Happy Birthday, Thea Harper.

I don't think I'd be wrong if I said that every woman who has had a child can pinpoint a moment when they knew the earthy roundness of their body was rooted and bound to this earth while reaching heavenward to the ethereal.  There is a tension which balances delicately between that starlike etherea of carrying a child and the ruddy weight of bringing that child into the world.  That tension, as it has done for millions of years, manifests itself as both terrible and beautiful as we woman birth our babies.

The day before both of my kids came into this world, I remember the distinct feeling of heaviness, like I was carrying a whole galaxy inside my body.  Both times, as contractions began, I felt more like myself than maybe I ever have, like the galaxy spinning slowly inside was the very place I would always belong.

One year ago today, I knew Thea would be with us soon.  The next day was the birthday of a dear friend who had lost a baby through miscarriage earlier that year, and I really wanted Thea to come on that friend's birthday.  I believe in a God who grants us good-hearted miracles, and so even though Thea's actual due date was days away, those baritone contractions started around midnight.  The only way I can think to describe them is like the color of the deepest, richest dirt you can imagine.  Like palm-fulls of soil--the most real thing on this earth, and all the while, you are also heading toward the stars--some indescribable lightness you've never been to.  And so, after 20 hours, Thea came.  And thus began my first year as a mother to a daughter.  So deeply rooted in the primal dailyness of learning what it is to be a woman and watching another small person become one, while so often pulling ourselves up from that primal state and for moments at a time, living in a space that is far bigger and far more beautiful than anything this world can offer us.  The tension that both makes us human, and better than human.  Like when Thea threw up all over my Sunday dress and we stood together swaying in the hot shower for what seemed like hours, her flowery little body pressed up against mine, her round head fitted snugly in the nape of my neck.  Mothers and daughters are this way.

I will always think of Thea's first year as the year that I both found and lost my voice, (and also the year that Remy made Thea laugh and laugh.)  I lost my voice to time that no longer belonged to me, but I found a wiser voice in the few moments I had to use it.  I lost my voice as a growing small business, but found that there will be seasons to begin again.  I lost a floundering voice of doubt in my spirituality, and found a sturdy and honest voice that tells me that working through doubt can make us strong, but also soft and more believing. I lost my voice of cynicism within religion and exchanged it for a voice of gratitude that I belong in a space that teaches my children that there are miracles, and those miracles can belong to them.  I lost my voice that used to be harsh to my body and gained a voice that loves this body and its imperfections because I want my baby girl to love the realness and joy of her own body.  I sometimes lost my voice of sanity and calm, but learned that that's okay.  I lost the voices that tell me I am alone in motherhood and gained a thousand voices of solidarity.  I lost the wavering in my voice when I speak about a Heavenly Mother. I learned that siblings are a gift and that watching Remy and Thea together is far more wonderful than anything I could have planned for myself.  I gained the gentle and constant voice of a mother nature and realised how much I need her to help me raise my children.  I gained a deep love for a baby girl who's name means Goddess.  I hope to treat her as such because she has both rooted me deeply in love with this world and taught me that there is much much more.

Happy Birthday wise and gentle Thea Harper.  So many people love you.

To Human Solidarity

I wrote about Sweden: all the things that surprise me about living here, about the rocks that pervade the landscape, about the way everyone has giant windows and no blinds, about the yogurt and riding on the trains, but after I finished writing, I looked around and saw cheerios covering the floor, and heard Thea waking up in her crib.  I'll still post that writing sometime, because it is interesting, but this week I need more to write about being a mom, read: being a human.

I am a stranger in a foreign land, and with that comes a decent dose of wide-eyed, glossy cultural change which shocks the system just a little, but far more than that, my world has shrunk down to the intimate space between a parent and children.  My entire experience is cloaked in the thick and colorful tapestry of motherhood, so when I tell you about riding the trains into the middle of the city, what I'm really saying is: I wrangled my children from pajamas to baths to clothes to breakfast to stroller to bus to snacks to meltdowns to silent train car to trying desperately to keep the kids calm to downtown to cold and through a thousand thoughts that leave me wondering, 'am I doing any of this right for these babies?'   Sweden is a beautiful place full of lakes and rocks and lots of things I want to tell people about, and I will, but it is hard to write anything about this experience without first writing as anything but a mother to two small people.

