Creating Thanksgiving

We spent an absolutely beautiful week at the beach as a family over Thanksgiving. We walked and swam and boated and played.

The kids got creative. Together they built an amazing lean-to—sticks by S, foundation by A. Then S kept embellishing the shelter while A turned to digging out (trying to dig out) a massive tree trunk buried under the sand. 

Mid-week, mid-boy in depth.

 At one of our first sunsets, the children invited a sweet toddler into their world, showing her as much as her shy self could handle. I could die happy thinking of my daughter’s smile as she coaxed the timid three-year-old into sharing her fun.

He started uncovering the trunk to the left.

Every night, S would sweep the sand inside the shelter so she could “see who visited overnight.” On one of the first mornings, someone drew a heart in the sand just inside the open end. Joy abounded in our creators. One morning we saw mysterious clawed tracks—racoon walking on its hands? Bunny? Tortoise? The best kind of mystery.

But as the week wore on, our visitors grew less mannerly. The sticks we placed around A’s giant pit to warn twilight walkers to go around would be thrown inside the hole, along with a foot or so of sand. The shells and seats inside the shelter would be topsy-turvy. Yet each day the kids set about recreating their projects. By the end, A asked for a little help, which we gladly gave, but mostly they loved doing what they were doing.

Then, on the last day, we found the shelter torn down. Only a pile of sticks remained.

I think we parents felt the worst. Who would do that? Why? Sure, kids are impulsive, but I remember telling my little ones to wait, to see how much work went into making that, to look at all the details. After a few seconds, I could relax, knowing they wouldn’t destroy anything. And yes, I mean ages five and up—but no toddler pulled down that lean-to! Our circus performer had been hanging from the ridge pole just the other day. It was sturdy!

She carried it--the one on the sand!

I thought of all the triumph S exuded when she brought the perfect section of palm log from the far end of the beach. I thought of her delight in her seashell wind chimes, strung on grass found washed up on the beach, and the pleasure the chimes had given us as they made music in the beach breezes. I thought of the beautiful shells she had collected, cleaned, and arranged on her log shelf, now gone. And I began to wonder--who would want shells that someone else had collected? Isn’t the fun in finding them?

We still headed to the beach for one last sunset, but we all felt a bit suspicious, looking at everyone to see if they might have been The Ones. And, honestly, we adults did our best, but our teenager, our creator, our child finally took us the rest of the way to truth and peace. She found her wind chimes beneath the pile of wood and rejoiced. She picked out a new project and got us involved. Together our family took the sticks from the lean-to and built the word “THANKS” on the beach. And we had a blast!

Finding the wind chimes <3

Thanks from our hearts—thank you, beach, for the wonderful week of sea air and gentle waves, the sunsets, the shells, the magical crabs, and the laughter, memories, and love those gifts inspired. Thank you, children of ours, for leading us to a new level of joy that sunset night. Thank you, children, for being the best gift life has given us. Thank you for reminding us that joy comes not from possessing a creation, but in the act of creating.

A celebratory sea-grape banner over the excavation!

Boy Mom

"Inslaget lik" means "wrapped corpse" in Swedish.

I’ve always loved hanging out with young folk—I babysat instead of getting a “real job” in high school, even in college. I spent my summers as a camp counselor. I worked as a nanny and volunteered as a scout leader. I love volunteering as a den mother for circus and working in the store at my kids’ school. But let’s face it, the vast majority of those young folks have been girls. Parenting our son has been a new adventure for me.

All the clichés (some entirely true!) aside, I’ve been most surprised by how fiercely protective I am of that tender heart of gold he wears on his grubby arm. And that’s on his arm, not his sleeve, because he only wears heathered v-neck t-shirts and chino shorts, ever. Short sleeves and shorts. Do other clothes even exist?

Today, my mama bear instincts haven’t left me alone. Our boy loves his world history class—archeology, mythology, origins, battles, economics, and the general whys of humankind fascinate him. Plus, he has a fantastic, motivated, passionate teacher.

Today, a big project was due, a manual with ten hand-illustrated steps for making a mummy. He could really use a good grade on this project, sure, but more importantly, he had a fantastic idea and threw himself into making it happen. Knowing him, I can see what a brilliant job he did. But will his teacher?

Every time I looked at the rubric for the project, all the requirements and the number of points they will be worth, I cringed. I could see what the teacher expected—a beautiful, ancient-looking, colorful book with a title written in hieroglyphics, something that Indiana Jones might have unearthed. And what will our boy turn in? 

Pouring in oil and covering with natron.

An Ikea instruction manual.

It’s beyond brilliant. He followed every detail—of an Ikea manual—to the letter. He has the little drawing of the parts needed followed by the illustrations to show the project requires two people who should phone Ikea for help as needed. He has the iconic Ikea figures doing the mummification and being mummified—which somehow makes the whole thing far creepier for me! 

