Weekend Recap

It was a whirlwind of a weekend. Oliver celebrated his 18th birthday. I made a cheesecake, as per his request. It called for 3 1/2 pounds of cream cheese, 5 eggs, 2 cups of sugar and 8 ounces of sour cream. He also asked for Chick fil A for dinner. I know we're not supposed to frequent the food of a company that discriminates against homosexuals, but we sinned.

Child number two arrived home from college for the summer. The house was quite literally transformed in a matter of minutes into the style that we (Oliver, Sophie and I) had forgotten about which one could call laissez faire or perhaps une porcherie. Will we ever see underneath that stuff on his bed? Never mind, as we're glad to have him home.

The almighty Blue Shield of California gave us their "approval" that Sophie receive her IVIG treatments, so she spent much of the days hooked up to an IV. We are coming up for air as well with Saint Mirtha out with a shoulder injury and a new helper, Maria, on board. Maria appears to be headed for sainthood as well -- she's even painted Sophie's fingers and toes in the most beautiful pink. I am grateful for these caregivers. I am beyond grateful, to tell you the truth. They save me.

I woke on Mother's Day in a kind of funk, I guess. Other than honoring my own mother on the special day, I think it's sort of a fake holiday -- well, not sort of -- and I struggle with all the expectations and concomitant resentments every year no matter how much I set my mind against it. Both boys slept in to nearly noon, but they gave me sweet and thoughtful gifts, and Carl went out and bought me a croissant. My sister sent me a lovely card with the most beautiful note in it. I cried, which I guess is appropriate for a weeping willow. Here's the video I made of it:

I also went on a short but steep hike in the Hollywood hills this afternoon with Carl and Oliver. The mustard is just turning from yellow to yellow-green, and the hills are still green from the spring rains, the city skyline lay off in a light hazy distance, Painted Ladies fluttered on every bush and hawks soared above us in the blue sky. I needed to get out and move my body in some way other than up and down the hallway and lifting Sophie, but about halfway up the peak, I started to feel dizzy from the sun and the exertion and my chronic inability to drink enough water, so we walked back down. I need to get back to doing more exercise that is unrelated to caregiving -- I am on the proverbial edge, both mentally and physically, I think. Lord knows why I've remained so healthy for so long despite the stress of it all, but I've got to stop taking it all for granted. With Saint Mirtha down, I am struck by what might transpire should I go down, and it ain't pretty, if I do say so myself.

I'm not going to talk about all the articles I read about the southern states passing these laws against women's right to have abortions, to govern their bodies, to ensure their reproductive freedom.

I'm not going to talk about it.

I'm not going to talk about it.





These people hate women.








Before I forget, I thought I'd post a hilarious exchange I had with one of my closest friends via text. She's in gray and I'm in blue. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. For clarification, Nonfiction is a new French movie, and the Arclight is a movie theater in my neighborhood.

Humor is everything to me on most days, so if you want to know what "you can do" or what "you can say," tell me something funny. And for god's sake, MEN, step up and help us to fight back with this anti-women, anti-choice clusterf*^kery.

Carried by Great Winds

There I am with what I called 2/3rds of the circus that I run. The work of my heart. Mother's Day came and went. The College Boy is home for the summer. The Brothers are back at it. Sophie had a rough weekend but is better today. I'm going through loads of paperwork and hustling for freelance jobs. I'm baking cakes. I'm answering calls and emails and appeals for help regarding medical cannabis. I'm working on an exciting caregiver project that I'll tell ya'll about soon. I'm reading novels and excited to start watching the Patrick Melrose mini-series. I read those brutal and beautiful books years ago and so look forward to seeing Benedict Cumberbatch playing the lead.

Here's a poem that my friend Noan sent me the day before Mother's Day. It's by Alison Luterman, and I think it's perfect:

Invisible Work

Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces fro dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.There is no other art. 

Allison Luterman



A long time ago one of my relatives, from whom I am now estranged, wrote a caustic comment on this blog, imploring me to get my head out of my ass and quit reciting poetry. Something like that. It stung then because there was a bit of truth in my head being up my ass. I felt a bit of the old shame and embarrassment at being bookish, having my head in the clouds, being book smart as opposed to street smart, pretentious instead of easy-going. 

