Parenthood

Dear Ira Glass,

On the day he was born the sun burned like a young god, like only a June sun can, bathed in its own gold, like water underlit. And I never saw it. I never breathed the outside air on that day, never thought of it, never needed it, because all the light was in a little face that swam into first light, into first breath at 10:14 am.

On the day he was supposed to be born, the first day of summer, that same June sun waited behind the early morning bluedark, while I woke, and drifted, and woke, and crawled to the bathroom to sit with myself and the heartbeat in my belly, to eliminate the previous night, and think only in small circles, breathing a lifted pattern through each circular, surface skidding thought. While I closed my eyes and said inside, “be… as… water” with 3 breaths, a tiny mind song. And the song brought me an image, so everytime I closed my eyes I saw a small blue planet wreathed in white rings. And I learned to breathe with the planet, breathing on purpose for my body and my son. And after a few hours, after a whole life lived within itself in my white and beige bathroom, the sun still crept into my tiny one room apartment and wrapped itself around my contracting body, my two bodies in one for one more day. And I welcomed everything. I greeted the pain with the widest smile, the biggest peace I could create, the roundest breaths I could surround us with. With the pain still inside, building. Growing jagged before I could feel how sharply it twisted. But I let the sun in too and that’s harder, harder to grip the edges of the opening with the insides of your knuckles so pinkly transparent and weak and pull, pull, pull it wider than the pain so it lets the sun in too. Like a big laugh inside a big loss. The expectancy of unbearable pain makes you want to clamp down, makes you want to be shaped like the pain, with edges, but the sun must come in.

I was 10 days past my due date but I still hadn’t packed. I will never forget laying the little clothes inside the big black bag, next to mine, unbelieving that someone will actually wear these, everything folded carefully and smelling like tangerines and just-vaccuumed carpet. There were things to clean and small pieces of furniture to rearrange and old flowers to throw out. Dishes. Showers. Coconut water. Brown and gold sandals. Fresh air. Calling the nurse. Car seat, still not strapped in. Passenger seat. Street fair. Warm, warm, warm. Car contractions. The sweet solo labor of the wee hours over.

At the hospital, they said, he will be born tonight. They said, he is a little one. Maybe six or seven pounds. They said, one centimeter every hour.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Six.

Six.

When it became clear he would not be born before the day turned, they tried to slow everything down. They came in less often. They gave me more time in the water. The water and the pain and the machines to check on us, check everything, obliterated me. Sent me inside the small blue planet. Sent me inside a loud song, my mother sang with me, his father sang with me, our doula, even the nurse I think in one moment sang with me. Hm, hm, hmmm. Two short and one long. A series of moments. I’m having a dream. No pattern left, just contractions three and four minutes long with barely any space between.

Six.

Somewhere the night reached its full force and I could remember twenty hours before when labor began, small contractions in a small bathroom in a small apartment in a small city.

They broke the water.

Can’t be laying down. Vomit, choking, letting go. Coconut water.

Hour number twenty-one… twenty-two… twenty-three…

Twenty-four. Staring at the clock. Where. Why. Whatisrackingmybody my hot heart, my lost feet, my thoughts incomplete, frantically searching, something to push, something cold, anything hard, where is solid, whereistheheartbeat, ragged, ragged, ragged. Red. The twenty-fifth hour. This is how old I am. This is how long I can go.

Seven.

Get me the drugs. They make me say my safe word: Studebaker.

The epidural man is small, meticulously groomed, with wiry arms and legs, and brown hair and eyes I think. I don’t know because I never actually see him. I can’t look at him the whole time, I can only look two inches in front of me or I will get lost. I will be ripped in half. Holding still is the worst thing in the world. The epidural man doesn’t care. He is a voice in the void, like the Wizard of Oz, the only clean thing in the room, him and his needle. Big needle, going in and in and in, like on a hundred T.V. shows about being born.

Sleep. One hour.

Ten centimeters.

Push. For four hours I push and nothing happens. I push until I can’t be more frustrated, and the frustration pushes out the fear, this is the moment, don’t miss it. They try everything. Every position the nurse knows. Every way they can arrange my body, every way they can channel my strength, nothing works. They bring in a specialist to turn him around, he’s face up, and it works, but then he turns back. Baby knowing his own mind, choosing unbirth as long as he can. Mother choosing to keep pushing. I can feel him kicking inside me and I know what he’s doing. I know he’s waiting. I know he doesn’t want to come out because he is afraid, afraid of the big June sun that’s reaching in to get him. I don’t care. I keep pushing. In the last minutes before they say C-section out loud I feel him shift. I know it will happen. I know he will be born. In the mirror we all see a big, blinking black eye. I’m not the only one who sees it, sees him. Black. Eye. Blinking. Slow. For so long, pulsing. Growing. Graphic. The hint of a creature. Promise of a boy. I see it

I hold it in my eyes

eternity, checking the clock, racing against it

the opening, stretched beyond the shape of pain, letting me stare at the mirror

and then I see the true head, so big and covered in black hair, so satisfying, I’m pushing with my whole body and I see his face all wide and watery in the mirror and that’s all I need, I throw my head back and they pull him out and he’s already crying and he’s on my chest

baby boy, born 10:14 am

8 lb, 10 oz

19 inches

beautiful, dark, wise

familiar alien

Here.

