Category Archives: the telling ground

Loving Hard: In Memory of Gideon Bruce

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In many ways it made perfect sense that I would call her at 7:30am, blurry eyed and frogged-voiced, having just rolled out of bed, bone-weary. It was the day after Christmas. All six of us were sick—whooping cough, we’d later find—and exhausted from both the fun and the coughing.

After I received her text—stilted, formal, apologetic for its intrusion—I called every hospital in the area, finally finding her where two of my own four were born.

Her husband answered, his voice making clear his surprise. After all, who calls the hospital phone these days? But I didn’t want to call her cell. At least I was awake enough to think of that.

“She’s with a nurse right now. She’ll call you back.”

Of course, she didn’t. And who can blame her.

She’d been at my house just four days prior, shuffling from one foot to the other the way pregnant women do. Her daughter ate a cupcake. They left within moments—I’m sure she was tired.

He was born a trimester too early, weighing barely one pound. Placental failure. Not insufficiency, but failure. I cried all day.

One hundred and ten days later—on her birthday, no less—he came home. Still tiny, still feeding through a tube, still too cold for his own good.

I finally met him at five and a half months, found him not yet the weight of my second the day he was born.

“Are you kidding, he’s huge!” His mother protested.

I was embarrassed at my gaffe.

“Yes, yes! He is. Of course.”

He was beautiful. I held him as long as I could, only putting him down when I ate my burger. So warm… he had finally learned the trick of self-regulating his temperature and he performed it masterfully.

He was beautiful.

A mere three weeks later, I cried again. This time the news came by mass email, one I read at least three times before feeling it settle, hard, between the shoulder blades, the eyes, the heart: “Almost zero chance of normalcy… Leave us alone. We’ll let you know. We don’t need anything. Just… let us be.”

“Should I come home?” A text from my husband.

“No. It’s fine. I’m praying.”

I’m praying.

I prayed to God, to Google, searching every avenue for an answer, but finding none.

I emailed a client—world-renowned pediatrician, a fellow congregant at my church. He would know.

“This will be difficult. No matter what, this will be difficult.”

The next day a follow up: “Be patient and hope that some sort of answer will come in the years that follow.”

And the next day: “Do they go to our church?”

No.

When I lost my son, eight months old, flaming hair, world’s most gummy smile, I thought those answers would never come. No years would follow—the earth stilled, and with it, my heart.

I know her days are frozen—she’s said as much. Each day she lifts him, tries to gauge if he’s gained an ounce. Half-an-ounce. A stack of envelopes in one hand, a baby in the other. How do they compare? Which fatigues her muscles more?

She looks at his head. Measures it’s circumference. Eyes it against her daughter’s .50 cent bouncy ball—the kind on end caps at grocery stores, drawing the sticky eyes of children, begging meter money from purse bottoms. She’s refined the skill—can tell you the weight and width of a fly these days. She and her husband take bets; they’re experts now.

I pray.

Google frustrates me with its ambivalence, God tries my patience. I keep living. Cooking, cleaning, writing. My daughter hits her first single. My oldest lands an internship and the youngest just won’t quit climbing the stove. We are living.

She’s living too. Living in fear, in doubt, in the hollow place between inhale and exhale. She watches him breathe. Smooth, warm, the way he should. Air fills small lungs, routes oxygen to all the necessary places. Escapes in sighs so sweet a flower bears its name.

But his name is not sweet. His name is that of a warrior who dared ask God for more. More miracles, God, and I will do your bidding. Do not be angry, God, but I simply must have more. God relented and the trumpets blew and the idols fell. And when that warrior died, years later, the alters were resurrected and the false Gods rose.

Let him live, God.

Full and healthy, conqueror of enemies. Bearer of swords and trumpets and weighty things of glory. An unlikely warrior, God. Let him live.

**********

I wrote this prayer in July of 2014. Four months later, on November 28, 2014, Gideon passed from this world and into the next. He was not quite one year old.

