You Know What the Monty Python Boys Always Say...

My backyard looks like the Easter Bunny went on a bender last night and threw up all over my patio. But it was just Jack, feeling his artist wings and doodling with sidewalk chalk. He has been totally engaged with this new expressive medium, chalk on patio (and walls and chairs and slide and sandbox and sliding glass doors and Berber's curtains and couch), and loving it so much that he's been eating it. He's now ingested so much sidewalk chalk that I called my pediatric nurse friend just to make sure he wasn't going to develop some crazy chalk-borne disease. No, she said. Just purple poo. Which he had. Which was weird.

I know it's been pretty depressing around here lately, my blog becoming a place where good moods go to die. But I'm deciding to shift gears a little bit and take a word of advice from my friend Traci who- in much nicer words- said, "Shut the fuck up with your whining already!" And as if I needed to hear it again, I pulled some cards for myself the other day and one of them read this:

Stop isolating yourself and dwelling on your misery and go outside. See the Divine all around you. Focus on the beauty, power, and holiness that nature affirms. Breathe in the Divine. You are in God and God is in you.

So, this post is my attempt to move out of the dwelling on the misery part of things into more of the beauty, power and holiness part of things. Or, at the very least, to the funny part of things. Funny, I can do.

I mean, purple poo is funny.

Finally, grace.

Just a moment ago, I sent off an apology email to a couple of people that I have been avoiding for over six months. I've been avoiding them because I said hurtful and ugly things about them which they overheard. I've been avoiding them because I have been too ashamed to say, "I was hurt. I was angry. I was bitter. I acted this pain out on you because I wanted you to hurt, too. And I am sorry." And by avoiding them, I hurt their kids who now believe that I don't care about them and have abandoned them.

I feel lighter, now. Sending that email was really a big gift to myself. I forgave myself and Compassion came in, soothing me with understanding and grace. I had been punishing myself ever since the mean words came out of my mouth in July and it's nice to hear myself say, "Okay, you've done your time. You can come out of that rotten prison cell of self loathing and shame now."

I understand that those I hurt may not be able to forgive me as I have and I am okay with that. I get that they may choose to protect themselves and their kids from me and this is okay. It really is. I realize that it really is my own forgiveness that I require. I need to tell myself, often, that I will make mistakes and I will hurt people and I won't be perfect in relationships or in life but that this is all okay. I am still okay. I am still worthy of my own compassion and grace, even when and if others decide to deny me theirs.

It's as if I have finally given myself permission to be imperfect. I have held myself to a standard that is quite impossible for anybody to reach. It requires that I not be human, that I never act of out fear or insecurity or anger or hurt. But I am all of these things sometimes. I am scared and I am insecure and I am angry and I am hurt. To deny these feelings is to live a smaller life, a locked up life, a constricted and stinted life. I am not interested.

As of today, I am embracing my humanity in all of its fumblings. I am human. I am silly and serious and scared and stained. I am hairy and bumpy and I don't look like the girls on MTV or in fashion magazines. NOT EVEN CLOSE. I have rolls that hang over the sides of my pants and I hate them. I am often jealous of others, especially people who seem content with their lives. I am convinced that sex with me is extremely disappointing. I am messy and inspiring and disappointing and likeable. I truly believe that if I were skinny I would be happy. I hate that I believe that. I will probably say or do something someday that will offend or hurt you and this is okay. I get it now. It really is okay.

And when and if I do, I will send you a letter asking for you to show me the same grace that I have shown myself. We're all just trying to figure out this life thing and we will bump into one another along the way. I think you're doing the best you can given what you know right now, and if I were there I would give you a high five.

Happy Birthday, Jack!

July 10th was Jack's first birthday. He is now officially a toddler, although the United States government failed to acknowledge this with a letter or some other form of notification. I'm sure it was just an oversight.

Anywho, I made these little videos as a gift to Jack, a way of looking back at his first year and remembering it. Be prepared to cry... some of them are total tear-jerkers.

