Awake.

I was unable to stay awake until the first returns started coming in. I slept. And woke to a new day.

Dizzy, giddy

I woke up yesterday feeling strange, cloudy-headed and dizzy. On and off a sudden sensation of light-headedness would wash over me then disappear; it was like a tingling wave rolling through my head; it seemed as if perhaps I might faint, but I never did; they came out of nowhere, repeatedly. It could be a mild case of vertigo- I’ve had it once before, so seriously that it actualy woke me out of a sound horizontal sleep with the sensation of spinning spinning spinning and needing to throw up. That time, about two years ago, I could hardly move; we called a doctor in the middle of the night who did a house-call - at 5 in the morning! oh Switzerland how I love you! - and diagnosed me. Then, as now, I had a baby in the house. That last time it was so serious that I simply could not trust myself to pick up the Small Boy even for a diaper change - we called an organization that provides emergency short-notice in-home help for families with sick parents or sick children (for a fee, of course).

This time around I do not feel nearly as bad but again there is a baby in the house and this time around a flight of stairs as well; again we took the route of better safe than sorry and called for some help. Small Boy is off at the grandparents (oh grandparents, how I love you!), but they’re not in a positoin to take care of both boys all day so The Boychen is at home with me and the home-help aide, D. It is strange staying upstairs trying to rest while I hear Boychen downstairs. But I do have to stay upstairs. First to rest - I’m going to the doctor later today, the same doctor who diagnosed me last time around and who has more-or-less become our Hausarzt (GP), to see what he thinks  - and second because if I go down there and Boychen sees me he will not let D do anything, will not allow himself to be distracted by her and won’t play with her and then it is just pointless for her to be here. So I’ve taken advantage of the day by doing market research and finding a few places to send a few poems.

Whenever I find a promising market, when I send something out, I feel light and giddy with the possibility of it all. Or maybe it’s just the vertigo.

Hockey Mama

I grew up around ice hockey, grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago skating on outdoor rinks back in the day when winter was winter. My father was president of the hockey association; my mother was variously treasurer and secretary. Later my father coached the high school team and also a young adult league. My older brother played hockey from the time he was five or six until he left for college; after college he played in an adult league and coached high school hockey for a few years. Ever the little sister, I played hockey myself for a season, but this was back before a lot of girls played hockey and I was the only girl my age in the league. Not on my team - in the entire suburban league I played in. There was another girl two years older than me, her name was Annie, but in my age group I was it.  After one year of having to stand alone in the hallway while the boys changed in the locker room, of getting checked and knocked down because girls don’t play hockey, I retreated to the stands and the occasional stint in the scorer’s box. But I grew up around hockey.

My mother was a hockey mom. She went to every single hockey game my brother played in for a dozen years. She drove him to practice and car-pooled his teammates and served early dinners and reheated leftovers so that everybody got to eat. She kept his skates sharpened and his equipment aired out and always knew where the hockey tape was. She huddled in warming houses with the other hockey moms and drank cup after cup of bad vending machine coffee. She stepped in as time-keeper and score-keeper when somebody went missing in action and she was the unofficial record-keeper for every team my brother ever played on, keeping track of minutes played and goals for and against and goals and assists and penalty minutes for entire teams of exuberant boys. She cheered and yelled and taught me the phrase “cherry-picking.” She was a hockey mom extraordinaire at a time when nobody cared about the hockey moms.

Since the day Small Boy put on skates last winter and I guided him around the rink by holding his hands as I skated backwards, I’ve been looking forward to this winter, to this year when he would become old enough to start the hockey camp, to being a hockey mom. Hockey school started on Saturday, so I am officially a hockey mom, at last, and I cannot begin to tell you how annoyed - irritated and angry and cheated - I feel to become a hockey mom at a time when the phrase “hockey mom” is associated with someone with whom I have no desire whatsoever to be associated. So please forgive this brief forray into American politics, but I’m feeling the need to reclaim the phrase “hockey mom.”

I like cities. (Most NHL teams, by the way, are found in cities, as are most theatres and opera houses and ballet companies and baseball teams. It just kind of works out that way.) They are vibrant and exciting and give people opportunities to follow their dreams. I like small towns. They allow people to connect more deeply with each other and to look closely into the fabric of their own lives and dreams. I like that I can decide which one fits me better. I am a hockey mom.

I live at the foot of the Swiss Alps and yet I think Yellowstone National Park is the most beautiful place in the world. I believe that geography does not define love of country. I am a hockey mom.

