Blueberries

“I HATE being the Blueberries!” John whined from the back seat.  It’s late, and we are on the way back from Vacation Church School.  The car is dark, and the four of us — our little pack — are gathered and tired.

VCS is running all week in the evening, and I’m one of the shepherds for John’s group.  In the past we’ve been given cool names, like the Lions or the Donkeys.  Lions can ROAR!  But this year we were given colors. So today we decided the groups needed names.  Adam and Rosie’s group, the Red Group, became the Red Wigglers.  Very cool for a bunch of four and five-year-olds.  Adam made that decision, which was probably the way to go. But I let our group create the ideas and vote on a name.  Big mistake (in retrospect) for a group where there are lots more girls than boys.

The name the Blueberries beat the Blue Saints 8 to 7.  That included kids and shepherds.  So Blueberries it is.  Back to our trip home….

“I just can’t STAND that name.  Can’t we change it?  The blue peeps?  The blue anything but Blueberries!”

“I can see why you feel that way. That’s not such a great name,” I say to John.  Turning to Adam beside me in the front seat I explain, “Problem is there are only three boys.  Then there are ten girls in our group, so it was a tough situation.”

“Yeah.  Girls! Ugh. That’s the problem.  Mom, can’t we change it?”

“John, I’m sorry.  I can’t change it.  But I see the problem.  I just won’t use a name, ok?  I’ll just say, ‘Let’s go guys….’”

“Uuuhhhh.“ You would think the world was ending.

Adam has his feet on the dash.  “Blueberries. “  He says slowly.  ” They are sweet.  Not so bad John.  They’re round.  Delicate.  You can squeeze them.  You can eat them.  Or crush them.  <pause> Yeah, very girl.”

“All those girls.  MMMMmmmmmoooooommmm, you have to change it.”

“John, I know it’s a hassle to have all those girls around now, but believe it or not, a day will come when you will love this situation.”

“Never!”

Adam chimes in, “Yep, someday, John, ten to three will get your attention.”

“No way, I just won’t ever let that happen to me.”

Adam continues,  “No, John, you will. You, or something within you, will let that happen.”

“John, that seems impossible doesn’t it?” I say.  “You ought to try to remember this moment, like with Cam Jansen, say ‘click.’  And remember how you feel right now.”

John almost shouts, “It doesn’t happen to everybody.  I will NEVER like girls!  Blueberries.  Ugh.  Never!  I just won’t ever allow that to happen to me.”

Rosie seems to wake up.  She chimes in for the first time, shouting as loud as she can, “It’s not up to you.  God is going to do it to you!  It’ll just happen!”

Adam continues in his dry humor, half to himself, half to John…..”Yeah, John, I’m just going to tell you now, that someday, it will happen to you.  It will be a powerful force, one that speaks to you from deep inside, one that will rival and perhaps extinguish all other thoughts.  With a kind of relentlessness. A berry, yes. Something that will tell you that each girl is delicious – like a berry.  You’ll decide, ah, that’s juicy.”

I give him a sideways look and quietly say, “Adam…..”

Silence from the back seat.

“Mom, how about the Blue People?”

This was how we arrived at church at 6pm last night…..two sleepers and one wired!  Pretty true to character for all involved:-)

The Counterbalance

What a day.  Rosie had her first ever hair cut followed by an up-do.  John had his hair cut and how to spell it, moussed?  And then we went to our summer discovery zone — the pool.  The joy that happens for us at the pool never ceases to amaze me.  I know that there will be a day that I take a book to the pool or even just drop off the kids.  But at this point, I leave the books at home and am grateful for it.  Yesterday Rosie discovered a discarded toy that would float for at least 20 seconds before sinking to the bottom.  So she started throwing it into the water, jumping in after it, and getting it.  This is a NEW thing.  Being able to swim and be somewhat confident opens new worlds.  Then you can go off the slide.  The diving board.  The possibilities are endless.

The amazing part is the pure joy.

We were there at 4:45 because the kids had swim lessons starting at 5:30.  In Salisbury there was a meeting about my mom’s meds.  I could have been in the meeting via a conference call. But I had to be here, Rosie flinging herself into the water with abandon and joy as John, newfound freedom in the board area, does his new back dive.  There are so few moments of discovery this raw, and right now I get to share fully.  This too shall pass, and I want to live it.  Or grab it and growl, as my friend Janet would say.  Also, since I trust my sibs to make good decisions, I really think my mom would want me in the pool.

