Mamalove | Bethany Bassett

Tag: Mamalove

Conservative Hippyism

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

Dan turned on Audio Adrenaline this afternoon just especially to annoy me as I finished cooking lunch because he loves me so.

Remember this?

I used to like them because even though they were Christian (a requisite for my mid-‘90s music collection), the long-haired bass guitarist used to paint his nails. SUCH A REBEL. Anyway, I hadn’t listened to them in 150 years or so, and some of their lyrics startled me today:
“You can take God out of my school
You can make me listen to you
You can take God out of the pledge
But you can’t take God out of my head.”

I was still brainwashed a good conservative Baptist girl when the issue of prayer in public schools stirred up tremendous controversy in the church. I earnestly believed what I was told: that you would be arrested for having a Bible in your backpack or praying at your desk. Of course that was simple misinformation, spread in hysteria by panicked churchgoers. (If any of you are interested in the actual details of Supreme Court rulings, here ya go.) It never has been and probably never will be illegal to pray in schools; it just isn’t legal to force everyone else to participate. (I am so tempted to go ask the hysterical doomsayers of my childhood how they would have reacted if it had been Muslim prayer or Native American rituals or Wiccan chants being banned… but I guess that is just the heathen in me.)

The subject launched Dan and I into one of those long coffee-fueled conversations that remind us how glad we are to be on the same page. (He calls us “conservative hippies,” a fabulous description for two people feeling out the balance between standards and open mindedness.) We’re coming into that delicate stage of parenting where our preschooler absorbs every word she hears and works it into her own context of the world, and I desperately want to protect her from all the damaging teachings I grew up with. For Dan, who grew up in a different (and more, uh, functional) culture, the challenge is in noticing all the subtle hints of religious dogma that pop up.

For instance, I was reading a new picture book to Natalie today—a gift from relatives who no doubt found the story wholesome. However, I almost threw it away when we got to the page when the spoiled little mice realize how ungrateful they’ve been and start to cry. “I’m so dreadfully ashamed of myself,” sobs the girl mouse, who had refused to eat her parsnips on page 6. Wham. One little sentence packing a life-long punch of obligatory guilt. I know it all too well. (I decided not to make a big deal out of it at the time and finished the story—Natalie has a few years yet before she needs to learn about the religious-cultural doctrine of shame—but that book is never going back on her shelf.)

Dan reminded how much of this idea of making oneself miserable to be moral comes from ancient Jewish culture, and later, Roman Catholicism. (It’s not, by the way, from the Bible. In fact, Paul wrote a lengthy letter directly to the Romans explaining that forgiveness was God’s job, not theirs, and was free, free, free, free, and did he mention free?) It’s incredible to me that shame, a monumentally damaging emotion, is held up as a hallmark of holiness in so many circles.

I’m still unsure how to cultivate the spiritual side of my daughters in a way that will be relevant to them now. I can guarantee I will never be hammering the concept of obedience into their heads as the path to preschool Godliness. (We do teach them to obey us, by the way, just not in the vein of “morality is the point of life, now clean your room.”) Neither will shame or deeply burrowing regret ever be sensations we teach them. We’ll let them read the Bible in time, once they are able to process context and applicability, but there will be no gruesome history lessons for now. (Do you know how many Noah’s Ark-themed gifts I’ve had to throw away? I would like to punch whoever keeps insisting that the story of worldwide homicide and destruction is good for kids just because some animals were involved. And Jesus’s horrific torture, murder, and abandonment by God? They deeply traumatized me as a young child, and I am not willing to put my girls through that at such sensitive ages, no matter how foundational the story is to our faith.)

That only leaves the question of what do we teach them now? I still find myself a bit undone spiritually, decades of righteous BS unraveling while my true un-churchy beliefs begin to form. I feel bad that the girls are not benefitting from a mother who has her own convictions figured out like the mothers of my past all did (or pretended to), but perhaps my honesty in the matter will be enough. Maybe my lack of pretensions can accomplish what severe doctrine failed to do for me: inspire their spirituality to grow and breathe and seek out the truth with confidence.

