Windowpain

Beside my writing desk is a large square window. Outside the window grows a sprawling cherry tree. In the bare branches of that cherry tree, birds–robins, nuthatches, house sparrows, black-capped chickadees, wrens, spotted towhees–congregate for whatever bird conferences and forums are necessary in the avian world.

Today a shooting occurred. An elementary school. A town like mine, like yours. Children died alongside the teachers who tried to protect them.

We are nearing the shortest and darkest day, the equinox. But today the sun shines, and as I try to write, I am distracted by the birds outside my window. They flit and dart and swoop from branch to ground and back to branch, enjoying the break in the rain, searching for the bugs and worms offered by the saturated earth.

My parents taught me to appreciate birds, to show them kindness when they arrive, guests in our yard and trees.

I don’t care for crows. They are too much like ravens, the birds Edgar Allan Poe has forever ruined for me. But most others, especially the rounded-bodied ones that would fit perfectly in my cupped hand, are a delight to watch as they confer in the cherry tree. Their bird bones, filled with air rather than weighted marrow, their jerky movements, their fixed stare. Do birds even have eyelids? And how about the way they look at me, at each other, turning their whole head as if they have slept wrongly on their nest pillows, awaking with cricks in their necks.

It is unimaginable, this tragedy. Just as Columbine was. Just as Jonesboro was. Just as West Paducah was. The parents who have not yet been reunited with their children? How do they stand the waiting? Because of course, they know what the waiting means.

I just Googled it: birds have three eyelids. Three! So yes, they do blink, but apparently their eyeballs are capable of very little movement. And, their lack of strong binocular vision means they must turn their head to see something, using only one eye at a time. That explains why they move as if in a neck brace. And, while we’re on the subject, what about bird bones? Does air really fill their bones, or is that a slice of misinformation I chose to believe, a way of explaining how on earth a creature could fly with such grace? Oh sure, I have often thought, if I had air in my bones, I’d soar like that too!

From the late 1980s to the early 1990s the United States saw a sharp increase in gun and gun violence in the schools. By 1993, the United States saw some of the most violent time in school shooting incidences. In 2006-2007, 38 deaths resulted from school shootings in the US. 

Bird Bone Update: According to Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, flying birds (i.e. not ostriches or penguins) do in fact have hollow bones, but they are dense and heavy, not light like plastic drinking straws as has been thought for thousands of years. Who knew!

The backyard of my childhood was dotted with bird feeders and bird baths. My dad made special trips to the hardware store for the particular birdseed for our yard’s particular native birds. My mom mixed hummingbird nectar, and my sister and I marveled, from the breakfast table, at the blur of wings and the shimmer of iridescent throats.

I appreciate birds (excepting crows) because of my parents.

But there is an unfortunate consequence of the bird conventions that take place outside the window beside my writing desk: once or twice each month, a nuthatch or a wren, a sweet little monocular-visioned fellow with three eyelids and a hollow skeletal system, flies directly into the glass window beside my writing desk. The thud of that feather-covered, air-filled body against glass astounds me.

That exact terrible thud jolts me today from the imaginary word-based world that appears on my computer screen. Oh no, I murmur. Pushing my chair back, I step to the window, reluctant, craning my neck to see the concrete below.

I call my friend, Ann, who has three boys and lives in Connecticut. I leave her a message, crying as I push out rambling words. I call my friend, Steph. I don’t leave a message because one crying message a day is plenty. I don’t call my friend, Schmidtie because she doesn’t need to know this, not now. She’ll call me when she finds out.

From experience I know not every bird that crashes into the glass will fall. Some might realize their tactical error just in time and swerve to avoid the head-on collision; only their wings or a bit of beak will hit the window. Others though, fall stunned to the concrete, a dusty imprint of their feathers left on the glass. But I can see no fallen bird from my place beside my writing desk, from my side of the window.

Much of the time, the traumatized bird manages to fly away, a bit off kilter perhaps, but still airborne, as if nothing has happened. But the seriously concussed birds fall to the steps below the window and lie there, twitching or shuddering a bit, their puffed chests heaving. Some die instantly, their down-covered necks snapped by the collision.

This tragedy, on such a sunny December day, is as unforeseen and stunning as a clean, clear glass window. So we find ourselves saying all the usual clichés: There are no words. This is unthinkable. Why did this happen? Their lives are forever changed.

Because I cannot see the bird from my side of the glass, I shuffle, slipper-footed, to the front door and open it slowly.

The sight in front of me, a small brown bird on cold concrete, is not pleasant. Already, the stunned fellow has lost control of his bowels. Two small circles of shiny white excrement pool beside him. He is breathing still, but the breath comes hard and heavy, and his black eyes are open, staring, blinking even. With one or two or all of his three eyelids.

As much as I want to cover the fellow with something for warmth, I simply whisper to him. I’ll check back, I say. And I do. No longer able to concentrate on my writing, I check on him every ten minutes, wishing I could do more, wishing I knew what was helpful at a time like this.

It is the invisible windows I hate most. Makes me want to wrap my husband, my children, in bubble wrap, then hold the bundle of them tight in my arms. My friend, Schmidtie, believes the things we worry most about will never happen. Therefore, she worries over everything.

When I check on my bird friend this time, the fifth or maybe the sixth time, things have changed. His eyes are still open, but no longer does his chest rise and fall. It’s clear his bird blood circulates no more.

But I can’t bear to clean him up, not right now. I’ll do it before the mail carrier, Mary, arrives with her big black shoes. Before my scampering, alive, safe, unshot children arrive home from school. Before the crows that congregate in murders (of all things!) on our block, gravitate—caw, caw, cawing—toward the death on our front porch. It’s terrible to be so close, just one brick wall away from such fresh death. Death that is still warm.

It’s hard enough to be a kid these days. After today, it’s even harder.

