Following Elias

Thankful for...

 

...sibling love.

And for all of you.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Someday I'll have to fill in the details.

From peanut-butter and honey, cream-cheese and butter, we end up on c-sections and incubators, and I almost put my foot into sex:

"How long was I in the hospital?" Elias asks.

"94 days."

"When I'm fifteen, doctors are going to cut my belly open too." Olive says.

"Um, no Olive, the doctors usually don't cut babies out and.."

"How long was I in the incubator?"

"...you won't have a baby in your belly when your 15. Seven weeks."

"Why?"

"What was I in after the incubator?"

"Because you can wait Olive, and baby's usually come out of your vagina. An open crib."

She squints her face at me, "No, their gonna cut it out of my belly."

"Not usually Olive, they come out all on their own, with your help, from down here." I place my hand between my legs.

"They come from down here." Elias pats his lap.

"Yes Bud, but boys don't give birth to babies. Only girls do."

"Why?" asks Olive.

"I don't know, its just one of the cool things about being a girl. But boys get to help make babies."

Oh shit.

"How?"

"Mom, how did the doctors get me in your belly?" Elias asks.

I stand at the sink not washing dishes, but looking at my nine-year-old son and three-year-old daughter, who wait for me to answer their questions.

"The doctors didn't put you in my belly. Your Dad and I did."

"How?"

"How?"

"How did you put us in your belly?"

"Uh, magic."

"But how?" Olive repeats.

"Your Dad and I just did a magic hug and then poof you were there."

Magic indeed.

Flashback Friday

In less than seven minutes, Benjamin Miller captures, beautifully, a micro-preemie's first year. Watching his video, I was back in the NICU, holding Elias for the very first time.

If you've been there or if you've ever wondered what its like, please take the time to watch.

 

A Princess with a House on her Head

Olive walks into the kitchen in her skivvies and announces: "I have Cinderella underwear!"

"Who's Cinderella?" I ask, as I glance at Nick.  She didn't meet Cinderella at home. Must have been preschool.

"A princess who lives in a castle." Olive says, as if I should know, and of course I do. I know all about Cinderella. But I don't tell Olive this.

I don't tell Olive I once spent hours dancing around my room with a broom pining for a ball. That my friends and I took turns playing the fairy godmother and evil stepsisters, the Prince, and the oh-so-coveted princess. That I knew the words to every song on my Cinderella 45.

Work work work, I try not to complain...sweeping, dusting, cooking, scrubbing, every days the same...

Instead I ask: "Is she smart?"

"Yep."

"Does she play hockey?" Nick asks.

"No," Olive laughs. "She's a girl."

"Girls play hockey." Nick and I say together.

"Your Mom plays hockey."

"Yeah, I play hockey."

Olive gives me a cocked smile. "But you're a grown up."

"Girls can play hockey too."

"Your cousin Tess plays hockey." Nick adds.

"Huh?"

"Yeah." I say. "Princesses can play hockey."

"Look at my spin!" Olive holds her arms out and twirls.

In October, when she told me she wanted to be a princess for Halloween, I asked her: What do princesses do?

Her response: Spin.

I smile. "So, is Cinderella strong?"

Olive plants her feet. "Yep!" She puffs her chest and reaches her arms into the air, her little hands balled in fists. "She can lift whole houses."

"Good."

"And monsters!"

Even better.

Writing Myself Out of a Bad Mood

(Olive holding my leg brace for my strained/torn MCL)

A week into my six-week stint with a leg brace and I'm painfully aware of how much I rely on not just moving, but moving quickly to respond to my world.

As both a Mom and an Elementary School Counselor, I tend to run, bend, twist, carry, reach and stretch in all six directions.

I am usually outside at recess with the kids every day, playing soccer and mediating conflicts that occur on the playground. I walk the halls of our school looking for kids, instead of sitting in my office waiting for them to arrive.

I am not good at being still.

And yet, as I wrote earlier, I know there are lessons here. I can't always rely on the physicality of my body. Contact sports can't relieve my stress forever. I need some ways to unload that don't involve movement.

