amazing grace

Having a two year old is exhausting and wonderful. It is sad to admit that I have almost no recollection of Beatrice's two. I was four months into grief when we celebrated two with sushi and pizzi. I remember delighting in her, asking her how she lived so easily. I remember cuddling with her for hours, watching movies. I remember painting with her. I remember having long conversations with her, and reading her long, intricate folktales of Inuit peoples and Mexican Indians.

I have no recollection if she was interested in using the potty. I don't remember how many words she had, or if her molars came in (they must have, they are here.) I don't know when she said "I love you" for the first time, or if she sang Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star as much as Thor does. I missed Lucia and appreciated Beezus with every ounce of me, but I couldn't commit either of them to memory. They were like sand. Every moment gone before it came.

Thor is severely speech delayed. I had no idea he was delayed, because I had no idea what to expect. I don't remember how many words Beezus had. I only realized because when I hung out with other two year olds, he didn't speak and they did.

He is slowly learning words, and talking. The speech therapist tells me that he is incredibly smart, above or at all his milestones, perhaps just a little lazy with his mouth movements. He'd rather say every word with a D. It is a very common speech delay for little bros. He gets so excited when his teacher is coming over, and he sits in front of her playing games with her. I hear him say Chicken perfectly. Pig. Cow. Boy. He raises his hand like he is in school, even though she is always calling on him and he is the only one answering. I like his teacher, she is kind and smiles at his little flirts and idiosyncrasies.

I feel like we are just starting summer. Guests and trips, then appointments and dentists and biopsies and food shopping and maybe we will never sit still again, wondering what to do. I think about making a schedule for us, but with what time? Every day is another appointment. Beezus keeps asking me, "Do you have my schedule yet?" She is a child run by routine. I am a mother run by routine, but I still can't construct anything schedule-y.

The yard is dry and our tomatoes seem to have some strange scorched disease. This summer has been brutal, and we spend more time inside than out right now. I hung my spider plant on the deck with my wind chimes that play the first notes of Amazing Grace. When the wind blows, it sometimes sounds like a song I once heard, and other times, divinely, I hear the beginning of Amazing Grace. Just a few notes, but like a prayer I whisper the words.

Amazing Grace. 
How sweet the sound,
 that saved a wretch like me. 
I once was lost, but now, I'm found.

I still feel lost some days. The psychic told me that someone cursed me, and I feel like that was the curse. Wandering the halls of my brain, slamming doors and blowing out candles, haunting myself, pushing my own hand up to drop the groceries I just bought. Someone tells me to lay my necklaces and crystals outside to soak up the sun and the moon energy, and they will shine brighter. Protect me more. I keep buying protection jewelry. Big golden shields to wear over my heart. Angel wings with turquoise. Black tourmaline and labradorite and clear crystals. I feel exposed and vulnerable. Drained by something.  I washed my home with protection oils while wearing all white. I walked around chanting with sage and cedar and incense and I don't feel the least bit self-conscious telling you that I am buying stones to grid my home. 


I don't even know what I believe anymore. All of those things seem ridiculous to some part of me. I have these dreams that I am battling against horned men. Their horns curl around their ears and my only defense is sending someone else in there against them. I don't even believe in the devil, and yet he appears to me. And I always win, but I don't know what the metaphor is anymore. I sit with it and seek answers from oracles and psychics and astrologers and they always tell me that my heart knows what the answer is. 


I have everything I ever dreamed. My daughter died, and I still say that. I appreciate that she was here at all, teaching me about the depths of my darkness and grief. I was a broken person, but I was not smashed. I was able to be found. I am back together. I easily remember all those days


I meditate on the blessings of these days--two year old Thor, five year old Beezus. They play together, and cling to each other, and tell me stories and bark like puppies and ask me questions about the moons and spells and sisters dying and butterflies. I love watching them draw people, and stories. I love learning about which books are their favorite, and not one moment in the day that I don't find something absolutely charming about them. I remember this time, like Beezus will too. That is the grace I walk into every morning. It is easy to imagine I am in control of something like curses and removals and my fate, but I control nothing. I never did. Clinging to that illusion is what is the curse, I think. My heart is telling me that. I must walk through each bloody hot wretched day and grid myself with their love. I am these people's mother. My job is to teach them what it is to be human. That is the sacred place of definitely-not-cursed. 

light rain

I stood in the rain last night listening to my friend talk about suicide. We lost another person in our community last week, which makes three people in a month. It felt good to be covered in a cool, light rain when our conversation was so heavy. I wore a light summer tunic and yoga pants, so I was soaked in fifteen minutes. The night was beautiful. I thought about my new flowers, my vegetables, my newly planted fig tree. I thought about the men that died, and my baby in the ground under her sister's tree. The conversation flowed easily, and we pooled around the subject of faith and the book of James. If he had realized, my friend would have stopped talking about Psalms, or he would have invited me into his car, but I wanted to stand in the rain, let it wash over me.