Today, on this one-year-anniversary, my household is where it should be: in a time of board games and late nights, of midnight pie with cream, and just one more game of pool before heading off to bed. We’re enjoying the smell of simmering soup while the just-put-up tree glitters with fresh-bought lights and tip-top star, and the littles dance to a singing snowman we plot to sneak away as soon as their heads are turned.

We are living life as it should be lived. As Gideon’s mom would say, we are loving hard.

I can think of no greater tribute to a boy so loved and missed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Things That Are and Could Have Been

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She—my baby girl Rachel—so badly wants babies. And we tell her: go to college, get married, have babies, in that order. She’s cool with this (she’s five), but the problem is: she really doesn’t like boys. Except her big brother, and sometimes her dad, and even less often her little brother. Boys, she says, are the losing team. They stink, and have too much body hair, and if they nursed babies it would be dirt-milk. So how to achieve her goal of motherhood? This, I want to tell her, is a problem women have faced for centuries.

She informed us tonight at dinner that men aren’t necessary for the birth of babies. My husband took umbrage at this and sought my support in convincing our daughter otherwise. I cocked my eye at him and said, “That’s a fine line, dear. She’s talking about carrying the baby inside and giving birth and nursing it. Do you really want to cross that line and tell her just exactly how it is that men contribute?” That put an end to that, and our daughter remains convinced that mamas are all that are needed. A lot of mamas think this too, and it’s kind of dragging us womenfolk down, all this hard work of going at life and parenting alone.

I should know: I did the single parent thing for right at twelve years. Technically I was married for about 18 months of those 12 years, but not in such a way that anyone would’ve noticed. Overall, those single years were some of the happiest of my life. My son makes for a wonderful life companion and I am the most introverted of introverts so being alone kind of suited me. But while happy, those years were also extremely, extremely hard. Like Chris Rock says, “Sure, you can be a single mom, but should you be?” It depends, of course, so I’ll just leave that one alone. Too many caveats.

I remember this girl from law school who was pretty much the most anti-marriage woman I’d ever met outside of a punk club. “It’s the worst contract for women ever! It’s killing us and bringing us down! We’re losing our selves, our careers, our potential!” And so on and so forth. That (wonderful) woman is now happily married with two kids and often posts Pinterest-worthy photos of homemade crafts on her Facebook page. She also is now “self-employed,” which we female lawyer-types know is really shorthand for “I want more flexibility than the jerks who run law firms (and some non-profits) will let me have.”

There is also the infamous case of Gloria Steinem who said women need men like fish need a bicycle (as in, not at freakin’ all). She is now married as well. I’m not sure if she’s happy or not because I haven’t checked. But regardless.

My personal ambivalence towards marriage could be because my first marriage was such an abomination. It was full of abuse, affairs, bar fights, and lots of drugs, none of which were perpetrated, had, started, or used by me. The innocent party stands highly wronged here, and though I’ve reached a level of forgiveness, the PTSD is a little harder to shake. What did come from that first marriage are two of the most beautiful people God ever created, and lots of what some might call “wisdom,” but only because it’s stuff I learned before the age of fifty; to anyone over fifty it’s mere common knowledge.

For some Godforsaken reason I decided to get marriage at fifteen. I think being pregnant had something to do with it. My parents yelled and screamed and forbade the marriage (as they should have), but his parents were gleeful and facilitated the whole shebang. I realize now the reasons for this were many. One, they were happy that their oldest son, whom they worried about greatly, had found a gentle and God-fearing partner who could influence him for good. Two, seeing as how I was pregnant, and that they were fundamentalists Christian types in a kindly and charismatic spirit-led sort of way, they figured we better make things legal to please Jesus.

So off we went in the middle of the night in an old Mustang that ended up stranding us halfway to the airport. Me, scared, pregnant, and hungry. Him, just happy to be doing something frowned upon by the establishment.

That baby, the one making me hungry, is the one who later died at not quite one year old. But even after that the ex and I stayed together and soon had another baby. That baby is now eighteen, in college, and the love of my life. Without him—as I often say while loving and hugging him hard—I’d probably have wound up in a cardboard box somewhere, spanging and dumpster diving with a tear tattooed on my face.

