Homes for Tomatoes

The arugula has already bolted.

We spent the weekend making homes for tomatoes. Digging nice, deep holes, spaced a bit too close, and slamming in stakes in the ground for makeshift cages. Running baling wire 'round the cages for horizontal support. Buying clear plastic to frame them in for added heat; then realizing we really needed Walls of Water instead. Sowing bee balm, calendula, Thai basil, oregano, and nasturtium in the plot so that, when finished, this one piece of earth is a verdant eruption of vining Scarlet runner beans and Lemon Queen sunflowers, hot peppers and green and black and red tomatoes; an Eden awake with blooming and buzzing and the pungent taste of herbs.

Makeshift tomato cages in progress in the new garden area.

From this fenced plot I can see my chickens sorting through the straw, scratching every square centimeter of yard in their patient search for bugs. Running with pieces of thrown dandelion, pursued by other chickens, because nobody wants to share. Blissfully napping under the big lilac, in abnegation of the sun. I have never seen them from this view before; they look cuter than usual.

Sasquatch the Brahma

To my left, in another bed, I have lettuces in untidy rows like the bustling organdy of a recital of small green tutus. Varieties run from spiky to solid, smooth to soft, and my favorite Black-seeded Simpson is dressed in wavering lines. Next to them, onions and leeks have become tall princesses, wearing tiaras of static-shocked electric white, their feet emerging in white and red bulbs in the rich dark soil of the covered bed. Among the edibles, a single columbine has bloomed and hangs a flower like a lantern for fairies lost among the peas. White pea flowers sit next to forming baby pods, sugary and innocent. Undiscovered asparagus spears have shot up to tickle the atmosphere, spreading in ferns and hanging berries, which drop into the mud. Carrots do their work deep beneath the soil, sending only their punk hairdos up.

Carrots, onions, lettuces in the cold crop bed.

In another bed, Egyptian onions have set blossoms next to chives like firecrackers—green sprays tipped with purple asterisks. Cucumbers volunteer from last year and poke their leaves out of the straw mulch. Jerusalem artichoke is everywhere, but still earthbound, nothing more than leaves spreading just above the soil. I have to use my imagination to remember what it is.

This is a Welsh bunching onion next to some Jerusalem artichokes in my perennial edible bed.

All of these plants live here. In a way, it doesn't look like much. Just a bunch of beginnings. Very little now that you can eat. And yet, there is nowhere I am happier than here, with my husband beside me, armed like Thor with his sledgehammer, putting the stakes just where I say. The two of us, in the shadow of my crabapple and my honeysuckle, making beginnings, putting work to hope, with faith that things will grow.

Ready to be planted! Northern NM nights are cold. The full bottles behind the peppers are for thermal mass.

Strong Dreams

Photo by Todd Nickols

You are the youngest, and the one to whom childhood still belongs. You are the one with the LEGOs strewn all over the floor like tiny dangerous pebbles, the one with a thousand costumes you still wear, the one who looks for leprechauns. You are the only one of these magical creatures—a child still being a child—that I still have. You wake daily, with tousled hair and bleary eyes, ready to climb into laps and cling like a monkey to whichever parent, or whichever brother, is holding you. You come downstairs, suddenly awake and planning to play, and are interrupted by ordinary life again and again, turning suddenly to glare at me, your delicate face framed by wild hair still unbrushed, so that you look like a cross Albert Einstein with his finger in a light socket.

"I need you to eat because it's time for school," I tell you.

Harumph to all my plans.

Other times you are very congenial about the paces I put you through. You indulge me, like I'm a senile auntie whose time on this earth may be limited, doing your grammar pages beautifully with periodic declarations of "You're the best Mommy in the world." There, there, now, old woman. Don't fret. I've put marks on your pages. Now let us get dressed up and travel to Ancient Greece.

You've taken to quoting the Buddha. This is disconcerting in someone so small. Your mind is a place of spiritual largeness, a sky in which you walk from star to star and explore the wisdom of the Lakota, the Ancient East, and talk to Aslan, asking him if he is Jesus and what it means to have faith. You think about everything; you already have all the right questions to hand.

Outside, you build a trading post, a rabbit trap, a long house. You snare rabbits, you tell me, and use all their parts. You remembered, you say, to say a prayer of thank you for their lives. And can you have some candy now? And some juice?

"I have strong dreams," you tell me.

Yes, you do. You are made of strong dreams. Dreams that sometimes scare you, that rip your insides out.

"I can see it, Mom. I can see just what it would look like. I can see everything just how it would be." Fear touches each feature as you speak to me. Waking dreams of sadness. Sleeping dreams of monsters in the night. Around your room, we cast strong spells to keep both out, the two of us.

