Missing Him

Running on the treadmill during a rainy day last week I was watching the highlights from the Chicago-Miami matchup, torn between my love of Dwayne Wade and my ambivalence towards LeBron James, when I started thinking about my father. I do every year at this time. If Dad were here he’d probably feel as I do about last night’s Dallas victory, happy for Nowitski but really never happy to see Mark Cuban’s team advance. My father was like that. He had a love-hate relationship with a lot of figures in sports, and over the seven years since he went in to the hospital for the last time, I’ve speculated about how he would have judged the sports figures of today. Brett Favre. Tiger Woods. Aaron Rodgers.

Dad went in to the hospital for the last time in June 2004, and the night they did the MRI on his brain, he and I celebrated the Pistons victory in the finals. We sat in his hospital room and watched the confetti fall and smiled despite knowing the diagnosis that would be coming the next day. I miss him (and Chauncy Billups) every year during the playoffs. But I also always look back on the time I had with my father and feel grateful. I see the sparkle of his eyes in Eva’s big blue eyes and I see his smile when Sam sings the ABC’s and looks at me waiting for the praise he knows is coming. Every single day I miss my father, but every single day I am so grateful for the time I had with him and the two children I have now that will carry his spirit into the future.

Photo by Tammy Hoeger of Capturing Moments

A Different Kind of Scream

Light spills from the master bath onto Eva’s face snuggled down near my armpit when I hear the screaming. It takes me a few seconds to realize it’s not the same screaming that occasionally accompanies his midnight half-awake stumbling towards my bedroom. This screaming is different. Not the sound of fear but the sound of pain.

By the time I move Eva to the bouncy seat and make my way to Sam’s bedroom, he is soaking wet, his sweaty hair pasted against his cheeks and his Thomas the Train pajamas pushed up to his knees. He stares straight up at the ceiling and holds both sides of his neck.

“Owie, owie, owie, owie,’ he yells over and over again.

Earlier in the day, he had fallen from the kitchen stool that he often sits on when he’s drawing or doing play-doh while I prepare dinner.  I am not sure exactly how many hours it has been since that fall and the slow motion way in which his chin slammed into the counter on his way down, but there was a half-eaten slice of Amy’s pesto pizza on the floor when I picked him up and pulled him in to a hug and discovered that he had bitten his tongue.  He had sat in my lap and cried for a few moments before saying “I’m okay, Mommy” and crawling right back on to the stool.

I push the Lightning McQueen pillow away from his face and try to calm him, tell him to take deep breaths. He is nearly inconsolable as I put my hands behind his neck and sit him up.  I hold him and take deep breaths, trying to get him to follow my lead, but only when I distract him with the promise of television does he seem to come out of it.  After a dose of children’s ibuprofen and a hot wash cloth on his muscle-spasm neck, I lower him onto the couch and turn on Nick Jr.  He is excited to see Ubi, the creepy naked hand puppet that Sam has talked about since the show appeared for just one Sunday evening a few months ago.  Sam is always making his hand talk like Ubi, and it’s a frequent keep-him-awake-in-the-car trick of mine.

“Mommy, it’s Ubi,” he says with joy and I go to quickly check the internet for symptoms and treatments for delayed neck injuries.  Is this whiplash?

We lay on the couch together for the next 3 hours, me dozing in and out of sleep while Sam lays wide-eyed watching Ubi and Grandpoo and then some bizarre program about an island with a giant tadpole. Every bone in my mommy body tells me he is fine, that it’s just a sprain, that he has a muscle that stiffened up while he slept.  But in the morning I call the Gunderson Lutheran Clinic nurse advisor line.  He is in pain and I want to give him as much medication as possible.  I want them to tell me he is just fine and I can double the dose.  The RN goes through the usual checklist.  No dizziness or mental confusion.  No flu-like symptoms.  No bruising.  No fever. No swelling.  He is fine.  He is happy.  Immobile on the couch in front of Yo GabbaGabba, but happy.

