Category: Retrospectives

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Four

My son is four.  I’ve written about it before.  A few times, actually.  Four is just so damn amazing, surprising, joyful and funny.  Like hilarious funny.  Like Louis C.K. funny.  Capital “F” Funny.

This week, driving in the car together, my boy, out of the blue, said, “I wish there was a medicine the doctor could give me so that I could stay this age.” WOW.  How cool would that be?  Can you imagine?  So much wonder to absorb.  But then I would roughly spend one third of my remaining life waiting for him to put on his shoes.  It would be my new sleep.

Having successfully come through the challenging aggressive phase of last spring (knocking on the wood surface of my writing desk furiously), what’s left are the joys of four.  I honest to goodness enjoy spending time with my boy. We go on adventures together and it feels like the most exclusive club I have ever been in.  It’s he and I against the world.

We call it Camp Mom, but the boy usually calls it CAMP MOM! as in “CAMP MOM! goes to the Botanic Garden!  CAMP MOM! goes to the beach!  CAMP MOM! goes to the museum!  CAMP MOM! goes to Target!”  All he needs is a snack, a book, a toy for the car, and a bottle of water and we are good to go.

Sigh.  Would that all of life were so simple.

Even my boy at four knows that it’s not.  After he wished for the medicine that would keep him four forever (which, having lost my daughter at four breaks my heart just a wee bit too much), he then went on to talk about all the responsibilities that grown ups have that he is not looking forward to having. “Like what?” I asked.  Well, for starters, fixing dinner every night.  And having to put your kids in time-out when they act up.  And bills and cleaning. Hmmm. He had a pretty good handle on the responsibilities of adulthood.

I explained to the boy that all of those responsibilities come on gradually, not all at once.  And that part of growing up is learning the skills to handle all that responsibility.  This is what I think he heard:

It’s okay.  I’m old enough to realize that he teaches me more than I will ever teach him.  Today I asked him what he most likes about being four, primarily so that I could exploit his thoughts for this whole mom blogger gig.  Do you know what his answer was?  “I can crack an egg and open it.”  Freaking brilliant.

“I can crack an egg and open it.”  That right there is a lesson in living in the moment, appreciating the moment.  I can crack an egg and open it, too, but being quite a bit older than four, I focus way more on the runny goo that drips down the side of the bowl every time I crack an egg rather than the joy of independence and satisfaction in mastering a task.

Most every day this summer I woke up and thought about the many hours that I would need to fill with my boy until Daddy got home and the business of dinner and bedtime took over.  What would we do today was a common question posed to me just seconds after blearily opening my eyes.  What would we do today? I would think to myself, with a little bit of panic mixed in for good effect.

I wish I had thought to tape these words to my mirror.  I wrote them myself for a piece I did for Huffington Post about being the mother of a child who died:

Life is full of wonder.
I will always and forever, for as long as I live, be the mother of a 4-year-old. A beautiful, clever, smart, and creative 4-year-old. Four-year-olds know a lot of things that we manage to forget as we grow into adulthood. They see and appreciate the wonder of the world around them. Dandelions are not a nuisance; they are a sweet smelling flower worthy of a vase on the kitchen counter. A rainy day is not something to be avoided, but an opportunity to stomp in puddles. Public transportation is not the awful thing that happens to you when your car breaks down, but an adventure. See the wonder, appreciate the wonder, don’t lose the wonder. Find it every day.

Well, with school starting next week, I am so damn proud of me and my boy. We rocked four this summer.  We squeezed the ever loving wonder out of four.  Sure, there was probably too much screen time here and there, and yes, there was grump from both of us, and more than once I tagged my husband as he walked through the door at 6:30 — “You’re it.”  But, for the most part, man, we had a great summer.

I think we have four to thank for that.  Thank you, four!  You are one damn fine age.  I will miss you, and promise to remember you fondly.

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This Woman Is Not Allowed to Cry

This is a photo, a mug shot to be precise, of Helen Ford.  I don’t know much about Helen Ford and the first I heard of her was yesterday.  Helen was arrested and charged for the murder of her eight year old granddaughter.

Helen Ford, charged and arrested for the murder of her eight year old granddaughter, Gizzell Ford.
Helen Ford, charged and arrested for the murder of her eight year old granddaughter, Gizzell Ford.  Photo courtesy of the Chicago Police Department.

The little girl’s name was Gizzell.  Remember that name, because chances are, she does not have an adult in her life that will work to tell her story and honor her the way I do my own dead daughter.  Rest in peace, Gizzell.

The details about the incident are horrifying.  I read about it in a Chicago Tribune article written by Rosemary Regina Sobol and Geoff Ziezulewicz. They write:

The prosecutor said Gizzell had injuries old and new over her entire body: Cuts, bruises and scratches to her face, ears and lips, bruises and puncture wounds on her back, chest and abdomen and bruises on her arms and legs.

Her neck showed signs of hemorrhaging and fractures and broken cartilage, Pillsbury said. The girl also suffered deep lacerations to her buttocks and had ligature marks on her ankles and wrists, as well as circular burns on her body that may have been cigarette burns, Pillsbury said.

When they examined the home for evidence, police took a pole, twine and cables, some of them smeared with blood. In the bedroom where the girl was found, investigators found blood splattered near her body, Pillsbury said.

Investigators also determined that Gizzell had suffered trauma to her head long enough ago that maggots had hatched in the cuts and spread to the front of her scalp while she was still alive.