Whatevs, as they say. The thing about being more than half a century old combined with living in the Trump era, is that you can shed all that shame and run for the hills with your poetry, bringing anyone willing along with you.

What else? I went to see an incredible interpretive theater thing called the theater is a blank page by Ann Hamilton and Siti Company at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus this past Saturday. I might as well have been raptured up right there, as it was a wild interactive theater performance of Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, hands-down probably my favorite novel ever.* I don't even know how to describe the experience that my friend Tanya, Chris and I had attending this show, but it was restorative and mesmerizing, and we all left feeling -- again -- like we'd been raptured into a writer/reader/lover of words heaven. Check it out if it comes to your town. Here's a video that I found on the internets of part of the performance in another city:




Also, if you're not one of the more than 115 MILLION people who've already watched Childish Gambino's incredible performance piece This is America, you should. I've said it before, but in these messed-up, clusterfuckery times, art and corporeal politics can save us.













* My Top Ten Favorite Novels

1. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
2. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
4. Middlemarch by George Eliot
5. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
6. Beloved by Toni Morrison
7. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
8. Love in the Name of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. Machine Dreams by Jayne Ann Phillips
10. Possession by A.S. Byatt

Who am I kidding? I didn't even list the children's books that should rank up there. It's virtually impossible for me to narrow down my favorite novels to ten, but those are the ones that come immediately to mind. What are yours, Reader?

Twenty Beads

The first thing I did this morning was open the long, yellow envelope with the word MOM scrawled across it. Sophie brought it home from school on Friday afternoon, along with a tomato plant in a green ceramic pot. The envelope held a beaded bracelet, purple, pink and pearly plastic strung on elastic. I slipped it over my hand and raised my arm until it stopped on that generous part of my arm above the elbow. When I lowered my arm, the bracelet fell to the floor, so I picked it up and put it in the dish on my dresser that holds trinkets, a safety pin, a Buddha coin, and earring whose pair is lost. A lost pair. Pare me down.

Even in year twenty, these plastic beads strung on elastic, sprung.

Sophie's eyes implore me. Beseech, plead, do something. I'm not sure if I'm projecting the implore, the beseech, the plea. Do something. She and I are knit, intertwined, beads on a string, strung.

Is imagination greater than identity?

Happy Birthday Oliver!

It's always the best Mother's Day when your last baby's birthday falls on the same day. It seems like yesterday that I held my baby in my arms, and now he's fourteen years old. Happy birthday, Oliver. I love you so.

Remembering When I Was a Bird

It is the province of mothers to preserve the myth that we are unburdened with our own problems. Placed in a circle of immunity, we carry only the crises of those we love. We mask our needs as the needs of others. If ever there was a story without a shadow, it would be this: that we as women exist in direct sunlight only.

When women were birds, we knew otherwise. We knew our greatest freedom was in taking flight at night, when we could steal the heavenly darkness for ourselves, navigating through the intelligence of stars and the constellations of our own making in the delight and terror of our uncertainty.

from Terry Tempest Williams' When Women Were Birds, Fifty-four Variations on Voice 

 

Boy Question That Beggars Belief*

(after accompanying me to a store where I bought my own mother a Mother's Day gift)

Wait! Does this mean I'll be having to buy you a gift for Mother's Day until I'm 50 years old?












*You really can't use an expression like beggars belief too often, but the incredulity I felt called for it, especially when The Boy clarified by stating how expensive it would be over all those years. Call me heroic, because he's very much alive

Self-portrait

curious window display on La Brea, near my house

I feel a strange lethargy this preternaturally sunny, dry and windy day. Perhaps it's the two hours I spent lying on Sophie's bed watching Rosemary's Baby, one leg thrown over Sophie to keep her from trying to get off the bed and hurt herself. She is going through the difficult part of the wean process -- withdrawal seizing, agitated and clearly uncomfortable. Perhaps it wasn't such a good choice of movies to watch on Mother's Day, except those clothes! the misogyny! the spectacle of Mia Farrow's infantilism! what we know about Roman Polanski and Woody Allen! the Dakota! Ruth Gordon! Perhaps it's the Sunday blues. Perhaps it's the desire to be somewhere else sometime other -- you know the feeling that belies all the meditation, the Buddhist study, the admonition to be here now. That's it.

