Following Elias

Sometimes They Come True

You ever dream about something for so long that when it finally happens, it feels like a dream?

I felt like that when Elias took his first steps across our living room. When sometime during his third year, he pulled himself up to stand, his sticky hands gripping the Radio Flyer wagon, and he placed one foot in front of the other. Step by tiny step.

He can walk! Holy shit he can walk!

Or when I heard a stout cry from Olive, seconds after they cut her free from my womb, moments before I passed out from blood loss, and knew, finally fully knew, Nick and I had somehow magically created a healthy baby girl.  

She's here! She's alive! She OK!

And now, as board by board, the house we longed for, on the land we love, begins to find its form. Board by board by board...

Its happening! Its really happening!!

Sometimes dreams do come true.

Autism or Teenage Angst?

Its hard to know if Elias's challenging behaviors lately come from him falling somewhere on the spectrum or stem from entering adolescence.

I remind myself often what I was like at thirteen--a sneaky door-slamming emotional fire bomb. Convinced that my parents knew nothing about the world, my heart my stage, reason and forethought hard to come by, I was not an easy girl to parent.

Just ask my Mom and Dad.

Elias loves to shake his head at us, not a smooth casual "no" but a deliberate jerky turning of his head from side to side. He does this when we ask him to get ready for bed, to eat a vegetable, to put on his socks (something he is finally learning how to do).

The other night he smacked Olive in the face when she peered at what he was watching on his iPad. "I was getting a mosquito," he said, as she cried harder than needed.

A sincere apology never came from his lips, much to Olive's dismay.

Elias gets off on staring at Olive, just to make her squirm, and ordering her around: "Olive hang up your coat." "Olive will you clear my plate too?" "Olive you need to pick that up."

"Elias, you aren't the boss of me!" Olive retorts.

When we ask him to entertain himself, without a screen, he sits in his chair at the table doing nothing. Or interrupts our conversations with questions he already knows how to answer.

He squeezes our dogs or walks right over them in his attempt to get from point A to point B. Even if we stand in his way, he barrels through, determined to take a direct path to his destination. Unless we need him to move quickly, directly, then he stands still, or gets distracted by every possible side route.

"I don't know," is his answer to most questions these days.

"What do you want to do Elias?"

"I don't know."

"What interests you?"

"I don't know."

And though he is having a good school year, and ends the day in smiles, he still struggles most mornings with a negative attitude about the transition from home to school, sometimes even starting to come up with reasons why he's not going to school the previous evening.

I'm not going to school because its too light.

I'm not going to school because its raining.

I'm not going to school because the road is bad.

I'm not going to school because there's a sea otter in the bay.

Last night, when he finally emerged from the bathroom in his pajamas, he said: "I was wearing those tight jeans and I said to myself if I can't get these jeans off then I'm definitely not going to school tomorrow."

Parents of typical teenagers, is any of this normal?

On this Day and Every Day

I stand in a line of only daughters.

My mother before me, with her two younger brothers. Me and Olive with our older ones.

Three lone double X chromosomes. Girls without sisters-- one after the other, after the other. 

Three generations of breasts rising, of hips rounding, of wombs stretching with the potential to circle a life. To hold the beginning of another.

From my mother's body, I emerged, and thirty-seven years later, Olive came out of mine.  

Blood spirals through our hearts with similar tide tables, with complimentary rhythms that move our feet in steps we recognize.

Seeing my mother and my daughter stand together, where the beach meets the sea, is like watching my future touch my history.

One digging deep, one standing upright, both intricate parts of me.

I stand in a line of Heath Everett Jordan women, with words all our own, with cells that belong to each other.

On this day, and every day, I am thankful for my mother, and for the opportunity to become one.

All We Need

Something about seeing Olive on stage shifts my parental lens, no longer a needy appendage but an individual performer with her own athleticism and grace. Olive the gymnast and ballerina, separate from me, with my hockey hips and scarred slide-tackling knees.

Olive running across the mat and throwing herself into a round-off, the only girl at her level comfortable enough to try one on stage. Olive remembering all the dance steps in her ballet routine.

And I sit in the audience, in awe of my little girl who is not so small after all.

"Thank you for making me breakfast," she says to me this morning, surprising me with her words of gratitude, with her understanding that food doesn't just magically appear before her but someone actually takes the time to cut the crust off lightly-cooked toast, to mix craisins and brown sugar in oatmeal to make sure its sweet enough.

"Mom, I didn't even have to say: whaaaa!" Olive holds a small dead Spruce in her hands, root ball and all. She says this in response to my explanation for my previous noises as I pulled out my own slightly larger tree-- I had told her that sound effects, like whaaa and grrrr, can sometimes make us stronger.

