Gratitude to all my yoga and T'ai chi chih teachers/Coronaville/Day 10

My yoga and t'ai chi chih studio

These two regular practices have been part of my life for some time. This routine has never been more important to me. What's getting you through?

New pandemic paranoia: Panting joggers, runners, and bicyclists who speed by me with huffing and puffing (droplets?) as they pass. Walkers seem to be much more respectful of the 6-feet rule. I wish we could all have masks. I'm working on a less-traveled route.

New favorite pandemic amusement: Kitchen island ping-pong. Unfortunately, the net and the paddles are nowhere to be found. Yesterday a friend and I tried wooden spoons as paddles, then rubber spatulas. Ultimately we settled on the metal pancake-flipping type spatulas. Without a net. The laughing was an immune booster for sure.

I counted steps on the most circuitous route possible through my condo, including bathrooms and closets. 300-- If I go around the dining room table and the kitchen island four times. How many times a day can I do that? How many steps can you walk through your space?

I am a student of the book arts, and yesterday I worked on my first small drum-leaf bound book with content. Here are the first three pages. If I never get my full-length memoir out into the world, there's this.

And I also worked on this zine about seasonal depression. It kinda translates to a pandemic lockdown, I think. It's hard to read because of the way it needs to be laid out, but you get the idea. All the marbled paper snips were marbled by me. It's pasted up the old-fashioned way rather than designed on a computer. Because paper.

Start on the bottom left, then move to the bottom right and work your way up and around.

Orange really is the most amazing color. What's your happy color?

Gratitude once again to all health care workers, and to the groceries clerks, delivery people,   

law enforcement personnel, and everyone who is working. 

xo

Tuesday Morning Beach/Crime Report

Long Billed Curlew in the foam

The bird watching has been wonderful these last few mornings. Curlews, willets, godwits, whimbrels, plovers, and pelicans. I'm not a photographer with a real camera, but I still can't resist.

Pelican taking off after riding the waves

I felt a bit like I like was sticking my long beak into someone's business this morning when I saw a cosmetics bag in the street just a few doors from home. There was a prescription bottle lying there with the mascara and lip gloss and such, so I knew it couldn't be trash. I wasn't sure whether to call the police or maybe just try to find the person whose name was on the prescription bottle. I Googled and bingo. (She's a professional with an office locally.) She thanked me and told me her car had been broken into this morning and that she'd be right over to pick it up. That seemed a bit naive, but I said sure, hoping I wasn't being naive about telling a complete stranger to come over to my house. 

Wisely, she had second thoughts and called the police officer who was already on the case. He came over and got the bag and asked me a few questions. According to his timeline, I picked up the bag just moments after it had been tossed. She's not the only person I know whose car has been broken into lately in broad daylight, so local readers, take note.

The officer wanted my contact info, so I gave him my card which has the cover of my book on the front. What's this? he asked. I explained. We had the so you're a writer conversation, but he was really interested in the book. The story. What? You're reunited with your son?! How's your relationship? What about his adoptive parents? Oh my god, that's amazing. 

Seems like he was either adopted himself or maybe had an adopted child or two. I wanted to ask, but didn't. I did enough minding of someone else's business today. But if you're adopted, or have adopted children, or an adopted sibling, or if you're a birthmother or know anyone who is, you might like to read MY BOOK.

And if you do, thank you from the bottom of my heart. It's a story for everyone and anyone, really. But I love it when it hits someone close to home.

My largest heart rock to date--but too big to carry home.

Review My Book! (please) and give some thought to reproductive rights....

Imagine a world where there is no such thing as birth control. No abortion either. Imagine a place where single mothers are shamed and baited. Imagine that the term single mother is replaced with the word slut. Imagine that you are the slut. You are pregnant. You are too dirty, too worthless, too much of an embarrassment to raise your baby. So you give him away.

Now imagine that this world is a real place. Because it was.

When I was a pregnant teenager in a small Catholic town in 1970, men were most decidedly in charge of women’s reproductive rights. The same issues are making headlines today.