19Aug

Gargoyle Daydreams

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I remember her sobbing under blood-soaked sheets, moaning and gasping and stifling screams. She would not go to a hospital. Not to save herself, not even to save her unborn baby. Only when she had lost too much blood to protest was an ambulance called. It snuck down the street in the middle of the night, lights muted and siren off, to carry her to whatever help she would accept. The next morning, her living children woke to babysitters who told them “Your mom is away seeing a friend, now who wants pancakes?” Of course, who would tell young children that their own mother had been willing to abandon them to a darkly looming life and a pile of bloody sheets, all for a misplaced fear of doctors?

***

I find myself immersed in gargoyle daydreams so often these days that the filmy wisps of imagination are becoming stone. I’ve always been good at picturing catastrophe, but these dreams are darker than anything I’ve experienced before.

In every single one, Sophie dies.

I spoon applesauce into her grinning, teething, lovely mess of a mouth and try to talk my heart out of breaking. It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real. I snuggle her against my chest the way we slept in my hospital bed, all cozy curlicues and softness, and nuzzle her perfect dollop of a nose, all the while trying not to panic. This isn’t a goodbye.

I didn’t figure the reason out until tonight, while I browsed sites like Glow in the Woods, other women’s haunting and exquisitely beautiful stories of their lostbabies. One mama in particular wrote about the day her thirteen-month-old died, how she had known he was sick even when everyone else blew off her worries, and I suddenly understood.

It was exactly like that, seven weeks ago. We were at church when it dawned on me that Sophie was not okay. “Of course she is!” argued the other women, the relatives, all the grandmotherly types. “She’s just teething. See, her forehead’s not even warm!” And even though I sensed deep down that something was wrong, I let myself be cowed by the other womens’ years of experience.

After lunch, I couldn’t ignore the heart-tug, so I did all I knew—Tylenol, Pedialyte, kisses. I rocked her back and forth while her temperature climbed from 103º to 104º to 105º (“The thermometer must be broken,” offered a helpful relative) and consciously decided against taking her to a doctor. No American health insurance, and we’d be back in Italy soon anyway. So we went shoe shopping instead, Sophie limp and expressionless in her carseat.

She had the seizure in the parking lot of Famous Footwear while I was inside merrily trying on high heels. I ran straight out and was nearly bowled over by her lumpy lavender skin, her rolled-back eyes, her forced breaths. I couldn’t look at her again, not once on the eternal ride to the hospital. I just held her head and willed us both to keep breathing.

When we first arrived at the ER, the medical staff seemed duly alarmed. They slapped a “Red Alert” bracelet on her tiny ankle, and a team of nurses bustled with needles and machines and pint-sized magic potions. “Just hold her hand, Mom. Just keep talking to her.” It wasn’t until hours later, when the adrenaline had worn off and sheer willpower was holding me upright, that the on-call doctor coolly mentioned, “Oh yeah, this is no big deal; happens all the time. She looks perfectly fine to me.”

At that moment, I felt as stupid as I had that morning in church when the grandmothers pooh-poohed my instincts. It’s no big deal… What kind of idiot must I have been on the trip to the hospital, imploding from the silent pressure of holding back sobs? I felt very distinctly that I had been robbed of my experience and, more importantly, the right to intuitively care for my baby. But the doctors knew best. I stuffed the whole episode into some scraggly Room of Requirement in my memory and locked the door.

Tonight, it finally dawned on me that it was a big deal. Oh, was it ever a big deal. Because when I look at bereaved mamas’ photos, I see my own little girl. When I read their heartbreaking stories, I read mine. My story has a different ending to be sure, and I could never presume to understand the pain these other women are going through, but it didn’t have to end differently. If I had just… or she had just… or we hadn’t been able to… The truth is that a happy ending doesn’t erase guilt. It doesn’t settle this urgency to turn back time and do things differently as some kind of cosmic insurance against my dreams.

It was a big deal, and maybe it’s time I faced that.

***

I tend to flaunt my faith in doctors around people who are afraid or skeptical of them. It makes me feel wise, I suppose, and independent and so very mainstream. But there is more to healing than textbook medical knowledge, nodes of intuition and loving concern that matter. I know that, now.

