Supporting Folks We Believe In

Last month, I featured a post with this same title about a friend and client who's work I believe is important to our community - and to the well being of community in it's larger sense. Collaborating with one another and positively supporting one another's endeavors in quiet as well as public can make a huge difference for everyone's success.

This is a snapshot is of Stella Lyn, an incredible village herbalist and doula. Sadly, she is soon to leave Southern Oregon, so our particular community won't have simple access to her attentive, practiced and excellent skills as a birthing doula. Thanks to the internet; however, she will be accessible for herbal care and consult. I'll be sure to put up a brief post when her website (www.stellalyn.com) is complete, so that you all can explore her work.

For now, take a look at the front panels of a recently created trifold brochure for Stella's doula practice. If you're from Palmer, Alaska, you're in luck - she's coming home! If you're from the State of Jefferson and having a doula is something you're interested in for the birth of a child in your life, call Stella and ask for local recommendations.

 



Red Pushpins

Twenty-seven years ago tomorrow, I witnessed the birth of my nephew, Jarrett.

It wasn’t pre-planned that I should have the honor of being a part of his arrival. I was home from college for mother’s day weekend, merely doing the dutiful May visit, when my sister went into labor. Like a red pushpin in a map of significant places one has visited, I can point back to that Sunday afternoon and say, “That was a defining moment of my life.”

It was one part - seeing courage in my beloved sister that I’d never seen before; it was one part the wonder of generations squeezed into a very warm, very small bedroom for a birth in the home I had grown up in; it was one part the gift of observing love’s commitment between my sister and her husband, and it was one part the miraculous itself: a perfect, dark-haired, squirming-with-life baby boy.

I returned to college in a state of pure joy and huge desire to tell friends back at school what I had seen, how it felt and why I was changed. Sadly but truly, I was greeted by people who either listened for two minutes before shrugging and turning back to their accounting 301 textbook - or worse, those who said, “Oh yeah, I saw a movie in high school health.” I knew it was alright. I mean, I understood that I really couldn’t expect someone who has never eaten an apple to understand it’s taste and texture, but I also knew that my change was going to create ripples. Namely, I now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I could never ever have children with the young man I was engaged to. And if I could never ever have children with him, I knew that I could not marry him.

That moment of birth became the first of nearly three decades of decisions I have made wherein my “mother self,” out of the many selves that reside within me, took charge of casting the final vote for all major life decisions. My “mother self” has been strong, resilient, determined, fiercely protective, very loving - and has always (sometimes to a fault) put her children first. While my other personae have occasionally disagreed with her choices over the years, they’ve let her drive the ship -- until recently.

With Mother’s Day upon us, the day that I do not consider a Hallmark-induced experience, rather - the day of my nephew's birth and the beginning of how motherhood would define my life, there are changes underway. Worn by joy as well as grief, my “mother self” has resigned - not her duty - but her post, and while she remains diligent she has definitely passed the baton. Someone else is at the helm. Now, if ever I didn’t quite fit before, I will surely shatter any June Clever mold in which I might be expected to conform.

As my wise friend Katie said to me last spring, “I know that you still have mothering to do, but the tide has shifted. You get to look forward and envision what’s next in your life - with work, artistry, in finding a partner, where you go next and why. Now, you can choose what’s best for Martha. It may be scary, but it’s also exciting.” Damn straight, Katie.

So, in honor of the ever-changing continuum of motherhood and the strong women who embrace it, and in celebration of my children whom I love more than any single thing in the world, I’m placing a new red pushpin on the map and changing course. And last, but not least, happy birthday, Jarrett. I love you very much.

 

(to my children)

I do not doubt you would have liked

one of those pretty mothers in the ads:

complete with adoring husband and happy children.

She's always smiling, and if she cries at all

it is absent of lights and camera,

makeup washed from her face.

But since you were born of my womb, I should tell you:

ever since I was small like you

I wanted to be myself -- and for a woman that's hard --

(even my Guardian Angel refused to watch over me

when she heard).

I cannot tell you that I know the road.

Often I lose my way

and my life has been a painful crossing

navigating reefs, in and out of storms,

refusing to listen to the ghostly sirens

who invite me into the past,

neither compass nor binnacle to show me the way.