I tell my story for a reason. Because it's happening right now.

If you haven't yet read my memoir and would like to, I'd appreciate a review. I currently have 30 Amazon reviews, but I've learned that there is increased visibility for books with 50 reviews or more. 

Now is a good time for increased visibility.

Here's the Amazon link: Birth Mother

Thank you. The book is a quick read in keeping with the publisher, SheBooks, novella length format. I hope you'll share this post. And I implore you to share it with anyone you know who has lost a child to adoption.

And here's the link to Center for Reproductive Rights in case you'd like to get caught up with the news.

And the link to Concerned United Birth Parents.

Minnesota: Land of 10,000 Tears

This post comes to you from my condo in St. Paul, Mn.--a condo I bought back in 2008 pre-economic downturn against the advice of my trusty financial advisor. He was right.

But post-divorce, I was making all kinds of crazy plans. I would have taken out a jumbo loan and financed the Taj Mahal at an interest rate high enough to reach the moon if I'd thought it was the solution to how shitty I felt back then. Daughter M was not doing the best in those days either, and I think living here was some sort of balm--as much balm as a physical thing can be for a hurt that's not at all physical. She lived here for three years, and now the other daughter, C, is living here with her husband. With my mom in a nursing home in northeast Iowa, the Twin Cities are now a good gateway to visiting her.

The frozen rural place/a.k.a. Iowa--taken on the road trip with C and her husband to see my mom

Photo of my mom and me taken yesterday. 

It was -28 degrees today in St. Paul. I went out for a walk. The sidewalks were dry and clean. With my eyes watering from the cold and my frozen tears sticking my eyelashes together, I thought about  my complicated history with Minnesota. I came here for college in 1970 just weeks after signing the final paperwork relinquishing my son for adoption. The next year I had major surgery on my spine and a month later my father died suddenly of a heart attack. The following year there was another back surgery. Thirty years later I came here again and again post divorce. I've walked in every type of weather. I've walked in deep into the woods and on country roads in the pitch black winter night while the sky was ripped apart by shooting stars. I've walked ankle deep in the mud on a lakeshore, along the Mississippi River in driving rain, in downtown St. Paul bathed in Christmas lights. I've walked drunk. I've walked sober. I've walked wailing out loud, talking to myself, while plotting mayhem, and while plotting my own destruction. Today I just walked, glad to be out under the sky.

Today, walking in St. Paul

Walking is what I do. Sad, happy, mad, glad, tired, wired, here, there. 

And while I've shed plenty of tears in California, somehow I always feel happier there.

Last month walking on the beach in Cambria, CA

And tomorrow, I'll be back in Margaritaville (a.k.a. Ventura County)

Though I have to disclose that this photo was actually taken in a Mexican Restaurant in Dubuque, IA

Another road trip photo--just because.

Come Visit Me

OVER HERE.

(If we're Facebook friends, you've probably already come and gone.)

Pull up a chair and stay awhile.

How the Eavesdropping Failed but instead A Brief Soundtrack of My Past

I really did go out.

First, the moon. A photographic failure. I can't make you gasp the way I did when I saw it--a golden crescent cradling the full shadow of its past and future selves. So picture it. Then picture this:

Couple 1: They're wearing black leather jackets--not matching. She has on tight white jeans and black high-heeled boots. They're in their 30s or 40s. He has an English accent. They're drinking cosmos. The glasses glowing like rubies. His arm rests on the back of her barstool all through three rounds of drinks. Occasionally, his hand hovers closer to her back, but he doesn't touch her.

#howtocommitforeplayinabar.

Couple 2:  Another set of 40-somethings. She's wearing a dress and hose. He has on black jeans and a black tee-shirt--and has a neatly trimmed  goatee. They're stylish, but there's something a bit weary about them. He scrutinizes the check a moment too long. She sighs and raises her eyebrows. Over the music, I hear only two words of their conversation. Pregnant and love. I'd bet a million bucks they were talking about someone else.

#IthinkI'llturninearly.Seeyouinthemorning.

