Crying (Babble)

With the recent death of my grandmother I have a good excuse to be crying lately.  Although, honestly, things are already feeling a little better.  The strange thing about her passing, for me, is that since there is no living person in the present to think of as my grandma, I am free to remember her as the person she was before the dementia set in and the woman I knew began to fade.  I’ve been released from thinking of that frail figure as my grandma, and back to thinking of her as the independent, intelligent, and generous person she was for most of her life.  She exists purely in memory now, so I can choose any memories of her I want, and I choose the ones that represent her best.  Oddly, for the first time in a long time, I feel like I have my old grandma back.

But experiencing strong grief has got me thinking about crying in general.  It’s one of those topics that doesn’t seem as if there would be much to it, until you give it a moment, and realize there are more types and situations involving crying than I’d ever have room for on one blog post.  From the parenting perspective alone, consider babies with colic where crying is like torture, babies who learn to fake cry just to get attention, kids who cry only when someone is watching, kids who only cry in private, arguments about letting a baby ‘cry it out’ at night, being able to recognize your own child’s crying in a crowd, if your kid cries in her sleep, crying about shots, crying about nothing, crying about everything….


I was fortunate that as babies my kids almost never cried.  I don’t really remember Mona crying about anything until she was around eight months old.  (She was the happiest little thing, and I had to check her crib often if I put her down in the day because if she woke up she’d just entertain herself with her hands or her toes and not make a peep.)  If they started to fuss I’d scoop them up, and I didn’t see any reason to ever let them cry.  (So for anybody out there whose instincts are telling them to not let their babies cry but are doubting themselves because of some outside influence, I say go with your gut.  I can’t name you one ill effect of having done that myself.)
 
From the time Aden was a few months old to the present day, if I cry in front of her, she cries.  If I cry in front of Quinn or Mona they can’t deal with it, and they act as if they are ignoring it, but I can tell it’s unsettling to them.  When something effects Aden emotionally tears come quickly and she accepts them.  Her tears flow and she wants a hug.  She even got emotional while we were doing violin practice the other day and got tears all over her instrument (ironically while working on “The Happy Farmer.”)  We got through it and then cuddled for awhile and all was well.  If I start to say something that Mona expects will be upsetting she tries to make me stop.  Mona wants to avoid public tears at all cost, and chooses often to be angry rather than sad to protect herself.  Quinn only cries out of pain or exhaustion, or if I act upset with him.  (If I raise my voice at Quinn it seems to destroy his world so I do my best to not let that happen.)
 
Sometimes I feel like I cry at everything.  There are songs on the kids’ CDs that will make me weep, and if I sing along with pop tunes I’ve noticed that usually a modulation in the chorus will induce tears for some reason.  I enjoy a good cry sometimes, and certain movie or TV moments can send me instantly over the edge.  (The final moments of Six Feet Under, the end of Harold and Maude, Spock dying in The Wrath of Kahn, emotional scenes in the new Dr Who, that episode of Star Trek the Next Generation where Picard lives out a whole lifetime in his mind and then snaps back to reality…..  Yes I know my Sci-Fi nerdiness is showing–what of it?  Huh?)

Anyway, when I think about crying I think about how unfortunate it is that women, in general, are wired to cry more easily than men.  I hate that.  There was a time in martial arts class many years ago when I got thrown particularly hard, and I had to clamp my mouth shut for a few moments or I knew I would burst into tears and not be able to stop.  I did not want to cry in the dojo, so I couldn’t even say, “Hai Sensei” in response to the teacher’s questions because I knew once the dam broke it was over.  I got away with a serious nod instead.  It’s not that I think crying itself is bad or weak, but the sense of not being in control of yourself is horrible and embarrassing.

And I do believe it’s biological.  I once heard a fascinating radio interview with a person who had transitioned from male to female, and she described what happened after the hormone shift began.  She was on the phone arguing with someone at an airline, and she knew in the past the way she’d gotten results as a man was to speak forcefully, but when she opened her mouth to do just that, all that came out were sobs.  She said she felt as if she were suddenly insane because it wouldn’t stop and the experience was bewildering and awful.