When the nurse says, “We’re going to have you bring him in,” I feel the same way I did when I went on my one and only blind date 20 years ago.  During the hour I spent with the guy, we had nothing in common and the outcome was clear, but when we said goodbye at the end of the night he said he’d call.

“Really?” I want to say to the nurse advisor.  Didn’t we just go through the checklist?  Didn’t you hear anything I said?  Doesn’t everything check out just fine?  Why are we concerned?  But I don’t say any of that.  Instead I immediately began planning for how I will find someone to watch Eva and get Sam into the car and across the county.

To Sam it is just another visit with his pediatrician. He moves slower than usual, and he glues his right hand to his neck, but he gets to ride the elevator and look out the window at the big construction crane and dig through a drawer of princess books and press his warm fingers into the skeleton that changes color when you push on it. He gets to pick out a toy in the Walgreen’s toy aisle while Mommy buys pain meds and searches for a heating pad. And he even gets to eat skittles and freezie pops in the car.

“I like it when it’s just Mommy and Sammy,” he says on the way home, the blue raspberry freezer pop juice running down his chin. “I like when it’s Mommy and Sammy and Baby Eva too, but I like when it’s just Mommy and Sammy.”

When we pull into the garage he refuses to get out of the car, says he needs his medicine first.  I carry the bag filled with toys and ibuprofen and a heating pad and a cervical pillow into the kitchen, check on Eva just waking in the arms of the friends who came to watch her, and pour him a teaspoon and a half of berry-flavored ibuprofen.  In the car he pulls his hand down from his neck and slurps from the little cup and announces “I feel better already, Mommy.  I feel better.”

This story originally appeared here.

Best Mother's Day EVER

Jezail and her boys

“I’ve told you a billion times not to exaggerate,” my father used to say. But he wouldn’t think I was exaggerating if he were with our family this weekend and I told him that this was the best Mother’s Day ever.

Eva waits in the tent before the ceremony

My morning started with the sun glistening through the trees and into the window of Jezail’s bedroom. Sam was curled up in a ball with his head buried under a pillow next to my right arm, and Eva was sprawled out in pink on my left, her little hands up over her head while air puffed in and out of her sleeping face. They had both slept solidly through the night after a long Saturday, and I could actually hear birds outside the window. Afraid of disturbing the peace and quiet I checked my email on my phone and saw this message had been left on my facebook page the night before:

9 years ago when I was 18 I remember asking you how could I ever get into a college because I knew I had no money. You told me "don’t worry about money Jezail. Just apply wherever you want to go. Money should not be a concern." Now I’m 27 and tomorrow I graduate with a Masters in Education and the person I thank first is Barbara Ann Matousek!!! You gave me what I needed- to believe I could do anything and I love you for that. Happy Mothers Day!!


And so I cried for the first (and certainly not the last) time that day. I cried when I first saw her in her robe, the sunshine reflecting off the big sign on Alumni Hall that said Congratulations Graduates! I cried when I called my own mother from the tent where the ceremony would be held, my young children giving a few appreciated moments of peace. I cried when I saw Jezail walk across the stage and shake the dean’s hand. And I cried when the kids and I stood on the grass and watched all the graduates file past. I cannot even begin to talk about how proud I am of Jezail and all that she’s accomplished. And I cannot even touch on how inspirational she has always been to me. From the moment I met her at the age of 15 she’s been teaching me by example about facing fear and overcoming obstacles and stepping out of your comfort zone and changing for the better and not ever letting YOU be your biggest enemy.

After the ceremony
Jaylin and Sam are very happy they no longer have to be quiet.

After a long day of sunshine and ceremony and parks and running after children, I played checkers with Jaylin while Sam and Branden destroyed the Play-doh. Jezail stood in her kitchen and did what she always loved to do when we lived together and family came to visit. She made a dinner of baked chicken and green beans and rice and corn muffins and salad, and we reminisced about how much my father had loved her cooking… her banana pudding and strawberry cheesecake and cooked greens and especially her fried catfish with hot sauce. I have no doubt that if my father were still alive he would have been there with us at Jezail's graduation ceremony. My father had his faults and he wasn’t perfect all the time, but he was loyal and thoughtful and generous with the people that he cared about. And over the years he came to love her as much as I did. He would not have called it exaggerating if I told him that this was the BEST Mother’s Day EVER.