And with that, I think the thing that has shocked my system more than anything (as would the first month in most any new place) is the solitude.  I came from a place where I would come downstairs in the morning to Remy pouring bowls of cereal for his friends he had gone and fetched from their respective houses.  I left a place where I went outside and spoke to friends everyday.  We knew each others business because we cared to know it.  My friends knew that Thea woke up 4 times a night and that Remy was going through a phase.  Motherhood in my old neighborhood felt spread across a nexus of dozens of hands, the weight, though mostly mine to hold up was woven into the threads of shared dinners, the children Remy spent his days with, phone calls with my mom and sisters daily, discussion at the playground and sometimes simple proximity.   So coming here to Sweden has felt solitary and for the first time in a long time the weight of motherhood seems almost entirely mine and some days it feels like a pillar reaching up into the sky and I'm not sure how to carry it.  Don't think of these observations as complaints, because there is also much joy celebrated between just me and my children and Carl before he leaves each morning and when he gets home each night, and one of the best things about leaving the place you feel most comfortable is the way it calls you to reckon.

Things in Sweden are not dismal, by any means. Carl, the kids and I love and are grateful for this adventure.  We are making friends at the open preschool downtown.  We are gathering phone numbers and addresses like seeds we carry carefully in our pockets because we hope to sow them.  We are grateful for our quiet afternoon scurries on the rocks and through the woods, and often times we simply endure the hours between four and six in the afternoon, when we've all exhausted our resources.

I guess the thing I mean to say is this:  I believe being a human is meant to happen in the care and watch of many others.  I love that my children are a part of a community where both my friends with children and my friends without children are a part of their growing up and a part of mine as well.  I love that I can be a part of somebody else's.  What I mean to say is that solidarity is a godly treasure.  I am amazed by the way the worries and joys we carry (mine being mainly parenthood at the moment) are both lightened and multiplied and more bright with meaning when others are around.

Reach out to people.  Since being in Sweden I've had to turn my head to wait for the water in my eyes to clear several times, not because I was sad, but because I was so incredibly, and probably pathetically grateful for even the simplest gestures of kindness toward me. It's not just the people immediately around me though: any phone call, email or even instagram have been bright lights.  I'm just writing a bunch of cliches now, which makes me madder than ever, so I'll stop at saying that I believe there is incredible power in solidarity as we tumble our way forward and around this old earth.  Ask for it, seek to give it, be a thread in weave that is trying hard to be vibrant and shining, and let others
offer their thread to you.

For Andrew Ungerman

When Remy came to us, round-eyed and stubborn as ever, I wanted everyone to know him immediately, and I wanted him to know everyone in return.  In my post c-section haze I sent out a mass message that said simply said, "Remy Kent Hoiland, friend to all, 3.19.2011."  A funny introduction in the world? perhaps. But I wanted so badly for my son to be celebrated, and I wanted him to learn to celebrate others in return.  Quite suddenly I went from my single entity to an extension of myself that meant so much more and I wanted the world's arms to be open to him.  I wanted him to really feel that there are friends at every turn.  I wanted people to lay claim to my celebration.  And they did.  People I could not have expected or predicted came into our life and loved my boy, and oh how I love them for that.  

However, as I sit down to write, it is a heavy celebration on the eve of Remy´s third birthday. I received news of a friend, Andrew Ungerman, who took his own life.  He was a boy I knew well for a time.  Not the most well, by any means, but a boy I considered a friend and I think he would have thought me the same. He was Carl´s roommate for a time and while Carl is out on geology work without access to a phone, I know he will grieve at the news as well. I know and love Andrew's brother and his brother´s wife very much. I taught his sweet younger sister in a writing class one summer and Andrew came to hear her read her poems in my backyard.   This is what I know of Andrew: He was a boy truly without guile, with a tender and unassuming heart.  When I think back on time spent with him,  I think of a grateful smile and a willingness to come. I remember him playing his guitar with his feet on the table, a cheap college apartment wall behind him, a harmonica around his neck.  He knew a lot about everything and was always eager to hear about a project or an idea.  I think of calm, and more than any conversation, I think of the comfortable and homey quietness he carried so well.  I think of the way his older brother, Alex, protected him and they way Elisa cared so well for him.  He was rare and kind and I know so loved. 

