What the Thunder Said

I’ve been crying about my dead mom all morning and it’s not even July yet. Every year around this time, it happens and I feel foolish for “forgetting” to mentally prepare somehow. As if I could prepare, as if grief operates in so neat of a timeline.

 No, her death anniversary is always tender, but I suspect it feels intensified this year because of the pregnancy hormones coursing through my body again. I decide to wear the blue and white print Peter Som maxi dress she got on sale at Target to make myself feel better. It clings to my soft, protruding belly in a pleasant way. I’ve gifted or donated most of her clothes over the years, but this one lives like a vestige in the back my closet for days like today. I decide to go to Trader Joes and pick up some peonies and sea salt caramels, her favorites. This will be eleven years of navigating one of the most difficult and strangely profound experiences of my life and I forget how soothing the rituals can be. I forget how brutal but necessary writing about her like this can be.

Today started with the bad dream. It was the kind of dream where you are screaming and screaming, yet no sound comes out. Strangled, still I try to warn her about what’s going to happen but it’s too late and she dies anyway. I haven’t had a variation of this dream for years—but when I do, it always catches me off guard and throws off the rest of my day. It takes me back to the earliest days of fresh grief, when, upon waking, there is still that disorienting moment before reality hits where I think she is still alive and living in the same house with my dad back in Colorado, and things are going along just as they always did before everything fell apart.

Instead, I focus on the soft curl of my daughter’s body next to mine. Her warmth. Her rhythmic breathing through tiny, pursed lips, sweaty blond ringlets clinging to her forehead. It would be easy to curse the fireworks in our neighborhood last night that kept her up, or my stupid bad dream for my poor mood. After a few false starts, we get up and go about our day. And somewhere along the way today, it feels too heavy and I (wisely) decide to stop what I’m doing and tend to this grief before it makes me.

I let myself feel angry that she died the way she did, and then I forgive her (again, for the moment). I feel sad that she won’t get to hold her newest granddaughter once she is born or laugh at my toddler’s antics or bond with my husband over Star Trek. I feel grateful that I have created this beautiful little family, and that we get to spend time with both our families frequently. I hold bitter and sweet. I practice allowing today to be messy and contradictory.

My therapist tells me that, in her culture, when a lost loved one wants to connect, you feel it in your bones.

The bones hold our pain, our memories differently; a shifting occurs.

The grief that has taken up residence in my chest suddenly collects in my jawbone and I am unable to speak until the heaviness subsides:

this tender ache of missing my dad, the way he used to be before this blankness unfolded in his brain, a void in the shape of my mom, a blackhole of memories.

During our visit yesterday, he looked placid on the outside face calm as water, but frozen eyes that seemed to escape the room before being forced back--

I am learning not everything needs to feel so forced anymore.

There is between us a bridge of who he was and who he is to me, of his thoughts and feelings that I used to think I could read so easily and what he really made of, the essence I recognize in my bones, the moments his eyes sparkle in recognition, in laughter, in curious moments between the blankness.

I delayed this round of grief too long, until it gave me a hangover. Heavy all day, all week really. No therapy scheduled in anticipation, a mistake. I'm not good at sitting myself down to focus like this, especially because it hurts so much in new and unexpected ways. But I read the news that one of my favorite spoken word poets, Andrea Gibson, died today and it was like a throughline to a tenderness I had been ignoring all week. Maybe it's because I was transported back to the freshness of that grief; dawn and darkness, the way time slows and bends and nothing makes sense, as if reality itself is blasphemous. Maybe it's because I have a love I could not imagine losing like that, and it broke my heart for my Dad all over again. I think especially it is because I have a daughter of my own now, and beneath the occasional residual layers of anger and bitterness about how my mom died, I am just really sad that she won't get to meet Astrid. Especially because she wanted grandchildren more than anything. 

It's kind of like I've been in a time warp all week-which is also what I've noticed happens when I don't slow down for my grief (or any big feelings really). And then I started doing the worst kind of math, anniversary equations that don't make any sense, like how old will I be in 2035, at the twenty year mark, or thirty? In 2045, I'll be the same age she was when she died--as if this means something beyond an arbitrary significance. 

