Category Archives: mothers

Sep2

Love The Sinner, Hate the Sin

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

Today is the second anniversary of my mother’s death. I’ve written extensively here and privately about my experiences in grief. I’ve written about her death two years ago being the final somatic death which followed so many other of her deaths I felt I had grieved over my recent lifetime.

Last night, when going over photos of her, the one below in particular, I wept silently while my husband slept beside me, oblivious and recuperating from a sinus infection.

This photo was taken about six years ago in my parents’ house in Canada. A place we used to joke about having in case there was another military draft. Now it feels like a good idea to hang on to in case Donald Trump becomes president.

Mimi and the boys, summer 2009.

I wept for many reasons. I feel now / today / this moment and felt during that moment that I weep because I will never have that sweet older lady in my childrens’ lives any more.

She wanted so very much to be present in their lives. She was, in her way. I got in the way. I see that now. I sort of robbed them of her sprite-like ways because I was so hurt by it, her lack of an anchor, as a child. I wanted to protect them from that, but I see now, that by just being their mother, I was protecting them from that. They weren’t going to be with her 24/7, as I was, yet I couldn’t really unplug from those memories, at least not then. I was aware of it too. What I mean by that is that I was aware that I was in the way and yet I wanted to be out of the way, and yet, I wouldn’t be out of the way. I was and am so hell-bent on providing for them a healthy life that I suppose in some ways I’m stifling an unanchored life…? that doesn’t make sense. I sense now that I’m becoming my own judge, jury and executioner. Breathe.

Mom used to say, “Jesus said to ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ or something like that…” and I’m being a little flip in my treatment of that memory, but she did often say something very similar to that, depending on the tenor of our conversation and her state of mind.

As I wept last night, my throat hardened and tightened and I knew that it was because I was and have been disallowing a truth for almost all my life: that I loved her and needed her so very much and that as much as I wanted to hate the physical incarnation of her addictions: her, I know rationally that doing so limits my exposure to her, even now in her death. So I thought and mostly felt some more (even though it was reeeeeally difficult to feel the feelings) and said to myself, “I do love you, and I always did and I guess I always will, even though I hated how things went down between us.” And my throat softened.

I always have to allow that reality, that caveat (that she was messed up too). I’m not one to paint a dead rose as one in bloom: shit was hard between us. We were each others’ teachers, of this I have no doubt. I am easily able to say now, that I am grateful for her being my mother and that she taught me the most important lesson of all: to get real with yourself, because she had such a hard time doing it herself.

I realize that Mom was an instrument of God for me and my brothers and that her mission was to teach us, in one way or another, about the dangers of addiction and alcoholism. And to live as an example, as harsh as it was (and it was harsh) so that we would be able to break a cycle. So that we would be able to live consciously and as deliberately as possible.

Mom was such that there was no patois of our dynamic, after all, she was an actor and an illustrator. As good as she was at stringing words together, Mom really seemed to fail at times in speaking and writing… it sometimes devolved into a bathos and her notes to me could cut like a backhanded compliment. “It was the booze talking…” I remember her saying one time. In vino, veritas, I would hiss back. In a way, she ended up unduly sacrificing herself for our sobriety. The tenor of our relationship was mostly mistrust, which really … sucked.

If my mom existed so that I could spare my sons an alcoholic mother and hopefully influence their own lifetimes in awareness of alcoholism and their genetic predilection, then her existence and my forgiveness of her is not for nothing. That’s the lesson I feel I’m steeped in right now. That’s where I can step into forgiveness. For me, right now, forgiveness has to be or at least look like a transaction.

I have actually begged for her to appear in my dreams. She does, sometimes.

The current book I’m reading, A Manual for Cleaning Women — Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin, is an emissary of sorts for me right now. In it, Berlin writes clearly about alcoholism, witnessing her mother’s and her grandfathers’ own travails and also her own. The shakes and delirium tremens, the self-loathing and mental anguish. Through her, I have a glimpse of my mother’s struggles and demons and I am leaning toward “forgive the drinker, hate the booze.” I suppose I could’ve used this book a few years ago. But it is what it is. Mom and I were as good as we were going to be around the time she died, we’d had several real adult and womanly conversations. Berlin has also made me a little braver in my own writing. Life is too short to have to fear what other people (through their own filters) think of anything I do.

When Mom aged, she softened, as so many of us do. Gone were the harsh and defensive edges of projected self-recrimination and doubt. At least around my kids, they were softened or completely worn away. She still had her self interest, poised above all others, but her kindnesses toward my children were absolutely sincere. In a way I was envious of them, their ability to be so at ease with each other. She had no worries about failing them and they had no fears of not living up to her expectations. It was like a little team of back-patters. I am happy that they all had those moments together.

