Systems

I think I'm supposed to be paying attention, but I've only half-discovered what the lesson is.

My daughter needs a new social security number. I was advised by everyone prior to the adoption--her social worker, her guardian ad litem, the attorney who finalized our adoption--to get her a new number as soon as the adoption was final. It would be too easy for the people from her biological family to find her if she continued to use her number. Already, her biological mother has the address to the adoption agency we used, which, although it is in a different town, is near enough that this makes me nervous. She is allowed to send S. letters to this address, which are apparently piling up, though S. has so far shown no interest in reading them. In any case, I assumed this would be simple--make copies of some documents, fill out some paperwork, send it all in, receive new number in...OK, I'm not naive. I figured it would take a few weeks.

About a month after sending in the paperwork, I was called in for an interview and told to bring S. with me. I had to pull her out of school. We drove the 45 minutes to the closest social security office, where we were interviewed in a room with a series of desks separated by thin dividers. We could see and hear everyone else being interviewed.

We were asked why we felt she needed a new number. Each question got more invasive. S. was nervous and began to flip through a horse magazine. When asked if she felt her parents had abused her, she said, "Yes, of course!" then asked the interviewer if she liked horses. The interviewer ignored the question. Did she ever want to see her parents again? Was she afraid of them? S. answered with one word answers. Eventually, the interviewer turned to me and asked me to describe her abuse. Then, after I did, she asked S. if what I said was true. At the end of the interview, I had to listen to the interviewer read something off of her screen and say into a tape recorder that I had not lied. To say this whole process was humiliating for S. would be an understatement. Surprisingly, though, as we got back into our car, she said, "Well, that was stupid, but I'm not going to get upset, because at least it's the last time I'll ever have to tell a stranger what happened to me."

During the process, the interviewer discovered that S. was supposed to be getting social security money. It was a small amount, but any little bit helps, so S. also signed paperwork saying she trusted me with the money until she turned 18.

Today I received three separate notes in the mail from the social security office. One said I owed the social security office a refund because they had overpaid me--strange, because I've not yet received any money. The second note stated that I would be receiving a check because I had sent back too much money. Again, strange, as I've sent no money anywhere. The last note stated that the state office was unwilling to provide a new number unless we provided proof that the abuse we described had actually happened. The office needed police records, CPS records. I had to call for another interview. In the interview, I would be asked to explain why, if S's mother is so dangerous, I had agreed to allow her to write S. letters. Never mind that I'd signed this document only because S's biological mother was doing everything to stall the adoption and against S's will, and never mind that S. had TOLD the interviewer this during our interview.

Now, I have thousands of pages of documents. I plan to set up an appointment and take my files, in a giant brown box, over to the social security office. Then I plan to tell them I do not think it's appropriate for them to look at these documents, which describe acts that were so horrifying to me when I read them the first time that I threw up, but that since it's the only way to keep my daughter safe, they are welcome to look through them.

S. says she wants to come. "I'm going to tell them that if they don't believe me, they can go fuck themselves, because I'm tired of people not believing me when I tell them how bad it was."

I am so tempted to let her do and say exactly this. All day, since we received the letter, which unfortunately she took out of my hands when she saw the look on my face, she has been saying, "Fuck the social security office. Fuck the attorney who made us sign that stupid agreement with my mom. Fuck everyone who doesn't listen to what I WANT." There's so little I can say in response because she's so right.

Today I also received another troubling note in the mail. It stated that my driving rights would be revoked by Feb. 30 if I did not pay a fine for a ticket I received in Illinois several months ago. Strangely, I'd sent in a check to pay the ticket, and received it back in the mail with a note saying that since I had agreed I was guilty (though honestly, the ticket was ridiculous--a police officer had been sitting on the side of the road with his lights off, and I was pulled over because I did not switch lanes on the highway, which apparently is a law in both IL and MN if no one is in the left lane), the fee had been revoked. And, the note said that I was to immediately pay the amount in the upper left hand corner of the letter. The amount there read: 0. I am utterly confused. If I don't pay...nothing, then I won't have a driver's license anymore? Um, OK.

