back to zero

My dad is the kind of dad that has a saying for most things.  Corny and comical, he was not above saying that he’d had a good day at the “orifice” when referencing his office, calling to mind a place where one could easily get lost and stuck, like a dropped hair pin down the drain.  His Saturday errands were never much better, often ending up at the “homeless depot,” that bright orange big box home center, trying to track down a tool of some kind.  Whether he was pulling out a pun, or creating some sort of predictable lingo, my dad could often illicit a grimace from us kids.

At home, around the dinner table, things were no different.  Most nights of my growing up, after the plates had been cleared and we pushed back our chairs from the table, my dad would call his Kitchen Patrol to order.  With his clear directive: “back to zero” we had just one task:  clean up. By this he meant that the kitchen, after a full day of three square meals and all the requisite mess that goes into making them, needed to glisten like it was brand new.  If all the day’s mess-making was added up cereal bowl plus butter dish in the equation, than this cleaning – the wiping and scrubbing and putting away – was the negative algebra necessary to balance it all out.  That, along with “completing the magic cycle,” which in his vernacular meant seeing to it that our dirty dishes ended up in the dishwasher instead of on the counter above it.

There was always camaraderie in the process.  When we were younger, my dad stuck around to make sure we got stuff done properly, but as we got older my sister and I were left on our own.  Of course we grumbled and made excuses – oh the homework! so much! really! – but we took up our dishtowels and stood in position.  If it was my arms and hands that turned red and raw from the hot water, it was hers that were at the ready with a towel, drying and reaching to the high cabinets to put dishes away.  And really, how else is one supposed to learn the art of snapping towels?  No child should be without this skill.

This language of completion, of cycles and clean slates, like anything with such childhood repetition, has stuck with me.  Standing in the kitchen now of my adulthood,  nary a night goes by that these refrains don’t chug like a train along those  railroads tracks deep in my brain, the ones that were laid a long, long time ago.  While my dad was teaching us about fair work, about responsibility, about the nitty-gritty of scrubbing pots and belonging to community, he was also teaching us about fresh starts.  Each day brings it’s own grime, and the dirt of living with each other stains us.  It takes diligent work, knowing how and when to say sorry, how to fix our mistakes, how to reach through to each other.  But each morning, we are “back to zero,” ready to face another day. Nourishing ourselves and one another is not without mess. In our house now, this means fresh starts whenever we ask for them.

My kids are still young yet for manning their own station as we strive to get “back to zero” every night in the kitchen, but they are learning their own small part in the process.  Each night when they set, and then later clear, the table, they see how they contribute to our family community.  And right now, the job for Mark and I  is to take up our station and do the work of scrubbing those dishes, completing the cycles, magic and otherwise, and putting glasses away, ready to start the next day new again.

This is part of a series that I  post occasionally about the  family sayings and folklore that are meaningful to me, especially in my family history, as a way to explore my own Story.  Similar posts can be found here: ‘near nough.  and here: it’s not that windy.  Tell me some of yours!

the struggle of snow

It seemed like a good idea.  Watching the pearly fluffs of snow fall quietly from the kitchen window it was hard to resist the tug of the luminescence calling us outside.  It is a Spring snow, afterall, and possibly the last of the year.  But it is only moments later, standing in the basement with the Littlest clamped between my legs, wrangling the Middlest into her gloves, that I am questioning my sanity.

It is a battle I know too well, one that is more physically demanding than I ever think it will be.  On the surface it doesn’t sound that hard: Ok, kids, grab a jacket, and let’s head outside.  But the reality is much grittier. The basement, our point of departure, is full of all the things that a basement should be full of, including a furnace and water heater, and flotsam of former stages of life.  All this is naturally inviting for any explorer worth his salt, and this Littlest of mine is no exception.  His speed isn’t hampered until I get his boots on, and then he can barely stand upright anymore.  The bigger two kids are surprisingly helpful at finding jackets and hats, gloves and boots, but even their fortified desires for self-reliance crumbles at the thought of snow eeking into a potentially exposed crevice at the wrists.

Snow pants, boots, jackets, hats, gloves: check. I shooed the big kids outside, promising to meet them momentarily.

Though I don’t even have my jacket on yet, my body temperature has risen, and with it my blood pressure.  I’m frustrated at myself for being so frustrated.  I’m ready to cancel the whole endeavor, because I’m already sunk in the task of making it outside, and I can’t even begin to see how, once we’re out there, it’ll be any different.  Every 0.35 seconds I’ve scooped the Littlest away from untold danger and he’s using every morsel of strength he has to fight against putting his arm into his jacket.  After practically dislocating numerous joints, both his and mine, we head outside, desperately seeking that cold blast of air to cool me down.

