but the ocean is still where I go to collect myself and bring myself back. Here I am, standing, kneeling beside the crowded tidepools of my inner world. There beside them, soaking in the brine, is the end of a long strand of mended rope. I pick it back up in my hand, ready to start adding to the storyline, twisting new strands, threading on new beads and seashells, eventually stringing more cranberries and popcorn once it is a little less soggy.

woman beside a tidepool

How does it happen that I would ever set this rope down? I know better. I repeat to myself like a mantra why I write. I repeat it enough that others know it, can paraphrase it. The fragmentation that once characterized my inner experience was the result of mental health crisis – major depression brought on mostly by emotional abuse (gone), but also a little bit predisposition (still there). Fragmentation, a broken storyline, allowed me to lie to myself, disconnect from myself, betray myself, something I remain committed to never do again. Writing is my best tool to maintain a cohesive storyline, to integrate the various pieces of myself into one narrative that I can keep my grip on, so that I can see the connections between one segment and another, so that I can tell if I am being true to who I am and so that I can tell if I am deviating from my truth or forgetting crucial pieces of the story.

tidepool on oregon coast

Too much slack in the line is a different problem from fragmentation, but tangles are not conducive to okayness either. Winds will blow on me, waves will continue to endlessly pass, and if I am not doing the steady, dynamic tending this line of mine requires, it can become knotted and snarled. These posts piling up behind the scenes, where I keep second guessing myself and saving to drafts, need to start being eased out before they accumulate further. Like the sheet that controls the business end of the sail, my line works to keep me on course, to keep the wind coming across my sails in the most efficient way to maintain forward progress, to keep me from capsizing, to keep the sails full not flogging, to keep me from wallowing in the doldrums.

sea urchins and anemones

There is a certain amount of tension required to keep ahold of myself, in other words. The danger is there to become too tense, to hold on rigidly, which can also rock the boat. When my shoulders start to reach my ears, my hands are clenched, and I am holding my breath too often, I need to loosen my grip, inhale, exhale, and observe what the ocean is doing. Take stock, adjust course.

sea urchins and anemones

You can sail forward even when the wind is close to your bow, but there is a reason why they call it “beating to windward.” Heading into the oncoming wind and seas (usually they are coming from a related direction to one another, though not always) can feel like a beating. The motion of the vessel is more jarring, the force of the impact coming down from the crest of each swell causes the whole hull to shudder and the rigging to vibrate, and the ship is heeled over at quite an angle. The ship must be tacked much more frequently to maintain course, an act which by its very nature strains every line and piece of hardware, every tired seam and joint. Changing direction frequently just to keep going forward is exhausting, and you must ensure the coffee pot is lashed in the galley, the deck gear all stowed.

sea anemone partly folded inward

Still, it is while sailing to windward that I have most often encountered dolphins riding the bow wake. It is also only in the dark of night that the bow wake glows with bioluminescence. Remembering my study of the word “streamlined” a couple of years ago, I recall my conclusion that the status of the flow around me has less to do with turbulence in my life, than what shape I present to the flow; that if I present less resistance to the flow, I have a more streamlined experience. Salmon use the energy of the current to propel themselves upstream; adversity is not a direct line to crisis, in fact it can be a force of energy that is harnessed for good.

sea urchin and anemone close up

I feel as though, right now, I am swimming upstream against a strong current, or sailing into a strong wind. I am okay, but I am on watch for signs of slipping down the current too far towards the waterfall’s edge, or letting the wind get around behind the wrong side of my sails. I am okay, but I am swimming hard with nothing in reserve, I am beating to windward and taking a beating. I am okay, but I am only okay because I know firsthand the consequences of slipping downstream, of capsizing.

urchin and anemone

At market one recent Saturday, a lovely woman handed me a bundle of braided sweetgrass. She grows it herself, and she said she wanted to give it to me because I inspire her. I am using it to smudge this space and reclaim it, to clear out any traces of energy that would keep me quiet, that would turn down my voice, that would ask me to be smaller, less than fully me.

anemone detail macro

red and purple sea urchins

closed sea anemone

sea urchins and anemone

sea urchin with spines missing

~thankful thursday~ three little birds

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Saturday 5-2

It seems like everywhere I turn the talk is of fear; of fears we feel, of fears we reject, of fears we perceive or reject in others. I want to check in with myself and see whether I am making decisions based on fear, but I am still feeling solid that I am making decisions based on information and knowledge, especially inner knowing. I have plenty of fear coming at me on all sides, but the way I think of bravery is that it isn’t the absence of fear, but the willingness to engage with the depths of what is. I am grateful for the ability to revisit my own words a few fathoms back along the unbroken line I keep stringing along to not lose myself, and remember what I said early on about being able to live with the decisions I make now, and that metric still feels right for me. I am grateful for the clarity.

The purple and blue baby quilt on my lap, handmade by my Mom for my baby shower so many years ago now, has butterfly fabric all around the border. Another visual reminder of the internal knowing, the compass within.

I let lots of time go by in between bringing up with Quinn when he will come back. He still says he is staying there longer…. “for now.” The last time I said, “if that means I don’t see you until you’re fifteen that’s a little hard for me,” and he said, “I know.”

I am grateful for the two little yellow birds were flying around the bayou salmonberry patch and the hummingbird who visited and flew just about right up to us (we think he is the juvenile we watched getting fed). They might just be three little birds, but they remind me that every little thing is gonna be alright. That doesn’t mean it will be easy or that there won’t be fearful things. It means this too shall pass.

Sunday 5-3

First swallowtail butterfly spotted in the yard!!! Today I am grateful for a nice long talk with mom while I weeded the patch of yard by the honeysuckle. Beautiful sun. Light on things. Yellow birds in the bayou.