An hour later, when I can no longer ignore the dead bird on our front steps, I do what I saw my mother do when birds collided with the windows of my childhood home: I go to the kitchen for a plastic grocery bag and an old dishtowel, this one green checked, a wedding gift from the decade when my favorite color was green.

Standing at the front door, plastic bag and wedding dishtowel in my hand, I pause to whisper something that could be prayer, could also be eulogy. But when I open the door, I stop. I swear the bird has moved.

Sometimes, I know, I imagine the things I want to happen. Snap-necked birds returning to life. Cancer miracles. Mean people getting kind. My children treating others with compassion and being treated with compassion right back. No more acts of evil on the campus of an elementary school on a sunny December day.

But yes! There it is: movement. His head lifts a little, and I see his body rise and fall as he breathes. My heart quickens and my face flushes. Go little guy, go! I whisper. Live! Live! Live!

I want to clean up the two ponds of white poop. I want to warm him with my faded wedding dishtowel, but instead, I back away, closing the front door, moving to my office where I can pull my writing chair over to the window and watch over him. So I can shoo away anyone or anything that threatens his recovery. Cats. Crows. The FedEx guy delivering presents I have ordered from my children who, today, will come home from school.

Maybe this is why it took me eight years to write my novel: dedicated bird watching.

My friend, Steph, calls me back. She cries as we try to help each other make sense of this, but we can’t find any sense in it.

So what do we do? Gun laws? Mental health support? I don’t know what we’re supposed to do on a day that brings this news.

But when I walk to the grocery store, to get away from my television, the Seattle sun is still bright. Once in the store, an employee asks whether I like the song that’s playing on the stereo. I can’t really hear it, but because his smile is so happy, I say, “Yes. It’s a great song!” And I find myself being especially kind to the woman behind me in line, especially friendly to the employee who rings up my soup. I say hello to a few other people I don’t know, and as I walk home, I realize I do know what we do now: We keep on being kind to one another. We love each other even harder and bigger than we did yesterday, just as we did after Pearl Harbor and Columbine and September 11^th.

My parents have taught me about hope and love. My faith affirms these things, and helps me understand that we don’t understand this tragedy because we don’t have to understand evil. We have to DO something about it–please, God, help us figure out what to do about this!–but we don’t have to understand it.

I appreciate birds (excepting crows) because of my parents.

Photograph courtesy of Flickr’s  Swampthing1000.

Rogue

Hello dear readers,

Today I have the pleasure of blogging at Writer Unboxed. Follow me, and I’ll explain what happens when a sexy carpet cleaning gentleman knocks on the door of a lonely housewife, plus some other stuff about how it can be tricky to put a label on art. And, we’ll conclude with a learning lesson about how mocking someone almost always comes back to bite you in the arse. Just click here!

Of course, this photo will make more sense after you have read the post. (Incidentally my carpet cleaning friend is the guy on the left.)

Hot

Oh, how I love a man who reads!

This fetish, however, wasn’t always so pronounced. When I was just a wee high school lass for example, I liked butts. A guy with a nice arse. In fact, as I type, I am remembering two particular arses that earned much of my attention, focus that might have been better spent on studying British poetry or dissecting a frog heart or memorizing African geography. Useful stuff.

And as I sit here typing, twenty-five years later, still not totally clear on African geography, I wonder . . . have the ravages of time somehow spared those two particularly fine specimens of male tush? I know not.

(I also know not why I just wrote a sentence with Shakespearean diction. But I’m going to go with it.)

As I have aged, of course, I realize that a nice arse can only take a man so far, that other attributes are slightly more important in a male mate.

Kindness. Sense of humor. A solid faith. He thinks I am funny. He doesn’t mind that I wear the weirdest conglomeration of clothing as pajamas. Forgiveness. He doesn’t get mad when I park too close to one side of the garage, thereby forcing his 6’4″ self to scrunch up in order to exit the passenger side of the car. More forgiveness. I’m not a good house cleaner. Willingness to attend Sound of Music sing-alongs.

My college beau loved to read, yet literarily, he was nearly impossible to please. This was, in fact, also hot. He would get so easily fired up about all the things he disliked about a piece of fiction, voicing astute opinions about narrative structure and character, finding strands of plot that were gratuitous or just plain silly.

Of course, now that I am a writer, his discriminating taste is not hot. It’s terrifying. I imagine him raking my writing, my novel over the coals, just as he did with all manner of canonical literature. Just as he still does when we (as we are among the lucky ones who are able to be friends) chat about the books we read.

When I met Husbandio on a blind date, I fell for him the moment he uttered this sentence: “I’m learning Russian, Sarah, because I thought it would be cool to read Dostoevsky in Russian.” 

He then proceeded to talk about books he had loved . . . Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. Tolstoy and Chekhov.

Wouldst that someone might hie ye hither to retrieve the fire extinguisher! Post Haste!

Of course, a few years into our marriage, I realized that his hot, first date monologue had been, well, not a lie or a ruse. Not even an exaggeration to get me to go out with him again. He didn’t (yet) realize that he was to be my betrothed, my sweet-breathed Romeo. As I would be his dear Juliet.

On that first date, as he shared his literary dreams, he just thought we were chatting. You know, about things and stuff.

Not me, man. HE WANTED TO READ DOSTOEVSKY IN RUSSIAN. He loved The English Patient.

Thoughts of arses flew by the wayside! Arses mattered not even a jot! What, after all, is a nice arse when compared to a passion for literature?

And, Husbandio’s Dostoevsky dreams were truthful. In college, he had read and loved those novels. In the early years of our marriage, he did study Russian with older, thick-waisted women named Irina. They were all named Irina. And they were all thick-waisted. And they were all about as cheery and encouraging as you, dear reader, might imagine.

Still, he stuck with it because, darn it, he really did want to read Dostoevsky in Russian.

His “passion” for fiction, however, might have been a little exaggerated.

Maybe he wanted to impress me, on that first date, in those first years of marriage. Or, maybe when you are single, as he clearly was when he walked into my marriage snare, you believe you will always have time to dream and read and study languages that require knowledge of an entirely different alphabet.

