Decades in a Day

Matron to John.  It is 10 pm.   The woman of the house is spent, facing details yet for the day to come.  Plus she wants to watch Downton Abbey and eat cookies.   Which can't wait.

Matron:  "Where DID the day go?!!   I can't even remember a single thing that happened!"

John, long pause.

"Remember?  You got up at 5:20.   Fed the dogs, let them out, started coffee and then breakfast for Stryker.  Fed the teenager boy and attended to his angst about upcoming ACT and finals.    Before 6:30 am.  Woke up the household, called two schools to report Scarlett's absence because of orthodontist and Merrick because of strep throat.  Then you vacuumed the house and made breakfast for both younger kids.  Got Merrick settled as he recovered from strep, Scarlett off to rehearsal.   Next?  Two prescriptions to refill, one vet appointment to make.   Two loads of laundry.  Now it's 9:30 a.m.   Library books returned.  You finish two syllabi which you've been working on all morning in between domestic duties and send them for copying.  Settle in Merrick and go to a four hour work meeting.  In the meantime, I agonize with Scarlett at the orthodontist as she gets braces -Invisalign, worse than normal -- and drive her to a rehearsal whle she weeps and rails.   I rush home to make lunch for Merrick and walk dogs.   Return to theater for Scarlett.  You continue on at work meeting.    Then I more or less successfully send work email until l- whoops, time to pick up Scarlett from rehearsal.  Do that.   Get home.  Merrick's fever has spiked.  I give him Tylenol and start my work taxes.  Leave to get Stryker from Debate and then bring him to work.

Then you call and you have a schedule change for Spring Semester while in the midst of your meeting.   deal with hysteria.   Redo family calendars.  Okay.

Mail comes.  You've ordered Brady Brunch from Day One through Eternity as love note to Merrick-With-Strep.  I spend much time reframing 1970s culture for Merrick.

Boc jumps the fence.   I spend twenty minutes chasing him and ten minutes calming you down via text.   My biggest client asks if I can meet with him tomorrow morning at 8 am.  I say yes and spend 20 minutes re-organizing domestic schedule.

You come home from work for an hour before going to yoga.   While home, you put in a load of laundry, answer email, check Merrick's temperature, update the family calendar, start dinner you can't eat because of yoga, check phone messages, wash the dog slime off front door, return orthodontist call, give Scarlett Advil for dentist pain, return call to my mother, put out tomorrow's garbage and I am felled.  That was a 40 minute flurry. Plsu you dusted the entire second floor while arranging a play date for Merrick on Friday.

Then you leave for a 90 minute 'relaxing' yoga session at 105 degrees, come home to eat for the first time in 9 hours, send me the schedule for tomorrow, finish laundry, put Merrick to bed, attend to Scarlett's hysteria, help Stryker with his schedule for finals and the ACT, combed Scruffy and then fell down a bit in exhaustion.

That's our day."

Here, the Matron falls into his arms and weeps.

Matron:  "We're the Titanic!."

John:  "Just one rough day.  And isn't the Titanic a great love story?"

Then they ate cookies and watched Downton Abbey.  

The Lovely Lengthy Philosophical Treatise in the Works

 . . . has fallen to the wayside.

This beautiful boy?

Felled by the flu:  he is a limp, feverish, bundle of projectile vomiting.  The school returned him to his mother that way, a couple of hours early.

So instead of the rich, nuanced reflection on mortality that's in the hopper, the Matron has only a nod to what happens while we're pondering the meaning of life:  its details.  Which include sick nine-year old boys.   Yours truly must also note a pattern here.  The beginning or end of each semester, without fail, brings disaster.  

Here are some bona fide real life examples:  lice, appendicitis, flu, major psychological breakdown for a child, and strep throat.   These are inter-changeable and pretty much a guarantee. 

But doesn't he look sharp with that killer haircut?

Hanging Chad

You remember.

Those tick-tacky scraps of paper that stole the election from Al Gore in Florida that took center stage of the 2000 presidential election?

Tuesday's blog post was just that!  A hanging chad.  Friends, she thought she hit 'save' but instead . . .well, you know.  It was published.  Still there but now complete with more details on the blog's headliner.   Just alerting the faithful (or sisters in soul who are desperate not to be involved with their families for one more minute).

A few more lines of distraction, friends.  Just scroll down -- and see you again soon!

Merry Matron Update!

The Matronly return to the blog has thus far been somewhat somber.  Here, she will update regular (for those hanging in!) readers with news of the day.

Wait.  She means year.    Slim blog pickings lately, she knows.

Friends, she is relieved and stunned to announce that it is a good era in the family life.  For the most part, people who live here like one another.    The details?