Monday 5-4

Today I am grateful for robin hatchlings! I was outside taking pictures of our blooming lilacs when one of the parent robins landed and I heard Peep! Peep! Peep! And there they were! Three little birds! An auspicious birthday – May the fourth be with them.

I had settled into my lawn chair a little while later with my camera and my laptop to multitask, and a parent bird landed with another worm. It eyed me, stuffed the worm down a throat, and then stared at me, hard. I stopped my camera clicking and sat very still. It leaned forward into the nest again, grabbed something, and flew off.

Oh no! Did it take one of the babies? Is it moving them because I’m here? Is it because of the neighbor’s brush pile burn? Are they moving their babies up wind? Is it the deer repellent Rich sprayed yesterday to stop the buttheads from eating my columbine blossoms?

I continued to watch, convinced it was me. I was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Mom came back with a worm. Three little birds strained to be fed first… wait, one wasn’t gone?

She fed, stared, left.

Dad. Three babies. Fed, stared, left.

They’re still here.

Next time mom came in, she pulled a black object that I could tell was smaller than a baby bird, maybe it was spit-up or poop, and she removed it from the nest when she left.

That must be what I saw.

This pandemic is a house of mirrors, making things seem one way and then another. Making me check whether my instincts are faulty, whether I am removing my child based on a false sense of danger. But no, the danger is not false, and the metric of being able to live with the decisions is still in play. Keep taking it one day at a time.

5-5

My purple asparagus crowns are starting to grow where they were hastily heeled in. I finally order the compost I need to build up the bed where they will be planted.

I am grateful for a beautiful day with lots of outside time, sweating as I weeded, moving my nursery area around (slug intervention). An evening walk and homemade pizza with sausage from the farm and a yummy stout aged in a whiskey barrel. In bed before 9.

Quinn doesn’t want the pressure of thinking he might carry covid from one house to the next. I wonder if he would feel a sense of relief of having the weight of deciding taken off his shoulders. If one of us got sick, the responsibility would not be on him. But that’s not really how I’ve parented him. He is aware of his own inner knowing. So aware that he cannot be distracted from it.

Wednesday 5-6

Today I am back on day 16 of the abundance meditations: today I will remember to be grateful.

My three yards of compost were delivered and I feel grateful for how working with soil helps me get grounded.

Quinn emailed me before bedtime to see if I want to do an extra one hour video call on mother’s day. The wording woke up some deeper fears. Rich researched what the plandemic video was all about. It was not a good time of day for me to overhear it, so I walked outside to check if my makeshift cover for the asparagus bed was still intact. I sat in the Adirondack chair in the gloaming. A chirping bird flew overhead, and as I looked up, I saw that it was chasing a much bigger bird, also flying over, but silently. An owl! It flew straight into our woods and landed. A shadow soaring silently through the shadows. Boy am I peering into the shadows right now. I felt like I was getting a grip today. Got some spreadsheet work done, listened to Brene and Sue Monk Kidd and Jen Hatmaker, and Glennon reading Untamed, planted asparagus, had chili in the crock pot and cornbread baked by the time Rich got home. The day started out with gratitude doodled in rainbow colors in my journal. But I cannot lie. It is ending with a gaping hole in my heart that I am not sure how to reckon with.

The moon came up over the ridge when Rich came outside to find me. He got to see one swoop of an owl through the trees as well, under the full super moon we didn’t even realize would be rising tonight.

Thursday 5-7

Tomorrow it will be eight weeks since I’ve had Quinn home.

Since I had said that thing about not seeing Quinn until he is fifteen, he talked about the concept of dividing that amount of time up into 2 or 4 or 8 chunks of time. I said, “fractions. You’re doing math to it.” A phrase Vi Hart uses is to “do math to it” or “do algebra/calculus to it”. He said, “I do math to it when I get nervous.”

His face. His precious face and the way his lip curved when he said that. Vulnerability. (Still so grateful for video calls.)

It is not resolved but I am not letting myself dwell on it. I am trying to focus on gratitude for how much integrity my kid has that he wants to prioritize long term goals like us all living past this pandemic, and how he is able to recognize that doing numbers is a defense mechanism… the awareness he has. It’s kind of blowing my mind.

Friday 5-8

The robin babies are gone, fledged already. I believe I miscalculated and they actually hatched earlier than the 4th. Now I am seriously empty nesting, bereft of my son and my robin nestlings as I head into mother’s day weekend. I thought I had more time with them. I don’t know why I thought that.

Today I will remember to be grateful for the time I’ve had.

~thankful thursday~ surreal chamomile

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On pi day, I started typing some gratitude, right in the middle of a month, and with no deadlines or expectations to polish or publish attached. It has quickly developed into a sanity-saving, not-restricted-to-gratitude, self-integrating tool that I am relying on heavily for self-care purposes. I’ve mostly experienced mental health struggles in my life as depression, but it turns out I’m not immune to anxiety, either. But it also turns out, writing helps me with both; just simply putting my day down in words helps me gauge how quickly normal has slipped away, helps me keep my one unbroken line intact and whole, defragmented through the insertion of mile-markers from the menial and mundane to the major and monumental. I’m excerpting from my obscenely verbose word document from the first week or so, in a moment when I’m feeling less raw and more ready to share. It’s still messy, and long, and best enjoyed with tea.

~Timeline~

Thursday 3-12 Normal workday with everyone wondering what is going to happen. We go to swim lesson, we go to karate, we get the email from the superintendent that schools will close Monday the 16th, that the next day, Friday the 13th, will be the last day of school.

Friday is a whirlwind workday. A grad student from BC (let’s call her Tink) I have been working with extensively has to leave and go back to Canada. Immediately. The next day. The email from her university is worded politely, but in Canadian, it pretty much says get your butt back in the country. We hastily grab a raspberry rose cider at bier one when we finish our work at 6pm.