I used to wonder how this could have evolved because incessant weeping doesn’t seem like a useful or desirable trait, but I developed a theory after an incident in college.  I was running a music cognition study that required subjects listen to recordings, and the equipment for doing that was only available in a certain room shared by other psychologists and musicians.  I had clearly signed out the room for use in the afternoon, and a graduate student (who, frankly, no one liked) barged in during the middle of my hour and disrupted everything.  I had to throw out all those data and find new subjects which was very frustrating.  I had a right to be mad. 

But what happened was after my subjects left the graduate student turned on me and told me I couldn’t use the room without my adviser present (not true) and he made me write down the rules (as he saw them) for the use of the room.  He stood over me as I scribbled in my notebook and yelled at me while I kept my mouth shut.  I knew the second I opened it I would cry and I was not going to cry in front of that irritating man.  I walked the entire half a mile home without opening my mouth.  I maintained my composure until I stepped inside our apartment and saw Ian.  Then I lost it.

Ian jumped instantly to my side and tried to figure out what was wrong.  By the time I was able to choke out why I was crying I remember very clearly the sense of Ian bristling as he held me.  He was furious.  He was ready to march out and kill the guy and I had to assure him it was okay and I would deal with it myself later.  That’s when I started to realize the utility of tears.  In the modern world with odd disputes about procedures and protocol I should be able to fight my own battles, but what if the threat had been physical?  It is probably a bad idea for the average woman to seek a physically aggressive confrontation with the average man. 

If I learned anything in martial arts it was just how intimidating a man’s upper body strength can be, and that was just with calm, careful grappling.  So physical fighting is not a good option.  But crying?  That would cause other men who care about me–boyfriend, brothers, father–to leap to my defense with their muscles.  That’s sort of interesting.  So I don’t like that I can’t completely control some crying fits, but I think I know why they exist.  Lord help the boy that makes one of our girls cry someday if Ian’s anywhere around to see it.

Another thing I think about is how crying can help tell us if something matters.  I remember trying very hard to cry when I was four and my grandfather on my dad’s side passed away.  I barely knew him, but it seemed wrong not to acknowledge his death with tears if I was a good granddaughter.  But I couldn’t make them come because from my end that relationship was technical but not emotional.  There are other people since then who have died where I was surprised at my lack of reaction, and when I was honest about how little I was connected to their lives it made sense that I had no tears for them.  It’s a bad sign when a relative does so little to touch your life that you can only hope to muster tears in his or her honor.  (Which is saying something for someone who cries during Star Trek.)

My mom once asked me if I ever cry when I perform music.  I thought that was a great question because I can be moved to tears by certain pieces, but at the time I couldn’t think of an example of crying while playing something.  I’d been moved, or had shivers run up my spine if something was particularly amazing to be in the middle of, but never experienced crying.  I told her the concentration level for getting through a typical quartet or orchestra performance probably blocked that possibility out.  But I had to perform a children’s concert the day after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and now I know it’s possible.  It was a whole program of patriotic music, and as I played our national anthem while blissfully innocent toddlers smiled and clapped, I found out what it was like to perform with tears streaming down my face.

At the moment I’m not shedding as many tears for my grandma as I would have expected.  I’m sure I will at the memorial service in a few weeks as the loss is more palpable, but I’ve cried for her so much in the past few years that now I find myself preferring to focus on thoughts of her that make me smile.  She was losing her life while she was still alive and I’ve been grieving for her for since the first difficult decisions about moving her to the nursing home.  There was so much about her end that was painful to witness (and I’m sure to live), that relief has swallowed my tears for the time being.  My gram wouldn’t want me to cry anyway.  She’d want me to bake her famous spritz cookies with my kids.  So I will.


--photos missing
(Okay, and just because Sad Mona in particular breaks my heart, this is her about two minutes after that other photo was taken.  Because eventually all crying stops.)

Eulogy for Grandma (Babble)

I don’t know if I have the right words to express just how much I loved and admired my grandma.  I suspect I don’t, but I owe it to her to try to find them.  I’ve been thinking about what I want to say at her memorial service planned for early December.  If I had to give a eulogy today, this is the one I would give:


Grandma loved babies.  She told me she always had, as long as she could remember.  When I had my first baby, she came out to Milwaukee alone. It was just over a month after the comotion of the holidays when everyone had come out to see Aden right after her birth.  Grandma came out then, too, but the visit in February was special and quiet and private.  We got to spend hours just looking at the baby and admiring all the cute things new babies do.  One of those evenings, sitting in the dining room watching Aden smile and wiggle her hands in the air, we got to talking about our thoughts on life and death in general.  Grandma was always interesting to talk to, and I could talk to her about anything.  I asked her what her thoughts were on dying one day; if it scared her or if she thought there was an afterlife.  Her response was the best one I’ve ever heard on the subject.  She said, “Well, I think about all the amazing people who came before me who accomplished so many impressive things, and how they have died, and I think to myself, if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.”

