My son is home ill this morning, and is watching the third movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King. He’s near the end now, and Faramir is returning to Minas Tirith to tell his father the outer strongholds have fallen. The movie has just spent a few long moments on the gruesome battle between the Auks (monsters) and the men. It is dark and violent and the sounds are wince-inducing. It occurs to me that my sons have testosterone coursing through their veins and are programmed, evolutionarily, for battle like this. Men are supposed to be the dragon-slayers, the fighters, the brave, the hearth-protectors as women are the hearth-keepers. (Please don’t accuse me of sexism- I’ve done my share of protecting my hearth the last 17 years; I am talking about hardwiring here.)
In modern society, the battles most fight are across the internal landscape. We are no longer fighting tooth and nail for food and shelter, or even land. We maintain the same adrenaline rush, but without the physical release. I’m sure much has been written about this. My sons will not go into hand-to-hand combat (unless they have a penchant for ultimate [idiot] fighting, like their father). My sons will slay different dragons in their heads and hearts and psyches, with the same chemical changes and anxieties in their bodies. They will have to discover outlets for the physical release of the angst that will accompany them, truly a bedmate to us all some days.
I wonder at the move to the interior as we have become sedentary in the exterior. There is no choice to an extent, but as we sit and watch moving pictures on a screen, or play video games impersonating heroes (or villains), I suspect the energy trapped makes disquietude grow. Some would say it’s just a change in lifestyle, others see it as evolution. I wonder if it isn’t lack of a positive spiritual force (and by this I do not mean only Christian). Are we not brave enough to suggest this lassitude is a negative in our lives? And then to do something about it? How do we expect boys who grow up killing people in video games to show deference across the dinner table with no rumblings of dissatisfaction?
I continue to work to give my sons (and daughters) the means to do battle. I want them to fight poverty, domestic violence, damaging patriarchal refuse, injustice. I want them to fight for peace, for love, for exhausted blessed sleep at the end of the day after a nice run or bike ride to exorcise the tension.

Here they come through the front door, screen a’slammin’, smelling faintly of sweat, cafeteria grease, and pencil erasers: my two high-schoolers. He’s a frosh and she’s a junior, and in the first three days of back-to-school they’ve bonded like nobody’s business. They may walk to different bus stops in the morning (he heads to the first one early- she runs out to the last stop at the last minute, bagel in hand) but they walk the three blocks home in the afternoon stride-in-stride, words formed quickly and just-so to tuck into the other’s ear. They talk to hear themselves talk, sure- they’re self-absorbed teenagers! But they also listen to each other and sometimes even (gasp!) try to understand something the other is saying, the cadence changing a bit from two-note staccato to a more lilting melodic line. It’s this reaching for understanding that comes through despite the gab that mystifies me and gives me hope. Days like this, I just know I won the mother lottery, and damn if I’m not grateful as all.

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

Audre Lorde

Also, please check out www.charitywater.org

Namaste.

‘I’ve decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.’
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

and some days (TODAY), she makes me pop the cork on a cheap bottle of Zin that’s caught more dust than the corners of my bedroom and drink it straight from my beautiful, thin, read (sic) bowl-shaped wine glass like a toddler sucking apple juice from a sippy cup.  She is all that bold, beautiful, fiery Sense of Self that takes down parental figures like a scythe does wheat.  Fifteen doesn’t care who stands in her way.  Fifteen will karate chop your trachea and never look back at the wheezing, almost-carcass she’s left behind.  Fifteen forgets she’ll need you tomorrow.  Fifteen is brimstone and smoke and cuss words muttered perceptibly behind eyes that would cut out your heart with laser beams if she could.  Fifteen would leave you for dead.  Fifteen dares you to even EXIST in her world of vigilante justice.

