We Are All Living History

So, yesterday, I was teaching boichik his tunnel stops (Westlake is the monorail, University is Hammering Man...). 
 An Asian American student who was pure effervescence overheard us and launched our section into a rollicking conversation about the public transit experiences no one talks about. (Like when the person sitting next to you has fallen asleep, and you don't know if letting them stay asleep it is the best thing you could possibly do, or if they are going to be totally screwed by missing their stop if you don't do something…)
Then I said to boichik, "And International District means-"
And he said, "Mochi! Mochi!"
And I said, "Daifuku mochi!"
And he said, "Daifuku mochi!"
And our bubbling student *squealed*, "Daifuku mochi! You have made me homesick! I grew up with my grandmother making daifuku mochi for me!"
And as we pulled into the station, she added, "They lived right here-- before the internment camp."

-------

Being a citizen is like... it is like being born into a collective body. And to live well in that body, you need to know its triumphs and its injuries, what it has overcome and what it is struggling with.

You have to know what you are a part of now, and what is a part of you-- the monorail, Hammering Man, daifuku mochi, the internment camps.

It's not trivia. It's a difference in consciousness. And differences in consciousness are what make differences in conscience.

Maggot-Slug

OK, we have hit our first real snag with the "go ahead and let our home go to hell while staying away and healing" plan.

Maggot-slug.

Because hell hath abundant insect life.

Horrified Child: "How did this happen?!?"
Calm Adult: "This is just a normal part of life."
Tweaking Adult: "Not in clean homes, it isn't!"
Calm Adult [wisely switching horses midstream]: "And that's why we all need to work together to keep things clean."

Calm Adult: "Now that you've pointed it out, how about leaving it there and I'll see if I can figure out a way to deal with it sometime later?"
Tweaking Adult: "... That is so not even an option."

Calm Adult [leaning in the kitchen doorway]: "So, how has the rest of your day gone?"
Tweaking Adult [in the middle of dealing with maggot-slug]: "This is not the time."
[Sixty seconds later]
Child: "Could you please-?"
Calm Adult: "Learn from my mistakes, son. Don't go in there right now."
Tweaking Adult [scrubbing frantically]: "Maggot-slug! Not the time!"

Epilogue:
Calm Adult: "So, what do you think it was feeding on?"
Still-tweaking Adult: "NEGLECT."

Tendrils

Tendrils.

Last week a friend came over to help me with meal-planning... a conversation that I expected to be all about more affordable, healthier, easier one-pot dinners, because I don't even think about things like breakfast. My friend gently pointed out that not thinking about breakfast is a sure way to keep one's self stuck in a state of not-thinking.

"Look," my friend said, opening my fridge, "You have cottage cheese, you have yogurt, you have good protein options here. What's stopping you from eating them?"

"I can't eat those," my brain replied, "I have to save those for my husband and son to eat if and when I get too tired to fix anything."

I stood there like a deer in the headlights, frozen with horror at my own thoughts. Three years of one of the best women's studies programs in the country, and I've been unconsciously "saving the good food for the menfolk"?

Later the same day, I realized that part of the reason I have not been making progress on Jewish liturgy (which is sung) is because I have stopped singing the songs I grew up singing, because they weren't Jewish. I have come through multiple health problems that have left me badly short of breath, and when I can sing at all I push myself for "progress"-- working on my singing while working on my Hebrew while working on my prayer life. This means I'm not rebuilding my breath and tone by drawing on the songs that go down to my bones... which is part of why I'm getting nowhere.

Today I woke up and fully recognized that one barrier to my productivity is that I have so few clothes, I need to change out of my street-worthy outfits as soon as I come home. Any little thing that requires stepping out the door also requires getting dressed.

I once watched my friend discover a place where a neighbor's morning glory vine was invading the vegetable trellis. Tendril after tendril had to be discovered and painstakingly unthreaded without damaging the fruitful vine. It would seem as though all was done and then another one would be spotted, and working on it would reveal another three...