This first one is Jack's first day of life... grab the kleenex.



A little video about Jack's love affair with water. Caution: this video contains nudity.



Uncle Corey is Jack's favorite person in the whole wide world. Jack gets so excited when Corey walks through the door! If Jack were a cocker spaniel, he would pee on the floor every time. Here's a little video that shows how cute these two are together.



If you made this video, entitled Jack & Co., you know you are kind of a big deal.



This last one is a letter that I wrote to Jack on his birthday. Get more kleenex.

The Rocking Chair

I am holding your entire body in my arms.

You are wrapped in the blanked grandma knit for you; your fingers poke through the stitches. Our chests, pressed together, expand and fall at different rhythms.

I can feel your heartbeat.

A pink cheek is illuminated by the dim light, inviting me to kiss its smooth surface. I do. Your ear touches a tiny shoulder, a shoulder that suggests that someday it will belong to a man, strong and angular. But not tonight. Tonight it is soft and round, like a caterpillar or half baked bread.

Music from a toy given to you at Christmastime lulls you to sleep, but it is your breathing that soothes me. Shallow, rattled breaths escape from your mouth, passing by rose petal lips that beg me to meet them with my own. Paper eyelids cover dreaming eyes, and I long to kiss these, too.

Every part of you draws me close; I could stay in this embrace forever.

Why I Hate Poland

My best friend, Carrie, moved to Poland just before my son was born one year ago. At that time, my life was radically changing: I was expecting my firstborn child, I was finishing up my Master's Degree, I had started a new job and left an old boyfriend. Her leaving, while sad, was overshadowed by the excitement of becoming a mother and the adjustment to life with a baby, and I didn't really have time to notice how much I missed her.

I have never loved someone like I love Carrie. The day we met felt like a reunion of souls that had been apart for a while. What I remember feeling when I shook her hand was the comfort and relief of familiarity, like the smell of the house you grew up in. We were instantly and fiercely friends. One person we met told us that we were "twin souls..." I don't know what that means, but it sounds right.

I know that the term "best friend" is usually reserved for fourth grade girls and charm bracelets, but Carrie really is my best friend. In fact, my admiration and love for her was problematic with my ex boyfriend. He got mad at how often I compared him to her, with him always on the short end of the comparison. He suggested I just marry her, something she and I had considered before we remembered that we aren't lesbian.

When she left, I didn't realize how hard it would be for us to stay connected. We've been separated before- like when I moved to Orange County to become a foster parent and when she moved to Virginia to mend a broken heart- and we've always been able to maintain an almost surreal closeness. However, over the past year, the time difference and Jack's need for my attention made conversation almost impossible. Not that I had much to say: Jack isn't sleeping, I'm going crazy, he rolled over today, he's got diarrhea, he gained two ounces, I've gained 15 pounds. New mom talk is only interesting to other new moms. Really.

And she's in Poland, for chrissakes, living through culture shock, blizzards, and bad, pickled food. When she would talk about it, I would try to imagine her life but my only reference for cold weather is San Diego at night. And not knowing what the town she lives in looks like, only that it is "a small, country town," I am embarrassed to admit that I imagined her in Main Street, USA at Disneyland.

I'm so used to getting my support from her, but for the first time in our life together as friends we had to go to separate support groups for our individual traumas. I'm so used to calling her when I need to laugh or to bitch about my job or my tummy fat or the price of cigarettes. Our parallel lives made this easy, but our lives look really, really different now. I have a baby that I love so intensely that it hurts while at the same time want to auction off to the highest bidder on Ebay. She is living in a country where people are not friendly and do not smile, and where Taco Bell does not exist.

She sent me an email today, a rare commodity since she does not have a computer. As I wrote my reply, which is posted below, I felt the sting of her absence in my life, a hollow, empty pain that I had not realized was there. I will see her in July, at the wedding of a mutual friend, and I look forward to that sweet reunion, once again.