So instead, I'm thinking of something I said to my aunt last week, about how my mom's death forged me into the mother, the woman I was meant to be. It was an offhand comment that, upon further reflection, feels more true every day.

I have accomplished a small part so far, which is getting sober. Not small as inconsequential, but more like the top layer of something deep and complex. It’s about practicing being present instead of abandoning myself, my emotions and my experiences.

A difficult truth I am learning and relearning is that I can know it is important to slow down and feel these things I deem too ugly or sharp instead of numbing or distracting from them, but it doesn't mean I won't resist or find other ways of circumventing feeling all this. It's excruciating because it feels so final and empty and real. 

But the truth is, it's not always so empty. There are beautiful little snippets of my mother all around me when I take a breath and slow down enough to notice. Like when my husband whips up an absolutely delicious and accidental kitchen creation, I see her so strongly. Or when he references Star Trek (often), I know she would approve. (It’s a bonus that he’s tall too! That was important to her)   I see her when my daughter crinkles her nose in the same cheesy, mischievous grin and in the eyes and hands of my aunts and uncles. And all of this is so equally, beautifully real that it makes the pain of missing her worth it (most days)--because it's all inextricably tied together.

Taking Your Baby to Your Mother’s Grave

sounds like the worst kind of pilgrimage; 
more bitter than sweet, reminiscent

of that unrelenting day you had to stay

and watch her get lowered down into the ground,

to make it real somehow.

But as you plop your daughter down,

her little body balancing on the burial mound

layers above the bones of her grandmother,

fat fingers tracing the grooves of names and dates,
 (already a student of her own lineage)—

there is the quiet remembering of how peaceful this place is, 
the ache of this space dispersed; 
a cracked open heart, wide as sky and

just as empty.

inspired by Maya Stein's "Arriving"

It's amazing how sharing a few deep beaths with strangers in a room can make me feel like we are sharing a body. I feel disconnected from my body today, but I arrange it, part by part, to match the others in the yoga studio and breathe into what feels stiff, disconnected, numb. It's a practice of shaking out my joints, and then this writing is a practice of shaking out my mental pockets. My brain feels blank today too, the last day of work before vacation. I never really liked the beach before, but I find I am looking forward to it, how the air and the light will look different against the backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean.

We brought my daughter Astrid to Florida when she was five months old, just to dip her ties into this ocean before traveling to California two months later so she could greet the Pacific. Water is so healing this way, and I forgot until I am there, I forget the gratitude of this mighty pull, the mystery of the moon and tides love affair over the ages, constant, strong and a bit secretive. I complain about sand and sunburns too much, and I want to remember how these things feel this time, notice the vitamin D being absorbed into my skin, think about the tiny crystals and microorganisms making up the sand itself. I think it is impossible to live like this all the time, but maybe that is mindfulness-surf and sun and sand; the falling peony petals arranged on a countertop; our cat curled in the corner, missing his mate, a grief we haven't even touched since last week when we had to put her down, all this traveling and busyness, broken air conditioners and making dinners and working and trying to catch up on sleep. I'm ready for the pause, the break in this monotony that somehow also feels frantic, like time is moving too fast for us to slow down and catch our breath.

I am shopping for toddler rain boots and thinking of you, 

Of us, a lifetime ago;

Lady galoshes, you called them, 

pausing to arrange our wet boots neatly on the mat outside your apartment door before we burst into your room. 

Or maybe I am remembering it differently after all these years, 

the way television depicts frenzied lovers consuming each other to get to bed, a frantic mauling, insatiable; 

No, it was more

furtive glances across the room at the party, 

soft, slow glow of recognition, 

a subtle nod towards the bathroom.

Maybe we wanted to believe we were different from other girls 

at other parties, feeding the hungry, drunken male gaze  as a ring of camera phone flashes ensconces them. 

I swear, I thought you were magic from the beginning—

the complex softness of you, 

delicate pink shells of your nails raking through my hair, pulling me closer 

the sweet urgency of our bodies pressed together, molding around each other

your palm soft and slick with sweat in a delicious way, a prelude of what was to come. 