Grey

Dear Ira Glass,

This is a story about how television changes our lives.

I’ve only seen the show Grey’s Anatomy once, and in that episode a doctor was pierced through the stomach with a twelve inch icicle that fell from a gutter on a hospital supposedly set in Seattle. I live in Seattle, and our icicles don’t reach anywhere near a foot in length; they are more like iciclets. I don’t like people misrepresenting my city, so naturally I gave up on the show right away. I haven’t seen it since, but a few months ago Grey’s came back into my life with a clarity only a t.v. show that’s gone to water cooler status can bring (though, let’s be honest- who drinks from a water cooler anymore?).

So, rewind to late May 2010. I’m on my way to go bowling in Tukwila with some girls from work. We’re reminiscing about television sitcoms from the 90s and singing spotty lyrics from their theme songs, the anthems of my early teen years: Growing Pains, Step by Step, Full House…I’m feeling nostalgic for a time ten years in the past when I unashamedly patterned my analyses of life, death, and love on the twenty-one minute plots I watched as reruns on the Disney Channel (anyone?). In so many words I mention the weirdly intimate intensity of t.v. to the girls. One friend, S, gasps: “Oh my god. Does anyone watch Grey’s Anatomy?” We shake our heads and when I tell her I have no intention of picking up the show at any time she goes on to tell me about the season finale that had just aired. <SPOILER ALERT>.

S: “Oh my god. I’m still processing. It was so intense. I couldn’t sleep after.”

Me: “Did people die?”

S: “Yes, people died. Two people died in the opening credits.”

Me: “Did main characters die? Did Patrick Dempsey die?”

S: “Lots of main characters died, like right in the beginning, you just see them get shot in the head, Patrick Dempsey didn’t die but he almost did. This guy came into the hospital and just started shooting people and they didn’t even get a chance. I don’t even know, it was so crazy…”

The way she spoke caught my attention: with such immediacy, such empathy. So human. So real. So…television. But I believe in it. There’s a scene in the show Boy Meets World, perhaps the most pivotal television show of my past, where Cory is lamenting his girlfriend’s impending move out of state to his best friend Shawn. Shawn isn’t worried at all, and gives Cory several examples of main characters on popular television shows who were all set to move and at the last minute always end up staying. Cory asks Shawn if perhaps it doesn’t actually make sense to compare what’s happening in their lives to what happened on those shows. Shawn stares at him earnestly, with full sincerity, clearly awed that he even has to say the answer out loud: “Not if television is the true mirror of our lives.”

It’s been about ten years since I saw that episode, and still it’s stuck with me all this time. I can’t get the quote out of my head, and it comes to me like a Bible verse, like a favorite song, like a line from a love letter in difficult times, when I need comfort, when I need a familiar pattern. Because if television is the true mirror, we are never totally alone: other people are watching too. Other people are interpreting, making meaning, laughing, keying in.

A few days later I walked Greenlake with my friend R, who is also my brother Nige’s girlfriend, discussing deep things as kindred spirits tend to do. Fear of death came up. “Oh my god,” she asked, “do you watch Grey’s Anatomy?”

Me: “No, but I heard about it. I heard it was life changing.”

R: “It totally is, was, did. Nige watched it with me and it made us talk about things. Big things, like death, like the future. It makes you realize how you can lose everything in an instant, and you have no idea what’s going to happen ever.”

So we discussed it all the way through, and it wove its way into our analysis of our mutual irrational fear of death, our conversation that stretched around the lake, into the building of our friendship in its relatively early days. And later we discussed it again, at dinner, with Nige, and I half-laughingly said, “Oh Nige, did Grey’s Anatomy change your life?” The king of sarcasm and mockery stared at me earnestly, sincerely, with complete empathy: “Yes Corn, it changed my life. It launched a conversation about the future.”

And I think in the end that’s the true mirror, that’s the pattern that seduces us: when the twenty-one minutes are up, there’s a clear break between the screen and the life. Our lives. The television show can launch us into the big, laughing, dying black space where we make sky, where we make glittering pinpoint stars blurred out of memories our own, or shared, or just heard about. Where we bring the colors alternately marred and threaded, watered and concentrated, bright and scaled in grey. Where we make it together, this life, this anatomy.

