Month: May 2020

My mother’s mother died when my mother was ten. I knew the woman who stepped into her role and finished raising her children, including my mother. She was a good woman, a good grandmother. Yet there is this other grandmother whom I never knew.

My husband’s mother died when he was eighteen. I never had the chance to meet her. Never got to have a mother-in-law. Never got to have her input into our lives. I know it wouldn’t have been all sunshine and roses, but we would have benefited from the increased complexity. I’ve been thinking of her more lately. Wishing I could talk to her and ask her questions.

My son-in-law’s mother died when he was a baby. I thought of her often as I carefully tried to find my place in her son’s life. Stepping up to be a mother for a person who wasn’t accustomed to having one, without displacing her. Standing beside her empty shoes, not stepping into them.

Three women I never knew, yet their choices and sacrifices shaped three people who I love dearly. The absence of their mother defined each of them in different ways. I would have liked a chance to know each of these women, to hear their thoughts on mothering. Mothering is such a complicated role and I so often fear I’m doing it badly. Yet sometimes it feels like these absent mothers aren’t so far away and that they’re rooting for me from where they sit. Sending me support as I try to help take care of their children. I like that thought, the one where I always have a support nearby, only a soul’s breath away. The network of mothering not interrupted by so small a problem as death.

In a world where people can easily share the photos of their fantastic trips, it is easy to forget the beauty of ordinary things. One of the gifts of staying home so much right now is that when I’m seeking for peace of spirit, I need to look for it right where I am instead of seeking it at a destination. This is when I recognize the deep beauty of sitting in a garden shaded by trees I planted twenty years ago, scented by flowers I planted, and carpeted by lawn I have mowed. Any peacefulness this place possesses, I earned through tending. This is one of the reasons I bought a new hammock.

The view from my hammock is tree leaves, fences that are in need of repair, and a lawn with many bare patches.

Yet there is peace to be had here if I’m willing to hold still long enough for it to show up. Holding still can be hard for me. I have to put aside the feeling that surely I could be doing something more useful with my time. As if the process of untangling my thoughts, of just being, had no intrinsic value. I spent more than an hour out there today. Not thinking about anything in particular. Not reading the book I brought outside with me. Not trying to solve anything. When I cam back inside, the words for this blog post flowed instead of needing to be extracted from tangles. It is a subtle, but significant change.

Having the hammock makes this process easier because it is new and comfortable. But I always had the option to throw a blanket on the lawn, or to sit on my concrete steps, or to just stand under the sky. It isn’t the hammock that brings me calmness, it is sitting still and breathing without doing.

All of the days feel very long, so you’d think I’d get more done with them. Instead I feel badly that I’m not doing more work that is directly tied to bringing in money and feeling like the work I’m doing to tend and repair house is me not carrying my share. It is a strange mental twist, a mobius loop where I travel around and around without giving myself a break. It is the “I should be doing more” loop. I get caught in it often. The truth is that I’m occupied pretty much all day every day. Only a sliver of that time is on purely recreational things like a video game. Everything else is connected to maintenance or creation in some way. Cooking, sweeping, planning a grocery list, answering emails, maintaining contacts with loved ones, time for small kindnesses, driving, picking up mail, answering messages: it is easy to feel like none of these things count as work. They all are, of course. They all take a measure of attention and energy.

One of the messages I’m seeing on social media is about the brokenness of the Cult of Productivity. I know that I tend to tie self worth to the things I do rather than believing it is intrinsic. (Everyone else’s worth is obviously intrinsic, just mine that isn’t.) But I’m starting to readjust my thinking. This enforced slow down has shown me that the world doesn’t fall apart if everyone slows down. I confess to a hope that we will collectively decide that some of the slower pace is good. That it won’t harm us to wait a week for packages rather than being angry if they don’t show up in two days.

On social media I see a lot of people vehemently refuting positions or posts. These refutations aren’t aimed at a particular person or source, they are just a scattershot argument to a person that the refuter has imagined. I’m not sure that these refutations really do much good. It’s like we’re all standing in the cafeteria shouting on our soap boxes, hearing only fragments of what others have to say and then responding angrily to those fragments. I’ve decided that if I see a friend or loved one spreading information that I believe to be harmful, I have a responsibility to choose a private avenue to take it up with that person. If I don’t have access to a private mode of communication with that person, then I’m not close enough for them to disarm and listen to me.

Locally there is a group trying to determine if Covid-19 was transmitting locally earlier than March. They’re using antibody tests and patient histories. Howard’s January illness fit their parameters, so he went and had a blood draw today. Not sure when the results will come back, hopefully in a couple of days. Howard’s case is a useful study since he came down sick about five days after a wedding reception, had fever, body aches, coughing, and shortness of breath. He even landed in the ER one night because the coughing was so bad. They did a nasal swab which ruled out influenza. And Howard has had troubles with asthma and breathing ever since. A positive result won’t change many of our behaviors, antibodies =/= immunity. But it is information. We like having information.

The weather has been beautiful the past few days. It is my perfect weather. Comfortable to sit outside with the sun feeling pleasantly warm on me.

I wonder how much all this reopening will do to save businesses. Consumer behavior remains changed and regulations have changed. Some businesses simply can’t thrive in the current circumstances. I know that my purchasing and living behaviors have changed. Some of the changes I’d like to keep for a long time to come. I suspect others will also have permanent shifts. Perspective and priorities are different now.

