Do you want to build a sandcastle?

The other question that I've often answered the wrong way is, "Are you coming in with us, Mom?"

 My usual answer is, "No thanks.  Not today.  You guys go ahead, though.  I'll be right here."

 And you can see why, right?  I've got the chair (slightly in the shade, as my Irish-pale skin just doesn't do full sun very well), plus the picnic cooler, the extra sunscreen, the towels, the big blanket for all the drippy, sand-caked, shell-sorting, seaweed-fighting post-swim creatures to sprawl on, once it's lunchtime: the perfect place to hold down the fort.

 And then there's my thighs, and other things that jiggle...  and what my hair will look like once it's wet, and the part about getting all sandy all over after swimming...

Yup.  I have all the right reasons for opting out, right? I mean, I even brought a book.  And there's always my phone to check, and knitting and... well, you get the idea.

But the other day, listening to someone talk about their childhood,  I heard this, as tears ran down the person's face,

"I never built a sandcastle with my mom. And she never came in swimming with us.  She pretty much missed my whole childhood."  

Yes, it's a leap from "no sandcastles" and "no swimming" to "she missed my whole childhood", but to that person, at that moment, that's how it FELT.  Someone's mom just couldn't or wouldn't allow herself to get all covered in mud and sand, to march that imperfect figure right down to the water's edge and plunge in, turning her 'do into a wet mop. 

And I totally get it.  How many times since I entered motherhood have I sat by the side of the pool, or in the beach chair, never once getting in the water?   I mean, it's cold, and it's gritty, and it gets everywhere, and everybody can see me... and what if I got all ugly, and then we had to go somewhere on the way home, like the grocery store?

When my kids were tiny, I somehow managed to get wet and sandy even on days when we *weren't* at the beach... But then the kids all got potty trained, and learned to walk steadily, and talk, and swim, and dig holes in the sand, and they seemed really ok with just my supervision from a short distance away.  And it was so nice to just sit there and watch, or knit, or gab on the phone.  It's nice.  It's relaxing, like a vacation.

But I almost missed someone's whole childhood.  Maybe.  So, today, on the 8th birthday of my youngest child, I arrived at the beach with my kids;  me wearing my comfy swimsuit (yes, I have a comfy swimsuit... they exist--that's a whole 'nother blog post)  slathered with sunscreen, equipped with a rash-guard shirt that would keep my chest, arms, and shoulders from getting all lobster-y.  And I got in that chilly water, dodged the bits of seaweed, laughed at the kids' homemade floating toy: a t-shirt wrapped around a beachball and dubbed, "Bob" (middle school humor), and I acted like a watery goofball until I got cold enough to need a dry-land break.

What a great day.  What was I afraid of?  I got all ugly and sticky and sandy, and there was no place to shower, blow-dry and re-coif... but who cares?  On the way home, in total disregard of my unsuitable appearance, we even stopped off to visit some elder friends of ours who live not far from the beach. These wonderful, wise folks are facing a pile of serious challenges right now.  The one tiny thing we could do for them was to walk their dog, as neither of them currently has the energy to do it.   My perspective got yet another dose of "get real, please".  When I am that age, and facing the kinds of things they're facing, I hope I won't also be regretting that I missed some of life's delights, like playing in my kids' world, for fear of getting messy and looking ugly.

Oh, and today, after my first swim of the day, and then lunch, and before my last swim of the day, my youngest kiddo and I did some great sand-digging, and built "Castle R" entirely of Silly Sand.

( I wonder if Silly Sand Construction Techniques could be worked into the Common Core for the elementary school years... This kid had never heard of it before. )

We model for our kids what happy adults look like.  It's clearly time I got more interested in being that kind of "model", rather than beating myself over the head that I'll never be the *other* kind of model, the one that involves airbrushed, suntanned, lipo-suctioned perfection in public places.  My kids don't give a flip about my fat rolls and squirrel's nest hair, but they sure get enthusiastic about my getting down in the sand and the surf, getting messy, and sharing in their fun.

Should there maybe be a chapter in "What to Expect... " entitled, "Get Dirty, Get Wet; Wash, Rinse, Repeat UNTIL THE CHILD LEAVES HOME"  ?

Life's messy... Last one in the water's a rotten egg.