But I advance,

go forward holding to the hope

of some distant port

where you, my children -- I'm sure --

will pull in one day

after I've been lost at sea.

by Daisy Zamora ~

March 10, 1929

Today, Like Every Other Day

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

~ Rumi

Happy 81st Birthday,
to the woman who has not only taught but also shown me,
that there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
I love you.

Jeanette Alden Bennett Phelps!

Los Angeles, California 1935
Six years old with her elder brother Norman
and younger brother Charles

1946 - Top of her class at LA High

June 19, 1948 Mr. and Mrs. Dean Phelps

1962 - Baby #5

1966-ish

1977 Dancing with her younger brother, Chuck

Late 70's

1990 (Baby Reid)

 60th wedding anniversary

Taken this last August 09 with Reid

The 63 Word Decade

Two days ago, I was contacted via Facebook by a woman who was one of my dearest high school companions. We shared some incredible adventures thirty (oh lordy, I hadn't done the math lately) years ago. Sometime when I'm plowing down memory lane, I'll post a story about skipping econ class my junior year to go drink black coffee with Pat in her always sophisticated high heels. At seventeen, she claimed that a woman wasn't truly complete unless she wore pumps, but I digress...

This morning I get a perfectly-Patricia message. It is brief, witty and delightfully demanding. In her message, she encapsulates her life since we last saw one another (1997), into sixty-three words and then challenges me to do the same "speed catch up."
 
Ack! Those of you reading this blog or knowing me for any length of time know that I can't do anything in 63 words. Nevertheless, I've given it a go.
 
Before you read on; however, indulge me. First, this exercise was sobering. To reduce a decade that I believed was significant, changing and full of dimension into a quickie paragraph rather brings one up short. It feels as though there are several thousand words missing. Then there's the reality that my life, after re-reading the allotted statement, I judge to be somewhat...shall we say -  humdrum? I don't know what I expected. I mean - I'm perfectly clear that the last thirteen years have not included the long dreamt of retreat to Greece, the Grand Canyon trek, a published collection of poetry, learning to play the banjo or even the purchase of  a new television (my kids have been offering to pool their savings -- it's actually that bad), but I digress...again. Needless to say, the life of glamour that we envisioned all those years ago while delinquently sipping bad coffee transformed into something all-together-else.
 
So, Patricia Rae, I’m digging in the recesses of my brain trying to recall how old my kids were when you passed through Ashland with a very big, rambunctious dog and a bottle of vodka in your trunk. I’m pretty sure it was 1997. Had I run the Portland marathon yet? Sarah, then my youngest, would’ve been two years old. Reid David was seven, and I was still a brunnette. Yikes! Thirteen years chronologically in the space of a classified ad. Ready? 
 
“Single mom, English teacher, met man, took risk, married man, millennium delivered Virginia, stopped teaching, worked non-profit foundation, kids thrived, eldest child graduated AHS-moved out-started college, continued my art & writing, began dabbling in photography, separated from man, middle kid started AHS, youngest in 4th grade, working freelance studio, eldest child fighting-surviving leukemia, now very different strong-loving single mom.”

Sick Days

I have a kid home sick today, so I'll keep this brief.
Assuming that most of my readers are over thirty, do you remember sick days as a kid?
I do. In a word - they were, besides bearing all the trademarks of typical childhood illness's (low grade fevers, puking, sore throats and horrid head colds), BORING.
In my family of origin, staying home sick from school meant sleeping, reading, pretending the lines of the quilt were roads, drawing pictures and occasionally, if one had an exceptionally bad headache, and if one of my parents had stayed home to adhere to those lines in the unwritten contract of parenting (Section II, article IV: "When your kid runs a fever over 101.5, you are required to take a day off of work.") - then we might get read out loud to for 20 minutes. By the time I had done all of those things, I only had another six and a half hours of feeling lousy and bored until one of my siblings came home from school. By the time I was a teenager, the sick day repertoire expanded to listening to records or sometimes being allowed to bring the 18 ton "portable" black and white tv into my bedroom to choose between three channels of daytime television.
The beauty of sick days back then were that they were so horrendously mind-numbing, the motivation to get well soon was very very high. Anything at school (except for the cafeteria food) was better than being stuck at home with a snotty nose.
Here at my house, in this grand new year of 2010, being physically ill is no less of a drag, but the stay at home perks are abundant. First off, I work at home - so Mama is on call all the time. Since 7:30 this morning, I have delivered tea, pancakes, re-warmed the tea, whipped up an egg and toast, administered children's ibuprofen and opened a fresh tissue box. The many voices of Jim Dale (brilliant reader of all the Harry Potter audio books) is drifting down the staircase into my office, and I know that when I go to check on my rosy-checked girl, she'll be contentedly snuggled down in the blankets in a Hogwarts induced stupor.
She's already asked for the laptop and Netflix, to which I replied with a firm negatory. An order for the next in a series of books she is reading will hopefully be filled at the public library. An art pad awaits when she feels ready to sit up, and the kitchen won't close all day long. She'll be amused, but not too; we'll both be grateful that I work at home, but I'll surrender much of the day (in accordance with section II article IV). She’ll whine a bit, sigh a few hundred times, and her healthy little body will race through this with nary an issue. All will be well.

