The bed is in the ocean

I have a child, a girlchild, who is somewhat highly strung. (I hear my own mother's voice in the background, saying, wryly, like her mother. )

Granted, I think Tess has been through a lot of life experience that most nine-year-olds probably can't lay claim to, both positive and negative.

I was 16 the first time I ever rode in an airplane; Tess was 9 - as in 9 days. Like pease porridge hot. She was still a tootsie roll, wrapped in a blanket, when we all took a little Cessna on a short hop from Port Townsend, Washington, to Roche Harbor on Suan Juan Island. She has since flown constantly, shuttling around amongst her large extended family.

Tess has all the advantages and disadvantages of a modern American child, born to older parents. She has a ridiculous amount of stuff, being the only grandchild of a large doting Chinese American family on one side, and a large doting Yankee family on the other. She doesn't have to suffer a lot of frustration - she often has more than enough people around to solve most difficulties for her. But I have to say most, not all.



Tess has also been through more life-changing events than many adults I know. She lost her maternal grandmother to ovarian cancer before she was two. She doesn't remember Helen. She lost one of her favorite aunties, my darling sister-out-law, when she was six. To ovarian cancer. That, she was old enough to remember.

Most recently, she lost her other grandmother. To leukemia. You are starting to see the pattern, here, I think. And has suffered through seeing her mother getting treatment for breast cancer.

Keep in mind that everyone Tess had ever seen "get" cancer, before me, had croaked. She has always been an only child - I'm it, as far as she's concerned. There was a long time when "family" meant she and I. Team grundoon, the buck stops here.

She is close to her birth dad, emotionally, but he lives several states away. She also is very close, now, to her stepfather, but initially, we were all making it up as we went along. Kevin leapt into the fray at the beginning of my cancer treatment, and never looked back. We all got through it as best we could, but they truly forged a relationship during a state of emergency.

Additionally, over the course of my cancer treatment, in addition to the new stepfather, we moved, changed schools, dealt with immigration, etc. etc. ad nauseum. This is a ridiculously high level of disruption, and stress for anyone, much less a seven year old.

And the most amazing thing was to see how resilient she was. She surfed stressland like an old hand. No problems in school, tight with a number of close friends, no real visible signs of stress -except one.




Sleep. Or lack thereof.

There was a period of about three months where she almost never slept through the night. She would come in, often sobbing, at any hour, unable to go back to sleep by herself.

It took us several months to parse the problem. She presented it as nightmares - she was scared of something awful happening, and this morphed over time. Fires, monsters, someone coming in to kill her, you name it. But after much discussion, we realized that she was asctually coming in the check on me - the inverted equivalent of a parent worrying about SIDS.

During Sue's treatment for ovarian cancer, no one in Bob's extended family ever discussed that Sue might not get well. Bob's family is very prone to putting the best face on things, and in many cases I have no objection to this.

But look at if from a 6 year old's point of view. She saw her aunt on Sunday, and she was still in treatment. I spoke to Bob on Monday about hospice care, and this was the first time anyone on his side of the family admitted that she was not going to get better. I didn't manage to explain any of this to Tess.

Susan died on Thursday. Tessie's experience? People with cancer can be just fine on Sunday, and then be dead by Friday.

No wonder the poor lamb was coming in to check on me.



Since then, we have talked a GREAT deal about cancer, and death, and what it would mean if I got cancer again. Aaaand, she still has trouble falling asleep at night.



I took a page from Jessica Pierce's book, and she and I have jointly designed a garden, that is the safe place she can go to in her imagination when she starts to think scary thoughts. It has a round house in the center. It has a tree house. It has an elephant with a palanquin that she "designed" for me, and horses, monkeys, actually quite a large menagerie.

And her bed is in the ocean.

I've attempted to teach her any number of relaxation techniques - but falling asleep has that wierd zen effortless effort quality, where you have to focus your thoughts enough to avoid the scary stuff, but no so much that you can't fall asleep. By far the most successful one has been to get her to breathe with the waves.

I tell her to breathe in slowly, and then as she breathes out, to make the shhhhh sound that waves make when they back down the sand. The sound helps, imaging a rocking boat helps, focussing on her breathing helps.



And the bed is in the ocean.

a painter's kitchen: third gear in reverse

a painter's kitchen: third gear in reverse

Dear Title 9 Sports,

I am a 43 year old woman/triathlete/writer and I'm just coming back to training after breast cancer treatment. I'm re-starting my training for the Wildflower triathlon and possibly the Mt. Shasta climb for the cure...and I NEED HELP. I need a jogbra that will hold a prosthetic comfortably (emphasis on comfortably), and a swimsuit that I can actually SWIM in. (Please do not tell me about Land's End. Yes, they make the only reasonably priced mastectomy suits in the US, but I do not want a granny suit for a triathlon, thank you very much anyhow.)

