Missing

As a little girl with a kitten



With my brother Anton. She bought him the pink shirt, XXL.

On her wedding day in a cape and white boots

Last day with her first grandchild

Camping in Big Sur, she couldn't believe the stars

She had a pony when she was little. The pony had a cart.

Sailing in the Netherlands, I was 16.

She ran away to go to college. It was worth it.



In Paris in berets. Cracking ourselves up.



Dancing in the kitchen at my wedding, 3 months before

working motherhood

Ellis' first swing ride. He is so fun these days. So curious and happy to see new things.

I asked a fellow working mother if it gets easier to be away from your baby all day.
No, she said, it gets harder.

I didn't believe her. I thought that as he got older and as he enjoyed his social time with the kids at daycare, or the afternoons with his father...it would be easier to leave him.

I was wrong.
Its breaking my heart.

He starts to whine when he sees me packing my laptop away, getting my coat. He army crawls over to me. He wants to be held.

I know that after I leave he is fine. I know that his father takes good care of him, that the eight hours a week he spends at daycare with other kids are good for him.

I know that I have to work.

I know that we are lucky that he doesn't have to go to daycare every day of the week, that we have friends to trade childcare with, that he is healthy and happy and social, that we like the caretakers at our daycare, that our daycare is at Dave's college, just down the hall from his classroom.

Still, as I see how fast he is growing--a new skill mastered everyday--I understand how precious these days are. And eight hours away from him seems so long.

My relatives in the Netherlands have many options. They have subsidized childcare on site at their workplace. They have year long maternity leaves. They can job share with other mothers so that they have time off during the week. They have options.

I have a very flexible workplace. I shouldn't complain.

Still. There should be a value placed on mothering. A value that is reflected in labor laws, in company policies, in government subsidies, in our collective common sense.

Everyday in the news, another story about someone getting overpaid for a job they did badly, while public school teachers, social workers and parents get underpaid for the difficult jobs they have committed their lives to, jobs they are doing well.

All the price tags have been switched around.

I don't know how to write policy, but this is what I know to be true: No one can take better care of a child than its own mother/father/caretaker. Invest in ways to allow mothers and fathers to stay home with their children and you invest in your future citizens.
This is obvious to me.

I like going to work...

But I would like to have options.

I would like to be living in a country that gave me those options, that supported me in my efforts to raise my child. Tax credits are all good and fine. But they don't give me back those eight hours I miss everyday of watching him grow, of getting to know him, his preferences, his budding personality.

I miss him, everyday. I miss him.

http://www.momsrising.org/

Ellis Island

Today, Ellis in the highchair, eating his cheerios. Dave and I drinking coffee. Dave is sketching out his family tree. He is looking back, trying to find the source of the sadness he sees in many of his family members. He writes notes next to each person; little haiku's that sum up the lives of each family member. "Divorced. Sad. Drinks."

He puts a smiley face next to Ellis' name.

Ellis babbles and eats unaware of his loaded lineage. Between Dave and I's family there are a lot of powerful narratives that each new generation hears and retells. These stories define how we think of ourselves. They define us in ways we don't realize.

Dave is looking back and looking forward. As parents, we can chose new ways forward. We don't have to repeat the patterns. But it requires consciousness of those patterns. It requires that we sketch out our family trees on Saturday mornings, and look for the codes, the repetition, the continuation of behaviors from generation to generation. And then it requires that we change course. Deliberately. This is harder than it sounds.

My great grandmother came through Ellis island in 1913. She was pregnant on the boat, miscarried soon after arriving. After that she gave birth to two stillborn children in the space of three years. The light went out of her. She was a hard woman to live with, my grandmother told me, she lost her ability to love. This affected my grandmother, and in turn affected my mother.

My grandmother's first child died in her arms at five months, because my grandfather refused to take the baby to the doctor. The impact this had on my grandmother and grandfather's marriage, affected my mother, and in turn affected me.

My mother's father died when I was six weeks old. The shock of this dried up my mother's breast milk and I screamed for days, my wailing the soundtrack to those first days she lived without her father on the planet. And then my pregnancy in the wake of my mother's death. One heart stops beating and one starts. What do I do with all of this death at the moment of birth, birth at the moment of death?

These stories seep into our skin, permeate our view of the world. We wonder why we feel sad for no particular reason, and then remember, we are carrying the sadness of the people who came before us.

The choices of my grandmothers have affected my trajectory, and now Ellis'. My grandmother herding three children through Ellis Island, ultimately resulted in Ellis. He is a combination and culmination of all of our choices, and all of the things out of our control.

When we were children, we were passive recipients of our reality. Now as parents, we are the deciders. We get to decide bedtimes, activities, which religion to endorse, what to make for dinner, the politics we preach.

I always told my mother that she did the work of many generations in moving us forward. She drastically changed our course. She ran away from home to go to college. She shook off the conservative religion she was given. She rejected her family's belief that women were inherently inferior. She moved away. She moved abroad. She broke all the rules.