I think you are made to walk what wiser cultures called the spirit path. I think your time here is to be spent, in part, bearing the discomfort of living in the loud and angry world of war and televisions and Walmarts and finding your way back to the unity of the stars—that sense that you already have and talk about that we are all one, we are all sacred, we are all a part of God.

I know a little bit about this, because I was a child like you.

I lift you in my arms and carry you, because I still can and I won't always be able to. I hold you close so that I can feel your heartbeat against mine. And, for now, all the bad dreams are kept at bay by this simple act of love.

Today, you are eight. You will wake shortly and see that balloons rise above your bed. You will come down, excited, and get a special smoothie and some cereal you really wanted at the store. You will come down, trailing God in your blankets, rubbing stardust from your eyes, and join me as we celebrate the occasion of your birth in this mortal world.

Happy birthday, child of wonder. May this year bring strong dreams of wisdom and peace to you.

Mother's Day: Just the Way it Is

Techno music is blasting at Chili's. The clatter of stacked plates on trays erupt from the nearby kitchen. A cacophony of voices; plates glancing against each other with the force of swords in battle; glasses set on tables like mallets against sheet metal. Lights vibrating like strobes. Silently, I rest my head on the table. It is Mother's Day. 8 PM. Three hours of driving from Durango and we are in Española where the streets are lined with fast food Walmart chain link desperation poverty, and nature has been tucked away behind the concrete asphalt—just far enough away that it is lost. Forty-five minutes from home. They have to eat. My body is screaming, dying, assaulting me. My legs are going numb. A pain from my lower back rises up, wrenches my neck, twists my jaw and binds my head. I cannot cry in Chili's and so I keep my face still, impassive, expressionless, vacant.

"Happy Mother's Day," Devin says and smiles at me, checking.

And so I am struck again with the brutal reminder of what I'm doing wrong. Carpe Diem. I am supposed to be having a good time. I smile and the stretched, thin smile just makes it worse. I hate myself in this moment—for being the wrong mother. The mother of whom it is said constantly by one child to another, "She has a headache," the mother who needs it to be quiet, the mother who isn't having a nice Mother's Day, the mother who wishes she wasn't in Chili's, who can't eat anything normal at restaurants, who needs to support her neck—and can someone get her a place to rest her back, the mother—the only mother—who is too tired from watching soccer games to walk steadily to the car, the only mother in the world who gets frustrated at the sound of her children's laughter because it's like a bomb going off in her head. (There was a time, wasn't there, when laughter was not like a bomb going off in my head...I wish I'd known then how lucky I was.)

And I've just had it. I'm through with myself. I give up. I am supposed to be able to accept this pain. I am suffering because I resist it. If I could accept it, then it wouldn't hurt so much. If I could accept my children and their loud, bomb-blasting laughter and repeated getting up from the table into the walkways and the path of servers, then there would be no suffering. If I could accept that I can't accept it, then there would be no suffering. But there is suffering. There is tremendous suffering. And it is contagious. It infects everyone at the table as they hang by their fingernails on the expectation of my delight in Mother's Day, making small talk and glancing at me nervously. I am so—disappointing.

There is one job given to me worth doing—to be a mother—and I am screwing it up. And I cannot seem to figure out how to do it better than I am.

I think there is some lesson here, just out of reach; just behind a corner, that I can't see yet. I tell myself I am not supposed to see it yet. I am supposed to hang out here, increasingly desperate, until I am ready to learn something. Meanwhile, my ego is having a temper tantrum: throwing blocks and spitting, pulling hair, refusing to accept reality—just wanting anything other than the body and the familiar set of thoughts and emotions I've come to know as "me"—wanting to cut to the chase, come out on top; be crowned as a winner, able to laugh at my former idiocy, and have laurels set upon my brow. I want very badly to be an inspiration to everybody, unearned, and I don't want to spend time with the ugliness of pain and fear and disappointment and wanting things I cannot have. I want to to have survived.

This is what I'm like: I am not good with pain. But I like the after. I like the accomplishment of having lived through things. I feel elevated by the times I've spent with darkness, the prayers I've prayed in desperation, the emptiness I've stood in and stayed with and learned from. But I don't write much to you from there. I write from the after: the bliss where a child is suddenly handed to me, wrapped in warm receiving blankets—not the moment when I'm screaming that I cannot do this, that I want you to shoot me, that I don't have what it takes. I want you to see the victory and not the sobbing, bloody slog that took me there. I don't want you to see me scream.