Finally, also today, I received a call from the hospital (supposedly ranked second in the country) that is treating my father for his lung cancer. My father also sees a general practitioner at this hospital. And a doctor who specializes in diabetes. And, more recently, doctors specializing in kidney problems, and radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, and...you get the idea. My daughter is not doing so well. But all of these doctors work for the SAME hospital. They have the SAME computer system and the SAME records. So, the call I received completely bewildered me. But let me back up. On Wednesday, I received a call saying that a recent blood test showed that my father's cumedin levels were low, and he needed to have his blood drawn. I said, "Well, he's currently taking chemotherapy and radiation."

"Why is that?" the woman on the phone asked.

"He has lung cancer. The chemotherapy, the doctors think, is the reason his cumedin levels have been off, and the reason he's taking wayfarin."

There was a long pause. "Oh, I don't see that in his records."

I stayed silent, not knowing how to respond to this.

"Well, he needs to have his blood drawn again."

"OK," I said. "Can you contact his oncologist and let him know that, so he can decide when it makes sense to do that? He's on the hospital's campus right now."

"Oh," the woman said, uncertainly. "OK."

I hung up and called his oncologist's office, explained the situation, and asked them to tell my father to go get his blood drawn--or to call the cumedin clinic back and let them know why doing so was not possible. "You'll have to talk to radiation," they said.

He wasn't there. Or at chemo. "But he'll be back there soon, right?" I said. "He has another treatment at 4 today, right?"

Yes, he did, and yes, they would tell him.

Today I got another call. "Your father never got his blood drawn."

"Well," I said, "I called his oncologist's office. And the radiation center. I told them to get my father to the cumedin clinic. I don't know what else I could have done."

"Well, I guess we'll just put another order in," the woman said.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm putting a note in his record saying he needs to get his blood drawn again on Monday."

"Who's going to see this record?" I asked.

"Um, his...doctors?" she said. It was a question, not a statement.

"What if you call radiation at 8:30 a.m. on Monday morning and tell the person who answers the phone to tell the person who is wheeling my father around to bring him down to the cumedin clinic when he's done with his treatment?"

Silence. "I don't really know if that's normal procedure," she said.

Yikes. When systems stop working based on the needs of people and start working based on...well, procedure, I guess?...then we're all in trouble. Meanwhile, my father's blood levels are not normal, and nobody knows why. My daughter has to talk about her abuse to total strangers, who then send us notes saying they don't believe her. And I guess I'll be calling the Department of Motor Vehicles on Monday to ask where I'm supposed to go to pay my fine of...0.

OK, universe, God, whatever...I got the message. Systems are not working for the people they are supposed to serve--even systems like the social system in MN, which is supposed to be one of the best, and the hospital caring for my father, which is supposed to be one of the best. What am I supposed to do now? (I really did mean that to be a prayer. I hope there's an answer out there somewhere).

Robinson's prayer and Obama's speech

I know there is controversy surrounding Obama's choice for the minister who will offer the inaugural prayer. I also know that his decision to ask Gene Robinson, the Episcopal Bishop who identifies as a gay man, to pray at the opening event tonight was likely a political move, perhaps even a way to appease the GLBT people who were angered by what they perceived as an insensitive move. Admittedly, I've been a bit bitter about this decision--I love Robinson, but I also hate for a member of the GLBT community to be used in this way, as a public appeasement for the liberals who feel slighted. And now, the controversy continues; some stations did not run the prayer, starting their coverage after its offering. I'm not going to jump quickly to assume that this was purposeful, but it is too bad...because, now that I have read Robinson's words, I think they are words all of us need to hear.

I felt proud to be a Christian, a feeling that is rarer and rarer these days. Robinson's words were strong--a call for all of us to feel the sorrow and anger and discomfort we ought to feel at all the suffering in the world, a call for us not to ask too much of Obama, a prayer for his safety, for balance, for hope.