Sincerely,

Courtney

Hide and Seek

Dear Ira Glass,

I started my spring cleaning early this year, in February. I’ve done it every year since moving out of my parents’ house, that ruthless kind of purging that has its liberation rooted in commitment to a new, streamlined life. A life that doesn’t cut as many corners as the old one. It’s the kind of cleaning they make montages of in the movies, when the hero or heroine has to pick up and start over in a new place, and the background song starts out melancholy and nostalgic but ends up with some lyrics like “but I gotta hold my head high/ I gotta let this go/ I’m heading out to the horizon/ the sun isn’t showing up yet/ I might get there first/ in the meantime I’ll hold my head high…” Say what you want about the drudgery of cleaning, but it’s a way of leaping out, a way of creating your own inspiring montage in a flurry of clothes flying out the dresser drawers, papers to be recycled or shredded stacking up higher than your desk, and bags upon bags of miscellaneous garbage that’s been hiding in the psyche as well as the closet gathering across the floor.

Sometimes, though, you find something you didn’t bargain for. Something that either will make you stay in the old life, or must go with you into the new. When my spring cleaning was almost complete this year, my most relentless and satisfying cleaning spree to date in which I got rid of roughly fifty percent of the contents of my room, I lay awake in bed relishing. I mentally combed through my closet, newly worthy of one of those infomercials for organizing systems…my desk, complete with typed and alphabetized file folder labels…my bathroom, rid of several pounds of expired makeup and hair products…my back porch, rid of…

Oh, crap. There’s still a humongous Sterilite container out there with God knows what in it. I seriously have no idea.

At that point it was about three o’clock in the morning, so I had to leave the Sterilite project for another day, in the interest of the neighbors who would probably wonder why the red-haired tenant of the basement room next door was in her pajamas on the porch, madly sorting ‘keep’, ‘give-away’, ‘garbage’, and ‘maybe’ piles in the middle of the night. I went to sleep, vaguely wondering what odd assortment of forgotten belongings I would find. Whatever the contents, they were clearly unnecessary to my new minimalistic lifestyle.

When I opened it the next day, only one word escaped me: “Oh.” One sigh. Among a bunch of old sweatshirts twice my size, a couple of matching kitchen-themed picture frames still wrapped in cellophane, and an outdated TJ Maxx pastel painting lay a black-and-white eight by ten. Of me. Of a little boy and me, smiling at the camera, the first camera I ever had, the digital Kodak I held out in front of us like a tourist of our own lives. Around Christmas, the second year I nannied for this little boy. As you know from my letter The Taken Heart, B died when he was five years old, of complications related to a brain tumor that caused significant developmental delays during his short life, five years ago. This picture was taken just a few months before that. It is of just our faces, him looking down and smiling and me kissing his cheek. I printed it, framed it, and hung it wherever I lived for two years after his death. After two years I needed a break. I was getting ready to start graduate school, to start my practicum placement teaching preschool at one of the elite early childhood centers in the country. The job I got without talking about B at all in the interview, not even once, even though he and his brothers are the reason I do this work, the reason I love it every day. But in my new life, I wasn’t yet ready to publicize that reason. So while I kept B in my heart, I kept the details of my past experience to myself, put the picture in a Sterilite storage container, and threw myself into two years of training as a classroom teacher.

Which brings me to the “Oh” moment just two months ago. With my first year out of grad school nearly under my belt, my first year of teaching nearly over, I am starting to talk about why I’m here. I recently had a long conversation with a friend who, struggling to explain feeling constantly caught in the undertow, said “I keep trying, but in the end, I just don’t know why I’m here.”

I stared at him, almost unable to comprehend. “On Earth?”

“Yes.”

“But…it’s great to be here.”

We went on to debate this point, never reaching a resolution, but I’ve been captured by the concept ever since. And I’ve been thinking about why I’m here and what makes it so great. And when I rediscovered the picture and the one sigh escaped, it let open the space for the next breath to captivate a small revolution. And I hung the picture again, next to the alphabetized desk. And I’ve been remembering many things.

One day in my first year of nannying was mostly the same as all the others: diapers, meals, laundry, tube feedings, more diapers, Sesame Street, toys, more diapers. But something different: the smallest moment, the revolution in one breath, mere seconds that changed the way I will live and teach always, in ways I even now don’t understand. It is this moment: B and I are sitting on the floor by the ottoman in front of the television, and I think Sesame Street is on. It’s a segment he doesn’t want to watch, so he turns around to face me. I’m sitting W-style with my knees about six inches apart. He crawls over and hides his head between them, then lifts it back up, looks at me, and smiles. “Boo,” I say. Because what else? He does it again. “Boo.” Again. “Boo.” He’s smiling so wide. “B,” I whisper in awe. “You’re playing.” It’s the first time I see him play like this, the first time I watch someone learn this game, the first time I’m a part of it.