The shift between a "Thrive" mindset and a "Survive" mindset is like that. Inspirational speakers talk about it like flipping a switch. It doesn't work that way. There are so many sacrifices that had to be made in the moment that became habits that have become invisible, like a rubber band that was popped around the wrist for a moment that has cut its way down to disappear beneath the surface of the skin. Like a hundred rubber bands all over, too many to even find them by the pain.

There is no switch to flip. Each needs to be discovered. Each needs to be unthreaded.

I'm trying for "Eat Pray Love" but I'm managing "Slurp Poop Bus".

Last Monday was a snow day, and today there were wild daisies growing by boichik's preschool.

Snowmale

Made my second-ever snowman!

Sort of.

Okay, so actually that one time it snowed an inch and a half in the desert when I was five it was pretty much my father who through superhuman effort cleared the entire apartment lawn to make me a foot and a half tall snowman.

I have no actual snow-packing experience.

Today it became very clear very quickly that I have no idea how to make big round anything.

I tried to just mound it up but the snow kept falling away at the sides so I concentrated on packing it tight around the remaining core.

I ended up with a kind of wonky column that I did manage to get as tall as boichick.

Then it was time to make a face and with all the effort it took him to get one leaf-eye fixed in place he decided that was good enough.

So basically we've got this yard-high erect firm one-eyed snow- um, ahem.

Not posting a picture.

Some folks are at work today.

Apparently there's a key developmental transition between when your child is two and four when you go from seeing something good to eat and thinking where's my child to enjoy this to seeing something good to eat and thinking where's my child okay the coast is clear.

Parent Suggested, Four Year Old Approved

"I have built an army of robots!"
"Oh! What are they doing?"
"They are attacking people!"
"Quick, go get your knights to defend the people!"
"Good idea!"

Welp.  Looks like we have a game plan for the day.

Had the grace of a ride home today from Hashana Rabbah services, so proud of my little guy who made it through the whole multi-hour liturgical maze that we use to set the final seal on our Season of Repentance. Absolutely endless circular marching to the refrain of hoshia na, save us, please!; the strongest people among us exhausting themselves standing straight with the weight of the Sefer Torah in their arms; the final laughing cathartic thwacking of the fragile willow branches that we have tended so carefully this past week, whacking them until all their leaves fall off (let it go), all culminating in this tremendous feeling of closure, of having done all that could be done. And then the grace of a pleasant ride and a rare chance to catch up with a friend, instead of the always weary and lonely wait for the bus. Then we, my boy of joy and I, are walking in the sunshine on our own turf, past the piles of red leaves our neighbor has cleared from the sidewalk. I see that the police had the mercy to leave the orange car in place when they arrested its homeless owner last night, and I am filled with gratitude on behalf of the two other men who take turns sleeping in the car, and hope on behalf of its owner who now stands a chance of being released released and able to reclaim his one lifeline before it is impounded and gone forever.

As we walk past the car I see the man currently sheltering in it with his sleeve pulled up and rolled tight thwacking the inner skin of his arm trying to raise a vein. And the whole world of desperate people dying by inches with no chance at all of getting what they need crashing down on me.

HOSHIA NA! HOSHIA NA!

And So It Begins

Today is boichik's first day of preschool, which is to say his first *full* day of school, as well as the first time he is spending any real length of time away from me that is not with kith and kin, and it should be mentioned that the times he has ever spent any real length of time away from me at all can still be counted on the fingers of one hand.

In other words, first day of preschool today should have been its own priority, all by itself.

Except, the synagogue and morning services are directly on the route to preschool, and for five years, I have been trying to get back into morning services. Keeping up with morning services while getting my degree was a top priority for me, and it did not happen.  Bringing my son to morning services and having him grow up hearing the prayers was a top priority for me, and it did not happen.  Morning services have been the single biggest missing chunk of my pot-holed life, because there simply has not been reliable transportation and money for it, and now-- 
morning services are directly on the route to preschool.

So, Priority #2 becomes to make my son's first day at preschool our first day in the saddle as morning minyanaires.

But, wait, that's not all!  Because there is still the small matter of reliable transportation and the money for it-- i.e., discovering how close to their printed schedules the buses actually run in reality and whether a single disabled fare will, in fact, get us from home to the shul, from the shul to the preschool, and then me back home again, or whether I'll be paying twice.  And since we do not actually have the money for me to pay two fares a day-- one to drop him off and one to pick him up-- we are going to be in a lot of trouble if it turns out I have to pay three fares a day.