A journey of 32 years, and 12 days

It's been a number of months since I last posted anything here, and I'm doing some looking back as well as some looking around at the present.
**************************************

London, July 2014 - getting ready to time-travel

The grey mid-day light of the Gare du Nord wasn't anything unusual.  Sunday, July 13, 2014 was a bit of a grey day when we left St.Pancras / King's Cross earlier that day, and there had been summer drizzle as we'd crossed the French countryside after emerging from the Chunnel.  I was a little sleepy from our very early departure, and a bit queasy from motion sickness and coffee on a nearly-empty tummy.  And in the midst of the thoroughly routine and explicable, I was puzzled by my sudden rainstorm of tears as I stepped off the TGV Eurostar and began dragging my new rolling luggage down the platform to begin an adventure in Paris.

I was back.  How was this possible? 

And I was overwhelmed.  Why did this feel so hugely significant?

Thirty-two years before, my 18-year-old self  had entered the Gare du Nord with my ticket and luggage, and stepped onto the TGV (Train Grande Vitesse--the first French high-speed train at the time); at the beginning of a life-changing first trip to France right after high school graduation.

All these years, and all these life-changes later, I was back, on the 2-year-anniversary of a day that had changed my life forever. 

I guess it makes sense that the eclipsing light and dark in my heart at that moment would overheat my emotional circuitry and result in a tearful overflow.

How was it possible that it had only been two years ago that my life looked like an unsalvageable mess; facing the prospect of what I thought would be years of empty loneliness and abandoned dreams?  How was it possible that I was here in Paris, travelling for free as a working chaperone, in the company of 19 terrific teenagers, two new adult friends, and a man who makes me laugh and learn every time I'm with him?

As it turned out, it was not my first moment of gratitude that went beyond words and into joyful tears, and it would not be my last on this 12-day trip. 

...

July, 1982 - happily bringing back les baguettes

In mid-July of 1982, I was an optimistic high school graduate who had studied French since junior high school and had fallen in love with all things French, spending a summer with a warm and gracious French family on a farm property outside Lyon.  I was eagerly soaking up all they had to teach me about life in this lovely country: the language, the food, the people-first pace of life that was full of long, leisurely visits with family and neighbors, sitting at tables under the courtyard trees, sharing jokes, stories, and amazing food, and imagining what life held for me in my truly bright future. 

In mid-July of 1992, I was a 28 year old single woman, working as an ESL teacher in Nashville, TN, and wondering what had become of my original plan to travel the world while teaching, wondering if I'd ever find my soulmate, wondering if I'd already asked too much of life, hoping that the best was yet to come, while worrying that perhaps I'd already missed it.

In mid-July of 2002, I was a sleep-deprived, homeschooling, California housewife, in late pregnancy with my third child, having witnessed my husband survive his first suicide gesture, and wondering what kind of family this yet unborn child would be grow-up in, as his father struggled with his inner demons while trying to survive the Silicon Valley ethos of throwaway humanity and 22-hour workdays. I had no more dreams or plans for the future, other than getting through the next day, keeping all my babies safe and healthy, and maybe catching 40 winks from time to time.

Somewhere in early July of 2012, I came to a moment when I could finally accept the truth:  I could no longer let my four children live under the reign of terror of an increasingly paranoid and abusive man who was my husband and their father.  And on the night of July 13, I made a stupidly risky last-chance move and broke the news of my decision to Andre: that he needed to get help, immediately, or I would have to take the children and leave. Several hours of arguing and thirty minutes of silence led to the awful moment when what was left of Andre Hedrick left us, with a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle in his hand, a rifle that held, that night, 20 rounds in the clip that he'd loaded, secretly, in the garage earlier that afternoon.  My mis-assessment of the risk I took by telling him of my decision almost cost us all our lives.  Some guardian angels somewhere were working the late shift, I guess.

Thirty years.  Plus two. 

And in those past two years, I have seen my four children emerge from trauma and loss and start rebuilding their lives, complete with successes and failures, false starts and unexpected opportunities.  I am in my second year of a two-year graduate program in counseling psychology, a field that has interested me since my high school days.  I'm working as a trainee two days a week in a community counseling center and looking forward to a second field placement as a school counselor in the Fall. Since last November, I've been spending time with a fascinating, hilarious, multi-talented, man with an insatiable curiosity, a big heart and a great big, hearty laugh. 