Most people in early intervention have a story about a particular child who catalyzed their passion for this work. Most of those children are alive, preteens and teens now, some even adults. That isn’t my story, and that has been awkward to navigate. Usually I don’t go there; I just don’t tell the whole story. Even five years later, I still don’t feel like it’s really mine to tell, and so telling it is a different kind of risk. A free fall kind of risk. I am not good at that kind of risk. For most of my life, as independent and self-reliant as I’d like to pretend I am, in the end I’ve almost always relied on others to push me out of the nest, down the zipline, off the mountain, whatever. Now I’m pushing myself out into the free fall. I’m telling this story, this story that is definitely not all mine, and it is difficult, the words are so lacking, but the stories where words lack are the most important ones to tell. This is a story about a boy who is still there every time I look up, no matter how long I wait with my head between my knees, before the jump, before the next life that doesn’t cut as many corners, that says with actions more than words this is why I’m here on Earth, and I’ll always be figuring it out, and it’s great to be here. He is still there. Smiling so wide. Reminding me why I play and teach play. Why I must always do both. Reminding me that this moment, the smallest moment, is the most important thing to render in this relational, awkward, wonderful unresolved life.

Sincerely,

Courtney

Re-release: Dirty Downward Dog

Dear Ira Glass,

Three years ago I traveled around Western Europe with two girlfriends and my cousin Jesse. We, like so many other backpackers, kept a travel blog. In honor of the three-year-anniversary of our trip, I am reposting one of my entries from that trip here. I wrote this before going to graduate school, before becoming a teacher, before moving out of the suburbs, before my mom went back to teaching yoga, before my best friend had a baby- before so many of the experiences that make me up. But I remember clearly the night described below doing silent midnight yoga, taking hold of the uncertainty of my life and twisting it upside down. Before I flew to Europe I was wary, carefully guarded. I had a lot of attachments, still-frame memories, excess emotion compressed somewhere inside me, asking me to move as little as possible. It couldn’t stay, couldn’t live neatly layered in me anymore if I moved. When I traveled to Europe I moved reluctantly, warily, but seriously. Small, subtle, while everyone else slept. In confined spaces. And it hurt, and it predicted hurt. And I owned up to it, and I found the movement that pushes us and also cradles us, that presses on as attachments fall away, that whispers half-formed words in the air around us as we change.

Here is Dirty Downward Dog, originally dated April 25th, 2007:

I think I will start with a quick description of my amazing vegan finds in Barcelona.

We went to a large outdoor market on La Rambla that has everything under the sun (literally under tents), and in the back we found a stand called ”Organic is Orgasmic.” Excellent! I had organic vegetarian paella with delicious Spanish toppings. I can’t believe I found this in Spain! Later, I had falafel salad that sounds strange but was very good and fresh- falafel is very popular in Spain.

After the last time I blogged, we went back to our merciful hostel on Vigatans and I set up to do yoga in between the lower bunks that belonged to Kinsey and me. This was a 1 by 4 space of filthy cement upon which I laid my little yogitoes hand towel (no mat, no block). By this time it was about one o’clock in the morning, and I had not done yoga in ages (a week), so I scrolled through Philip Urso’s casts until I found one called ”One Hour Easy Power”. And oh dear, was it slow- not to mention the fact that I had barely enough room to pose and almost no space to flow. Whatever. I did sun salutations to the underside of the top bunks and let my feet stretch out under makeshift curtains, so they poked out into the hostel room’s mini walkway. I did wheel and sank down on brown-gummed concrete, but couldn’t invert (no room, too hard) so I came up with my own version of shoulder stand. By the time I got to final relaxation I was ready to meet that filth and be in it, under our beds, for awhile. There was a sleeping tipsy English kid in his underwear in the bed on the other side of the partition to my left and windows with iron bars but no glass to my upper right. I closed my eyes. No talking, just the echoing of Philip’s Britney-mic breathing and my own head. The manic mind, but I found peace in my makeshift midnight yoga. So the ending words were like a balm to exhaustion and dirtiness: ”Who you are is who you are now. So it holds that there is no effort required, no struggle to become who you are. And it holds that the problem of time is dissolved as well: we think that we have to make time, go on a voyage to discover our true selves. But really, it’s right here.” On the dirty floor with my black feet and hands and the germs of hundreds of other backpackers. No matter what I can always find it, no matter how tiny my section of cement is. Then I took a shower.

