giving thanks

Troublesome origins aside, I adore Thanksgiving. No material gifts; just gratitude, family, and good good food. Here (in no particular order) are just a few of my reasons for giving thanks on this day.

• You people. Friends. Family. Blog friends, whom I love from afar. Your words, your care, got me through this year, and then through this past week of panic. This week in particular, some of you came and spent whole days with me when my fear got bad. Some of you introduced me to paths of less suffering. So many of you listened to my fears, my struggles, without judgment. Thank you for your generosity and your compassion. It has not gone unnoticed.

• My health. All of my labs this week came back great. That rare disease? Not in my body. It’s hard for me to perceive my body as healthy and strong, but I’ll get there again. I am devoted to getting there again. To trusting. This week revealed some wounds. Now I’m ready to heal them.

• My wife, who as I type this is working on a vegan walnut lentil loaf in the kitchen. It’s an ineffable thing, the sense that you are understood by someone. That you understand someone. I am blessed by this marriage dance.

• My mom, who’s spending her Thanksgiving here with us, helping us prepare for Rabbit. Who bought J and me Christmas Eve pajamas for the last time this year (since next year, that tradition will move on to the boy). Whose presence this year has been of tremendous comfort. Family matters. Family matters a lot.

• Emmett Ever, who was with us last Thanksgiving, and who we carry now. I’ve always loved Yeats’s idea that “nothing can be sole or whole / that has not been rent.” I just never quite understood it before our girl.

• Rabbit River. Who kept his mama and his mum up for most of the night last night. And who is nearing four pounds. And who has the sweetest energy. And who I believe I was meant to parent.

• Rabbit’s donor. I don’t think about him a lot, but he’s on my mind today. Though we may never meet him, he is our family now. And I love him for his gift to us and for his silent presence.

• Gratitude itself. And joy. And the ability (struggle though it sometimes is) to be present. And wisdom, even when it comes through painful experience. And growing pains. And surrender. And vulnerability, even when it feels like it might break you.

• The greatness that is J’s 31-week belly, and the way it peeks out from this flannel shirt.

The mobile above Rabbit’s crib. The way it dances in an apparently still room.

The stained glass full of concentric circles. Circles, which feel like life to me. Circles, which will surround our little boy in the space where he will begin his life soon.

Thank you all for reading. For being a part of our family this way. For the things you share with us. For community. Happy Thanksgiving.

 

july 19th, 2011

Louis Comfort Tiffany, “Magnolias and Irises” (1908)

~~~

Today was Emmett Ever’s due date. This has been a complicated (sorrowful, cathartic, confusing) time for us. I wanted to mark this day for her, but I don’t feel ready to write about any of it yet.

I’ve been sitting for awhile with the cherry box of her things (her small urn, the bowl of stones and shells collected for her, photos, the bag of lavender given to us by a friend so that her box would always smell sweet and healing) and I thought that, instead, I might offer a few of the pieces friends chose to share at her blessing. I’m leaving so much out. I’m not including any of the letters written directly to her – by us, or by friends and family – as those feel like they belong only to Emmett. Only one of these selections (the last, “Elegy for Emmett”) was written for her. Still, each one speaks to the love our little community feels for her, to the hope that she offered, to the things she had to teach.

We will carry you with us, little mermaid girl. You are loved with no end, and no measure.

~~~

We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. * Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

~~~

And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it. * Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

~~~

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?
This isn’t a playground, this
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on. * Mary Oliver, “A Pretty Song”

~~~

To think of the sea
is to hear in the sound of trees
the sound of the sea’s work,
the wave’s labor to change
the shore, not for the shore’s sake, nor the wave’s,
certainly not for me,
hundreds of miles from sea,
unless you count
my memory, my traverse
of sea one way to here.

…

But I owe a human story,
whose very telling
remarks loss.
The characters survive through the telling,
the teller survives
by his telling; by his voice
brinking silence does he survive.
But, no one
can tell without cease
our human
story, and so we
lose, lose.

Yet behind the sound
of trees is another
sound. Sometimes, lying
awake, or standing
like this in the yard, I hear it. It
ties our human telling
to its course
by momentum, and ours
is merely part
of its unbroken
stream, the human
and otherwise simultaneously
told. The past
doesn’t fall away, the past
joins the greater
telling, and is.

At times its theme seems
murky, other times clear. Always,
death is a phrase, but just
a phrase, since nothing is ever
lost, and lives
are fulfilled by subsequence.
Listen, you can hear it: indescribable,
neither grief nor joy, neither mine nor yours….

But I’ll not widow the world.
I’ll tell my human
tale, tell it against
the current of that vaster, that
inhuman telling.

I’ll measure time by losses and destructions.
Because the world
is so rich in detail, all of it so frail;
because all I love is imperfect;
because my memory’s flaw
isn’t in retention but organization;
because no one asked. * Li-Young Lee, “Furious Versions”

