Celebrating the Keepers

As he approached the car, I saw him clutching it in his little hand. I couldn’t make it out fully as he walked towards me. I knew it was colorful and I knew I loved it. Even though it was the last school day before the weekend, before Mother’s Day, I honestly didn’t expect anything. My mind was busy, focused on planning and errands and this and that. But then, when I saw him, when I saw the small, rectangle-d thing bopping in the sunny, open air, my heart … it just surged.

This, my first ever handmade Mother’s Day gift, is immediately special and important. It reminded me of some of the homespun works I gave my own mother (awww, yeah … talking ’bout you, dry macaroni jewelry box. Stay proud, you rock-hard, corny thing.). It’s beyond sweet. And even though my son will probably not remember anything about it, this orange frame will never be forgotten.

That’s just what we do. We mothers keep the memories, the moments, safely stacked and stored. Even when the actual glued up, painted, sparkly, uneven, macaroni thing is misplaced, ruined or tossed, it’s still in the vault.

I was thinking about that storehouse — the Mama Lockbox — when I read this beautiful tribute to a mother gone by writer Timothy Egan in the New York Times. He talks about his mother, who passed away, and what left along with her. “[Y]ou also lose the true keeper of your memories, your triumphs, your losses. Your mother is a scrapbook for all your enthusiasms.”

And again, my heart surged.

Happy Mother’s Day to all. A special warm wish to those of you facing the day without — without your mother, without your child. I can’t imagine how difficult and sad it might be for you today, in the face of celebration and sweetness and reverence. But know that you have will always have them, nestled there where you keep all things important and loved.

Book Talk: Motherhood Exaggerated

Heartwarming, heartbreaking. Joyful, challenging. Rewarding, thankless. Motherhood can be all of these things at once. It’s also the way some writers might describe their process. So it was good to chat with mother and writer Judith Hannan about her memoir Motherhood Exaggerated –  a book about her daughter’s battle with cancer and how the ordeal tested and strengthened her own resilience.

————- 

How difficult was it to relive this emotional and harrowing experience in order to write the book?

Judith Hannan: The experience was indeed harrowing, but with a lower case “h” — a more intimate form of fright.  The reader will not be taken to a place of despair.

In the past I have described the writing process as being in a room where the temperature is poorly regulated, see-seesawing between chills and sweats, or like the swing of the pendulum when it was hard for me to get the tone just right. There were times when the words I needed seemed to be all around me and I just had to sweep them up.  Other times they were scarcer.  Sometimes I didn’t even have an idea to wrap them around.

The parts that came the most easily were often those that described some of the most painful events. I wrote many of those sections very soon after Nadia’s treatment so it wasn’t so much that I was returning to events as pouring into the page what I was still feeling at the moment. Those passages were too raw, though.

I ended up being grateful for the time it takes to write a book, try to get it accepted by a publisher, and then wait for the actual book to be produced.  If it had been accepted when I first started sending it out, it wouldn’t have become the better book I think it eventually became.

Perhaps more emotionally draining than writing the book was the rewriting and editing process, when I resisted being brought back to a time I had already dispensed with in my writing.  There is a passage in the middle section which is devoted to Nadia’s surgery, which is described as a form of rebirth.  She is still tethered to a variety of lifelines. I write:  “Alone in her web of tubes, Nadia looks out on the rest of us—unencumbered, scarless, full heads of hair—through the scrim of self-consciousness . . .”  I have never been able to get through that passage without my heart breaking, without returning to that very moment.

What do you hope other parents—those with children battling illness or not—will come away with after reading the book?

JH: I got a call yesterday from a woman who is the mother of healthy children who behave as children do — funny, fussy, belligerent, spoiled, generous, cranky, joyful, cooperative, stubborn; they get colds and stomach aches and have fights with friends and need soothing and care.  This mother said to me, thank you for drawing a picture of what my life is like, for embracing motherhood but not romanticizing it. She was giving Motherhood Exaggerated to her husband who, like my husband in the book, doesn’t understand or see the nitty-gritty of what it takes to raise a child.

I also received a letter from a woman whose son was diagnosed with the same cancer Nadia had when he was 20 years old.  A friend had given her a copy of Motherhood Exaggerated.  She shared with me her own story and her gratitude that someone wrote a book that reflected so much of her life in recent years.  What is extraordinary, though, is that I had actually known this woman and she had known about Nadia, but it was the book that reached out to her and connected us, because when we are in the midst of these crises we are often isolated, either intentionally or just because our lives have temporarily become separate from others.