The modifications for a mastectomy suit top and bra are relatively simple and cheap, and I'm desperate. If you don't have one, will you please make them? I will glady volunteer to be your guinea pig/poster girl/bikini model/janitor for post-breast cancer female athletes. I swear if you do it there will be an audience for the products. One in seven women. One in four new cases of breast cancer are women 30-40 years old. We are everywhere, more than you know. Even one swimsuit top and one jogbra, I promise.

Thank you so much. Eagerly awaiting your response,

Chris

An early promotion to crone

Dear you,

Why is it so difficult to pick up writing when we've been away from it for a while? There are times that words seem to flow out endlessly, that I can't find enough hours in the day to put pen to paper (or less romantically, fingers to keyboard). And then there are days, weeks, months, when the spring dries up, and when confronted with that endless blank white paper, I run screaming. I knit, I draw, I cook, I arrange the sliced tomatoes beautifully on the plate, fresh basil, green olive oil and brown vinegar, but I have no words.

In Something in Season, Brendon talks about the fallow time for writing - perhaps we all need a winter, for the overtaxed soil of our wordminds to just absorb the world around us, but not attempt to put anything out. People ask me why Jim's salad is so good - my answer is often that his farm has been organic for over 30 years. The soil is happy, which I realize is ridiculous anthropomorphism. But places always have a tangible feeling to me - happy, dry, ancient, fierce. One of the reasons I love walking around on the Laurentian shield - this ancient piece of rock, even the trees seem young when compared to the bare rock bones of the earth where they emerge.

I know, I know, I'm hopping all over the place. One of the hazards of not writing for a while, I have too many loose and feathery ideas floating around in my head, and they are all interconnected, but I have trouble sticking with one theme.

Have you noticed that even though it's still summer, it's a new season? Remember, my year has five - summer is ending, harvest season has begun. That sneaky tang in the air, the promise of crisp apples and cooler nights.

So how am I going to connect a fallow wordmind, overtaxed soil, and the granite underneath the great lakes? I'm probably not - I know you will fill in the interstices.

It's odd being a cancer survivor. There was a time that I literally felt as though I was most of the way on the other side of the veil. I know it sounds odd, but there were times that I felt closer to dead than alive.

There was a day I remember, in the middle of chemotherapy. We were visiting friends up in the Capay Valley, enjoying their new pool. Wertperch and the imp were cavorting in the pool... I was looking out from the porch. I couldn't have been more than 100 feet away. But it was as though there was a scrim in between us. I stood there, unable to walk the distance to the pool, and I wondered to myself if I would ever get to be alive again, like they were.

This is the walking death of cancer treatment. The euphemism is "quality of life", but you know what I mean. The treatment kills you part of the way, just hopefully not all of the way.

It's only within the last few months that I realize that I have come back to the living. I was down visiting a very old friend, Therese. (Our Tess is named for her.) Well, visiting might not be the right word. She was at the beginning of an extremely hard labor, which eventually produced the fabulous Eigel Marcus, but that's another story.

Her house is perched on a steep hillside in Berkeley, and cell phones don't like it. I had walked upstairs and outside to give wertperch an update, and it was a gorgeous Berkeley day - it had been kiln hot in Davis, but Berkeley has perfect summers - seventy, clear, breezy. I leaned back and closed my eyes, soaking in the sun and the wind fingers caressing my face and arms. After I was done on the phone, I just sat there, pure lizard on a rock pleasure. And I realized, my friend, that this was the first time I had just felt good to be in my body in as long as I can remember.

This might sound small or trivial - it is not. Cancer is a breeze - it's the treatment that feels like hell. I had staggered along for long with side effects, and side effects of the side effects, that it was a real revelation to just feel…normal. I had gotten used to things like, oh, yes, you have fibrosis in your shoulder from the radiation, and did you know that you are going to be more prone to carpal tunnel in your right wrist, because of lymphedema? No, and I wish someone had told me this before I began a marathon drafting session that made my hand swell up like a balloon.

The difference between health and not-health ...'ease and dis-ease', if you will... is fairly subjective. I'm starting to whomp this excuse for a body back into shape - swimming and tromping around barefoot in the woods helps.

But I also understand the urge to leave the body behind that must come to everyone at a certain point during this sort of treatment. Robertson Davies refers to the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. At some point it's not only that, but the foul rag and bone shop that makes up a body, that is this organic miasma that still takes breath and weeps and loves, and that I longed to leave behind. It's burned and scarred and sliced to pieces, yes, I'll confess, I am a witch, please drown me!