The next day we visited La Rambla again, and made our way to meet a friend of one of Kinsey’s friends at a small town where the castellers (climbing people) were performing. This was truly a family event; everyone from the very young to the elderly were both participating and observing. Turns out it was Earth Day- so Kinsey’s friend tipped us off to the hippie street fair that was taking place at the Arc de Triomf. We made our way there from the metro (which we know and love quite well now) and after taking pictures of the Arc made our way through the park lined on either side with booths. Voila! I found the hippies and the vegans of Barcelona. When I emailed my dad with this news he told me he was very happy I found ”my people.” Heck yes I did. When my brother Nigel and I visited Berkely, CA a few weeks ago we both instantly felt we could live there, and we both know we’ll go back. I commented, ”Nige, I think we both love it here so much because we are hippies on the inside. It’s how we were raised.” He looked askance. ”Corn, look at me. Look at my hair and my clothes. I drive a Volkswagen bus! I am a hippie.” ”Oh yeah,” I answered. ”That’s right. You are a hippie on the outside and I am one on the inside.” This place in Barcelona also called out to my inner hippie. She ached to flow out and write an abstract poem, cook some un-recipe vegan mishmash and make some beads out of recycled material. The minute I stepped into the area I felt at home. I basked in the glow and wandered around making semi-conversation with different artists. Happy Earth Day, let’s celebrate vegetables, vegan food, yoga, incense, handmade things, and the return of macrame. This was my little home in Barcelona. I could talk about the stunning Sagrada Familia or Parc Guell (they were incredible!) but the other girls will let you know, and this was my personal haven, discovery, kindred connection, what have you. Glorious.

Sincerely,

Courtney

The Taken Heart

Dear Ira Glass,

The first time I lived away from home I was nineteen years old. The experience was short-lived, lasting all of three months before my roommate and I parted ways and I went to live with my grandparents while I finished my undergraduate degree. However, in the elasticity of time, those three months stretch to cover several soul-shaping events in my life. From April to June, the five year old boy I had nannied for two years died suddenly, I graduated from community college, I ended a year-long term on student government, and two of my closest friendships ended. I remember coming home at one point between the death and the graduation and literally breaking down in front of my roommate and her boyfriend because I had not slept for two days. I was pushing so hard to finish the year, which the spring had so wrecked, that by the end I had nothing left, no tether to any kind of tangible sanity.

That was five years ago. In my memory that time is a strange jarred collection of wracking emotions, grief- and love-related, solitary and weirdly public, quiet but the whole thing was one loud shout, raw and unfiltered like liquid before it’s been strained. I didn’t know how to edit it, but I couldn’t keep still, but the singularity of that combination of experiences made me keep still even after writhing desperately to catch onto some kind of social understanding, some human resolution.

One of the friendships that ended during this time burned brightest at the last, hailed my heart to rally for the final exit. Like the paper ballerina and her one-legged love in The Steadfast Tin Soldier, whose spangle attaches to his metal heart when they are thrown into the fire, we became closest in the midst of tragedy. Right at the end. When B (the five year old) died and I was floundering in the midst of my first face-to-face experience with grief, this friend did my math homework, defended me when I failed the test, fed me vegetables and coffee, skipped class with me, and made me watch funny movies. He even picked me up at my house for school even though I  lived a mile away from campus and had a car, because he knew, for whatever reason, how immensely comforting it was for me to be driven around by someone else, in someone else’s car. And I welcomed the care. I opened to it, found solace in it, even sought it out though I knew it wouldn’t last. And as a result this person became unforgettable, though after graduation we parted ways and I haven’t spoken to him in more than four years. I’ve been thinking about him lately as the morning frost seems more and more out of place on my windshield, as the sun reaches shadow wings through my blinds that haven’t gaped their thin dark lines in months, as winter swindles its last hailstorms out of the rising spring. I feel again everything about those three months, the shame of a grief I didn’t have the capacity to process or name, the nightmarish mysticism of sudden loss, the ache for physical touch to remedy, to answer the gathering giant slate-colored storm that is permanent, that is closed without closure, that is death. It’s easier to name it all now, with five years in between, in which time I have learned how to reference art to name my life. As Clarice Lispector writes:

A dark hour, perhaps the darkest, in broad day, preceded this thing I don’t even want to try to define. In the middle of the day it is night, and this thing I still don’t want to define is a peaceful light inside me, you might call it gladness, gentle gladness. I am a bit disoriented as if the heart had been taken out of me, and in its place there now were a sudden absence, an absence, almost palpable, of what before had been an organ bathed in a darkness of pain. I feel nothing. But it is the opposite of stupor. It is a lighter, more silent way of living…But I am also uneasy. I was all prepared to console myself in my anguish and pain.

When you are in the midst of it with grief, nobody tells you some things. Like that grief is addicting. And seductively prone to resist the cyclical process. Prone to get you stuck. And that if you fight the stuckness and enter the process, you will obsess over trivial components. The day that B died my first laptop came in the mail, and late that night I curled up on the floor of my apartment while my brother and my roommate’s brother spent two hours setting it up, installing software, and responding to my delirious calls from the carpet to scan B’s picture onto the desktop. Nevermind that we didn’t have a scanner. Somehow they made it happen. I fell asleep at 3 o’clock in the morning, on top of my bed, but I couldn’t get under the covers, and I couldn’t even go to my bed until well after everyone else had passed out in various places throughout the living room. I woke up three hours later, and knew the crushing awareness of that first morning after somebody dies, and went to the bathroom to glance at myself in the mirror to make sure I looked the correct way. In my grief-stoked obsession, the correct way was no make-up, a red t-shirt, and blue athletic shorts. I had to have a completely blank face for weeks, just blank. And I had to wear blue and red, for no reason I could have identified at the time. This is the shame of implacable, ambiguous grief: colors matter. Clothes matter. Not how they matter in every day life, but a strange mattering that requires cognition to keep running underneath the deep black current. It glints and rolls on, and somewhere in the depths clothes matter, and working through a small obsession keeps you going.