I miss sharing my life with you. I miss having you to call. I like having you as a witness to my life, someone who shares in the beauty and the mess of it all, someone to rejoice with me and be awed with me and devastated with me. My life is devastatingly beautiful, Carrie, and I want you to see it. I want you to witness it with me. Without you here, events in my life bounce around like an echo, unabsorbed by anyone but me. And they're such great events: Jack's smile in the morning, the way a Cheerio sticks to his cheek when he eats, how his chubby baby legs just seem to get fatter and fatter, the sound of his voice when he sings as he plays with a straw.

Maybe it's just loneliness, period. Maybe it is that I am ready to invite someone into my life to bear witness to what I am creating, what I am, who I am. I'm just used to that person being you, Carrie, and I like it when it's you. I like standing with you in the rooms of my life.

I don't want you to come home for me, and I don't want you to stop creating your own life. I support you, and always will, in your journey and in your life wherever that leads you and I want you to experience the hell out of yourself! I just miss you, am incredibly lonely without you, and I feel like you are missing out on me. And I, you.

I love you.

Amber.

Peanut Butter and Cigarettes

I think I may have just accidentally changed my life. I can tell this change is for the better, but I can’t quite recall when or how it happened. Normally I make these really grandiose and quite narcissistic announcements that I am going to change my life and rarely does this ever turn out well. In fact, it usually results in me feeling a bit stupid and wishing I had just kept my mouth shut.

But this time, I didn’t really mean to make such a great improvement to the quality of my life and I’m not even sure that I can take credit for it. And when I say that my life has changed you might be confused because my house is still a mess, I’m still unemployed, my bank account is still the same and so is the number on the scale. And at first it might look like something so little, something so insignificant that it wouldn’t be worth even writing about, much less building up to like I have in these first few paragraphs. But here goes.

I’ve been hearing a lot about gratitude lately from really spiritual people and places like Oprah and church. The problem is that the things I’m most grateful for are like things like peanut butter and cigarettes, not exactly stuff that spiritual gurus espouse as the way to happiness. Still, everyone that I respect and admire says that having gratitude is essential to bringing about abundance in one’s life, the idea being that when we practice feeling gratitude we will attract more things to feel gratitude about. However another problem I have with this whole gratitude thing is that I’ve noticed that the people who are saying this have a lot to be grateful for, like Oprah who has a zillion dollars in her spare change drawer. I, on the other hand, am often scraping the bottom of my purse looking for quarters to do with laundry with. So I began to wonder: is gratitude an emotion that only the wealthy can experience, or is in experiencing gratitude that we create wealth? Which comes first… the gratitude or the nest egg?

Shortly after my son was born, I went a little nutsy. Officially this little time in my life is called post pardum depression, but I believe that my son’s arrival was like the proverbial last straw on the camel’s back. See, prior to his arrival I had managed to just barely be able to meet my own standards of what I thought was acceptable behavior. I could get the house clean before people would come over, I could make myself presentable when I went outside. I had time to return phone calls and money to pay the bills and energy to exercise. I could wash my car and make sure all of the take-out cartons were thrown away before anyone else had to sit in the back seat. I believed that being able to do these things was very important to how lovable and acceptable I was to everyone around me, including God. It was an anxious, scurrying dog-paddle fight to keep it all up, but I managed to do so.

However, when Jack was born I couldn’t keep it up anymore. I was barely able to keep him alive, much less keep my car clean. Suddenly the answering machine showed that I had 27 unheard messages and my email inbox was full. Dishes were piled up around my sink and my plants were dying from neglect. Piles of mail teetered ominously on any and all of the flat surfaces in my home. Weird, sticky, black grime had formed in spots on my entryway floor, and my Christmas tree was still in the lawn, even though it was February. Above all of this, I hadn’t plucked by eyebrows in several months and I was beginning to resemble a member of the Adam’s Family.