Saturday 3-14 Last farmer’s market, wore gloves, explained new protocols to each customer. The observation that people maintain social distance while shopping but not while standing in line. Trying to sound confident while answering questions about where we will be next week, saying, “it’s really out of our hands how this week will unfold. Keep checking the farm website.” The observation that humans dislike uncertainty. The NBA is shut down. USA banned travel to Europe for 30 days. After market I went to the lab for a few hours to load Tink’s egg respiration plate. Missed St. patty’s day festivities at camp boss’s but felt that was probably good in an effort to begin social distancing.

~3-14-2020 gratitude~

Kitties in boxes, fires in woodstoves, heated shirts from husbands. Exhaustion from work that feels worthwhile – feeding the people and saving the Arctic. Tiny fish egg bubbles that I see in my dreams. Hot bath. Echinacea and elderberry and sage. Piles of carrots to juice and potatoes to fry tomorrow morning. Obscure mathematical holidays to share with my son. Rich’s apocalypse Costco purchase of a tower of cashews. Three trout lilies blooming already. A week of sun, and a little rain. Seeds tucked into seedling pots underneath an old skylight.

~timeline~

Sunday night 3-15 the NOAA guidance read in supremely vague language that we should all be teleworking… to the extent possible… unless our lab experiments and field work were deemed mission-critical and essential…. like a pinball I could fall into any category at all. Guidance-free guidance. Relief at the thought of school lunches being provided to kids in our county, both via pickup and bus delivery. And not just lunch, but breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Also relieved talking to my mom, that the Rew household is taking things seriously and sanitizing the house, staying home. Hard not to run worst case scenarios but talking was good.

~3-15-20 gratitude~

Tink. I’m going to miss her and hope she comes back soon! We had some things in common, as well as the things she had in common with my 25-year-old Master’s student self. I found myself wanting to help her avoid pitfalls that caused me to stumble, like forgetting to prioritize my mental health. I kept telling her to hydrate, encouraging her to sit down to eat. She shared about her perfectionism-flavored undergrad studies, striving for all As. I know someone who did that. It can cause a tendency towards thinking one should be able to handle anything, shouldn’t need help, should be better than this. Grateful for the conversations and side-by-side work we got to do together. Grateful I am better at 41 than I was at 25 about recognizing that I am not taking this class for a grade.

~meme of the day~

“Nation’s nerds wake up in utopia where everyone stays inside, sports are canceled, social interaction forbidden.”

~timeline~

Monday 3-16 Conspiracy theories, reminders to check your constitutional rights, plans for homeschooling, plans for home cooking, lots of arguing about what social distancing means, and most of all, toilet paper and other panic purchasing. Showed up to work hoping a plan would formulate throughout the day for how we were scaling back experiments and what measures we would take to correctly carry out social distancing. Left work with no plan, no measures in place. Made my own plans and brought home everything I could think of that would enable me to tackle some telework; backed up files, copied data, gathered notebooks. VSA (vitality supported agriculture boxes) invented and implemented by the farm literally overnight. Restaurant closures ordered.

~meme of the day~

Had a great laugh at all the memes concerning GenX’s ability to survive a pandemic being inevitably better than other generations; specially equipped with experience in being left home alone, to self-entertain and play board games against ourselves, to pick up a book or watch reruns and sit there. “Smells like middle aged spirit.” “I can live on spaghettios and pop tarts for weeks if I have to.” “And when the real push comes, those shoplifting skills we learned early on will really kick in, we actually know how to fight and we are used to living on food that starts off as powder.” Talkin’ ‘bout my generation… grateful for laughter.

~timeline~

Tuesday 3-17 I also appreciated the memes replacing homeschool plans with corrected versions involving all-day screen time, memes replacing meal plans with corrected versions involving many successive “meals” of stress-eating. Started feeling real anxiety about previously planned visit from Rich’s family. Superintendent announces schools closed until April 28th – four days after closing them for two weeks, tacking on four more weeks. Finally cried that night.

~3-17 to 3-19-20 gratitude~

As I’ve been peering into the shadows of chaos and unknowns, upheavals and differences of opinion, these last few days it dawned on me what might pair nicely with my militant social distancing campaign: gratitude (also nachos, thanks to Rich’s valiant Costco trip on Saturday). We left off last November with the monarch butterflies encrusting the bark of trees to sleep for the winter. In February, the butterflies woke up and started heading North. Now it’s March, and the maps of their sightings across the southern U.S. are a good distraction from other maps sprinkled with colored dots that one may be looking at lately. How do they know which way is north? Do they remember how they got there? Even if they do, they will soon breed a generation of offspring who will travel to a place they’ve no reason to know how to get to.  They face a lot of unknowns on their journey, too.

I feel about as flimsy as a butterfly’s wings right now, not nearly up to this journey. I wouldn’t have guessed I’d be such a lightning rod for the energy all around me, it’s like I have antennae that are efficiently collecting it all – the gruesome, terrible whole of everyone’s collective nightmare that we may be living soon and are already imagining. Tuesday night I finally let some of it out on my husband’s shoulder. And while I’m usually one to speak my mind, I wouldn’t have guessed I’d be speaking up quite so much. I have three jobs and none of them are fully shut down; with the farm job, it makes sense to me that people need to eat and the farm has food – it does no one good to let it go to waste. The science jobs are a little different – but scientists have trouble with being left to self-define words like “essential.” I do have one thing going for me: the clarity that I’ll be able to live with being the loud mouth and then being wrong about this; my conscience won’t let me live with being the other kind of wrong and finding out too late I was not doing enough. I desperately hope I am wrong, please let me be wrong.

