Mother's Day Peace

Mother’s Day began with a text from my college boy middle child.  He was working the farmers market and wished me a happy mother’s day and said I Love You.  He won. Later that morning my daughter presented me with an orchid, a plate of raspberries and a muffin, and a homemade card with a wonderful note.  Ok, she won. Handmade trumps text. Sorry buddy.  Now nirvana: read the Sunday New York Times in peace.  But, there is no peace in the NYT.

The story of the 200+ abducted Chibok schoolgirls, plucked from their boarding school beds and loaded onto buses by armed Islamist militant terrorists, is a hard one to read.  The group’s name, Boko Haram, translates to ‘Western Education is sin’ and they believe in strict Sharia Law. Their leader, Abubakar Shedau released a video threatening to sell the girls.  He wants to trade them for prisoners.  A CNN interview with one of the girls who escaped is heartbreaking.  She is so traumatized that she will not return to school. 

This is not good Mother's Day reading. Or maybe it’s the exact right kind.  I yell upstairs for my daughter to give me an update on her homework. 

In stark contrast is a moronic article in the Style section about crop tops. An enormous amount of lady sweat and anesthesia is going into feeling confident while sporting a partial shirt.  As a mother of a teenaged daughter, this is not optimal.  Apparently there are women so beholden to Forever 21 fashion standards that they’re scuttling over to their friendly neighborhood cosmetic surgeon, waving red carpet pictures of starving celebrities in crop tops and plunking down 6K for Airsculpt – all for the promise of flashing a smooth tight midriff.

At this point my ‘fix this’ mom brain kicks in.  Navy Seals can airdrop the crop top ladies into Nigeria in exchange for the 200 abducted schoolgirls who value education over Ab Attack class. I think about running this idea by my daughter. I envision the blank stare. I know she will think the Stella McCartney top that the 84 pound Rihanna is rocking is super cute, and that she will be horrified that my idea suggests that I am not taking #bringbackourgirls seriously. 

Good thing it’s Mother’s Day, as my first-born slides in under the wire and calls. He’s in solid third place. It was our first conversation in over a month.  There had been talk just that morning of filing a missing persons report, but luckily it didn’t come to that.  The call was appropriately glitchy – he has no reception on the Oregon farm where he lives and works.  It mirrored our relationship – ‘Huh? What? I can’t understand you. OK, well, thanks for calling, I can’t hear you so I’m hanging up. Call when you have better reception. Love you.'

Peace.

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c is for courage

Anne Frank: 

'I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn' 

courage

I wrote myself through childhood, in journals and diaries. Through moving and divorce and latch key kid loneliness and fear. I wrote myself through a miscarriage, a friend's suicide and postpartum depression.



The writing was for my eyes only, until I took a class at Book Passage, then joined a writing group for mothers. It was partly therapy to write and then therapy to share. Through that repeated practice came the courage to tell my stories and make sense of my grief and confusion that life sometimes serves up.



I wrote through shame and fear and helplessness after my son was arrested during his first year in college. More than anything else, writing and sharing my stories have helped me become a better mother to him, and gave me the courage to let him go.

Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop. It is filled with essays about every possible aspect of parenting and life. Mamas Write, and it takes courage.

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Write On, Mamas! announce our newborn Anthology

Mamas Write, (Bittersweet Press)
29 essays by the Write On, Mamas! 

It's been a long and thoughtful gestation, and our due date is imminent.  Deep cleansing breath, and.......

Sunday, April 27 (3 PM) at Napa Bookmine

and

Sunday, May 4 (7 PM) at Book Passage Corte Madera

we get to follow Ayelet Waldman and Andrew Sean Greer!  OMG.

Join us!
Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

and stay tuned for the A to Z challenge......

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Jungle Plant

there's one in every litter

Remember looking at National Geographic magazine's pictures of jungle tribes?  Lying on the living room floor, your head bracing hand falling asleep, the scratchy carpet irritating the skin of your belly where your Hang Ten hand-me-down shirt had lifted up,  turning the slick pages with your functioning hand.  The smooth skinned naked natives with their blackened nub smiles both fascinated and repulsed.  The body manipulations: ritual tattooing, scaring, piercing and stretching of the dark jungle moist skin was so other, alien.  I thought about this as I seated myself at the dinner table on Christmas Eve, forcibly softening my squint of disapproval and holding my tongue in order to enjoy a rare visit from my eldest son.