16Aug

A Tablespoon of Time

Posted by: Bethany in Sunday Scribblings 9 Comments

Wednesday, August 13: Day 6 of Vacation (Day 3 here, Day 4 here, Day 5 to come… perhaps)

I had been looking forward to our lunch invitation today, old friends of my husband’s seeming at once new and homey to me. They have a little boy now who would be both a common denominator in those first shaky get-to-know-you conversations and an instant playmate, and the wife cooked up a beautiful Venetian meal. But the visit began to crumble two minutes in when the little boy bit Natalie, severely and without provocation. A minute later, he yanked out a fistful of her hair, and as we were busy comforting her, he wrenched Sophie’s nose. He hit them over the head with toys. He scratched their faces and stabbed them with drumsticks. I stopped him from biting my nine-month-old upwards of 30 times, but he did manage to pull her hair and yank her around on a regular basis. I have never dried so many little tears in one day.

The duality of my feelings hit me after lunch as I stood holding a crying baby in one arm and a glass of chilled prosecco with the other. As a mother, I was hurt. You cannot watch your own children sob without feeling their pain ten times over. I wanted justice, which is mostly unheard-of in Italian parenting; couldn’t they put him in time-out or take away his toys or send him to toddler juvie? But as a woman and, more importantly, a friend, I understood that two-year-old boys can no more moderate their own frustrations than their mamas can apologize away the guilt. I felt so sorry for our friends who find themselves trapped with “un mostro”—a monster, their own baby—and couldn’t bring themselves to believe me when I said it would get better.

I guess the thing to remember is time. Because with just a wee dash of it, the girls’ bruises will heal. With a bit more, maybe a tablespoon or so, our friends’ boy will learn less violent ways to express himself. And after a while, once the sprinkling of hours pile up into a new layer of life, our friends—and quite possibly we too—will find that we have the guts to be parents after all.

30Jul

Captain Courage

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“We should go out,” Natalie observed this morning once we had finished muddling through breakfast. Oh boy. After twenty-seven deep breaths and a booster shot of Zen, I forced myself to agree. We should go out. It can’t be healthy to cluck around inside our tiny coop alldayeveryday, and maybe the giant-sized world outside would go easy on us — a wee flock of homebound girls with shy feathers.

But first, there were naps and a shower and diaper changes and potty time. Clothes were procured from the laundry line (because one can’t wear a bathrobe forever, you know), hair was brushed, makeup was applied. Sunscreen was dolloped onto wriggling fair-skinned girls, and my industrial-strength corduroy purse was filled: wallet, no wallet (who wants the extra weight?), keys, phone, wallet again (we need to get eggs), lip gloss, tissues, camera, baby food, dirty bib, oops, clean bib, spoons, napkins, water bottle, water to go in the water bottle, sunglasses, did I already get the keys? Natalie got her holey jeans and socks and her cool silvery tennis shoes, plus a polka-dot headband—her latest fashion obsession. Sophie got a hat, until I remembered how she always flings it in the mud, and those great Velcro sandals she loves to remove with her teeth, and I buckled her into the stroller. We were going to do it.

Out the door we traipsed into my Tim Burtonesque imaginationscape. Curly, sunken-eyed trees, purple-tinged sunlight, whimsical hostility at every turn. But I could not in good conscience let myself become a hermit. At least, I could not retreat until we had spent at least as much time outside as we had spent preparing to go out, so I screwed my courage to the sticking place* and marched on.

Natalie skipped and picked pink flowers that “smelled like candy!” while Sophie kicked for joy and occasionally tried to dive-bomb out of her stroller. We bought eggs without any meltdowns or blitzed grocery displays, and my outlook slowly softened. Maybe these great outdoors, buzzing with life and warmth and green, were not so terrifying. Maybe I really could find my way back to my lane in the flow of normalcy and be the kind of mom who breezes her girls to the playground every morning without a hitch. And even if I found it tough to pry myself away from home, I could do it for them. Just seeing Natalie’s palpable excitement about going to play with other children made the trip worth it.