Please. My mom, autoimmune/cancer survivor, a ridiculous number of surgeries and a round of radiation just last year. Please. My dad is over 75. Please. Outlaw mom. Please. Oklahoma parents heading for 90. Please. The list gets long, their faces popping into mind on a loop, all the loved ones for whom I am so grateful, but the soundtrack right now is only one word, repeated: please.

Time for some balance, some gratitude, some thank you. Scientists figured out that the butterflies gauge direction by using the sun’s position in the sky in relation to the horizon, but they have to integrate this data with the internal knowledge they have of the time of day. Listening to the rhythm of their own clock. Trusting this instinct, as well as their observations of the world around them. Making the best choice they can given the circumstances. So today I’m grateful I’m able to listen to my internal knowing.

I have so much to be grateful for, and it makes it all so clear to me how much I therefore have to lose.

Like the butterflies, I will try to keep my eye on the sunlight and follow the compass of my inner knowing.

~timeline~

Wednesday 3-18 Extreme intensity on social media, people exhorting others to check their rights, people begging others to keep the health care workers in mind and stay the f*ck at home. So many insecurities, so many chips on shoulders out on parade. In retaliation against the shadows, a lot of posts attempting to share some good news and inspiration. Redoubled meal planning and homeschool lesson planning, new ways of distributing homegrown goods, volunteering to help others in need, restaurant takeout options to support local businesses. Free virtual museum, zoo, aquarium tours, concerts. Wellington the penguin tours the Shedd Aquarium since it is closed to visitors, to everyone’s delight. More tears, frustration with work and mental exhaustion. Realizing my muscles are tied in knots, my breathing is shallow. The idea of a visit is causing me to feel panic. Realizing I feel safer having Quinn stay at his Dad’s house instead of coming home Friday, but feeling depressed at this thought. I have been practicing with google hangouts this week and the highlight of my day was by far my hangout lunch chat with Lauren.

Thursday 3-19 Awake at 3am becoming more resolved in my need to control the only factors I could so I could accept the ones I had no way of controlling; leaning towards keeping Quinn at a safe distance, isolated at his Dad’s, isolation being a skill that I know his dad truly possesses and this is the first time that attribute has ever been positive.

In the morning Rich and I cleared the air on all of the stress that was getting between us. He said I didn’t have to hold the world on my shoulders (obviously he is still getting to know me, because I most certainly do), and doesn’t want me being a martyr… funny, in my mind I could just picture both my brothers breaking out into song, as we Rews have a special song about martyrs.

Quinn and I had our first space phone call to discuss him staying put, and Quinn is thankfully old enough to understand.

Quinn would have been leaving for Italy tomorrow. The wave is cresting there. Watched video of an Italian artist, son of a doctor, telling what it is really like in Italy right now, with footage of at least twenty caskets lined up at one local church in his region.

3-19 evening. I just made a list of things to do with Quinn together in google hangouts. I am at three different jobs right now, where varying levels of precautions are slowly being taken, and Rich is going to work daily as well. I am also teleworking as much as I can but being in and out of the world and then coming home to my lonely thirteen-year-old feels like the wrong choice when he has a safer option.

~gratitude 3-19~

These space age phone calls might just save me. I’m also attending a virtual baby shower this weekend.

Gratitude for the good man I married. He gave me a special broom as well as a ring when we got engaged, and we have been diligent with the metaphor of keeping the space between us swept and clean.

Grateful for emotional awareness, so I can tell instantly when a decision makes me feel relief, or dread. I am grateful to be officially teleworking with the blessing of both supervisors, as of this evening. So many decisions that felt so hefty today. And a much lighter feeling this evening. But tired. Like thin wings that have flown a bit far for one day and need to rest.

Elderberry bourbon smash gratitude.

~timeline~

Friday 3-20-20 Woke up to the news that Kenny Rogers died. This is my first day of full telework. I am keeping busy and a good dynamic is flowing; I am writing procedures (they’re photo heavy, in case anyone is wondering) for D who is being a champ and taking on all my hands-on duties in the lab. Attended my second virtual lab meeting.

As the day went on, I started feeling one million times better than I have in the past 48 hours. It’s been a tough week. Pandemics are no joke. My decision has been made, and Quinn is staying at coparent’s and my heart is a little sore right now, despite also feeling relieved.

Our governor is calling for medical gear donations; links for people to start sewing fabric barrier masks to donate for health care workers as they start running short of N95s. Depoe bay set up a trailer testing site. Not sure anyone had been testing in this area at all yet. “No positive cases” may mean no tests have been run. Perhaps some have been sent to the state lab, whose capacity is only a few hundred a day, but my guess is those few hundred have been dedicated to the hot spot of Portland. Out of curiosity, I took a look at the CDC protocol for PCR testing for COVID-19 and it’s totally in my wheelhouse. With just a few virus-specific supplies, I could run it off the document with the reagents and equipment at my lab. I can see a reality where personnel/labs could need to be diverted for this type of task. It’s mixing like oil and water with my other reality where the vibe is so much more chill than what’s going on inside my head.

But I also escalated to the ultra-cautious end of the spectrum in just a few days, last Friday I went out for a drink with Tink. It has been a big whirlwind of changes and sequentially dialing back, and the choices I made last Friday seem idiotic to me now, but that’s just perspective and I keep joking 2020 will be the year of hindsight.

On our mailbox date, I received my photo prints; all the 5 by 7 nature shots I had ordered a few weeks ago to hang up in my office at work. Just when I was feeling more inspired to take up a more permanent residence there.

~3-20-20 gratitude~

Sunshine is flooding my new office at Quinn’s desk (with nature photos). I’m sitting here in between procedure writing tasks and soaking it in, finishing my coffee until my nettle-lavender tea cools. Nettle leaves and lavender flowers I have in jars, saved in years past, in addition to lots of other food stores I feel so lucky to have put aside over time. Right now lavender and nettle feels like the perfect mix of calm and strength to see me through the pandemic panic attacks.