But instead, I’m here.

In case I haven’t mentioned it thus far, let me now say with emphasis: things happen for a reason. So I try not to even question it, this voluptuously curvaceous life, choosing instead to marvel at the mundane, squint so as not to bat my eyes at the ironic and absurd, and keep focused on the faithful, such as finding myself squarely in these middle years, strangely, dizzily, ironically, married.

Again.

You Will Know Us By the Dirt Under Our Nails

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My first son.

Jeremy.

Everything begins and ends with him. He and Jesus are my alpha and omega, but only Jeremy is my magic baby awaiting me in Heaven.

I promise you: he is.

And when I find him, he will still be almost eight-months-old. He will still have red hair and the most gorgeous, luminous white skin you’ve ever seen. He will still have the gummiest of smiles, and arms for only me.

When you grieve, if you grieve—and I hope you don’t—you will understand. You will get religion in a heartbeat, unless you swear off the Gods for good and let yourself die inside. Which you might, because some people do, but I hope you aren’t one of them.

I think this was even the first argument I had with the man whom I later married: could someone whose child died not believe in Heaven?

“Religion can’t be your crutch!” this childess man of twenty-something years and no prior marriages said to me.

“You know nothing.” Hot words from a seething girlfriend said through clenched tight teeth. Maybe he didn’t know anything then but he does now; he will shout “halleluiah, happy birthday” with the best of them, and if he’s humoring me I don’t care.

“I want to dig him up and hold him.” My friend whose son just died wrote these words to me. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

“Good Lord, no,” I wrote her back. “You’d be crazy if you didn’t want to. You’d be crazy if throwing out his last crap-filled diaper was something you wanted to do. You’d be crazy if you laid aside his lovie the first week after his demise and said, ‘I guess I don’t need this anymore.’ The grieving mom’s job is to do whatever the hell she wants to do. And if that means getting dirt under your nails from clawing at the freshly turned earth on a Berkeley hillside, then by all means, get to it. I’ll loan you my nail brush and a shovel.”

A grieving parent has no limits. Grief is everything for a long, long time. Forever, even, for all I know, because frankly, I’ve just gotten to where I don’t allow myself to think about it. It’s been over 20 years, but even now, as I type, I don’t think, or feel. I worry a bit that when I go to bed that having written these words might force my brain to think, to love, and so maybe I’ll stay up just a bit later, type until sheer exhaustion weighs down my head and hands, so that then I can blissfully, ignorantly, blank-mindedly, sleep.

But if you are a thinker instead of a stuffer, I imagine your life will be pretty unbearable for somewhere close to always.

“I’m sorry to burden you.”

That’s what my friend said to me somewhere in the middle of a 2am email when she couldn’t sleep and needed comfort from someone in this exclusive club of moms who have lost.

“You should apologize for that apology,” I may have said, or not, but certainly should have if I didn’t.

The Dead Child Club is gratefully small, and if you’re a member you’d better be prepared to welcome new members with open hearts and honest words, no matter the time of day or if Comcast is finally on the other line. When my son died I didn’t know anyone else who had lost an almost-one-year-old. Miscarriage, yes. Stillbirth, yes. Adult child, yes. 100% healthy, beautiful, learning-to-crawl bright-eyed baby boy? Nope. Is any one of these experiences easier or harder than another? Only God knows that, and it’s a question I think is better left unasked.

The first time I met someone who confessed to having lived through the same as me was about fifteen years after my loss. I was shocked. But I was also comforted: “There’s someone else! She gets it! She knows!” I wanted to shout from the rooftops, hug her tight, have her over for dinner. But our encounter was short—ironically she was performing an ultrasound during my 20-week prenatal checkup—and we never crossed paths again.

My friend’s son had a disease I can’t pronounce or spell, and that is so rare no one puts any money or thought into researching it, or raising public awareness through rubbery bracelets and walks for the cure. My son died of SIDS. It is much more common, but without a known cause. One fatal illness presents within the womb, the other during the quiet of sleep.