Of course, that’s not the case. Work becomes more consuming. Young children ingest your free time as if it were cotton candy. Things like reading and shaving your legs and knitting sweaters fall by the wayside. Life gets very busy.

Therefore, for a lot of years, Husbandio read very little fiction. Sure, I forced him to read The Great Gatsby. I captured him and his attention whilst on lengthy road trips, popping in a book on CD while we drove.  But when he had time to read, he mostly picked up non-fiction. And non-fiction, as you likely know, is only vaguely hot.

A man out for a walk with his chocolate lab puppy has the same hotness as a guy reading a novel from the Man Booker short list. 

A man reading non-fiction? That’s like a man taking a walk with his cockatiel on his shoulder.

(Not that he’s not hot; he’s just a little more pirate-y than I can handle.)

But just this summer, fourteen years into our marriage, something miraculous transpired, something to make me realize that First Date Husbandio is still alive and well.

Husbandio started to read fiction again. Five or six books since the summer.

He’s like this guy, but with books instead of hot dogs.

It’s a change that makes me wonder why a fiction-reading man is so attractive. Do I prefer a man who prefers to reside, for brief periods of time, in a fictional world? Do I just like being with someone who loves reading as much as I do? And why doesn’t non-fiction have the same hubba hubba effect on me?

Alack and alas, I know not the answers to any of those questions, be that I am a mere, muddle-headed pigwort of a wife.

I only know that this morning, I put Husbandio on a plane to Atlanta with a fresh novel in his backpack. Ha-cha-cha-cha-cha!

Pirate-parrot guy photo courtesy of Flickr’s mnassal’s photostream.

Hot dog eating guy photo courtesy of Flickr’s Space Pirate Queen.

Armor

Hi friends. I’m blogging over at Writer Unboxed today, discussing rejection and the nasty chafing and heat rash that occur if we try to hide from rejection.

If you have never felt rejected in your life, no need to click over; otherwise, come join me over here. You need not be a writer to read this one!

Thank you, dear followers of Inside-Out Underpants.

Tsunami

Anatomy of the School Emergency Kit

Sweetie, do you know what I dread each September? The assembly of your emergency kit.

I know it seems silly; after all, the contents are simple, basic things I have lying around the house. But maybe, perhaps in the year 2045, you will be a forty-year-old woman with a seven-year-old daughter for whom you have to pack an emergency kit. Then my dear, you will understand how those simple, basic items placed in a labeled Ziplock can take your overly-imaginative brain to terrible places.

Here. Let me show you.

The first item on your school emergency kit list: Juice box/beverage (the school has some emergency water). 

The school has “some emergency water”? Meaning what, exactly? One gallon per kid? One Dixie cup per kid? If the school’s not going to be specific, Sweetie, you get two juice boxes. Drink up. Or, share with a thirsty friend. It’s a scientific fact that generosity will distract you from the earthquake that has just flattened everything but (apparently) your 62-year-old school.

Next? Granola/cereal bar/cracker package/rice cakes. Dried fruit/trail mix raisins.

I slip four granola bars into your Ziplock, going back and forth and finally adding the granola bars with the almonds—a cardinal sin, I know, to bring tree nuts onto campus. But when that tsunami hits Seattle, and I cannot reach you, I want you to have some protein. Sure, I could give you a can of black beans and a can opener and a spork, but a can of black beans–even if it’s organic–will not say I Love You or I Will Get to You As Soon As I Possibly Can like a tree-nut-filled granola bar.

So four granola bars. And a handful of Hershey’s Kisses that needs no explanation or apology.

This year, I will also include a bottle of bright pink nail polish in your emergency kit. Was this the “Small comfort item (optional)” the school had in mind? Likely no.

Will it irritate your teacher? Perhaps.

But obviously, Sweetie, you cannot bring your brother (your favorite comfort item), and the Ziplock bag is too small to fit Phantie, the pink elephant(ie) with whom you have slept every night of your 2465 days.

I figure you and your brave classmates might get bored, sequestered in the classroom for 37 hours after terrorists bomb Seattle. So when inevitable tedium strikes, take turns painting each other’s nails a pink so bright and cheerful that you think of sundresses and sorbet and strawberries, not the reason you are stuck in a classroom with “some” water and your dear teacher who is reading Enemy Pie and The Adventures of Taxi Dog and Freckle Juice by flashlight, wishing he were home, safe, with his wife and daughter.

Pair of socks for hands or feet.

Socks for hands? When you were in preschool, it wasn’t as hard to imagine your little hands wearing a pair of socks after a natural or man-made disaster.

But you are nearly eight, Sweetie, and it’s heartbreaking to picture you, at this age, curled up in the dark, without your Phantie, lying beside your manicured classmates and fearless-on-the-surface teacher, wearing socks on your tender hands.

And let’s be honest. Nine times out of ten you pull a pair of socks on your feet and then wail, “But these don’t feeeeeeel right!” If socks never feel right on your feet, how on earth would socks possibly feel right on your hands?

Still, I add a pair of socks to the Ziplock bag. If all the other kids are wearing socks on their hands, I don’t want you to feel left out.

Which brings me to the tricky one. Note/Photo from home.

You know my friend, Rachel? She refuses to write the annual Emergency Kit Letter. She claims it’s simply too upsetting.

With most things, Rachel is peace and calm personified. Not when it comes to writing an emergency kit letter to her boys, not when she knows she might not be alive when they read it. A letter under those circumstances is a whole different ballgame.

I agree with Rachel. It’s terrible to write that letter. But I don’t want you, Sweetie, to wonder why there was no handwritten note tucked into your Ziplock. Had I been too busy? Too forgetful? Did I accidentally put both your letter and your brother’s letter into his Emergency Kit, just like I sometimes accidentally pack two desserts in your lunchbox or two chocolate milks in his?

