Denomination of Daughters

{on a bench outside Jefferson's Monticello}

Susie is my Mother-in Law.  She calls me "Be-fessica,"  or "The Incomparable Jessica."

I can't think what I might have done, or been, or said to earn the latter.

The former came by way of birthing one Jonah, who for lack of a 'j' sound early in life called me Be-fessica, and himself Fwonah.

Susie says I am a daughter to her as much as any of the five she bore herself.  What can I do with this?  What do I say between the space of good fortune and friendship that is mine and hers.  I love her.

I love you.

Susie thanks my Mother for Susie's ability to love me as she does.  This is why - my Mother loved my Dad's mother as only a Ruth loves a Naomi.  All my years of growing up I saw my Mom wash dishes in my Grandma's kitchen.  I watched her laugh with my grandparent's, and talk, and seek advice, and accept help when help was all that would keep our family from glimpsing the edge.

To love the mother of the man you marry is a good plan.   And Susie is right, it was seeing my Mom's love - determined and constant, reaching out beyond herself which planted in me the expectation that when I walked into the Rasmussen home for the first time, I was coming to join, not to divide.

Matt told me early on that his Mother's only advice to him about who to marry was to make sure he chose an orphan.  I am hardly an orphan.  Oh grief, I am a Leavitt - a passel of kin, a parcel of generations that claim me up tight.  And despite that moment of hesitation at the Social Security Office just weeks after we married, I was able to slide out of the name that had cradled me for 23 of my own years and who knows how may hundreds of the years that came before me.  I tried on Rasmussen, filling out the paper and passing it over to the woman at the desk who seemed desensitized to the transformation taking place in front of her.

I am a woman.  I am a Jessica.  She is a Susie.  We both tucked away the name we brought to courtship and wed ourselves to a husband and a name.  Father - Son - Grandson.  Someday Jonah will  offer the same name to another woman, who, like us,  a daughter in her own clan, will find that there is room and to spare under the shelter of this name.

Funny how we women go about trading a name for a name, an identity for an identity.  One might be tempted to think that the moving about and the scramble of families and generations and alphabetical segregation would leave us feeling isolated.  But I don't.  I feel like the jumble of appellations untangles into one metronymic name that lets us be sisters, that lets us love.

ONE YEAR

Someone Who Needs Somewhere

". . . . a song for
        someone who needs somewhere
        to long for . . . ."

If there were ever a light cast across a piece of earth more beautiful than the one on this particular June evening in a little corner of New York state, I have never seen it.

This light came with restoration to our weary souls.
Did we leave our friends without proper goodbyes?
Did we drop tears onto the skinny face of a sick baby?
Did we feel homeless before we ever left home?
Did we drive 2000 miles?

We could answer "yes" honestly, but the whole truth of it would be lost somewhere in the bleakness of the question.

We have friends, we have a baby, we have a home, we are together!
Yes, these patch up the spaces that felt empty in the question.

As lake Ontario laps soothingly at our feet and the sun throws warm, low light across our faces we begin to be happy.

We trust,

In all of it, I see two things.

I see where my Dad is not.  He is not sitting on the bench next to my Mom, with a book in his hand, or a laptop on his lap, or his hand resting softly at the nape of her neck.

I see children who build.  I think Jonah told me they were elves making a shelter because he became ill.     Nowhere to live?  Nowhere to rest when your body is spent?  They pull from the unmade space as we do in time of need.  Here a stone, there a stick, a piece of driftwood drug from the water.  All buttressed against a small rise of earth.  The whole thing a bulwark of youthful ingenuity that protects against element and distress.

It is the blueprint to the weeks ahead.

Just a Place To Lay My Head

Some times, some of us arrive at a place of desperation. Here is a small Cecily, having arrived at that place. What it looks like to her - that desperation - is a wearisome day trailing along behind so many wearisome days with no bed to call her own.