My grandma was amazing.  When she was born women still didn’t have the right to vote, but she loved school and earned a college degree.  She had so many interesting stories about working in adoption and I used to beg her to write some of them down.  She never did, but I remember the ones she told me, and maybe I will find ways to write them down.
There isn’t a day of living in Milwaukee that I don’t think of her.  Sometimes I pass the house she was born in, on the corner of Locust and Cramer.  I live on the side of town where my grandpa grew up and I imagine myself and my children retracing his footsteps when we walk by his high school.  My grandma’s stories of her early life and meeting my grandpa take on new life for me now that I live in their old town.  One of her favorite stories was about how she got to know my grandfather because he would walk her to her bus stop after class because it was on his way home.  My husband is a map and transit connoisseur, and he told me he would never tell my grandma this, but he figured out that grandma’s bus stop was nowhere near grandpa’s way home.  He was merely going out of his way to be near her.

I know a lot of stories about grandma, how when her kids were at school sometimes she and a neighbor would occasionally wile away an entire afternoon playing Scrabble and feel they were being quite wicked.  Or about when she and her friend Florence would visit a place known only as “Lake Twelve.”  Or how she used to help her mother do the laundry which was a full two day project every week, and that in the winter they would hang the wash in the attic where it would freeze solid and they would spend the second day ironing it all dry.  I once asked her if there was any particular modern convenience she’d seen invented over her lifetime that was especially important and without hesitation she said, ‘The washer and dryer.”

There are so many interesting stories about her as a child and a student and a young married woman and mother, but my own experience with her was as a grandmother.  And she was the best grandmother possible.  When I was little we would visit my grandparents in Columbus for Christmas and Easter and it was always special.  Grandma kept a beautiful home and it was always welcoming.  She cooked us wonderful meals, and whenever there were homemade treats on the counter and we’d ask if we could have one she would always say, “That’s what they’re there for!”  She was the kind of grandma that made you feel secure and safe and loved.

But I was particularly lucky to have the chance to get to know grandma better while I was in college.  I wanted to go away to school, but I also wanted to be near home.  By going to Ohio State I was able to be out on my own, but having grandma nearby was like still having a familiar home when I needed it.  I started school nearly two years after grandpa died, and gram and I were able to be there for each other.  She would pick me up from campus nearly every Sunday.  I could do things for her like set the VCR or help with things in the yard, and she taught me how to do laundry without making the washer hop across the basement.  She looked forward to cooking me a real meal once a week and I looked forward to eating it.  She let me bring my friends.  She was the first member of my family to get to know Ian.  Grandma came to nearly every performance I gave while I was at Ohio State, and when I graduated she gave me a box of all the programs from everything I’d played in for the past five years.

When I found myself home more because of pregnancy and babies I got into a habit of calling grandma at least once a day.  She was wonderful to chat with, and was the perfect person with whom to share baby updates because she never found them boring.  She would tell me what was going on in her neighborhood or we’d talk about the news or books or movies.  And when Ian was deployed, grandma was the only person I knew who truly understood what it was like to be pregnant and caring for children in Milwaukee while fearing for a husband at war.  She would listen to me cry and say, “I know, Kor.”  And she really did.

My grandma was smart and kind and made the world better for those around her.  She was the best listener I ever knew.  And she loved me, and I never doubted that she was proud of me.  When I read her some of my earliest fiction she beamed at me and said, “Oh Kory, you are a writer–A real writer.”  And because she said it I believed it could be true.
These past few years have been so difficult.  It’s been heartbreaking to watch grandma slowly fade to a shadow of the person I knew.   There were glimpses of her now and then when I would visit, but the truth is I began mourning the loss of my grandma awhile ago.  That doesn’t make this final goodbye any easier.  There is no way to accept that my grandma is not in my world anymore and have it be anything but profoundly, crushingly sad.  But maybe grandma is finally with her husband again.  Or maybe she has simply been released from the pain of an existence she had degenerated into that I know she wouldn’t have wanted.  Either way I hope death meant relief for my grandma.  And in those moments when I contemplate my own mortality, I can think to myself, “If it was good enough for her, it’s good enough for me.”