Couple 3: They're in their 80s, sitting side by side in a booth. Maybe so they can hear one another. But maybe because they like it. He savors his red wine. She lingers over the menu. They lean toward each other. When they leave, he aims toward the floor to ceiling windows as if there's a door there; she takes his arm and steers.

#IblessthedayIfoundyou.Whatdidyousay?

The Soundtrack of My Past (performed by a lone musician): 

I'll Get You in the End by The Beatles

I'm in my room with the liner notes to The Beatles Second Album, listening over and over again while reading the words and looking at the pictures on the album cover. I will memorize all the lyrics, who wrote what, who's singing the lead vocals on each song.

She's Not There by The Zombies

I'm probably not supposed to be there either. "There" is the new frowned upon teen club called The Web. It's a regular after school stop on my walk home. No drugs. No alcohol. Pizza. Soda. A juke box. And it's run by a cool 20-something guy. Was his nick name Spider? Parents didn't approve.

Brown-Eyed Girl by Van Morrison

Was it our song? Had we formalized it in some way or was it just in my head, the significance so dizzying because of the way he looked into my eyes as we danced to it? We are caught up in the ecstasy of a summer dance at the park pavillion. I am wearing a dress my mother sewed for me by ripping apart a hand-me-down and re-using the fabric. A couple of summers later, this will be the dress I wear home from the hospital after our son is born.

Me, wearing the dress.

Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones

A song that takes on new significance after the adoption papers are signed.

Cherry Cherry by Neil Diamond

Neil Diamond live onstage at my first college concert. Is this a dream?

High on a Mountain of Love by Johnny Rivers 

I'm wearing a red mini-skirt and a white blouse, driving to my waitress job at a supper club on the Sauk River in rural Minnesota, the job that will get me to California despite the fact that I'm a terrible waitress and my best tips are motivated by pity.

What's on the soundtrack to your past? 
Is it possible to imagine the sound track to our futures?

My mother will remain in the hospital tonight. Maybe I'll go out again. Maybe I'll have popcorn for dinner and sit on the couch with the cat.

A Brief History of My Mother's Hospital Rooms

I remember every hospital room my mother's been in--except for the first time she almost died. I was a toddler then, but heard the story many times. How my father rushed her to the hospital one evening and was told that her exploratory surgery would be at 9:00. He went back to his grocery store, assuming they meant 9:00 a.m. When he arrived at the hospital the next morning to be with her before she went under the knife, he found my mother recovering from major surgery to remove a tubal pregnancy.

The summer after my freshman year of college my mother developed pneumonia and a staff infection after surgery to remove her gall bladder. I wasn't in great shape myself that summer. A year earlier I'd given my infant son up for adoption. My pregnancy had aggravated the curve in my spine and my ribcage was twisting toward my heart and left lung. I needed surgery, too, and was scheduled for a month-long hospital stay the following January, but my mother's condition was more dire. What I remember is the shininess of the hallway where I was allowed to stand and talk to her. From that perspective, her isolation room seemed unnaturally deep, and the view out her window stretched forever into the green Iowa summer. If my mother died, I'd be expected to quit college and raise my younger brothers. This would be God's way of punishing me, I thought, for giving up my baby.

I was in my twenties when she had her first lung tumor. I flew from Los Angeles back to Iowa to see her. Her room was near the nurses' station and the kitchenette where ice and juice were dispensed was nearby, too. Her pain was excruciating, and I shuttled back and forth, asking the nurses for pain medication and permission to serve my mother a glass of juice or ice water while I craved a good stiff drink.

There were a dozen more minor procedures in the following decades. Stents, angioplasties, hernia repairs, minor cardiac procedures, cataract surgeries. By that time, my mother had moved to the east coast, and I was a continent away with children of my own. With the exception of a heart procedure meant to shock her misfiring heart into a more regular rhythm, I missed all of it.