And it's because of that life-enhancing friendship with that wonderful man, that I found myself on the train platform in the Gare du Nord, keeping that 32-year-old promise to myself, to return to this lovely city and REALLY see it and experience it. 

If time allows in the next couple weeks, I might even get back to writing a bit of a travelogue, coming full circle to the place where this blog began a few years ago:  a chronicle of travel and what I learn along the way.  I certainly have the photos to share.   

July, 1982 - on my one-day whirlwind tour of Paris, I promised myself I would return.

July 14, 2014 - I promise myself that the next time I'm photographed in Paris, I will take off my glasses, check my hair and use good posture (!)

Chiaroscuro

Isaiah 45:7a - I create the light and make the darkness 

(I'm beginning to think that I should warn new friends that there's a risk in teaching me something or sharing something profound:  it might show up in my blog.  So, you know who you are-- keep being brilliant in my presence, ok?  )

"Chiaroscuro - Contrasting effects of light and shade in a work of art. Leonardo da Vinci brought the technique to its full potential, but it is usually associated with such 17th-century artists as Caravaggio and Rembrandt, who used it to outstanding effect."  

I've been thinking about the chiaroscuro nature of my days lately.  As Christmas approached and the lights went up in the neighborhoods, in the shopping malls, in my friends' photos on social media, they looked more beautiful this year than I can remember them being for several years. It's not that the lights actually were brighter, but it seems that light, when contrasted with the darkness I've lived in recent years,  is somehow more beautiful and more significant.  Just as Caravaggio's smiling young lady in blue, or DaVinci's angel would be less striking without the darkness in the paintings, it seems that the darkness that accumulates as I age only serves to make the bright moments in life that much more beautiful.

These days, I'm watching my two older kids grow through those teeth-clenching teenage years, and sometimes the shadows feel suffocating.  But then I catch a glimpse of that fusion of the sweet children that they once were and the admirable adults that they're growing into. In that moment, that vision is all the more beautiful because of the deep shading of these seasons full of ill-tempered, refrigerator-emptying, sibling-bashing, kitchen-trashing aliens in my home.

My trip through the middle-aged adult dating scene this past year has had its burnt siena shadings of frustration and hurt feelings, but where I stand now, a year later--still single, still wondering how life will turn out--feels bright with possibility.  I've met some wonderful men, added some of them to my life as friends, and I've begun to wake from my Rip Van Winkle social life to discover a whole world of people, music, activities, restaurants and movies that I'd somehow missed in my years as Andre's wife.  My life is rich now because I'm aware of how emotionally impoverished it was before.  I'm beginning to see that the shadow of loneliness is not one I have to run from. I can simply keep moving in the direction of living life as fully as I can, and enjoying the light of companionship when it appears. When it does, I'm finding that it's that much more soul-feeding because I know how precious it is.

The quote from Isaiah is a gift from a new friend in my life, a friend who has seen more than his share of darkness in recent years.  This scripture seemed to be telling him that both the light and the darkness are part of God's plan.  Carrying that reminder in his heart, he has begun to see more and more light. His sharing of that fragment of scripture with me was another way of multiplying that light and I'm grateful

Tonight, over a friendly home-cooked meal, I was catching up with a creative/inventor friend of mine, who showed me a piece of electronic art he's been designing/ playing with.  He calls it a "Starling", and it contains some beautifully color-changing lights and one dark spot. It turns out that the dark spot is simply where the battery is, but in discussing his creation, it seemed to me that the dark spot in his twinkling creation is perhaps another use of chiaroscuro: what is bright and lovely is made more so by the presence of some shadow.

As we move through this season just past the Winter Solstice, the days are getting brighter and longer; the darkest day of the year is past, and from here, the light grows until we reach the Autumnal Equinox, when the darkness will begin to move in again. Somehow, acknowledging the presence of both the light and the dark, the seasons of shading and the highlighting, makes the light that I see in this new year ahead seem brighter and more beautiful. In 2014, I wish you light, and the ability to see that the shadows don't steal the light--they enhance it.

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."  John 1:4-6

Those things you frame

We've all got 'em, right?  Those framed things... the Prayer of Saint Francis, the Desiderata,  "Kiss the Cook", "Live Well, Laugh Often...", that hang in the kitchen, the living room...or in the garage: "Parking for 49er's Fans Only", the basement:  "Man Cave Rules:..." or elsewhere:  "Flush!"