I love you, grandma.  And I miss you.

(Last photo of me and my grandma when I visited her at the end of August)

Goodbye Gram (Babble)

My grandma died this morning.

It’s so odd to post this right after posting my essay about losing my grandfather 25 years ago. I feel as if I should say more in her honor but it’s too much right now. I don’t want my grandma to be gone.

She was non-responsive the past couple of days and I have been torn about whether I should have dropped everything and driven out to Ohio. I kept thinking would she want me there? Yes. But would she want me to see her in a coma and have my last memory of her be like that? No.

There’s no right answer to that one. Either way I’m left crying.

This I Believe (Babble)

This is sort of a moment of shameless self-promotion, but I don’t profit from it so I don’t feel too weird.

Five years ago I was inspired to try my hand at writing by the ‘This I Believe’ project on public radio.  I’ve heard some fascinating essays on that segment, and have even printed out a few so I can revisit them when I like.  I’ve always enjoyed writing and missed not having an excuse to do it since college, and I’ve always regretted the essay I submitted with my school applications.  I was overly influenced by suggestions I’d read and didn’t write the essay that I should have.  I decided to write the essay over and put it into the ‘This I Believe’ format and submit it.

They loved the essay, but it didn’t make the final cut to go on the radio.  The local paper in Milwaukee picked it up and ran it on Christmas Eve and it got a very nice response.  After that, other than the link on my website to the archive of the This I Believe project, I didn’t think about it anymore.

But I got a nice surprise earlier this year when an editor from This I Believe tracked me down and asked if they could include my essay in a collection they were putting together specifically about love.  All proceeds from the book go to continue collecting stories for the project, and my compensation was a single copy of the book, but I was honored to be included.  I got my copy in the mail the other day and it’s still sort of unreal to me that I can open up something off my bookshelf and see my words in print.  With my name in a table of contents like a real writer.

In any case, there are some surprising and touching essays in the book which is called “This I Believe: On Love”, and is available to order now, as well as many interesting essays in the This I Believe archive.



Amazing Grace

My grandfather died twenty years ago. I was fifteen. He was kind, strong, fair, and very funny. When I was a young musician, he was my biggest fan. My grandpa used to applaud when I tuned, and I would roll my eyes and shrug off his enthusiasm as too biased. I played my violin for him when he visited, and he loved everything, but each time he had one request. “Could you play ‘Amazing Grace’?” he asked, full of hope and with a twinkle in his eye, because he knew my answer was always, “I don’t know that one!” We went through this routine at every major holiday, and I always figured I’d have time to learn it for him later.

About the time I entered high school and had switched to viola and started guitar, Grandpa got cancer. The last time I saw him alive was Thanksgiving weekend in 1985. My mom warned us when we turned onto the familiar street that Grandpa didn’t look the same anymore and that we should prepare ourselves. For a moment I didn’t recognize him. He looked so small among all the white sheets, and I had never thought of my grandpa as small in any sense. We had all gathered in Ohio for the holiday, and I’m sure we all knew we were there to say good-bye. I can see now that Grandpa held on long enough to see us each one more time. I remember how we ate in the dining room and laughed and talked while Grandpa rested in his hospital bed set up in the den. I wonder if it was sad for him to be alone with our voices and laughter. Knowing Grandpa, he was probably content.

The next morning I found my moment alone with him. I pulled out my guitar, tuned to his appreciative gaze, and finally played for him “Amazing Grace.” I had worked on it for weeks, knowing it never mattered if I actually played it well and choosing not to believe as I played that it was my last concert for my biggest fan. The cancer had stolen his smile, but I saw joy in his eyes and he held my hand afterward, and I knew I had done something important.