My children were grown by the time the second lung tumor appeared. I was still on the west coast, but I was divorced and living alone. The removal of the pea-sized squamous cell tumor would require five days in the hospital, she told me. I planned to arrive on the east coast on day four, bring her home from the hospital, and spend a week with her as she recovered. Her first room in Washington Hospital Center was dark and cramped, and her bed was just a foot or two from the door. The morning I arrived to take her home, the crisis team was huddled over her. My mother looked terrified as she struggled to breathe through the oxygen mask pressed against her face. A petite woman in a white coat whisked me out of the room and told me my mother was being rush to ICU where she'd be put on a ventilator.

I spent the next month living in the guest quarters at WHC. My room resembled a slightly run-down 80s motel, but there was a laundry room, a microwave oven, free coffee, and a bank of vending machines that kept my self-soothing M&Ms habit well supplied. My mother's ICU cubicle, whirring like an engine room, was directly across from the giant control station where some ridiculous person sat at an elevated console answering the patient call buttons. "May I help you?" she'd respond in her polite and perky voice. I was polite and perky in return the first time I explained that my mother could not speak due to the ventilator tube rammed down her throat. The many subsequent times the voice responded to the call button in this manner, I assumed my psycho ax-murderer voice to repeat the explanation. Sometimes I simply shouted, "Get someone in here right now!"

The room my mother was transferred to after nine days in ICU was just as dark and crowded as the one before her breathing crisis. Finding it impossible to move forward head on, the nurses tended to every task by sidestepping between bed and walls, i.v. poles, and monitors. A nurse and an assistant performing a task together required a sideways duet that made them look like a pair of waltzing crabs. My mother's roommate had pressure ulcers and wept in her curtained bed so close at hand that it seemed criminally cold-hearted not to tear aside the curtain and comfort her.

After a week or maybe two, my mother was transferred to a slightly more spacious private room. There was a window that looked down on a courtyard, and I remember the day we finally stood together and looked down at the trees and benches. Not long afterwards she was released to a skilled nursing facility and managed to spend eight hours there before experiencing chest pains. She was transported by ambulance to Baltimore Washington Medical Center.

BWMC was the Ritz compared to the decaying inner city hotel ambience of Washington Hospital Center. While my mother was trapped in her spacious room getting sicker and sicker, I took breaks in the glass-topped atrium coffee shop, swilling caffeine and getting more and more agitated over the fact that I was about to lose coverage under my ex-husband's medical insurance. "My mother's dying and you're putting me through hell," I howled to an Aetna representative explaining for the umpteenth time that Aetna had all my medical records since all I was trying to do was switch from a group policy to an individual one. As I stood in an expansive hallway looking across a neatly mowed lawn into a row of trees explaining my woes in a phone call to a friend, she took charge and somehow convinced my ex-husband to keep me covered a month longer.

Before that month was up my mother was released from the hospital and Aenta approved my individual policy. I returned to L.A. and, after a stint in another nursing home, my mother moved in with my brother and his girlfriend in suburban Baltimore. Near the end of summer last year, she moved across the country to live with me. She's been an outpatient in two different surgical centers since her arrival here, and I've driven her to the emergency room twice. Yesterday morning she was transported to the ER by ambulance. That afternoon was her first admission to a hospital in southern California. A stay in the hospital is never like a hotel vacation, but given the jubilation I felt yesterday when my mother survived her latest crisis, this room with its ocean breezes and view of the mountains seems like the best destination this side of paradise.

Train Crashes into Iceberg

I'm not sure when my personal Polar Express derailed. The train wreck was already unfolding long before the end of my marriage. In the decade before we had children, The Someone and I frequently traveled back to the Midwest to spend the holidays with family. The year that our second child was born delivered the coldest Iowa winter on record. The airlines lost the children's car seats, our winter coats, and all our luggage. It was days before I had anything to wear besides my brother's sweatpants, and The Someone complained for years that the muscle cramps in his back were due to being underdressed while pulling our three-year-old on a sled. But it was probably carrying our hatless, coatless baby inside my shirt from the airport door to the curb and into my brother's drafty truck in sub-zero weather that convinced us we should to create our own Christmas traditions in Los Angeles.