I recall a day when she wanted to be with us, but logistics made it difficult (or maybe just I did) and so we all played Monopoly with her on the speakerphone. One of the kids would roll dice for her, the other would move her token (usually the thimble) and the other one would deal with her bank (that was usually my oldest son). She just liked being on the other line, hearing us all play together. I remember wishing she’d had an computer or iPad or something so that the boys could play online Scrabble and Pictionary with her; she would have loved it.

The day she died is different from today. Two years ago, it was Labor Day. Everyone in my family was with their own families, no one was alone to have to hear the news. I remember, clear as it happening right now, that when my father called that day, I was on my deck with my husband. I just knew. You know — how you just know? I just knew. Dad’s voice was unsure, but upbeat, like he was calling me to tell me that he’d cracked up my car but that everyone was ok… “Your mother has collapsed in the driveway. She’s in an ambulance now… the officer here wanted me to call you…”

…. ‘Officer…?’ ….

We went over to their house as soon as we could. I’ll never forget it. The angle of the sun. The heat of the day. The wait in their front hall for an update. Then the update from the officer, “Mary didn’t survive…” and I thought he had the wrong person… “Mary? Who is Mary… ” … “Your mother, I’m sorry… she didn’t survive…”

Oh.

Then the drive to the hospital. And the phone calls and texts to brothers — where was my younger brother?? — and cousins and in-laws and close friends from the back seat of my own car as my husband drove and my father sat, granitic, in the front passenger seat. It was about 4:30pm at that point.

So tonight, I will have another root beer float, as I did that evening when I’d found out she’d died. She was on her way to get one that day. I got mine from the Baskin-Robbins down the street from the hospital. I remember for weeks after that, just telling people that my mother had died. I told my cleaning ladies. I told people I barely knew. I always got a hug for it. The freshness is still there, of that moment. I feel like that’s the greatest gift of being sober and in touch with your feelings: that joy and pain and all the others in between are right there, just beneath the surface teeming to leak out. We should let them every once in a while, it keeps us real. If your mom is still around, give her a hug for me. If she is not, think softly of her for yourself.

Thank you.

May12

50 Things about Mimi

Posted on May 12, 2015 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

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Sunday night, Mother’s Evening, a friend shared a post she read on Salon. It was written by a surviving daughter about her mother who had died when the writer was 25. I was struck by the seemingly enormous task of writing 50 fifty FIFTY! things about my own mother, in ways which did not repeat themselves from things I’ve shared here (likely impossible). I would also like to do my very best to keep things positive, because as we all know mother / daughter relationships can be storied. Mine was no different in that I suppose.

God did not give me daughters. There is a reason for that.

Yesterday morning, I watched the penultimate episode of Mad Men. The scene when Sally reads a letter from her mother (whom she always called Betty) was so lovely, especially that she signed the letter “Love, Mom.” Betty and Sally were a bit like me and Mom. But I was Betty and mom was Sally. But one thing I heard a lot about myself from my mom was that she knew I would make it. In much the same way, Betty tells Sally that she knows she doesn’t have to worry about her anymore because Sally moves to the beat of her own drum.

I’ll not bore you again with our history, but we were two souls who intersected for 45 years and I know we loved one another deeply.

So, off the cuff and mostly positive if not striving for it and it’s likely you’ve read a couple of these before if you’ve read anything I’ve written about Mom…

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Mom always had a glass of water by her bedside. It was never a cup. Never plastic. Always a glass and it was always, amazingly, filled.

She did not understand electronics. I think in some very primitive Irish way, she suspected they were instruments of faeries and pixies.

She loved her Polaroid camera.

She loved photo booths. Alone, with her kids, with my dad. She loved the capture of a moment, staged or organic. She loved to remember.

She would listen to Caruso at very odd hours at a concert-hall volume.

Her self-applied hair colorings were inventive. I distinctly remember a purple time and a green time. (Keeping things positive.)

She had cheekbones and a facial serenity which belied her inner consternations. She often was looking into the middle distance.

When she was a child, her left? eye / pupil was damaged, horribly, by a classmate and his pencil tip. She would recount that story with bravery and bittersweetness. I don’t know if she could see out of that eye; she said it was often difficult. I remember looking into that eye, she would never tell me not to, and feel pain in my body at the thought of the injury.

She never said a really mean or critical thing about anyone she knew socially. She was always very positive and sincere. I remember one person who was particularly unattractive, in more than a physical way, and she said, “He’s very smart.”

She loved roller coasters. Again! Again!