A little girl with socks on her hands, listening to her teacher read Judy Blume by flashlight, shouldn’t have to wonder and worry why her note from home is missing.

That said, it’s an impossible note to write. I want to tell you everything will be OK, that I’ll be there in just a couple of minutes, that we’ll go out for ice cream afterward. I want to tell you that the biological warfare that has paralyzed NE Seattle isn’t dangerous enough to keep me from reaching you. I want to tell you that no quake or tsunami can separate us. That the massive meteor miraculously hit that big, already-empty hole in the ground that was going to be a new Trader Joe’s (what luck!), and I’ll be at the school ASAP.

But these might be lies. And I don’t want you to think this after reading my letter: You, Mom, Were So Full of Shit.

After some thought, I write this:

Sweetie. We love you so much! Daddy and I are missing you right now, but we know you are being so brave. Are you painting your fingers and toes with the nail polish? Make sure you paint your friends’ fingernails too. (And no, you do not have to wear the socks on your hands if they will smudge your nail polish.) Oh, we can’t wait to see you! Love and big hugs and kisses!

Mom and Dad 

Next? Small flashlight and Solar blanket (optional).

Do I add them to the Ziplock? You bet. The solar blanket might be handy, should the earth’s rotation slow, causing a dark chill to fall over NE Seattle.

Does a solar blanket require the sun to warm a little girl’s body? Who knows! Will a flashlight only cast eerie shadows in an otherwise darkened classroom? Who cares! Light begets hope. Hope begets warmth, with or without a solar blanket.

Packet of Tissues and Index card with emergency contact information, health needs, etc. Those I add with no problem.

I seal up that Ziplock, write Sweetie Callender, Room 26 on the bag with a Sharpie, and I say a prayer that you will never have to read my letter, carefully crafted with loopholes and almost-lies.

I say a prayer that this Ziplock will come home with you on the last day of school, still holding those almost-expired granola bars and optional solar blanket and tacky nail polish, a color I would never let you wear unless meteors or 9.0 quakes or tsunamis were in the day’s forecast.

I say a prayer that I can use the exact same letter next year. Each year.

Because I agree with Rachel. Some letters are just too hard, just too anxious-making, to rewrite every single September.

Hero

Care to follow me over to my post on Writer Unboxed? This particular post is for anyone who reads (i.e. you). Come on over. . . it’ll be fun, and you may just end up a hero.

 

Rules

Sweetie is 7.7 years old, but for years, she has been an expert at making up games with rules that make no sense, rules that change constantly during the duration of the game, rules that seem, to the rest of us, improbable and inconsistent and highly irritating.

Last week, for example, Buddy was down with a fever. Housebound for two days, Sweetie was not interested in Yahtzee or Sleeping Queens or Sorry or Whunu or Quirkle. She wanted to make up her own game.

“Mom,” Buddy (age 9.2) whispered. “I don’t ever understand her games.”

I patted his leg. “Me neither, Bud. Me neither.”

Meanwhile, he and I could hear Sweetie puttering downstairs, whistling her trademark whistle that she does when she’s most happy.

“It’s a little like Twister!” she called up to us, “but with Pick-upSticks. And some yoga. Buddy, you get to be the spinner.”

Buddy rolled his eyes. “Oh, great.”

What followed (which is exactly what always follows during one of Sweetie’s games) was the most bizarre and difficult and confusing game I’ve played since the last time I played one of Sweetie’s games.

You know how certain things (me in a maxi dress; Husbandio with a perm; Romney in the Oval Office) should never go together? That goes for Twister! and Pick-up Sticks and yoga.

Buddy, even while ill, was able to summon dramatic sighs and moans that mimicked the sighs and moans I was doing in my head.

He flopped on the floor, a look of anguish on his face. “Sweeeeeeetie,” he moaned, “this game doesn’t many annnny sense.”

“Yes it does,” she chirped. “You just need to do what I’m telling you to do. Then it will make sense.”

I’ve been thinking about those words a lot since. And while I’m no shrink, I bet a kid like Sweetie (i.e. a less traditional kid who doesn’t mind butting against societal mores, via hairstyles and fashion, on a daily basis) thrives when for once she can make up the rules. Rules that, sure, seem arbitrary and unnecessary and tedious to others, but that make sense to her.

A few weeks ago, she asked if she could use the green Halloween hair dye and attend Circus Arts Camp with green hair.

“Nope,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Why not?”

She didn’t whine or get upset. She just asked, “Why not?” in a way that made me realize she just wanted to understand why not. And as I thought it over, I didn’t really have a good answer. It was summer. The hair dye was temporary. Green is her favorite color. She was attending Circus Arts camp. There are plenty of Seattle parents who allow their kids to do far weirder things.

I could see why she was standing there, wondering ‘why not’? because I was wondering why not. Why is there some sort of unwritten rule about why a kid who loves color and loves standing out, fashion-wise, can’t have green stripes in her hair?

So I sprayed green stripes in her hair.

The more I think about it, the more Sweetie’s desire to foist her seemingly-weird rules on her parents and brother seem to be a form of payback. Payback for my rules, but also payback for the world’s rules, rules that in her mind, are a hundred times less sensible and logical than any rules she could create.

Why can her brother, age nine, take off his shirt and run around at the park when she, at age seven, is too old to do so?

Why can grownups dye their hair (“boring” colors in her POV) while kids can’t add a little color to their own locks?

Why can some people get married while others can’t?

Why is it OK to have dessert after dinner but not after breakfast?

All good questions. Questions for which I don’t have any good answers other than, “Because I said so.” Or “Because I am your mother.” Or “Because that’s just the way the world is.”

Do I want to teach my children that they have to follow rules even when the rules don’t seem grounded in safety or logic? Yes, part of me does. I don’t really want a kid with green hair. I don’t want Sweetie running around outside topless. I don’t want to send her off to school with a belly full of toast and ice cream. But you see? Those are all my issues, not Sweetie’s.