How did the cancer fight influence the way you parent?

JH: Nadia baffled me from the day she was born.  Independent and stubborn, it appeared all Nadia needed from me was to watch her master one skill after another.  My other two children, Nadia’s older sister Frannie and her twin brother Max, were more like leprechauns.  They embodied the sparkle of their Irish grandmother while Nadia seemed to have absorbed my soberness and moodiness.

At the time of Nadia’s diagnosis, I was still trying to figure her out. The basis of my parenting philosophy came from a limited distillation of my mother’s approach which was, when we were sick, we were entitled to a morning in bed, but then had to be downstairs by lunchtime. Obviously, this lesson could not be applied to a child with cancer, but, more importantly, it wasn’t an accurate reflection of my mother. A more complete contemplation of my mother’s life through the writing of the book had the effect of softening me.

At the beginning of the book my fear makes me stingy with my affection. I won’t let Nadia get an ice cream cone on the way to the hospital for a test; I think she should happily saunter off to play Monopoly with a hospital volunteer so I can meet her doctor and, when she insists I go with her and let my husband meet with the doctor, I keep nagging her let me go to point that she overturns the Monopoly board.  I even tackle her at one point when she refuses to get a flu shot.  By the end of the book, I have to work to keep from crying with Nadia who is so upset by every little thing, like when she returns home from a store and discovers that the sales person had forgotten to put a bathing suit in the bag.

I have also tended to like my solitude.  Since learning to speak, “Nadia has voiced her thoughts as they arise.  Her flow of ideas runs underground only to surface in a pool of conversation that, to those of us on land, might appear to have no source or destination.” Although I knew enough not to silence Nadia, I used to see these eruptions as intrusions into my own thoughts. But, in fact, conversation has been the key that has opened the door to my understanding of Nadia.

Perhaps the lesson I struggled with most is the place of humor in parenting.  I was very conflicted on this subject.  My husband and his family are great teasers; I was raised to see teasing as an act of aggression.  And except for my father’s puns, humor wasn’t a priority in my childhood home.  When I woke up the morning that Nadia’s hair had started to fall out, though, I saw this as time when making light of the situation might be a good strategy.  Nadia ended up having a wild hair pulling session that culminated in a demonstration for her brother and sister and the placement at my seat at dinner of a bowl of “angel hair pasta.”  It was a raucous moment. I imagined my mother would have said in her perfect social worker voice: “… by wanting to turn losing hair into fun, you are expressing your own denial of Nadia’s experience.  You are not allowing Nadia to examine her feelings …”   I still feel as if I did the right thing.  Most of my lessons in how to use humor would come from Frannie and Max and, while I wasn’t always comfortable with it, its power to heal was obvious.

Finally, there is an evolution in the way my husband and I parent together.  Despite considering myself modern, we had traditional family roles. John went to work and I quit working once I had three children to stay home and raise them. I was not very good at keeping John abreast of their lives and he wasn’t very curious about asking. Over the years, maybe only partly because of Nadia’s experience but certainly prompted by it, we have worked on deepening our partnership.  While I am still the primary recipient of their secrets, particularly the girls’, I hope I have become better at involving John.

How has this ordeal changed or affected your relationship with your daughter Nadia?  How does she feel about the book, your telling of her—and your—story?

JH: I feel as if the standard stages of childhood development became disordered and moveable during Nadia’s treatment and the years after. I had to do a lot of pre-meditated parenting depending upon whether Nadia was feeling rebellious, in denial, unable to separate, self-conscious, etc. This was hard for me because I have never been the sort of person to plan and develop strategies.

The hardest phase I think for both me and Nadia was during the years when her inability to separate from me caused her to think there was something wrong with her. In my desire to help her go on sleepovers or to camp, I had to measure my hugs, not squeeze her too tightly, to hide from her the depth of my own sadness at being separated from her. I felt her absence like a homesickness. As much as I found it hard to be Nadia’s mother before her cancer when her independence seemed to push me away, my job was to help return her to that state. We had become too attached to our attachment.

This year has been a major turning point for Nadia. She is a sophomore in college, easily making the transition between home and school. She can ask for a hug or curl up in my lap and we both can let go.  She is thriving as a dancer. Our connection is as deep as ever but, appropriately, I don’t know every detail of her life.  Paradoxically, I can see more of the whole Nadia than I have ever been able to see.  She is no longer obscured by her independence and pride or by cancer or by post-traumatic stress. This has been a long time in coming for both of us and I love being a mother to the adult Nadia.

