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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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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K is for Knowing

breakfast at Mama's

Unseen threads of psychic spider web link me to my children in good and terrible ways. Many choose to take a broom to those webs.  But if you are very quiet and can be very brave, if you are listening to your gut, and paying attention, you know. A mother knows.

It used to creep me out when a random thought would pop into my head and my eldest son would start asking me about it.  Something would remind me of my sister and then for some reason I would be thinking of her Teva sandals and my son would ask me if he could get new water sandals because his were too small.  Something would remind me of my family in Texas, a pickup truck or the clouds and my son would say, “I wish we had Sonic here.”  I got used to it.  The nagging pull from him is constant.

maybe just practicing?

It didn’t happen as often with my second son, but he was much more cerebral, less verbal.  He was also a sleepwalker so my mission was different.  I woke up at 2 am and immediately knew.  He was outside, in the rain, in his footed pj’s, fishing with a plush fabric pole that had Velcro at the end of the line, to pick up felt fish. Sound asleep but successfully catching felt fish. 

My daughter, is just a different animal altogether. I think her first words were: “What’s next?” She’s the one who took the broom to the webs, as she just blazes a trail to whatever it is she needs.  

Sea Ranch was on the To Do list

A very articulate communicator from the get go, she started making to do lists before she could write. She was slightly jig saw puzzle obsessed. There was no such thing as Not Finishing the Puzzle. My job has always been to create a cocoon for her to relax and not be so task oriented.  I kept her home until she was four, unlike her brothers, who would have loved preschool at 11 months, right? She was fun to hang out with, hike, go to the beach, anywhere without puzzles. She still is.  They all are really.  The mother web is intact.

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H is for Houdini

This was the first piece of writing I had published. (Marin Independent Journal)  Motherhood is a minefield. Motherhood is a goldmine. Oh yeah. 

Houdini at 8

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

He's 18 now.  Still pulling Houdini's.  Off to college in the fall. 

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F is for Fan

I am a San Francisco Giants fan with a small f. I have some shirts and caps and attend a few games each season. I love to watch them play, have minor crushes on players and I always root for the Giants. I do admire the the die hard Fans, the facepaint, dye your Mohawk, full orange and black battlegear FANS.

I went to my first Giants game when I was visiting a family friend, Lance, and he took my friend May and I to Candlestick and we froze our asses off. In July. We were teenagers from Phoenix and this was a harrowing experience. I’d never been to a Major League baseball game before, at that time the Diamondbacks didn’t exist. I earned my first Croix de Stick pin, without knowing what it was.

 I was living in New York in 1989, had just opened a beer and settled in to watch game 3 of the Bay Area World Series when the screen went black. Being New York I assumed it was the cable. Soon we learned of the Loma Prieta earthquake and watched sportscasters doing hard news as they interviewed drunk tailgaters in the Stick parking lot holding up chucks of fallen concrete and yelling ‘Go Giants!’

 When I moved to San Francisco in 1991 we started attending games, and my son went to his first as a four month old, complete with his first Giants cap. I have a picture somewhere of both my boys at the last game played at the Stick, with their grandfather in 1999. They lost to the Dodgers. Boo! I learned that day that The Beatles played their last complete concert there in 1966.

The Giants move to AT & T (PacBell/SBC) Park coincided with my daughter’s birth. Our first game at the new park I had a three month old Bjorned to my chest and was terrified she’d get beaned by a foul ball. Our seats were now behind third base and the Giants dugout, and she’s grown up attending games and has become a real Fan with a capital F.


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E is for Expectations

drummer girl

Following the rules

The rules are set for a reason.  Mom expects you to be respectful, in word and deed, of yourself and others.  Mom expects you to be safe, and everyone around you has the right to feel safe. Mom expects you to be responsible, for yourself, your things and your actions.

Own it.

Vuotan @ DNA Lounge

Bending the rules

Rules are meant to be broken.  Well, sometimes.  Mom expects you to take risks.  Mom expects you to challenge yourself. Mom expects you to blaze a new trail, to dare to be different, not to follow the crowd.  Mom expects you to create your own rhythm.