See more photos from our action-packed family weekend which included graduation as well as a local zoo, a fantastic afternoon with my generous and thoughtful friend Lisa, and several trips to several parks here.

Still Working On It

"What's that, Mommy?" (Sam learns about moss.)

“Where is Grandpa Jim?”

We are in the car and we have just driven past a cemetery, the same cemetery we drive past twice a day, every single day, on our way back from town. We have never talked about this particular cemetery, and my father is not buried there. But somehow Sam has made the connection.

“In heaven.”

There. I said it. I wasn’t ever going to talk about heaven in such concrete terms. But any parent will tell you that there are lots of things that you swore you would not do before you actually had kids, and I have run out of ways to explain death to my 3-year-old.

“Where is heaven?” he asks.

“In the sky.” I cringe when I say it, but I can’t stop myself.

“Where? I don’t see it,” he says, looking up at the thick gray clouds that threaten rain.

“It’s invisible.”

“But where is it?”

“It’s hard to explain. I’ll have to get a book to help you understand it.”

“No, Mommy! Don’t buy a book.” He is three. He yells things like this at me frequently. He wants what he wants, how he wants it. And he always wants it right now.

“Okay,” I say.

The spring rains have left the fields to our west a muddy mess, and the wind is pulling the car on the road. I push the button to open the garage door and hope he will be distracted by the sight of his bike.

“But what is heaven?” he starts again. “I don’t know what heaven is!”

“It’s where people go when they die.”

“But where is it?!”

[sigh]

Last week I struggled with “What is February?” and “What does salty mean?” A few days later I explained my friend’s father’s multiple sclerosis and the fact that we were walking to raise money for a cure; Sam wanted to know what “cure” was. Cure is an easy concept compared to Death, and Sam now knows that we walked to “try to fix Kelly’s daddy.”

I’m still working on Death.

This story originally appeared here.

A Giant in the Sky

“Maybe there is a big giant watching us,” he says as he pops the last of his cupcake into his mouth.

“You think so?” I say, pilling the dishes into the sink and wiping the counter in front of him with a damp rag.

“And he’s moving the wind and the clouds so that sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Maybe that’s God,” I say.

“What’s God?”

Since before Sam was born I’ve been prepared for discussions about why our family doesn’t have a daddy. I’ve made books explaining his conception and our story and what a gift he is. But I’ve never even mentioned God to him? God hasn’t ever come up when we snuggle at bedtime and talk about things we’re grateful for or the people we love? Nobody has ever mentioned God to him? How did this happen?

When my best friend was trying to figure out how to teach her young boys about God, whether to bring them to church, I admired the balance she struck between her beliefs and her husband’s beliefs, the way she wanted to educate her children about what others believed without forcing them to believe anything in particular.  A decade later when my sister grappled with the decision to send her son to a Lutheran pre-school, I understood her reluctance.  She and I had stood up during her children’s baptisms and vowed to raise her children in the Catholic church but at the time we both had our doubts and questions about religion and God.

Standing in the kitchen with a wet rag in my hand, all of my earlier pronouncements to my friends that “I want to teach my children about spirituality, not religion” come back to me.  How do I teach my child about God if I don’t know what I believe about God?

In Buddhist teachings there is a description of a huge net reaching in all directions called the Jeweled Net of Indra.  This net teaches about the interconnectedness of us all.  We are all part of something bigger than just ourselves, part of a whole that includes plants and animals and friends and neighbors, people across the world and people right next door.  What we do to the least of our brothers we do to ourselves.  I know I believe this, but how does my idea of God or a creator fit in with this?