As an obsessive, she had collections of things: books, audio tapes, handbags, clothing… much of it never opened. I see that in myself, to a very small degree: just having something, and it reminds me of her a little.

She would take my drawings of flowers and vases, pulled from those tiny little spiral notebooks, and she’d nudge them between the frame and her vanity mirror, alongside singular or folded frames from photo booths.

She loved a Reuben. Pickle on the side. The musher the better. She was all about the sauerkraut. I see the allure of the Reuben but I prefer its cousin, a grilled ham & cheese on seeded deli rye. Pickle mandatory.

Rosaries. Rosaries were practically everywhere — not out in the open, that would be too weird, too “ethnic” (my assumption, not hers); she had them in drawers and on bookshelves, tucked away. In a coat pocket. In a teacup on a shelf. In the spoon compartment. In the ashtray. I never saw her use one though.

Sometimes I would encounter a filled glass of water in a cabinet. And it would spill all over me. Sometimes I would encounter a glass of water in the refrigerator. I remember asking about putting a pitcher of water in the fridge and having it that way, but she didn’t like it cold. She just wanted to “keep it fresh.”

She had her own climate with her mother, who was lovely, but psychologically encumbered to a degree that she made my mother look like the trapeze girl at the circus.

Speaking of the circus, Mom was a majorette, in her all-girl’s high school. I can see her now in her felt wool skirt twirling her baton and marching in her little boots. I remember finding one of her half-dozen batons in her closet in our Canada house and running downstairs with it to try it. At first she was all, “Where did you get that…?” but she relaxed. It was safe, she was safe. She loved to watch me, and she gave me tips. “Here, like this…” she’d say and she’d take the baton, and show me how to twirl it between her fingers, running it up one side and then flipping her hand and coming back for more… “like this… just … you know … start here … ” the sun glinting off the rifled, chrome finish and one of her hands on her hip while her feet gently marched in place, feathery footfalls, just to keep a tempo. I’d end up sitting down, dazzled by her trancelike state as she twirled it and tossed it up in the air, spinning to catch it, as easily as breathing. “Now you try!” I passed. I suppose at some point in my life I took her talent with the baton as an affront, showing off, but as I type this, I recall it with awe and pride.

At Sherks’ Hardware in Canada (which sold everything, not just hose nozzles and 3-in-One oil), I got a hula hoop the next week. I was better at that. She was terrible at it. I remember coaching her, “Here, like this…” We laughed.

She loved the Canada house. Loved the sound of rain on the roof and the click-click-click of the squirrels running over the eaves. She would cry when branches were cut from the tall sugar maples because they were breaching the roof. She liked the idea of being in a forest, hidden, secluded and quiet. She rests eternally beneath a sugar maple now in Crittenden, NY.

She would cook coffee on the stove in a pot. Just pour the grounds right in the pot and let the water boil and then just pour the liquid, deftly, into her M. A. Hadley mug.

I think she took milk in it.

She was one of those moms who could peel an apple with a knife; I still can’t do that. Her hands were like a surgeon’s.

She would capture a moment or a phrase and plug it into a cartoon in a breath. Her sense of humor and observation skills were keen; in my jaded years, I used to think she was just projecting, but I do believe she was acutely aware of her own issues and used the cartoons as a vehicle for releasing them. Some people make lists, my mother did too, but she also made cartoons. I think she was acutely aware of the ephemera of the human condition.

She would bound around the Canada house at times quoting Moliére or Shakespeare or Wilde, usually their funnier stuff. In moments of strife, I’m pretty sure she would quote them too, but I tried to hit the road.

She had favorite things to wear: a green and orange “bumble bee” dress her sister-in-law made her.

Her Dr. Scholl’s sandals. I remember begging her for a pair for myself, but that never happened. She said they didn’t make them for kids, but I saw them … (keeping it positive…)

She would wear five static gold choker necklaces at a time. If you gave her jewelry, and it was valuable, it went on and never came off. If it was plastic or you made it at camp, she wore it, but it would end up in the jewelry box on her vanity. I see this in myself now; and I suspect it’s for a similar reason: the gold and silver are durable, they will last and be able to withstand daily domestic life. Those cute little plastic beads strung together with elastic won’t. There’s a part of me which wants to preserve those pieces, I think that was her angle too.

Family. Family Family Family. She was a master triangulator. I can feel her now, at times, nudging me to go one way or another. To be softer. She hated rifts. She hated divorces. They tore her apart, in ways I’ll never understand. I think watching her brothers go through theirs and the damage it did to the entire extended family network was galvanizing for her. She would never ever divorce. Never.