I believe that a blistering slapshot from the point is the most beautiful thing in sports. I am a hockey mom.

I have enough faith in women to allow them to make the most personal decisions about their lives without paternalist outside interference from people who know nothing about them or their circumstances. I am a hockey mom.

I believe that starting a family through in-vitro fertilization is as special as starting a family through sex and I believe that the children of in-vitro fertilization are magical. I believe that the decision to seek fertility treatment is a decision a couple can only make for themselves and I believe that treatment should be available. I am a hockey mom.

I believe that embryonic stem-cell research has enormous potential and that couples who undergo in-vitro should be able to donate embryos to research if they so desire. I am a hockey mom.

I believe that reasoned disagreement is the engine of democracy and that reasonable people can disagree reasonably. The operative word is reasonable. I am a hockey mom.

I believe that the overwhelming majority of global warming is the result of human activity and I believe that the majority of statistical findings support this belief. I am a hockey mom.

I believe in the scientific method and that science is a method, not a subject. I am a hockey mom.

I believe that Wayne Gretzky played a type of hockey that the rest of us could only dream of. I am a hockey mom. 

I believe that wild places like ANWR matter. They matter simply because of what they are, not because of what they can give us. ANWR isn’t about the energy we could harness. Places like ANWR, places like Yellowstone National Park and Grand Canyon National Park and the great network of American parks, are about setting aside something rare and wonderful and preserving it simply because it is rare and wonderful. It is about knowing that there is still something wild and mysterious left in the world. Wild places matter. They matter because they inspire us and teach us. They make us whole. They heal our wounds. They let us dream. They call us to glory and if we listen they teach us the liberating magic of being wholly who and what we are in that moment. They show us, however briefly, a world outside of ourselves. I am a hockey mom.

I believe that while one of us is oppressed none of us is free. I am a hockey mom.

I believe that the world - that new things, new people, new places - can only be approached with an open mind and an open heart. I am a hockey mom.

The word “cosmopolitan” is not derogatory. I am a hockey mom.

I believe that knowledge matters, that facts matter, that expertise matters, that “elite” means highly skilled and that highly skilled people are not, by definition, bad people. I am a hockey mom.

I believe that I am but one of many, that our diversity is our strength, that the sum is greater than the whole of the parts, that we stand together or fall alone, that an open hand is more powerful than a closed fist, that generosity is strength, that I am less when you are suffering and that I am strengthened by your joy, and that greatness cannot exist in isolation, for even Wayne Gretzky needed a team to play on. I am a hockey mom.

I voted for Barack Obama and I am a hockey mom.

I remember this

The yoga is getting better. I still do not feel long and luxurious, cat-like, but my movements are more fluid and my stretches are getting longer and deeper. My spine, a stiff trouble spot since Little Boy C was born, feels more supple. I am bending more like a willow and less like a pine tree and it feels good. I flow through my sun salutations, gradually adding repetitions every few mornings. It feels good. It feels familiar. It feels like something my body remembers, something my body has missed. Yes, my body says as I deepen a pose, I remember this.

Alone

I spent the weekend in Gstaad in the Bernese Oberland. We drove up as a family on Saturday morning, had lunch, played at a playground, went on a short walk, and then my husband drove back down with the boys and I stayed the night and returned home in time for dinner Sunday.

I didn’t do anything. I didn’t go on a hike, or a walk, or even ride the gondola to the foothills above the village to gain a “stunning view of the Alps.” I actually said to myself, I see a panorama of the Alps every day I don’t really need to do that. Can you believe it? The Swiss Alps, yeah, whatever. Instead I moved from one cafe to another, working my way up the main shopping street of the village one latte machiatto at a time. I didn’t write anything, or revise a poem, or do a few of the things I had brought along with me that needed to be done. I had my camera with me but once the boys left I stopped taking pictures. I simply sat and watched the people go by, drank my coffee and ate my apple strudle and now and then half-heartedly read the book I had brought with me.

It was all I wanted to do, all I had the energy to do. Introverts, I sometimes think, should not have children. Their very presence, after a while, becomes exhausting. Little Boy A is attached to me in the extreme; I call him my Velcro Baby. The touching, after a while, becomes exhausting. And the noise. Oh the noise noise noise noise! It’s like Who-ville on Christmas morning with me in the role of the Grinch before his heart grew two sizes. I long for stillness and quiet and solitude. Time to just sit there and not be touched. To read four sentences in a row without being interupted. To spend an hour without the constant soundtrack of firetrucks (”doo DAH da da! doo DAH da da!”) in the background; and foreground. It is the greatest challenge of parenthood for me, the absolute constancy of it all.