Along came a flood and washed us all away. It swept a small Cecily right out of her crib, right out of her mother's arms who called her "my baby" and rocked her slow, and laid her down with a Boppy and a blanky giving her over to a night of sweet sleep. This flood lapped relentlessly at the bottom of our stairs and the fringes of our sanity until we turned our backs on our dear old red brick friend we now refer to as "1010," which was as true a home as we have ever known.

And so sleep becomes a borrowed thing - putting children's bodies on the floors of loved one's living rooms, and basements, and extra bedrooms. Sleep becomes a thing of thank you to those who open their doors and say "stay as long as you need, and then stay a little longer, because your kids are lovely and we have missed you, and this is what family does, and even because we need the blessings that come with being able to do this little bit for you."

We are nomadic for a spell. Having packed up the movable bits of our life into every corner of a white Toyota Sienna we go East on I-80 looking over our shoulders at the valley full of all the moments of my babies being born and all the driving back and forth to houses full of people we love, and so many warm afternoons with our toes in the cool water of City Creek, or running the brick path through our very own Narnia between Main and State just above North Temple.

We look north, straining to catch the spires of the Temple that is so off center in the sprawling valley and so dead center in the scheme of it all. From those spires it is just a bit to the west and only a few blocks north where, if you are a person who has climbed to the top of Ensign Peak, you will see the green trees lining the streets that take your eyes to the chapel at 8th North and 12th West wherein lies the heart of Rose Park. Wherein lies my heart. But only for that last fleeting moment before Parley's Canyon closes in around us and we live in Salt Lake City no more.

Oh Cheyenne, Lincoln, Chicago, Cincinnati, I admit, I am content to leave your hotels, your Steak and Shake, your Wendy's, your countless gas stations, your badlands and bad breakfasts. I can drive past your many hundreds of miles of corn stalks and not feel the pine of leaving it all behind. I am still raw from parting with Isaiah's blossoming desert. Every mile I have put between myself and the place "at the top of the mountains" makes rosier the lens through which I see it.

Oh Utah, had I the facility of a welsh tongue, I would christen you the source of my own "hiraeth" that weighs heavy in my bosom, like a tether, like an apron string pulled taught and straining inside me.

But straining as they are, these apron strings loosen well enough when finally, after five days of in and out and drive and drive we tumble out into Palmyra's green humid hills, into my sister's house, into my Mother's arms. Ah, I see, home has traveled with us without my even knowing it.

____

July 24th, no coincidental day of pioneering, brought us all the way to a little clearing along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Buena Vista is an afterthought to the places we call towns and cities. At dusk we arrive with just enough light to drive by the new, red brick house that will buttress all our efforts at familial life. It is our refuge, just as soon as we turn it inside out with enough elbow grease to render it Matthew's "bane" no longer. It needs work . . . and love . . . but mostly work with a stern voice and a hand on the hip.

April 7th was the last night I put all my babies in all their beds and felt like a fit mother for offering them stability and peace. 144 nights of musical beds followed, that mostly consisted of a blanket and a pillow on someone's floor. Tonight they lay their heads on their own pillows and sink softly into new mattresses with crisp, clean linens knowing that whether it is Virginia, New York, cursed Wyoming, or blessed Utah, home is in the bosom of their parent's love, which has a surprisingly pliant circumference.

I'm Not a Witch, I'm Your Wife

Maren calls it the WITCHING HOUR.

I have heard Susie call it the ARSENIC HOUR.

Whatever it is, it deserves capitals and it deserves attention. The hour before dinner, the hour at the end of many in the house with small children, the hour after naps, the hour before Dad gets home. The hour we want to quit.

I know the pernicious ticking of these minutes mingled with the cries of all who live here making exhaustive demands for ridiculous unrealistics.

Let's paint the picture:

I am at the sink trying to clean up the kitchen so I can cook something to feed this family of children who will likely refuse the food I put in front of them when finally we sit at the table too late for our own good.

Ewan has been fed but is still crying while he reclines in the swing that mostly just spells a.b.a.n.d.o.n.e.d to him.

" I want a cookie, Mom!"