She was an absolutely terrible driver. Just … the worst. I think the first accident in modern times in Northern Virginia — when the vehicle in front which was rear-ended was blamed for the accident — was hers. She did NOT understand turning lanes… coming from a city, they just didn’t exist. They proliferate suburbia.

She hated suburbia. She just did. She liked the energy of a city, even a small town. I watch Mad Men, she’s a contemporary of Betty Draper’s, when Betty moved to the suburbs, a part of her died. In 1980s suburbia, Mom never fit in. I wish I were older, maybe 18 or so when we’d moved here, maybe I could have tooled around with her.

Pens. Pens were everywhere. Notepads too.

Kleenex in the pocket. Balled up. Unused for the most part, save for a lipstick kiss. Standard Mom issue. Smelled like leather, wool, Chanel No. 5 and dust.

Lipstick. Never left the house without lipstick. The one time I encountered her without it was at my younger niece’s 2nd birthday. Mom look positively ashen without it. I went through her purse and asked if I could put it on her. She brightened at the offer. I’ll never forget putting it on her. Her lipsticks were always flattened. Mine are pointed. We always joked about that: how hers were blunted and mine were not, “How did you do that?” we’d ask each other.

Cashmere. Every season was the reason.

Upper lip sweat. I remember it so clearly. She would be be drawing or cooking or sitting or reading. Sweat would form on her upper lip. She never brushed it off.

Skin. Her skin was beautiful. She had a car accident in the 70s and had to go to the ER. She needed stitches on her lower lip. She was devastated by the news and the scarring. After a few years, you could barely see it, but she knew. Lipstick helped her deal with that.

Egg nog. Duck lips. My mother had an egg allergy but loved egg nog. You couldn’t stop her. Mom had a streak in her: if she found out that something was tasty or delicious or good for you: she took it all at once. She encountered someone’s egg nog, I want to say “Giant brand” from a store down here and she drank an entire quart. Her face swelled up and her lips reminded me of the lips on Daffy Duck’s girlfriend, “Daphne.” She would get so mad when I said that to her, but I was terrified she’d never be OK again, so I think it was my humor kicking in to save the day and to keep me from coming unglued.

Bike rides. She had an old 3-speed “Why would you want anything more?” bike with a wicker basket. It had a bell on it. She would ride that around, again, free as a bird.

As the mother in the Salon article, Mom, too, liked to stay for the credits. I don’t remember watching movies in a theater with her, but on TV, she would wait for the credits. “It’s THOSE PEOPLE who make the film, Maaallly,” she would say to me. “They’re the most important.”

“I’m doing yoga,” she would say, lying on her back on our olive green wool living room carpet with one leg elevated straight up at 90˚ and the other leg on the ground. Knowing what I knew of yoga in the 70s: turbans, contortions, the Maharishi and the Beatles, I suspected it was just another Momism. Little did I know then, but I do now, she was doing yoga. She was.

Local was better. Mom loved the idea of Broadway, but preferred local genius. She directed many plays benefiting Buffalo’s charities. She was a volunteer who knew her strengths. I have apparently followed in her footsteps that way. Mom was not and I am not a baker. Bakers are great people, we just aren’t them.

If you could buy it at a Hallmark store, it should stay there. Mom was all about the handmade, unique, “esoteric” being one of her favorite words. “Provincial” and “providential” were others.

She used to say that “symmetry was overrated.” I have come to understand symmetry as balance. I feel I have a better handle on what she really meant but didn’t know she was saying. Balance was hard for her, maintaining a rhythm, equal footing; I suspect so because she felt uneasy about it, internal conflicts and all. I don’t know if she strove for balance, ever.

“Cool it, Mimsy!” was one of her favorite phrases for me. She borrowed it from Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suites” — look it up, it suits me.

“Piffle” was another word of Mom’s. It’s perfect, actually.

My father bought me a long red cashmere overcoat. My brother bought me a red wool hat to go with it. She would call me “the raging pimento” when I would be off somewhere. Usually in a huff, I guess. I feel like red was her favorite color. It had to be a blue, cool red though. Nothing hot. Not “cherry” red, that was too common for her.

Bangles. Mom wore bangles like how the Kardashians wear false eyelashes. Her collection grew after her mother died. She took those on as well along with her monogrammed and cuff bracelets. Sometimes those danced along her forearm with a rogue pink or taupe rubber band, perfect for the impromptu hair bun.

She never did pony tails. Always did hair buns. I remember putting her hair, it was very thick hair, in pig tails and pony tails once. She indulged me, but when I saw her, it never felt right. She wasn’t athletic, so pony tails were out; she wasn’t coquettish either. I remember her saying that pig tails on a grown woman always seemed forced, raw. Unless the woman was a hippie or a farmer. Or in a play.