Sweetness

There's my very glamorous mother and me, circa 1965. Why were many of our mothers so much more glamorous than us?

Happy Mother's Day to you if you're a mother, if you wish you were a mother, if you're grateful for your mother and if you wish your mother had never been born, and in that case, the Universe is your mother and happy, happy to it, too.

I've had a lovely Mother's Day morning, gifted with a wishing bracelet from Oliver that he tied on my wrist. Evidently, my silent wish will come true when it wears off. I'm already so excited by that wish fulfillment that I can't stand it! Oliver also wrote me the sweetest of letters. Here's what it said:

Dear Mom,

I love to the bottom of my heart or something like that, but that's not the point. The point is you are awesome and I love. I got you this bracelet so wishes can come true. Happy Mother's Day!

P.S. I wouldn't trade a mom like you for anything!

Henry gave me this stunning watercolor of Yosemite that he made himself! He knows that Yosemite is probably my favorite place on earth. Who knew that glamorous boy could also paint?

Sophie came home from school on Friday with a little package that I opened today. It was a gorgeous beaded necklace, and when I exclaimed over it and thanked her, she smiled! I know she liked it, however little or much she contributed to its making. Here, let me go out into the backyard, crouch down in all my glamour and show you what it looks like:











Never mind:

I also made myself bacon, ate four slices with one egg and two slices of toast, one with butter and the other with jam. It was a fine morning that catered both to my capitulation to the commercial aspects of the holiday and general f*^kyouery to the inevitable disappointment in its very unrealistic expectations. That might have been one of the most poorly written sentences in the English language, but you get my drift. I think.

And now, on the sweetest note, here's a photo from last night of Oliver (the best Mother's Day present one could possibly receive, thirteen years ago!) blowing out the candles of his Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake with pigs in the trough:

It's Enough

Let's be honest. I dreaded writing a post for Mother's Day. I knew things were going to be -- interesting -- when I came home from an all-day writing workshop yesterday afternoon and had to reassure Oliver that it was all right if he had forgotten to take the money Dad had given him and walk around the corner to our neighborhood store to buy me a present. A few hours later, Henry came home from his last baseball game, angry and upset that he had only played two innings and that they had lost the game and baseball was over and he sucked as a player and I don't want to talk about it anymore, Mom. An hour or so after that, The Husband came home and I overheard some tight whispering and then Oliver stormed down the hall to his room.

Reader, why the hell is there this silly day that we call Mother's Day? Why, why, why are we set up, year after year to engage in this charade of celebration? As much as I love and am grateful for my mother, I can't remember a single Mother's Day as a child. Did we do enough? Did Dad buy appropriate gifts for her? Was she happy? Did she feel taken for granted? Sigh.

I woke up this morning to texts from both of my sisters, Melissa and Jennifer, whom I rarely write about or mention on the blog. They are both terrific mothers, and we are probably better friends now, at the ages of 39, 47 and 49 than we ever were as children. We share the same brutal sense of humor and realized that even now at our advanced ages, we are hard put to appreciate enough our own mother and feel appreciated enough by our own children. We won't even talk about The Husbands. What the hey?

I woke up this morning to no presents, but The Husband made me my favorite breakfast and gave me perfectly gorgeous flowers. It's enough. It's enough. It's enough.

Happy Mother's Day to the rest of you. Now let's begin again tomorrow, my favorite day of the week.

Eggs Benedict and a Snippet of a Poem

For me, that's what makes for a perfect Mother's Day -- in my robe, in my kitchen, with a glass of orange juice and Prosecco. And a snippet of a poem --

Happy Mother's Day from me to you.

It's like watching your mother sleep,

minutes after you have been conceived.

and her closed eyes say it's all right

to wake alone...

-- from Harbor Lights by Mark Doty

Postcards from Paradise

Me, my mother and my sister Melissa (sister Jennifer wasn't born!)
Florida, 1966 

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

See other Postcards from Paradise at rebecca's. 

There'll probably be at least a million of these posted, but

when I first read this poem in The New Yorker, I loved it completely.

Here you go, and

Happy Mother's Day!

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.


--Billy Collins

Listen to him read it here.

The Day Before Mother's Day

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosum of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

-- Julia Ward Howe's original Mother's Day Proclamation - 1870