The miles she traveled outside of her comfort zone, and the battles she fought against limiting ideas are the gifts she gave Ellis on the day of his birth.

Today the weather is finally warmer. Its been a long winter. We need Spring badly. I can't wait to take a walk around the frozen lake today. There are many things I want to teach Ellis, many things I want to tell him, the good stories and the bad stories, the folly of his ancestors, the wisdom of my mother.

Today's lesson: When the sun is shining, go outside.

Somehow I've Got to Find Some Kind of Peace of Mind

In our old office, whenever I needed to pump, I would have to clear everyone—staff, artists, interns— out of our one room office. Having to request this mass exodus, and calling attention to my milk laden breasts every three hours was far from ideal. When we moved into our new office building, I asked the facilities manager if there was somewhere private that I could pump during the day. She gave me the keys to the “Health Realization Training Room.” She explained that this was the office of the Health Realization outreach worker, who was never there, since she was always doing health and wellness outreach in the community.

A small luxury in the middle of the day. Privacy. Alone in a room. A moment to take a breath.

Then a few weeks ago I bumped into the Health Realization outreach worker. I told her that I used her office to pump. Wise, calm, centered. These are the words that came to my mind when I met her. “Doesn’t that room have great energy?” she said.

I had never thought about it before, but yes, it had a good energy.

Last week I was a wreck. Everything seemed to be conspiring to undermine me. My mind wouldn’t stop racing. I wasn’t sleeping. Spinning thinking – this is what my mother used to call it. Round and round we go:

What if I don’t get another job? What if they cut the state budget and Dave loses his job? Is Ellis healthy? My body aches, I need to go to yoga, I don’t have time for yoga., I miss my mom, How is my brother really doing?, We haven’t properly mopped the floors in weeks, Is Ellis eating enough? What if I don't get another job?

My anxiety levels were soaring.

Then, on Thursday, when I went to the Health Realization room to pump, I found this chart that diagrammed a busy mind and a calm mind. There are always photocopied handouts lying around the office, but this chart was dead in the middle of the table, in front of the chair that I sit in to pump. As if it were waiting for me.

Health realization, it explained on the back, is the theory that our thinking creates our reality. If we change our thinking, we change our reality. If we learn how to calm down our thinking, we have access to the health that is within us all (“innate health”).

I have never heard of “health realization” but I am familiar with these concepts. This theory was very important to my mother and her practice of psychology—she used it with her clients and in her own life. I never knew the technical term for this body of thought.

My mother took every chance she could to remind me that I could change my thinking, and therefore change my world. Still, I needed it charted out and placed in front of me in the Health Realization room. My mother finds me in all sorts of places.

Remember the things your mother told you: Still your mind. Real-ize your power. Make your own real.

I took the busy vs. calm mind chart to my therapist, like you take a picture of a haircut from a magazine to your hair dresser.

Here, this one, I want this mind, I said. The calm one. The one that gives me access to my creativity. That helps me see innocence and opportunity, rather than dysfunction and obstacles. This one.

Ok, she said.
Start by breathing.
Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

Sustenance

I have had the stomach flu. I think this has affected my milk supply. Ellis has seemed hungry when we put him down at night, so Dave's been giving him a bottle of formula.

The transition to solids is still going slow. He still refuses anything on a spoon. But he will eat those Gerber puffs that melt in your mouth, and sometimes small pieces of food, like bananas. Anything that he can manage to pick up and eat himself, he will eat. But it is clear he is not a fan of being a passive recipient of food. As my Grandpa would say, that's the fire in him. I like the fire in him.

Most days we strip him down to his diaper, pour pureed baby food or pureed food unto his high chair tray and then sprinkle those Gerber puff things over it, and let him go for it, hoping some of it gets in his belly.

Today, my second day home from work sick, I could tell Ellis wasn't getting enough milk nursing, so I gave him the first bottle I personally have ever given him. This was hard for me.

Breastfeeding was so difficult at first. Ellis' latch was tight and shallow when he was a newborn. I was in a lot of pain for the first month and a half. I tried everything. I stalked lactation consultants. There were times I thought about giving up. The lactation consultant and the La Leche League people kept telling me it was going to get easier. I wanted to tell them where to go.

But, they were right. I made it through to the other side. It did get easier. I began to enjoy it, and understand how important it was to bonding with Ellis.

Now, with the prospect of my supply going down, I realize I am not ready to stop breastfeeding. We started using formula more regularly this last month. I am worried that this, combined with those days that I can't fit in a second pumping session at work, are contributing to my supply diminishing. And now this stomach bug...

There have been so many times that I have been so sick of nursing, bitter about the beers I couldn't drink and frustrated at having to watch the clock to make sure I was home within two hours...I resisted the limitations breastfeeding put on me. I can see now how much I fought against this invasion of my body, personal space and time. I had to beat down my ego, and go through a mourning process of my old self that could come and go as she pleased.

But now, I'm not ready for it to end. Now it's a part of my life and whatever self this is that I have become. I can see now this is going to be a never ending process of self reinvention.