Linen napkins. If there was one available, Mom was using it.

She loved nature. Trees, birds, clouds, torrential rain and then a clear sky. She loved the unpredictability of nature. I dare say she preferred it to people.

She was cool to animals. I blame her mother for that. She loved cats though and we had many as children. She resoundingly did not like dogs. She was bitten as a child. The dog we had as a family, Toby, was a mess. He was untrained and just having him made her twitchy, I’m sure of it. But she knew I loved them and that when we had “big news!” as a newly married couple, we told her and my father to welcome their new grand-puppy, Maggie, she probably wanted to stab me. But Maggie was sweet and trained and she grew to like her. She even trusted her with my kids. My dogs, as you know, like anyone with a chip. I remember many times, how Murphy often would sit by mom, even if she didn’t have food. I think he enjoyed her mellowness as she entered her twilight.

She would chirp and squeal with delight at anything we did; I used to think she was unhinged. I didn’t understand such huge reactions to what I considered to be just something I got to become good at. “DO IT AGAIN!” She would cheer. I wouldn’t. I don’t regret that; she was in her space. I see my own kids astound me with their intelligence, reserve, kindness, humor and talents and I cheer once and then gush later. This is theirs, not mine.

She used to chew her milk. I never understood it and the sound of the compression of her jaw sent shivers down my spine as a child.

Her favorite stroke was the butterfly. She used to swim it, laconically and loudly, in Lake Erie lake outside my cousin’s house in her star-spangled Speedo swimsuit. Her hair coming loose and wild from her bun, like tentacles.

She said to me often, “When you’re a mother, you’ll understand.” I used to think she was nuts. Now I know she was right.

I loved seeing that sweet message at the bottom of her mug of hot cocoa. She used salt, butter and brown sugar in it.

Gratefully, I could go on. That was nice.

Mom, know that you are remembered. Your most favorite thing of all to do, to remember. I remember you. I miss you, I wish I could undo a whole bunch of stuff I said and did, but I don’t dare ask anymore.

Thank you.

Jun2

Grief: Living. Wreaths. Painting with Mimi. Consequences.

Posted on June 2, 2014 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

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Amid the cacophony of my first-world suburban existence: prop planes buzzing above, sirens on their way, lawn mowers manicuring, birds singing sweetly and my hot tub shocking, I lit a couple sticks of incense and decided to do something I’ve been putting off for months: refreshing the springtime egg wreath on our front door.

I bought it about six years ago from Red Envelope. I don’t think they sell it anymore. It spoke to me because its muted springtime tones of subtle rosy pinks, soft powder greens, robin’s egg blue and dusty tans were more reminiscent of actual spring and actual eggs than the hot pink, electric blue and royal purples we see in easter baskets.

The wreath had been hanging every year: from the first day of spring to the first day of fall, for six years. In the fall it is replaced by an autumnal wreath, covered with (I hope artificially) speckled feathers in tones of rust, espresso and black. On Hallowe’en, for one day, the previous speckled wreath is replaced by a black feather wreath which is summarily re-replaced by the previous one. After Thanksgiving, I replace that wreath with a Christmas-time wreath until after the Epiphany wherein I replace that wreath with a faux cranberry on grapevine wreath: very wintry.

When I got married, I had grapevine and faux lily, rose, peony and hydrangea wreaths hang from every other pew at the church and window at the reception.

The hanging or display of wreaths is an apparently ancient custom. My wiki search included citations of wreaths from ancient Greece for seasonal or mythological celebrations such as the end of a harvest, or a birth of a god, death. To me, they mean “welcome” and “we know what time of year it is.”

I guess I have a wreath “thing.” We didn’t hang wreaths when I was a kid. I guess that’s why I want them in my adulthood. My wreath “thing” reminds me of my band-aid “thing”: I have band-aids in the kitchen, every bathroom of the house, some in my purse, cars and linen closet. We didn’t have band-aids when I was a kid; for some reason my parents never bought them. We needed them, but in my mind, I project that to my father and mother that they were frivolous. Band-aids and juices, things to drink. My aunts had band-aids and lemonade. I felt safe when I had a cut or scrape at their homes; I knew I would be attended to.

I digress. I write in the moment; I try to make it make sense at the end.

I have been avoiding the work on the wreath because I wanted to restore the “glaze” effect of the eggs, but without the glaze look. For some reason, I was stymied. But today, I decided: it’s gorgeous outside, I have been yearning to do this and so screw it, let’s go.

The wreath looked like this when I first started:

this is really a picture of Thing 3’s solicitors deterrent sign, which just happened to include a fair amount of the wreath, which is quite faded. The sign has been very effective.

