circle

I wake up and it’s early still, but you wouldn’t know it by the amount of light streaming through the windows. It’s barely five in the morning, but the white walls glow more like seven. I roll back to my stomach and stretch out into the space now vacated by M. The shower hums quietly in the next room, but after years and years of early morning showers, I have to strain to hear it, to know that he’s still here and not already gone for the day. I’m back to sleep, and the dreams between five and six-thirty are more vivid and distracting.

The buzzer starts quietly, and then ramps up to a full throttled hum within seconds. I stretch further across his side and hit the button that silences it for a few minutes longer. The dream resumes where it left off, and I recognize bits and pieces of my stress within its twisted story. My body rests, but not my mind. It needs this exercise, I tell myself, as I hit that button once more. In that second lull my awake self and my asleep self start to bargain with one another. When did I shower last? Do I need to dry my hair, or just pull it back from my face still damp? Will we have oatmeal from the stove or settle for cereal? If it’s toast, will there be jam and peanut butter, or just the jam? Each of these things add up to seconds and minutes and subtract from that magical moment number when we must be walking out the door to all arrive on time. I cannot control the timing of the stoplights or the number of cars in front of me in the left turn lane. I know that the number of steps between the car and the school door are always the same, and I scoop up the little one when necessary to shave a few seconds off that little commute. Mostly I just scoop her up to hold her to me a little bit longer before I release her to her puzzles and her clay. Her right forearm is cool from the air vent by the door, and so soft to the touch that I kiss it all the way up the stairs to her classroom. She marches in with purpose and sets to work.

…..

My asleep self wins the argument and successfully negotiates that third touch of the button. Two minutes later – long before the buzzer sounds again – my awake self jolts the rest of me awake, and the morning to-do list that my mind has suppressed sends an electric jolt through my body. I curse the clock that reads twenty-two minutes past the time that it should, and remember that I dreamed that last shower, and dreaming doesn’t make me smell any better. I hear the little one rustling around in bed and know that the games are beginning. I rush through my portion of the morning and forge headlong into theirs.

…..

It is 8:52 when I pull into the daycare parking lot. It is not a good morning. On a good morning the clock would read 8:44 as I turn off the car and grab the small backpack shaped like an owl. This morning required two backpacks, one packed lunch for a field trip, one urine sample from the little one stored in a brown paper bag in the refrigerator waiting to be dropped off at the doctor’s office, a sun hat, sunscreen applied, $2.70 in a labeled baggie for bus fare, a camping story and picture along with some money for a teacher’s gift, a lunch for me, house keys, car keys, cell phone, three pairs of shoes, a bag with two costumes and assorted props for an after school play, my camera, two glue guns (labeled) in a bag to loan for an event, four vitamins, one allergy pill, one stomach pill, and three breakfasts, plus a bandaid and an ace bandage. I type those things in a run on sentence, and backspace at least five times to erase a period as I remember more things. I’m quite sure that I’ve forgotten something in the retelling of this list. In reality I forget these things: the sun hat and the sunscreen, the glue guns (labeled), my camera. I’ve dropped off the older one and it’s now 8:52 in that parking lot and my cell phone is ringing. I don’t recognize the number and almost ignore it but I don’t. It’s E. She’s nearly in tears and not talking much. I ask her to hand the phone to her teacher’s assistant and learn that she has left her lunchbag on the seat of the car. I turn around and see the little one in her car seat next to the lunch bag. I turn back around and see the clock. 8:56. It is not a good morning and the urine sample is still sitting on the front seat in a paper bag.

…..

The play is wonderful but the room is loud and my head is pounding and I realize that I don’t have my camera. I give E a hug and congratulate her on her performance and she declares that she is starving because they barely had time on their field trip to have lunch and she proceeds to open her bag and eat her barely touched meal. I should understand how hard it is to settle down on the ground and eat on a field trip with your friends on a perfectly beautiful day in the park during the last week of school. I am not that good. Instead I snap as I think of driving around in circles for forty-five minutes, trying to predict a meeting place between my car and my child who is travelling first by bus, then by train, then by foot to the park. They have gathered in a circle in a field and I park illegally on the street and hustle the not-to-be touched lunchbag to a child who is too preoccupied to thank me. It’s nearly ten and that urine sample is still sitting on the front seat in a paper bag. I turn off my flashers and head to the pediatrician.