But here I am anyway. When I am in pain, I shut down. I focus my eyes on a nearby tree through a window and I wait for the pain to go away. I pretend that I don't have a body, that I am astral projecting somewhere else. Every time someone speaks to me, asking if they can do anything, it disrupts my small sense of relief. When I am in fear, I press it deep down like a seed, far into the soil, so deep that the light can't get there, and I stand on top of where it's planted and bite my cuticles. When I am angry, I breathe deeply and focus on a stillness that I think is inner peace. I am shocked when fire blazes out of nowhere—anger out of nothing. Because I really wasn't angry. I was sure I was doing fine.

I think—have thought all my life—that I can get 'round myself; that I can cheat, that there's some way to get quickly to the moment of glory without paying the price of pain. Maybe this is why I get to have fibromyalgia and migraines and TMJ. I don't really believe in divine plans per se, but I do believe that the Universe just keeps presenting us naturally with opportunities to master things we haven't yet been able to learn. (The more I think about it, the more I think these two ideas are basically the same thing anyway.) If I have failed to learn how to live with myself while recovering from alcoholism and bulimia or getting divorced or having three kids or falling in love, then I get to keep developing chronic painful conditions, so that I can practice noticing that I can't really escape suffering. The Universe is boundless, generous, infinite. I get every chance I need to learn again.

At least, true or not, cast in that light—I'm doing this exactly the right way. I'm just a child being raised and making mistakes as I grow up. I'm up in the walkway of the restaurant again and I'm causing a disturbance, but I still get a chance to sit in a restaurant once more. No one ever takes the chance away. I still have my menu and my drink and my fork; I am taken here again and again, no matter what kind of scene I make.

"Suffer, Child," the Universe seems to say kindly. "Suffer your physical frailty. Suffer the pain of not being who you think I want. All these ideas are yours: 'Should be happy,' 'should be well,' 'should be calm.' Suffer as long as you need to. I will wait for you. There's all the time in the world."

And so my instruction is to suffer and really do it well; really notice it; to not give it short-shrift—to suffer so well and so authentically that I'm right there with myself—to finally just give up and let the suffering be there.

I can't do it yet. But I'm trying.

So—all this is to say: Happy Mother's Day. It's fine just the way it is.

Brooding

Another black australorp, brooding

"Where is Ninja?"

For a good five minutes, I examined the different parts of my yard: the lilac bush, the smaller hen houses, the garden beds, the underneath of the trampoline. Nothing. I started peering anxiously over the fence into the yard where my neighbor's eighteen year-old greyhound lives, scanning the ground for torn feathers or the unidentifiable lump of black that might turn out to be my missing bird. No Ninja.

I looked back at the hens again. There was Henny Penny. There was Sasquatch. There was Ostrich—all of them, eating scraps of kitchen leavings in the mounds of golden straw; very definitely three and not four birds. My little black chicken, I concluded, had been abducted by aliens. Mild panic set in.

After a minute of helpless contemplation, a thought occurred to me. I opened up the side panel of the hen house and there she was in the nest box, laying her egg at an unscheduled time. I thought first, Whatever, Chicken and then, Thank God. Problem solved. My heart slowly dropped backed down to a normal rate.

"I thought the chicken was lost!" I told my husband as I came in from the yard.

The next morning at scrap-time, the chicken was in the nest box again.

"Why are you laying your egg at breakfast time?"  I asked her. "You're missing strawberry tops and asparagus stems."

She looked at me, with that particular black australorp gentleness, like a chicken empath, and then settled back to her business, ignoring my intrusion on her work.

The next morning was the same. When I went out to clean the coop later on, I finally wised up. The chicken, at 1 PM, was still in the nest box.

"Devin!" I yelled. "This chicken is brooding!"

I reached my hand into the nest box to pet her and all the feathers puffed out in a ridiculous porcupine-puffer fish-chicken show of maternal protectiveness. A guttural percussive warning uttered from deep within her belly.

"Good grief," I said. Devin and Mikalh came over to look.

I lifted her up, just slightly, and saw that she was sitting on a clutch of everybody's unfertilized eggs, which we hadn't picked up since she'd been on them every morning I went out.

"Will she have chicks?" Devin asked me.

"Devin," I explained "we have no rooster."

"Why does she need a rooster so she can sit on her eggs?" he asked, thoughtfully.

Somehow, my children's understanding of human procreation has never quite extended to the avian world. I explain it repeatedly and yet it just won't stick. There is an egg, you see, and from it should come chicks. This is just basic knowledge. They are highly skeptical of my attempts to convince them otherwise.

"Let's get a rooster!" suggested Mikalh, helpfully.

Yes, because there is no situation that cannot be improved by an aggressive, strutting rooster who will crow and wake up the neighborhood in the wee hours of each morn.