There is no figuring any of it out, but we retell the stories to each other. We witnessed those people. They lived. They died. My friend says that they chose a peace, the peace with a decision made. I never mentioned my miscarriage, or my hemoglobin levels, or my dead daughter, but they were all there running down my back, puddles of them around me. My feet wriggle into the wet ground, sprout hard knotty roots out of my toenails. They lift the cement, and I reach high into the air, branches and leaves, taking in the rain. My trunk covered in lichen and small burrowing insects. I bleed into the soil. I sweat all night into the air, covering the grass around me in dew. My sapling is gone. I need the rain to let her go.

My strength is slowly poured into my body through dandelion leaf juice with lemon and apple. It is a bitter tonic. My friend brought me vegan potato soup. It restored something earthy in me. I roast veggies all day. My husband reminds me that a steak would be best for my blood, but I shoo him away with his insights. I am no longer willing to compromise that part of my belief system. I did that for many years, told people I was once a vegan line cook, a vegetarian for a decade, but I eat some meat now and again. They'd cringe. No one trusts an ex-vegetarian.

I will tell that story one day, the one about me compromising my beliefs about eating flesh, but not today.

The rain suits me. Lately, I have been fantasizing about moving to Oregon or Washington state, where the weather seems perfectly suited to my personality. And the lifestyle, let's be honest, seems perfectly suited to me too. We talk late at night about creating a gypsy caravan or camper. We pin ideas for each other on Pinterest, and think about making something eco-friendly where we are completely off the grid. It has a woodstove and solar panels, a composting toilet and a veggie oil diesel engine. We sell our house. We take our family on the road for a few years, homeschooling and traveling across the country, then we end up in a rain forest, creating an ice machine. The children are young, they will manage quite nicely. And we can grasp onto all the second chances we were afforded in the last few decades.

I am a tree walker, a large creature with moss and bark and hollow crevices for small creatures to create a home. I stomp through the forest, and I don't make a noise. I want to live on nothing with nothing but my children, my husband, the dog, then the bare necessities. To create art with my children, and sleep in one large bed with blankets made out of old sari silks and turmeric dye. To learn about the world by seeing, touching, doing. We cling to each other now, Sam and the children and my need to protect us overwhelms me. We sleep together, and think about how we can create a larger bed. We want us all close, skin touching other skin. Someone's knee juts into the crook of someone else's knees. I search for protective herbs and plant pansies and snapdragons by our front door. I burn black candles charged with a white light to surround my family. I wonder what psychic harm I have endured by being so public about my grief and pregnancies. About my drinking past and sober present. I grieve and parent in this space. That feels so vulnerable lately, so much like a felled tree, rings counted at the whim of any passerby, made into a stump bench, gawked at and marveled at and confused by.

The last few weeks, I have been thinking about this space, my writing about grief and death and my daughter and my pregnancy. Sometimes I think the hardest part about this space is that I don't have any idea who reads here. My site tracker is vague. I check it infrequently at any rate. And I grow deeply self-aware that people in my daily life can come here and read my ugly thoughts, or my fears, and I know nothing about them. But that is not the hard part. It is not any of my business to know who reads here and it is certainly not my business to know what they think of me and my writing. What is hard is that I am changing. I want to have a conversation. I want a community. I offer up my writing, my vulnerability, in some strange forest ceremony, a large bonfire in a circle of trees, beckoning others to me, then I grow self-conscious when others watch, when I think they watch and offer no dance themselves.

The rain has continued all night into this morning. We lie in bed and read books, dreaming of the road and Sequoia. The babies ask me if our new baby is okay under Lucia's tree in the rain. And I tell them she is growing and changing into something more marvelous than we can imagine. We have to trust the earth to change her into something rich and loamy, and us too. And change us too.