Boyfriend tells me about his neighbor, weary of her teenage stepsons and their antics (driving without a license, whatever manner of public mayhem they can create, etc.).  Her daughters (with the teen boys’ dad) are around four and six years old.  I respond with vitriol- my feelings are transparent:  once you have more than one child with someone, you should not be allowed to procreate with someone else.  If you have more than one child, those kids deserve every ounce of your energy, time, financial ability; you must be responsible for what you helped create.  Children are all-encompassing.  They demand more than you can imagine, and more yet each step of the way.  This neighbor’s adorable four and six- who bring their Mommy angry sighs and frowns as they refuse naps, brussels sprouts, and polite thank-yous for gifts from birthday party guests- will someday give her far more muck heaped up than her “bad” stepsons!  Wait for the pain of daughters, young mother, wait and weep.

The Zin is mostly gone, the fingers weary of fast typing between this and an article to be submitted for publication (can I get paid for this, please?)!  A boy of thirteen-going-on-fourteen lies on the sofa behind me and watches the beginning of National Treasure, winding down after a day of eighth grade and track practice and girls and notes and brainpower and legpower and emotion.  I tell him he has to go to bed at 9pm.  “OK, mom,” he smiles, “Thanks for letting me watch the movie a bit.”  I choke.  I lean over, kiss this man-boy long and hard on the head (too much emotion, damn Zin), and tell him quietly, “I love you, baby.”  I go up and kiss everyone with Zinbreath.  Even Ms. Fifteen-Going-On-Sixteen.  I talk to her about our boy-cat.  What he likes, how he likes to be petted at night and then left alone.  She has softened now.  She lets me in.  Her world floors me, what it’s like when I’m not there, what it will be in a year or two when she is gone.  I listen.  I laugh.  I talk.  I pretend an hour ago didn’t happen.  I leave, five years older and with the wet tears streaming down my cheeks.  I kiss Twelve, and Eight.  I tell Ten to go to bed, now, even with his book (yes, I noticed, baby).

Had anyone warned me, would I have even listened?  Hardest job in the world.  I salute you, mothers.  I salute you, fathers.  Especially the single ones.  My Twelve told Boyfriend the other day that she didn’t think I was the marrying type.  Perhaps.  But I’m trying baby.  And you guys?  You’re Priority One.  Way ahead of me… I love you more than life.  xoxo

All bodies look frail on hospital gurneys,

laid out like sacks of flour.

Limbs tucked in like a night-bloomer, midday.

Brown skin looks pale, white skin paler still.

Hair that shines with sparks-fly-golden strands in the sun lies limp and bark-brown.

Sheenless.

After anesthesia her eyes flick open rapidly, wildly-

then fall shut slowly.  I don’t think she’s here yet, though we’ve had this small ocular exchange.

The monitor shows me her pulse in a crazy blue line

drawn by an invisible Harold-with-his-crayon.

Children- even almost-teens- look so small surrounded by white sheets,

and grey-blue scratchy linen.

Head perfectly still, one index finger eerily lit by a pulse-taking-hardware,

alchemies pour into her vein through the clear tubing taped to her arm.

Her warm hands belie the death-like sleep.

She awakens again and I ask if she wants me to put on her glasses (the world is out of focus enough)?

She tries to speak- panic enters her eyes as she finds her mouth full of blood-soaked gauze,

her tongue a swollen, leaden mound, her throat burning.

No voice. I slip the frames over her ears and watch her slip back into sleep.

Bad omens- I uttered these words yesterday in tears as I fell asleep.  So much death I’ve heard of lately-

the Reaper coming in from behind with his scythe striking the blow

before even the intended victim notices there’s something amiss.

I’m sure my child is already earmarked by a fluke that will leave me stricken in the waiting room.

But she isn’t.

Even after the anesthesiologist failed twice to find her vein due to his shaking hands.

Even after I’m certain the operation has gone on for far too long, and they are merely prepping how to tell me she is gone.

She is fine.

She is before me- groggy, swollen, bleeding, so small between the stretcher’s metal arms.  She is here.