Something smelled. Underneath the eggs Ninja was sitting on, one had broken and, with the warmth of her body, was emitting quite a reek.

"I have to get this chicken out," I told the kids. "Poor chicken."

Since no chicks were imminent, they lost interest and ran off to play basketball.

I lifted up poor Ninja, who had torn her belly feathers out and lamely placed some of them around the eggs all streaked with drying yolk. She made the guttural sound again and puffed up like a blown-up chicken balloon but did not peck me. She is just too gentle a girl. I set her in the straw where, right away, she began looking for an insect to eat without laying her feathers down.

I cleaned out all the broken egg and set aside the others for tossing while each of the other hens climbed into the nest box to personally find out what I was doing and see if they could be of any help.

"You're in my way," I told them.

This was in no way a problem for them. Coop cleanings are just about their favorite things.

The rest of the day, Ninja wandered the yard, eating and drinking normally and otherwise doing the chicken things she'd neglected recently but all the time puffed up to twice her normal size. The other hens followed her like a Greek chorus and offered commentary. I guess this must have gotten to be a bit much because later on, I found her having hopped the fence into my backyard, where she was wandering around with my dog.

"Poor Ninja," I told her.

She looked at me thoughtfully, with her usual Bodhisattva quality.

It took a couple of days to convince her that she wasn't going to hatch out eggs. She would seem to be broken of the habit and then somebody laid an egg in the nest box again and there she was, settled on everything.

You will sometimes hear people say that so-and-so "is brooding" over something. I never fully appreciated this before. This is quite what we are like. We are distracted perhaps for a moment, by a familiar touch and the possibility of an insect in the straw, but then something just seems to be missing for us. We are crying for meaning. So back to the nest box we go—to our self-imposed fast and dehydration and we'll sit here on this damn idea until something living comes from it! If someone tries to offer comfort, we'll puff up in otherworldly shapes, utter strange cries to tell them to get out of here. We think something important is happening.

But, no, it's just us—sitting on a clutch of ideas that will never break their shells.

From Womb to Waves Goodbye

The school year is drawing to a close. I can't think of a single year when I have learned so much about what education is and isn't and how parenting fits in, and doesn't, as I have this year. I am in no way done learning. I started my homeschool year with my son attempting to replicate school at home—only better, I thought, and more tailored to his needs—and I have learned that homeschooling generally doesn't work that way for a reason. Seeing what and how things can be learned by doing less has been eye-opening, but more than anything, if I'm honest, it has been terrifying. When my kid learns without my overtly planning everything, I feel moorless and I come right up against the deep and paralyzing dread that I am ruining him, setting him up to fail, leaving him behind, not doing my job. These moments of doing nothing are scary. All evidence to the contrary, doing what is closest to what everyone else is doing just seems the safest thing. I have learned that I will just keep on doing this act of imitation until I realize that I am sacrificing my son's happiness on the altar of my fears. So, now I'm looking again and asking myself how much of what I ask of him is what he needs and how much of it is like a little comforting rhyme that I repeat to myself in the dark so the closet zombies will not come.

Parenting my older kids has also been an opportunity for growth. With one child suffering from chronic health issues and the other peaking at perfect grades before suffering apathy and depressed disinterest in school, this year, I have learned that I care more about my kids' well-being than their grades. I didn't used to know that they were necessarily separate things or could be in conflict occasionally. I used to feel like if I just kept baking special cookies and serving healthy salads with dinner and giving hugs and attention and guidance, then the grades would obviously come. It turns out life is more complex than this.

At the very core, I've learned that my worst fear—that my kids will turn out like me—says something about the gratitude and joy for my life that I'm clutching to myself and hiding from my kids, lest they also wish to become teenage alcoholics who don't complete college. It's time to give that up.

The ultimate task of parenting, from womb to waves goodbye, seems to have something to do with first connecting with this other human so that you do not know where they end and you begin and then learning to understand that you are ultimately not in control and not responsible for how their lives shape themselves. To the extent that I can do this well—that is when I love. As long as I am attempting to control the experience and trajectory of a person who isn't me, the two of us will suffer, because I cannot make them grow up to whole and happy, I cannot make them find their way to spirituality, and I cannot even make them clean their rooms, no matter how much love I mean. I have power to influence and love, but none to control.

I am profoundly grateful to these children of mine for letting me test-drive my infant soul with their very lives. They are quite forgiving, quite patient with the efforts of all these silly adults to control their hearts with our tiny dams. They roll over us—sometimes smiling, sometimes yelling—like the swelling ocean breaking over our walls. They ebb back, patiently cooperating, and then surge forward, to finally grasp the adulthood that was always theirs.