Today’s noon google hangout with Quinn featured his two guinea pigs, who I never normally see. On breaks, I’ve been visiting the trout lilies and more of them are blooming; so grateful for my backyard bayou.

There is so much to be grateful for and I think when this is all over maybe everyone will have a better grasp of that concept. But I also have to remember that I can picture very clearly what my son looked like hooked up to a ventilator as a baby and not everyone has that ingrained in their mind. I don’t wish it on my worst enemy. I wish it didn’t take people dying before our eyes to make that perspective shift happen, and my heart is very fearful for a lot of people. I have to keep reframing that into gratitude for the gift of these people in my life to begin with, otherwise I start forgetting to breathe again.

My kiddo, I am so grateful for him. He has taken in stride all the disappointments of this pandemic, beginning with his Italy trip being postponed, and now the extension of time away from me.

On the bright side, nature is taking back Venice, as dolphins and water fowl return to the now clear blue water of the canals. Edit: After fact checking, this claim was found to be exaggerated at best, though what is true is the water is clearer with less boat traffic. And although we’re sad about being apart we’re staying positive and focusing on how this free time can be a gift. Quinn is making himself up a study schedule with drums, karate, duolingo (for Italian), algebra, maybe some chemistry or ecosystem dynamics for science, computer programming, etc. Our noon hangouts will be so helpful. He texted me last night to ask me if scheduling a game night hangout for 6-7 on Fridays would be okay, in addition to our noon meeting. So tonight we played Taboo in hangouts. Oddly enough, one of the cards I held up to the camera for Quinn, that he had to get me to say, was “martyr.” Then he talked me through solving his 2×2 Rubik’s cube after I scrambled it. He blew me away with how he could visualize and articulate what I needed to do and then tell me how to orient and twist the cube to solve it again. It worked!

~meme of the day~

“Your quarantine nickname is how you feel right now plus the last thing you ate from the cupboard.”

Yours in gratitude, Surreal chamomile.

~quinn’s forty sixth month~ stirring the pensieve

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~written november/december 2018~

by this time, the blog had taken on a life of its own, and i began documenting quinn’s happenings on a regular basis in ~a month of unschool~ posts the next month, which then transitioned to ~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ posts. as such, this feels like the last chapter needed in this series to complete the splice in the one unbroken line.

unschooling was proving to be a good fit for the learning style of quinn. he was always inclined to follow his interests in an in-depth way, learning pertinent life skills as a matter of course. he was exploring numbers and taking on math all on his own. he would tell me things like, “2 and 2 more, and then another 1, is 5!” he did the same with subtraction, during the course of play. “you have 4 but you take away 2 so you have 2 left.” his boat-y observations about the letters on a page were a great example of how he constructed his own meaning of the world around him, including the o buoys and q crab traps he encountered.

in addition to chronicling the learning-oriented activities and events that took place each month, the monthly learning posts have become a place where i’ve processed some of the different layers of his learning style and personality. by this magical age of three, many of the most quinn-ish aspects of quinn-ness had emerged and i was starting to observe and take notice of them. the blog has been a bit like dumbledore’s pensieve in which i have been able to store memories, and at various times revisit them, swirl them around, and discover connections among the memories and the present days’ events, coming to understand both more fully. i find it incredibly fitting that the memories in the pensieve seem very much alive, as though pulsating with bioluminescence.

by this time i had put my finger on one tricky aspect of quinn’s personality, in that he has a serious perfectionist side. i can easily relate, and i think that was why i could identify this in him at a young age. i had noticed that quinn was easily upset when he was unable to execute his artistic goals to his liking, and he would spend months not drawing. his drawing skills would eventually catch up to his drawing goals, and then he would enter a new phase of drawing willingly, often to the exclusion of other activities. when his goals and skills were out of sync, he bided his time. part of this had to do with his style and personality, my watery ebb-and-flow dude, but part of the ebb was/is definitely an aversion to imperfections and mistakes.

during this particular month, quinn realized he could just turn the page to a new sheet of paper when a mark went onto the paper he didn’t like. he then filled an entire 100-page spiral notebook with drawings in one weekend. attention span was certainly not his issue, and i recorded that three hours elapsed one saturday while he stood at his play table, drawing storm waves, boats, and people so adorable i could have eaten the pages. his people had heads, stick arms and legs, with blobs for hands and feet. he would dictate, “you have to attach the eyes,” and make sure peoples’ legs were inside the boat so they would not fall in the water.

his narrative still saturated with boat imagery, he told me about a drawing in which we made our daily commute in a boat instead of a car; he told of filling the streets with water by poking holes in the road. of all the places in the world to be thinking of sending a boy with an imagination so preoccupied with boats, a few days in venice seem especially apt.

this month was when the milks seemed just like buoys to quinn! and we baked our two big green pumpkin boats and turned them into pumpkin pie, pumpkin muffins, and we still had pumpkin left over to make pancakes and store some in the freezer. my kitchen helper left no eggshells in the mix, was getting better at filling and leveling the teaspoon, and i didn’t have to stir anymore- he was very thorough!

delving into these archives, i found that the series seemed to be woven through with a few themes revolving around personhood. quinn was solidly self-possessed, and i was heading in that direction myself, engaging in a lot of self-reflection, and contemplating what freedom meant to me. having begun to establish healthy boundaries, i was more free to pour my energy into actualizing my potential in areas i cared about, such as parenting. quinn and i weathered storms, to be sure, as i climbed the mountain of parenting ideals. life would not come to rest in some static pose in the rain shadow, but we would find that we were camping there more frequently than we were trudging through gales on the weather side.