I decided to test my super-thin acrylic paint application on a test egg, one that had fallen off the wreath. The color was still too strong. I rubbed it off with my finger and thought, “better, but I’m not going to paint and rub-out each egg, plus, they’re only two eggs that have fallen off… so I’m definitely not going to either take them off and put them back on or … ” you don’t care what I was thinking. I don’t either.

Moving on…

So then I thinned the paint some more. Better, but still…

the first two pinked eggs. meh, directly above.

Then I took a broader brush, dipped it in the water and wet an egg that was still on the wreath…. “you’re taking a big chance here… if it drips, then that’ll affect the other egg…”

The fear in my head was really just … “STOP IT.” I said to myself. “Just do it. Screw it. It’s only paint and you can dilute it….”

I put my color brush in the thinned pink paint and dabbed it onto the wet / primed egg.

It washed. It was glorious.

I heard her, Mom…. from when I was wee and we were painting on watercolor paper, a huge treat for me:

“When you wet the paper first, like thiiiissss … ” she would take a broad brush and wet just the top of her sheet. I didn’t understand, there was no color… I was impatient, but I watched.

“And then you take a pinpoint of paint, juuuust like thiiiiissss… and you dab or stroke that colored brush tip onto the wet paper … it does …. THIS….” and the color bled onto the sheet of thick, dimpled parchment. I watched with wonder and squealed at her magic.

It was those unfiltered and infrequent moments with Mom, those now- deeply poignant moments, riddled with ephemera, when she showed me who she was: a magician, a painter and an artist, who cared deeply about her creations.

It was also in those moments, that I felt envious of her interest in that paper.

In that brush.

In that paint.

In that creation.

She was in her zone then.

There was no getting her back.

“My turn! My turn!” and I would try to do it the way she showed me. Soft and gentle strokes of just water onto my sheet.

I was a spectator. She let me in for a few moments, but they were fleeting.

“That’s too much!” she would blurt, unconscious of her tone, yet (to me) very concerned about wasting the paper, of making a mistake.

She wanted it to be really good as much as I wanted it to be really good. I wanted her to be pleased and proud of me. I chose red. She wanted me to choose burgundy, but I wanted the red. She wanted to show me how to paint a sunset. I just wanted red.

So we went on… I put my reddish pink tones on my paper and watched it bleed into the water.

The color stopped where the water did. I thought that was neato.

She showed me how to make a sun burn in all that red and periwinkle.

“Make a circle with your brush, big enough for a sun. Ok! Yeah, you can add some little streaks outward and then get another color, say orange or yellow… just a little… watch what it does…”

I did as she instructed. I dabbed into the burnt orange.

“Bittersweet. That’s my favorite color,” she would say.

I’m back.

So I heard her today, when I was washing each egg first and then gently dabbed my color onto its soft, slightly porous and smooth, mounded oval surface.

The color stopped where the wash stopped. Just like on the paper.

I just noticed that today is 9 months from when Mom died. “June the TWO!” she used to shout sometimes on June 2nd; I don’t know why. “October the ONE!” on … October 1st.

Eggs. Nine months. Pregnancy. Motherhood. Death. Wreaths.

more color, more life.

So then I got confident and was off to the races. I painted about ~~seven~~ ~~twelve~~ a dozen eggs that pinkish “bright magenta” tone. I wasn’t in love with it, but it was getting better, my technique was improving and the eggs were being restored. Mom would’ve been pretty psyched.

Green. I did the same with the “lime tree” green. Dilute it to smithereens and then wash and dab. Those came out a butter yellow hue, which was ideal.

I decided to leave the blue eggs as they were. Their colors didn’t fade too much because they likely didn’t have any red tones in them.

The door faces north to the brutal Virginia sun, or else that wreath would be an omelet by now.

Then I took a step back.

The pinks were too pink. The green was OK, closer to what I wanted. I wanted to tone down the pinks.

So I mixed green with pink. A preppy fantasy. Green and pink make grink. When I put grink on all the pink eggs, it toned them down.

I was pleased.

“Wash the color… wash the color. You can always make it stronger, but making things softer… that’s a challenge,” Mom would say.

Oh how right she was, about all of that — it applied to so much more than paints and colors. It’s always easier to strong something up, to push through, to bully or force your way out, through, around or under something… but to yield…

To yield… that’s something else entirely. To step back and yield and let things roll out and just … become … without influence!

How difficult that is! We have to influence. Sometimes we have no choice. We have to step in. Change the direction of things; redirect. Can’t sit with the waiting. Can’t sit with our pain. Can’t sit with our consequences.