Thus leading to Priority #3: find out whether it is at all possible to pull off this double-barrelled morning run on a single fare.

It was raining at dawn.  Not the hammering rain so rare here, but the kind of steadily soaking rain that Seattle tends to reserve for darkness.  My sleepy son went into his school-clothes like a kitten getting dressed up, all limp weight and awkward joints, and managed to sit up long enough for teeth-brushing, but was too cold to move quickly enough for us to catch the first bus of my choice.  We ended up at synagogue in time for the Amidah, and I set him up beside me blearily munching a banana and watching me wrap my poor battered tefillin.  Right before the Amidah is not the best time to step into service with a very little boy who has been promised services as the new time for the long cuddly cuddles with Eema that have been the central feature of his waking hours up 'til now, but he coped.  He coped spectacularly, passing out on my chest as the Torah service approached, raising his head briefly for a long, solemn look at the scroll itself during the aliyah I wanted so badly for myself for this parental rite of passage.  The service was everything I could have wished for, a solid minyan trickling in, the usual meshugas over unprepared volunteers juggling the necessary rites and roles, friendly faces with familiar names all around.  Oh, the things I could tell you, my son, if you were awake.  Did you see it's Uncle R leading services?  D who is chanting Torah for us came to our house to hold you in her arms when you were only a few days old. You don't know the tall man beside us at the bimah, but I do because I met him when my grandfather died and he came to me when I was in shiva.  Lift your head again now-- look-- M is lifting the Torah up!  That is M who sat next to us just this past Shabbat dinner, as we celebrated together, and oh, someday, b'ezrat HaShem, may you lift the Torah just like that.

Then we are outside, in the exquisite color and freshness that is Seattle's morning face, waiting at the mercy of Metro with half a dozen other riders smiling without seeming to be aware of it.  And of course the bux takes forever to arrive, of course it stops at every single stop, of course he keeps sleeping, a dead weight into my numbing arms, and of course my eyes crossed staring at the passing minutes wondering if we were actually going to be on time our first day after all.  Then there's the beautiful young redhead asking the bus driver for the right stop for the rail downtown, the bouncing school boy at her side who must be her little brother, but he isn't, he's her boy, he has an appointment downtown and she doesn't know the way or any of the routes because they are all here from Alaska because her tiny baby girl is in the hospital here and they're all going to be here a long time now so they have to start learning.  

We get off the bus with her, a crowd of us, kind of like a minyan, half having heard the story and walking with her intentionally.  Boichik and I have another route.  His head is up as we hit the open air and I have time to point out the fountain shouting its joy to the sky, the same fountain that I ran to see as a freshman on this campus, over twenty years ago.  I tell him the mountain isn't out today and he demands to know why, and I tell him it's hiding.  I think again of the joke I keep making, that today is my son's first day at university, and I carry him through the wonder of the deeply wooded path by the Forestry Department.

I cannot carry him any longer by the time we reach the hospital.  His preschool is in the human development research center, right behind the main building, but we must move at the speed of very little legs all the way around the perimeter of the great hospital, under the broad bridge to the surgery pavilion, down past the construction, down the flights of steps and at last in past the lobby where we are greeted by name by the miracle worker at the front desk.  Here's your own cubby with your own name, your own teacher, look at the kiddie toilets, look at the kiddie sinks, and here I thought I would be signing you in but instead you are handed a sheet with your own short name printed on it and a crayon and asked to follow the lines and by the third letter you are actually making an effort to do so.  Then it's time for hugs and kisses, and I'm gone.

Another mother was beside me in the hall, double-checking and triple-checking the pick-up time.  Her child, like mine, will be here all day, and this means that she is in the low-income program.  The city council mandated that reserved low-income slots will all be fulltime slots, trying to keep the same families from having to "double-dip" into separate preschool and daycare funds.  As much as I understand the logistical need from the civic point of view, for me, as for the many parents and grandparents who are unable to work because of disabilities and language barriers, the mandatory all-day preschool for our low income children feels like a punishment.  It feels as though a choice has been made that, because we are poor, because we are unable to work, the less time our child spends in our home, the better.
And the reason that hurts so much is because some days, I think that, too.