 

My gal on a feeling great day, not so long ago!

Too Revealing

People keep saying I should be writing all "this" down. "This" being the vague euphemistic reference to the fact that my eldest child was diagnosed with leukemia last September.

While I've been diligent in semi regular communications about Reid's health status via a blog created on his behalf, it's the more personal and in depth that are being called for: the experience of being a family with cancer, how it feels to be a mother dealing with a child's cancer, and how I'm a woman who's world has been turned on tilt (by a number of things).

"Why don't you do it?" Asked one old friend, and I told her that I felt as though I was sparing others by not sharing all the dirty details. It's my version of "what you don't know - can't hurt you, " and after seeing the people I love hurt so deeply by cancer - why would I want to add to their pain?

Writing the reality feels raw, uncomfortable, too revealing. So why am I here today?

Because I've realized that to be revealing may be the most honest way to embrace life.

Behind The Door

I love this small hometown of mine. I truly do. I love my childhood memories, the comfort of belonging, the safety of well known places and sensations, the lifelong friends as well as the recent. I love the deep abiding sense of community. This place and its people have taken care of me and mine, and I feel honored to do the same for those around us. Perhaps, because of the depth of my familiarity, I am equally aware of the degree to which none of us can every really know one another completely.

None of us really knows or understands all of what unfolds behind the doors of other people’s homes. How can we? Even with friends and family we’ve known for years, sharing the heights of celebrations and the depths of challenges, there are always dimensions in other’s lives that we simply cannot be privy to unless we reside together. Frankly, even those with whom I have the deepest affection, I don’t spend much time wondering about the unseen aspects of my friends and neighbors’ lives. I trust that what they choose to share will be right for them, that it’s up to me to care, learn and pay attention, and that together we decide whether to be in relationship - and to what degree. As for what others know of my “behind the door” life, I am as honest as there is interest and sincerity. Since I’m a fairly average person, I don’t imagine that too many folks apart from my close friends could care less about the innards of my household, so it’s always a surprise to me to discover that my life has been the topic of a conversation among people who hardly know me. Wow, I think. Someone must be either really bored or really confused (as in, you think there’s a more interesting story here than there actually is). So - for those of you who fall into one of these categories, here’s a little bit of sharing about what happens behind my door on a typical day. Hope it scratches your itch, and let me just say up front, sorry to disappoint you.

We like pie in our family, so I’ll use a pie chart to explain a 24 hour cycle in my world. My three children have effectively divided their mother (that would be me) and my time into three portions. Here’s how is goes, more or less:

The littlest one (a nine year old), gets the night-into-morning portion. After her dad moved out last spring, my youngest daughter moved into the master bedroom. One night of needing a place to recover from a bad dream became a second night, and then a third....and now every night she lays on “my side” of the bed sighing deeply in her dreams and occasionally allowing me to curl into her small warm body. When I am lonely, I am tremendously grateful for the radiance of her small spirit next to me. When I am exhausted, I fall into the blankets hoping that neither of us will disturb the other.