I've got one, given to me by someone I barely knew, just before we moved away--how's that for "no particular sentimental connection"--and every time I think I'll put it in the charity donation pile, I read it again.
It says:
Look To This Day

Look to this day:
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendour of achievement
Are but experiences of time.

For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision;
And today well-lived, makes
Yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!

And then I take it out of the donation pile, and put it somewhere, intending to hang it up again.  

Lately, I've been getting a little self-congratulatory.  I've been comparing NOW to where I was a year ago.
Last year at this time, I was barely stumbling along in the fog of grief and trauma, plastering an optimistic face over my panicked sense that what I was living was "the new normal" and a fear that what I saw was all there would ever be.  I did NOT want to "Look well to this day". The chaos was just too daunting. And the future seemed impossibly foggy.  I was hardly able to keep track of appointments, numbers, phone calls to return...what day of the week it was, whether my youngest child had eaten dinner.  My teenager was lost and floundering in school and in life, my 1998 minivan was coughing and dying and coming up with new ways to strand me every week.  I was sleeping about 4 hours a night between nightmares.  And so, in my determined flight into distraction from the situation, I was taking on editing jobs, writing in a blog, looking at applying to grad school, and thinking about soon entering the world of dating.  (The diagnostic term for this condition is "Nucking Futs !!"  --be sure to include both exclamation points.  It will be in the next edition of the DSM, for sure. ) 

And a year later, I'm here.  I've gotten myself a smart phone that keeps track of appointments, numbers, phone calls to return, and what day of the week it is.  I'm still working on a program to keep tabs on the nutritional intake of the youngest kiddo, but Siri's "call home" between night classes, works pretty well.  Usually said kiddo can tell me if he ate what I prepared for dinner, or made himself a peanut-butter tortilla roll-up (we DO live in California... yes, he prefers tortillas to bread) .   My replacement mini-van means that I'm no longer on a first-name basis with the operator at AAA.  Grad school is a delightful reality that keeps me in a state of nerdly bliss on those carefully-guarded study days.  And when I'm sleep-deprived these days, it's not because of nightmares, at least.  I'm less prone to distracting myself, but I am still a die-hard over-loader of the calendar.  It's just that I'm doing it more successfully now that I can remember what day it is.

And it's tempting to think that I've entered that part of the poem that says, "the bliss of growth, the glory of action, the splendor of achievement", and that I'm going to stay there for a while.

But then I get hit with the next wave-- a teenager who has managed to find his way back to "lost and floundering", some feedback from a colleague at school that keeps me humble... and I'm reading the next line, "are but experiences of time."  Nothing's permanent: not the horror, not the high-fives.  I'm on the journey, and I'm here today.  And "in its brief course, lie all the verities and realities of (my) existence".

I have another sign that reminds me that my power to control things is limited.  It hangs in the kitchen where it seems like so many family conversations occur:

 I wonder if, every once in a while, my friends and should have a kitschy philosophical wall-art trade-off.  Who knows what treasures of ancient and modern thought are hand-lettered and decorated with a ribbon, gathering dust in someone's hallway closet? 

Any Port in a Storm

"Were you out there praying?," my grandmother asked me, as we sat at the galley table in the 33-foot cabin cruiser, now docked safely in the marina.

"Nope. Singing," I admitted, making that little head-duck gesture that I still sometimes do when embarrassed. I'd been caught doing what I usually did when I could no longer do anything else to make myself feel better: I was singing through the songbook in my head of every show-tune I knew.  In this case, "out there" was the open-air aft-deck of my family's boat, during a slashing mid-summer rainstorm on Long Island Sound. I'd spent a couple of hours riding out the storm, with its choppy waves that made me painfully seasick, out in the open, wearing a life-vest over my tee-shirt and shorts, with an improvised safety line tethering me to the base of the ladder that led to the fly-bridge.  My parents were concerned that I might wash overboard if a rogue swell hit us.  In a family of avid sailors, for whom weekends and summer vacations meant boat-trips, I was the only one who was regularly prone to seasickness.  Being inside a closed cabin, even on a calm day, would likely have meant spending the trip in the head, or heading outside to lean over the rail and upchuck.