One of us whispered into the others’ mouth “Let’s get out of here”

 and then we were, emerging into the wet night, 

inspired by Morgan Farley's "Why I Stay"

What's real is nothing like I thought, changing every day yet solidifying in slow brilliant meaning accidentally, while you were distracted and not looking.

What's real is my daughter's laugh when she is utterly delighted, starting deep in the belly from those soft strong fluctuating muscles and bursting from her throat, somewhere between a song and a scream.

What's real is the vibrant green of the tomato leaves, billowing out with their beautiful pungent fragrance or the look in my dog's eyes when he is utterly contented, laying belly splayed to the world in a patch of sunshine on the living room floor, filtering through the window.

What's real is the smell of good coffee. When I met my husband, he said to me: "I will never let you drink cheap coffee again" and I believed him; the swirl of cream hitting earthy brown liquid and unfurling its truth, the mingling of two substances, both true at the same time.

What's real is the moment right before my client cries and their face and voice simultaneously break like we've hit on something either really big or sad or scary but it is indeed, the realest.

inspired by Maya Stein's "First We Have to Start With Nothing"

First we start with nothing-isn't that how it always goes? Skin forging together to make something new. We wake nakedly to this new reality. It's like the way people with kids always used to say to me: "You'll understand when you have kids" but it's really not that simple, and we don't (understand I mean, no one does.) It's more like a great mystery, a great unraveling; being this responsible all the time is both tiring and magical.

What's next? A new future, everything I write about lately seems so future focused when all I am trying to do is cultivate presence. Sometimes I worry I will lose my identity in motherhood, like so many others-- but in fact, this is why doing this wild writing is so important. I want to stay sharp, knives in the drawer instead of blunted with inexperience. Maybe we are starting with nothing, every day like a container. This Monday has been a good one so far: yoga, a bit distracted, home, under the blank shade of the umbrella, watching Astrid tool around the yard, the way she does "Knees Up Mother Brown," the drunken and dizzying delight with each twirl. I wish I could sleep like her, heavy and unbothered, and when she awakens, there is something new there. The dream within the dream. She upgrades overnight.

We start with nothing until there is everything embedded with meaning. Because that is what having a kid is to me-a chance at everything, future converging with the present, shaped by the past.

After Mother's Day, my therapist asked me: "What does being Astrid's mom mean to you, right now in this moment?" And I have thought about that question every day since. Most times, I don't have a simple, clean answer but that's kinda the point, isn't it? Lately, my parenting is about transmitting values. I think I told my therapist something about wanting to raise a good person and she said, "How could you not?" But I know that people turn out how they turn out and despite our best efforts, I still worry... I suppose I'll always worry, just about different things.

inspired by Maya Stein's "Daffodils"

While I’m over here feeling tragically misunderstood in my grief,  Grace is waiting in the wings, standing in a golden ring of light.

Her light found me, claims me after Anger unhands me reluctantly. 

I am tired enough to curl into her lap, soul quieted with three deep breaths. 

“Don’t be a jackass”, she says, maternally firmly.  “Pray you will never know the impossible break of burying your child.”

I’m tired of feeling like I don’t belong in this family, I whine. 

And there it is, a crystalline memory of not belonging, of being excluded 

suddenly seen differently than I’d remembered. 

“Time is a liar”, Grace reminds me. 

Because Friday’s child is loving and giving, we must protect her;

how she ushers in laughter’s brief amnesia, 

how her shining fills the room, all big bright eyes and mischievous knowing smiles, 

how she shares a middle name with the lost sister: Morrell, like the mushroom

and now everything is mushrooms and fairies and woodland creatures being cute.

Babies are magic, a wise woman once said to me, 

and I believe it.

My daughter is indeed magic 

because to create new life after so many years of loss and pain and grief is truly audacious (in the best way), 

because every day is something new and exciting; the rapt way she studies a rock, a leaf, a doorknob: turning things over in her hands, eyes full of questioning wonder,

because we need more love, more life in this world (not less!) to keep it going,  despite all the hardship and whatever we are in for today,

because she’s started coming up to us and hugging our legs  with a fierceness and strength that freezes us in place, freezes us in play

 makes us pause the endless elsewhere

The black cat outside our house, whom we call Porch Panther,  has feasted on the garbage, leaving a trail of detritus across our driveway. 