Ok, I can’t photograph the pool.  IF I could, it would be that moment when Rosie is flying through the air, arms and legs flying, leading with her chest as she catapults toward the water.  But I can show you some images of Rosie, after 5 1/2 years of never getting her hair cut, getting her first experience with the added bonus of the updo.  She had that, “I can’t believe it’s my turn!” look on her face.  She asked which way to cross her legs if she wanted to do it like a grown up.  Then when someone there asked her if she was going to miss me when she went to school, she emphatically said, “NO!”  She can’t wait for that, like for this:

Saying Goodbye

I wish my mom were here to help me face and deal with this time of losing her.  I walked into the Carrillon, the residential facility where she now lives, and she was about four feet from the  locked door I let myself in.  Her eyebrows went up, and she was so happy for about ten seconds.  She knew it was someone she loved, and to the degree that her expression could look familiar with a sunken face with no teeth and eyes half shut, it looked like my mom saying hello to me!  That was such a gift.  Then it was gone.  She doesn’t want to wear her teeth, so her face is sunken.  After shuffling the halls for a twenty or thirty minutes, I fed her lunch.  Her eyes stayed closed most of the time.  There were only two more moments the whole visit when it felt like she was there.  I paused with her in the hallway, pulled her close and said quietly “Mom, I love you so much.  So much.”  She said, “I love you back.”  Then I got a series of kisses, quick ones.  Then we kept walking.
And this was a good day.  Two 20-second moments of recognition in a 1.5 hour visit. A banner day.

Adam told me tonight that he only gets one kiss.  I get about eight:  kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss….quick ones.  John gets that too, on his head.  Adam said she reserves only one for in-laws.  So maybe she knows more than we think she does.  But honeslty, it feels vacuous.  It hurts so much.
This is so hard.

Back when I was photographing the New River, frequently I could only get country music on the radio.  I loved a Patty Lovelace song about saying goodbye.  The chorus went:

Mama whispered softly, Time will ease your pain
Life’s about changing, nothing ever stays the same
And she said, How can I help you to say goodbye?
It’s OK to hurt, and it’s OK to cry
Come, let me hold you and I will try
How can I help you to say goodbye?

The main help I have is the beauty of life here in Durham — the moments of our lives here at 911, which is what I created this blog to record.  When I was at the peak of shooting for the Geographic my parents were interviewed about their lives.  I’ll never forget one answer my dad gave the interviewer.  She was asking about his marriage, and she asked dad if there was anything he really wished would happen that hadn’t.  Out of the blue he said, “I wish Susie would get married and have kids.”  It was a shock.  But today, dealing with my dad being gone and losing my mom, I’m so grateful for Rosie, John and Adam.  They keep me in the game.  Dad was smarter than I knew at the time.

Want to hear the song?  Here”s the url.  I’ve been listening to it lately and Rosie begged me tonight to let her listen to it as her goodnight story….  Anyway, you’ll have to cut and paste this url because I can’t figure out how to make the link work.  But listen….it’s very to the point:

http://s0.ilike.com/play#Patty+Loveless:How+Can+I+Help+You+Say+Goodbye:66594:s307368.27682.12568408.0.1.85%2Cstd_95b4e951dfb569f98adf1ec0719fe2b2

Hard to believe this was her last birthday:

End of an era….I didn’t realize

(written 7/2/09)

This morning as I heard Adam leave the bedroom, I didn’t want to move or open my eyes.  I was a sandwich.  On one side Rosie was sleeping, her body completely relaxed and folded into mine.  On the other side, John had climbed in and pressed in tight.  Not tangled in with his limbs like Rosie, but in a full body press.

While I might have imagined in the past that this would feel oppressive, it isn’t.  Not at all.  More like breathing in flowers in the spring or tasting your first summer tomatoes straight off the vine.  Completely delicious.  So I laid there and enjoyed  drinking it in, the natural way that your children’s bodies are connected to and familiar with your own.

As Adam was still partly in the room, the thought floated through my mind, “So much of what is important to me is right here, right now. I am so fortunate.”

Meanwhile, both kids were in camp this week. This is the only week of the summer that they are both gone.  I knew I had to pick my project because there are so many things I could have tackled.  Lately I’ve noticed that the kids’ rooms really weren’t their rooms.  Makes it easy for visitors.  They were more of adult guest rooms with some baby toys and books that the kids had long outgrown.  The box of outgrown clothes was overflowing.  You have to wonder — have I looked, really looked, at this space recently?  I had picked up the bedspread from Rosie’s room in PEI in 1997, the year I met Adam.