So while I am doing downward dog, with right foot on red and left hand on blue, waiting for Buddy to “spin” the Pick-up Sticks and do some sort of mathematical calculation that only Sweetie knows how to do, in order for me to know where to put my left foot and right hand, I am thinking that Sweetie is basking in the knowledge that for once, she gets to be in charge of the rules.

And that must feel pretty good.

Photograph courtesy of Flickrs’ Wrote.

Lottery

I have always been pro-hope. I tend to gravitate toward overtly hopeful people, those who, in their 60′s, enter the dating scene, trying to re-find true love; or those who start their own businesses; or those who stare down cancer with an unblinking eye.

Obama nabbed me with his Hope posters. My faith and belief in God are tightly tied to hope. I love the Olympics.

Yes, hope has always seemed like a good and beautiful thing, something to name a baby or a soap opera star.

Something that looks like this:

Or this:

Or this:

But I’ve realized lately, that hope can also be scary as, I don’t know . . . a party hosted by Anne Coulter and Sarah Palin? An earwig crawling into my ear and using its pinchers to prune important segments from my brain? Realizing the parachute is not going to open?

To clarify: Hope (the noun) is not scary. It’s the verb (to hope) that’s as scary as the Coulter-Palin Party/Earwig/Broken parachute thing. It is scary to hope.

I know this because a week ago, my fabulous agent (who is the perfect balance of arse-kicker and mother-figure and literary Buddha) started sending around my manuscript (AKA my book) to editors, with the hope that one of them will love it enough to convince her colleagues to purchase and publish it. As a result, I’ve been flapping and flopping around in a pool of my own hope. It feels equal parts terrifying and heart attacking.

My agent tells me that editors move slower in the summer. She tells me that all of publishing shuts down during the week of July 4th. She tells me it could be weeks before we hear anything. In spite of all this, I am still checking my email like a crazy person (which, in fact, I am). The refresh button on my email is now called my hope button.

And it’s this fervent hoping that I find surprisingly scary.

Sure, I must have had some form of hope (the noun) when I was writing the book. But that wasn’t scary because I didn’t have much choice in the matter; it was a book that needed me to write it so I wrote it. Also, it wasn’t scary to hope that I could write a book because accomplishing that goal was dependent only on me and my follow through.

Now though, I have to hope that some important editor likes it enough to convince her publisher to purchase it. My hope is dependent on other people. Smart professional people who love books and only want to publish the best ones, the ones that will sell. Will mine fit that category?

Yes, it’s scary to place my hope in the hands of another. But in writing this, I realize it’s even scarier to NOT put myself in situations where hope is required.

Back in March, the Mega Millions jackpot grew to $640 million. Imagine that. $640 million.

Apparently, in spite of very long odds, a lot of people imagined $640 million. According to this CBS News article, ticket sales were unprecedented. A cafe employee in Arizona sold $2600 worth of tickets to one person. Other Americans doubled and tripled their typical weekly lottery ticket spending, creating “unprecedented” ticket sales.

That’s hope, right? Hope + Mathematics; the more tickets I purchase, the better my chances of winning.

But in the same article, Mike Catalano, chairman of the mathematics department at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, S.D., provides “a good dose of reality.” He states the following:

“You are about 50 times as likely to get struck by lightning as to win the lottery, based on the 90 people a year getting struck by lightning,” Catalano said. “Of course, if you buy 50 tickets, you’ve equalized your chances of winning the jackpot with getting struck by lightning.”

Based on other U.S. averages, you’re about 8,000 times more likely to be murdered than to win the lottery, and about 20,000 times more likely to die in a car crash than hit the lucky numbers, Catalano said.

Some might say that the likelihood of getting a book published is a lot like the likelihood of winning the lottery. Maybe that’s true. Only I don’t play the lottery. I find it a little silly and a little depressing . . . to be so hopeful about something with such long odds?

The article shares the example of David Kramer, a lawyer in Lincoln, Nebraska. He says,

buying his Mega Millions ticket wasn’t about “the realistic opportunity to win . . . It’s the fact that for three days, the daydreaming time about what I would do if I won is great entertainment and, frankly, a very nice release from a normal day,” he said.

Ah yes. There’s the hope. The flower on a wire fence kind of hope . . . I suppose. But is it the same kind of hope as Obama hope? As the hope of a teacher who believes in her students? As the hope of someone praying to a God who–let’s face it–may or may not be there? As the hope of someone who spends nearly a decade writing a book that may never get published?

Lottery hope seems different, a little sadder, maybe because I believe the act of hoping must be paired with a bit of work if it’s to be powerful. If hope is paired with hard work, hope can only be admirable, not pitiful.

In this TED talk about the power of hope, surgeon Sherwin Nuland, notes that when he looked up the word “hope” in the OED, he found that the root of “hope” is the Indo-European word, “curve.” Therefore, he says, hope can be understood as “a change in direction, going in a different way.” He found that a great way to understand such an abstract concept.

[Furthermore,] Hope [he explains] does not consist of the expectation that things will come out exactly right, but the expectation that they will make sense, regardless of how they come out.

So is buying $2600 in lottery tickets an example of that kind of hope? Sure, it’s an attempt to “curve” one’s life in a different direction. But I think hope is more than that.

Dr. Nuland goes on to say (and I’ll paraphrase here) that hope gives us the knowledge that the world can be saved by the human spirit, that we can all rise out of our ordinary selves and achieve something that initially, we didn’t know we were capable of achieving.

Yes. That’s it. Hope as action. Hope as a change agent. Hope as a catalyst.

Just think about it: the world’s greatest humanitarians, leaders, teachers and artists have dared to hope. They have taken their hope (the noun) and made it an active verb as they go public with their hope. Is there risk? Yes. Did Martin Luther King, Jr. ever have stomachaches? Probably. Did Abe “the hunk” Lincoln ever worry that he was pushing the country in a foolish direction? Most likely. How about my friend who is on round four of cancer (and she’s my age). Man, that girl is filled with hope!