to find some books on xeriparenting

Modestly pierced ears were pretty much unanimous at the table.  My scientist brother-in-law has tiny hoops in each ear, but my eldest son has surgical steel in various gages looping in and out in three different directions, plus rosewood bottle cap sized plugs in stretched lobes, but most festive is the thick shiny silver bull ring ending in double ball bearings dangling from his upturned nose, jewelry that would be more suited on a 350 pound Samoan, not my delicate featured, freckled, blue eyed Scot-Irish Neo Primitive. Plus I think we can all agree that white boy dreadlocks are unfortunate. Two ambitious rope heads are seated at our dinner table. Brothers, one dark, one red. Seeing them seated next to each other, eating only the quinoa salad, I recall rinsing playground sand and sweat from their toddler scalps as they battled with multiple Batman action figures – and me -  in the tub.  I would pour water from a Toy Story popcorn bucket as they covered their eyes with a washcloth, the stream pulling their ringlets down their backs as the suds were rinsed away. Now those curls are matted and hidden in rough ropes that smell worse than they look and include remnants of camp outs on Mount Tam, beads and feathers.  The elder, the redhead, ‘the Gingerdread Man’, has crafted his signature look into a dread mullet, cutting the front short, growing a pompadour, bleaching it, then shaving it down to a burr cut again, and with the red ropes pulled back, he passes as employable. 

The Gingerdread Man, as he sits here before me, is six months into what we are collectively agreeing to agree is a gap year. He left college after his freshman year and he is the only person at the table who is happy about this. His freshman year of college was a busy one.  While he did well academically, he also hopped freight trains, took up with a nefarious crew in Portland, can use the term ‘squat house’ with confidence, has earned an arrest record and he has three four DIY tattoos. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say he hasn’t been wearing his retainer.

I’m enjoying Christmas Eve dinner with my family and baffled by my poseur Hobo. When he left school he and his tribe went on food stamps because they didn’t want to be tied down to summer jobs. He wanted to roam and since we, the evil fun oppressors wouldn’t be sponsoring his plan, well he showed us. He and I had a chat about integrity and I might have used the words ‘lacking a moral compass’ when I forgot to use my inside voice.

Willing to sleep in a squat house in Oakland or the joint custody tribal van rather than his bed in our home.  Opportunities rejected, intentionally festooned to appear unemployable, throwing himself headlong with gusto into risk laden situations, all the while knowing he has options.  His reality is his choice.

HoboCam Pic

My choice is to detach, and enjoy my dinner, sip my wine and breathe. I look at my kids and realize it was never my intention to raise house plants, children who fear the world and I cannot control his 20 year old choices. I am fascinated and repulsed. I say nothing. 

Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

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D is for Direction

seventeen NOLS Alaska

My son was an early walker, and would lunge like a two foot tall Frankenstein's monster at any dog, arms outstretched bellowing 'Daw! Daw!'. Leaning forward, the weight of his giant ginger baby head nearly toppling him, gaining speed, he lurched forward until he was face to face with the Daw. 

 Dogs loved this. He was clearly their new chew toy. He also had an uncanny talent for impaling his forehead on all coffee table corners. In hindsight, nicknaming him Danger Boy was a bad omen.

A logical adult knows it takes at least couple months before any real respect for your parents grips the conscious mind of a child. Screeching 'No!' as my lumbering infant went on Daw patrol was not effective. I had read in one of my useless baby behavior books, that I needed to redirect his impulses, so that 'No!' would not become another meaningless mom noise, like 'Wear a Helmet!' This was months before he gave up on crawling and started running with the dogs.

ten

I nursed him in the beautiful oak rocker I'd bought long before I was pregnant, so beautiful it needed several cushions and a blanket to be comfortable. It was because of his teensy crab claw infant fingernails that I first wanted to yell at my gorgeous sweet baby. They grew as he slept, Nosferatu style, and as he nursed into a milk orgy he would take a miniscule bit of tortured breast and pinch the bejesus out of me. I would take his fat dough baby hand and nibble off the nails with tears of pain in my eyes and he would pass out like a drunk frat boy, milk running down his chin.

Throughout his school years it was much the same. He lurched forward towards the most exciting thing, skirting disaster, right on the razor's edge. Direction Danger, full steam ahead. My attempts at redirection have been mostly about health and safety, and largely ignored. From sunscreen, helmets, drugs, condoms, hitchhiking to the latest tattoo, I say my piece and hope for the best. Sometimes I tell him to call his aunt or Gramma, and miraculously he does.