Later, Obama spoke of the importance of stamping out oppression. He mentioned GLBT people and people with disabilities, two groups that rarely get mentioned in the "list" of the oppressed by politicians. He talked honestly about what is wrong and how long it will likely take to turn things around.

I feel so hopeful today. I never thought I'd see the day when a gay man would give the opening prayer at an inaugural event or an African-American president-elect would mention GLBT people in his speech. (Seeing Bruce Springsteen on stage also never hurts)!

I am also proud today to be an American--a feeling that, again, has become rarer and rarer. I wish I could be there to be a part of the festivities as I was in 1994 for Clinton's first inauguration. I will try to be satisfied with watching bits and pieces of the festivities online, and praying that Obama can, in his first year as president, at the very least, change the way we talk about what it means to be an American. This seems like such a small thing to ask, but it could be the first step to so many big changes.

As I said, I am hopeful. Although I don't have a T.V., I'll be watching online!

Impact

I heard from a former student today. “I’m grieving,” she wrote. “I used to be able to write what I was feeling, but I can't anymore. I feel like I've lost something.” She is in medical school, and her journey to that career began, ironically, in her introduction to creative writing course with me in 2001 (I think it was 2001—is that possible?). She is a gifted writer—this was clear about her from the first assignment she submitted—but she is also gifted at connecting deeply with others. This was clear when I observed her for the first time in the Alzheimer’s unit, where she had been assigned to visit weekly and to record the residents’ words and write found poetry from them. That year, she wrote a beautiful essay for the families of the residents with whom she worked, one that I still use in my student manual as an example.

N finished her English and Spanish majors, then went on to try working in a nursing home in the activity department, then a hospital as a translator. Eventually, she realized she wanted to be on the front lines, helping people with dementia as a doctor and medical researcher. And, she has succeeded as thoroughly in her work in this area as she did as an undergraduate in the Alzheimer’s unit at the nursing home. I am, in short, proud of her, and proud of the small role I played in her passion and success.

But today, she is grieving because a professor called an essay she’d written for a special medical internship “vanilla.” He asked her where her passion was, why the essay was so dry. “Medical school sucked my ability to write creatively right out of me,” she wrote to him, and then repeated to me. I knew right away that wasn’t true. Nobody as gifted as N loses her ability to write.

But when I read her essay, I understood why she felt this way; it was a very thorough accounting of her journey from college to her current research, but there was, as her professor had identified, one problem—there were no stories, nothing to connect the work she’s done to the people for whom she has cared.

I didn’t know what to advise her exactly, so I did the simplest possible thing: I sent her that essay she wrote in 2001, writing that it might remind her of some of the stories that had first inspired her work and also help her to think of other similar stories and people she’s encountered over the last seven years.

In the essay, she’d written beautifully about how she’d found connections to these women despite their cognitive failings, how she’d discovered who they were even though they weren’t, really, at all who they were. In fact, she wrote these things more profoundly and beautifully than I have ever been able to manage.

I have the strange privilege of getting to know quite a few people in my small town at the end of their lives. I am often the person at a funeral who has known the deceased for the shortest amount of time and in the most narrow context—only during his or her stay at the nursing home. And yet, my students’ poems always make an appearance in the sermon or the memory table; the project, which began in 2000, has affected many people’s lives.

For some reason, though, N’s words got under my skin, and I couldn’t, at first, pinpoint why. Finally, though, I recognized the reason: I have the same feeling about my own work. My passion for social justice and community building, for parenting a special needs child, for teaching—these passions have taken the place of what was once my passion for writing. I used to love solitude, hours alone in front of the page. The act of putting things on paper was transformative, but I also dreamed that the words would be my contribution to the world—that my work would change people in the way writers like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde had changed mine. Now, I seem to crave community more than solitude (though I still need a good daily dose, and a longer dose on the weekend, to feel like myself). I crave time reflecting with others over time at the page.