Consequences. Thing 2 didn’t turn in a field trip permission form nor the funds to cover the trip. It was all due last week. He was even given an extension by one day. Still didn’t do it; didn’t remind me, didn’t ask me for the funds, didn’t do any of it.

This morning he called me in a lather… “Mom. I need the funds. I need the permission form. I need it all today.” I heard noises in the background, lots of kids, adults talking over them. I thought the trip was today.

“I’ll send an email authorizing your attendance for the trip…. I don’t know about the funds… how much?” I said.

“Just send the email. We can talk about the check when I get home. Thanks… Bye, Mom.”

>click.<

I sent the email. An hour later, the teacher replies: “The trip is Thursday but the funds were due last week. I gave him an extension… finance office needed the funds by Friday. I’m sorry.

He can attend class with Mr. Gitchygoomie. He will be staying behind at school… he can attend his specials and PE. … ”

It’s been a tough “academic” year for all of us. Mom died the day before school started fer cripessakes. Thing 2 has some fantastical notion of wait-and-see after weeks of do-nothing-and-fake-it.

Thing 2 is barely surviving middle school. Middle school is … ugh, hard enough on its own, but then that little asshole on the bus couldn’t help himself. I said “asshole.” I think by the time you’re 15, if you’re still picking on unrelated people who are smaller than you, you’re an asshole. You’ve set your course. Then the parents of the asshole coming after my kids…? Lots of head shaking going on over here.

I have determined that I’m going to stop thinking about that bullying problem. In fact, I’ve determined it lots of times. Then a thought or a memory or a juxtaposition or a freakin’ voice wafts over my backyard’s fenceline crux and I’m sucked back into that ridiculous evening and subsequent days of their utter desperation. I got sucked in back now because of T2’s having to sit with the consequences of his inaction (which is also an action, by the way) and his less-than-stellar middle school accomplishments. I get it: middle school stinks.

So yeah — nine months. It feels about right. The weather here is as it should be now. The sun is shining in a bright blue cloudless sky and a breeze is rustling the oak leaves above me and blowing my stray hairs into my face. It’s cooler than expected, here at almost 11 am and it’s 67˚ outside. I’ll take it. The wind in the leaves sound like “ssssssssssSSSSSSsssssssssSsssssssssssSSssssSSSSSSSsss” but not threatening, like how a snake would hiss. It reminds me of wind blowing high grasses or wheat stalks. Very peaceful.

Murphy is laying by my feet and Charlie just hopped across the yard to say hello to the doggie who lives directly behind us.

I miss the idea of Mom. I miss the projections I wished upon her more than the reality of our relationship. I find myself romanticizing at times how things were; I find myself doing what she did a lot of the time: lying to myself about how things really were. It’s hard to admit that your relationship with the Most Important Person in your life was rife with conflict, pain, fear, complexes and mistrust. I need to remember the reality though: that things were challenged and challengING because it’s where I get my strength now.

No one is perfect. I am not a perfect mother. I am reactive and abrupt and cold at times. I am also tender and compassionate. I am defiantly sober and consciously honest and a fierce advocate for my children and their rights — even against one another. That’s my legacy, or part of it.

The other part of my legacy, as Mom intoned, is in “making things softer.”

I may not be perfect, but I have band-aids, and I have wreaths. And lemonade. I have lemonade too.

The finished product:

browns, greens, butter yellows and softer pinks. good to go for another six years, i’d say.

Thank you.

Dec2

Thanksgiving Leftovers / Wrap-Up and What’s to Come: 30 Days of Brené Brown

Posted on December 2, 2013 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

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Hello! I hope everyone in the U.S. enjoyed their Thanksgiving holiday.

It has been a while since I’ve written anything regularly. The last series I wrote with any daily dedication was the 30 Days of Jung where I took a quote of his and did my lay-person best to make sense of it while sitting in my cheap seats. I had a great time with that series and considered myself developing somewhat of a niche: the self-effacing, occasionally humorous psychology nut.

I fancy myself a writer and I love to do what all great writers say to do in order to become a great writer: read great writers. I love reading other writers, I love writing about them, I love imagining how they decided to come up with that phrasing and how I feel so merely mortal when I read it.

Because my life radically changed on Labor Day when my mom died, I fell off the writing horse, so to speak, in terms of being my old self; partly because I felt my old self was gone. One of the ballasts of my old self had died. In short: I was exquisitely lost, but I knew I needed to write about it. So I did.