It is the swift lightness, almost a phantom that grabs hold, that takes the heart. The “organ bathed in a darkness of pain” is left throbbing, bruised inside you, drenched by the black current, dependable. Needing care indefinitely, just to soothe and not to heal. The small lightness comes later, if you are fighting for cyclical grief, and fleetly arrests the grieving heart, takes it as ransom for peace. Returns it, not soothed at all, but mending. Working. Beating blue and red hope.

In grief, nobody tells you some things, but hopefully they tell you in some way how to recognize the fleet light: one morning after B died I took my laptop just outside our apartment door to sit on the cement porch, to read and write with tea. The 10 o’clock day was all green and bright sky blue, covered in corner-searching sun. I was quiet and typing, and my cell phone rang. It was my friend. This was the conversation we had.

Him: “Hey. How are you?”

Me: “I’m okay. How are you?”

Him: “Good. Just calling to check on you. Are you outside?”

Me: “Yes.”

Him: “Are you sitting in the sun by your house? Writing about B?”

Me, quietly awed: “Yes. How did you know?”

Him: “I just knew that you would be. That’s what you should be doing today.”

Rewritten, it sounds like something out of a ready-made paperback novel. But on the phone, it was a reassurance, a buoy. Taking my laptop on the porch was another behavioral obsession like the red and blue outfit, like the blank face, and there were so many of these compulsions starting to build up that there was no gap for perspective. On the phone my friend pulled me toward the taken heart, the healing, long before it would actually happen. Kept me holding on to the tug-of-war so that when I lost, I would lose to the side of the fleet light and fall forward into the mud rather than backward.

Sometimes I go outside only to sit in the sun. I curl up and grip my ankles with my palms, press my knees together, dip my chin into the hollow where they meet. I sometimes think of B, and other things since that have caused a similarly ambiguous grief, a similar dark immersion. I think of my old friend and others who have pulled on me. The light disorients me, fools my compass, tries my analysis till it’s poked full of small irreparable holes. And I have sunny skin, and prisms in my eyelashes over tiger-tinted eyes, and brightly-lit blues & greens are everywhere I look, and the colors matter.

Sincerely,

Courtney

Body

Dear Ira Glass,

When my brother, sisters and I were growing up our mother was really into parenting by lecture. She would announce “Children, gather round! I’m about to give a lecture! Gather!” and we’d all groan and try to scatter. Not fast enough. Somehow a few minutes later we’d find ourselves in a mini-audience, all different ages but roughly half her height, the backs of our heads signifying raptness like the Apostles in the paintings watching Jesus. Our mother didn’t exactly look like Jesus, but she commanded our attention like some kind of blunt, 1980′s female deity with a crimped bouffant and a four-inch roll of bangs. Larger than life. Looking back I realize she was in her late twenties and early thirties, only five or ten years older than I am now, but her wisdom was for the ages. Everything from safety awareness to sibling kindness was covered as part of her lecture series. Every subject made us squirm. It was so personal. What right had she to analyze the deepest components of our emotional and relational imbalances, our mother?

Sometimes the lectures came with corresponding materials, like a set of required reading. Our mother would seize any opportunity to really hit the point home- but always it was because the point had been genuinely hit home for her. She wanted to share her little epiphanies with us. Lucky us. A lecture on complaining about my body at around ten years old came with this poem:

The World is Mine

Today upon a bus I saw a girl with golden hair;
She seemed so gay, I envied her, and wished that I were half so fair;
I watched her as she rose to leave, and saw her hobble down the aisle.
She had one leg and wore a crutch, but as she passed–a smile.
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine;
I have two legs—the world is mine.

Later on I bought some sweets. The boy who sold them had such charm,
I thought I’d stop and talk awhile. If I were late, t’would do no harm.
And as we talked he said, “Thank you, sir, you’ve really been so kind.
It’s nice to talk to folks like you because, you see, I’m blind”.
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine;
I have two eyes—the world is mine.

Later, walking down the street, I met a boy with eyes so blue.
But he stood and watched the others play; it seemed he knew not what to do.
I paused, and then I said, “Why don’t you join the others, dear?”
But he looked straight ahead without a word, and then I knew, he couldn’t hear.
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine;
I have two ears—the world is mine.