I mean, what the f*?%? We lay in our beds, eating ice cream, fat and happy and pregnant, and all the while certain death is building in our bodies, masquerading as pure joy.

Once bright-eyed beauties, grieving mothers are rendered greasy haired and malnourished. They are the real life living dead. Trust me on this. Although its been 20+ years, I’ve yet to convince my eyes to smile and I’m much less buoyant than I was all those years ago. I wonder who I would be today without this gaping hole, this miserable loss, but since it hurts too much to think about I usually don’t come up with much of an answer.

I ask you: How can these hollow-cored, hollow-eyed women believe in a God who could take their babies? Or, if believed in, how could they love him? Believe he loves them? Well, that’s a really good question. It’s right up there with questions about the Holocaust and genocide and war and rape. How could any of us believe in, or love, God in this kind of world?

There are a lot of folks out there who try to answer that question, and I think most of their answers are full of holes joined by high hopes that no one will think to look below the surface.

“God has a plan.”

“Why would this be His plan?”

“It will serve a purpose in your life.”

“Screw that.”

“God doesn’t control these things; we all do our own stuff down here while God watches and eats popcorn.”

The list goes on. Some of it may hold water, but overall it’s all just a bunch of baloney. You either do or you don’t, and you either draw closer or further away. If you’re lucky, you draw closer. You feel in your bones the truth of God’s power, and love, and knowledge that all things will knit together through your misery, somehow, someway, should you just let it.

But really, you should probably never try to convince a member of the Dead Child Club that there is a loving God. Instead: Pray for them. Love them. Let them hit you with small angry fists and smear snot all over you. It’s the least that you can do.

The Telling Ground

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Those who say we encounter crossroads in life are idiots. I know no one who walks a straight line for years then suddenly hits some great, game-changing T in the middle of the road. Instead, the crossroads and forks and dead ends come fast and furious most days, one after the other. Others sneak up on us as we’re on cruise control, dozing at the wheel.

The daily in and out of breathing, living, being, mocks us. It tells us one week we are on a calm and determined path, and the next that we are certain of near death from sheer exhaustion and stress. I can think of no greater sad sack in this regard than me. It seems that every month or so I email my prayer team friends, saying that my husband and I are at a “great time of change.” A time of important decision-making. That we feel the winds of change a blowing’, taking our lives somewhere we never anticipated they’d go, but we just know—know!—that God has “A Plan for Us.” And my friends smile and nod across our virtual divide; “praying!” they write on our private Facebook page, followed by cute emoticons. But I know they must be rolling their eyes at yet another of my “crossroads” moment, coming mere moments after the last.

Example:

“The kids are doing great! Our marriage has never been better!”

Six days pass.

“I need prayer! Our oldest got a speeding ticket, the youngest hasn’t slept in days, and marriage is just too hard for words!”

Sigh.

God gives us much more than crossroads. He gives us sinewy snakes and wiggling vines and magic trick glasses that tease us into thinking they’re half full, right before convincing us of their emptiness and that He’s leaving us to die of thirst somewhere just past the last gas station in a 100-mile radius.

I have guessed for the last several years that this has something to do with being in one’s thirties. That the thirties are a time of changing jobs, career-ladder climbing, raising a multitude of children, and maybe even taking care of aging parents. Marriages have often hit the magic number seven, the year infamous for being the most rocky of them all (at seven years in, there’s usually a five- and two-year-old running around, tossing rocks with great abandon into one’s happily-ever-after path). But when I wisely assert this gleaning in front of older friends they laugh and say that being of a certain age has nothing to do with it:

“There’s always something!” They say with a nod and a smile, all but patting me on my sweet little head.

And I see that this is true. I see it among my older friends, my family. Those in my church, and the people who I’m somehow friends with on Facebook although we’ve never even met.

Prayer, prayer, prayer, they say. “We need prayer.”