Finally, I exhale.

but think of the scenes in Love, Actually where Liam Neeson portrays a widower trying to move forward in life with his young stepson, as we imagine him at his wife’s bedside now?  And now- while praying for that cup to pass from this family- it appears he may be a widower in real life, far too soon.  Prayers to the family of Natasha Richardson, and here’s  hoping for a miracle.

What is it when you walk around slightly dazed, yet feeling the coiled- up spring of a tiger’s tail in your gut, ready to pounce on anything or anyone who crosses your path?  When the impulse flashes to punch yourself in the nose to awaken from the eyes-open coma you feel in your soul?  Perhaps the split-second shock of pain would snap you out of it?  The lack of feeling feels like too much February grey.

It’s raining, so I can’t shock out of it with a run- though in college I had the gear and used to always run (and love it) in the rain.  Today I feel it may be my only hope, so the old yellow poncho that’s accompanied so many of my kids to camp may have to do for 30 minutes of cover, and my knees may have to ache in the cold, wet air.

My kids are moody.  Angst-ridden.  Coiled tiger’s tails themselves.  My Thirteen wants to know why he won’t see his dad for a month again (his dad will be out of town on “his” next weekend).  It’s unfair.  He is slamming around like a feral cat at the SPCA, and snarling every few minutes.  My Fifteen is getting over being sick.  My Ten wonders aloud why his friends don’t want to play with him.  My Eight and Eleven (for one more week- happy birthday, baby!) are holed up “cleaning the room,” but I hear the GameBoys on, so I imagine the dust bunnies are safe for another hour.

Me?  I’m going to resist punching myself in the face, screaming, cussing- I’m going out into the grey.

Lately, I’m all about the Vikings.  I pick up a mythology book and find that Odin- the Zeus of Viking lore- did not eat at the fancy feasts of the gods, but sat listening to the stories of the ravens on his shoulders: Huginn (which means thought) and Muninn (which means memory).  His food at the table goes to the 2 wolves at his feet.  Odin is associated with wisdom, war, poetry, and others.

The Vikings are seeping into my life in the most random of ways, and at some point, I know the impact will be manifest in my thinking and then perhaps my actions, and certainly my writing.  Earlier this fall on a field trip with my daughter’s sixth grade class to the air and space museum, a man gave a demonstration using liquid nitrogen.  He froze some flowers, and had a student put on an oven mitt and grasp them- they flaked to the ground like wood ash.  At one point, he said the following (or this is how I heard it):

Vikings didn’t fight in the winter.  They ran their swords in the ground to the hilt.

They found that the swords came out sharper when pulled from the frozen earth in the spring.

Freezing changes steel.  It stays sharper longer.

I can find nothing in a quick search on the internet to support or refute the above (Google offered the option of “Vikings put words in ground in winter.”  Hm… I like it!)

As I find myself in a frozen time- frozen with decision-making, frozen with moving forward in some important places, frozen in fixated thinking- I take great solace in the idea that I may come out of the freeze into the thaw sharper than I ever was.

1.  Upon waking up, decide the world just isn’t worth venturing out into today.  Hit snooze 5 times.  Cuss yourself out because now you are LATE.  Eat 7 Hershey’s kisses you find in your sock drawer.

2. Get dressed and make it to the kitchen, yelling.  Feed wayward children.  Take youngest ones to bus stops.  Think about children who don’t have money for coats in cold weather.  Or breakfast.  Feel your eyes tear up.  Walk home doing relaxing yogic breathing.  Hum your mantra: Don’t Fixate.

3. Vacillate for 45 minutes about whether to have eggs or oatmeal, while eating Hershey’s kisses.  They take so long to unwrap.  Break down and cry.  Have cold cereal.

