The Broken Page

Prayed to the Lord for a new beginning, and here I am, broken at the blank page, coffee in hand, trying not to be overcome by nervous mom anxiety. Today my heart kid wouldn’t eat breakfast, wouldn’t drink much, woke up trembling and coughing and with a diaper that wasn’t wet at all. He has a heart cath scheduled for Tuesday (today is Friday) and I don’t know if he’ll be able to go under anesthesia with this cough. He wanted to go to school so badly, but I hated to send him with an almost empty-stomach, with my nervous fretting energy flitting around the little lightbulb of his existence. We got our first snow of the winter, finally, last night and the school wants to let the kids outside, even though it’s only about 20 degrees out right now. I plan on swooping in shortly before release at 11:30, always the earliest mom there, to rescue my son from imminent dehydration/hypothermia/neglect. And to give him his next dose of medications, which I push back so he can go to preschool. But this is all my nervousness—he loves preschool, and they take great care of him. Keeping him home to mope about and stare longingly outside didn’t feel right, either. So I released him like a canary from cupped hands, and he raced into school with a “goodbye Mom!” and didn’t notice at all when I came back in with his snowpants and boots. This makes me happy—to let him be where he wants to be. I just hope he’s ok—that his strange and “off” behavior is nothing more than a touch of a cold and maybe, like me, being woken from 1:30-3:30 am by snowplows.

Life is not tied up in neat packages. Unfinished novels show us that—Hemingway died and left over 300 unpolished, unfinished, or otherwise unpublished works behind. Yet that doesn’t stop us from reading them, from imagining our own endings, or engaging in a self-satisfying flight of fancy, "WWHD?” “What Would Hemingway Do?:” imaging the old man had something up his sleeve after all. But reading a published, unfinished novel reminds me that tying up all the ends is merely a convention of the genre, like a sitcom or a blog post—an “all’s well that ends well” or a sense of an anecdote, a false sense that it has happened, and we can now stand back objectively and laugh about it a little—“see how cool I am? I can see the irony in my own situation.” The end. But no, problems aren’t always resolvable, especially not to an author’s or mine or your satisfaction. Maybe we don’t want resolution to a story yet, and resent having to tack on an ending to an otherwise unfolding story. And that is how I feel about my journey right now. I want to write about being a heart mom, but to do so with any authority seems to imply I have something final to say about the topic, and just when I think I’ve found my footing, I have more summits to climb after all.

Summer Storm

(for Shawn)

You came home in the night with the approaching storm
Each seismic wave of thunder a giant's pace
I awoke from my spell with your kiss on my cheek
But my release was in mouth-to-mouth resuscitation
After the sea had tossed me, delirious, to a solitary shipwreck.

Portal

I wandered from the hearth of the living and you followed
A backward glance towards the warm den of family and friends
I was drawn into the street by Patrick and the red wolf
You padded behind me in white socks and I knew you were watching

Patrick was sitting on the curb, thinking, but he vanished when we reached him
The wolf circled us and I laughed, saying it was only a dog after all
Impossible, since there aren't red wolves in WI...just grey
That's what I told you, but we turned and fled

Straight into an underworld, or an overworld
A tower of staircases, we couldn't tell if we running up and down
And you in your white crew socks
You were the only one who followed me there.

My Friend of Cautious Amusement

I dreamt of a mind meld but it was terrifying A stern cold voice and my "how did you get in here?" It held me inside the bubble as I tore against your presence My friend of cautious amusement, you don't know how I laugh now You've never seen me smile so wide, nor so happy How happy I am now, we never dared to imagine You might return but you won't know me You're not following what I'm trying to tell you I forget you don't see what I see You're not acknowledging what remains after the world breaks a heart If you reject the way life has turned out, you'll reject the inseperable self Why don't you accept my joys and sorrows Standing over this wishing well, trying to see our reflections I wonder if I'll ever again say what I used to say about you, and believe And I'm lowering, lowering this bucket into my heart I can't even say if it'll come up empty or brimming.

Stalemate Showdown

A traffic jam of anxieties converges in my mind
each vehicle holding a tiny dictator-occupant shaking a fist,
honking, yelling, cursing in pip-squeak sounds
It's rush hour in my life again.