Then I started to feel self conscious, as though all I was writing about was grief, and Mom and me and grief. I didn’t want to be a downer. So I changed my tune, perhaps a little too early or perhaps even announcing that I was changing my tune was something I shouldn’t have done. (More about my penchant / need for intention / purpose soon.) I regretted it almost immediately: that I shared my decision to stop writing about my grief, but I also knew that I needed to shift gears. I didn’t want to ignore it but I also didn’t want to focus on it.

It was all so hard. Is so hard.

Which brings me to right now.

I loved the Jung series. I feel it prepared me for the yoga retreat which ultimately prepared me for Mom’s death (I’ve written about that dovetailing in a post called “Wahe Guru“). The Jung series was regular, predictable, something I could count on being there, so I find myself needing and wanting that anchor again. So now, I’m going to start 30 Days of Brené Brown, whom is a modern-day philosopher of sorts. She is my “if you could have dinner / evening out with anyone you don’t know who would it be…” -person.

As with Jung, I selected the quotes as ranked on Goodreads by readers whom I believe highlighted the quotes in the books on their ereaders which were then uploaded onto Goodreads because Amazon owns Goodreads and everything between Uranus and the Degobah system (apologies to George Lucas). Each per-quote write-up will be in the neighborhood of 1,200 words (don’t ask why 1,200; it seems to be the point at which I start to run out of gas and I think you do too). I am picking 30 Days because well, why not?

This is “Day 0” — where I’m letting you know. It’s almost 10:00 pm where I live so I don’t plan on writing via Brené tonight although I can’t wait to get started. I also don’t want to jump right into this without sharing a little about my Thanksgiving, as I’m guessing both of you are curious about how it went this first time without Mom. It went well. It was momentarily bittersweet and graciously easy. We seem, as a tribe, to be navigating these waters with relative steadiness and patience for one another.

My brothers and I all recognize that we all had different “versions” of Mom, just as how my sons will have different versions of me based on our chemistry and relationships (although my relative health and awareness is vastly different from Mom’s to my brothers and myself).

In the early stages of our grief it felt to me that we clung to our various versions of her as though they were buoys. I am the middle child and I’ve got four years between my brothers and myself, so even those four years create quite a crevasse in her own personal development, any major challenges notwithstanding. Everything I have read about birth order and timing of children suggests that a span of four years or more between the children creates a space where each child is virtually an only child in terms of parenting attitude, fatigue and sibling relations. That theory was both myth and truth in those first posthumous days. I’d never felt closer to my brothers in those first days while at the same time I felt very separate.

While I was fiercely drawn to them both, I was reluctant, to tolerate either of their versions of her. I accepted the notion that there could be different versions, but I didn’t want to debate them or hear about them. I felt it was essential that everyone see her as I saw her, which (especially in those first days) was completely as the flawed saint and alternately undefinable. As time wore on, and we shared with each other more, the different versions became as real as the differences in our own persons. Mom occupied the same body, but she was in different places with us energetically.

This Thanksgiving holiday was the first time we were all together again since Mom’s funeral. For me, it had an almost challenge-like vibe: “We Will Get Through This 2013” — I should have made t-shirts. I was girded for anything and that girding was unnecessary. Having an adorable drunken-sailor -esque toddler bounce about the house wielding my sons’ various light sabers and make his own sound effects on top of the ones the sabers already make was a definite spirit lifter.

For me, it was nice, especially to have everyone in my house. Even though we have the world’s smallest kitchen, I loved it. Coming from a place of mental preparation helped too because I was ready for the “break” from the confusing drama and the heavy emotions that so often accompanied major holidays in my family: for so many years, the attention and energy were sucked away by fear and confusion over Mom’s condition. This year, we could focus and share and enjoy each other equally throughout the long weekend — that was a first and at times it was for me a little disorienting, but welcome nonetheless. We are all a little crazy, as both of my brothers have said to me and each other since Mom died. We have our quirks and unmet needs and we will always do our dances around each other; that’s natural — dysfunction or not — but there was no heaviness or fear.

As I pulled away from my brother and his team at the airport today, I caught a glimpse of my beautiful niece looking back at me in my car and we smiled and I waved hesitantly, I wasn’t sure she saw me so my hand went down as soon as it went up. A lump formed in my throat for her because I realized what was happening: they were going home and I already missed her, I missed them all.

In the final analysis: Mom gave us to each other as siblings and we figured it out somehow. The next thing we did was find impeccable mates, some of the strongest people in the world for our weirdnesses individually and collectively — they loved us enough to marry us, knowing where we came from. No one is perfect, but we’re good with that.

So the first Brené Brown entry will start tomorrow, December 2. I hope I will hear from some of you in the comments section. I often say that the comments areas to me are where some really great conversations can be had. It’s a real treat for me to be able to exchange ideas with you.

Thank you.