We are home and it’s time to make dinner, and everyone is hungry and grouchy and tired. I need to leave, to come back into the office, but not before yelling and crying first. I snap because F is about to knock over the ironing board as I try to fold the mountain of clean laundry on the bed and while E is reading poetry out loud producing this constant drone of noise thrumming in my head. I cannot take another minute. I leave and seek the quiet of the office. I stay long past midnight and have to walk out into the creepy, empty parking lot in the dark. The house is quiet and I spend time silently apologizing to three sleeping bodies in the house. They don’t deserve my anger, but the stresses have bubbled up and boiled over and I can. not. hold. one. more. thing. in. this. brain. of. mind. Not one single thing more. I make lists with a fat, black sharpie marker and tape them to the door. My brain is still so full.

…..

I am sitting in a church pew in the middle of the day. There is a silver casket in the front of the room and it is covered in a spray of lilies. It matches the flowers in my own house, given to me on Mother’s Day but these are for someone else’s mother, and her children sit in front of it and hold each other. They have buried both parents and two grandparents in the last eight months. They are still little, but seem old beyond their years. The opening hymn is the hymn that the young girl has sung in our church on every single Mother’s Day. She has a lovely voice, but of course cannot use it today. We all stand to sing, but I only make it through the first few words of ” A Mother Lined A Basket”.  It is all too much.  It is all unfair.  I am here and I am sitting beside my love, and we hold hands tightly and we cry because we think of our own daughters and we know that we can give them absolutely everything in this world except for the guarantee that we will be here with them to enjoy it.  We cannot promise that and that thought is terrifying.  As the service winds on I see another gift in front of me – the gift of community.  It is a gift that this mother has shared with her children – one that she and her husband so carefully tended and nurtured for their children for decades.  I see that connection and feel grateful for those circles that we travel in, and make a silent commitment to strengthen those daily.  The service is over and the lilies roll out and I should be going back to work but I stay.  There is a luncheon and all I want to do is sit with these people in this circle and draw more strength.  I return to my desk awhile later, full and hopeful.

…..

It is 7:15 and I’m accelerating on the highway towards my last commitment of the day.  I have navigated traffic from work to home to school to set up a reception that I do not have time to attend.  I take photos from the back of the gallery of my oh-so-big now fourth grader playing her violin in splendid fashion.  The music that is coming from those instruments is beautiful and rousing and the applause at the end of each piece is so enthusiastic because we hear these songs in bits and spurts at home each day, but we are always amazed to hear them together.  She stands so tall on that stage, and so beautiful.  I have to run now, and I sneak behind her chair and kiss the top of her head and tell her how proud I am of her.  I am so proud.  I will always tell her this.  It’s now 7:22 and I enter a dark storefront and walk to the light in the back.  There is a teacher and five other students and we introduce ourselves and I apologize again for being late.  I have a brief moment of panic as I watch the other five machines whirring away and I remember that I haven’t used a sewing machine in several decades.  The instructor leads me to the ironing board, and then a few minutes later to my seat.  She guides me through the threading and the starting and I’m off.  Twenty minutes later I have caught up with the class and I’m in such a rhythm that I’m floating.  It’s like riding a bike I think to myself, and the pieces stack up to my left. 

…..

It is almost nine and the instructor is giving us homework.  She asks us about our machines at home and I’m the only one without one.  No worries, she says, you are fast, and she invites me to come in a little early next week.  I tell her about my grandmother’s machines.  I tell her about my grandmother.  They are all listening.  I find myself saying the words that I have tried not to say all day today.  I try not to say them as I sit in front of that silver casket.  I try not to say them as the pastor tells the stories of this mother’s quilts and sewing skills.  I try not to say them as I’m racing down the highway towards a class that I’m late for.  I try not to say them as I sit for a few quiet hours at a sewing machine and realize that I need no instruction.  And then I say them to a room full of strangers.

My grandmother sewed.  She died tonight, one year ago, on a day full of so many responsibilities, when I couldn’t get through them all and then heard the news and had to fly down that long and lonely highway by myself in my own grief and still not get there in time.  And for the whole day I have been sitting in a funeral and at work and at a violin concert and in the car and they are all so exactly like this time last year and I have still not let myself say it.  But then I sit in front of that machine that I haven’t touched and it comes alive and I am so at peace and so very, very happy.  I fold my project up with great care and head out into the dark street to my car.  I hum all the way home, the hymns that I could not sing that morning, and I know that she is with me.