So, on that day of high winds and growing waves, with the sudden rainsquall that overtook us, I chose to be wet, cold, and in the open air, rather than take my chances in the closed cabin with my brothers, my grandmother, and her two adventure-loving sisters, my great-aunts. My parents were on the fly-bridge, piloting us back to port: Dad checking his chart notes, and monitoring various navigational gadgets, and Mom handling the helm on the precise compass heading and speed instructions he gave her.  And to keep me from crying over how nauseated I was, and to keep the deep breaths coming, the ones that help keep me from hurling, I had been sitting on the lower deck, breathing the fresh air, soaked to the skin, with my hair hanging around my face in dripping limp strands; singing.

"You're a girl after my own haht, singing in the stawhm", my grandmother beamed, in her broad north-suburban Boston accent.  Nani was our "fun grandmother", the eternal Pollyanna, the grandma who wore sneakers, shorts and a swimsuit whenever possible, Nani who could throw together a thermos of coffee and a picnic on a moment's notice and head to the beach or the pool, or the zoo, or the mountains in a flash.  She'd been widowed in her late 50's, travelled the world with her sisters, took up photography and began winning prizes in her late 60's.  She also had crippling, painful rheumatoid arthritis that attacked nearly every joint in her body, in the age before NSAIDs and steroid treatments came along.  It was her swimming (sometimes in the icy ocean off the coast of Maine in the summer), her insistence on walking, her picture-taking, her zest for life, and her stubborn Pollyanna optimism that kept the pain at bay. She simply refused to give in to self-pity, or if she did, she took great pains that no one ever found out about it.

There's that "game for anything" smile of Nani's. (maybe a shot of that stuff helped the arthritis too.) 

There are days when I wish I had Nani's die-hard ability to put up a brave front.  Days like today.

Today was Friday the 13th, another narrow gate, (If you haven't been reading the blog very long, see my previous posts on wobbling through narrow gates to know what I'm talking about.), one that caught me by surprise.  I had forgotten to pick some kind of mental "pebble" to draw my attention to the other side of the gate.   I also made the mistake of taking on some interpersonal stuff that I should have left for another day, and that made it even worse.  Today I've been doing more than wobbling.  I've been crashing painfully.  It's been a day of tears and a lost, unproductive state in which I found myself in my exercise clothes all day, but somehow never made it outside to do my run.  I spent hours sitting at my computer, but the final paper for the quarter hasn't been written.  The bills I was supposed to dig up for a bit of accounting somehow never got found.  The dishes piled up.  The laundry never got started.  The dog kept wandering over and putting her tiny front paws on the lap of the zombie in the chair.  She even tried that ultra-cute head-tilt while looking at my face for some sign I was still alive.

But this afternoon, I realized that if I went out to do errands with uncombed hair, no make-up, wearing my sloppy tee-shirt and running pants, I'd feel even worse with every imagined pitying glance I'd be attracting.  Or maybe even worse, I'd be invisible: so frumpy as to be beyond noticing.

So, I shuffled into some decent clothes, tried to make my hair look less like a red-blonde pot-scrubber and more like a coiffure, and even got into the usual quantity of spackle, mascara, and lipstick to complete the look.

 And without thinking about it, from somewhere in my head, the show-tune soundtrack got cued, (thank you, Nani) and I found myself singing:

 "...who cares what they're wearing on Main Street or Saville Row (or Walnut Creek)  It's what you wear from ear-to-ear and not from head-to-toe that matters..."  (Need a little corny pick me up? Click here for the video clip from the musical, Annie.)

I think I may need to see what Broadway collections I can find on iTunes, maybe make myself a CD of stuff to keep my breathing deep and the tears and sick-feeling at bay for a little while longer.  It worked in a different season of storms.  It might be worth a try again.

If you pull up beside me at a red light and I'm belting out those show tunes, just look the other way and pretend you don't know me. I'll be better soon.  Meanwhile, I'll try to remember to stay tethered to the bottom of the ladder 'til the storm passes.

*******  "Have courage, my soul, and let us journey on.  Though the night is dark and I am far from home, thanks be to God, the morning light appears.  The storm is passing over, Hallelujah!"  ***********

Another song in my inner soundtrack is this one.  Definitely NOT Broadway, but a favorite of my choir buddies, and one that my choir family sang for me at Andre's memorial: The Storm is Passing Over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3jgPsGQSdQ    This performance is by the Detroit Mass Choir and they sing it with a lean, muscular punch,( and a cool Hammond organ part) that few choirs can match.  Enjoy !