when he was an infant, and the struggle was being bitten while he nursed, i had to learn not to clench my own jaw. when he was three and having a tantrum, i had to learn that there was a prerequisite amount of connection needed to see us through those storms. now that he is eleven, i am seeing the parallel to the learning i’m doing now, which is maybe more advanced in that it is both about clenching my jaw less and front-loading connectedness. one of the key components to a thriving parent-child relationship all along has been attention to my own self-care, and looking back makes me want to give myself a high-five for steady improvement.

quinn and i took a trip to portland, and given our previous month’s trip having been so hotly contested by my coparent, i did not tell quinn ahead of time, so that i would not have to ask him to keep a secret. when it was time to go, i told him, “we’re going on a road trip tonight to see r and s and t!”

quinn said, “i like them!”

he was quiet for a while, but then spoke up again:

“dada says that one of the mamas is sicker than you are, mama… (pause)… r is the guy who dada says is sicker than you and she has problems in her head even more than the problems you have in your head.”

“whoa buddy. that’s heavy stuff. how did it feel to have dada say that to you?”

“when he said that i wanted to cry.”

“oh yeah? you felt sad, huh? i think i would feel sad too, if someone said that about my friend.”

“yeah (repeating the ‘sicker than you’ part)”

“oh. well, sweetie, i want you to know that you are the one who gets to decide what you think about people. even if dada or i think something, it doesn’t mean it has to be true for you.”

(repeating, “but dada says…”)

“so boo, do you think that about r?”

“no. i like r. she’s my friend!”

“me too. i like r, and i don’t think she is sick.”

a few minutes passed. i can still picture the low winter sun glancing off the water’s surface as we crossed the bridge.

“quinn, how are you feeling about it now?”

“i’m not sad anymore.”

the court-mandated parenting class i took when i originally planned on establishing custody paperwork had engraved in my mind that kids derive a lot of their self-esteem from their image of their two parents, and therefore any trash talking about the other parent in front of the child, while it can influence their kid’s opinions, is done at the child’s expense. so i had redoubled my commitment to never doing it. ultimately, without any need for trash talking, i trusted my kid to figure out whether his other parent is a person of integrity, without me ever having to burden him with my opinion. conversely, if i helped quinn maintain a center from which he could determine his own opinions in spite of outside input, he might stand to be less vulnerable should one parent choose to engage in trash talk.

r and i took the boys to omsi. we spent oodles of time in the room full of nerf balls and vacuum tubing. we played musical wrenches and played with electricity in the physics room. we dunked and excavated in the watershed model. we got to hold a leaf bug. quinn put together a human skeleton puzzle. we used to go to omsi all the time, but it was a different experience with quinn being older and more capable, since i could actually look around a little bit myself. i found a cool book called while a tree was growing about all the historical events that happened during the lifespan of a certain giant sequoia tree- it was a cool blend of science and history. when i got home i ordered it for 48 cents for a christmas present. s was into drawing mazes, and he made one for quinn, and showed him what a maze is all about. the boys played with cars, driving them down the ramp. quinn pretended everything was a boat. r fed us like royalty, quinn ate 27 little oranges, 15 chocolate chip cookies, and a few bites of burrito, and i got to do lots of mama chatting. i made a side trip to visit a friend at print arts northwest, where quinn made beaded candy canes at a table with four adult women, and i looked at art. q told the women his favorite colors are “green, pink and orange.” this was the first time i had ever heard him name any color a favorite other than green!

quinn told me on the ride home, “i had such a good time at r’s house.” i figured it would be so fresh in his mind, and he’d mention something about it to his dad, but at least after the fact, it wouldn’t ruin the trip. when coparent asked me if we had gone to portland, i simply answered truthfully. whereas the prior month, mr. hyde had lectured me about the requirements “by law” that i inform the other parent when taking his son out of town, this time i got dr. jekyll: “so, what is the policy on that? i’m confused.” i agreed i would like to know if he were taking quinn somewhere, without agreeing that i would notify him. i certainly did not apologize or in any way indicate that what i had done was wrong.

i never did confront him on the trash talk. at earlier times he would turn it back on me, denying things he had said about me completely with, “maybe he got the terminology from you.” (gaslighting alert! looking back now with an understanding of such dynamics, it is so easy to see.) from all these years later, i hold these truths to be self-evident: that i had good parental judgment and the right to do what i wanted to do, and go where i wanted to go, with my son on my own parenting time.

what is also clear to me years later is that i stand behind my then-conviction to maintain quinn’s personal integrity, to encourage rather than discourage him to decide for himself on matters large and small, whenever possible. it can be unwieldy to parent a three-year-old with a strong self-knowledge and definitive agenda, in a world where the prevailing parenting paradigm revolves around compliance. with my eye on the longer-term goal of quinn knowing, absolutely within his own soul, who he is, and as a side benefit, knowing who his parents are, i have always encouraged him to be in touch with what he thinks. this has been worth every bit of awkwardness going against the mainstream.

this was the same month i posted that he knows himself in which he made stunningly self-aware statements about not going to school, and not belonging in a city. i was in awe, looking to him as a model, and hoping to catch up in the department of self-knowledge! i could already see the radical approach i was taking was starting to bear fruit.

one morning on the way to work (in the rainy semi-darkness of mid-december) we saw an owl fly out of a tree beside the road just before we crossed the bridge. since nobody was behind us, we waited at the stop sign a while and watched it fly again, down to the grass. we talked to it, telling it to stay safe and not go into the road. it flew back up into the tree. we drove across the bridge.

solstice this year fell on a full moon, and featured a full lunar eclipse! the timing of the eclipse didn’t allow for us to see it, but such a celestial backdrop seemed like the natural time for things like owls flying by my car on my morning commute.

