Holy Now

 "This mornin' outside I stood / I saw a little red wing bird / Shining like a burning bush / And singing like a scripture verse. It made me want to bow my head / I remember when church let out. / How things have changed since then / Everything is holy now."

- Excerpt from song lyrics to "Holy Now" by Peter Mayer

Burning bushes glow fire engine red at peak season, and are highly visible now in the West due to our warm and sunshiney October. When I was in Montana last week with Mom, we saw a few burning bushes as well as maple trees and highlighter yellow larches. On my walks I did not see any red wing birds, but we had a family of deer rest each day in the shadow of the house, just outside of the basement windows and easily observable from the living room. My sister calls it "deer day care."

My favorite vista was Mama deer sitting a cautious distance from her three little ones, back turned to them and huge long ears on a swivel to catch any possible danger. The youngsters sat with an eye on Mama, turning their heads to stare at us whenever they heard foot falls or voices from inside the house. Mama wasn't too worried about us but she did jump to high alert when shots were fired across the bay. The echo of their hunting-season clarion call carried, and Mama eventually sat under the rose bushes against the house while her babies retreated to shelter under the buck brush. 

The Mama deer, with her combination of devotion and "leave me alone" attitude, resonated with me. I remember the days with little ones, days full of miracles and minutiae, when I wanted to gaze at my children with awe but also to escape for an hour or two. I wrote a blog post headed by Peter Mayer's "Holy Now" when the kids were in elementary school. The beautiful lyrics capture how we can see everything as miracle, and the song lyrics reached out and grabbed me in the car yesterday, tying those early days with young children to this special time with my Mom.

Spending long, quiet minutes with people you love, with space to appreciate our shared existence, always feels miraculous to me now. I loved the time with Mom, soaking in histories, laughter, jokes, walks. On our last walk we saw the deer family out in another yard, and one little guy came close to check us out. We got a photo of her head lowered in our direction, bright black eyes staring unblinkingly as her soft ears twitched. Then a noise spooked her and her thin legs and shiny hooves scrambled for purchase in the landscaping as she bounded away.

It was hard to say goodbye to Mom, to the special quiet moments. I had to leave her in the Missoula airport, water bottle at her side and cane in hand, to wait for my brother. I wanted to ask the TSA agents to look after her, just as I asked them to watch over Aden on her first solo flight. Time and the people we love are precious and fragile, and every time together seems like a miracle.

Mr Moon Shines Bright in Montana

 "Oh Mr. Moon, moon, bright and shiny moon / Won't you please shine down on me?

Oh Mr. Moon, moon, bright and shiny moon / Won't you come out from behind that tree?

Oh my life's in danger and I'm scared to run / There's a man behind me with a big shotgun

"Oh Mr. Moon, moon, bright and shiny moon / Won't you please shine down on me?"

-Lyrics to Mr. Moon song and nursery rhyme, unattributed

Last night I lay in the spare room bed in my parent's house, spotlit by the full supermoon beaming through my window. Toasty under my electric blanket, I watched the illuminated clouds pass by and remembered nights in this house with our babies, catching a blessed few hours of sleep in the dark and quiet while they slept (at last). The lyrics of "Mr Moon" came to mind and I was startled to remember the man behind the tree with a shotgun -- was there ever a time when that was appropriate for grade school? My third-grade class used to belt that line, singing out of tune with gusto, but that song would never be in the curriculum now.

I dreamt of coaching swimming, urging my swimmers to kick (an activity they do with reluctance) and woke myself up by flutter-kicking my heavy covers off the bed. Though my feet were imprisoned I had apparently been carrying on with some urgency, as I woke up sweating. After a chuckle at my foolishness I went back to dreamless sleep.

My siblings and I are rotating through visits with my incredible Mom, who is here recovering from a stroke that put her in the hospital in early September. She's doing well with her recovery, walking 5000 steps a day, eating a normal diet and working on her enunciation. Yesterday she used so many elite vocabulary words I felt like I was back in my Harvard English classes! 

Our visits here are a gift of time and presence, backlit by the beautiful scenery of upstate Montana. I have two robes on now, as it's only 60 degrees in the house, and the heavily frosted grass outside unmarked by deer hooves or geese's webbed feet. Yesterday we saw a brilliant full rainbow as we drove into a storm by the Mission Mountains and took it as a lucky omen for both the time together and the future. Under the benevolent gaze of the moon and double rainbows how could the time be anything but blessed?