Nadia is very proud of me, as is my whole family and I made sure I had everyone’s blessing before I proceeded. For the longest time, though, Nadia said she would never read the book. Then, when I got my copies, she clamored to receive the first one, still insisting she wasn’t going to read it.  Then she read it in two days.

The big change is that Nadia has gone from trying to act as if she could return to her old life as if nothing ever happened, to internalizing and accepting as part of her this life-altering event. As supportive as she is, though, it is unlikely she will ever attend a reading.  I am grateful to her and to John, Frannie, and Max for being so generous with their lives.

Pausing to Get My Color Back

Have you ever seen a flower that so desperately and so clearly needs to be back in some water? It’s droopy and soft, wilted like warmed lettuce. Lying there, weary, on a dry table, you can see muted version of its special, brilliant tones — the vibrancy almost all drained away — at the base of the bulb. Maybe it was mistaken for dead and so was dragged out of the comfort of its vase.

But it’s not dead. It’s not dying. This thing, delicate and important, just needs some time to get its color back. It needs some repositioning, some sunlight, some quiet all in order to flourish again and stand tall.

For the last few weeks — maybe as many as eight — I’ve been feeling like that flower. Like I need a chance to get my color back. I’m still trying to feel comfortable here in our new environment, feel rooted in our new CT Life. It hasn’t happened yet, and that has left me somewhat out of sorts. Off balance. Out of my vase filled with water.

Now, I wholeheartedly agree that happiness is a choice, and I am actively choosing it. But in order for me to arrive at Happy in a real and true way, I need to work through this other stuff. The stuff that is blocking my path there. The best part is, I know I will work my way though. I’ve done it before. So there’s nothing stopping me from doing it again, ever brilliantly.

Good Night and Good Luck (All Over Again)

Pray for us.

We’ve somehow gone back in time and landed in the late summer of 2009. That was when we decided to “sleep train” our 6/7-month-old son. The first night was absolutely horrible, but by night three, we had ourselves a sleeping-through-the-night young’un. My husband and I were able to eat dinner — get this– slowly! At the dinner table! While having a real live conversation! And we were happily re-introduced to this thing called The Evening.

"Yes, but this is how *I* read books, all right?"

The Youngster really took to the new sleep program, too. From 7-months on, he continued to sleep soundly through the night. Nothing salted this kid’s sleep game. Not Daylight Savings Time. Not moving to a new home (twice!). Not even transitioning from his crib to a toddler bed. Maaaan. It was glorious. Yes, glorious.  No, that’s not an exaggeration. Said it before, good  sleep is a serious matter, especially to parents and them babies.

So, right … back to our time traveling.

These last five or so weeks PI (or Post-Italy ) have been rather rough ones for the MMM Crew. Though we’ve made solid progress — for instance, The Youngster no longer kicks up a fit to go to school — the sleep portion of things is still walking with a limp.

There are random wake-ups in the thick of night, and getting QB back to sleep — in his bed, which is important — has been long and involved process. The result: We’re all waking up tired and cranky, thanks to the broken sleep. Adding another layer to this Yuck Cake, I’ve also been doing that ridiculous light, “listening for him stirring” sleep, which is utterly useless and leaves you feeling more exhausted than if you only had two or three deep-REM hours.

Oh, and at bedtime, QB is now insisting that we rub his back until he falls asleep. At first we figured, What’s 10 minutes of back-rubbing? We’ll still have The Evening. Yeah. Uh-huh. Now, kick that up to 45 minutes or even 6o minutes of trying to soothe this kid to sleep. Right. Something quite the opposite of glorious, isn’t it?

Yesterday my husband and I made the decision to pull the plug on this Let Me Control Things video game our son was playing with us. We’ve brought out our old books, namely this one: The Sleepeasy Solution, and I’ve been reading through my smarty-pants blogs (hello, Alice over at Science of Mom! *emphatic wave*). Because it’s BACK. TO. SLEEP. TRAINING!

We start tonight. I already had a chat with QB this morning during snuggle time to let him know that we’ve got a new plan. Funnily enough, last night the kid actually slept (as he says) awwwlll the way ’til the morning. He seemed quite proud of this, and we made a big deal about it. I’m thinking (OK, praying, wishing, hoping, throwing pennies into fountains-ing) that by this time next week, we’ll ALL be proud and making a big deal about our new sleep-through-the-night Youngster.

Maybe we’ll even have I Survived Sleep Training Redux tees made up for everyone.

(Still, send us positive vibes, folks!)