The other mother and I caught each other's eyes as we turn our heads to both glance into the observation room.  Because this is a research preschool, the big mirror along one side is a window through which graduate students will learn while watching our children play. Parents are also welcome to come and watch, and learn about their own children as independent persons.  The little room is crowded now with morning drop-off parents drinking in the sight of their little ones playing with one another, the little ones they will be reunited with in a little while at lunch time.  Will my boichik be sad or frightened when family members come to collect his playmates and he is one of the few left behind?  "Work," whispered the other mother as she turns away, and I have to hightail it back to the bus, Priority #3.  We who will not have our children in our arms again for hours also do not have the freedom to watch through the mirror and reassure ourselves: time is money, and we have neither.

I made my way out through a scattered influx of running parents half-dangling small children as they descend from every direction except the most obvious one that is blocked by construction.  I knew that someday I would need to take the time, and money, to explore all the possible walkways, but that day could not be today, as I was trying to get home on the same dollar.  I took the route closest to the line the crow flies, and attempted to cut straight through the hospital.  That is to say, I entered the labyrinth.  One would think that with as much time as I have spent in that hospital, I would have either learned my way about or learned better, but neither is the case.  It is amazing how quickly one can become disoriented in an interior without windows, or passages of equal size, and as I came across landmarks that showed I was direly off-track my ambitions dropped from reaching the front lobby to simply seeing sky as soon as possible.  

Outside, everything was familiar again, Alice back up from the rabbit hole, and I was able to cross the street in time to catch the bus right on time.

Which charged me another dollar.

Okay, then.  On to Plan B.

Just another day

The playground is for families of color; the pea patch is for childless white women.  It's not an official rule, not posted anywhere, it's the reality called "social segregation", and I think of it every time we go to the low income playground and pea patch.

I think of it today, as I have tottered out holding my three year old's hand for balance.  I am still in recovery from the food poisoning that has had me on my back for two days and kept him trapped in our apartment.

The other children from two or three families are fresh from some profoundly special occasion; they are in satin and chiffon, embroidery and sequins.  I managed to get my son in a bath this morning, but the co-ordination it takes to untangle his long hair is days away.  He shuffles past in football-shaped slippers he picked out when I told him he had to choose footwear that he could put on himself because I did not have the balance to bend.  His ragged clumped hair looks exactly like that of the classmate I had in first grade, who used to grin and shrug as our teacher would publicly rail at her for her unkempt state.  I am sharply, painfully aware of how my neighbors-- multi-generational poor blacks, immigrants, outright refugees-- do not think of allowing their children to step outside in less than immaculate condition, lest they be judged.   I am more embarrassed than I can say.

My son watches wide-eyed as an older girl turns flips on the rings, her hijab magically falling into perfect position as she comes upright each time.  My son clambers on to the teeter-totter with her younger sister; she plays with him until she realizes he is a "him".  The girls swarm around to stare in my son's face; he has a girl's skin, a girl's eyebrows, they tell me, seeking to rationalize the irrational cultural lens in which they have interpreted all he does as feminine.  They scatter and fly to process their experience, and my boy is left alone on the teeter-totter.  "Why did it stop working?" he wonders out loud.  Like so much of life, it takes someone to do it with you.

The baby of the bunch has stumbled trying to follow her sisters up the slide.  She wails.  They run to her and their faces turn to me.  Suddenly I am not the stranger, I am merely the nearest mother.  "She's bleeding, do you have a tissue?"
"I have a skirt," I say simply, and drop to my knees in their midst.  The baby stares at me uncertainly but does not move away as I wipe her chin with the hem of the red-brown dress that has hidden stains for ten years now.  A barely-split lip, I think, the bleeding has already stopped.  "Smile for us," I ask her, to check the damage, and she shows a thin slice of teeth and toddles off to play more, content that she was hurt and a grown-up came to fix things.