~~~

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore -
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two. * Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Sonnets from the Portuguese, VI”

~~~

I am not sure I know when mourning is successful, or when on has fully mourned another human being….Perhaps one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance. There is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned. * Judith Butler, Precarious Life

~~~

Clarissa had a theory in those days – they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them….It ended in a transcendental theory which allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. * Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

~~~

This is a poem of welcome.

Your presence says yes

this world is marked by suffering;

yes, and measured by compassion that will answer it.

You say, loss does not preclude love

nor pain, peace.

You are always the right time for these things to begin. * E.B., “Elegy for Emmett”

 

hawk weather

It has been a sad, hard day. Nothing new has happened. All of the goodness from my last few posts remains. But I have learned not to take the lightness of one day as a sign that the next will be light. This day is heavy with the weight of what has been taken. I have begun to accept that there’s no avoiding these days. No barreling through them. No productivity aside from the productivity of grief.

But J checked the mail this afternoon – something I lacked the energy to do – and found a gift for me. It’s a chapbook by a poet, Anna Ross, entitled Hawk Weather. In 2009, Anna Ross met her grief with a pen, or a pencil, or key strokes. In 2011, a stranger – a woman I’ve spent maybe five hours with, an intense and successful writer/scholar – thought it might help me. It seems to be the woman’s own copy, as it’s stained from previous readings. There may be no grand plan here. Some days are sad, and hard, and heavy. But on some such days, strangers send you poems.

 

to the heartbeat of a lark or the lark in my heartbeat

I’m not sure we’re doing this right. It occurred to me tonight that there’s probably a much better way to go. Do you ever feel that way? Like you’re taking a path full of resistance because you’re not sure how to find another (softer) one?

We have about four days to stand still between the chaos of the semester and the difficulties of next week (J helping her mom through surgery and me working this crazy conference). I wasn’t sure what would happen once we had a little time. I’m five feet, one and a half inches tall, and J just (lovingly) called me “five feet, one inch hot mess and half an inch of joy.” That’s a fair assessment.

I’m sad that J and her mom have to go through this fear and pain. I have this image of J laughing and happy. It’s not from any particular time, just from before. I want to see her laugh that way again. I want for the universe to carry her and her mom safely through the week to come.

We spent the last half an hour or so listening to Josh Ritter songs in our living room. J’s head was in my lap and there was stillness. Mostly I felt quietly sad. Our dear friend A’s mother died yesterday. A has taken care of her mom for years, and though I never saw them together, I know that A was a loving and generous daughter. I know this because she’s a loving and generous mother, and friend, and teacher. Those of you who know her know how blessed we are by her presence. I keep thinking of the Indigo Girls singing “my friends and I have had a tough time.” So many of the people I love are in pain. I want to find the less.achy path for them too.

My anthem today is the Josh Ritter song “Lark,” which my friend C recently gave me. This is what I’m praying for tonight:

I am assured, yes,
I am assured, yes,
I am assured that peace will come to me.
A peace that can, yes,
surpass the speed, yes,
of my understanding and my need.

Here’s a link, if you want to hear it. It’s helping me right now. Maybe it will help you too.

 

a woman said to the universe

Thank you all for your sweet, encouraging messages (here and through e-mail). I am devastated by this news. And on top of that sadness, J got her period, which means no Christmas Eve baby. And on top of that sadness, both of our beloved moms are in the middle of scary health situations. So we are not pillars of joy right now. Don’t come here if you’re looking for rainbows and unicorns. Do listen to our friend M sing Dar Williams’s “Iowa” on my facebook page (if we’re friends in the real world. If not, I’ll try to find a version of this that can be linked here because our friend M can sing), as that could cheer anyone up. Seriously, folks, our friends are the level best. I love them like nobody’s business. (I stole this line from my friend MTB. She can sum up a sentiment.)

So the coping with this new development. Because I’ve always wanted to adopt, I tried one time in my mid twenties to adjust to the idea of never carrying a child, but I couldn’t make peace with it. I’ve always wanted that experience, as both a woman and a mother. I was the girl who loved her period because of what it represented. My all-time favorite Ani DiFranco Lyric is “I can make life. I can make breath” from “Blood in the Boardroom.” In a patriarchal world full of male privilege, I’ve remained optimistic because I’ve always secretly believed that this power to grow a person is so magical that it tips the scales of equality, making women unfathomably great. I know that lots of women choose never to have children, but I’ve had to work towards understanding that choice because it doesn’t make instinctive sense to me. (This is not meant as a judgment, as many women I love are deeply invested in that choice, and through them I’ve come to understand it more. I’m merely offering this aspect of my limited, human thinking as evidence of how entrenched I am in the notion of women as biological mothers).