I argued with people all through college about my music major. I was told by strangers that music wouldn’t make me any money and it wasn’t useful like being a doctor. But I know firsthand that with music I was able to give my grandpa something at a point when no one else could. Food didn’t taste good, doctors couldn’t help, and his body had betrayed him and left him helpless. But for a few minutes listening to me with my guitar, he seemed to find beauty and love and escape. At its best music is the highest expression of humanity’s better nature, and I’m privileged to contribute to such a profound tradition.
So, this I believe: Love matters. Music matters. And in our best moments they are one and the same.

A Dragon, A Blue Jay, and a Dog Named Spot (Babble)

Costumes!  I actually finished all my kids’ Halloween costumes in time!  And not just in time for Halloween (which, sadly, doesn’t mean anything here on the real day*), but for my girls’ choir rehearsal where they were allowed to wear costumes, and the school dance which happened mid-week before school let out for a four day weekend, for a small neighborhood party, and finally Trick-or-Treat on Saturday night.

It’s worth all the effort I put into making their costumes myself because it’s not just for one day.  They wear them for all the little seasonal events, then they wear them around the house, to birthday parties, the store…. They make up excuses to be in costumes like coming up with plays, or just decide life is better as something non-human for an afternoon with no attempt to justify it.  They wear their costumes for years, so I have to make sure they are washable and sturdy.  Mona’s giraffe costume was practically in shreds by the time I convinced her to let me retire it.  So I don’t mind the work of getting those costumes done because the kids certainly appreciate them.


I finished Mona’s costume first.  She wanted to be a dalmatian, and it worked out well.  She picked out black gloves at Target for her paws, and the final touch was her tag to put on her collar.  I just cut out some cardboard in the shape of a bone and spray painted it gold, then wrote ‘SPOT’ on it and added a small heart (per careful instructions).  From a distance her tag looks kind of like a bow tie, but she’s happy with it.  That girl makes a cute dog, romping around and barking.  And this relates to nothing in this paragraph, but I need to mention that Mona’s latest new expression is, “Quiet as a moth.”  I love ‘Quiet as a moth,’ especially since Mona isn’t.

Quinn had his heart set on being a blue jay for months.  His costume is particularly cozy and warm so he likes hanging out in it.  One of the most adorable things I have ever seen in my life is Quinn flapping around in his blue jay suit saying, “Tweet tweet!  Tweet tweet!”  (Before he headed out into the neighborhood with his pumpkin basket I suggested he could say “Trick or Tweet” but since I stayed back at our house to hand out candy I don’t know if he actually did.)  It makes me want to scoop him up and nuzzle his neck and tell him not to grow anymore.  How was he just a baby five minutes ago and now he’s this three year old who can read and jump on one foot and pretend to be a blue jay?  When I tell him he needs to go back to being a baby he laughs and says, “My age can’t go lower!  It can only go upper.”  I guess I don’t really want him to be a baby again, but I’m shocked sometimes at how fast it all goes.  I just want to hold onto the blue jay moment as long as I can.

And speaking of kids growing up fast, I can barely reconcile in my mind that Aden was once that tiny baby who taught me how to be a mom.  I asked her what she currently wants to be when she grows up and her list was interesting.  She wants to be a chemist since she’s curious about elements, a paleontologist, a baker, a barber, a person who works at the humane society, an artist, she wants to help me at the violin store, write a blog, and be a mother.  I told her she’s already an artist, and she can write a guest post for my blog whenever she likes.

Anyway, her dragon costume turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated and I’m glad I left as much time for it as I did.  I started out making the basic costume out of fleece, and then I figured I’d just sew the flimsy holographic scale print material she picked out over the top of it.  But I didn’t realize that I wouldn’t be able to do that last part on the sewing machine and ended up having to stitch most of it by hand.  I cannot tell you how sore my fingers were from pushing that needle for a day and a half, but Aden would come hug me periodically and tell me how much she loved her costume so I didn’t mind it (much).  I just set myself up with a marathon of competitive cooking shows on Hulu and sat and sewed and occasionally made Aden try her outfit on to make sure I wasn’t slowly stitching myself into a proverbial corner.  One problem I kept running into was that the costume didn’t move the same way with the second layer of fabric on it, so even though, for instance, there was good freedom of movement in her arms in just the fleece version, they got more restricted when I added the scales.  Oh well.  I also ran out of time for adding wings which she really wanted, but there are limits and my fingertips reached them on Monday.