I’m not raising house plants.

photo: his brother

Making considered choices

Notice the sunrise, the full moon, new leaves, the fog. Mom expects you to be in awe of your world.  Mom expects you to contribute in a meaningful way. Mom expects you to persevere.

Clean up after yourself. Leave No Trace applies to the kitchen as well as the tundra. 

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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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C is for Can

Si se puede.

Last night I had the honor of meeting the author of the book Migrant Daughter.  Our book club selection of the month, and one member had worked with the author when she was a teacher in the Mission District in San Francisco in the late 60's.  Frances Equibel Tywoniak celebrated her 82nd birthday with us last night at our book club.  We had a great time getting to know her and question her about her experiences as a migrant farmer's daughter during the depression and attending UC Berkeley in the 1949 as one of the few Mexican Americans on campus, much less a woman.

Born in 1931 in New Mexico, her family had lived on their land for several generations before being forced to move to California to work as migrant labor.  She navigated her parents culture with Spanish only spoken at home, her school culture with Anglos being assigned to a very different academic tract based solely on ethnicity, and society's ever changing view of who she was based on her last name, her neighborhood and her language.

Fran persevered and made choices, sometimes heartbreaking ones like when she broke up with a boy she really cared about because she knew he'd settle for living in the barrio his whole life and she wanted more.  She graduated from UC Berkeley, taught school in San Francisco and ultimately was principal of a high school in the Mission.  She had a fire in the belly and was always questioning her world.





She signed my book, 'Si se puede'   Yes, we can.

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awkward beginnings

My writing is suffering from self conscious awkward adolescence.  Zits, braces, unfortunate hairdos, gangly, clumsy, hormonal, too short, ill at ease, trying too hard to fit in.  My writing hasn’t found it’s true self yet.

I keep trying, and every once in a while, by some miracle, I craft a really good line, an observation, or I hit a vein of inspiration, usually just as knives are being drawn in a discussion between my teenaged sons about a borrowed Berzerker t-shirt.  A frantic spousal call from the kitchen inquiring as to whether or not we have a spatula. 

I try desperately to hold on to the train of thought at it chugs away, belching smoke, obscuring my path, and I respond to my daughter’s question about planning her birthday party, by pointing out that her birthday is in four months, and we have plenty of time.  I say this a little too loud, though clenched teeth and then have to lure her back and stroke her head like a scared cat until she recovers and tells me we could look at birthday cakes on the computer. 

I had never written fiction before my friend, Ken suggested I join him in doing NaNoWriMo.  When he first told me he’d written a novel in a month I thought he was delusional.  Then I learned about November. I took the challenge.  The beauty of NaNoWriMo was that I didn’t have to show my work to anyone. Ever.  It is all on the honor system, just word count. The story doesn’t have to be going anywhere. It got me into a habit of writing and not worrying about content. Characters changed names, they died, they kept talking. My childhood room was described in detail for no reason.  A subplot developed that featured one of my beloved second grade teacher’s sad home life after she was done teaching cursive and all the ‘kn’ words for the day. Characters ate out a lot and stood up and walked to the kitchen and made tea, constantly. None of it made any sense but that’s fine because by Thanksgiving I was nearing my 50,000 word goal and then my sister went into labor.  This served a dual purpose: one of my characters suddenly giving birth and my knowing for certain that I did not want a fourth child.  Not that it was a consideration at all but it was satisfying to firmly shut the door on that possibility.  I was able to write the birth scene with detail that I could not have described before, having only given birth myself three times, and not having been able to observe all the technical details.  It’s amazing what nuances you miss when you’re in agony. I now had a doula character with dreadlocks to the backs of her knees and a myriad of catch phrases and technical drama.

It took me a long time to dive in and take my first creative writing class, because I was so self conscious about not knowing how to craft fiction.  Crazy circle of logic there.  I would have not put up with such reasoning from any of my kids but I dog-eared class catalogues for years before I had the courage to enroll.  I found total support, and was rewarded for sharing my work, which I had never had the courage to do. 

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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