And then the magic happens.  It’s like stepping through the back of the wardrobe into another realm entirely.   The brightness of the still-falling snow is almost blinding, and the corners of my mouth turn upwards instinctively.  My shoulders sink back away from my ears, releasing a tension I didn’t even know I was carrying.  The kids are spinning circles, dizzying themselves with their heads thrown back and pink tongues thrust out and lined with white dots of snow.  Any disappointment they had when I came out without the sleds has faded away and they have created a new game, rolling themselves like hot dogs down the hill.  Popping up out of the snow when they reach the bottom, the snow shakes off of their heads and their shoulders, and I’m struck by the sturdiness of their bodies racing each other back up the hill.  Layered up like a miniature abominably snowman, the Littlest can hardly stand in balance, let alone take carefully calculated steps, but he is content enough to make a snow angel or two.  Then, hoisted onto to my hip, he points me all around the yard as I become the battleship he steers, his voyage a mission to explore this white land.

The magic is there until it isn’t anymore.  The Middlest’s gloves just won’t stay on anymore, and now her wrists are cold and sticky-wet.  The Littlest has commanded this mother-ship around and around again, and is only frustrated that he can’t command his own body in the same way.  Now it’s the tug from the other pole: the hot chocolate and dry comfort that draws us back inside.  The wet mess of shedding layers is an exacting mirror of our earlier struggles to piece it all together.

And what I see is this: I see this pattern of sweat and struggle interspersed with beauty and magic in large and small ways.  The magic of life’s beautiful moments may be fleeting, but in order to see it at all, you have to be there.  You’ll never get the magic if you don’t show up.  Those few moments of pure joy, for both the kids and I, in the snow, showered by today’s sparkle, was hard-won.  It could’ve been easy, halfway into the hide-and-seek of mismatched gloves, to abandon the program all together.  But in pressing on, we had our hands open, palms up, the magic lighting on us the way the snow illuminated their tongues.  And it’s these glimpses of beauty that keep me pressing on, day after day.  Because so much of it is a struggle: it’s a struggle for bedtime, at the end of the day, each at the end of our shortening ropes, with the clock ticking off a world of crazy when all I’m seeking is quiet.  It’s the hard work of listening through the whining, the tears, and the tantrums to seek out what is underneath it all.  It’s a struggle to find time – carve it out, really, chiseling in to one thing or another – for all that is important.  It’s a struggle to learn, again and again, to love each other and do it well.

And this is what I need to remember, when I break out in a full body sweat in the middle of the struggle.  It’s effort; it’s work.  But that is where the magic is found.  This is the whisper that I want to sink deep into the wrinkles of my brain. Right there, in the middle of the struggle, there are moments of beauty – the magic of sleeping bodies, hearts and souls that connect, joy for joy’s sake, and laughter snorted through tears.  I only need to step out into the snow to see it.

 

mud: the work that is real

We found the sun this weekend, or more like she found us.  The kids tumbled in from outside, all smiles and flushed cheeks, never ending stories and runny noses.  They peeled layers off, cheeks flushed red with fresh blood, and smiles that seem to burst forth from deep inside their bellies.  Before I could throw out a reminder about their boots, the mud that had spread into the treads of those boots  and darkened their knees was already loosened and coloring the white tiles of my kitchen floor.  Their story varied over the course of the weekend, but their excitement had something to do with digging deep in the dirt and making soup. Or Chinese Food.  And there was an extravagant  delivery system involving dump trucks.  Our back door was wide open, and I demanded that breeze to exorcise  my house of all of winter’s ills.  I welcomed the familiar sound of the metal spring stretching out and then the heavy thwack of the wood door landing hard back in place.  But it was the constant presence of the dirt, the thick clay-like coolness of the mud, that sticks with me.  Yesterday, as the rain came heavy and fast from the sky, I watched the kids’ fresh dirt trenches fill with water, rivulets of mud soup navigating through the backyard.

The work of the world is common as mud.

This line is written on my tiny patch of chalkboard paint in my kitchen.  When we replaced our oven a few months back we had to rework some of the spacing of our cabinets and I was left with some odd wall space.  One wintry day, I claimed it for myself as a place to write out words so they can be a regular part of my visual landscape, even though I’m not quite hip enough to make it look stylish (and I’m okay with that).  The work of the world is common as mud, it says.  These words, from a gorgeous poem by Marge Piercy, have been following me around now for weeks.  They will not let me go.  (If you are my friend of Facebook, you know this, because I couldn’t keep these words to myself!)  My work these days in nothing if not common.  Like mud, the work of mothering is not unique to me, but is the work of families this wide world over, timeless and spaceless like little else.  Though my quest this year is to see the Story swirling around me, some days the only story I can hear is the one of dirty dishes teetering way-too-high in my sink.  These days it’s easy to feel the quicksand pull of this work,  hearing only the slurping sound of suction as I try to rise above it, futile in my resistance to it’s gravity.  The poem continues:

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

Some days my efforts feel like dust, crumbled and falling through my outstretched fingers.  Holding no shape, the work of my mind, the toil of my hands, only seems to tell the story of dirt pressed deep into my fingernails.   The common mud-work of dinner making, crumbling to nothing as the picky eaters of my table push their plates away, upturned noses wanting only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I make dust through my own self-talk of patience, grasping for the right words in the middle of mind-battling the Eldest.  It is the stink of old mud, left brittle in the sun, when I am again revising sleeping arrangements, desperate to carve out a space of solace for myself, my husband, in this house too small and so full.  I scrub at my hands, and mostly my heart, all smeared with the day’s dirt and dust.  I’m looking for a cleaner version of myself, but the grime remains.  The end of each day finds me exhausted, over saturated with tiredness, and yet with a look back over the day I produce nothing to say: see, this, here.

But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
-”To Be of Use” Marge Piercy

Here’s where I take solace: the amphoras that are now in museums, adored for their sensual shape and their glow of beauty, must also have sweat pressed into their clay.  They bear the invisible finger prints of someone so long ago who maybe didn’t think this vessel was beautiful at all.  It was simply useful.  And that is beautiful.

Like that pitcher, I cry out for work that is real.  Water, oil, wine — all poured out with significance in blessings, celebrations and renewal.  Even the kids, with little care in the world, create real work for themselves, out of nothing but mud. The trick is in seeing how real my work actually is. This work of raising people, teaching and tending, feeding and mending, bodies and souls, can be shapeless and formless, not so clean and evident. But maybe another way to look at it is this: “Work is love made visible,” says Kahlil Gilbran.  Today I may have trouble seeing how my work, with this particular color thread, will appear in the tapestry of my story.  Without a sense of the big picture, it can be hard to understand the importance of this daily, common work of mud.  I want to remember that this, above all else, is the thing worth doing well done.

It’s a story of longevity, and I’ve got time.  This type of beautification comes with age, and with wear.  I’m not ready for that high museum shelf yet.

broken car mirrors

I was backing out of the garage the other day, my body yanked around to see the view behind me, when I heard it.  “What was that, Mommy?” asked the already-anxious-about-loud-noises-in-the-car five year old.  And just like that, my careless precision had not just bumped the side view mirror (which I may or may not have done countless times before) but smashed it to pieces of plastic and glass.  In my frustrated haste to successfully get all three Little Ones, with shoes and jackets and school bags, into the car, I was careless.  Isn’t this the danger then – that these things become  too familiar (like backing out of my garage countless times a day) and I get numb to them?  I wasn’t paying attention.  I was wrapped up in the chaos of our morning routine, tired already with the day looming ominously large in front of us.  I called Mark and cried into the phone with him, not because of the broken mirror (though there’s that), but because I knew what this broken mirror was reflecting back to me.  In those shards of distorted light, I saw that I needed to slow down and pay attention.  I need to take care.

Pay attention to this: the 13 month old who grows like a fairy tale weed right before my eyes.  I can’t say he toddles so much any more because it’s more sturdy and sure than any toddle ought to be.   He finds ways to play his own games with me, games that tell me to pay attention, to him, right now.  He pushes the buttons on the dishwasher and then make those flirty eyes with  me.  He laughs, throwing his head back exposing that kissable neck, and runs away as fast as he can, daring me to catch him.  (Don’t worry, I do.)  Or he finds just the right laundry basket, because goodness knows there are plenty around.  But he finds the one that has all of the folded clothes inside.  And one by one, he takes them all out, making a display on the bedroom floor.  And when I push him in the direction of all the unsorted, unfolded, un-everything clothes at his disposal?  He lays his body full out on the ground, kicking his feet and offering up his best imitation tantrum.  If I’m honest, these baby tantrums turn me to mush, and I love him all the more dearly for his ambition.  So, yes, love, I’ll pay attention to you.

And this: see these bodies, unabashedly naked, small but not so tiny anymore.  Our bath times have become circus like, as you can imagine, all three kids in a regular ol’ bath tub.  The new trick last night was from the Littlest, who stood proudly sticking out his belly and patting it with such pride.  And then there’s the lemonade station (please, oh please just pretend yellow, right?)  in the corner where the Eldest is brewing and pouring and serving it up to anyone who will answer.  The Middlest is lost in her own world, which I can’t believe is even possible in this arrangement, but she is singing and humming and la-la-la-ing to herself, letting herself feel the water.  I’m slowing down, taking notice to this, because I know that it’ll be all too soon when everyone needs their own space, their own privacy.  Their bodies won’t be mine to marvel at, and we’ll be hustling them towards showers to move along to the next thing.