This past week, my mood matched my strained knee, limping along, stutter steps instead of easy smiles.

Even now, as I write, I feel a heaviness that comes with a lack of fresh air and exercise. A tired feeling of inertia, as if the air around me grows heavier with time.

But really, in the grand scheme of things, this is small, a mere blip compared to the storms that wreak havoc on lives.

I am the fortunate one.

Secure in my home, my children alive and playing.

Last night, friends gathered here for an early Thanksgiving feast. We ate smoked turkey and ham, pearled onions and green beans, raspberry crisp and pumpkin pie.

Olive led a parade of girls through the house, wearing her butterfly mask and a too-big dress that exposed her bare chest, chanting, "Cheer everybody! Cheer everybody!"

Elias chased after the boys as they ran from an imaginary ghost, smiling and laughing and keeping up without his canes. He almost seemed like just one of the gang.

He came to me a couple times, as I sat on our kitchen bench to say: "The girls won't listen to me when I asked them to get out of my room." Or: "Owen found the green radio before I did and I really want to use it."

He used his words to express his frustration.

"How bout you just sit next to me for a bit and be an honorary grown-up," I responded, and he smiled and boosted himself up, our hips touching, his arms waving the way he does when excited. 

Problem solved. Just like that. No pushing or pulling hair. No scream from the bedroom for me to hobble towards. Just words and a small diversion.

My boy might be growing up.

Playing with kids without Nick or I needing to be right there: This is new.  I don't know how many parties we've attended where one of us has ended up in the kids' room for most of the night. Leaving without ever really talking to another adult for more than Hello.

And here we were, relaxing in our own kitchen, finishing conversations, watching as both Olive and Elias played well with their friends.

I went to check on Elias before dinner and found him in his bed with three other boys, their heads all pushed together, as they took turns playing games on Alden's ipod. Elias sat waiting for his turn, instead of grabbing the device from the other boys' hands. Progress indeed.

Later, all the kids marched through the house as one giant train, no two cars the same, each child a minor miracle of cells dividing into spirits all their own.

Cheer everybody! Cheer everybody! Cheer everybody!

I suppose that chant includes me. So, I'm a bit of a gimp, moving awfully slow, don't need to be a grump too.

Cheers everybody.

On behalf of my Mom's Birthday...

...A picture by Elias:

Happy Friday All!

Sidelined From Within

Let's just say I let out a one syllable word that rhymes with duck the moment my skate edge caught and my knee traveled in the opposite direction. Second shift of my hockey game Sunday night. Chasing a girl almost half my age and twice as good.

Will I ever learn?

And now I sit in bed, on a sunny afternoon, with fresh snow on the ground, wearing a full leg brace, hoping my MCL (medial collateral ligament) is just mildly strained or torn. Hoping when I see the doctor again in three weeks my knee will be on its way to a full recovery and I'll be back on the ice after the Holidays. Back to hockey and soccer and skiing and running and...

Its humbling to fall.

To lay low.

To go.

So.

Slow.

I hobble down the hall, aware of my limited mobility, feeling shackled by the effort it takes to move.

Of course I think about Elias, my nine-year-old son with CP, a boy with a body and brain that communicate through a version of morse code instead of spontaneous texts.

I remind myself that my leg may be healed in six weeks. This is a temporary.

This too shall pass.

As an athlete I struggle with being still. Sports and exercise are my stress-relievers. I move to release and recharge. Often, as Elias's mother, I have thought about the irony of my own need for an active lifestyle and my son's inherent limitations.

And now here it is, my own body limited. Damaged. Sidelined from within.

Why does the world seem to offer up the same lessons to re-learn time and time again?

Slow down.

You are not immortal.

You are not in control.

Let go...

Why is it so hard to listen?

He Only Wore em for a Moment But...

...Happy Friday

Beyond Boo

You can tell a lot about kids by the way they approach your door on Halloween.

Do they stay back or step forward? Do they say, "trick or treat"? Do they look you in the eye? Do they hide their head? Do they reach into the bowl? Or wait for you to give them candy? Do they say thank you? Do they smile?