Getting a book published? Big whoop. Small potatoes in the scheme of things. So OK, I have a wee stomachache. So I’m having trouble sleeping. So I had to call Husbandio, worried that I was experiencing a heart attack. (I wasn’t. My shoes were too tight AND MY BOOK IS BEING READ BY EDITORS!)

I may win the lottery and get my book published. I may not.

But I think I will.

I hope I will.

If our country’s most famous hopers, Abe and MLK, Jr and Obama (shoot, why are they all MEN?) can accept the inherent scariness of fervent hope, so can I.

After all, the scary heart attack feeling is certainly better than attending a scary Palin-Coulter party.

While you are pondering the image of Sarah Palin dancing the Macarena and passing hors d’ oeuvres, please share with me your opinions and experiences with hope, with lotteries, with earwigs. When have you been most driven by hope? How did you deal with the scariness and the risk of getting egg on your face? What’s your “hope button”? 

I’d really love to hear your thoughts. Just, please, don’t send me a photo of an earwig. It’s been a bad week for earwigs.

Hopeful post-it photo courtesy of Flickr’s Natasja db.

Hopeful flower photo courtesy of Flickr’s Fountain_Head.

Hopeful paper crane photo courtesy of Flickr’s Photography-andreas.

Expecting

When I was pregnant, other mothers promised the following would magically occur after the birth of my child:

1. I would want to stay up all night, staring at my sleeping, sweet-faced child.

2. I would be able to recognize my child’s cries from a sea of also-crying children.

3. I would miss my children terribly when they weren’t within arm’s reach.

4. I would absolutely love being a mom.

None of that happened.

When other mothers promise that certain things will happen automatically, and then those things don’t happen automatically, it makes a gal feel like a totally inept mother. Inept and abnormal.

A mother who couldn’t recognize her own child’s cry? Certainly Buddy, in his colicky first six months, gave me plenty of opportunity to hear his cry.

A mother who didn’t need to stare at her beautiful sleeping baby? Yeppers. When the babe was asleep, I wanted to be asleep OR I wanted to be writing. Or eating some form of cheese on some form of cheese vehicle. Or surfing Nordstrom.com, putting things in my shopping bag and then forgetting I had put them there.

It also took me a while to admit that some days, I simply didn’t love being the mother of babies . . . or toddlers . . . nor did I love Sweetie’s Helen Keller phase. I make a lousy Annie Sullivan.

And yet, there has never been a question, not one single doubt, that there’s anything weak about the Love I feel for Buddy and Sweetie.

The love just doesn’t look or feel like how I expected.

It’s a hard thing to articulate, a mother’s love, in ways that don’t sound cliché and sappy. It’s also hard to assign words to something that’s simultaneously basic and complex.

In some ways, the love I feel for Buddy and Sweetie is as solid and natural as the pit of a stone fruit. But it’s also like the pearl that sits on the meat of an oyster. It’s like a Rubix cube or a many-faceted gemstone. It’s also like a pile of dirt. Some days the love feels like bricks. Other days, like bubbles.

Other than that, I have a hard time explaining what I feel for my children. It must be some base animal instinct, some biological reaction, that mothers almost always love their children without question or reason.

But I had been promised (and therefore I expected) that if I loved my children, I would love the role of mother. So I worried I was not meant to be a mother. Or, that I was not one of those natural mothers.

Of course, not all innate, “natural” maternal actions and reactions are examples of good parenting.

When I was in kindergarten, our family took home the class gerbil. During the vacation, this particular gerbil decided to give birth to three or four pink, hairless babies.

She then proceeded to eat them.

In hindsight, these babies were likely stillborn, in which case this could have been an example of a mother’s grief. Or her desire to tidy up the place a bit. Animals, as we know, do some pretty violent, unsophisticated stuff sometimes. They can’t help it.

But recently I’ve noticed there’s something rather violent and unsophisticated, even animal-ish, about the way I love Buddy and Sweetie.

Which isn’t what I was expecting.

A few months ago, Husbandio and I noticed a weird-looking mole on Buddy’s upper arm. The dermatologist agreed it was weird-looking, that it might be something that was once called “juvenile melanoma.”

Excuse me?

“They don’t call it ‘juvenile melanoma’ anymore,” she explained. “Apparently the word ‘melanoma’ frightened too many parents.”

“Take it out,” I said. “He doesn’t have baseball until Saturday or viola until Monday. Take it out. Now. Please.”

No stranger to the removal of weird moles, I moved to the chair where Buddy was reclining. I held his hand as they cleaned his arm and injected the lidocaine, and I began watching the “punch” excision.

Here I must pause to explain that I genuinely enjoy watching medical procedures. I like watching my own, and I like watching the procedures of others. I don’t get woozy or wiggy or grossed out. I just think bodies are pretty cool.

But apparently, I don’t think it’s cool to watch someone take a piece of my son.

Holding Buddy’s hand, I started to feel dizzy and sick and lightheaded. He was fine, but my face must have lost all color because the dermie forced me to sit down.

Even weirder: I kind of wanted to punch that dermatologist in the face. NO ONE takes a tiny chunk of my son. No one.

See? That’s a violent and irrational response. The response of a gerbil.

Then, just this week, I was watching Buddy’s baseball game when a parent carried over a sobbing Sweetie, explaining that a boy had pushed Sweetie off a concrete thing. YET AGAIN I had not recognized the sound of her crying. Another mother had to rescue her.

Holding her tight while she cried, I surveyed the damage. Sweetie’s shin was already bruising under a scrape of raw skin.

“Who did this?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm.  “And do you want me to go talk to him?”

Sweetie nodded, sitting up and wiping her eyes.

“Good,” I said. “Let’s roll.”