The song is wrong

Any musical theater fans here?  Anybody remember "Carousel", and the song, "You'll never walk alone"?  (Yup, I'm dating myself... well, actually that's kinda where I'm going with this one, but more on that later.)

The coach this morning started us with some "ankeling", he called it, a kind of almost-running walk, with a lot of heel-to-toe movement, and then some backwards walking, some sideways skipping, some weird looking high-stepping movements straight out of "Springtime for Hitler", and then he and the half-dozen regulars with The Run Team took off running.  And I do mean "took off", as in a flight of well-synchronized eagles.

But I'm not an eagle, or even a seagull, ... I'm more of a penguin, actually. (If you're not familiar with the concept of a running "penguin", click here to read John Bingham's blogpost about runners who are penguins.) The flock of folks for whom an "easy jog" is a 6-minute mile were out ahead of me and gone in what felt like seconds.  So much for running with a group, which was my plan when I clicked "join this group" on Meet-Up.  I had been assured that there were going to be "runners of all abilities" on this run.  I guess the otherly-abled people decided to sleep in this morning.

 I ran alone,

 mostly.

...except for when the 70-something-year-old coach of The Run Team turned around from the 3-mile-point and ran BACK to me, asked if I had any injuries, and then, after giving me a few pointers about working on my speed by doing short intervals, turned around and ran ahead to catch-up with his group.

I ran the rest of my 4 miles alone.  The full run was an 8-mile out-and-back, and I'd been told there would be some other folks who would turn around early.  Again, I guess they slept in this morning.

Except for when the six-milers on their way back to the start point passed me in a cloud of dust, I ran alone.

And lately, I'm finally facing that that's my state; alone.  Yes, I have 4 kids, and some great, caring, selfless friends, friends who would drop everything and be with me in a crisis, friends who mentor my teens, friends who let me hide-out at their house; making jam and drinking wine, friends who move themselves and their entire family into my house to look after my kids so I can go away for a week...  And then there's another undeservedly large cloud of friends on Facebook who post encouraging words, who like my photos, who read these blogposts almost before I have them posted, so I'm not truly alone.

But, in some new way, I'm coming to grips with the fact that I'm a widow.  I'm alone.  (The Chorus of DUH has not been heard from in a couple of months, so it's time to let them warm up... go ahead, give us a melodious , "DUHHHHHH!!!")

After I congratulated myself this morning on 4 miles at a faster pace than I've done in many months, I got into my car, drove to a parking lot a few miles between the run venue and home, and had a full-throated, self-pitying, damn-it's-good-no-one-here-knows-me, no-holds-barred, cry-it-out session like I haven't had in quite a while. And it felt different this time.

As odd as it might seem, I have not truly allowed myself to come to terms with this layer of "alone" yet, ever since the police told me to "call someone" as they shoved past me, into my house and up the stairs on the night Andre died.  From that point on, I've leaned on friends, leaned on my therapist, my pastor, my neighbors... and eventually I found a... gosh, "boyfriend" sounds so silly... a man-companion to lean on, to hide from my growing horror at the thought of a life alone.

And he was a terrific distraction. There is nothing like a smart, funny, handsome guy to completely un-hinge me from reality. So while most widows would still have been wearing somber clothing and staying at home every night, I was distracted by balancing the rest of my life to include dating.  And then that relationship went bad, and it ended after a couple of months.  And a day later, (really, no kidding)  another incredibly attractive man walked into my life, and we had a terrific 3-month relationship.  And then it ended.  And the day after it was "over" with Man-Companion #2,  Man-Companion #1 briefly re-appeared on my Distraction Board and I was able to keep running from my sadness at the loss of MC#2,  my residual grief over Andre, and my completely unprocessed sadness at the ending of the first relationship with MC#1.  But now MC#1 is gone again and I'm left facing the fact that I really am alone, and it hurts like hell.

 (Are you feeling like you need a scorecard to keep this straight?)

But I'm studying to be a therapist.  I'm supposed to KNOW better.  "Physician, heal thyself", I guess... It's only dawning on me now that I'm not done with the park-the-car-somewhere-and-bawl-your-eyes-out stuff yet.  And it looks like I'm not the only one who is just turning the corner into a fresh field of grief.  My youngest child, who has been pretty much coasting along, doing well, is suddenly, daily, having tearful episodes of "I miss Daddy.  I want a Daddy."

