Prayer for Lila Pearl

My great friend Mark Barad and his wife Pasquale had a little girl in June - Lila Pearl. We hear she has a serious medical problem that so far has resisted a real diagnosis. Doctors and parents are working hard to manage the situation and there is no sense they can develop of how things are going to turn out. In these cases, Mark says, some children's trouble resolves and some children's trouble gets worse. Lila Pearl is on my mind every day and I pray for her as I do for my own girls. Nothing seems so precious as the health of these little lives.

Dolphins, dragons and lions.... oh my!

I was thinking about Luciana's preoccupations with preparations. She was crazy with anxiety because I didn't get all enthused about buying helium-filled balloons to put on the door of the house. Before she was hospitalized she kept fantasizing about having people visit the house, sitting on the couch in the living room and drinking iced tea. She even went out and bought a large wooden tray to carry the drink on. She was despairing that we don't have a large glass pitcher with matching glasses. My reaction to all this: what madness!

I was reading last night about the Hundred Years War (Reformation & Counter-Reformation in the Netherlands) and found a wonderful description of the public works that were thrown into place to celebrate the arrival of the King of Spain's appointed regent in Brussels. All the artisans and artists suddenly had work, throwing up spectacular (and temporary) triumphal arches decorated with appropriately Catholic imagery, while housefronts and public places were fronted with great representations of dolphins, dragons, lions and monsters.

Maybe the balloons and the ice-tea-on-trays are just domestic versions of these great public celebrations, creating ceremonial passage through which the new Prince (or Princess) can make a suitably important entry.

Maybe blogging is the literary equivalent to erecting a cardboard and wood archway decorated with dolphins and dragons. An entryway for the arrival of princesses in this digital age.

The hospital room is an architecture that arranges experiences

What kind of experience is being arranged on this structure?

The Waiting Place...

...for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or a No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a sting of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.

--- From "The Places You'll Go," by Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

In that intermediary neither-here-nor-there waiting-for-time-to-pass place, where people's activity consists of "monitoring," "checking," "keeping an eye on" and people are afflicted with sensations of boredom, anxiety, uselessness, fear, annoyance, and confusion. Questions can only be answered over time, situations can only be resolved over time. And while we are waiting, and wishing for waiting to be over, the babies are breathing, drinking, kicking, blinking, touching with fingers and toes, reacting to sounds and pressure, turning in the womb and (recently) putting their heads down toward the exit. They have been waiting too - developing from a single cell!!!!! to these complex creatures -- humans about to begin being with us!!!! In the excitement of it all, that gets hung like a coat on a hook on the wall of this bare utilitarian room, I find myself saying, "Take your time, there's no rush, we can wait two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, get yourself ready, we will be here when you need us." And I find myself feeling, "I can't wait!!!"

But I can. Luciana can. We all can. So we do!

Around the well

We want to know how each other is doing: if the baby is moving inside our wombs, if eating yogurt will ease our intestines, if the nurse will find out if we had sex the night before when she checks our inner parts. There are the usual optimists and the prophets of disgrace and we want to listen to them all, just for the sake of it.
We are gestating destinies, facing uncertainties and risks - that is what brings us together. Our stories, circulating through many voices, calms most fears and nourishes even the tiniest bit of courage. We see on each other bodies how Nature carves its way and makes us part of something much bigger than our vanities. We are pregnant women.
We used to stand around the well - and that was a long time ago. When the waters were tamed in our kitchens, we moved to the church social hour and then to the doctor's waiting room. And now that we are kept apart by the urgencies and conveniences of modern urban life, we meet again, online.
Our posts travel through the electronic sky to find each other's fears, questions - and wisdom. We found our well again.

Old skills in new situations

You know why I like to spend time at work? Beyond the sheer pleasure of being with people and the endless puzzles and knots that people present, there is the reassuring experience of being on solid ground with myself. I know what I'm doing, I know what there is to do, there seems to be a reasonable match between these two sets, and so "I'm okay."
Which helps me understand the distress of a person -- like my wife -- who has been thrust into the opposite case. She doesn't exactly know what she is doing, and she doesn't exactly know what there is to do. All the challenges and questions that come up evade any automatic answer, because she is simply not allowed anymore to do anything she normally does.
Can she get out of her maternity bedrest to attend a meeting at school on the very important topic of X? No, she cannot. Her boss gets wind of her intent to attend, and calls her up to say, You can't come to school, it's not allowed, you're on medical leave, we can't tolerate the liability issues.
Can she keep working on reports while at home? No, she cannot. They want her to turn in her raw scores and hand over her laptop. They are saying, We'll take it from here.
Which leaves her in the lurch with herself.

A fear

A current fear, that crops up several times a day. How long am I going to live? What if I get cancer, or get killed in an accident, or choke on a piece of steak? What is going to happen to the children? The prospect of bringing these three into the world, and then dropping out, really bothers me. When I look in the obits each day, I look to see stories about people who lasted into their 80s, not because I want so much to keep on having the daily experience of life - I'm thinking I need to stay around to take care of them, and to stay with Luciana who will be there for them.

My other big fear - dementia!

Getting ready, every day

Funny how clean I've gotten.
When we came back from Rio, L. and I flew home on separate flights (a long story having to do with urgent confusions when we were planning our trip South toward IVF treatment a month and a half earlier). I got home three hours before L., and after an overnight flight and a long morning wait for my Miami to Boston connection, I got home to find the three dogs healthy and happy (good), our house-sitter healthy and happy (good), and the house completely overrun with dog-crap. Every room in the house. I dropped my bags, grabbed a mop and a bucket, and set to work washing floors.
Three hours later, when I drove up to Logan Express to pick up L., each floor had been washed down three times with high-test Lysol floor cleaner, the house smelled of lemons and alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chlorides - a cheerful bouquet and a big improvement over the dog-run pallor that had hung in the air when I first entered the premises.
Since then - almost a month - I have been cleaning the house - sometimes furiously, sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes diligently, sometimes lovingly - every day. I've never been a slacker, but also never been a dedicated house cleaner before. But L. has been on modified bed-rest for a couple of weeks - she had frequent bouts of bleeding (or spotting, depending on who was doing the describing) and the OB-GYN nurse emphatically warned her off from sweeping, mopping, carrying cans or groceries.
This was the best-news-possible, since it has given me something to do. Carry groceries, sweep floors, empty the garbage. We don't do much chopping of wood nor carrying of water here in the suburbs (although now that I think of it, we have switched to bottled water, so I'm carrying six or seven gallons of that into the house each week). I can't do much regarding the gestation of triplets, but I can invest big-time in the creation of a warm, clean home context for the mother of The Three.
It was funny to notice this morning how I grabbed the spare fifteen minutes between walking the dogs and beginning my work-day to sweep the floors and put away all the dishes. Really a simple pleasure. And it clears the mind, which is preoccupied, all the time, with thoughts of The Three and "how am I going to do this?!"