 

we filled the house with the fragrance of cinnamon-applesauce ornaments, and cloves stuck in an orange. we made playdough (beet juice pink, reminds me of red violet), and painted all our buoys for our buoy garland every color of the rainbow. a long string of rainbow colored buoys is about the most fitting ending i can think of for a post series about fixing a broken line, finding a whole bunch of unexpected treasures, and turning them into a celebration.

 

~~~

~post-script~

as i tucked the pensieve back into its cabinet, i re-read each post and pondered how transformative this writing process has been. just due to the very act of saying yes and showing up to do this specific writing, my perception went through a dramatic shift. at first i perceived this line splice project as a repair that would be functional, but not necessarily pretty. i was on a mission to unstick myself in a certain aspect of my writing, because it occurred to me that this missing piece was holding me back from fully integrating my storyline. i went into it slightly intimidated, daunted by the things i knew i would revisit, and apprehensive about what i may have forgotten. i thought i would catalog memories, organize them into paragraphs, slicing away ugly or unneeded parts and maybe inserting a metaphor to tie them all together. however, by the end of the first one, i realized i had been remiss to think of it so clinically, and i had been so focused on how hard things were during that time, that i forgot how beautiful and joyful they had been. by the third post, there were rainbow connections and so many gems whose immense worth i could not have fathomed at the time, but which were now radiant given the new angle of the sunlight shining upon them. i gained some momentum through several more posts as i savored the flower petals i was able to hold in the palm of my hand once more. and i reveled in the broader view having come full circle up the spiral staircase. the connections zigzagging from then to now and back to then, all reminding me that integrating is about making these important connections, that this mending project is not just making the whole more functional, but also lending it strength. it will remain to be seen if i am now “unstuck” as i hope to be, but what i feel i can take away from all of this is what beauty you can make out of what was broken and left behind, if you’re resourceful.

it turned out that the broken ends of the strands of my rope were just another magical place on the edge of things, the crack where the light gets in.

so i lay my line splice down here on the threshold of another winter solstice 8 years hence, another darkest part of another year, to hopefully bring a little light to the darkness.

~quinn’s forty-fourth month~ storm season

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~written november 2018~

as my blog was gaining momentum, i started writing more in the moment, more from the heart, as well as including more about me in addition to quinn, my ideas, my past, my hopes. i was more aware than ever that i needed to process and integrate my experiences through writing, and that it would save time and sanity if i did so in real time. as i’ve been splicing together these loose ends of the rope, i’m now down to tucking in the last pieces of tapering twine as i close in on the beginning of the past 8 years of consistent blogging.

it was the beginning of storm season, both in the season of the year and the season of parenting i found myself in. we opted out of setting up our tents one stormy saturday, choosing instead to bike trailer ourselves to market in the rain to pick up our csa, chat with the few other hard core market goers and vendors, and let quinn splash around  a bit.

storm clouds were gathering in the mama realm as well. the mountain of my ideals promised of a rain shadow, but i was still climbing up the other side where the moisture piled up, sliding back down in each deluge, unable to bridge the disconnect between what i believed i ought to do, and what i was actually doing. reacting to my ineptitude with self-criticism made me even less able to scale the peak and emerge into the sun.

even as i was celebrating his growing autonomy and self-possession, i was struggling against him on non-negotiables. we had developed a great communication around choice and lived our days with a “how can we” approach to resolving incompatibilities in our agendas. the troubles seemed to arise on the few have-to’s of household harmony and health and safety.

quinn was reacting strongly to feeling powerless. waking up at the beach from a nap after leaving his dad’s, and deciding, “i didn’t waaannnaaa come to the beach!!!! wahhhhhhhhh!” was one example. more frequently it came up at bedtime, when i needed to brush his teeth or a put a diaper on him for sleep, and the resistance on his part was formidable.

in exhaustion, i would default to my routine, allowing him as much choice in the process (offering certain amounts of time for him to get ready for said activity, offering choices of venue) but because i had always honored his personhood, he felt strongly that he was not going to do these things, and no partial choice in the matter was going to sell him on it. he knew he was not in full control of these situations (i was not going to allow flat-out refusal of dental care, with his need for extensive dental work that also took place during this month).

on a few occasions, i would end up having to restrain an unwilling boy and brush his teeth through his clenched jaws, with him kicking me throughout. in addition to feeling like this violated every parenting principle i held dear, it was also unsustainable, and the kid was big enough to inflict harm on me with those kicks. i would end up some nights feeling completely defeated, disgusted with myself, unable to see possible solutions. at the end of one particularly problematic week, i was yelling through tears at him that all i wanted was to be a good mama and take care of him and i felt like he was preventing me from doing that. obviously, this was not the solution either.

i was still centered enough in my principles to believe that he felt safest with me, as i had protected his little integrity and worked hard to keep it intact, and therefore he was most likely to exhibit these behaviors with me. i was where he could work through his feelings of powerlessness, because i was in it for the long haul, i was striving to parent from a foundation of unconditional love and empowerment. for the most part i had been able to live that, and celebrate his unique experience of being quinn, not an extension of me that i expected compliance from. however, in these situations i was floundering, and i was beating myself up over it. an increasing feeling of panic and overwhelm started to loom like a thundercloud.

luckily i had a community of mamas with whom i could be real, and some of them were able to remind me to orient towards self empathy, rather than self-criticism. one friend spent an hour and a half on the phone with me, helping me break down my emotional journey as a parent, and that outside perspective was crucial to understanding my own needs. there was a part of me that was resisting engaging or being present with quinn, begrudging having to pull my attention away from other things to attend to him. in my heart i wanted to engage with him and play, but i would notice myself “one minute”-ing him and not following through, and also failing to do any “front-loading” with him. then to make matters worse, i was judging myself for not being able to snap out of it and front-load, judging the part of me that was resisting, wishing i could do away with that part of me.