He did his title in hieroglyphics, all right—but first he translated “mummy” into Swedish via Google translate. He measured a real instruction manual and translated the proportions to standard American paper. (Sweden uses A4 paper, remember?) And he grudgingly colored the cover and logos, but drew the line at coloring the actual instruction pages. “Ikea manuals are black and white, Mom!”

As he worked, I would get swept up in his passion, his details, his fantastic sense of humor…but then I would remember the rubric and crash back into my fear. Will his teacher appreciate this work of art? Will she understand that he respected her requirements in every way that he could while staying true to his vision—a vision he totally fell in love with?

To me, this feeling has pervaded my experience as the mother of a son. My most frequent prayer has been that the world will see his pure intentions, his delight, his vulnerability, his burning desire to share his joy with others. For young people in our day and age, that starts with school. Will his unique talents survive school?

I will be eternally grateful for his first preschool teachers, educators with beautiful hearts, who loved him, too, just as he came to them. But then the next few years school showed us the other side—he could do nothing right in his teachers’ eyes for two grades. And now, since then—for going on five years—both of us have been learning to trust again.  

So today, I’m holding onto the hope that his teacher will see the research our boy has done, the weeks he thought about how to make it happen, the extra miles he went to make it right, the care he put into its very simplicity. I’m praying that instead of seeing how the title straggles across the top of the paper, not very neat or centered, with no regard for margins, she’ll see that he translated it into Swedish. I’m praying that, instead of seeing the plain printer paper and black pencil as laziness, she will realize they fulfill his careful design plan. I cross my fingers that rather than lack of text, she’ll see the incredible detail in the drawings that renders text unnecessary.

And, if my past experience holds, being lucky enough to be my son’s mother means I will be feeling this fear and praying this prayer over and over as long as I live. I will always pray that the world respects our son’s tender heart, his vision, his pride, his joy. 

And I would not change one single thing about being his mom—unless I could open the world’s eyes to the beauty of boy energy. 

My favorite step is #10--cursing the tomb!

The Lightest Life

I’ve never been a huge fan of magnetic poetry—in the throes of postpartum frustration with my lack of time for writing or even adult conversation, I even wrote a fairly bitter poem about those poor polarized word fragments. Yet we have a set; the kids love it and even my math-minded husband has fun with it. And still, I’ve always dug in my heels—the whole glory of this insane English language lies in the plethora of words at our disposal. Why limit yourself to a couple hundred options defined by a stranger?

Today, I looked at the unused words remaining on our fridge and challenged myself. Can I express something I truly feel right now using these few dozen scraps? As it turns out, I could. I did. See above.

That I chose those words, that I might—do?—believe them, that they now will live, here and on my fridge, terrifies me. That they may be true tantalizes me.

I feel like I’ve spent most of my life building something—a nest perhaps. Tucking solid things in around me and mine, weaving tangible structures for protection, support, and stability. And every time the weather has gotten rough, every time life has shaken my tree or a storm battered my nest, I’ve rebuilt. And over the years, each repair, each rebuild has grown more frantic as I fix larger breaks, coming faster and faster, one after another.

The past two years have swept away my fantasies of fixing—both in the modern sense of repairing and the older, photographic sense of making permanent.

Two summers ago I learned that no one can afford elder care and then spent a month consumed by the specter of breast cancer. Then Hurricane Irma swept into our lives, tangibly destroying first-world assumptions of security that we had thought we didn’t have. In one sense, Irma literally sent us from one nest to another; after the hurricane, we decided to buy our forever home because…well, life is short and unpredictable and now is all we have. 

Then my siblings and I had to find eldercare, affordable or not, and we moved my mom. Then my husband and I moved our family, then, before we caught our breath, everything went wrong with our new house. For about three months, we thought no one could repair our nest. I certainly could not. Yet time moved on, we moved back in, and, tentatively, carefully, we moved forward.

Now…now we start to trust the shelter of our home again, feeling secure enough to hang the last few pictures and re-cover a few remaining cushions. Now life’s rhythm, though resting on a different—more fluid and yet, perhaps, more lasting—foundation, has resumed. I have begun to pick up my head and look around.

"a powerful healing year for you"

I’m not much of a mystic, but I think we tend to notice the astrology, numerology, and tarot offerings that we need to hear. So when I saw this prediction for 2019, I latched onto it:

In August, past the midpoint of the year, it turns out that this year might truly be a time of healing. A time after the wind rose, blowing away so much that I sheltered in, so much that weighed on me, leaving me shivering, uncertain how to move forward without a familiar enclosure. 

A time when I might learn that the lightest life can also be the deepest, the strongest, the richest, the warmest—the most of everything I love.