I have struggled all day though in wondering what right I have to lay claim to sadness when the sadness of others is so much greater.  For a moment I felt selfish for crying in the car while driving because who am I to take up this sadness? do I even deserve to?  But as I stood at one end of the kitchen tonight and watched Remy wash whole avocados under the radiant light, then carefully dry each one and wrap it in a paper towel, I realized that I am everyone to feel grief because our sadness does not come from the shallow well of selfishness, but from a deep and rich well of empathy and love. I feel it now both for people who have gone and for people who are left behind, we all do. I think that just as we want others to celebrate with us, we need others to grieve with us.  I think many of us, myself included are surprised and even scared at the depths the waters in this well of empathy reach to.  

As Remy leaned his head back, eyes closed and chin to the air while I rinsed the soap from his hair in the bathtub, I realized that my sadness is not taking the space of those who feel it more intensely, but my sadness is the duty and price of being human, and what a beautiful and heart-breaking 

thing that is.   

As I lay next to the soft, slumbering body of my son in his narrow bed, I thought about celebrations and tragedies and how they are spinning like a wheel in all of our lives.  I thought about how three years ago so many people truly celebrated a beginning for me and Carl because although they didn't know our son,  they knew it was so important to us that he was carried on the hearts of his community.  I cried some more next to Remy in thinking about how some of those same friends, with the exact same heart that celebrated, are mourning so deeply today.  How is the heart is capable of stretching itself across incredible expanses to the very edges of emotion, both the happiest and the saddest, and somehow still have room enough to reside inside these flawed bodies of ours?  

And so today, on Remy's third birthday, my heart will meet somewhere in that great and inexplicable meadow in-between happiness and sadness, somewhere between beginnings and endings and endings and beginnings.  I don't quite know what I will find there, but I have a feeling there will be many friends, and hugs, and someday we will look back and maybe our sorrows and joys will make more sense.  But maybe they won´t, and even then, we will still cling tightly to one another and search out the beauty. 

* For the sweet Ungerman family, I'm so sorry for your loss.  

I know I didn't know Andrew nearly as well as so many, but his life has touched mine for the better.     

To Pauline and Her Dog, and Such Others

We are pioneers navigating in a quiet and beautiful land of Sweden.  The landscape is hard and thick with ancient rocks covered in moss and solitude, watching us strange creatures climb over this new place as we head out bundled every afternoon.  We spend a lot of time outside, Remy, Thea and I. Partly because I feel I have support from a seasoned and wise mother in nature when I don't know what else to do.  Carl had to lead a field trip in musky Scotland, and so we are here, literally the most alone I've maybe ever been in my whole life.  I've lived abroad before, and I've been on my own before, but I wasn't quite prepared to be this alone, or to see my kids feel this alone.  It is a short time, and so to lament and feel sorry isn't so productive, though I can't say I haven't indulged in some of both.  To gain a little insight and empathy seems to be my best bet and blessing, so I will say this:  please be broadly and unsuspectingly kind.  Be the guardian to those around you, however briefly they are yours.  I think you will find it more natural than you think.  Protect the people that come into your space, even when you don't know what they need protecting from.  

A few weeks ago I read a line from Matthew when Jesus is instructing the apostles and though I know initially what it means, I haven't been able to get it from my head for suspect that it means much, much more: 'freely ye have received, freely give.'  The part that initially struck me is how indeed 'freely I have received.' Often with eagerness and without a look back and then I was a little ashamed when I thought how often I am reluctant to 'freely give.' 

So to Pauline from Kenya with the black lab who invited us in and let Remy jump on your couch and dig for worms among your vegetables; and to the kind woman with the leather saddle shoes who translated the whole church meeting for me without my asking; and the man at the grocery store who asked first in swedish, then in english if I needed help out,  I have freely received, drank, gulped up your kindness.  How could you have known your words and gestures would be like a light house in the sometimes wavering and lonely light of motherhood?

For most, in fact, probably all of my life, I have received abundantly, staggeringly so, and I recognize it is not that way for everyone.  There is such a thing as the friendless and the helpless, and there are times when I am that one still.  I think we all are vulnerable to this feeling, even in the midst of a crowd. There isn't a  time exclusive to either side of the equation: receiving and giving.  Their time moves like cycling seasons: a harsh winter jumping into spring and a vibrant summer heading in a vapid, cold autumn in the course of a day and a week and even an hour. We are our worst and our best 100 times a day.