"No, we are eating dinner in an hour."

"I can't wait that long, I'm hungry."

"You just had a bowl of yogurt and a graham cracker. You can wait for dinner."

"YOU ARE MEAN, MOM"

"Please don't yell, Caroline."

"I want to hold you."

"I can't, Cecily. I need to make dinner."

"I don't want my dinner - it's gross. I want to hold you."

"No Cecily."

"Is that blue fire, Mom?"

"CECILY, get AWAY from the stove."

My yelling is of course only a measure of safety, trying to scare her away from the flame, but it inevitably scares her into whimpering tears and I am forced to hold her while I should be attending to the cooking of whatever is on the stove.

Ewan is screaming by now. Cecily's wounded feelings are unsoothable, Caroline is still begging and accusing me of meanery, while Jonah refuses to clear the table off, stamping back and forth through the kitchen declaring how unfair it is that he cannot go outside to play.

I am crippled, standing in the midst of our mess from breakfast, lunch, lessons, coloring, half hearted attempts at working on Christmas gifts, cutting, paper, glue, dolls, boxes, markers, junk mail, books, candy wrappers, dirty socks, dirty diapers, crackers, cracker crumbs, blankets covered in spit-up, shirts covered in spit-up, damp towels, leaves, math sheets, sticks. I am rendered impotent by the milieu of stuff and the milieu of noise.

And then Matt walks in.

How often he enters this cacophony of trouble when his day at work has ended. How seldom is he met with my smile, dinner, happy children.

Need.

We greet him with need . . . thinking little of the needs he brings with him. His daily salutation as he comes through the door, fairly certain of the scene that awaits him, is "I'm here to help." And help he does. My good husband, gallant knight, swooping in to restore some idea that family is good and we can actually enjoy each other.

As yet, this circadian demise of my good self has not driven me to arsenic. But I would do well to remember when my husband walks through the door that like Billy Crystal's little henchwoman in The Princess Bride, "I'm not a witch, I'm your wife." As witching as the hour may be, as tempted as I may be to lash out at the man who fathered my chaos and leaves me to it each day, I am wife - not witch. His 'leaving me to it' is fulfillment of his duty to provide for us in a way that I could not. We live by the bargain of accepting our roles.

I told Matt the other night that I had figured out why we sleep. God knew that mothers and fathers would need desperately to arrive at the quotidian moment when they could lay the little bodies of their children in their beds and find enough quiet for enough hours to reset their tolerance for the work of parenting.

This is not a diatribe against my children, or my luck to be their mother. It is the truth of it; my weakness, their imperfection, our parallel attempt at being a family.

Life with children is hard and hard and hard, punctuated by moments of pure illumination. So let there be light.

Forefathers and My Father

I know that everyone knows this part by now - the part where I can do almost nothing but sit on my bed. This pregnant body betrays me . . . or is true to me. I can't tell which one. I read recently a woman who at some point in her seventh pregnancy came to this realization; I can grow this baby as long as I don't do anything else. That's how I feel - capable of this thing my body does by itself with no conscious effort from me, but nothing else.

So, to get three kids in the car and go to the Utah Museum of Natural History is, well, a bit ludicrous. But I have a Community Exploration card good through the end of August that grants us free entrance into the Natural History Museum, Discovery Gateway, Red Butte Garden, and the Fine Arts Museum. Never mind that my belly is contracting, my feet swollen, my back tight and aching - we will eek out these free experiences before the baby comes, and before my kids go crazy in the doldrums of summer.

Side note - Discovery Gateway has been permanently removed from my list of worthwhile things to do with the children. Unless the establishment would like to grant us a family night all our own.

Insanity. Times ten. With pigtails and petulance.

"Other people's kids."

That's what Matt always says. As if ours were . . . well they aren't. But we like them best.

On this trip - to the museum, where there are things of actual interest, we listen to music. Jonah and Caroline demand songs from the MP3 as soon as we get in the car.

"Play such and such."

"No, play this one first."