That's what grown-ups are for.

My belly hangs like a ripe fig now.

My belly hangs like a ripe fig now, the same distended belly I have seen in other mothers, mother women at my synagogue, mother cats long after the litter is gone, mother dogs with their dugs almost dragging.  I finally have official permission to exercise after a long string of tests for my pains, and I plan out planking and crunches, pluck hairs for the first time, and wonder if starting to wear make-up at my right age might improve my credibility as a speaker and advocate... and at the same time wonder what it would be to love this fig-body the way I love figs, why I would ever want to erase the evidence of my maternity.

This is, after all, what I was born to do-- not all that I was born to do, but a proud and primal part.  There are generations on generations of mammalian mother love written in the figgy flop of my body.

I am stronger again, on this wild see-saw.  This winter I lost my breath, and with it, my ability to carry a child who loved the world from my arms.  The steroids forced us to finish weaning. I have come to realize that profoundly changed our relationship because the nightly nursing was the only time my son could count on me to stop doing and simply be with him.  Now months later I am strong enough and stable enough for him to ask to be carried just to be closer to me.  How long before the curve of my strength and the curve of his weight cross lines and part us again?  Up and down, closer and farther, growing up and growing old all the time.

I love figs.

I love figs.  I love them like the smell of a newborn baby.  I love their gravid weight, I love the way they become unabashedly vulnerable in their moment of ripeness.  I love the way figs open up to reveal a world of alien sweet tendrils, I love the wonderful shapelessness of their crushability, the way my little son, wide eyed, can pull the open purpley wonder of a fig into the impossible smallness of his mouth with the fluid possibility of a sea creature vanishing into a cave.

I love that my mother asked my father to plant a fig tree, as he recovered from the heart attack, so that every year the tree grew bigger and stronger she could see in it the life they had that they could so easily have missed.  I love that this tropical tree growing way up in the northwest in the fourth corner of the country where it has no business produces enormous, succulent figs.  I love that I never knew my mother loved figs, and loved the same figs I love best, the new leaf green figs as purple inside as a flower, until she asked for the tree.  I love that my son has been watching us devour figs all week and has refused to have anything so suspiciously green enter his mouth until the last hour of the last day of this visit, when he asked for one last walk outside and then devoured one, two, three side by side with me.  I love that there are figs that were unripe this morning, unripe at midday, unripe when my father made his rounds and when the neighbors came to pick, that are ripe now in the last hour after sunset for my small son to discover again what he learned last year, and the year before that-- figs are good.

Months in Planning

Today was months in planning.  Little Guy adored his two previous trips to Pike Place Market.  It seems like forever I've been jockeying to get us a full day there and Big Guy a full day to attack the hoard without us underfoot-- but the cold hard fact is it is $5 in busing for fun and everything else comes first.

So today was our big day out at long last.  Yesterday I'd double-checked all the most current online information for what we'd need to do to eat and shop.  Good ride in, then our visit started with the Hammering Man, the view of the water, the lifesized Sasquatch statue (that he remembered), the glass elevator, the midair squid, and bubblegum alley.  Got a big smile at the market office from someone who had the promised map of the few establishments that have actually succeeded in jumping through all the hoops necessary to take food assistance.

But I'd completely forgotten the summer-crowd phenomenon-- the living wall.  Other parents using strollers like battering rams to force a way through and me side by side with an unarmored toddler who freezes under stress.  Breakfast first, I decided-- breakfast first, then come up with a new plan.  Through the press of humanity to the bakery, where we successfully fought our way around two of three counters to make a selection, wait our turn in line, get all rung up, and--

--the bakery's equipment for processing food assistance was down.  They couldn't sell to us.  Deep breath, check the map-- maybe they have some baked goods at the Mexican grocer?  Through the press of humanity to find out!  No baked goods today, just hot foods food-ass can't cover.  I used two dollars of our monthly ration to get us a fat square of homemade coconut candy and forced our way to a tiny corner bench under a stairwell so we could get something in our stomachs, but it turned out to be stale as a stone and inedible.  Little Guy tried his best, stubbornly gnawing at his long after I'd given up, then trying to hand it to me to "fix" at which point it ended up on the sidewalk and I drug him away.