 Like the way Thea wakes at 3 a.m. and holds her arms up in the dark knowing I will reach down to her and slide my hands under her familiar and heavenly armpits and pull her close, look for those who need your love, and pull them quickly and close to you.  Let them know it will all be alright because you too have been told so by someone else at some sacred time, a thousand times over. 

An Uprising of the Godly.

I heard it once said that Mother Theresa experienced 2-3 years of profound spiritual experiences, then 50 years of silence where the heavens were sealed to her.

I do.  I sometimes wonder where that beaming sense of God has gone in my life.  When I was in kindergarten, I would play a game with my best friend: we would sit on the grass out by my mailbox and wonder about God.  We pictured him as a giant, maybe a giant with wings and a shining face.  I remember telling my friend, "God's bellybutton must be the size of a trashcan."  Until recent years, that God, the one I imagined pushing back plump clouds to reach out and whisper to me, was very present in my life.  On my mission in particular.  The skies in Uruguay were more expansive and encompassing than any I've seen.  I often felt like a tiny doll in a glass globe.  There seemed to be so much space in that sky for God to reach down and talk to me.  I was sure I heard him telling me it was alright one day when I'd only been in the country a month and nothing made sense and I had a migraine.  I felt positive that he led us to certain doors and to talk to specific people on the street. I longed for this thinly-veiled relationship in the months and years after my mission, but it slowly faded from me except for moments like flashes of lightning.  That God, the talkative one I seemed to know so well has grown quiet in my life and in that absence, I have found an uprising of the godly.

This is not to say that I don't believe in a God.  I do.  I believe in two Heavenly parents in fact.  A Heavenly Mother and a Heavenly Father.  I believe they are kind and concerned and woven into the details and emotions of my life in ways that I cannot comprehend.  I believe there are times that they weep for me, both because of our nearness and because of our distance.  I believe this because I do the same for my own babies.

The God of my youth however, feels quiet.  I think in some ways I made Him out to be more garish than He ever intended and assumed that He must love a fanfare of spectacular answers and miracles always because I was young, and it was easier to picture Him that way.  I think the God of my youth knew just what I needed, and I'm learning to trust that he continues to know so now.

In these past years a rush of solitude has washed over my spirituality.  At first it was alarming to me and I often felt like I was scrambling after the profound I had grown up clinging to. There were and still are many, many times when I am jarred at my smallness and lack of understanding.  I sometimes feel like I've lost something and can't put a finger on where I've left it. I sometimes call out for that God of my youth, the one who felt less reserved, more quick to allow me an answer.  I still believe in a God who holds me in the palm of His hand, just in different ways than before.  Instead, I've found profundity in the palpable evidence so close around me.

I've allowed questions in as part of my religious dialogue when for so long I'd ushered them out the door before even allowing them to catch their breath.  I felt relief when I spoke to them and found out those questions weren't so bad after all.  In fact, my questions were sincere truth searchers, not the wiley tricksters I'd sometimes labeled them as. In a recent Q&A session with Terryl and Fiona Givens, they mentioned that "every question, every reach for discovery becomes an act of faith." and "good questions require risk." There are so many things I haven't even thought to ask yet though.

For so long, my quick tears when asked to share my testimony of God led me to believe that I understood and it was really all quite simple.  I cry far less often now.  When this began to happen I was shaken up to think my heart had turned cold, but I think I feel a coarser more raw love both from and for God.  I'm also learning that the questions are not always stumbling blocks but sometimes things for us to acknowledge, to kneel beside and say a prayer right alongside. Doubt too, can be a holy experience.

I've found the hallowed and well-trodden path between the heart and mind, though complicated, is still at times the surest track to the ephemeral beauty this world has to offer.  Like this evening when Remy and Thea were bathed, pajamed, hair-combed, and wresting and laughing on my bed. There is no amount of God calling down from the heavens, or tapping me on the shoulder that could have equaled my joy, nor schooled me more effectively, than in seeing those two babies in their tiny bodies learning what it is to be alive in this world.