All of this was enough to make me a nervous wreck. My therapist told me that I needed to just make it okay that things weren’t perfect, that nobody expected my life or my house to be clutter-free. I tried to let things go, like the dishes in the sink, but then I found a cockroach in the kitchen which set me into a state of panic likened only to the catastrophic stockmarket crash in 1929.

I would wake up each morning in this state of utter panic at how messy my life was and how it had all gotten away from me, totally overwhelmed by the piles of mail and the sticky floors. I would rush to my desk and furiously write out a to-do list, often multiple pages long. It felt so good to write that list out, like how I imagine it must feel for a drug addict when the needle hits the vein. It was an almost instant relief from the anxiety, a delicious high. To see that numbered list, so neatly written, gave me a sense of control over what felt like such chaos and despair.

All I could think about throughout the day was getting that list completed. Having a completed list was like being flawless; there were no errors to point out. Somebody could walk into my life and I could feel safe. I could say, “Yes, you can come in! I have no flaws! I’ve got it all covered! My files are in order, my checking account is balanced, the diaper pail is empty, baby photos have been sent to all relatives, the plants are all watered on a schedule! I am a good employee! I am a good friend! I am a good mother! I am a good daughter! I am a good person! See!?”

The problem is that the list never, ever got done. Damn it, it never got done. I would check off number 14 on the list – Get the mail – but then the contents of the mail would add 5 more items onto the end of the list – call health insurance, research conference dates, call mom about babysitting, call H.R. about W-2’s, pay bills. It was so depressing to see the list growing instead of shrinking each day.

The worst part about this time is that I was so wrapped up in this totally neurotic pattern that I missed out on the first few months with my son. He became a nuisance to getting the list done that I would get so frustrated with him when he would require my attention (which was all of the time- he was a newborn!). I would nurse him or rock him to sleep or play with him in this sort of annoyed, distracted way, as if he was just another task to complete in the day. I remember wishing that he would just sleep all day so that I could have some uninterrupted, productive time.

The to-do list had become a problem. I would get up, make the list, and experience the exquisite relief of writing it all down, and then dread looking at it. I would ignore it all day, detest it even. Looking at all of those undone things, all of those reasons for self loathing, all of those imperfections and flaws, all of the “things that are in the way of you being worthy” would take away my buzz. And so I both loved and hated my to do-lists like an alcoholic loves to drink, giving me both relief and reason for self rejection in a single swallow.

God, those were dark days. They were anxiety- driven, heart-racing, brow- beating days where I couldn’t get away from the evidence of my imperfection. It showed up everywhere I looked until… well, I don’t know. I just…shifted. I mean, the evidence is still there, but I shifted.

I can say that at some point I realized that my entire day, yes even my entire life, had become about checking items off a list and that this was not how I was interested in living my life. I wanted to live a life engaged, a life with fullness and richness, a life with gratitude and appreciation. I wanted to feel human again, lithe and alert. And maybe it was just in the defining of what I wanted I created it.

And so I dropped writing to-do lists totally cold turkey. In its place I am now implementing a to-be list. Each morning I decide to be present, to be grateful, to be mindful. I wake up and set an intention to be compassionate with myself and my son as I move about the day, to be willing to trust that God is with me and that I am worthy of love- both God’s love and my own. And it really is a decision. I have to choose to be this way with myself because it’s not hard for me to write out entire lists indicating that I should have been left behind by God a dozen years ago. To be loving with myself is the most amazing task I can do because it requires that I embrace all parts of myself, even the lumpy, messy, awkward parts.

When I fall of the wagon and use the overflowing trash can as evidence of my unworthiness, gratitude helps me see that the trash is actually evidence of God’s favor in my life, that my cup runneth over, so much so that I have things to throw things away. Gratitude is by far the most effective cure to my overindulgent self-loathing. Similarly, when I see messy floors and piles of mail and dirty windows I tell myself that I it is a privilege to have floors and mail and windows to attend to. It is a privilege to live such an extravagant, abundant life where floors and mail and windows exist at all.