Weightless

My job is not safe. The organization I work with is being hard hit by the economy. I go over what I could have done differently, who to blame, how to plan. I have to start to think again what it is that I want to do when I grow up. The idea of failure, and my ego.

A friend's father was diagnosed with cancer, and as I console her, all the memories come flooding back. How it felt to have cancer always there, always threatening, a constant that you lived with, a secret that no one understood. There was a kind of relief, when my mother died, that the cancer was gone too. Now here it is again. I offer my friend what I have, understanding of how it feels to be staring down death, how strange it is to contemplate existing beyond the people that brought you into existence, the question of how to use the time left.

Ellis and I started swimming lessons at the Y last week. A lot of the other kids in the class were scared of the water, shivering, whining to get out. Ellis loved it. He babbled happily as I pulled him through the water. When the instructor told us to put the children on their backs, most of them resisted the vulnerable position. Ellis spread his arms wide open, looked up at the ceiling, his head on my shoulder. "Well, someone sure is comfortable and secure on his back," the instructor said as she passed us. I remember how in the first months of Ellis' life, when he wouldn't stop crying, how responsible I felt for his wailing and fussiness and reflux. I worried that the grief that had coursed through my body during my pregnancy had seeped into him. I took his crying and discontent as a sign that he didn't feel secure enough, that I was doing something wrong, that I wasn't doing enough to help him make the adjustment from womb to life outside of it. The weight of the things I take on myself.

Ellis in the water on his back, his arms open wide, content and happy. This week of hard truths and death revisited, I go back to this image. I remind myself of the things that are good in this moment. Things are unfolding exactly as they should, my prenatal yoga teacher would say at the end of our practice, and I would feel my pregnant body go limp with relaxation. Did she know how much I needed to hear that? Very few things actually matter, my mother used to say, a mantra that at first glance seems pessimistic, at second glance is freeing. Don't waste your precious time or energy. Stop your mind's spinning. Let go. Unclinch your fists. Lay back, arms open wide. Let the weight fall away.

Notes

1. My office moved last week to a Community Center closer to my house. Our old office was in a gloomy old building that used to be a funeral home. The other offices in the building always had their doors shut and no one talked to us when we passed them in the hall. Our new office is the exact opposite. The Community Center houses a youth program, a free clinic, a sliding scale daycare, a theater company, HIV AIDS outreach, Parenting classes in Spanish, Somali, and Hmong, a computer resource room, a bike shop run by homeless youth. Like minded, content people are always roaming the hallway, stopping by our office, chatting, asking us about our work. The free clinic, which is a hybrid Eastern Western health clinic that has acupuncturists and Western medical doctors providing consultations together, is right across the hallway. On Wednesday and Saturdays, they offer free acupuncture and massages to anyone who shows up. When the clinic's calming music drifts across the hallway, I am reminded of sanity, holistic solutions and the kindness of strangers.

2. Ellis isn't crawling yet, but has begun to pull himself to stand by tables and chairs. I wonder if he will skip crawling and go straight to walking.

3. Last weekend the city smoothed down a path for cross country skiers and snow shoers that goes all around the frozen lakes down the street from us. On Saturday night they lit the path with luminaries, and set up hot cocoa tents and warming stations with fire pits. We went to watch crowds of skiers circle the lit up paths.

4. I went to one of the art programs my organization runs in Special Education classrooms last week. The students wrote a poem called Mad, Sad and Life, about how to get through a bad day. The last line was, "I don't worry about it. I keep going. I get on with my life."

4. Ellis is still refusing solids. We put him the highchair and try different foods everyday. When he sees the spoon coming he clamps his mouth shut. We have begun to let him stick his hands in the bowl of food, and to hold the spoon himself. I food milled one strawberry the other night that ended up spread all over the dining room, Ellis' toys, my clothes and his clothes.

5. It warmed up at the end of the week, to double digits, 10 degrees, then 20 and today a high of 38. On double digit days, Dave goes down the street to the park to play pick up hockey, and we can take Ellis out for short walks. He blinks at the sun as if he's never seen it before.

6. My mother would always laugh at my tendency to think of things as half empty, rather than half full. She would call me out on it, remind me that no matter what was happening in my life, I was in charge of the way I saw the world, that I could be deliberate in how I saw and experienced it. A few days before she died, they released her from the hospital. After a harrowing car ride through Amsterdam, the last time she would see it, she and I arrived at her beloved art studio. She was so happy to be there. She could still walk then and she shuffled around her easels and tables, looking at her half done paintings, shifting through her found junk and sacred relics. She found a piece of paper that she had typed a quotation on, and she handed it to me."There, this is for you, this is what you need to remember." she said. The paper had these words on it:

"The single most important decision any of us will make," said Albert Einstein, "is whether or not to believe the universe is friendly."

I read it, and my mother said, "Chose friendly, Bree. Chose friendly." She then put on one of her favorite songs, turned it up loud, closed her eyes and danced.