Olive stands at the front of the pack and keeps trying to weasel more candy than her allotted amount. She holds her position on the porch instead of making room for her peers. She runs ahead of the group with our six-year-old neighbor, only a few steps behind him, as they bound up the next driveway, or cut through the yard, the garden, on a bee-line for candy.

Another friend, also three, stands at the back, never reaches her hand in the bowl unless directed, eyes down cast, shoulders slightly hunched, a quiet, "Thank you."

Elias, with a whole flock of costumed kids behind him waiting for their turn at the door, asks: "Have you added an addition to your house?"

"Now's not the time Bud."

At another house, after some costume confusion with his "ghost" outfit where folks thought he might be a bat, or a raven or a wizard, he steps right up to the woman at the door and says, "Trick or treat. I'm a ghost-slash-raven-slash-bat-slash-wizard."

She smiles. "Well then you get extra candy due to being so creative."

We have Olive in tears after one house, where an older lady who hands out pre-packed bags of candy drops an orange one in Olive's cloth pumpkin and she says, "I want a purple one too!"

When she steps off the porch, I squat down in front of her, "Olive you just say thank you. You don't ask for more. You say thank you and you step aside to make room for other kids."

Nick follows up with some words of his own, and we soon have a crying princess in our arms.

Towards the end of our loop, we stop at a friends house who says, "Please just take one, I'm getting low on candy."

Elias clutches two candy bars in his hand. "Elias, did you hear Danielle? She said one."

He doesn't let go, so I pry open his fist, "One."

And as if I have just told him green is now red, he says, "But I always take two."

I catch Danielle's eyes and roll mine, she smiles as I say:  "Not when someone say take one. You take one."

Back at our own house, where we hand out candy from our yard, as we gather around a fire and drink adult beverages, I find myself observing the various approaches to candy-taking.

"Take a handful, we still have a lot left," I say to a young robot who looks at me unsure, his fingers still gripping one bar. "Its OK."

I think maybe, like me, his mom coached him differently until she says, "Here, I'll take a handful for you." She clutches as many peppermint patties and recess peanut butter cups as she can and drops them into his bag.

Then this un-costumed young Mom pulls another bag from her chest and says, "Trick or treat? Me too?"

"Sure," I say.

Part of me wants to judge her, shame her, but another kinder part thinks maybe she never got to be a kid. Maybe she's reliving her own lost childhood through her son.

And isn't that what Halloween is really all about? Dressing up as someone we are not or long to be or could never imagine? Pretending for a few hours that we are someone or something else?

I miss the days of making costumes from scratch and getting homemade treats from my neighbors. Advertising and razorblades distorted the Halloween of my youth. But we still get to carve faces into pumpkins, roast the seeds, and on the 31st of October walk the streets in disguise, ringing bells and knocking.

Olive came home from preschool on Wednesday the 30th with a 101 fever. As I put her to bed that night I thought about the possibility of her being sick for Halloween. Its not really a Holiday we can postpone, go door to door on November 1st or 2nd.

Luckily, she woke up fever-free and full of her usual zip, though we both stayed home from school to be safe.  "Mommy is it time to go trick or treating now?" she asked me at eleven that morning. (And every hour after.)

"No not yet. You still have a long time to wait."

"But I've been waiting and waiting and waiting for a long loooong time."

"That's life Babe. Waiting. And learning to be patient."

Waiting and wondering.

Learning and living as best we can.

Everyday we wear masks, whether we realize it or not, as we dress up as the person we want the world to see. We make believe we are "OK"  even when we feel broken inside. Even when we hurt. Even when we want to crawl into a cave and die we don't. We zip ourselves into our Super Hero clothes so we can keep stepping forward, keep breathing, carry on.

This world isn't easy.

Its not Happily Ever After.

But it's the difficult times that make us, that transform us, that give us the will to defeat the beasts and goblins who dare to suppress us.

We are all survivors, each and every one, and when we greet each other at the door we need to remember to look into the other's eyes, past the draperies that cloak us, to the child inside who just wants to taste a little sugar.