the resistant children in both quinn and me had very good reasons to resist, and both deserved a loving response- my friend helped me see that my resistant child needed it first. she told me, “there is a side of you that is needing more caring.” then she provided some of that exact thing i needed.

i had been doing lots of self-reflection and digging through my old journal “archives” and when i pictured the “me” who was resisting engaging with quinn, it was the me who was really trying to get a handle on some things about who i am, digging up pieces of myself to give them back to myself. this self kept wanting not to be interrupted, saying “this is important,” but i kept sending her the message that she shouldn’t be so resistant.

i was grappling with the dichotomy of extreme loneliness vs feeling like i stood to lose my self-sufficient sense of empowerment if i delved into relationship again. this was surrounded by fear that the two could not be reconciled, that if i were to quench the loneliness, i would inevitably lean too much and lose my self-reliance. in theory, i understood interdependence and could see it as a healthy goal; i knew i ultimately wanted a relationship where i could keep being who i was, and interdependent, just not dependent or codependent.

my self who was resisting… she needed time and space; to get in touch with my value system, gather up pieces of myself (and she kept clamoring about how important it was!) my friend was able to convince me not to kill her off.

my disapproval of myself was tied to my disapproval of my kid. we discussed how there seems to be a time in a parenting journey when we stop approving of our kid. it was easy to approve unequivocally at first, even when the newborn baby was pooping on us, but somehow at some age, we started acting like they somehow no longer deserved complete approval. my own response to realizing i was withholding approval of my 3-year-old was, “what is wrong with me??” i started berating myself, withholding approval of myself. aha.

i adopted a new mantra: i approve of myself.

i adopted the strategy to look at each time quinn and i would have another one of these moments as an opportunity for growth, vs. dreading each inevitable next one.

at that point, i was able to reconnect with my normal intentional connection focus with quinn, and in turn, it was as if the universe granted me the time i was needing for self-gathering, somehow magically creating spare minutes out of the chaotic days. the strong wind of disapproval had reversed its direction, and instead we were going back in the right direction, towards the peaks. this gathering became efficient as i built a spreadsheet to help me organize the tidbits from old journals and sort them by date to make the re-integration task seem like it might not be insurmountable. looking back i can see what a corner i turned in allowing the “me” to do this work, in agreeing, “she’s right, it is important,” and embracing the effort to honor the side of me that needed to be this dorky and try to figure out “me” and piece “me” back together.

how this all related to parenting might seem tangential, but more directly, i needed to offer myself the same measure of kindness and understanding in this area as well. if i was going to be able to scale the peak and make it to the sunny side where my reality and my principles aligned, i would need to stop berating myself for imperfection. someone learning to ride a bike may have read a book about it, and seen someone else do it, but they will still need to build their skill, and they will fall off at first. i may have had my philosophy figured out, but i still needed to build my skills. berating the person learning to ride a bike would not help them learn; it would take practice, and gentleness.

that rainy saturday afternoon we went to help a friend process another 30 pounds of tomatoes she had scored for $8 but was uninspired to deal with. together we made tomato jam, a spicey cloves-ginger-thyme concoction that was quite good on a bagel with goat cheese. we made a batch of salsa with the remaining tomatoes. the rough housing boys had fun, and after no nap, quinn went to bed at 6:00. i was rewarded with some of that mama bath/reading/journal time i was needing so desperately.

sunday started out rainy, too, so we did laundry and grocery shopping chores. then after an early naptime, we were greeted with partly sunny skies! we had time to go to the beach before quinn had to go to his dad’s. despite a few scattered showers, our days were starting to clear, and it seemed we might reach the peak after all.

just thereafter we had a sweet, sweet day. it was sunny and warm, and not windy. truly summerlike, moreso than the weather we had all summer. we spent the whole morning outside in the yard and then at the community garden and playground. there were lots of good moments, sitting together in the grass having a snack. nice and simple. we were in sync. we read all 184 pages of nim at sea in the span of two days.

 

on my lunch break during work, i took myself to the beach to eat my leftover pizza. i was no longer required for the daily nap, a bittersweet but ultimately beneficial development because i never needed to enter my coparent’s shop anymore. on this particular day, not only was it sunny at the beach, but the annual dragonfly migration was going on. i saw hundreds of dragonflies fly by me that day.

later that year, i would write a post about dragonflies, and all the things they may represent in our lives. i can’t help but notice some of those features jumping out at me, all these years later, concerning the time frame during which i was witnessing their exodus.

tuning into deeply felt, but ignored, emotions certainly hits the nail on the head. visualizing and manifesting positive outcomes absolutely fit what i was seeking to do at that time. maneuverability and movement, propulsion into new ways of being and doing would definitely have been a helpful sort of energy to guide me through a time of transition and re-evaluation, of getting unstuck and propelling me forward. or transformation, if you will. they spend up to a couple of years in the mud as nymphs before they emerge and fly away! i was glad to be feeling like i may yet emerge from the mud. seeing around things from different angles; seeing color and light and coming to understand who you truly are. need i say more?

weathering these storms may have made me into a stronger person and a better mama. once i let go of having to always do things right, the storm clouds became slower to gather, and i became more adept at taking a breath and letting the clouds slip on past, without dreading each one and fearing for the worst. more of our days were sunny again, full of light and pomegranates. as mama of an eleven-year-old, looking back on being a mama of a three-year-old, i know that i cast my thoughts back to this time frame to remember my ideals and refocus on my goals as a parent, as well as to sigh in relief over the added years of perspective that help me sweat the small stuff less than i ever did then. in turn, looking back then on a pomegranate can flash me forward to the present in the most indescribable way.

i need reminders, so i cycle back around and the integration process continues. but then that’s why i take myself to the beach on occasion, and every now and then, i glimpse a dragonfly glimmering in the sunlight…