So the project I took on for the week was to straighten out their rooms, and turn them into a place that belonged to them, not to us.  Not to our storage needs.  I started with sorting out clothes, toys, old stuff.  Did I really find a diaper genie in Rosie’s room?  (Yes.)  I looked around, did some purchasing.  A friend, Avalyn came to visit and agreed to help.

Then this morning, when they were both gone, Avalyn and I went to work, going as fast as we could.  We got rid of the old toys, put together furniture, unrolled rugs, made beds with new bedspreads.  Rosie LOVES pink and purple, along with “all the colors of the world,” but really pink and purple are “it.”  John has recently come into his own — he can pick off varied pitches in baseball and shoot hoops with our eleven-year-old neighbor in the backyard. He LOVES sports.  Anything with a ball.

So Rosie’s room is pink.  She has a new bookshelf the shape of a little house, and a pink satiny bedspread.  I can’t describe it here and give it justice, but now it’s a little girl’s room, complete with a frilly lamp that has a heart shaped jewel on the end of the chain.  She came home from pincess ballet camp, and I told her to close her eyes.  She came in her room, and when she opened her eyes she couldn’t believe it.  Joy exploded on her face, but she turned and buried her head in my neck in disbelief, like an adult entering a surprise party.  She spent the next three hours searching the house for everything important to her so that she could get her room set up.

John came home later.  His room had already been fun, complete with a small trampoline and some drums.  So the transformation was less dramatic.  But when he saw his new sports bedspread and lamp, he couldn’t stop touching the balls on the bedspread.  His space.  Aaaahh.

For the past few years, we’ve lived a little like a family in the developing world, all piled together.  Rosie has always slept in our room.  John has slept in there for the past two years.  Even Samson.  Makes lots of room for guests, but out recent vacation opened the door for them to sleep in their own space.  I was hoping that this change would introduce the concept of them spending time in their own rooms, and maybe within the next year we could get them in there to sleep.

But it’s gone faster than we thought.

“I want to sleep in here tonight,” Rosie said, arms stretched wide across her satiny pink bedspread.

“Great,” I said.

In the midst of her set-up, Rosie came downstairs.  “Maybe if Sweet Doggie goes in my room with me, it won’t be scary.”  John saw a picture of a mummy two years ago.  He’s been scared to be in a room alone since.  It hasn’t fully rubbed off on Rosie, but the fear concept is there.

“Well,” I said, “maybe now that your room is all yours and is so special, maybe you could just decide that it’s a safe place.  Maybe you could decide it’s the safest place in the whole world — your place!  And you could go there to feel safe if something scares you.  Would that work?”

“Yeah,” she said, running back upstairs with another toy.

So bedtime comes.  Instead of all four of us piling into our bed to read, Adam and I each take a child to their own room.  They proudly turn on their lamps.  When it’s time to sleep, they each want to give it a try.

My  morning started sandwiched between my children, their warmth filling my heart.  Now they are both tucked in and sleeping deeply in their own rooms.  Didn’t realize what I was doing as I rushed to  screw together the particle board before they got home.  As I’ve said before in this blog, precious things end without notice.  So I guess all of us piled in reading and tangled up sleeping is ending.  Something new will start. I wonder what it will be.

(Well, it didn’t stick….more to come.)

Imagination

(written 5/27/09)

Magic sparkly imagination dust must get sprinkled onto four-year-olds in their sleep.  Something like the pixie dust that Peter Pan shakes off of Tinker Bell to allow Wendy to fly.  I can’t see it, but I believe it’s there. And I’m learning from it.

When John was four, I frequently had acquaintances ask me if I had several other sons.  I knew at that point that John had been telling them about his brothers.  At any given time, he had between two and nineteen brothers.  The main brothers were named John, Aiden and Jackson, and their ages changed, depending on which cousins we had been playing with recently.  Some days they were seven, some days they were 23.  They were always adventurous, brave and fun.

Rosie is living IN the stories she hears. Today we began as Cinderella, the stepmother, Wastazha (Anastasia) and Wuzrella (Drizella). Then we progressed to Jasmine and Sleeping Beauty.  Followed by Jack and Annie — and part of the time we were Jack and Annie we were also mermaids that could live underwater.