When the mother-witness pointed out two boys making their way to the other side of the field, I literally sprinted after them, taking the shortcut (running through center field), hot on the trail of these punk, middle school-aged bullies.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey you! Why’d you push my daughter? Huh? Why’d you push her?!?!”

Turning to me, the thugs proceeded to make up some story about “not even being over near your daughter,” during which Sweetie caught up to me.

“Mommy,” she said, tugging my hand. “You chased the wrong boys.”

After I apologized profusely, I chased down the right thug, only to realize he was the child of a super-nice mother I know from the gym.

I looked down at Sweetie. “Um . . . I know that kid’s mom. Do we still need to talk to him?”

When Sweetie nodded, I took a deep breath and, in my explanation of the crime and the resulting injury, I proceeded to make this little boy cry. I came on too strong. I was far more aggressive than necessary. As a result, I felt obliged to track down this nice-mother’s email so I could send her an apology for my crazy mama bear antics.

See? I’m only a few brain cells more sophisticated that than poor mama gerbil.

And yet, I’m glad I want to protect my daughter from thugs. I’m glad I want to punch someone who’s cutting up my son. It means I am a natural mother after all.

But it’s taken me a while–years–to feel like a natural mom. We have these certain expectations, and if they aren’t met, we can feel like failures. Our expectations cause us to criticize and condemn ourselves and other mothers who make different family or parenting choices.

In this Huffington Post article, Elisabeth Badinter makes this statement: “Nature knows only one way to be a mother.”

That’s true. The mama gerbil didn’t pause to consider her various grieving options. She just started eating her babies. But, Badinter goes on to explain, we human mothers have choices and options.

[Women are] endowed with consciousness, personal histories, desires and differing ambitions. What some do well and with pleasure, others do badly or out of duty. By failing to take account of women’s diversity, by imposing a single ideal of motherhood, by pursuing the notion of a perfect mother — one who has the exclusive responsibility of making or breaking her children — we fall into a trap.

I once had a friend tell me that the birthing choices we make–whether to give birth with or without an epidural, in a hospital or birthing center or at home, with a midwife or with an OB–”says a lot about who we are as mothers.”

This friend  chose to have a “natural” childbirth, whereas I had recently given birth to my second child, in a hospital, after a visit from Dr. Feelgood, the deliverer of epidurals. I felt slapped in the face, and her meanness, the way she judged the way I chose to welcome my children into the world, is still painful.

So how about this. Instead of focusing on whether we (or others) are meeting our own (or society’s) fixed and limited expectations, let’s focus on how we show our love, our encouragement, our dedication to our children.

If you are someone who does love every moment of motherhood, please don’t think I’m a monster.

Likewise, if you want to nurse your preschooler on the cover of TIME? Rock on. If you want to return to work two weeks after the birth of the babe? God bless you, sister. If you want to homeschool or send your kid to boarding school or enroll in the Waldorf School down the street? Great!

The different choices we make as mothers does not usually reflect the amount of love we feel for our children, and that’s the important thing, Love. The unimportant thing is those terrible expectations that society foists upon us.

So please, if you happen to hear one of my kids crying and I don’t notice, will you come get me? Chances are, I won’t have heard him or her.

Also, if you see me sprinting somewhere, in hot pursuit of a four-foot thug, please ask me if I’m sure I’m chasing the right guy. Chances are, I’m probably not.

 

Story

Sometimes I like to crack myself up by making things talk that don’t normally talk. A while back for example, I wrote a post in which I shared the photo of the little man-faced berry that Husbandio grew in our yard.

I’m telling you, that little man-berry was hysterical, with his high-pitched British accent, just a tad whiny. Like David Sedaris, only British. Nigel Sedaris.

I like to make our cats talk too, especially the compulsive overeater one, in kind of a Samuel L. Jackson way. “Gimme the sandwich, ya dum &!**$#, or Sweetie-kid gets cut.”

Of course, it’s not only cats and man-faced berries that provide me entertainment. Sometimes it’s snapdragons or heirloom tomatoes. Other times, during warm weather when shorts reveal a bit more leg, I like to make the fat on my knees talk. Postpartum belly fat works well, too, for pretend conversations, though I find watching one’s belly fat tell jokes is more sad than funny. And isn’t there already enough sadness in the world?

The best, though, has got to be Cornish game hens, what with their legs that appear to be wearing jodhpurs. If you ever have the good fortune of cooking a Cornish game hen for dinner, save yourself a few extra minutes to have that hen do a little dance, perhaps a brief vaudeville routine. At least very least, have him walk about his cutting board stage and share a few jokes with you and the cats. Have him do the Macarena, perhaps, or the Electric Slide.

Why do I do this? I can only imagine it’s related to my love of writing fiction. I get such a kick out of pumping voice and personality into things that are otherwise lifeless.

Take that little man-faced berry; did he get teased as a kid? Did he consider surgery to remove his . . . face . . . so he’d look more . . . faceless? What about the Cornish game hen? Is it not possible that his whole life he yearned to be on the stage, but instead, he had parents who made him pursue a degree in Economics? And what about belly fat . . . can you imagine the nostalgia of a postpartum belly, longing for the days of yore?

I’m working on a blog post for a writers’ blog, and in doing so, I have been thinking quite a lot about story. Why do we read stories? Why do crazies like me choose to spend years and years penning the stories of people who never lived? What about the stories of others is so interesting, so compelling?

Of course, story provides entertainment and escape. But there’s more to it. I know there is.

Right now, I am reading The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. And I can’t put it down. Yes, there are parts that are irritating and meandering and, if I may be so bold, may have been cuttable. There are other parts that seem a little “this happened, then this happened, then this happened.”

But the other day I realized it’s precisely that meandering, cuttable detail, that makes the story so deeply satisfying. Through that detail, I see myself in the female character’s story. I also see that the characters who on the surface are not at all like me, have a layered richness that makes me realize we are, in fact, not so far apart. That we all long for the same things (love, acceptance, understanding) and will act both stupidly and, occasionally, wisely, in order to get those things.