Aden actually helped with some of the sewing.  She’s interested in learning to use the machine, so I had her thread both the bobbin and the needle for me a few times, and even let her help sew simple areas like the legs.  She put the foam in all her spikes, and painted the lines on her horns and her belly herself.  I have a feeling next year her costume will be much more of a joint effort.

If I had it to do over there are a couple of things on the dalmatian costume that could be better, I’d stick with how I did the blue jay, and the dragon I would approach in a way that didn’t mean essentially sewing the whole costume twice, but overall I’m happy with this year’s effort.  But the important thing is the kids are, too.  The true test of their appreciation will be if they share any Kit Kats they collect!  (I already know they will.  That’s why making costumes for them isn’t a chore.)



(*  So, why, you may want to know, does the actual Halloween not mean anything?  Because Milwaukee uses a system for always having trick-or-treat in the daytime on the last Sunday of the month.  Which would mean something this year, except that Bay View, which is our little corner of Milwaukee’s south side, has switched to night time trick-or-treat on the last Saturday of the month.  The first year Bay View switched to night time trick-or-treat it was confusing because our specific block fell on the boundary, and we ended up doing both daytime and night time trick-or-treat which made my children very very happy.  When I lived in Columbus, Ohio, they had an even more confusing system for trick-or-treat so that it couldn’t land on Halloween proper for some reason.  I grew up in the Detroit area, where trick-or-treat was on Halloween and always at night.  That just seems right to me because it’s what I did as a kid.  Of course the night before Halloween Detroit has problems with people setting things on fire for fun, so some traditions I’m fine with letting go.  But trick-or-treat should be on Halloween.  And at night.  And on Halloween.  You know what we’re doing on actual Halloween?  Putting on costumes and visiting the frog exhibit at the Public Museum.  –sigh– )

Pumpkin Fun (Babble)

Pumpkins!  I love pumpkins.  I even love just saying the word ‘pumpkin.’  I have yet to learn how to actually cook a pumpkin, but I make good roasted seeds, and this year for the first time the kids ate some with me instead of sucking on them for a moment and spitting them back out.

This year I also invested a couple of dollars in one of those little carving kits they sell at the grocery store.  Normally I gut all the pumpkins and have the kids draw where they want me to cut the faces out, but it was nice this time to have a couple of harmless mini-saws for the girls to use.  Aden and Mona did most of their carving themselves and only had me help out when something wasn’t going right.  Quinn simply pointed to where on his pumpkin I should carve and told me what he wanted.

I know people do astonishing and creative things with pumpkin carving anymore, and I like seeing what some of them come up with every year, but for myself I have no interest in doing anything elaborate.  I like to make a basic Jack-o-lantern and stick a candle in it.  Maybe I carve enough with wood that I don’t have a carving itch that needs to be scratched by going all crazy cutting up a squash, or maybe I have old fashioned tastes, but a couple of eyes, a nose, and a mouth and I’m good.

In past years I’ve had to spend a lot of time explaining to Mona that I couldn’t cut out the dozens of tiny teeth she always drew on her pumpkins.  But this year she was only limited by her own abilities, which are apparently greater than mine at cutting tiny teeth, so her pumpkin came out exactly how she wanted it.

Quinn wanted his to look sort of surprised and scared.  He ended up taking the little piece that came out when I carved the nose and putting it back into the hole backwards, so it sticks out like a real nose.  He calls it a 3-D nose.  This is him trying to imitate his pumpkin while posing with it for me:

Aden and I both went for scary angry looking faces, and I thought it was funny how similar they seemed when we were done and showed them to each other.  (Mine’s the big one and Aden’s is the little one peeking out from behind it.)  Anyway, I like when all the pumpkins are lined up, because it looks like Quinn’s is scared of the rest.  (Or scared of the dull knife on the counter–either way.)

We’ve had ridiculous wind storms here for the past couple of days, so the pumpkins are the only decorations we dare put out that we’re pretty sure won’t blow away.  I’m hoping the wind dies down enough soon that the kids can do more.  I put Aden in charge of hanging skeletons and the like however she sees fit this year, so I hope she actually gets the chance.

And this year Ian is home for Halloween.  That’s an anniversary I don’t like to miss, so it means a lot to me that he will be here.  He can help me solve my annual dilemma of whether it’s better to buy candy for handing out that we like to eat ourselves, or don’t care for.  (Maybe one bag of Snickers mixed in to snack on from our own bowl and the rest can be Smarties….)