But, I miss writing. I don’t think about it much, but I really do miss it. There was a night this past semester when I stayed up almost until dawn working on a piece. There have been a few other nights like that one over the last year, actually—but I rarely have the time to follow up, to do the hard work of revision. And, I haven’t sent my work out for publication in over a year. I have two finished poetry manuscripts that sit on my desk, waiting to be copied and mailed out. I have a first draft of a novel and enough creative nonfiction pieces, in first draft, to be turned into another manuscript. I can’t seem to get motivated to send out the finished work or to finish the unfinished work. And it is a source of sadness for me, though I rarely have the time to think about it—except at times like these, when answering a question like the one I got from N makes me feel somewhat like a fraud.

I know I’m not a fraud. In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe commercial success makes a person a writer. I don’t think being a writer is the same as having a wide readership. I know the process matters more than the outcome, that my life’s work is not my writing as I imagined when I was much younger that it might be, and that this is OK, and makes me no less a writer.

But then I get to thinking, morbidly, about what people will say about me at my funeral—as if this will somehow be the measure of my life. This is likely due to the fact that there have been an unusually large number of nursing home deaths lately, or because I recently lost a friend, or even, perhaps, because my 20th high school reunion is this year—yikes! This would mean little to me—I mostly want to forget about high school—except that recently I’ve been back in touch with people I know “back then” and am realizing just how much those early years shaped me—and how much all of us have changed for the better. Things like these make a person look forward as much as they make a person look back.

Recently, one of the nursing home’s youngest residents, who had a rare debilitating disease, passed away. His funeral was beautiful; he is Buddhist, and there was chanting that felt comforting in the way chanting always is to people who grew up surrounded by ritual. People told stories. There was incense and music and poetry. I was proud because my students’ poems, as is often the case, were displayed at the service, but I was also struck by how narrowly I knew him and felt deeply sad about this.

“How well do you think you know me?” my daughter asked me recently.

“Better than I did yesterday,” was all I could think to answer, and I believe that’s true; I am attentive to her in a way I’m not to everybody, of course, and I learn new things about her every day. I added, as an afterthought, “But not well enough, of course.”

This is, in a way, the answer to this question for everybody we encounter. There is always room to release whatever holds us back from a deeper knowing of another person. There is always room, as well, for humility—there are limits to what we can know about each other, and even about ourselves, and it’s important to recognize these limits. So much of what it means to be human, to be in relationship, is mystery.

I asked my daughter how well she thought I knew her. “Better than you think but not well enough,” she said, and this, too, is likely true. It is easy to think we don’t know what we do about the people we love; it is easy, also, to get lazy, to stop continuing to work toward deeper knowing, or to stop allowing the other person, or oneself, to grow and change.

I first got interested in writing because of the personal connection between writer and reader, the intimate knowing of another person’s soul. Millay’s poems about her mother’s death comforted me when I was 13 and confronting my own mother’s death. The same year, Dickinson’s poems made me aware of the wonder in the natural world, opening my heart so that it felt like a deep, rushing river, a feeling I still get when I read a really good poem. Later, that connection changed, becoming more about understanding the large themes of life, building community, creating change—I believed writing could be the guide through these processes.

My social justice work had a similar path. It started with a desire to help this person, or that one—to reach out to a girl at my church who lost her father a few years after I lost my mother, to reach out to the developmentally disabled girl in my grade who was getting teased. It wasn’t until later that I understood how helping these individuals did not impact the social realities that created the lives they had (one friend’s poverty, the other friend’s disassociation with the life of the community due to her disability). I came to believe that reaching out to one person was not enough—that it was more important to work on the political level to change things.

St. Paul (not my favorite writer of Biblical chapters by any means) wrote (and I paraphrase) that love was a required impulse for any good action. I think that, about this, he was right. Wanting to change things that are wrong in our world without also being willing to be in relationship with the hurting people is as wrong an impulse—perhaps a more wrong impulse--as thinking that reaching out one person at a time is enough.