My daughter loves this cat, almost as much as our other two, probably because he is wild but tame enough to sprawl in the sunshine and take a dirt bath. 

When I first saw it, I could have sworn it was the embodiment of Katja,  my lost sister-in-law, lurking and mysterious behind the lavender bushes.  “There is something about a black cat” she used to say. 

She was a collector of cats, buried her beloved Maria in the mountains,  checking the fur and arranging the bones, just so, every time she visited if the ground was not too frozen. Then there was her majestic Maine Coon look alike named Winston,  who she would whistle for endlessly in snowy nights any time she left the door open  (which was all the time.)   And then there was the fat grey tuxedo farm cat Tippy and finally,   the black cat shapeshifter named Nomi who turned out to be a boy.

As much as I want to remember her like my favorite photograph: standing in that open field, the path outstretched before her, hair wild in the wind;  I see her as sedentary, sleeping her days away  with the cats piled on top of her, pinning her in place on this wild, spinning earth,  anchoring her to a body that betrayed her, again and again;  the cats contributing their warm feline fur smell to the bed smell, the smell of unwashed hair, spoiled food, a feast of garbage indeed! when she was feeling ambitious enough to eat. 

ekphrasis: the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device.

I.

After I ended my engagement, 

I sewed the ring right into the canvas alongside lyrics to Lana del Rey’s “Diet Mountain Dew”:

You're no good for me

But baby, I want you, I want

Embodied release

in broken glass and butterfly wings

Every time I hear that song in my daughter’s dance class,  I think this is the true meaning of trauma:

We can’t go over it,

We can’t go under it, 

We have to go through it.

As I pantomime swishing through tall grass and swimming through a big river and squishing through messy, messy, mud

I marvel at the audacity of pretending we are not scared of the worst thing happening, the brazenness with which I stomped through life before this loss leveled me.

When we finally find the bear, the big scary thing

all we want to do is go back home again, where it is safe-- 

Not yet knowing the bravery of staying in the cave,

of looking the wounded animal of grief in the face; 

Today I missed a call from my OBGYN while I was in session with a client. The office was calling with the results of the quadruple blood test I took last week, which screens for certain birth defects like Down syndrome and neural tube defects. With this being my first baby, I was especially eager to learn the results-specifically the sex of my baby. This call happened to be during my last session of the day before the OBGYN office closed and the nurses left for the day.

Now I am notorious for screening my calls, especially while I am at work and have my phone set to Do Not Disturb. The call rang through anyway and I chose not to answer it while I was in session because I consider that hour sacrosanct for the client. Although I know I made the right choice, this triggered some considerable internal anxiety that required an almost Herculean level of effort to refocus.

The nurse left a non-descript message asking for a call back to discuss the results. I’m not sure why she didn’t leave a more detailed message, as I’d indicated she could on the initial medical paperwork or posted it on the patient portal.  I frantically called back after I wrapped up the session, to no avail-the nurse was out for the day.  Then I promptly called my husband and messaged my bestie and some family members to prevent what was starting to feel like a full-on meltdown.

And here, I arrive at perhaps my first lesson in patience with this kid-babies (and the people they grow into for that matter) run on their own timetables. After some time (and some tacos), I felt calm enough to do what I always invite my clients to do-I got curious. Why was I feeling so anxious, and about the sex of the baby specifically? Admittedly other catastrophic thoughts entered my head as well, because the blood test included genetic markers for spina bifida and Down’s syndrome-yet these thoughts were tertiary on the list of what ifs bombarding my brain.

(And at the risk of sounding ableist here, I think every new parent to be hopes for the healthiest baby and doesn’t necessarily consider other alternatives unless presented with them directly. I thought that I had already worked through much of the old stories around my “advanced maternal age” and what that even meant for the possibility of this pregnancy and health of my future child. It seems a lot of old beliefs are being challenged today!)