Except that by the time we got to the playground, it was deserted. Every one of the other kids had gone home for lunch. Natalie, ever an optimist, asked me for her pail and shovel (“Sorry, we didn’t bring those”) and then for her soccer ball (“Uh, we didn’t bring that either”) and finally just wandered forlornly around the empty swings and seesaw. I sat down on the winner’s bench for Crappiest Mother of the Year and fed Sophie her puréed blueberries, which she alternately spit out and sneezed out, and my head slowly began closing in on me. The sun was gothic cartoon again, the olive trees dense and grabby. I remembered the piles of dishes and laundry and misplaced toys I had ignored for the sake of this trip, back at home breeding and throwing wild parties like housework tends to do when left to its own devices. And suddenly, I needed to be indoors RIGHT AWAY.

I hate how easily panic hits me these days. There is never a reason or an obvious trigger, though anytime between noon and 7 p.m. is fair game. It just strikes my brain like a lightning bolt, and I can’t catch my breath. I can’t think straight. All I can see is the future billowing in flames around me and some abstract shapes of terror, urgent terror. I wouldn’t be surprised if my eyes turned white during these attacks, like the character from X-Men who summons tornadoes with her thoughts.

There might as well have been tornadoes shrieking over my head as we rushed home today. It had been too much. Simply going out had been too much. Or maybe it was going to all that effort, so much effort, just to reinforce our collective loneliness. I had suddenly acquired a taste for agoraphobia, and it chased me up the elevator, shaking, into our front door. Goodbye world, hello chronic wimp.

Much later in the day, as I was relocating messes and bludgeoning myself over the brain, a quote flashed through my mind: Courage is the willingness to accept fear and act anyway.** Despite my fragile state of mind and irrational fears of the world around me, I made the effort to walk out my front door today. What’s more, I survived. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that hey, this pretty much makes me Captain Courage. With way cuter clothes.

The End

—

*I have a thing for Shakespeare. Don’t tell Dan.

**Not Shakespeare. Not Jesus. Not sure who said this, in fact. Was it you?

11Jul

Eat Me, Uncle Moneybags

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Growing up, I learned to hate the song “Count Your Blessings.” (Please tell me some of you are old-fashioned enough to know it too?)

Are you ever burdened with a load of care?
Does the cross seem heavy you are called to bear?
Count your many blessings, every doubt will fly,
And you will be singing as the days go by.
(Lyrics by Johnson Oatman, a 19^th century preacher who probably got beat up a lot as a kid)

No matter how many times I sang it, its birthday wish mantra never worked. The magic elixir of contrived thankfulness turned stale when I swallowed it, and nothing ever got better as a result.

—

Dan and I lay awake in bed far, far too late last night talking (a bad habit that’s always been too delightful to shake) about the life we could be living right now had we just accepted it. We wandered through shadowy conjectures of a big suburban house and a six-figure salary. Bulging pockets. Unlimited comfort. Dollar signs popping out of our eyes just like in cartoons. We have been so tempted some days to quit our grad-schooling, world-traveling teetertotter life and grab the easy one dangling very much within reach.

But no matter how beautiful the bait looks, we know we are happiest as free fish with the whole ocean to play in. We need adventure, he and I, even if it sometimes looks like instability. Money matters so much less to us than experience… though, admittedly, a lot of experiences are easier to come by with a fat wallet.

I’ve been skulking on the outskirts of panic lately, and it helps to keep all of this in mind. It is so easy to feel lost in a new culture, especially with talk of moving to a different city soon. Especially with quickly growing babies and quickly disappearing time. Especially with the kind of urgent, helpless inspiration my brain manufactures without warning. Especially when unexpected expenses converge like thunderheads over water and more water, no dry land in sight. It’s the price of diving headlong into the ocean.

So I beat myself over the head with logic and lecture myself with my own beliefs. Keep everything in perspective… and This will all be worth it some day… But for all the mental haranguing I do to keep myself on track, the only thing that truly brings me out of dark moods is thankfulness—spontaneous and unplannable. It happened today when the girls woke up from their naps together with that gorgeous, sleepy glow of afternoon dreams. I looked at their faces, and simple as that, I was floating. To be able to know these vibrant little people, to be able to kiss their cheeks and read them bedtime stories and add beauty to their eternal souls was like a living in a sudden song. Unexplainable joy.