Carl is a geologist.  Part of his work involves the process of dating grains of sand--tiny zircons--to better understand ancient landscapes.  After working through hundreds, sometimes thousands, he slowly puts back together a picture and story of how those grains of sand came to be where they are after millions of years, a conglomerate of all their varied and vast histories.  Carl can say for example, "this zircon was once part of a granite that was at the top of a mountain range that has since eroded, redeposited, and later uplifted into a mountain and eroded again, only to be washed down a series of streams, crushed and broken along the way until it finally rested for a moment," where Carl picked it up, worked it over and dated it in an attempt to unravel its story. And the next zircon may tell a different story entirely.  How then, could God simply speak these kinds of miracles to me the way He used to? Vocabulary lacks pure awe.  Perhaps that is why He has quieted.

This thought is not finished, as I am in the thick of it.  I just wanted to write down some ideas while my babies sleep.  Perhaps it is merely an attempt to comfort myself, to appease the part of me that wants to believe that the silence of God is not punishment.  I am learning to believe that the quietness of God is trust, is a season of deep love in which the godly in my daily life usurps the need for God to speak loudly. And that, I can learn to celebrate.

On Being Earnest

And then there is the earnestness.  Like a low-grassed, wildflower strewn, sunny meadow that has hardly been touched by the world.  A place that has never heard the bustle of people traffic and car traffic and the churning wheels of the internet.  My children's earnestness is sometimes the most real thing I've ever witnessed in my whole thirty years in this old place.  It's a bright-eyed honesty that stems from someplace I'd like to return.

Yesterday I put them both in the bike trailer, pulled the seatbelt strap across their chests and buckled helmets on their bobbly heads.  I gave them both a graham cracker and as we pulled away from our house, I looked back and they were holding hands.  We pedaled through the Eucalyptus trees on campus and I was humbled to know how much they trusted me.  Believed that I was taking them someplace nice, that perhaps I made the ribbons of sunlight fall down through the branches and onto the sprouting ground for them.  We stopped at the shopping center and got two ice cream cones from McDonalds.  We sat in the little court and I heard a mouse jump around in the bushes.  We ate our ice cream cones slowly.  Thea opening her mouth like a little rabbit and biting into the soft white.  The ice cream made a miniature beard every time and every time I wiped it with a stiff napkin. Remy (I picture him like a golden lab) licked and licked until one side of his cone was a long slant of little boy tongue and then he would hand it to me to lick around the edges so it wouldn't drip.  At one point he wiped his face, gave his nose a blow and stuffed the napkin in his pocket.  Neither of them wished we were any place else doing any other thing.  If I wrote a perfectly composed essay on earnestness, I still would not come close to the saturation of moments like this that I am so often privy to.  Why does it nearly make me weep?  I'm not sure, except I know that I wish and want to be more that way and more than that, I wish and want to keep the world perfect for them.

My mom recently got back in touch with the missionary that came to our house nearly 25 years ago.  Turns out she had been working with him for nearly 3 years as he was a doctor on the floor of the hospital where she works, she just hadn't recognized him.  She said that she was talking to him and he recounted one of his favorite memories with us: a storm came while we were all inside, lots of rain right at sunset.  When the rain cleared, but the streets were still glossy and pink with reflection, a rainbow showed up.  I remember, and the once-missionary remembers going outside to the edge of the grass to look up at it.  What he does not remember though is that I was in the bathtub and heard their voices outside.  I stood up on my tiptoes on the edge of the tub and pulled the window shades to peek out.  I remember seeing first these two missionaries who my family loved so much, then my mom and my little brother (I'm told that my dad was away on a business trip, but my memory has placed him there next to my mom too.)  When I think of it now, they look like a painting, or a set of dolls on a stage. I remember feeling so happy, like all was well.

It's funny the missionary and I should both remember it 25 years later, it was such a fleeting moment.  When I think of my children's earnestness for this world, I think I understand them when I step back into that memory of the rainbow.  It seems then that we all have a deep well of honesty and earnestness somewhere not too far inside us to offer this world.  I believe it is there that our most important projects, ideas, words and gestures come from.  Maybe then, that is why a tender and joyous swell rises in my throat when I see my babies believing that the world is nothing but good places we are going to. I want to both take them there, and let them lead me to where they are surely headed.  