Pain Is Not a Competition (Babble)

All pain is relative.  We each of us live in our own skin and view the world through a lens crafted from our own experience.  Sometimes we are able to empathize, and sometimes we aren’t.  Some days I successfully put myself in another person’s shoes before voicing an opinion, and other days I fail.

My first experience with violin making was a brief amount of time at a school in Pennsylvania.  My bench shared a wall with the bench of my friend Matt.  I loved hanging out with Matt.  He was easy to talk to and he made me laugh.  One day I came in to school with four stitches in my thumb after a carving accident at home.  I had never had stitches before and was feeling quite traumatized.  I sat down at my bench and regaled Matt with the whole gruesome story of Ian having to drive me to a doctor and the icky feeling of the stitches tugging at my skin and how we went to the movies afterward to distract me from the pain. 

I blathered on and on telling my tale of grievous injury with Matt just looking at me, when finally, to my horror, I remembered that Matt had been in a terrible car accident just a couple of weeks before and had more than 80 stitches up one of his legs.  I was deeply embarrassed and apologized, but Matt just shook his head and said, “It’s all relative.  For you those stitches are a big deal.”  And then he went on to tell me that right after his accident he’d been bemoaning his fate to the new guy at the school, and it turned out the new guy had been in an accident the year before where he was declared dead on the scene and he got to meet the patient waiting for his heart.  The new guy by comparison was feeling pretty humbled by the fact that the man he shared his hospital room with had lost his wife and child when they were all hit by a drunk driver and he would never walk again.  My four stitches were starting to look like a gift.

So I know better than to try to one up someone in the pain and frustration department.  Everyone has stitches that are a big deal in their own context, and also I’m smart enough to know how ridiculously good I have it.  My struggles are all of an elite variety that don’t involve starvation or crippling poverty or chronic pain, but they are still my struggles, even if they are only four stitches long.  I try to keep things in perspective, but we are each entitled to our feelings even though there is always someone with a worse story.
That said, I feel like I’ve done a poor job lately of sympathizing with my husband’s struggles at home.  I want to be supportive but sometimes just find myself simply irritated.  I get frustrated and then I feel guilty for feeling that way.  It’s hard.

The bulk of Ian’s challenges, I think, comes down to the fact that he is now in a role where he doesn’t feel appreciated.  Parenting is like that.  The three year old will behave obnoxiously to him one day (because he’s tired or hungry or both and three year olds are cute but frequently unreasonable and occasionally awful), and Ian knows not to take it personally, but he can’t help it.  It must be very hard to go from a position of power and authority in a place like Iraq to being dad at home mopping up the messes of three kids all day.  Not that the war was easier, I’m not saying that, but to go from ordering people to do things and having those people respect those orders and follow them, to requesting very simple and reasonable things of children and have them essentially ignore you is maddening.

Our kids are good kids, but kids push limits, and they can be lazy and careless and obstinate.  They don’t know how to appreciate what they have most of the time because they don’t have much to compare it to.  I’m glad they don’t live in fear and that they don’t know hunger and that their lives are comfortable enough that they can indulge their creativity.  The downside of that is they don’t realize how special their situation is.  I tell them when I think they’ve crossed a line into being unappreciative or greedy and they are quick to apologize.  They are still learning where the lines are but that takes time and experience, and that’s okay.  Childhood should be a time to enjoy the good in the world.

However, poor Ian has days where he’s drowning in laundry and one of the girls can only complain that a specific shirt isn’t clean yet, or he finds their bikes lying in the middle of the sidewalk again regardless of any reminders or threats about that, or Quinn wants his mommy and there is nothing else that will appease him and I’m just not available.  I’ve tried to get the kids into a habit of always thanking anyone who prepares them a meal because I think that’s important to acknowledge, but there are too many things that go into parenting and keeping house that seldom if ever get notice or praise that it does feel thankless much of the time.  The clean bathroom has to be its own reward, as does the organized closet, the stocked pantry or the raked lawn.  If you stick around in the Army long enough someone will eventually hand you a medal.  There are no medals for ordinary life.  I remember the first time my dad read us the story of the Prodigal Son, and I asked him why the bad kid essentially got a party and the good son got nothing.  Dad told me that supposedly goodness is its own reward.  I think sometimes the good kid still deserves a party, but I can see why he gets overlooked.