So I fled for twenty-four hours to the Bernese Oberland, those green Alpine valleys with the stereotypical Swiss challet houses, their windows and balconies bedecked with vermillion geraniums. The sky was pristine blue, not a cloud to be seen. Farmers were out cutting hay, those stubborn traditional Swiss famers whose cows and sheep and hay-cutting make the low mountains of the Bernese Oberland so beautiful, so traditional, so Swiss. And I sat there, drinking my lattes alone, storing up the silence, the solitude, the sheer self-indulgence of it all, sometimes watching the tourists with their high-end shopping bags (Gstaad is a high-end sort of place, not the sort of place we usually go) sometimes positioning my chair for a view of the Voralpen, the foot-hills, with their pastures and challets and lines of sage-colored cut hay drying in the sun.

There wasn’t a thing in the world I wanted to be doing besides just sitting there, alone, blessedly, brieflly, alone.

Wimbledon then and now

So twenty-seven years ago I was sitting on the couch watching Wimbledon, watching a new generation take down the five-time champion. It’s right there in my journal, in my child’s hand. And here I sit on the couch tonight watching the fifth set of Wimbldon as Nadal tries to snap Federer’s five-match winning streak.

I can see my child-self waking up early - six time zones away from London, that match was in the Chicago morning - going downstairs alone, having “breakfast with Wimbledon” in the living room. I probably had a waffle and a glass of orange juice; since my parents would have still been asleep, at least in the beginning of the match, I probably snuck my breakfast into the living room and ate sitting at the low coffee-table and cleared my dishes during a break between games. I probably had a school-girl crush on Borg; I probably didn’t appreciate the quality of the tennis in the least. I did know enough to know something historic had happened - I can’t imagine another tennis match that would have made it into my journal.

Here I am watching Wimbledon again. All these years later I still hold on to my childish faith in the magic of sport. All these years later I still believe in the power of sport to lead us to our best selves. I still believe that winning with humility, losing with grace, and pushing ourselves beyond our limits along the way are among the finest of human traits, and I still think athletic endeavor can teach us those lessons like nothing else.

All these years later, I still think that at 2 sets apiece, 5 games all, 40-40 a person finds out who she really is.

Sowing poems

Last night I booted up the computer, stared at the screen, and shut it right back down. These foggy-mind days of sleep deprivation drain me; after the boys have gone to bed I am too tired to think clearly, to do anything deliberately, but when I try to go to bed my mind is frantically finishing off all the half-finished thoughts of the day. I try to capture them but they flutter faster than hummingbird wings - I can hear them whirring and see the blur of their existence but I cannot isolate an individual thought. I stare at the blank screen. I stare at the blank journal page. I hover over a poem that needs editing, pen in hand, but the words swim on the page and I cannot bring the presence of mind necessary for the deliberate work of revision. I have many many first drafts, practice poems, nice lines that need the deliberate work of revision but my mind balks from the task.

I know C will not wake up three times a night forever. I know it is just because he rolls onto his front and cannot roll back over - and the knowing of this keeps me awake, too, peeking into his crib constantly to make sure he is not trapped on his stomach slowly suffocating, the knowing of this keeps the sleep I do get light and troubled with a part of my mother-brain always listening for a cry of trouble. I know A will settle into his new big-boy bed and stop calling for Dada in the night - he wants Dada in the middle of the night, not me, but the call, of course, wakes me as well. I know this will pass and that I should simply accept this time for what it is: the time of my baby’s babyhood. A time to take advantage of the way sleep deprivation can, in fact, allow me to access sudden strange places of creativity. Maybe this is my season of drafts. It is spring, after all, here in this farming region. The time of planting. Maybe I should take a deep breath, learn from my farming in-laws. Sow now, reap later.

Family lost, family found

I grew up not knowing much about my extended family. My paternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother died before I was born. My maternal grandfather died shortly after I turned four. I have a few memories of him, the sort of memories a three-year old would have: brief flashes, an image of a living room, a face - memories reinforced by photographs so that it is hard to be certain if they are truly my memories at all. My paternal grandmother moved across the country when I was eight, perhaps younger. There were short visits after that - she and my mother did not get along - and she died when I was fourteen. One set of cousins was a dozen states away; another set - my mother’s brother - lived nearby and we used to get together when I was young but for some reason contact ended abruptly. I imagine some sort of falling out between my mother and uncle, but I don’t really know.