On the other hand, and this is where I was convolutedly leading to, I've had this early promotion to crone. Chemotherapy mostly put paid to menses, and tamoxifen has shorted it out the rest of the way. So I get to be a crone, at 43.

Granted, you know that any woman worth her salt is all three: mother, maiden and crone, but there are certain benefits to cronedom that mothers don't seem to get to share. Name me a female archetype that gets to have a trickster side. Crones are much more likely to have a Coyote aspect than moms. Young girls can have a trickster element (Pippi Longstocking, say), but not "matrons" (and isn't THAT an awful word?). I get to be wise and scary and eccentric and fierce and witchy instead of only nurturing and charming and mothery. Kevin has always been perfectly aware of my witchy side, but it seems to be becoming more visible. I don't remember 10 years ago wanting to be slightly scary - now I understand where that scary old lady thing comes from. It's FUN to be the witch next door.

Calm after the storm

From a friend:
I thought you looked well. I know you were troubled by a cough and the blankety blank lymph stuff but you seem to have a sort of peacefulness about you.

Dear you,

You're right. In most ways life seems really easy right now. Wertperch and the imp and I have gotten through the medical mess, and we are in a little calm spot. We moved this fall. The new house feels like a really good fit, and also a haven - we find that we don't want to leave on weekends, we just want to loll around and sit by the fireplace.

As much as I dislike that new-agey thing about cancer being a "growthful experience" (ACK! HAIRBALL!) it did give me a different perspective. (And isn't "growthful" a wonderfully awful word?) I think there's certain ways that I've let go of control - after being dragged arms first into the medical version of a brush shredder, I got to see how little control I really have...so lots of things now just make me shrug and laugh, instead of fighting them. There are still small botherments (the lymph stuff, ongoing kerfluffles with the imp's dad, who is a wee bit narcissistic) but they do seem pretty small. Solveable.

I have to give wertperch a lot of credit, too. In some ways I think being the support person for someone with cancer is harder than being the patient - all I had to do was cope, and I managed to cope with grace most of the time, and cope pretty lousily once in a while. He and the imp had to take care of me, and worry about losing me, which I think is probably worse than being sick, AND forge their own relationship in the midst of all of it. Plus being both a caregiver AND a sweetheart at the same time is hard - there are times I think his compassion got pretty burned out, and with reason. Nobody loves chronic...But now that our stress numbers are not off the charts, we both get to enjoy the calm after the storm.

At one point we added up our numbers for one of those things that's supposed to measure your stress - so many points for divorce, illness, death in the family, etc. - over 150 and it can take a toll, over 300 and it can cause physical illness, over 450 and watch out! you are likely to get in a car wreck or some such...and we were both over 600 points for that year. Cancer, moving, job changes, immigration, death in the family, ill parents...you name it, we had it. AND there were stressors that weren't on the list - like the convolutions of going through the immigration process. I'm amazed our heads didn't explode.

We're also both meditating, in this weird little Davis Zen center, and that helps me to slow down to a more normal tempo. I always used to be going 90 miles an hour, rushing through everything. Now I manage to be a little more present for all the pleasant things as they go by. Now is really all we have, in the long run - better enjoy all of it.

Thank you for letting me know, it's fun to know that some of the change I've been feeling is noticeable. Grace is both an external and an internal thing. I just read that the Greek word for grace is charis - only one letter away from my name. Fancy that.

water painting

Paint me a picture
of muddy ecru, cinnamon
of streets awash in mud
Pointillist sepia
glints of color
reflected from umbrellas and raincoats
flashes of christmas red and green

Of a warm pub
In early afternoon
Smoke and beer and wet wool
smells
wrinkling your nose
but it is the best place to warm
and scribble notes of the afternoon
in nottingham.


I'll paint you a picture
of crystal clear washed air
and unreasonable movember sunshine
brightness that makes squints
Sweet gums every color from liquid green
through gold and orange magenta purple
the cancan girl of trees.

Despite the shardlike brilliance
here
the weather I feel is your smoky
English cold and drip



With you gone
I lose my words.
I cannot write
or barely
The writing turns primitive
A
word
here

a word
there

But my river of words
dries up to mere splashes
on the page

Small, disconnected
discolored
tea colored pools
stagnant

No clear laughing
chattering, giggling stream.

How much of that creative
river we share
becomes inaccessible
when you're not here.

On parents, trust, guns and doublethink

I have been accused, in my time, of being overly romantic. Strangely enough, I have also been accused of being overly pragmatic. Even stranger, Both are true.

Trust

National Public Radio recently ran a story on Morning Edition about a father who installed a black box GPS in his teenage daughter's car. After listening to the story, I found myself ranting, out loud, to the father as I finished my commute to work.

Mark Pawlick, the father in the story, bought a black box that would track his daughter's location and speed.