It sounds old-fashioned, perhaps, or not in line with my politics, but I have always felt that a good deal of my strength comes from my reproductive system. And I’ve carefully waited to make use of that strength until I was where I wanted to be: with the right, forever person. At home enough in my body and my life to feel I could fully surrender, be taken over by the experience of being with child. It was my goal long before I learned to be this me: before I committed to this person, before I knew what I wanted to do professionally. I have constructed a life around the idea of motherhood (one that includes motherhood as a bodily experience) for so long that letting go of part of it feels like losing an unthinkably massive, central part of my being. I feel as though Emmett’s death began a hollowing out process that has left me, three months later, empty in ways I never could have imagined.

A saying we use a lot in my house is “right sized.” My wife and I try regularly to understand ourselves and our problems in these terms. Being right sized involves having the perspective to understand your wounds in terms of your blessings, but I think it also involves allowing yourself to look at and grieve your wounds. If I want to see myself as right sized, I have to allow that I am neither the greatest nor the worst at anything, and my problems are neither greater than those others face, nor less significant. I think it will take me a long time to understand this with any right-sizedness. My sense is that, like E, I will grieve this for the rest of my life. I don’t anticipate that I will ever be “over” it, in the sense of having no lingering sense of loss.

I keep saying to J that no one ever promised us more than this. I saw the kind of life I wanted in those around me – lovely people with healthy bodies (nurtured by real food and exercise), strong marriages, meaningful careers, kids, pretty old houses, animals, close friendships, joy – and I began to pursue these things for myself, but nobody ever promised that hard work would secure them all. I have no idea why I’m even alive (in an existential sense, I mean; what are we all doing here?), and that mystery alone, the opportunity to live today, is more than I’ve ever been guaranteed. Life was just given to me, and one day it will just be taken away, and in the meantime, nobody said that it would look a certain way. I am frustrated by people who move through the world with a sense of entitlement, but of course, I do that too. I never dreamed that I wouldn’t be allowed this. The body swelling with life. The quickening. The painful transition towards motherhood, towards the billions-strong club of women who’ve labored. Last night, I told J that if I believed in an embodied being in the sky, that being might sing to me: “I beg your pardon. I never promised you a rose garden.” Then I remembered another way of saying this, which is this Stephen Crane poem:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.

Touché, Mr. Crane.

 

so human

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, the narrator talk about Lot’s wife (from Genesis), who, he says, “was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back.” I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it is to be human. The love-driven, gut-wrenching, glorious, sun- and wind-filled, disappointing, evanescent, lonely, connected, never enough – never never enough – singular condition of humanity.

We do look back. We long, despite the illogic of doing so, for what was, for what is not. We turn ourselves into pillars of salts. We carry our grief around with us (as Dianne Wiest’s character, Nat, says in John Cameron Mitchell’s brilliant 2010 adaptation of Rabbit Hole) like bricks in our pockets. We do this, Nat offers, because it’s what we’ve got instead of whatever it is that we’ve lost. That suffering. We’re not supposed to revel in it, but I don’t think we’re supposed to avoid it either. It’s not that we like that brick, exactly, but it’s what we’ve got.

There’s something else, though, about being human. Something that begs us not to look back. J started her period today. No November baby. No Thanksgiving baby. Another month of patience and planning and worry. Another expensive attempt. Another hope-filled (frightened to be hope-filled) surrender. In addition to this news, my life these past few days has consisted of:

• my second period since losing Emmett (bleeding still brings fear; the trauma is still raw)
• the delightful day J described in her last post (a day filled with in.the.moment life. a pause on looking back, a momentary allowance of the beauty of just being, of being together, of having survived)
• a screening of all six hours of Angels in America for the course I teach on American culture
• concerns about my mom’s health (her low iron, its unknown cause)
• a gathering of friends, of community (this difficult to bring about in the busy months of a semester)