Surely the big deli-grocer way down on the other end off the Market office map was set up to take food assistance?  Through the press of humanity, wait in line to ask-- the answer was no.  Back through the press of humanity looking for the special tent described on the website, the one that turns food assistance into special double-value tokens to encourage low income peeps like me to buy local produce.  There was no sign of it.  Checked the food assistance map, what can we eat? through the press of humanity to the cheesemonger.  There were no lines, no other customers, and nothing I could do caught the shopkeepers eye.  He actually left his counter, walked out the door and away with my tiny tyke and I standing there waiting for service.  A few minutes later he came back and walked right past us without saying a word, went right back to his busywork without looking at us--

and I ought to be able to cope with this in a simple, effective believing the best of people manner but I haven't eaten and I'm two days out from the woman in the PCC parking lot pretending I and my child weren't there because she assumed I was a beggar and just a few weeks out from the homeowner who actually left her house and came across the street to harangue my little family into leaving the park she lives by because we didn't look middle class enough to have a right to be in her neighborhood and I need to eat to think and can't 

and I break and bolt with my hungry child wrapped against me.

So smurf the whole local living healthy food thing, we haul smurf to smurfing TARGET.  Because, surely, every Target location is set up to take food assistance, right?  Since the working poor are their Target market?  Right?  All I have to do to find out is to wait through the line with food in my hands and my heart in my throat and my two year old little boy who has at this point been promised food is imminent four different times from for different places looking at me... and I can't do it.  I look at our reflections in the glass of the drinks coolers and see myself shake.

We'd hit crisis at this point.  I was on the verge of not being able to take care of him or myself.  The hideous part was knowing that there were solutions I was missing, other things I could be doing, IF only I could get enough food to function.

Then the sight of the Larabars at Target reminded me of the untouched emergency Larabars stashed in our big red bag.  One last two block walk to the food court in the old Borders building, past the big signs on the door that only eating customers of these fine establishments may come use the furniture, past the two security guards on duty, all the way to the farthest end of the lobby.  We hunkered on a sofa facing away from them and my little guy inhaled one bar and asked for more but I'd already eaten the other two.

Then I let the food take effect, gathered myself, and marched up to the security guards to try to pick their brains about an underground grocery store that I knew took food assistance, it used to be a couple blocks away but I could never remember just where.  They tried to send us on foot out to the Whole Foods on South Lake Union-- not.  

So I told my little guy he'd have a chance to run in Westlake Park and play in superhero fountain, but when we got there the fountain was off and all the open space filled up with cafe seating and summer projects.  

So we went up all the layers of Westlake Mall looking for the information booth in hopes they might have an idea of a downtown central place to use food assistance, but the information booth is gone because, hey, what kind of loser needs live help in these days of smartphones?

I was tired enough, hungry enough, and cracked enough to actually think of hopping the tunnel bus down to Uwaijimaya's for some food and then bouncing my boy through Pioneer Square to rescue our day, but, of course, there are no more free tunnel buses.

And that was the point at which this conversation between me and my two year old little boy happened:

"Eema, why aren't we getting food?"

"Because no one will take the kind of money we have, son."

"Eema, why don't we have real money?  Why don't we have any money, Eema?  Why don't we have any money?"

Stick a fork in me, I'm done.

We went down to the tunnel and caught the next bus back to our own neighborhood, back to our little five block box where I can take care of us.  The new reduced fare pass didn't work and I stood there with my baby in my arms letting everybody else press past us while the bus driver decided whether or not to let us ride.

We got to Fred Meyer's.  We got food.  The rest of the day was a series of better-managed setbacks.  (In case of being locked out, do not hesitate to walk to your neighborhood library.  They will be happy to call your husband for you.)  The Big Guy's day was no better.

Sitting down that evening to a table full of friends, a bowl of pasta, a glass of homemade kombucha, and a wedge of the sweetest watermelon I've had in my life, I experienced this "Calgon, take me away" moment of joy and serenity in the wisdom of the Jewish tradition of ending a day at sundown.

Because some days just need to be declared OVER.