N is struggling not just with her writing, but with the overarching narrative of her life, with how to tell it. She doesn’t know where the focus should lie—on the list of achievements, the academic reasons for wanting to go to the next logical step in her research about dementia, which has the potential to impact many people, or on the stories of the people who have inspired her. It is hard to find a way to do both in an essay, but even harder, of course, in a life. Finding a balance between any two equally good impulses is difficult.

My daughter, for instance, is beginning to feel shame for the first time. She doesn’t want help from a para in her classroom—it’s too embarrassing, she says. She is realizing she doesn’t have the social skills to connect to kids her own age, whereas before, she was clueless (happily so) and therefore didn’t get embarrassed even if what she said and did was, well, a little “off.” “I don’t know what’s better, knowing or not knowing how different I am and how much my past messed me up,” she said tonight, crying a little.

We talked about when it both should and shouldn’t matter what others think of her—how she can use this new awareness to become more compassionate person, and to make a greater impact in other’s lives, but how she also needs to make sure that, in the process, she doesn’t begin to hate herself as so many people going through this transition do.

“What really matters?” I asked her, stroking her hair.

“How I treat other people,” she said. “And what I do with my life.”

She is wiser than I am.

Tonight, at the diner in town, the son of an elder who had been in the project in its early years—I believe she died in 2004—approached me to ask if we were still doing the project. When I told him we were, he thanked me for the poems, saying they mean even more to him now, but that, more importantly, he was glad to know there was still a steady stream of young people at the nursing home. “I always meant to keep going after mom died,” he said, “but things get in the way.”

“I know how that goes,” I said.

“Actually, you don’t,” he answered, surprising me. “You’re still doing it after all these years, and that’s admirable. Thank you.”

S stared at me for a minute after he left, then said, “You don’t always know how people feel until much later, isn’t that true, mom?”

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “So let’s try to pay attention.”

She nodded, and even though I only vaguely knew what I meant, I think she really got it. Like I said, wiser than I am in so many ways.

Back at home, I read N’s message and sent off the essay, then read another message from a student struggling with her student teaching. She didn’t give details, but her struggle came through it what she didn’t say.

Be sure you take the time to figure out what you’re learning about yourself as a person and a teacher, and about your students, I wrote back. Nobody’s going to give you that time. You have to take it, or else you’ll get lost in the day to day business of it all.

Good advice for me to follow, too, as the craziness of a new semester begins for both S. and me. Ultimately, I can make the time to write if I want to—but I at the very least need to make the time to reflect (something I do mostly through writing) so that I will know what I’m learning as I learn it. Whether or not these musings make their way into stories or poems or creative nonfiction pieces is a whole different question.

So is writing a tool toward finding balance between all the extremes we must balance—caring what others think and not giving a damn; solitude and connection; love for the individual and love for the cause? Or is writing the path itself, one writers are called to pave so others can ponder such questions? Is writing an act of love, or the love itself made concrete?

In a way, it doesn’t matter. We come to the page and write. We care for others and ourselves and the causes that stir our hearts, and we act, and reflect, and act again. In the process, we make an impact in small and large ways every day, and we work to make that impact positive, transformative, even.

New Year's Soup (and one resolution)

I promised my cousin I would blog about the New Year's soup. So, Lia, for you, I just have to say that the soup on New Year's day was phenomenal--maybe the best ever.

Our family is Greek, which means that we eat and sing a lot over the holidays and that all of our celebrations reach into the late night--to leave a home at 11 is considered early. My favorite tradition of all is singing the Greek new year's song--partly because it is something we have been doing on New Year's day for as long as I can remember, partly because it's one of the only true "old-time" traditions we still follow that's stayed the same since I was a kid, and partly because the song itself is so beautiful.

The song starts out simply, praising the beginning of a new month and a new year and the closing of the old. But later, the song becomes a dialogue between the singer and St. Basili, who is the "Santa Claus" of Greece and comes on New Year's Day. The song asks St. Basili to come in, sit, drink, eat, tell us his troubles, and sing with us. This is such a different image than the Santa Clause who comes in the middle of the night and leaves gifts. This is a man we can get to know, one whom we'd like to actually dialogue with. It seems to me to be a reminder about the importance of keeping doors open, of welcoming strangers and newcomers, as Jesus told us to do. It also places the center of the holiday season in imagery that has nothing to do with gifts or consumption, but rather, with relationship.