He Who Cannot Be Named (HWCBN) has one foot out the door.   The middle of his junior year is so far defined by academic and debate (varsity team) successes notable enough to be already be opening college doors in a variety of ways.   More importantly - on a minute by minute basis for a 16 year old -- he is the proud owner o fa 1999 Lincoln Continental, purchased from a neighbor by a fraction of the Blue Book value and stocked with music like this --

Okay, there is less palatable fare but we'll leave it at that.

Important to the Matron on that same minute by minute basis?   He is nothing but compassion, grace, and dry wit toward his mother.   These are the reasons she is not unhappy to get up at 5:30 am on school days to prepare a heartfelt breakfast (bacon!  scones! eggs!) -- every morning.  For which he thanks her.

Much has been written here about Scarlett, veteran of the stage at age 10.   Dearth here -- in fact, the Matron thinks that her last Stage Mother update was nearly a year ago!    Much has transpired since, none of it predictable.

Scarlett was first diagnosed with vocal cord nodules, a not -uncommon condition which resolved itself only to reveal a large lesion and hemorrhage previously hidden by the nodes.  These conditions?  Not so common.    Not only was the daughter immediately whisked off stage (she even quit a show, which is unheard of only to the point of tsunami in theater) her doctors at the University of Minnesota's Lion's Voice Clinic (best around) sighed that surgery was the most likely option.

Still.

Very Fine Surgeon Specializing in Singers:   "I would be unethical to perform this risky surgery on a 14 year old.  There's a .5% chance that the lesion will heal on its own.  We have to take it."

But the chance?  Required one month of complete vocal rest.

That child -- the one onstage since 8 and the center of an astonishing array of friends and social events -- was suddenly silent.  She took a medical leave from school.  She communicated with a white board and dry erase marker.  She said 'no' to sleepovers and trips to the mall.  No friends, except those able to adhere to the guidelines (few).  Instead of being in shows, she saw them.    She follows the surgeon's rules to the letter of the law, all in the hopes of avoiding a dangerous (to a developing voice) surgery.

And . . . she did it!!

The Matron remains in awe of this young woman's resolve and discipline.    She also remains  . . . here, she is at an uncharacteristic loss for a single pithy word.   How to describe having your 14 year old daughter tethered to the home front for a month?    The Matron is hugely grateful for that time -- but the medical leave from school and month of silence was a family endeavor.   Psychological fortitude was in demand from all the players (maybe even more so for the mama?).

She wouldn't trade that month for the world.  Or do it over.

Merrick remains the tag line, adorably uneventful at 9.   Give him a dog and a stick -- still --and promise him there's no school tomorrow and you have the prototype for Ideal Human.   The richer, more complex addendum to the tag line that is the youngest is that he is a full-body person, the kind who does not necessarily thrive in school or willingly pick up a novel.  No.

Merrick's Teacher:  "Mary!  It's so interesting that Merrick doesn't turn in assignments during the day.  He just does a couple of problems or something halfway and then finishes.  I ask him 'Merrick don't you notice that everyone else is working' and he says, yup."

Matron: "Can he stay inside during recess or somehow have a consequence for this?"

Teacher:  "I don't believe in punitive measures.   This will sort out.'

Indeed.  The Matron thinks that 'punitive' is sometimes promising -- and actually, a fact of life.   Also a fact of life, this mother would rather the teacher do the dirty work.  So much easier that way.   Unfortunately, parenting is not the easy path and this mama and her husband?    Trying to build responsibility into Merrick's bone structure.  

Life is good for the young people in the house are, in a word:  poised.  One is readying for college and another for that next audition, both ready to make that mark somewhere outside of the home.  The youngest doesn't yet know that he too is ready for launching, as it's the parents who be lighting that cannon.  Still, it's happening.

And yours truly?

After 16 months of agony and defeat, the Matron has accepted reality and the new number that comes with it.  She has no problem declaring her rightful claim on 50.  Indeed, she appreciates that there are some things in life that are, now, a younger person's game.    That's okay.   But there's a secret, enduring tool that yours truly possesses and that is her great, big, highly-functioning brain.   Now, this entity can give her no end of trouble (oh, the roads we take!) but can also shine when the body and beauty ache.   She plans to use it.

Starting with . . . . yours truly has been commissioned by an actual, real, professional, theater company to write a play!!    She's a hired gun here and grateful for it, so can't spill any details - yet.  But she will when the time is right.  In the interim, know that one intrepid writer will be getting paid for her work.   Other people will experience her work:  it will be staged!!   Tickets will be sold and an audience, clapping!

This makes one 50 year old very, very happy.

Now, you say:  how does she do it?    Career, teenagers, elementary school child, college looming, theater, marriage to maintain, play to write, dogs to coddle?!!