Two legs to take me where I go,
Two eyes to see the sunset’s glow,
Two ears to hear all I should know,
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine;
I’m blest, indeed, the world is mine.*

As I read the poem now, some fifteen years later, I find it excruciatingly saccharin & overt. Many things about it make me uncomfortable, including the reference to a Deaf person as a victim (I studied Deaf culture and language for two years, the first lesson of which is “Deaf people can do anything hearing people can do except hear”), the patronizing attitude of the author who deigns to buy sweets in the midst of his busy schedule, and the antiquated rhyme scheme that can only be described as lilting. Lilting? With such subject matter? Not a great fit.

But I remembered it. Long after losing the scrap of paper someone on the street had dutifully passed to my mother which she had then dutifully passed to me (with a lecture), I remembered enough to find this poem on Google. I remember so clearly the moment she said to me, “I can’t do anything for you if you’re going to insist on being like this. Here, just read this poem. Read this poem and change your attitude.” I remember why she was so frustrated. Why the lecture and the poem-flyer were so ill-received. I hated my body. Completely uncomfortable in my own skin, I couldn’t stop itching to be out of it. I wished for anything else than what I had inherited, what I saw in the mirror every day, what I schlepped around at school like the red-haired, brown-eyed, glasses-clad & freckled burden I thought it was. I wished for some kind of magical solution, that my hair would start growing in thick and blonde, I would wake up one day with 20/20 vision (it’s a miracle!), and my limbs would organize themselves cutely and finely instead of awkwardly flailing and poking people at random. I stayed like that for years, well into my late teens. I couldn’t let go of the deprecating addiction.

Over the years my mother mellowed her style of imparting wisdom, but the messages remained clear and acute. She started doing confidence-building activities with me like shopping, running, and going to yoga class at the gym where we shared a membership. She was already an elite yoga instructor by this time, and didn’t need to bother with unstandardized, low-energy, poorly-heated classes taught by soccer moms in their spare time. She chose to practice weekly with me as a meditation, in a cramped, dark blue room on borrowed mats separated by one thin wall from a step aerobics class that blasted dance mixes we couldn’t help but bop to during final relaxation. Afterwards we would get three-day old packaged sushi from Top Foods, the rice almost crispy and the avocados questionably edible. We’d discuss everything from the family dog to skinny jeans (a then just-emerging trend) to boys to eating vegan. Confidence-building.

One day in class as I was struggling to stretch my head upside-down toward my knees in downward facing dog (this is a resting pose?!? WTF?) and my mom was floating effortlessly into a tripod headstand, her legs swirling around in the air like the stems of an uncurling fern, I caught sight of a disconcerting image at the back of the room. About three rows behind me an older woman with short white-blonde hair and a red face was shaking uncontrollably as she labored to hold her arms up in the air and balance on her feet in a basic standing lunge pose. Her hands fluttered like unprinted flags raised high, white sails in the wavy sea without tether. As though without tendon. As the class moved fluidly through series of poses she ground every effort to stay in the flow, just enough to keep up every moment while others could rest in the current. Whatever medical condition she had prevented her from being still in any volitional movement. It was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.

Again, years later, long after I’ve stopped attending that gym, started attending yoga classes at an actual studio, and begun eating sushi that doesn’t come in a plastic box, I remember this woman. I think of her often and wonder if she still practices yoga. I wonder if she brings that same quiet, verdant bravery to other tasks in her life. I wonder how she feels about her body. Because for some years now I’ve been broken out of that addiction to distortion, to body-hatred. My mother’s lectures and educational materials and confidence-building activities finally worked. This is why I now view vanity as a rare gift, why looking in the mirror is one of my favorite activities, why I find endless fulfillment and energy and soul-growth in doing things with and for my body. And it isn’t trite. The world absolutely is mine. Is ours. And in this gloriously body-centered, body-powered life I’ve found, when I think of that woman, I can shake a little and still be strong. I can waver and still be a bright light, in the back of the room, in the current. Letting go of the tether to reach for the work ahead.

Sincerely,

Courtney

*Credited to Dr. Tennyson Guyer/ Anonymous

Our Town

Dear Ira Glass,

I’m pulling into an almost empty high school parking lot, my parents’ car the only other vehicle here besides mine. It’s pouring. I beg the six inch lake that has collected over the entire white-lined asphalt to make way for me as I head for the auditorium, almost thirty minutes early. The steady rain is eerily vocal, as though it is another person walking on every side of me, quietly taunting me at each drooping point of my umbrella. When I went to this high school the entire place was packed for every school performance. Tonight’s production is much more modest, the audience scattering throughout the seats and filling only about a third of them by the time the play begins.