What would happen to our planet if we had a better understanding of the stories of others? If we could better understand what makes a person who she is, why a person says the things she does, who a person wanted to become, but for whatever reason, was unable? What could happen to our planet?

It seems to me, when we have a better sense of a stranger’s humanness, we tend to treat that stranger with a little more compassion and a lot less fear. More compassion and less fear? Holy schmokes, can you imagine what that would do for our world?

A few weeks ago, there was a very angry lady ahead of me in line at the drug store. She was already huffing and puffing about how long the line had been, how long she had had to wait, how she was already running late, when she realized she had forgotten something.

“Don’t help her!” she yelled, pointing at me, the next person in line. “I’m late for work!” And she hurried off to find whatever it was she had forgotten.

The cashier and I smiled nervously at each other, waiting, waiting, waiting for the lady to return. Finally, the cashier grimaced. “I guess I can help you . . . do you think she’ll yell at me?”

“Nah,” I said, putting my Preparation H and bottle of Riesling on the conveyor belt. “And if she does, I’ll defend you. I’m a lot tougher than I look. A lot tougher.”

Well. When that angry lady returned with her forgotten item (a purple UW Husky t-shirt), she went absolutely nuts. “I TOLD you not to help anyone else!” she yelled. “I TOLD you I was late for work! Now I’m going to be miss my bus!” Then she pointed at me. “You didn’t have to DO that!”

(A bit about me and my sense of justice: I am usually fairly happy to admit when I am wrong. I am also somewhat happy to be yelled at when I have done something wrong. BUT when I am yelled at because someone else is having a bad day and when a perfectly nice-albeit-timid cashier is yelled at for keeping the line of customers moving? I am not OK with that. Not one bit OK.)

But I had just been to bible study. And going to bible study reminds me that we are all total messes who, for the most part, are just doing the best we can. This angry lady included.

So I went for it.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, getting a little closer to the yelling woman. “It sounds like you are really having a hard day. And now you’re going to be late for work? That’s really stressful.”

That’s what my mouth was saying, but make no mistake, my brain was thinking exactly what most brains would be thinking: if you, lady, were so worried about getting to work, then maybe you shouldn’t have spent all that time picking out a UW t-shirt. And why did you need a UW t-shirt, anyway? I can’t really see why you’d need that ugly t-shirt when you knew—

“You want to hear about stress?” she hollered at me. “My boss is going to yell at me, and I got robbed this week and they took $200 cash and my car won’t start . . .”

I nodded, taking my bag from the cashier. “Jeez, what a terrible week. I’m so sorry.”

I stood there, trying to absorb some of the angry woman’s anger before it hit the cashier. After all my tough girl talk, I had not done a very good job at shielding her from this woman’s wrath.

While the checker rang up her items, she raged on, detailing the other bits of terribleness in her week, something about her cousin being sick or maybe her uncle, and apparently the Seattle police weren’t at all helpful after her burglary. I stood a few yards away, nodding all the while, a look of sympathy on my face. It wasn’t hard to feel sympathy. This woman was a hot mess.

But as she continued, the volume of her anger became lower. As she finally spun herself out (while the cashier bagged up her all-important t-shirt), the yelling woman reminded me, her voice stern, “Still, you shouldn’t have gone in front of me.”

“OK,” I said, biting the inside of my cheeks, hoping to release the juice of kindness and compassion into my words. “I really hope your day gets better!”

As I started my car, I saw her walking in the opposite direction of the bus stop. And something weird happened: I wanted to keep on being nice to her. I wanted to smother her with compassion until she passed out. I wanted to shove kindness into her angry face until she puked up all of her roiling anger.

“Hey!” I called, not thinking. “Can I give you a ride? I’m happy to give you a ride to work.”

She shook her head and kept her eyes on the ground. “I’m fine!” she said. “I just need to work it out on my own.”

No, I wanted to tell her, what you need is some time with my dancing Cornish game hens. THAT, is what you need!

Instead, I waved. “OK. Tomorrow will be a better day!”

And I drove off, relieved that she wouldn’t be in my car (I generally don’t need more Crazy in my car) marveling at the sadness and anger in her story. Feeling overwhelmed with sadness myself.

Certainly, the story about the burglary, about being late for work, about her mean boss, may have been fiction. After all that, she wasn’t even walking toward the bus stop. But the sadness and the anger? That was 100% real.

That’s the thing: there is a lot of sadness and anger in a lot of our stories. Certainly, we may handle it differently than the angry woman did, but we all have sadness and anger in our lives. All of us. Yes, even you, Miss PollyAnna Perfectlife. Even and especially you.

Which brings me back to Story. I think we love and seek stories because our own stories are so important to us. Our stories, past and present, forge our identity, and with our identity, we are grounded in something that feels slightly more stable than life often feels.

We humans need to believe we matter. We need to know our lives have meaning. I think it’s our stories that give our lives meaning. My stories tether me to something bigger than myself, and your stories, when I remind myself to hear them, add a richness to my life, either by what they teach me or by how much less alone I feel after hearing them.

Weeks after that near-scuffle at Rite Aid, I am still thinking about that angry woman, wondering how she’s doing. Wondering if that ugly t-shirt was for her or if she gave it to a loved one. Does a woman that angry even have loved ones? She became real when I absorbed a small part of her story. A little part of her now resides in my head, for better or for worse.

Sharing our stories with others, and even more important, taking the time to listen to the stories of those around us, is the best thing we can do to grow peace and love. Likewise, making inanimate things tell jokes and cuss inappropriately adds humor and laughter (two other key growers of peace and love) to our day.

So come on. You try it, too! Learn someone’s story this week. Coerce someone to share his/her/its story with you, then report back. I’m not kidding about this, people. Inquire of and listen to the stories of others (even if it’s just an heirloom tomato or some knee fat). Just see what happens.

Black and red tree art courtesy of Flickr’s DryIcons.