Sometimes it’s for cancer. Sometimes a sick dog. Other times the death of a child. But always, always, it’s something. Really, it’s kind of funny if you think about it. On one of your darker days, when all the humor you can muster comes straight from the gallows and you haven’t yet showered by 4pm, if you can step outside yourself to look in, you might see a little humor shining through. We’re all so chaotic, convinced we’re neurotic and that everyone else is better than we are, while at the same time thinking snidely of all the ways our neuroticism is superior to that of others—it’s really quite absurd. We’re all so desperate. Desperate to unplug, to declutter, to simplify, to keep Sabbath, to be less judgmental, to eat less sugar, to self-improve while also accepting ourselves just as we are. And all the while we’re hitting T after T in the road, convinced that each is the best and last and hoping our insurance covers whiplash.

My good friend’s son just died.

He lived slightly less than one year, and each day was torture. Torture for him, for his family, and surely for a God who doesn’t enjoy seeing good people suffer. Those of us who cared were tortured, too. We wanted so very much to take the pain away but couldn’t. So instead we cooked and cleaned and babysat and called (or didn’t call) and texted (or didn’t text). Whatever we could do, we did. But her son died anyway.

My son died, too, also not making it quite a year in this curveball world we live in.

And to this day, they are both still dead.

So yes. There’s always something.

It’s true that some of us have more “something” than others, but it’s also true that some of us just hide it better.

Me, I’ve gotten to a point where I barely hide anything at all. To be sure, I spent one of my life’s many vignettes doing just that, but now… I write. For two years now I’ve put my whiny words to electronic paper, or sometimes its my perceived wisdom and wit, hitting the little button that says “Publish,” sending my very essence out to the few folks who actually take the time to read about it, which always surprises me.

Many of my friends do this, too. We’ve joined up our little bloggy selves into a little bloggy sphere in which you will find us high-fiving and fist pumping and in general being the mutual admiration society for one another’s words. And, occasionally, one of us will hit a larger audience than ourselves, something that feels good and gives hope to those of us who are convinced we can’t go on living unless we’re a) better understood, b) teaching a life lesson we’ve learned in all our infinite wisdom, or c) making someone laugh at the quirkiness of our kids and personal lives. Even better is option d—helping others feel understood.

Most of my friends write about God and Jesus. I do, too, but not like they do. They teach lessons. They have studied and learned and applied good things and strong principles to their lives and really, really want to teach others to do the same. Me, I just ramble. Funny thing is, those few writings in which I do impart something I’ve learned are much more widely read than the ones when I write about, say, my youngest’s latest foray into potty training. Go figure.

But what I’ve also found among those who miraculously keep coming back is that they read not for a lesson, but because they love to see my “something,” and know that I might just understand their “something” too. And they’re right: I do. I’ve got very little to teach and even less wisdom to impart, but life-ache and absurdity and hilarity in the trenches? Those I’ve got those in spades.

And the answers? Some of them I have, others I don’t. Some answers are only known by the creator of this universe, and maybe someday I’ll find them out. So much of life is about waiting to find out. I often don’t even know I’m on a exploration or scavenger hunt or deep-sea diving excursion until the thing or place or coral reef I didn’t even know I was looking for jumps up and hits me in the face. Or lightly taps me on the shoulder, which is sometimes even worse: a whispered word I’m not quite sure I heard, or heard correctly. It’s the misery of “if”: If this, then that. If not this, then that. He lives but he doesn’t. I suffer but you don’t.

So there’s pain is in the telling. So what? There’s also catharsis. More importantly, there’s sharing. Telling is talking; sharing is giving someone part of you, hoping it benefits part of them. As ironic as it may seem, sharing the hurt and the grime and the rise from the ashes that you simply know you didn’t deserve but somehow got anyway is actually very good for the soul. Mine, yes, but hopefully too for the souls of others who need to hear of things equal to or greater than or less than all that they are and will ever be.

And so here we are, in the telling.

When I can, if I can, you will find that telling here. In bits from larger projects (books!) I’m working on, no chronology needed, hopefully each piece standing—a little wobbly maybe—on its own. If you think they’re worthy, I’d love if you shared them with others. And if you have thoughts on these excerpts I’d love to hear them.

I think.

Happy two-year anniversary to me. Not to be too dramatic or anything, but thanks for being here with me.

THE TELLING GROUND COVER