But what we eat on New Year's Day isn't traditional Greek fare. We eat black eyed pea soup and sour kraut. The story goes that my grandfather, who once owned a grocery in Akron, Ohio at a time when the neighborhood was full of people of all cultures and backgrounds, including recent immigrants from all over Europe and African-Americans, somehow learned of this food from one of the customers as a traditional New Year's food, and our family has been eating it ever since. This is akin to the story of the time my grandmother learned about this crazy dish called "pizza" and tried to make it--only she didn't understand that the dish was supposed to be made on a flat bread and put sauce and melted cheese on a big, square loaf of bread. Or the story of my grandfather learning how to say "welcome" or "good day" in every customer's language.

My childhood was not easy by any means, but I do have a connection to past generations, an understanding of who I am in relation to these generations. I have a model for how things both stay the same, for rootedness, and for change, for being open to new ideas. I have a model for deep relationships based on welcome, even if some of the relationships in actuality were more flawed than the one we sing about each New Year's. S. has none of these things, so participating in the holidays was important for her.

There are traditions, though, that I'd like to do away with. Probably because we didn't have a mother for part of our childhood and lots of people loved us, we were always showered with more gifts than we knew what to do with. I remember even as a kid feeling depressed, thinking, this can't be all there is to Christmas--this can't bring my mother back, and I don't even know what to do with all this stuff. I remember wishing that the women in the family, who were always so busy cooking, wrapping, running around, shopping, etc., would instead spend some time together and with me, really talking, really listening.

There are, of course, a few gifts that I still cherish--the teddy bear my aunt gave me as a kid, some beautiful Pegasus ornaments I've received over the years when one of my aunts sort of assigned this flying horse to me as something I'd collect--before I even understood that Pegasus was the bringer of song to the muses when they were silenced by their father. But, overall, I could have done without the gifts, and with more time together over the holidays. My aunt who raised me is having a hard year financially and wept because she couldn't give enough. This was strange to S., who had more gifts this year than she's ever had before and, later, confessed she felt a little dizzy and overwhelmed by how much she received. I talked to my aunt later, on the phone after returning home, about how little I remember or care about gifts and also about how she'd gone way overboard, again, as usual, and that I wasn't sure why she was upset--but she remembers Christmas mornings of total dizziness, and somehow in her mind they are good memories where in mine they feel chaotic and crazy, and what I cherished was time to sit and talk to people, and, again, the singing.

I tried to work on holiday traditions that weren't totally focused on consumption. We lit advent candles each Sunday of advent and did some readings, sang, talked about what the holiday meant to us. On these Sundays, we also gave each other one gift, so that there was time to focus on each gift. Because we'd be away from home, we had our own pre-Christmas, with a few gifts each but not so many that we'd feel dizzy. We spent a lot of pre-Xmas time preparing for our trip, too, talking about how to handle the stress of being among so many people for two weeks away from home, without her beloved animals.

Overall, especially considering my father was back in the hospital and we were there every day, she handled the trip exceptionally well. There was one bad flashback on New Year's day that resulted in a blow up, but we were able to talk afterwards about the bad memories that the holidays hold for her, how even though we're building new traditions it is hard, so hard, to let go of all of that pain.

We also got away a lot, which was important--we promised each other some time alone each day to reflect and to heal from any wounds. We managed to go to the science center, to see a great film about the Great Lakes, to go on a nighttime holiday "Lantern tour" of a great old-fashioned homestead that I hadn't visited since I was in Girl Scouts, and to spend a little time browsing in shops in a part of Cleveland that I'd loved as a teenager but hadn't seen in years. In the process, she heard bits of stories from my life, and we made new memories. We talked a lot after lying down for the night.