Here is the Matron.

Actually, not quite.   Her will of steel hasn't loosened but her desires have.  Slowly, steadily, the Matron has learned not to worry about work.  She doesn't.   Her job -- while it has its moments - is largely like chopping vegetables:  a task that must be done.   It isn't stressful but takes time.  When one is immersed in the task, there is joy in completion and excellence.   That's it.  She doesn't chat about colleagues or worry what might happen next, but has learned to show up and be a great teacher.    She dabbles here and there in other interests, as required, but as learned the language of "No but thank you."   This has meant a shift from being deeply engaged in college-wide issues, serving on lots of committees, and being tapped (and saying yes) to take on all kinds of leadership or interesting positions.    Not now, anyway.

Being a great teacher, she also has learned, does not mean spending hours and hours on semicolons in student papers.  That, friends, has proven a tremendous waste of time.  More on that, later.  But a more refined focus on writing instruction that doesn't require The Teacher as the only expert in the room has made this task much easier as well -- and pedagogically sound.   Blog post on this soon, she promises.

Perhaps the most significant change is much less quantifiable.  Indeed, it is nearly inexplicable and warrants her attention on its own little page here, which will be coming.  Suffice it to say, those 16 months building to that birthday weren't wasted away but produced transformation.  Something majestic, even.

Finally, the Matron's stalwart companion of 21 years?  John too turned 50.  Instead of wringing his hands for an entire year or buying a Harley Davidson, he woke up on May 19th and said:  "well, I'm 50" and then mowed the lawn.    While patiently watching his wife's extended breakdown.  He's eithe a keeper or crazy himself!

There, is the not so pithy but more complete, update!  

Happy holiday season, of all sorts, to each of you, dear friend and reader!

Carrying Suffering's Weight

Like most Americans, the events of last Friday brought the Matron to her knees:  literally.  She was on a run when the news filtered in through the radio headpiece:    the AP confirmed one victim and the shooter, dead.

"Oh!" panted the Matron, still intent on the task.  "Please let it not be a child but some adult that crazy person targeted."   

 A few minutes later, an audibly emotional radio announcer intoned that 18 elementary school children were among the 20 + dead.

The Matron stopped running.

There's snow in Minnesota and there she sat, weeping for those babies and their mothers -- dumbfounded in the face of Evil able to walk into a school and murder children.   Eventually she dragged herself home, only to spend the rest of her waking hours online and in front of the TV.

She cried when she picked up Scarlett from school and clutched He Who Cannot be Named when he walked through the door.   When it was time to get her 9-year old from a friend's house, just seeing the simple act of Merrick opening the van door broke her maternal heart.

Some other mother will never see that simple act again, not from the child she lost.

So bereft was the Matron that she spent two days uncharacteristically unable to move on.   Because that's what she heard on Minnesota Public Radio and read in the newspaper:  how to cope, how to explain, how to move past tragedy.     She was offered no shortage of expert advice in self-care.   The only problem is that advice came while she would be weeping or wondering at a world where "assault-type rifles" hang on some family's wall.

 Scarlett:  "Mom, you should stop watching the news."

John: "I know, I know, sweetie.  Just don't go there.  It's too awful."

The Matronly Mental Health Self Talk:  "Don't project your own 'stuff,' know your boundaries, model good self-regulation for your children, don't get sucked in, move on and be a better person in honor of those families."

Not one thing worked -- not even NPR.  Instead, she of most-excellent imagination went over and over the terror those children may have experienced and the parents' grief.  What is the extent of f human suffering?  This seems unbearable.   What kind of country have we become, when a 24-year old man walks into a school and slaughters  helpless children (using the weapon his mother legally purchased).

In desperation, on Sunday the Matron went to Clouds in the Water Zen Center, hoping against hope that the Sunday 'sermon' (Dharma talk) would take on the horror in the same visceral, full-body way in which the Matron seemed destined to experience herself.

Friends, she was not disappointed.

The priest -- a woman about the Matron's age -- just picked right up where the Matron was.

Priest:  "I cannot move beyond Friday's events.   I am weeping, rooted in suffering, trying to understand how to incorporate this into human existence."

The Dharma talk turned into a conversation where Priest and community members talked.  She doesn't need to go into those details.  You know them.   The world moved in that conversation:   gun control to suffering to children to mental illness to video games to presidential politics.

Here -- in a paraphrase unworthy of the real deal -- is how the Priest wrapped them up:   "I think that not only is it okay to not 'move on," I don't think we're supposed to.  What does 'moving on' mean?.   We bear witness to the most unimaginable suffering.   The Dharma tells us that we are all connected and that life's work is the end of suffering.  So we are where we should be, thick in the middle of it."