If I choose to make it so, something as simple as doing the dishes can be an exercise in appreciation. I don’t have to do the dishes, I get to do the dishes. I get the privilege of going over to the sink (my God, I have a sink!), turning on the hot water (hot water! I have clean, hot water at my command! And I don’t even have to pay for it!), putting on rubber gloves (can you believe that a person can buy gloves for only 99 cents?!) scraping the food (thank you, God, for such abundance!) off of my dishes (a gorgeous set) and placing them into my dishwasher (a dishwasher! Can you believe my fortune! I have a dishwasher!) And then there’s the dishsoap. Have you ever really looked at dishsoap? It’s like liquid jewelry, shimmering and luxurious. Iridescent streams of emeralds and opals pour elegantly from the bottle while bright bursts of citrus or pine fragrance meet your nose. All of these things are exquisite gifts to be cherished and held in the deepest places in our hearts.

When I move through life in this state of consciousness I can’t help but notice the ravishing beauty and ridiculous abundance of my life. It is awe inspiring, humbling and profound. My God, I get to change a diaper. I get to nurse life into a child, I get to feel his soft baby skin against my own. My God, I get to pay this phone bill. I get to receive love through this small mechanical device, my friend’s voice nourishing me like milk and honey. My God, I get to sweep my porch. How did I ever get such a lovely porch where the sun comes through the slats in the awning above in the most extravagant of ways, warming my toes as I walk upon it?

I hope that my son will see me living my life this way and it will rub off on him at least a little bit. I do suspect that we will scuffle some day as I tell him that, no- he doesn’t have to clean his room but he gets to clean his room, a clever way of shoving my philosophy down his future teenage throat. I’m sure that this will be followed with a roll of his eyes and a slam of a his door, which I then get to be on the other side of.

Jack the duck.

March 17, 2007

I woke up this morning to Jack climbing onto my face, breathing his hot, baby breath into my ear. It was the best way to wake up ever. I could smell his little baby smell, all warm and sweet like bread baking in the oven. He grabbed fistfulls of my hair as he moved, his diaper crinkling as he crawled. He climbed higher and higher, until his entire body was on my head, pajama-enclosed feet kicking into the air propelling him to the other side of me.

When there, he sat up and began excitedly telling me a story. “Bob. Bob bob bob bob bob bob bob. Bob. Bob.” His eyes are wide and expectant as he tells me this, his hands gesturing wildly. I’m wondering what is going on in his little baby head when he suddenly grabs my face and lunges forward, burying his own face into my cheek. “Bob bob bob, bob!” he squeals, and then proceeds to make fart noises on my face with his mouth.

He stays there for a while, his face pressed into mine, his body piled up in the crook of my arm. I am nearly dying from my love for him, making it hard to breathe. I could cry a thousand times a day by just looking at him, if I let myself feel it every time. I wait for him to pull away, to move on to the next baby thing to do, but he lingers in this moment of embrace with me and I cannot help but let the tears come forward. The lump in my throat appears and then ebbs away, softening as I move through this exquisite pain, this exquisite joy.

There are so many moments like this in a day of being with Jack. There are so many little, tiny instants that look like nothing but are actually totally profound and life-changing. A smile, a sound, a new skill mastered like opening up cupboard doors. All of these moments, when captured, are divine moments of grace where love comes in and it transforms the day.

I watch Jack as he sits up and faces the room, his hands exploring themselves out in front of him. He reminds me of a duck gliding effortlessly in the water, head turning aimlessly, eyes seeing nothing. His little beak opens up and “Bob, bob bob. Bob. Bob,” escapes, quietly. I notice that his foot is near my hand and so I curl my palm around it, noticing his smallness.

He looks over at me, coming out of his duck gaze. “Bob?” I ask him. And he bursts out laughing.