We climb over old fallen Hemlock, weave around Devil's Club spears at this pre-leaf time of year, as we work on clearing the undergrowth of our woods.

 

"You are so strong!" I say, and her lean muscled body smiles back at me as she searches for another small dead Spruce to pull from the still wet ground.

We are close to a giant rotting log, Olive's make-believe trolly, complete with a seat for people in wheelchairs, because Olive's pretend world is an inclusive one, with space for forearm crutches and wheels.

 

Olive draws two pictures for the cabin, she tapes one downstairs with images of folks with mobility issues and tapes another one on our ladder-like stairs with able-bodied stick figures.

If she could, she'd build a ramp to erase the barrier to accessibility. Or try to rig a harness system to pull someone up top, wheelchair and all. She'd order and install an elevator if she had the funds.

Olive already turns tree stumps, chairs, and snow-piles into elevators to entice her brother to join her creative play. She falls in dramatic ways to  make Elias laugh. Crashes into walls and trees just to see the glee he can't contain, the full body humor that makes his belly shake.

And sure, she still pushes Elias's buttons, whines, cries too easily, lies outright-- she's still an imperfect child, as we all are inside, but she's growing up into a remarkable person all her own.

"Mom when I was in kindergarten I thought babies just popped out," she says, as we lay in her bed snuggling. "I didn't know it hurt and there was blood."

"Having babies is hard and messy," I tell her.  "But it is often the most difficult things that bring us the most joy."

"Do you still have babies in you?"

"No, I have eggs, but your Dad and I won't create any more babies."

"Why not?"

"Because we are happy with our family the way it is."

"Because we are moving out of the cabin into our trailer?" She asks, referring to our upcoming downsizing at month's end.

"No, because you and Elias are all we need."

And with that, I kiss her head and say goodnight.

"I love you," I say, as I tuck the blankets around her shoulders that grow broader as she cartwheels and somersaults her way through first grade.

"I love you too, Mom."

I mean really, what more could I possibly need?

Happy Homecoming Friday

On the drive to school this morning, our grumpy 13-year-old boy suddenly burst into a grin and said. "Mom, its my homecoming day today. I totally forgot. Its today. My homecoming day is today. I forgot. I totally forgot."

So did I.

And yes, he repeats himself like that all the time. All the time. He repeats himself like that.

Cinco De Mayo: Elias's homecoming.

Ninety-four days after Elias's premature birth, after his arrival at 24 weeks via emergency c-section, after an Apgar score of zero, (still zero at five minutes), after multiple resuscitations, after heart and brain surgery, after endless hours of sitting by his isollete unable to hold our first born, we finally brought our baby home.

Look closely, even Elias is waving goodbye to the windowless fluorescent lit hospital room.

I cant even begin to explain what it felt like to finally be outside with our boy, for him to feel sunshine and fresh air for the first time:

And then, despite signing a sheet saying I wouldn't, to finally sleep with Elias cradled in my arms:

Pure bliss.

The panic of no longer living with a highly trained medical staff to help us respond to his needs would kick in later.

On this 5th day of May, we only felt the sheer joy of finally coming home with our boy.

Happy Homecoming Friday, my friends!

Raise a glass to perseverance, to science, to medical providers, to love, to the will to live despite the odds-- and to facing challenges with the raw heart of mountains, saints, Elias.

 

When Laughter Lightens the Load

"Will your worrying hurt you or help you?" An older woman asked me before the Poetry Parlay, when I told her I keep a book of Mary Oliver's poems by my bed to turn to when my mind won't stop polishing stones.

Turning over the sediment of my life.

All those boulders I imagine in my path, the ones that fell from the mountains that crumbled when the life I anticipated vanished-- the way mirages always do.

Reality has a way of changing our landscapes, an ocean floor where wildflowers once grew. A creek turned dessert. Farmlands transformed into icy bays.

Will your worrying hurt you or help you?

Some of the stones I polish are small pebbles of despair that I can't seem to shake no matter how many times I take off my boots and bang them against the post that holds up our porch. Those tiny what if questions, like slivers of shale.

Other rocks fall from the sky, as if dropped by returning flocks of geese, they appear in the night right when I turn out the light. Thud...thud...thud...

And there I lay again, as if encased by granite. Paralyzed by my own mind.

Will your worrying hurt you or help you?

In almost all my late night tossing, the honest answer to the question is that my worrying only hurts me.

It is a self-induced tornado of angst.

So on this first day of May, as the rain falls, after a sunny weekend in the mountains with a gaggle of women where laughter won the day, I plan to carry fewer stones in my pillowcase.  

To travel a little lighter on this landscape that is mine.