I was raised in a Catholic home and from the distance of my adulthood I look back gratefully for the tradition and the community and the center the church gave our family.  My earliest and most pleasant childhood memory is of my head in my mother’s lap as she stroked the hair back behind my ears as the priest’s voice droned from the pulpit.  I look back and see how no matter what was going on in our lives, we made time for God on Sunday.  We got out of bed and got dressed and rode in the car together, whether it was raining or sleeting, whether we were healthy or sick, whether we were getting along or fighting.  Every week we traveled the short distance to St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, and we sat in the pews together.  My Sunday memories include silver dollar sized pancakes at The Village Inn, peeling apples for pie, and watching football in the family room.  Together.

I’m still forming my ideas about the spiritual traditions our family will follow, but when I think about what I want my children to know about God and religion and spirituality, THIS is what I KNOW I want them to learn:  that we are a family, the three of us as well as the greater human race.  That there is no “us” and “them.”  That each human being has as much value as the next.  That those who have a different skin color or speak a different language or form families with two moms or ride in a wheelchair or follow the teachings of Mohammed or believe that Christ was the son of God or don’t believe in God at all are all human beings.  I want them to learn that families can come from anywhere, that what we do and say can influence others and we don’t always see the effects we have on others, and we’re all in this together.

I stand in the kitchen and look at the frosting smeared into Sam’s hair and the blue sprinkles caked to the corners of his mouth, and I do not even know how to begun to talk to him about God, how to even put a human word to something I consider to be so grand and awesome that even the act of naming it diminishes the greatness of God.  But I know that it is time for our family to begin forming our spiritual traditions, our Sunday memories.  Better late than never.

“God is love,” I say.  “God is all of us.  Together.  Love.”It’s not perfect and it never will be.  And as my son grows he will develop his own ideas about God and religion and community and tradition and humanity and love.  So while it may not be perfect, it’s a start.  We are finally talking about God.

This story originally appeared here.

Something's Gotta Give

When I picked up the kids from daycare this afternoon, I saw that Jamie had brought out the exersaucer, the plastic activity center that supports a baby that can't walk yet.

"Does Eva go in that yet?" I asked.

"Yah, she loves it," Jamie said.

"That's so funny because she hates the one at home," I said. "She gets mad at me whenever I put her in it."

"She plays with all the little toys and she spins around," Jamie said as she showed me how it worked.

"She gets mad at me for just about everything I do at home unless I'm holding her," I said. "I think she just needs more time with me."

"So does Sammy."

"So does my boss," I sighed.

Something’s gotta give.

When you’re in survival mode, it’s okay to serve your 3-year-old just buttered noodles and a big glass of milk for dinner.

The Mess Walk

“We’re going to fix Kelly’s Daddy,” Sam said.

I was bundling him up in his blue jacket and red hat, and my friend Sarah was standing in our kitchen holding Eva. The day before the forecast had been for about 32 degrees with mixed precipitation-- the dreaded “wintry mix” – so we had agreed it would be best if I left Eva behind.

Earlier in the morning I had told Sam that we were going to have another special day, a special day with just Mommy and Sammy. But I had explained that this day was even more special than our usual special days because we’d be walking in the local MS Walk. I told him that we were going on a special walk to raise money to help find a cure for the disease that Kelly’s daddy has, that MS is the reason Kelly's daddy doesn’t walk.

“We’re walking in The Mess Walk to fix Kelly's Daddy's leg,” Sam told Sarah. “Just Sammy and Mommy.”

And so we did. The weather wasn't perfect and we never did find the other Sam's Squad team members who were walking in our area, but we rode on a glass elevator and turned in our donations and ate two donuts apiece and got our pictures taken and walked 3.1 miles and saw a rake in a tree and the flood waters of the Mississippi and the same patch of daffodils we saw when we walked in 2008. We got our orange t-shirts and talked with people as we walked and listened to people tell their stories on the microphone and called Kelly's Daddy to tell him we finished, and we had a very special day. Just Sammy and Mommy.

What Spring Looked Like...

...before winter returned.















See more photos of Sam's Special Day Hiking here.

See photos of a visit from Brooklynn and a great visit from Eva's soulmate on this page of March photos.

See more photos of outdoors spring activities with friends on this page of April photos.