Sacramental Care-Giving

 “We could afford to do this because a person can get paid more to sit in front of a computer and send a bunch of emails than she can to do a job that’s so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy: to clean excrement off a body, to hold a person while they are crying, to cherish them because of and not despite their vulnerability.”

-Jia Tolentino, New Yorker Staff Writer

Tolentino's words moved me to tears. Referring to parenthood and care of her children, she also describes caregiving for a sibling, spouse, parent or friend. The idea that selfless, often mind-numbingly repetitive actions of caregiving are sacred flies in the face of our culture's emphasis on earning potential and GDP. Her words note the relatively high value of sitting and typing ephemeral emails.

When we perform acts of care for a loved one we are in sacred relationship, and the vulnerable individual allows the (momentarily) stronger person to see them in a weakened state. That is hard, also.  Tolentino says in an interview with Ezra Klein "The thing that connects them both is submission." Both sides of the coin are sacramental; caregiving and allowing care to be given. 

The submissive actions take us out of our modern plane, out of the speed of daily emails and texts, away from the urgency of stockmarket gains or losses and Fed interest rate decisions. They focus us instead on the miracle of being alive, the fragility of human bodies, the strength of character required to care-give and receive care. 

Tolentino's timely message pierced my heart. Having been on both sides of this holy connection, I need to provide care again soon, and indeed it will be a sacramental privilege.

Giving Care

I forgot how Daniel reacts to anesthesia.

Silly me, for planning any work or activities on the same day that he got his wisdom teeth out. I was rapidly disabused of my faulty logic when the nurse came out of the procedure (finally) to say, "he's very emotional - I need your help!"

"Now you need me," I thought but didn't say as I picked up all my belongings from the waiting room where I'd spent the last two and a half hours, "You should have let me go back with him for the IV and pre-op stuff so he wouldn't be so anxious."  

Daniel was moaning and weeping and incoherently asking one question repeatedly as I took his hand and tried to get him to slow his breathing. The machine monitoring his heart rate beeped like crazy as he muttered "air ar air ods" over and over.  After ten minutes of this I finally understood him saying "where are my air pods?"

"You brought your airpods to the surgery?" I asked in disbelief. "Where did you put them and why?" Daniel gestured wildly to his pocket; I looked in both and under him but no airpods to be found. I dismissed this as A. Ridiculous and B. More than I could handle at the moment.  The nurse and I helped a weepy, staggering Daniel out to my car, where he limply lifted a hand for the seat belt and began crying again about  - you guessed it - airpods.

The emotional outburst slowly diminished over the next forty minutes as I sorted piles of drugs on the counter where William's meds had just abdicated space. From ACL surgery to wisdom tooth removal, over the last two weeks I've remembered the every-minute crisis care and nursing skill that sometimes goes hand-in-hand with mothering children. This type of hands-on, sacrificial, round-the-clock care is not so common with children in their late teens and early twenties, and boy, do I NOT miss it.

Difficult to maintain a calm, caring presence when Daniel's meds wore off and gave way to anger, frustration and stomach issues. Similar scenes floated to my consciousness of his early surgeries: tonsils and adenoids removed when he was two, ear tubes put in when he was four. I guess I can be forgiven for forgetting or blocking out those difficult days, after all the twelve years intervening have been full of other adventures.

Caregiving is HARD, and so many of my friends and family are in unexpectedly difficult times of caring for others. Teachers are overwhelmed by serious needs of students, pastors are similarly drowning in the needs of their flocks, and we all know how stressed medical professionals have been over the course of the pandemic. Friends have aging and ill parents to care for, spouses have their husband or wife, parents have ill children and children have parents who are sick. At least, I reason with myself, we are so fortunate that both the boys' surgical procedures achieved good results and the recovery time is fairly quick. Having lived with chronic pain myself for the past ten years, I am appreciative of solutions that promise relief.

I wish our society appreciated caregiving, because it demands so much from human beings and makes other parts of our lives difficult: other jobs (that actually pay), time to restore ourselves, time to sleep, even. I'm grateful for the friends and family who take care of me and firmly resolve to be a much better patient in future, whenever the opportunity arises.