Waking Up Smiling
Waking Up Smiling: 15 July 2021
Here at our cousins’ house in Massachusetts the rooster wakes me up. Every morning it makes me smile. And then the delicious vacation-y thought, what shall we do today?
It’s a much more pleasant version of the first moments of pandemic mornings: What day is it? What happened yesterday? What do I need to be doing today? My sense of time is anemic. I can’t remember when things happened because there is no stake in the ground to anchor the memory. Was I wearing cold weather clothes? Was Dad still alive? Had Mark had surgery? Did Jack have glasses yet?
When I was a Quaker, I appreciated the intentional goal to understand every day as holy. Other faith traditions aspire to this as well, but that was when I first heard it articulated. I did then, more often than I tend to now, stop to consider each meal a blessing that evokes the Eucharist, each day the birth of Christ, each death the fulfillment of Resurrection. But I have to say that the sameness of pandemic days strained that aspiration. I was still grateful and reminded of the gifts of discipleship, but monotony and stress did not add up to Enlightenment.
But vacation mornings!
We’ve picked blueberries, hiked to a great swimming lake, played tennis, reconnected with friends. We’ve read, played video games and watched Wimbledon; curled up with the cat, romped with the dog, conversed with the chickens. We’ve napped on rainy afternoons and stayed up late on clear nights. It’s been a joy to wallow in the slow days.
Of course, even in paradise accidents happen, mostly to Emma. She injured her wrist again. The other wrist. The first wrist was last Fall (I’m not kidding that it took me 20 minutes and a perusal of my calendar to come up with that approximate date). She’d fallen out of the climbing tree. Because Jack was pestering her to jump.
I’m recalling it because then, as now, I was feeling anxious about needing to post my blog, which I hadn’t written, and, of course, other things kept cropping up. Emma needed extra help with schoolwork. There was the Zoom lesson with the French tutor later that afternoon. And a doctor visit. Ugh. That’s what tipped me off that it was Fall. Emma’s annual physical.
Too often I leave a pediatrician’s office feeling like a contender in the worst-mom contest. I thought we were home free that October day until the doctor said, “anything hurting today?” and Emma said, “No. Well, except for my arm where I fell out of the tree, but it’s mostly fine now.” Oops. So, we talked about that a bit and the doctor said to me, a mild but pointed accusation: “You didn’t think you might need to get an x-ray of that?”
Um, no, that honestly didn’t occur to me. I wrapped it...I put ice on it…I gave her a dose of ibuprofen…Bob’s your uncle.
And, no, I didn’t notice that purple bruising on the bottom of her thumb, other than to assume that it was magic marker, which these day covers many of her extremities.
But…my defensive-self wanted to whine…but did I mention I found a tutor in France and she has lessons twice a week so she doesn’t lose her French during pandemic? That I had to configure an easel so that her piano teacher can see her hands on Zoom? That she’d never used a computer before being issued a Chromebook for virtual school and I can barely even see the words on that tiny screen when I try to help her with her renewable energy science work? That I’m juggling this around my job, my other child, my husband, a major renovation and an estate to settle? Could I just throw in that Emma’s been Hermione Granger all week?
With righteous mom-guilt I wanted to sweep from the examining room saying, “I grew up with two older brothers; people fall out of trees!”
Instead, I went home chastened, and when, a week later, she came inside crying and holding the arm because of a missed football catch, I took her to Urgent Care. The x-ray showed a hairline fracture. She was delighted with her splint. Blue ribbon mom.
This week the injury occurred on a hike. She was holding the dog, who took off after a squirrel and launched her into the bushes. We untied her and the dog, finished the hike up to the lake, and she swam like a fish. The sprain has not impeded blueberry picking.
The bushes are loaded this year. The berries go from spring green to dusty lilac to cloudy sapphire to glossy navy. I start with the best of picking intentions but at first, if I’m honest, it’s just pure gluttony. Eventually I settle into a system, trying to pick all the ripe berries on a single branch before going to the next branch. Branch by branch, bush by bush. But when I step back, I see all the ones I missed. How did I miss them? I pick a handful but when I drop them in the container, the lilacs land on top of the sapphire and navy ones. Aha. Without them on the branch for perspective, the lilac ones look ripe.
My perspective has changed in the past 18 months. How could the experience of living through prolonged uncertainly while remaining responsible for some level of predictability not change me? One thing that I have learned is to try to savor moments, to fix them in my mind with some context clues so that I’ll begin to reestablish a reliable timeline. I’m pretty sure I’ll remember waking up smiling in Massachusetts.
A few Christmases ago when we didn’t all fit in the Montreat house, Mark and I had an Airbnb in Black Mountain. Christmas Eve was a long, full day of family, decorating, cooking, eating, cleaning and trying to fit all those presents under the small artificial tree. We put Jack and Emma to bed with their cousins and left, exhausted, around 11:30 for the Airbnb. It was a short night because we wanted to get back Christmas morning early enough to see whether Santa had come. We weren’t happy about the 6:30 alarm.
The morning was chilly and I was struggling to lock the door in the pale winter sunlight when Mark grumped, “Who keeps yelling Merry Christmas?” I checked to make sure he wasn’t kidding before I said, “Darling, those are roosters.” To his credit, he laughed with me, and when we got to the Montreat house we waked everyone by crowing Merry Christmas! to them.
For me, this week at least, it’s Christmas each new morning.