"So, Mark Pawlick bought what's called a black box and hid it in Jessica's car. By using global positioning system technology to fix its location every second or so, the device is essentially an electronic tattletale. It automatically e-mails or calls Pawlick every time Jessica drives too fast, or goes somewhere she isn't supposed to."

Interestingly, he failed to inform his daughter that he'd installed the black box in her car.

Later on in the story, the dad is quoted as saying "She violated our trust and we didn't violate hers. Trust is earned, not given out."



I beg your pardon. but I terribly sorry to inform you that you are full of shit. How on earth is installing a spy device NOT violating her trust? Excuse me, but I think your daughter is doing a fine job imitating the behavior that has been modeled for her; you do sneaky things behind her back, she does sneaky things behind yours. Like father, like daughter! I can give you a damned good idea of where she learned it from, too!

Parents

You'll probably be able to tell from the last paragraph that this article enraged me. What on earth was this man thinking? "Once she's an adult, she'll thank us for this. It's my job to keep her safe." Well no, frankly, it isn't. If she's already 16, you should have already taught her to keep herself safe. It's very clear that my idea of my role as a parent vastly differs from yours.

My role as a parent, in my view, is to provide Tess with exactly those two things I mentioned in the first paragraph. I want her to have both a romantic view of the world, along with a pragmatic view of the world. I want her to both hold high ideals for what the world can be - a place of trust, honor, intelligence and caring, where what she does and the choices she makes make a difference. I also want her to be pragmatic - to see the world as it IS. That it is in addition to all of the above, a place with risks, with contradictions, with dangers, and stupidity. She is reponsible for learning to keep herself safe. Now, this might be doublethink, but I think it's a practical and useful kind of doublethink.

As Laurel puts it so well - "I have spoken with several people
about the doublethink necessary for sanity in working
for a better world. The world, the suffering, has far too
much inertia for us to slow it no matter how hard we hurl our tiny bodies
at it. We have to know that in order to not give up upon continued failure.
But in order to continue, we also have to believe that we could be the one
to make a change. Despite the massive physics of it, the statistical surety
that I and you are absolutely unlikely to be unusual in any way, strange
things still happen."

Guns

This is why I come down exactly the opposite of where you might expect my groovy liberal self to land: let your children play with toy guns, and teach your children (if you are raising them in America) how to use a gun safely. I'm about as far from a gun nut as you can get - Quaker pacifism is about where I fall on the violence scale. I also wouldn't have one in my house. I have, however, used both a handgun and a rifle at a shooting range, and plan to have Tess do the same thing when she's a teenager.

The romantic view - wouldn't it be great to live in a world where there was no guns, or at least no gun violence? Especially not teenagers taking machine guns to their 14 year old classmates. And our innocent youth need to be protected from them! Well, yes. But the pragmatic view? People in the United States have guns, and sooner or later your child, no matter how groovy and TV free and non-violent your home is, will be exposed to them in some form. If he or she has no concept of the risks, isn't that far MORE dangerous than if they have a basic understanding of how the thing works?

This was brought home to me once while housesitting, in the hunt for a towel in a strange house. An enormous handgun fell off the shelf above my head and landed at my feet. I had never in my life handled a firearm. Was it safe to pick up? Had landing on the floor primed the thing somehow, and as soon as I touched it was I going to shoot myself in the foot?

But the caveat - it's very important for the doublethink to be clear - these are our ideals - we strive to act with integrity, honesty, authenticity. AND. In the real world, not everyone is like this. And you need to understand both of these, conceptually, to be safe in this modern world. As Lazarus would have it, trust your fellow man, but always cut the cards.

Doublethink or
Now HOW are you planning to string these all together?

The dangerous kind of doublethink that seems to be popular in our culture right now is demonstrated on a small scale by Mark the Nitwit - I can be dishonest to my daughter, and that's perfectly acceptable, but be shocked and angry when she's dishonest with me.

One a larger scale, there's our the political arena which lately has overshot the burlesque straight into theatre of the absurd.

What kind of doublethink does it take to be Ted Haggard, a preacher expounding against gay marriage and for family values, while simultaneously paying someone for gay sex, not to mention a little methamphetamine on the side? This might come as a surprise to you, but last time I checked, buggery and meth were not on the Republican list of "family values".

So having talked myself almost full circle, the doublethink of being a parent and the doublethink of our current politicos have this difference - I know the difference between the vision, the ideal of the world as we imagine it, and as we work towards - and the pragmatic reality of keeping yourself safe. George "when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace" Dubya? I'm not so sure.

Y'all are going to have to model trust to gain trust. You are going to have to model peace to get peace. Model terrorism, or a reasonable facimile thereof, and what are you likely to get?