Oh, crap.  (Don't worry.  That's a technical term.  I'm a trained professional... well, a professional in training..)

I can't do anything about either of those conditions, especially not now.

So, when he's sad, we talk about it, and I tell him that it's really Ok to feel sad, that he won't always feel this sad, and that he can tell me any time he's sad.  Sometimes we cry together, and then we brainstorm ways to feel better.  Sometimes a hug will do it.  Other times, it's tickle-session, or a ride-along on some errands that I need to do. Tonight, his solution seemed to be a bubble bath with ALL the floating toys: ducks, cars, fish, airplanes, trucks.  It can get a little crowded in that tub sometimes, but I guess that's better than being alone.

Not long ago, on a night when the plan to go out with one of the MC's was suddenly cancelled for "unfinished business", (yeah, that is as bad as it sounds),  I did something I haven't done in a while. I took myself out.  Yup, I dated myself, as it were.  I grabbed my notebook and a pen, found a table in a place that played good music, ordered a beer and some chili fries, and spent some time with myself, working on some writing for myself alone.  By the end of the evening, I'd heard some terrific music,  gotten some clarity, felt a little stronger, banished most of my self-pity, wrote a note that needed to be written, and went to bed and slept well that night.

So, maybe the song is right, in a way, "...walk on, walk on with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone."  (Here's the cheesiest, most clearly-learned-phonetically-by-people-unfamiliar-with-the-idiom performance of the song that I can find: The Three Tenors (I loved them) sing "You'll Never Walk Alone )

Ok, nope.  It's drivel.  I'm walking, and running, alone.  At least for a while.  And I'm pretty darned sad.

Now, let's see...where did I put those floating toys...?

The Birthday Season

"Ack!  The poop deck is collapsing!
"Fondant! Quick!  Roll some up and stick it under there. We'll frost it blue and call it a wave"

Or...

" I can't get the woolly mammoth to fall over when it gets a direct hit, without making it so floppy that it won't stand up in a breeze.  Can you take a look at it?"

Or...

"So, do you think we should have the kids rob the tomb in the pyramid before or after the toilet-paper mummy race?"

Those were just a few of the conversations that took place during the preparation for kids' birthday parties in our house, in the good years, during times when Andre was stable and I was the uber-mom.

It's the Birthday Season again here, and I'm sort of surprised by the brick wall of "I can't do this" that I'm facing.  I've been thinking about the stark contrast between "then" and "now".

Back in the days when I not only cooked nearly everything from scratch, homeschooled my kids, and kept my house reasonably picked-up, I figured out that all we had to do for a great kids' party was pick a theme that appealed to them:  Pirates, Cave-people, Ancient Egypt (Ok, give us a break, we were homeschoolers--Egypt-o-mania comes with the territory), Space, Tigers, Swamp Creatures... and then follow the formula of projectiles, finger food, and some large props made from cardboard, and of course, THE CAKE.  Not just any old store-bought cake, but homemade cake sculptures:  a space shuttle, a head of a saber-toothed tiger, a pirate ship (yes, we did manage to shore-up the collapsing poop deck with a rolled-up piece of fondant), a tiger, an arctic scene with fondant penguins and polar bears cavorting around an icy pool made of blue jello,  the pyramids at Giza (complete with palm trees), Lightning McQueen from the movie, Cars...

 For entertainment, the kids shot rubber-band rockets at a huge cardboard moon, climbed up in the tree-house to hurl water balloons at a  British Man-o-War cruising in the grass of the backyard below, threw bean-bag "meat" to feed the hungry (paper-mache) alligator, slingshot bean-bag "rocks" at the cardboard woolly mammoth. ( See how theme-adaptable the formula is? )   They took turns unwrapping gift-studded aluminum foil asteroids, used sticks and leaves to paint the inside of a cardboard "cave", mummified their dads in toilet paper, and walked on two-by-fours through the "gator-infested-swamp" wearing huge rubber Wellingtons that engulfed their little legs and made them wobbly.  And they made memories.