And there’s the Eldest learning to read; and the Middlest making friends.  There is the Littlest pushing furniture around and blowing kisses.  There are more arts and crafts projects that I ever could have imagined, and I worry that someday I will be help responsible for the number of trees we’ve used up. There are scraps of paper everywhere.  On good days, I pick them up and smile at the experiment of it all.  Other days, I grumble over the tedium – scraps, everywhere.  I’m paying attention, but maybe to the wrong thing.

Here’s the thing:  I don’t usually think of myself as the kind of person who needs to be reminded to slow down.  My gears are set pretty low.  I’m more of an ambler, a putz-er, a mull-er.  But then it happens:  the daily grind wears me down.  It’s like the game that Grant likes to play, outside at the swing set.  He spins the swing around and around, and it lifts higher and higher until he can’t crank it up any more.  Then: let it go and watch it fly.  The swing spins, uncontrollably, barreling around back down again, with no regard to anything in it’s way.  I can unravel carelessly, too.  If I’m not paying attention, mirrors break.  And sometimes that’s a good thing.

I know that I’m not unique in this.  I need to pull back and see the bigger picture.  I need to take the long view, and see the panorama.  Because without the bigger story, I can’t make sense of the baby tantrums, let alone the big ones.  But when my nose is stuck on one particular page, in one scene of the story, it’s easy to get careless and forget to notice.  Or worse yet, to notice the things that don’t matter (the unsorted laundry, the uneaten vegetables).

Tonight, Mark is picking up a new side view mirror for my car.  And if all goes well, I will have the full view by morning.

of winter

The bigger Little Ones have created an island bed of sorts, sleeping bags hanging precariously from the arm of the couch, every pillow that we have pushed into this space on the family room floor.  Their own retreat has just the right blend of kid ingenuity and practical thought to make it mostly functional and the kids tuck themselves into it’s welcoming warmth.  It is a movie afternoon here, and this tuckaway is just the right spot to catch the show. We’ve been to the library; we’ve made the popcorn.  Now we’re ready to be enchanted by a visual story.   The Eldest remarked on our way to the library: “Mom, this is really special because we usually have movie days when it’s raining, but today it is sunny.”  What he didn’t notice was the deceit of the sun.  Though it is bright, the sharpness  of winter’s light  unfettered  by leaves on the trees, winter’s cold has built a wall around us.  Movie day, it is.

*

Grant has been asking lately, “Is this real?” and I’m not talking about  dragons or imaginary friends named Lacey.  He’s asking it when we’re driving to school, as he gazes out the window.  He’s asking it when we’re gathered around the table for dinner as he waits for me to finish cutting his carrots.  And I know just what he means.  Is this real?   I have a distinct memory, when I was about his age, feeling the same way.  I remember sitting in the car, watching the trees and the other cars, the shops and the traffic lights all pass us by.  But really we were moving past the scenery.  And I remember getting all twisted up in my head about what was real: was it myself in the car, seat belt on and singing along to Raffi?  Or was it the trees and the birds, the pavement and all that stuff outside?  What is real?  So I get what he means, and I’m sympathetic to my over-thinker, this dawning meta-awareness, and I know that he’ll never grow out of that.

*

The cold of this season has been bracing: the wind has pushed the wintry air into every crevice and crack of this house.  Each effort to leave the shored up warmth requires such work and yet, all it takes is a blown kiss from the north to reveal the open weave of the sweater I am wearing, the loose gap between my pant leg and sock.  By the end of the day the muscles in my back and neck are tense, my body hunched in on itself seeking inner warmth.  Maybe that’s why a fort of blankets and pillows looks so inviting.  I set the lid on the pot of chilli simmering on the stove and nestle my way into this movie retreat, too.  I feel my shoulders loosen, I let the little kid bodies mold around mine.  My cheeks flush with the moist warmth of breath, the child-like exhalations of rhythm.  This is real.

*

Later, when Griffin is awake, and I’ve pressed his cheeks into my heart so that he knows the beat of my love and I’ve smoothed back his hair, damp with nap-sweat, he’s loud and pointing to the family room, to his brother and sister, so we go.  We go, and we find the movie fort tweaked a bit, and now it has become a captain hook adventure and they are running on the coffee table (yes, this) and there is water and rescues and duels and Griffin gets right in on the action.   Just try to tell me that this isn’t real, folks.

The groundhog poked it’s head out this past weekend, yawned, blinked and stretched out, unimpressed with what he saw:  No shadow this year.  They say that means spring will come soon.