On New Year's Eve, we went to a dance at the church I grew up in. I used to go to this dance every year as a kid with my family, and it was strange to be back. There was literally nothing different about the dance except that the kids I'd gone to Greek and Sunday School with were adults now with their own kids. Even the band had the same name (though the men looked different). There was a lot of repetition of how S. and I came to be together--the shortened version--because I saw many people I literally hadn't seen in 20 years.

S. was nervous at first, but she ended up loving it. She tried to Greek dance. She bravely introduced herself to some kids her age and danced with them when the band played American music (as we used to call anything not Greek). All in all, the dance was fun, but also odd--I realized how different S's life is from mine, and how some of what I had has been lost, of course, because of my decision to leave the church and to move so far away. But I also realized what I'd learned from stories of my grandparents--that is it possible to be rooted and to welcome change.

We got to stay at my 84-year-old aunt's house, and it was wonderful. She was gone for the beginning of our trip, but at the end, we were able to share stories and photos, narrated by the person who knows our family history best, the elder. S. loves her and said, "Everybody else seems a little crazy and in a hurry, but Thea K is calm and takes the time to talk to me and look me in the eye." I felt my eyes well up with tears, because I remembered how, on the day my mother died, I arrived at the house after church and got the news, and after some weeping, after lying on my bed with my little cousin, then 4 (the one who insisted I blog about the soup), I went downstairs and Thea K knelt beside me and talked to me, really listening to what I had to say. I told her I wished my mom had died when I was a baby so I wouldn't feel the pain I was feeling. She said, "You will be happy later that you have all the memories you have."

She is so right. At one point, S. said, "I'll bet if Yiayia E were alive, she would get on my eye level and talk to me the way Thea K does, and I would feel like she was paying attention." That is true, too. I don't remember my mother ever seeming manic or distracted. She had a deep calm about her, a way of being totally present in whatever she was doing. Sometimes what she was doing had nothing to do with me--singing old songs, washing dishes, picking veggies in the garden--but she always seemed calm and present, and yet she got things done very efficiently. I have unfortunately inherited some of the manic busyness of the rest of the family--though of course this is also just a part of our culture, the idea being that the person who is most over-committed and manic is somehow the most productive, which of course is rarely true.

Of course, I was 13 when she died, and I know my mother had moments when she felt out of control because everyone on earth does. She was better at keeping those moments out of sight than I am with S., but she did let me, on a few occasions, see her anger and sadness, her deep sense of the world's injustice. Those are memories for another blog, but they are indelible and have shaped me profoundly.

Still, this brings me to something I wanted to do, which was to make a New Year's resolution public on this blog, so this is it: I want to be more present in each moment, to feel what I'm feeling and know what I'm thinking and know what I need to do, whether that is noticing how the light is hitting the roof of my garage or knowing what to say to someone who is hurting or simply getting the next chore done mindfully and without irritation. I want to work toward a lot of things, and they are in my mind and in my journal but I don't think they need to be here, because in a way, I feel like this resolution would take care of all of them.

My daughter, over the holidays, came up with a dream: to open a place called Healing Ranch where abused animals and people could come to live for awhile to find hope. I can't remember how we thought of it, but somewhere in our conversations, it just began to come together as the clear goal for which we should be striving. As crazy as this sounds, I've begun to dream this place, to really believe it can happen--never mind that I'm in debt, that the small home we have is the biggest home I can afford, etc. Somehow I really believe that someday this place will happen in some form, and that everything we're doing now--learning about horses, learning about how to be responsible to each other and to others, learning how to support each other in our mundane work, learning how to be in relationship with others as a mother/daughter duo, helping my father during this difficult time when his age is leading to more than single episodes but to an acceptance that life will slow down, and eventually, end for him--is preparation for that far-away goal. It is, at the very least, motivation to work on being present--because I feel like being present is the antidote to everything from over-consumption to procrastination to depression. It also seems the key to finding a balance between rootedness and change. Maybe that's too simple, but for now, it seems right.