She is a relentless morning person. I am not. She bolts upright and looks eagerly at the clock. I do not. She has a plan; right now. I simply wish to continue sleeping. Her plan always includes speaking to me; right now. She is learning to start off softly and gently (my grumpy threats about the necessity of being nicer to mom in the morning seem to be paying off); thank goodness. Each day, we take turns making the bed - comforter up, pillows in place, and the creatures (Chestnut the lion, Alice the elephant, Dexter the mouse, and Tommy and Dixie - the pigs) all assume their lounging atop the smoothed blankets. Yesterday morning, as I placed the menagerie against the pillows and surveyed the stack of children’s books on the headboard, I felt very cranky. Where is my adulthood? I gnashed. Where is the privacy of MY bedroom? I grumbled. It was a frivolous moment - some would say a “typical American mother moment” - of wanting “my space.” For now though, this is her major third of my pie - which I willingly give (while sometimes fearfully wondering if she’ll be there until she’s eighteen? Yikes!).

My eldest, my son - claims the banker’s hours (or these days, doctor’s office hours) of each day. This is the nineteen year old whom I thought had been successfully launched into his own life. Hugged, kissed and sent off to college a year ago, he was off like a rocket! Well, Houston, we have a problem. Launch delayed due to cancer. Most days we move in parallel. He has his routine (sleeping, healing, labs, doctors appointments, girlfriend, eating, more sleeping, distractions from leukemia - like video games, buddies, books and movies) and I have mine (waking him, making sure he’s eating, taking him to the appointments, watching-listening-questioning-advocating with the docs and nurses, arguing with him about the hours he keeps, worrying about him, feeding him - and his girlfriend, learning more about leukemia than I ever would have imagined in two million years. When his blood counts are dangerously low...and they are each month in between rounds of chemo, we really don’t know from one day to the next if he might be required to stay longer at the clinic for a hemoglobin, or red cell, or white cell infusion. He is vulnerable, and his body’s responses are unpredictable. These days we’ve found that making plans is a luxury we don’t get to enjoy since the best laid plans of cancer families are often dashed. We’re not in control. Period.

I was laid off from my job not too long ago, which is what makes it possible for me to devote myself to being my boy’s primary caregiver while he weathers the chemotherapy storm he’s been in since September and will be until February. This is my new job. I feel privileged to be here for him, to witness, love, hold tender and be fierce for him. I also feel scared, for him and his life, for his sisters and their lives, for our precarious financial situation, of all of the unknowns and this feeling that everything is out of control. On days that he feels well and strong, he ventures out to act “normal” in the light of day, and I do small freelance jobs from my office here at home. It’s quiet then and a little bit lonely, but peaceful.

My middle kid, gets the afternoons and evenings. This sassy high school freshman is my soccer player, swimmer, violin playing, youth symphony girl with nearly unflagging optimism and a nearly regular smile. Back before her older brother’s cancer, her intense schedule had us all panting to keep up. Now, she manages - mostly - to navigate it on her own, except for the times she needs a ride, or an audience, or her own special witness to the passions that fill her heart. She doesn’t ask for much, which makes me want to offer her that little something extra, and she’s more helpful than not, which makes me want to hold her closely - even when the day has been longer than usual. When she arrives home I want to take more than just a moment to hear about her friendships, inquire about the school day, listen to the radio songs she’s singing along with and watch the rhythmic way she moves around the house.

Dinner comes, and my son’s sweetheart is usually with us, and we all take our places around the table. This is it. Me - with four kids and a dog - at the end of the day. I sigh. It is a grateful sigh, a tired sigh, a “this isn’t what I thought my life was going to look like” sigh, a single mom sigh, and a blessing sigh. I actually wish I could give them each a larger slice, but I’m only one pie - no matter how hard I try to be more.

This is not a horrible life. This is a blessed and beautifully complex life. This is not an idle life. This is a full and multi-faceted life. This is not a life of mystery and mischief-making. This is pretty damned straight forward and honest to the point of discomfort life. This is a life infused with love between children and mother, as well as between family and friends. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t missing being more then a mother some days. At times, I’m hungry for the unique woman I am apart from the “mother-me,” and then my kids tell me that they love me, and I figure “pie be damned.”

If you see me out without my kids in this wonderful small town of ours - alone or with a friend - then you’ve witnessed a unique and fleeting moment in my present life. And if after reading this lengthy snapshot of the ordinary life behind my front door, you still think there’s some more thrilling version that’s not being shared - go ahead and ask me whatever it is you’re curious about, or better yet - come on over and trade places with me for a couple of days. I’d appreciate the short vacation - and I can promise you - you won’t be bored.