Here she paused.  "This particular tragedy tells me that we must expand our grief pool.  We should reconsider the expanse of human suffering from which we find shelter from on a daily basis.  That shelter from suffering is a luxury we can choose to set aside."

And the Matron knew in that moment how much she pulls out the luxury of shelter --- how she understands that death, disease, and war define the lives of millions while she turns on her flat-screen TV or debates the merits of those new boots.  Suffering from which she shelters herself is not limited to what's far away.   Friends and family crippled by addiction, mental illness, or existential despair are often those she avoids:  good boundaries and self-protection.   Yet these people are suffering, too.   

So the Matron left Clouds in the Water feeling more firmly situated in her grief.    She understood that asking the big questions were precisely what the situation warranted --and she was glad to be reassured within her religious community that there really is no 'moving on' from the human condition, a condition she shares with the mothers and fathers of Sandy Hook.  

And Ethiopia, Pakistan, South Detroit, and four blocks down.

Sometimes feeling better isn't 'making things right' but seeing the world differently.   Let's open the grief pool, folks.   That's an action statement, from voting differently to lobbying to alleviating the pain of a friend to whatever ways in which we can do right and live our own lives in ways  that work against pain (large and small) and suffering.   

  In the end, that's how the world changes.

And . . . the Return

Last week, the Matron intended to return to this blog.  

Hmmmmm . . . . sort of like "did you do your homework?"   The answer wouldn't be no, but 'not yet.'

The  Matron has been in a year-long, deeply interior place.    She sees a light at the end of that tunnel, but, friends, it's a flicker.  And it's not the bright, comedic, light of youth.

On November 26th, the Matron turned 50.    When she first started this blog, she was a solid mid-forties, and the Matron Moniker?   A joke.    

It is no longer:  50. 

The Matron is not a greeting card sort of person, so those "you're halfway through" elbow-nudges fall on deaf ears.    The life expectancy for a woman in the United States, born in 1962, is 73 to 80 years old.  

Folks -- that's 23 to 30 years.   

As any hard-working human (especially us mothers) knows, one day is an eternity of task and emotion:  we fall into bed with long to-do lists and impressions of the relationships and people the day left behind.     On some level, the Matron feels like those potential 20 some years are a gift!!   Each day a universe, an eternity.

On another -- she barely remembers yesterday.  Do you?  

Will the next 20 pass this way?

Friends -- she does not mean to be depressing you.   But rather than not write, the Matron has decided to plunge full speed ahead into honesty and reflection.    Yes, there will be humor. . . . remember, she has two teenagers and a 9 year old.  Sitcom material.    

Children don't keep this Mama young -- just awake.

Update coming on details -- a young man picking colleges, an actor recovering from an injury, the 9 year old slogging guns and dogs-- but for now, the Matron signals a return.  She has time (more on this too) and renewal. 

And very, very, painfully aware that time and renewal are temporary gifts, entertained at this minute.  No more.

Wherein the Matron Talks Politics

The Matron has turned her voting decisions over to her nine year old son.

Presidential Politics

Merrick:  "Mom, is it true that Mitt Romney tied his dog to the top of his car and DROVE on a vacation?"

Matron:  "Not privy to all the details, but yes.  That's true."

Merrick:  "Can you say it for me?"

Matron:  "?"

Merrick:  "Exactly what he did.  Say it so I can be sure."

Matron:  "Mitt Romney tied his dog on top of the family car and drove to his vacation."

Merrick:  "With the dog on top?"

Matron:  "Yes."

Complete horror overtakes the child.

Merrick:  "AND WE LET HIM RUN FOR PRESIDENT?  CAN'T WE ARREST HIM?"

Well, the Matron fell right out of her binder, laughing.

The Marriage Amendment in Minnesota

Minnesotans will be voting on whether or not to amend the state constitution to mandate that marriage can only be between one man and one woman.  Mormons must leave the state.

Merrick:  "If that amend thing passes, do Ann and Ann, Ricky and DJ, Aunties Chris and Susan, Holly and Betsy, Marc and Paul -- and Amy's Moms, you know, the Lauras  - do they all have to get a divorce?  By force?"

Matron:  "Honey, they're not married.  It's illegal right now for anybody who's not heterosexual to get married.  So nobody's married yet."

Shock on Merrick's end.

Merrick:  "You mean Lilly's moms and Abe's moms and the spermer dad -- and the Aunties -- NOBODY'S MARRIED?"

Matron:  "Not as in 'legally,' -- no."

Merrick:  "Nobody told all their kids, you know."

The Matron's only solace is the amendment passes?  Merrick and is kind are next in line to make these decisions.   Things will be different.