To Tradition on Christmas

Recently I found a picture of my three-year old self, which looked surprisingly like my 30-year old self. It is Christmas morning, I am surrounded by 'My Little Ponies' and my face is one of geeky, three-year old glee.  I've been anxious this year about doing things right for Christmas. All through December,  I wanted a scene of an afternoon house: Remy pouring ingredients into a bowl for sugar cookies while Thea bounced merrily in her little seat.  I pictured calm and quiet.  I pictured taking Remy to hand deliver gifts to kids in need and I pictured I was teaching him invaluable lessons. I pictured homemade gifts wrapped well in advance, I pictured advent calendars and flawless Christmas traditions. Turns out, little
of that actually happened.  Instead, much of December, our little student house was filled to the brim with books, my books. and packing supplies.  We never got around to making cookies, though a neighbor invited us over to frost some in their tidy home.  Our house was messy like it has never been messy.  I more than once felt sure that I had ruined Christmas for my family because all 'my' projects had become 'our' projects.  But the closer Christmas came, the more clear a few things became.  One, I had not ruined Christmas. Two, we had made meaning as a family because we had worked together, even if it was packing up books.

Growing up I was always terribly worried that my family didn't have enough traditions.  I was that annoying kid trying to make everyone go overboard and do things like tie an annual quilt, sing way more christmas songs that anyone wanted, put on a nativity even when we were all way to old to want to act it out.  I wanted meaning infused into every moment and felt there must be something awry if it wasn't that way.  But last night as I set up a humble little Christmas for Remy and Thea in front of our Christmas tree, I realized that my growing up was rich with meaning because my parents were simply there.  There was never a Christmas that I doubted my parents loved us.  Not because they gave us things, but because it was so apparent that they delighted in it.  The year my mom ran out into the living room and hopped on the pogo stick in her robe and slippers, I knew she was just as eager for us to be a part of the happiness of Christmas morning.  Looking back, I now see that our little tradition of Christmas pajamas is just as meaningful as a Christmas vacation because it was ours.  I look back and only see thirty years of my parents faces shining from their place on the couch as they watched us open gifts.  I look back and see thirty years of my own face, beaming because I knew somebody loved me.  

Simple At Our House

"We're just so simple here at our house."  My mother, the woman without guile, the soft mom who remembers details about my classmates from the third grade, the one who cried when we spilled a pitcher of lemonade all over the kitchen floor over 20 years ago and I didn't understand.

I told Carl the other day that I think I've been waiting my whole life to be 30.  It may be that I no longer feel sympathy or puzzlement at my mom those 20 years ago, rather, I want to champion her.  I understand things my childish heart could not.  I want to award my mom giant bouquets of sunflowers, and at the same time, I want to hold her while I tell her thank you for her best and quietest gifts to me. I want to thank her for keeping things simple enough that I believed I could do anything.  I'm glad it took the world to tell me I could not, because by then, I was already too stubborn and naive to stop.

When my mom said to me over the phone, with my babies wailing in the background, "We're just so simple over here at our house." I knew she was speaking the absolute truth and I loved her more all day for it.  My already sunny memories of my childhood seemed a little brighter as I sifted through them that afternoon.  My heart warmed to bursting as I shed the stigmas I had attached to simpleness, and instead took to wearing the simpleness of both my past life and my present life as a beaming badge.

Sure, growing up most of my mom's recipes flaunted sour cream, butter, or both, as to say, we were not organic, nor drinking any blended kale; we shopped for shoes at Mervyn's once a year and I didn't know Gap was a brand until junior high; I spent hours on the back patio spraying the hose and collecting potato bugs under a rock. We had a brief stint with a boat in my teenage years, but mostly we went camping for vacations.  Neither of my parents were famous, though very sociable and always well liked.  Mostly, they were just nice.  Their faith is simple, their house is simple, and though the details do not always perfectly align to simple, I can count on bringing anyone into their home and know they will be loved simply and fully.

I guess this all goes to say, don't worry about it.  You're probably a very good parent.  You're most likely a good friend, neighbor, person.  The world is a nexus of complexity and sometimes I think it's good for our souls to challenge that.

My Remy boy and my Thea girl need a simple mom.  Not an un-smart, un-ambitious mom who doesn't question the hell out of most things, but just a mom who is willing to say, "We're just simple here at our house." and be confident in the carrying out of that sentence.  I'm working on it.