• and a beautiful production of RENT courtesy of my university’s super.talented theater department.

Given all of this – the head space created by all of this – I’m so aware right now of the need to live right now. Thirty-year-old Prior Walter hospitalized with AIDS. Not wanting to stop moving. At any cost. Kids – talented kids who could be my students, who are teachers in their own way – up there singing with so much sincerity you can’t not love them. Twenty-somethings delivering to their audience a lesson made all the more poignant by their youth: “There’s only us. There’s only this. Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way, no day but today.” These years that we’re given by who knows what, for who knows why. Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes. I think this is where I always get lately. Maybe I get a little closer to understanding it each time I get here. So many paths to getting here. Fleeting. Heartbreaking. Glorious. Fragile. Life. Life. Life.

 

that feathery hope

Emily Dickinson wrote:

Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

I’ve always loved this view of hope. I think it’s a part of faith that we’re called to aspire to, to surrender to, but that’s never been an easy thing for me. Hope has always threatened me. A handful of early experiences taught me that it’s dangerous to hope, at least without caution. So I tend towards restraint in the hope department, assuming that it’s better to wait until you know if some good will come before getting attached to the idea of it. This philosophy runs counter to the person I want to be today, and these contradictory influences – my cultivated restraint versus the faith to which I feel called to surrender – are especially apparent with regards to this baby making business.

I still haven’t started my period and it’s day 32. This is an odd thing. It could mean that I’m pregnant. It could also mean that my cycle is a bit askew from the stress of trying. In fact, it’s probably more likely to mean the latter. What seems more interesting than which of these possibilities is true, though, (at least in the immediacy) is what I do with this moment of not knowing. My learned response is to assume that I’m not pregnant, that my period is simply late, that it would be destructive to hope. But that response is just self protection, right? I don’t want to think that I might be pregnant because I don’t want the hurt of learning that I’m not. But how dangerous is that hurt? I have a fierce and unwavering support system: my partner in all of this, our loving.and.generous.at.every.turn friends, a devoted mother and mother-in-law. I have my health and time and resources (limited though they are). So if we’re not pregnant now, we’ll grieve that and move on to new possibilities. All that I will suffer for hope is a little, very temporary, pain. We will walk through it, and then we will be fine.

It seems to me now that the not hoping costs more. It closes me off from the miraculous possibility of new life. From “the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.” I don’t know how well this attempt at surrendering will work, or how long (if we’re unsuccessful for months on end) I can sustain it. Still, I think it’s worth trying. Maybe this is a self destructive decision (I think most American experts in fertility would say so), but it seems that opening one’s self up to a child takes far more than opening the body. So I’ll try now to put down the fear of hope, and to pick up, in its place, the unrestrained faith it has to offer. Wish me luck.

 

a beginning built of peach blossoms

I am a person who is always searching for a way in. A starting point. An origin. This wars with my intellectual understanding that there are no origins – that every story is in medias res – but there you have it. My wife and I created this blog to track a journey, but this moment in no way marks the beginning of that journey. My guess is that in the months to come, J and I will speak to some of the things that brought us here – our meeting, our marriage, our desire for a family, our personal/political/intellectual/emotional responses to being human/American/lesbians/academics/hopeful moms, but I don’t think (though we both love order) that it will all come out neatly or chronologically, and that’s okay. I want to let the story we tell here unfold.

Still, I am a person who is always searching for a way in, so here’s one in the form of two poems. The first is “A Blessing,” by James Wright. My wife gave me this poem – hand wrote it in her small, perfect script inside of a card, which she does from time to time – in the early months of our relationship. It is from these lines that we drew the name of this blog.

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the
darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

The reasons this poem speaks to us are numerous and complex. Do with it what you will. Sometimes I feel I can read this and know what it must be to exist as these ponies. Today I feel more like the speaker, and this day is a gift.

The second poem was read to us by a wonderful friend (a poet herself) at our wedding. It is “From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee.

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

This moment in our lives is about creation. Whoever you are – you who are reading this – it brings me joy to share this with you.