Lightning McQueen from "Cars", Andre's last cake sculpture

In those days, I'd sit down with my notebook, the one where I kept all the sketches for holiday table designs, the recipe lists, the guest lists, the cake ideas... and I'd work out the theme, the games, the guest list, the ideas for homemade goodie bags, the menu, and after the first few of these, I figured out how to best tap into Andre's gift for engineering the props for the games and sculpting the cake. We'd stay up past midnight on the night before the party, working on those amazing cakes, and it was a genuine relief each time to hand off the final perfectionist details in buttercream and Betty Crocker to Andre somewhere around 1 a.m. and go to bed knowing that there would be another birthday masterpiece in the freezer by morning.

On the day of the party, I'd be busy setting up the "experience"--the bowling-for-tigers game, the posing-for-pictures-as-a-penguin area, the giant cardboard moon for rubber-band-rocket shooting. The feed-the-alligator bean-bag toss.

The guests, their parents and siblings would arrive (no "drop-off and pick-up" parties for me), and I would spend the next few hours in a blur of motion. I am so grateful that there were adults with cameras at these gatherings, or there would be no photos at all.

In those days, those parties didn't feel like work.  I felt like That Mom, the one who could pull of these amazing parties and make it look easy...before there were just too many plates spinning in our day-to-day lives and my energy began to flag.

Somewhere in the middle of every party, Andre could be found doing something he did extremely well.  When I need an image that helps soften my painful memories, it's an image like this that I turn to.

Andre and Mark, 2004

I've written a lot about Andre's darkness, and for most of the first year since his death, that's felt like the thing I needed most to do: to bring to the daylight the side of our life together that we colluded in hiding.  But our lives were not all darkness.  All of the Hedrick babies knew a Daddy with an almost untiring ability to cuddle sleepy children, a Daddy who could fix nearly anything that was broken, a Daddy who took great pleasure in the grand gesture of unveiling the special birthday creations that he spent so much careful time perfecting.

In fact, over the years of growing instability in our house, as my own energy to keep up the facade faded, and the parties got less and less ambitious, the tradition of the cake sculpture was the last to go, because it was something that I could hand-off to Andre.  I would make the sheet cake that would be frozen and sculpted into shapes, and the buttercream icing that would hold it all together, and my cake-engineer would take it from there.  One year, I couldn't even muster the energy to make the frosting, so I gave Andre the vague instructions to mix "some butter, some milk and some powdered sugar, until you get something the consistency of spackle".  His ratio of butter to sugar was inordinately high, and the coating on the outside of the Death Star, for Mark's 2009 birthday, was a bit shinier and greasier than usual.   But the piping of the black icing designs was precise, and thrilled the birthday boy.

Toward the middle of that party, too, there was another sleepy child who needed to be held (and needed his face wiped, too).  I'm so glad that photos like this exist.  In years to come, I hope that the kids will remember these moments were real, too. 

Rhys and Daddy, 2009

Last year, one of the great gifts that came from the thoughtful, selfless circle of my care-givers was the handling of The Birthday Season for me.  Three of my four kids have birthdays that fall in August, September and October, and there was no way that I could have managed any kind of a celebration then.  I wasn't even managing to get dinner on the table in those days.  In fact, the Birthday Season felt as challenging as the upcoming Holiday Season that year.  

And this year, it's time for me to handle the Birthday Season, which kicked off yesterday.  Try as I might, I just couldn't gather the courage to plan a party full of little kids, but I did manage to make a cake and bring it with us to another family's party on Friday night, where we sang and shared what Rhys dubbed, "The Zebra Butt Cake"  The plan was for a chocolate cake, iced in white buttercream, with Zebra stripes of chocolate ganache.  I was rushing, and tried to put warm ganache onto buttercream and the result was a sliding, muddy-looking mess.  Given that I had used a bundt pan (say that like a 7 year old, until it comes out "butt pan"), my 2013 creation became the Zebra Butt Cake.  It is, sadly, a far cry from the cakes of other years. 

But I was told that it was delicious, and it was homemade, from scratch (not even a box cake), and somehow, my kiddo felt celebrated.  (Going to the movies and getting to choose a restaurant for dinner out, followed by a bike ride together through the neighborhood also helped, perhaps.)  

And that, I think, is the best I can do this year.  With one birthday celebration behind me, two more ahead of me, plus the shadow of what would have been Andre's 47th birthday in September, I continue to hang onto the notion of "good enough", and hope somehow that it is, truly, "good enough".  

Belly up to a lovely slice of Zebra Butt anyone?