I tried to bring these thoughts together into a coherent post, but I guess today is just scattered.

It continues to be fascinating to me what things are available at the grocery stores and which are in short supply. For some reason this week the case full of fancy cheeses was half empty. After two weeks of warnings in the news about disruptions to the meat supply chain, I’m beginning to see the meat cases empty out. Flour and yeast are back in stock, though not fully stocked. I’ve seen reports in the news about altercations between store staff who ask people to wear masks and people who refuse them. I’ve never witnessed any such thing. About half of the customers are wearing masks and everyone is polite about giving each other space. Most of the stores I frequent have added plastic shields at the check out counter. Combined with my mask and the employee’s mask, I’m having to repeat myself more often or to ask for the clerk to repeat something. Lip reading to augment hearing is no longer a thing I can do. It hasn’t been much of a problem, but it could be if I were tired and having trouble with auditory processing that day.

I have a neighbor who’s job is involved with tools for hospital administration. He says he’s seen significant shifts in how hospitals are run. He has trouble getting in touch with his New York contacts because they’re all busy, yet in other areas there are hospitals which are slowly going bankrupt because all non-critical services have been canceled. High end hospitals which mostly catered to plastic surgery are facing dire financial situations. I don’t feel badly for the celebrities who have to wait for their beauty treatments, but I do feel badly for the hospital staff who are just regular people trying to make a living.

I asked my bishop (who is also my neighbor) if he’s seen a change in charitable needs within our ward. He didn’t give me any details, but told me yes he’s seeing big pattern shifts in who needs to rely on the social safety net provided by our church. It’s probably time for me to increase fast offerings since those funds never leave the neighborhood. They’re re-distributed right here and some of my neighbors need help. Then the bishop looked me in the eye and asked if we need help. I told him we’re okay for now, which we are. He nodded, but said be sure to speak up if things get hard down the line.

That’s the part I need to remember. For all the angry people in the news and on social media, all the people vehemently shouting for staying home or opening up. My town and neighborhood is full of people who are quietly trying to make the best decisions they can for their families, and who are quietly helping and supporting each other. Everyone I talk to acknowledges the strangeness of our situation. Know one knows what the long term outcomes will be for any of us. So we try to be kind. That is all we can do really while we watch the world shift around us and try to keep our balance as the shifts continue.

I remember my great-grandmother’s hands. The woman herself I hardly knew because by the time I was aware of her, she was simply a quiet presence in the corner of the trailer home where we would stop by and visit. For the most part my job as a child was to greet her when we arrived and then to occupy myself, quietly, elsewhere while the adults visited. Yet her skin fascinated me. She was the only person I knew who had that many wrinkles. There was one day when I was left un-attended near her and I touched the skin on her hands. It slid across the bones and tendons underneath. I discovered that if I gently pinched it and pulled it upward, the pinched portion would stay put as a miniature ridge on the back of her hand. That was the point at which some other adult realized what I was doing and began to scold me into stopping. Great-grandma told that other adult it was fine, she didn’t mind. So sometimes when I visited, touched the skin on her hands and was amazed at how translucent it was and how loosely it was attached to the rest of her.

The other day the skin on the back of my hands was so dry from all the frequent hand washing, that when I pinched it, a small ridge stayed put for several seconds before sliding back into place. I noticed this, and the increasing accumulation of wrinkles. Some day it will be my skin which slides loosely across my bones. I put lotion on my hands and the skin sprang back into place for now. The skin on my hands has adapted to the increased washing. Redness, cracking, and wrinkling have subsided. Yet there is still a texture difference between the skin on my hands and the skin on my arms. Each portion of skin adapted to its regular use. The older I get, the more my body bears the marks of how I’ve used it.

When I studied art history in college, the teacher devoted a portion of lecture to discussing negative space. When we are looking at an image, it is the human tendency to look at what is being depicted. In Hokusai’s Great Wave, our eye takes in the wave and the distant mountain.

Yet we’re only able to focus on the wave because of what isn’t in the painting. Instead of filling the image with trees, more waves, a few birds, the artist instead gives us a void. It is the space around the focal points which give the painting it’s tension and meaning. Because of the space, we feel that the wave is going to come crashing down. This is the negative space.

One of the places where negative space is most apparent to me is in love story lines in television or movies. There is often a moment when the two people are close, sometimes looking at each other, sometimes not. But I become very aware of the space in between these two people and of my desire for them to close the gap. When they touch, or kiss, I feel a relief. The tension is gone and I can relax with the connection complete. This, of course, is why so many romantic story lines end up oscillating in “Will they or won’t they.” The desire to watch people connect keeps the audience showing up, waiting for that moment when everything is okay again.

Any time I venture out into the world right now, I am very aware of the spaces between me and other people. We are all like magnets with similar poles, pushed away from each other by an invisible force. I change my path through the store so that I do not impinge on another person’s six foot space. I appreciate the space with strangers, but with those I love, the ones I want to connect with, the space has become painful. I’m not sure whether talking on the phone with people I miss makes missing them easier or harder. I suspect that being socially distanced in the same place would just make us more aware of the space that should be maintained. The space definitely feels negative. We’re all trapped in that moment of not-quite-connecting. The moment of highest tension. And there is no relief in sight.