But beyond these deaths and absences, these fallings-out and strained relationships, it was the general atmosphere of silence and secrets in my house that kept me from knowing my family. We were not a family of stories, we were not a family of family histories. That’s not uncommon in an alcoholic household. My mother did not like telling stories - at least, she did not like telling stories she could not control; she did not like revealing information that she, for whatever reason, deemed dangerous - and I quickly learned not to ask questions. It was a good survival technique for a young girl, but I regret it now.

I do not know how my parents met. I do not know why they waited so long to have children. I do not know my maternal grandmother’s maiden name and I’m not entirely sure how she died. I don’t know when her family arrived in the US. I don’t know how she and my grandfather met. I don’t know if she had siblings. I don’t know what any of my cousins - those four children of my mother’s brother with whom I used to play - are doing today or where they are living or if they have children of their own. I do know that my maternal grandfather was Swedish, but I do not know where his family came from or when they emigrated to the US, or why. And with both my parents dead there is nobody to ask even if I belonged to the kind of family that talked about this sort of thing.

After my parents died and before I married I often felt rootless. There’s a line from a Shawn Colvin song, “I’ve given nobody life, I am nobody’s wife, and I seem to be nobody’s daughter” that sums up how I felt for many years. I had no family history to connect me to the past, and I had no offspring to drive me into the future. Even after I married, married into a Swiss family that could trace its family tree back about 400 years, I felt like a jigsaw puzzle piece that had fallen out of the box. When my first son was born, my family, my blood family, suddenly had two generations. A doubling of my connections, but still my history was a blurry mystery.

Until Sunday.

Sunday, out of curiosity, I googled my maternal grandfather. He was quite an amateur photographer in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s; I have some prints of his that still bear the ribbons they were awarded in local showings. I was looking through family snapshots. I got curious and typed in his name. The first result that popped up was a link to a family tree website hosted by somebody with my maternal grandfather’s last name. I clicked through to the site, and it appears that his father and my grandfather were brothers - my grandfather had four siblings who lived to adulthood. I had only known about one. I spent the afternoon looking through his family tree; there is information there that matches what I know; many of the sources he used to verify his findings are foot-noted. I have a feeling that it’s reliable.

It traces the Swedish branch of my family back to before 1730. I have gone from rootless to seven Swedish generations in the blink of an eye. And that’s just my grandfather’s paternal line. I haven’t even begun to dig around his maternal line. There are people out there with my grandfather’s name, with my blood, with my son’s funny ears and high smooth forehead. There are people out there, my people. I have people.

My how I love the internet.

That’s me running around on the field

I love this line from Trish: “Emerging writers are just seven year old kids, playing their hearts out and hoping that someone on the sideline thinks they’ve got potential.” That’s where I am with my poetry right now: full of the enthusiasm of a seven year kid (and perhaps sometimes turning a phrase as clumsily as one) just playing the game. There are days when I believe I am talented. There are days when I’m full of doubt. But mostly, these days, I’m running around kicking words like a ball and laughing to see which direction they fly off in. I’m having fun; even the work of revision is fun. In fact, the work of revision is often more fun than the rush of the first draft. Honing, fine-tuning, molding something raw into something with form and shape and purpose. Finding just the right word and putting it in just the right place. For now this is enough, knowing that I enjoy this.

I want more. I’ve got plans for more. I’m working towards more. But I also want to enjoy running around barefoot on the cool grass kicking balls with all the passion only a seven year old can muster.

1 for sorrow, 2 for joy…

 A crow visits our backyard, our postage stamp of a backyard here in this urban neighborhood, almost daily. It swoops down from the same direction every time - from the east - and lands at the back of the yard by the vine-covered brick wall that divides our piece of green from the apartments behind us. We make up a nice little green patch, the six little city gardens of our apartment building and the grassy stretch attached to the apartments behind us. Several large trees, the wall to perch on, the hedges. It attracts the sparrows, a motley crew of song birds, and this crow.

Last Thursday while I was drinking a coffee on a balcony that overlooks an open-air market a glossy black crow landed on the railing a foot from my elbow. Its claws clicked as it grasped the railing and it gleamed in the sun. He - was it a he? how does one tell? - tilted his head this way and that as he inspected my table; finding nothing to eat he inched his way down the railing to the next table, then the next. He flew the brief distance back to the spot at my elbow, I met his gaze - glossy black eyes in his glossy black head - and then he soared away over the market.

I’ve always loved crows, those collectors of the shiny, those companions of the wolves. These visitations feel like a blessing, like a message from my totem, like a guide to the way forward.