A railroad yard crowded with beached steel on wheels,
Heavy boxcars squealed to a stubborn halt and
their morose bullying bulk demands my action.
Called to be the magic conducter,
flipping switches, giving clearance
When I'd rather
let their dead weights explode into each other and burn

When I can't escape the logjam,
When I can't shout over them
When they refuse to be ignored
when they refuse to disperse
with their heavy freights
When running away just means
they'll catch up again,
I can't take any prisoners
I have to banish them all
One way or another
I have to deal with each one
and send them on their way
One by one.

An Early Lesson in Greed

I learned a lot of valuable lessons from my Dad early on. Like, the reward of being loyal to a particular team, no matter how abysmal their performance year after year: that loyalty is its own reward. That it's ok for a man to cry. That it's ok to be imperfect, as long as you're genuinely you. Like not compromising your beliefs. But one of my Dad's lessons was largely unspoken, and came to inform an unfolding perspective over many years. It is a discussion he probably doesn't even remember. This weighs heavily on my mind right now, when suddenly everything in Wisconsin seems for sale and "open for business," including public services, benefits, and worker's rights.

My parents had gotten a subscription to National Geographic for donating to some cause or other. Being interested in other places and cultures for as long as I can remember, I would thumb through every issue and study the pictures.

One month, there was a photoessay on famine in Ethiopia. I was 5 or 6. I stared at the picture of an emaciated mother holding a skeletal baby, and the light seemed extinguished in their eyes. I wondered why they were starving. Was there not enough food in the world? Did they live in a place so isolated that food couldn't get to them? Why did people have children if they were going to starve? These were the thoughts that went through my 6-year old mind.

I brought the magazine to my Dad and asked him why there wasn't enough food in the world to feed this lady and her baby. My Dad looked at the picture, and I could tell he felt angry about it.

"Well, you see, there is enough food in the world to feed everyone," he said.
"But Dad, if there's enough food, why are they starving? Can't anyone get them the food?" I asked.
"Well, let me put it this way: we could feed everyone in the world if we really wanted to," he replied.
"But Dad, I do want to!" I exclaimed in horror. "What do you mean, if only we wanted to?! Why should they starve if there is enough food??"
"Because of greed," he said. "Because there are greedy people in the world."

I didn't know what to say to that. And he seemed to have nothing more to say. So I walked away, and for days, my child's mind was obsessed with images of fat pashas gorging themselves with delicacies, and sticking their fingers down their throats so they could throw up only to stuff more food in their faces. I imagined storehouse after storehouse of grain horded by warlords with guns. Although these images subsided over the course of about a week, the seed was planted for me to have an awareness of the enormous structure of global economy, trade, and inequality in the world. What I couldn't grasp at the time, what my Dad could not explain to a child as young as I was (and maybe couldn't even explain to himself at the time), was that there were very few particular individuals gorging themselves on actual rare and expensive delights, but a huge, complicated picture of interconnected political, economic, and social forces of power and greed at work in the world on all levels--local, national, international.

My Dad taught me to see and try to understand the big picture, and about the problem of insidious and destructive greed. To try to grasp things that might defy simple explanation. To try to put a picture, instead of a face, to a concept. To realize that relatively small-scale injustices can add up to far-reaching catastrophe. To remember that greed cannot only be attributed to "warlords with guns," but to an entire global order. That the famine, or any situation, was not an isolated event with a quick and easy fix, but an entire process of historical events and factors. And that therefore, quick fixes are rarely the answer to enormous structural problems of greed, corruption, mismanagement, and inequality.

I can recall the picture of the mother and baby, and their eyes. I still wonder what happened to them. I still wonder if the light seemed extinguised because they were so hungry, or because they knew there were some who wanted to help, and others who wouldn't help.

Falling under

Sometimes it's too cold
I drive to end of the road
And I walk to the end of the land
Where the land falls under the water

Brilliant blue ice and eyes
when he appears and I ask,
"What brings you here?"

Aren't you afraid that you've run into a strange man out here?
I never fear my own people.
Are you the queen of this land, then?
Why, yes. And as queen, I know what you're seeking. I can take you to it. As long as you agree to do no harm.

Come on, let me show you these parts.
So I showed him where the deer sleep and the birds wait out the winter
I showed him how they survived and when they would go to the stream
Until he'd forgotten what he was looking for, and his intentions

As his lips turned blue to match the ice and eyes
He realized he felt the fear inside no longer
The land and water would keep him
We had time to walk in the land that falls under the water
And I showed him those parts too
And there I left him, knowing he could find his way home.