"No, I don't want that one."

"You always pick first."

"I never get a turn."

Until we end up with some Miley Cyrus (I'm embarrassed that this is on the MP3, but there is a reason outside my own music taste, and now that I have an Apple computer, I can't remove it) song, that makes me cringe. Where did they gain such an interest in Top 40, pop, teeny bopper music?

But not always. Sometimes it is Fleet Foxes, Mykonos. Or Sufjan Stevens, Decatur. The Eagles, Waiting in the Weeds. Or Feist, Joni Mitchell, Ingrid Michaelson, Jennifer Warnes, Kings of Convenience, Loreena McKennit, Landon Pigg, Hungry Cloud - music being passed to them intentionally.

Today it is Dan Fogelberg - Forefathers. This is Caroline's choice, taken from the playlist I made in December for my Dad, when I thought he might die, when he wouldn't wake up, when his heart quit working.

A massive heart attack took him from upright to open heart surgery, to unconscious for five days. My Mom and I took turns sitting by his side nearly every hour of each of those days, but he was not be woken peacefully. Like a bear he was, like a lion in a cage, thrashing his big body about such that there was no choice but to keep the sedatives dripping into his blood and his captive consciousness. We felt very tearfully helpless.

Aubrey felt the most helpless being three thousand miles away. In her geographic impotence she offered a suggestion that I think made all the difference. "Take him some music. Just play his favorites for him, soft things that will help subdue his subconscious while they try to wake him up."

I did. Within a few hours I had collected the music that lives in my Dad's soul, the music he would set on the turntable under the alchemy of a needle that would give us song and just a bit of crackle at midnight when we should all have been asleep, but were instead being infused with the stuff that brought musical magic into our home. I put it all on my MP3 player in a playlist titled For Dad.

We played it over and over until Aubrey's prescription lulled him into a kind of dreamy awakening. So many tears for the familiarity of songs that have marked the moments of living for him. Which he seemed then determined to do - live.

Forefathers is the first song on that list. I cannot summarize the poignancy of this song that harbors the foibles of synthesized bagpipes and other sundry sounds of the 80's, but still makes me cry every time I listen to it. The words are a means of bringing me into the center of my familial tapestry. Within it I am placed soundly and happily in all the roles that are the mortar of my identity.

And Caroline says "Mom, this makes me think about Las Vegas."

"How come," I ask.

"Because it sounds like Tickle Grandpa."

"Yes, it does. I have always liked Dan Fogelberg, because I've always thought he sounds like Tickle Grandpa."

And I can see Tickle Grandpa, my Dad, lying in a hospital bed, with a tube down his throat, a machine heaving his mighty chest up - then down - then up, eyelids fluttering from the movement beneath.

I see him sitting up in the same bed, awake, raspy voiced, professing CHANGE on every front. "A mission" he says, "God" and "gospel" woven through all the days that will follow. Professing mistakes and a hushed decree that he will learn to dance - for my Mom - he will learn to dance.

Yes, it sounds like Tickle Grandpa, who is an active forefather, granted time to become so much more to the generations he has borne thus far.

Good choice Caroline.

The Darwin Disconnect

A book review - Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution

The controversy - be there any in the first place - is irrelevant. While reading this book on the plane to England the man sitting next to me asked "Is it for, or against?" "Neither," I responded, "it's a biography."

Randal Keynes is the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin and he deals with the life of his progenitor in an objective, scholarly and warm manner. In an interview with Diane Rehm, Keynes said that he wanted to portray Charles through the lens of family. He achieves this primarily through Darwin's wife Emma, and the death of their ten-year-old daughter, Annie. His devotion to science never eclipsed his supreme devotion to family.

Be you a Christian and a Darwinist naysayer, be sure to develop a keen differentiation between what you have to say about the man's science and what you have to say about the man. Although he spent many years determining that, although he would not deny the existence of a God, he could not subscribe to a belief in Jesus Christ, he was most Christian in character. He had great love for and cared deeply about the welfare of other humans. Outside his work as a scientist and father to ten children he did much to help others help themselves.