Reading that description made me weep.  Maybe it had the same effect on you, too.  The details, specific and grotesque as they are, are important to recognize, though, as a means to bear witness to Gizzell’s suffering. Imagine an eight year old girl, defenseless, in her family home, abused and murdered at the hands of her own grandmother.

I live in a big city, so stories of child abuse are not unfamiliar to me.  They can be seen regularly peppering the headlines and newscasts.  In the moment they are wrenching, and then you watch a commercial, or click to a gossip column, the sad tales of abused children forgotten.  After my daughter was diagnosed with cancer, though, and after four miscarriages, I value the life of a child, any child, more deeply, more profoundly.  I am ashamed to admit that.  The stories, the headlines, the names seem to stick with me now in a way they never did before.

When I see a story of extreme child abuse and neglect, I tend to click on it, steeling myself for what is certain to turn my stomach.  And sure enough, my stomach is always turned.  My eyes tend to well up in response to a child who is missing the must fundamental things a child requires from the adults in their life — love and protection.  I think about my own daughter, who was surrounded by boat loads of love and protection, and yet those were not enough to save her from cancer.

Child abuse is preventable.  Every time, every situation, every whip and slap and burn and cut and chain and restraint is preventable. The prevention gets mucked up in bureaucracy, to be sure, but the presence of bureaucrats is no excuse for the suffering of an abused child.  If anything, it only adds to the manner in which that child was failed.

Seeing this mug shot makes me angry.  You are not allowed to cry, Grandma.  What are her tears about, I wonder.  Is Helen Ford sad she went one step too far this time?  Is Helen Ford sad she was caught?  Is Helen Ford wondering how she ended up in front of a police camera?  Is Helen Ford resentful that she was straddled with the care and feeding of the eight year old daughter of her bedridden son?  Is Helen Ford weeping for herself and what has become of her life?

I don’t know.  And truth is, I don’t care.  Wipe your tears, Grandma.

Gizzell Ford

Rest in peace, Gizzell Ford.  May you know peace, for what surely must be the first time, in death, if not in life.

Click here for more information about child abuse and how to detect and prevent it.  

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The Family You Choose

I am fresh off a week’s vacation in rural Vermont.  Every summer for however many years, my family has joined three or four other families for a little something we like to call “Rockababy.”  I first wrote about our communal vacations here.  The core group was formed way back in the 1980s among friends at the New England high school they attended.  I am a happy addition through marriage.

My own family didn’t really take summer vacations.  We would have the occasional trip to Janesville, Wisconsin for a couple of days at the Holiday Inn with the pool.  There was the St. Louis trip when I was four where I oddly remember getting to sit in the “toilet seat” while riding to the top of the Gateway Arch.  And there was the grand family vacation, our only one really, where six of us crammed into an RV and toured the western United States. That trip was at turns perfect and a disaster (just like family), but I have very fond memories of it (just like family).

This last week, surrounded by good friends, I spent most of every day in bed, as I was diagnosed with pneumonia mid-trip.  In a lot of ways that sucked, but in a lot of other ways, the perfect time for a mom to get pneumonia is when she’s on vacation with seven other capable parents. What sucked worse was the lack of wifi.  No Internet while stuck in bed for a week.  Yeah, that really sucked.

I spent more than a few hours streaming episodes of The Sopranos on my iPhone, feeling nostalgic after news of James Gandolfini’s death.  It is fairly unsatisfying to watch that quality of television on a screen the size of your palm, but desperate times call for desperate measures, right?  And when you’re sick, you’re sick.  So, there we were, me and Tony, hanging out, getting reacquainted after all those years.

Sopranos Family

That’s when it struck me.

There’s the family we’re born into, and then, if we’re lucky, there’s the family we choose.  Tony Soprano had his chosen family, and I was surrounded by my chosen family.  Ha!  The juxtoposition between these two chosen families makes me giggle, as this New England crew could not be more different than Tony’s Jersey crew.

The toughest person in my chosen family would be a toss up, but definitely a woman.  It might be S., the high school teacher who spends her summers working on a Fulbright extension program, touring Pakistani students through New England.  Or M., the biochemist working to find a cure for cancer. Possibly A., whom I always lovingly refer to as the “Martha Stewart of Iowa,” who had the guts to bring her two young daughters into the rain forests of Suriname (it’s okay, I had to check it on a map, too) for this year’s spring break.

Yeah, Paulie Walnuts ain’t got nothin’ on these broads.

One of the beautiful gifts my husband has given me are the long maintained childhood friendships he nurtures.  I remember in our wedding vows, I wrote that I would work to cultivate our “mutual community,” not quite knowing what that might look like, but wanting it still the same.  Relationships take work. Family relationships, too.  Chosen families are no different.

My chosen family.
My chosen family.  Photo courtesy of Anne L. Geissinger

Each year we make the effort to reconnect.  Even if there is minimal contact throughout the months, we know that once a year we will come together, watch our children play in the sunlight and rain, eat 21 cooked meals together, fall deeply into whatever sofas we are near after the kids go to sleep, gorge on chocolate and sweets, and catch up, reconnect.  We have seen each other through illness, death, grief, loss of jobs, depressions, and on and on.  We like one another.

I am grateful for these folks who have come to be my friends even though they started as my husband’s friends.  I am lucky these folks have picked such fantastic life mates.  I am happy to think of them as extended family, my chosen family.

Maybe a bit like Tony thought of his chosen family.  With less whacking.  And fewer stripper poles.

If you are part of this family, thanks for taking such good care of me this past week.  This is my ode to you.  And if you want to subscribe to these posts of mine, well here’s how:

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