This morning I texted him for the forth day in a row, Check in please, with no response. Because we're on the same phone plan I can see that he read the message. So I know he's alive. I have sketchy second hand knowledge that he's headed to New Orleans via Mexico, hitchhiking with two other young men. I am doing my Lamaze Breathing and hoping the universe has a plan for Danger Boy.

nineteen    photo by one of his tribe

He called while I was writing this. I had turned my phone off and he left a voice message. 'I'm in Reno. I'm fine. Well Reno isn't, this place is bad. My phone got wet but it's working now. We're hitchhiking to Salt Lake City today. Bye.' His Direction, for today, is East. That's all I've got, but for today it's enough.


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Albuquerque Airport

My younger sister and I started flying alone after our parents divorced in 1974. At nine years old, I soon became familiar with the Albuquerque airport.  I would descend the rolling staircase onto the tarmac, holding my little sister’s hand as we walked toward the adobe terminal and look for my father.  He would be inside wearing Ray-Bans, jeans pressed with a crease, a big turquoise belt buckle and new running shoes.  He would pick up my sister, who is seven years younger than I am, and hug me too hard.  Soon enough I would learn that he smelled like pot.

The summer he wasn’t waiting at the gate, arms crossed and Ray-Bans on, I didn’t panic. The gate emptied and we were the only ones left. I searched the faces as we went down the escalator and continued to scan the crowd gathered around the baggage claim. I found a pay phone, expertly dialed “0” before the number, gave the operator my name and it rang forever before she told me to try again later.  I repeated this routine countless times for several hours.

I dragged our avocado green Samsonite into the ladies room, helped my sister use the potty and held her up to the sink to wash her hands.

When he finally picked up, I could hear him smiling at the sound of my voice.  Then I told him where we were. His voice was curt, insinuating he’d been told the wrong date. The tenuous grasp I had on my father was always in jeopardy. I never told anyone about this until I had my own kids. Only then did I panic. 

He rapped his chunky turquoise rings on the Volkswagon’s steering wheel in time with the Flying Burrito Brothers and sipped on the bottle of Dos Equis he had wedged between his legs as we drove north.  Five years later I would feel a chill of embarrassment during Drivers Ed class when I learned that this was actually illegal.  It had never occurred to me that it was a crime.

Summer visits with my father meant backpacking. On the outside of my father’s frame pack hung a large clear thermos of Jose’ Cuervo silver tequila that I gulped by mistake, thinking it was water. I thought I had swallowed the fuel for the propane stove.

My father laughed and told me that the next time we drank tequila together, it would be because I’d turned 18 and he was free from child support payments.  He was buying.  He still owes me.

2007   previously published in The Sun in a slightly edited version
Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

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Houdini Toddler

There’s a cold dark place you go when you can’t find your child.  I went there once. This isn’t the run of the mill can’t pick out your kid’s head bobbing in the pool, can’t sift through all the hooded toddlers at the park, just focused on a sale rack for a second and now you’re on your hands and knees at Nordstrom.  This is an all hands on deck, EVERYBODY is looking and minutes are ticking by and your toddler is GONE.  This is when someone gently leads you to a room so you can scream while they hold you.

I stepped into the Toddler Room to pick up my two year old son and in the scramble for lunch boxes and hanging up of jackets I couldn’t see where he might be.  The afternoon kids were settling in for lunch and the hip-height chaos was all around me.  A few seconds passed before I could move into the room and peek around the corner to the area where I usually found him painting. Not there. His teacher saw my questioning look and helped me look.  She opened the door to the outside play area, asking several parents and teachers if they had seen him.

In seconds the entire school was in lock down mode with all able bodies calling his name and looking in the garden, upper school, kitchen, parking lot, office.  This is when it became cold and dark, and I was led by the elbow into an office.  I remember screaming for someone to call 911.

Parents and teachers had begun looking in the creek that runs behind the school and were fanning out into the neighborhood, when a local resident came out of her house and asked if we were looking for the little boy she had in her arms.  He had slipped out the gate in the back of the school and disappeared up a flight of stairs leading to the Homestead Valley Community Center.  Like Popeye’s Sweetpea, skirting disaster at every turn, he had gone past the pool, through a parking lot with a blind driveway, along Montford, a typical Mill Valley neighborhood street with no sidewalk or shoulder, across Montford and up this neighbor’s steep driveway. The fact that he wasn’t run down by an SUV was a miracle in itself.

Ten years have passed since that day, and the two preschool teachers have since retired and moved away. I send them both a Christmas card each year and get one in return.  I know they went to their own cold dark place that day.

2007   originally published in the Marin Independent Journal, edited version
Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

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