Those who are "believers" should not look upon Charles Darwin as an object of wholesale derision. As one of history's most iconic figures Darwin is used as epithet, rude caricature, and source of ill-placed humor. His tender nature was wounded by such treatment, so much so, that he delayed the publication of his "Origin of Species" for years, not wanting to subject himself or his family to the scorn that would surely come.

The natural world fueled his development of intellect. Fatherhood heightened his sense of humanity. Both taught him to see terrestrial beauty in a way most of us cannot conceive. His heart was continually swelled with the beauty of form, relationship, emotion, and filial connection. He cried bitter tears over the death of his daughter Annie. Tears made more bitter by his inability to have faith in a life after the one he knew. Although faith could not offer him comfort, love could, and as father to ten children he certainly had no paucity of love. Charles profoundly appreciated life; whether that life came as gift from a Maker, or as the stunning chance of natural selection.

A Perspective in Ash

Today I wish we had television; Comcast cable with 23 different news channels to surf through. It is the first time I have thought such a thing in the 4 years since we abandoned television altogether.

I'm guessing I'm not the only one who had never heard of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano before last Thursday. In fact, "hear" may be a loose term in regards to this volcano, as I have only heard one person actually try to say the name. I believe it is more commonly known as the "Icelandic Volcano".

I don't mind. American ears, much less tongues, just don't do well with that many oddly chosen consonants.

So there's the ash.

Then theres 96,000 flights canceled over the last five days.

Then there is me, sitting in front of my computer, checking BBC and CNN for updates every couple hours. My eyes sting. My pregnant body wants a soft chair. In short, I want cable news to pour over me while I lay on the couch stressing over

whether or not we will fly to Manchester England on Friday for Matthew to face the grueling ordeal of defending his doctoral dissertation.

There is a proportionate amount of uncertainty swirling about in the ethos, above our technology dependent heads, companion to those millions of tons of ash being spewed by a heretofore unknown fracture in the Earth's crust. Such dense uncertainty leads to chaos in absolutes.

Absolutely no flights.

Absolutely no way home.

Absolutely no idea in anyone's head when things will change.

All this exported from Iceland.

I liked it better when Iceland was mainly exporting woolen goods.

Had I not spent a good deal of money on plane tickets to England for dates so in danger of being terminally affected by all this, I would have the luxury of being a curious, and slightly sympathetic bystander - as I usually am - in regards to most chaos and catastrophe that comes to me by way of NPR - with variations on my level of sympathy. This time my stomach hurts and my head reels from only the potential effect awaiting me...not to mention my poor, doctoral defense bound husband.

My anxiety and "suffering" is a little bit inconsequential at this point. I am a person, in my home, with my family, enjoying a bed, not yet caught in the web over Europe. Except that web is invisibly large. When considering the domino effect of closing Heathrow Airport the web gains some visibility as a thing that consumes the world. The British Empire may have let go their purchase on many a foreign shore in the last century, but you close down London's airports and it is felt in every far corner of the earth.

Yesterday Caroline stood at my side asking questions about the video clips showing stranded people all over Europe and the UK.

"Where is the ash, Mommy? Are you and Dad going to England today? Where is your airport"

I pulled out our Great Britain Road Atlas A-Z, and showed her Manchester, and the parts of England that might be reopened soon. She flipped through the pages stopping on London.

It looks like this:

"Wow," she said, with appropriate awe. Declaring, "That's the world, kiddo."

That's Caroline calling me kiddo, not me talking to the four-year-old.

And she's got it right. London is THE World. It lies at the center of so much civilization and economy - even today.

But as I put Cecily to bed last night and said a prayer that consisted of just this phrase; "Heavenly Father, thank you for my family," I became so profoundly aware that this little house, with these five people (almost six) is MY world. England is a thing that has contributed in no small way to the development of my world. But it is here, with this family that I find I am untouched by any amount of uncertainty...or ash.