I don’t know anything about Our Town. I’ve never seen it, read it, no one’s ever bothered to tell me the plot. I only know it is an iconic play, especially in high school, especially in sitcoms about high school, where I heard it referenced most growing up. I vaguely gathered something about a narrator moving in and out of interaction with the characters in the play somewhere along the line. Something that used to be groundbreaking and now…just isn’t. We’re over it. I am certainly over it in the first two minutes of the narrator’s plodding description of a profoundly boring and completely invisible landscape. Over it, in a peaceful, loyal way. I am here to see my sister, who at seventeen has already known for two years what she wants to do with her life. She will act. And she, like Franny in Salinger’s little novel, will haunt the witnesses of her craft with strange & pummeling reflections of the contents of their own hearts. In delicate beauty. That is why I am here.

Everything about this play is stilted. I am shifting, shifting, shifting the heels of my boots a thousand different ways into the corners under the seat in front of me, whiling. Until she finally comes down the invisible stairs to her invisible breakfast. She’s one of the most exquisite things I’ve ever seen, my sister. But I don’t really feel like the play is doing her justice. I’m supportive, but I’m wondering what the big deal is. Why is this iconic? Why is this a rite of passage? I’m combing through my sitcom memories, trying to fit the pieces into what I’m watching. Something doesn’t fit. My sister is cast as Emily Webb, a young, naive, conscientious student. Starry-eyed. My sister can play it, and well. But I’m thinking that she’s so much more talented than this, so much more faceted. I miss the depth of some of her other performances I’ve seen, but I understand the part she’s playing this time. I think.

The first two acts pass. That’s all that really happens. They go by. My sister grows up and marries the boy next door just before the second intermission. Poofy white dress, young love, a couple of jokes, vows, starry eyes, stage kiss, curtain. I shift, shift, shift some more. My dad putters on his iPhone. My mom says something to me about boots. My grandfather says they tried to make him read this play several times in school but he never got past the second page due to boredom. My grandmother makes small talk.

Third act. Something is not right. Though my fingers and toes are numb from sitting so still in the draft, I can hazily sense a solemn grey grief stealing in along the floor, from the narrator’s voice, in the upturned faces of the suddenly at-attention audience. Who is it for, I wonder. Who are we grieving, and why? I mentally run through the main characters. Obviously not my sister, her fake husband, her brother, the neighbor girl…could it have been one of the parents? They still seemed so young. As I continue watching the stage and listening to the narrator it becomes clear we are in a graveyard. Her brother is dead. Her mother-in-law is dead. Several other characters are dead, standing, representing their own graves, stoic, no longer present to the audience but staring straight above us all. Okay. I’m hyperventilating a little bit but it’s not that bad. I can recover from these deaths, personal but not too personal. In the past.

Except the narrator keeps talking.

It’s a funeral.

No no no no no. Not her please not her please not her.

It’s my sister.

She comes out, seven or eight more years instantly showing in her face, slight, drawn with denial, aged, isolated. Unseen as the others weep. She is fully aware of her own demise but she fights it, screams at it, tries to claw down its defense just like I know I would. She rails against the nonsense of separation from her family, her love, her children.

And I am completely undone. A few years ago I had a string of recurring dreams about my sister dying. I would be trying to find her in a mall, in a bookstore, at a school, and I could never get to her in time before she would fall or get caught in a fire or get hit by a car. I never woke up in time either. In the dream she would come out in pieces, her skin black and blue, smiling at me and asking where I’d been. The scariest thing was being in the dream knowing that in real life she would never survive, even for a little bit, and I couldn’t wake up. I couldn’t rewind.

So there I am, watching this modest little play, also unable to rewind and unable to change the outcome. The death. And though I know it will stop, that this is just one pretend hour, the reaction is valid, immediate, breathless. I try to weep silently for the sake of those around me who aren’t related to the heroine. My mother and grandmother are passing some weeks-old crumpled tissue from the depths of their purses back and forth and I clutch at some shreds as they pass me in transit. Try to contain the undone state. It is pretty futile.

When she finally takes her place at her grave, starts staring endlessly like all the others, I am exhausted from being so relentlessly crushed by that universal god-palm in the sky, pressing down down down on my heart till it’s doughy and clings back. She is finished weeping but now it is her husband’s turn. When he kneels at her feet and rocks back and forth, head touching the ground in time with his sobs, a rhythmic reminder of his constant pull between Earth and death, I have to fish out my damp fraying tissue shreds. For some kind of respite, maybe some kind of raft. I hope the other side of this pretend hour is near.

After the play I wait for my sister in the teeming lobby, craning my head over the actors who have suddenly shed ten or twenty years, reliving every minute the loss. Finally she is in my arms. Little vibrant sister, alive, smiling, her skin its normal color, all of her limbs intact. I hold on to her for an extra second. I can see everything in her face. That this was all real for her too. That she gave herself over to the life and death, the grief, the husband, the child, all of it, a complete giving over, so that she could wrench something open in anyone who watched. So no one could leave untouched. And this is what she makes with her life. And I am strangely blessed to know her and call her sister here, in the land of the living.

Sincerely,

Courtney