So I am up late at night writing this because I am concerned about how preoccupied I am with the biological sex of my baby. I live in a culture that is obsessed with binaries, yes, but as a therapist I know that gender itself is just a social construct, an elaborate system of rules and roles, complete with color coded costumes. In my work with transgender clients, including teens and their families, I know how fluid a concept gender truly is. I also know how terrifying that fluidity is for those that don’t understand it, and the painful, humiliating, and violent realities trans folks face because of this ignorance.

I know there is a lot of time and resources being spent on reinforcing the gender binary in this country. I write this on the heels of Kansas passing a bill banning transgender athletes from competing in school sports. Frankly, I think we are focusing on the wrong priorities here when it comes to our children’s mental health at school; this is not new, although I find I am thinking about it differently knowing that one day I will have a school-aged child, and my husband and I will be faced with finding the safest place for them to get an education. (Despite my previous thoughts on the subject, I can see why homeschooling is appealing.)

inspired by Akwaeke Emezi’s “Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir”

Dear Taña, 

I want to talk about anger. 

I have been so angry this week, and I suspect also for much longer under the surface of everything.

In our field, we talk about anger being a “top” emotion, the tip of an iceberg, but it feels different for me; tamped down, a powder keg, a scary thing. My body is still vibrating from all that hot energy.

I want to talk about the feminine tradition of caging our anger, of tamping it down to be caged and quiet and compliant, a burning ember under the surface. I’m tired of swallowing my words, of being told when and how I can communicate like a strategy, of being told not to talk over them. I feel like I am choking. 

I know I am not alone in this. My clients talk about it all the time, in the language of headaches and strained voices and tight shit eating smiles that have become painfully permanent; how anger becomes inaccessible if it doesn’t fit neatly in an obedient role. Sometimes the ones who dare to name it are punished, labeled and cast out of their families like modern day witches who broke the code of keeping everything copacetic. 

My job is to create a space where the anger can breathe and dissipate. For them. 

But my anger is a tightly coiled thing in my chest, and it’s hurting me. There is no space for this to breathe, not yet, not when I’m in the midst of this untangling as you call it. I am figuring out how to starve a hungry narcissist without spontaneously combusting, without cannibalizing myself in the process.

I know too, there is a reason anger is a stage of grief -because that is really what this is, a prolonged grieving:

 I miss the physical presence of my husband. Nothing about our first year has been ordinary, and I didn’t even think I wanted that anyway. I miss the man my father used to be to me, the dad I could tell everything to before the dementia began cannibalizing his brain. I could really use his advice right now. 

And I miss the semblance of control I used to have, a mistaken freedom before everything shut down, before I felt the weight of each decision so keenly. Foolish, I already know; the program taught me all about letting go of control.  We plan and God laughs. 

I also know this is the part where I am about to be broken open again. I remind myself that it’s not the worst thing, I’ve already survived my Saturn return.  I’ve learned so much already in this life and yet I keep forgetting, I keep losing the thread that weaves throughout my experiences. 

In these moments of suffering I ignore the fact that I am an alchemist, that I can transform pain into something meaningful, that attachment is ultimately an illusion but a useful springboard to human connection. 

I often wondered if my dad ever tired of hearing about the one that came before him. Ed Lesch. The name itself sounded like an insult, a bitter curse that slipped off the tongue wherever my mother told stories about him. With the advent of Facebook, she discovered that he had died several years earlier; his profile picture a bloated tanned body of a man submerged in a neon swimming pool, a small child wriggling just out of his grasp. Small squinted eyes or sunglasses, I can’t remember.

Seeing her reaction to this news was like learning a new piece of her history that was so foreign to me. There was a hint of something like sadness, masked by the dissonance of nostalgia. It was in the awkward pauses punctuated by what if’s and could have beens that hung heavy in the air.

This was a time of great loneliness I gathered from her, despite having all the trappings of a successful life, the semblance of a happy relationship without the substance. Apparently, Ed liked to buy and drive fancy sports cars, and he was away in Saudi Arabia often. I had a hard time picturing my mom just waiting around for this guy, which seemed to be often. Or maybe it is how it seemed in the telling, the way you look back at a narrowly avoided disaster yet somehow know you escaped not quite unscathed.