In any case, where I fall short is that Ian will be having a hard time–an understandably hard time at that–and I can’t help but think about how much better he has it than I did while he was deployed.  If he complains to me when I come home from work about how he didn’t have an adult to talk to all day, I want to say, “But you only had to make it to the end of the day and here I am!  I didn’t have anybody here for years!”  Or if it seems like a lot to do his half of caring for the kids and the house I shake my head and think about how I had to do everything, plus I sold a house and bought another and moved us and ran the violin store with the kids in tow, etc. etc. etc.  I feel like he has four stitches and I have a thousand.  And I take a deep breath and remind myself those stitches are still real and they count and that it’s not a competition.

But I finally lost it a bit the other day when Ian was complaining about having a hard time with Quinn.  It had put him in a foul mood and I felt as if I was being put into the position of having to cater to two fussy egos and I just didn’t have the patience for it.  Against my own better judgement I said, “Well, then just be glad you didn’t have to deal with Mona at age three.”  I felt instant regret because there are so many things wrong with that.  The first is the one-upsmanship sound of it that is just not cool.  The second is that he missed most of Mona being three, both the good and the difficult, and I’m sure that pains him.  He doesn’t need reminders of the sacrifices he’s made.  The third is it reeks of the resentment I sometimes feel that my struggles were a result of his choice to be in the Army.  It’s hard to feel that being a supportive spouse makes me complicit in my own abandonment.

Ian’s reaction was to say, “So I feel like crap and I should be glad to feel like crap.”  And I wanted to say, “Yes,” but I said nothing.  It’s hard for me to make Ian understand that at his worst, Quinn is a million times easier than his sister was.  Mona’s tantrums were epic, and I was trapped.  That first deployment I had no close friends, no family around, I had to drag the kids with me on every errand, and poor Mona was stuck with a mother all day every day who was pregnant (or eventually tethered to a newborn) and exhausted all the time. 

When I hear people click their tongues at parents with a child who is having a meltdown in public as if the offending parents just aren’t conscientious enough to remove the problem child from the scene, I think about Mona screaming her head off one particular night in Target.  It was past her bedtime and she was beyond tired but we’d run out of diapers and I didn’t have any choice but to complete that errand.  She wanted me to carry her, I was 8 months pregnant and could not lift her, and she screamed for nearly half an hour in the store.  She would lie down, I physically could not move her, and somehow I coaxed her across the store where we waited in line for ten minutes with her wailing like a desperate animal.  A neighbor at that point at least offered to walk Aden home, but Aden was not a problem so I declined that help.  It was embarrassing and horrible and heartbreaking.  Quinn snubbing Ian on the playground and then telling his dad not to talk to him in the car just does not compare in my mind.  (But those four stitches still hurt….)

We had this terse discussion on the short drive from our home to the violin store, and by the time we got there and I was sitting at my bench I just burst into tears.  I told him he really didn’t understand how traumatic it had been to be scared for him all the time and to be responsible for everyone and to get no breaks and no sleep and no help.  When I think back to that first deployment I’m amazed I got through it.  I remember when Quinn was about a month old and I had mastitis, and I was up all night shivering under my blankets with the baby next to me and the girls asleep in the next room wondering how I was supposed to make them breakfast and get Aden dressed for school again, and I cried because the only person I wanted to talk to was the one person I wasn’t supposed to bother. 

It would have been dangerous for Ian to be distracted by problems he couldn’t fix, so I told him things were fine and he had no idea how hard it really was.  Ian put his arms around me (in the way I used to imagine he would do when he was gone) and said I always seem to handle everything so well he forgets sometimes how deeply some of these experiences have affected me.  (And then a customer arrived with a bow for me to rehair and I had to excuse myself to wash my face and somehow pretend I hadn’t just been balling my eyes out when he walked in.  Because I have great timing like that.)

So it’s a complicated balance between accepting pain for what it is and keeping things in perspective.  I want my husband to feel comfortable enough to complain about the frustrations that come with parenting without worrying that I’ll always have the worse story up my sleeve.  I know plenty of people with worse stories than my own, but my frustrations and pain are real, too.  All pain is relative.  Compassion shouldn’t be.