4. Put misanthropic tendencies aside to do errands.  Periodically tear up to a poignant song on the radio.  Wipe eyes when going into businesses.  Think that no one else knows you’re a sap- after all, maybe your dog just died or something, and you have a REASON to weep.  Put on stoic face, despite smeary mascara.

5. Snap at strangers who cut in line, cut you off in traffic, generally piss you off (especially the guy who played chicken with my car on Lynnhaven Parkway- uh, in the case of smallish teen delinquent vs. the minivan- you, sir, would lose.  Messily).  Decide Hershey’s kisses should come unwrapped especially for eating while driving.  It’s dangerous to drive and unwrap the foil.  Resolve to email Hershey’s about this.  Today.

6. Call best friend.  Cuss at answering machine while it’s ticking out the message.  Hang up before leaving message.  Call other best friend.  Let her talk.  Listen to her stuff for awhile.  Feel better that you can leave your own shit lie for a little bit to care about another human being.  Decide you are pretty cool that way.  When she interrupts this mental reverie to ask how you’re doing, burst into tears.  Explain you MAY be pms-ing.  Hang up quickly.

7. Notice another driver on a cellphone.  Rant loudly (with closed windows) about how IDIOTIC it is to DRIVE and talk on a CELL PHONE.  Feel superior.  Your cell phone rings.

8. Answer cell phone.  Put it on speaker and in your lap quickly.  Realize you’ve been butt-dialed by friend.  Yell into phone.  After 1 minute, hang up.  Rant loudly (making sure phone is completely hung up and keylock is on) about how DUMB it is to not KEYLOCK YOUR CELL PHONE.  Wonder if you can get your 8-year-old to unwrap a whole package of Hershey’s kisses and put them in a ziploc baggie, without eating too many of them herself.  Maybe she could have one per every 20 she opens.  (This ziploc is for emergency purposes, understand.)

9. Somehow make it through afternoon kid appointments.  Watch a teen girl pace around counselor’s office loudly repeating “I once believed in Humpty Dumpty,” only it sounds like, “UhonebeeleeHUMDUMTY, uh huh.”   As her mother slumps in a chair, periodically imploring her daughter to “Sit down, honey,” or “Find a book for us to look at,” you are a woman divided.  You want to grab the mother and hold her and laugh hysterically at the Universe for this scene (about a dozen others in the waiting room acting like this disruption is either a) not happening or b) normal in this office), and also  grab her and hold her and let her weep with you for the reality of a child locked in her own world, unable to even hear her mother.  You also want to offer the mother a ziploc baggie full of unwrapped Hershey’s kisses.

10. Arrive home.  Eat 25 Hershey’s kisses while helping kids with homework.  Yell at son to stop throwing ball IN THE EFFING HOUSE.  Realize Hershey’s kisses evidence from morning is all over desk.  Quickly scrape too many wrappers into trash bag.  Feed wayward kids.

11. Rush out door to take son to freshman orientation at high school.  Wish you had brought bag of Hershey’s kisses.  Realize you cannot sit through meetings eating one after another pieces of chocolate.  You are NOT in high school.  Wish you’d thought about UNWRAPPING many Hershey’s kisses and stashing them in pockets for meetings.  (They could be cough drops, you know.)

12.  Sit through meetings craving chocolate.  Tell son repeatedly to stop wiggling his leg.  Finally grab his leg with vice-like grip and hiss between clenched teeth, “STOP-MOVING-NOW-OR-YOU-WILL-NOT-LIVE-TO-NINTH-GRADE.”  Smile at teachers and administrators.  Feel your eyes burning.  Wonder if there’s a candy machine nearby?  Wonder why you feel so bloated?

13. Arrive home with tired boy after 2-plus hours of meetings.  Yell at children still awake and watching Spiderman.  Threaten bodily harm if they don’t GO-TO-BED-NOW.  Feel utterly overwhelmed.  Decide you are too tired to even unwrap Hershey’s kisses.  Make hot tea.  Fall asleep on sofa, top jeans button undone.