That’s how thankfulness got me out of our tightly-walled house and into the sunshine today. The girls and I had to go out for a necessary purchase—strawberry gelato with two spoons—and a playground date. We really had no choice but to have a perfect, panic-free evening once I realized how ridiculously, extravagantly rich we are together.

Of course, later came a particularly fussy bathtime and dirty dishes and the dull thud of reality and the fear that everything good about my day was horribly cliché…

But if sunwarmed giggles with these two and overwhelming lightheartedness become cliché for me, I will have more to appreciate than Uncle Moneybags or even Johnson Oatman himself could ever count.

—-

By the way, and on a completely different topic, I wish everyone in the world could get a chance to read this.

6Jun

The Cure for Crustiness

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I have mixed feelings about parenting magazines. On one hand, they can be very informative (How to potty train!), but on the other hand, most of the information is hardly revolutionary (1. Put child on potty, 2. Give sticker as reward, 3. Pat yourself on the back for a job well done). They can provide a sense of community, but on the other hand, glossy photographs do not count as friends. I suppose for me, it all comes down to how the magazine makes me feel about parenting. Wondertime, for instance, makes me want to go nibble on my girls’ earlobes and noses and perfect little elbows just because I’m so delighted to know them.

I wandered onto a popular magazine’s website the other day, though, that made me feel as if I’d walked straight into a spider web. Days later, I still can’t brush off the articles: Why I wish I’d had a girl instead of a boy. How my husband should know better than to expect sex as long as we have kids at home. How I ruined my daughter’s life: A memoir. I couldn’t put my finger on the exact problem until I read their mission statement, which was (and I paraphrase): “Too many magazines imply that parents should like their kids, when the truth is, WE DON’T! So let’s get together and bitch about it.”

I sort of understand. Parenting is a tough job; the workday is 24 hours long, and a lot of poop is involved. It requires enormous sacrifice, patience, wisdom, and creativity. And karaoke skills. And strong stomachs. I find it incredibly dishonest when people claim that parenting is easy. It’s so, so not.

But it’s good. Swinging-at-the-park good. Spontaneously-giggling good. Dr.-Seuss good. Earth-shattering-love good. No words could fully depict the goodness of children: life’s gift to adults who might otherwise grow old and crusty. The magazine’s opinion—that parenting is awful, end of story—is poison. Because the fact is, all the sleepless nights and temper tantrums and sticky floors and rearranged sex lives pale in comparison to the joy of hugging your children each morning, showing them the world, and discovering that those tiny people love you every bit as much as you love them.

26May

Girls

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We notice flowers. Bright bits of lace on the grass, living confetti. We say “ooooo!” and discover magenta, petals dripping jewel-toned paint. We pick haphazard bouquets to stick in a chipped mug and watch during breakfast, because we need pretty.

We dance, every day. Living room dance hall, disco lights through open windows and the stereo up just loud enough. Even I, despite my traumatic experiences with skirts, put one on so we can twirl and twirl. We spin ourselves dizzy, lighter than air and beautiful as gilded carousels at play.

We mother. She with her well-loved plastic baby, I with my well-loved squirming one. We wield bottles as tools of our trade, spit-up cloths and a cheery “hooray!” for rolling over (two for trying to crawl). Even her cars, after VROOOMing across the floor, are put down for naps, blankets tucked up around their fenders with love.

We take over the kitchen. Not hostile, oh no. We’re delighted conquistadors, tasting, stirring, and tasting again, messy dishes left spooning in the sink. We make our own kinds of coffee—mine dark and steaming, hers invisible and spill-proof—and we say “mmm-hahhh” together, eyes closed for emphasis.

We wear pink. And blue and turquoise and orange, and truth be told, I wear mostly brown. But she shows me how to wear pink with charisma, shirts that sing opera and sparkly toenails that send giggles to each other in Morse code. We are pretty.

—

I love little boys, their grit, grime, and rough-and-tumble, their perpetual bounciness and smudginess. I always thought they were what I wanted, a personalized pack of Lost Boys and I their Peter Pan. But now? Not in a million Never-Neverland years, not even for a pocket full of disgusting treasures offered with a grin, would I choose boys over this:

She and I, girls.

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