Other than the gingerbread house baked from scratch and the sugar cookies, not much stuck to the free- floating iceberg of our lives away from family. There were a couple years of dad and daughter forays to choose a Christmas tree, several years of big festive dinners with friends. There were a few years at the same favorite restaurant for Christmas Eve dinner A few years of a Christmas carol Mass at the church The Someone attended--for which we routinely forgot to bring the de rigueur gift for needy children. Some years I cooked salmon. Some years I have no idea what we ate. Gifts for our children figured quite prominently into the celebration when they were younger, but The Someone and I never shopped together for them--or even discussed what they might like--that I can recall. Our 1950s division of labor required that I tend to those sorts of errands while he made the money. We bought gifts for one another, of course--in the early years before children, quite lovely sentimental things. Later when there was money he bought me diamond earrings, pearls, a beautiful outfit, or a cashmere sweater. But, in the later years, as the pressures at work pulled The Someone away from us for more and more hours, as our appetites for everything diminished, as our marriage lodged into some kind of permanent solstice, Christmas seemed like a charade.

My gifts from The Someone became more and more impersonal, and the things I chose for him never quite hit the mark. Books remained unread, a scarf stayed in its box, the whimsical choice of a 6 ft. tall farm windmill never went to his office as I thought it might. The daughters stockings were filled with the same lip balm, the same lotions--until we did away with gift-giving all together. No one in our house really needed anything, and if there was something Mr. Ex and I wanted, well, those desires went undetected on our personal radar.

I had my chance to reinvent Christmas when the marriage ended, but I didn't. The daughters were pretty much grown--and Thanksgiving is our day for gathering together. As my son's birthmother, while I'm not regarded by him as superfluous, I am wary of elbowing into the traditions created by the parents who raised him. So each year has been different since 2007. Hawaii, St. Paul, home--which has, itself, changed again this year. The man who loves me and I don't make a big deal out of Christmas either. We'll eat dinner at my place with my mother tonight, and tomorrow he'll go off to his sister's place. But I'm searching for something. Not religion. Not material things. Just something, or some place, or a purpose I can look forward to during the darkest week of the year.

A Whale of a Week, A Whale of a Love Affair, A Whale of a Visit, A Whale of a Trip, and Just Plain Whales

The last excursion of the "granddaughter week" was a whale watching trip. "I can't promise you we'll see whales," I told the girl who's been to Sea World twice. Ha. We were mugged by Humpbacks, which is whale watching boat parlance for being so surrounded that the boat can't move. Take that, Sea World. We saw Blue Whales, too. It's not a small event---seeing the world's largest animal--but it was the breathing of the Humpbacks, so close to us, so like immense human sighs, that surprised me.

And the dolphins again--this time a nursery pod with babies, hundreds of them the size of footballs. I love the things the guides tell us on these boat rides. The Common Dolphin cannot survive in captivity, they said. Without their family group, they perish in five days, they said. They loose their ability to echolocate.

Location can be everything in a love affair. The Man Who Loves Me, who I thought for a few days might not weather my change of location, was at the train station when the kid and I got off the boat. Immense human sigh.

Instead of driving halfway to Phoenix to hand off the granddaughter, her mom and her auntie came with the other kids to stay for three days and then take her home. They were good sports and did their own thing while I hung out waiting for plumbers and contractors to do this or that in my final push to finish up jobs at the house before I bring my mom to live with me.

Who am I when I'm with you? Are all of us changing our spots, doing the chameleon thing? The little girl/deep thinking budding psychologist turned into a less-than-charming martinet once the little brother and sister were back on the scene. Ah, well. Little human sigh. This just reinforces my plan to take those kids one at a time.

And so, with barely time to pack, I was back in the arms of The Man Who Loves Me. Echolocation working fine, thank you. Then onto a plane 12 hours later, and into a rental car, and driving for five hours, and then into my home town, which cannot be visited without a plunge into the past. See other blog, and peruse while thinking about the Common Dolphin. And imagine these steeples rising above the cornfields, rising above everything, visible from five miles or so away as you drive down the highway. And weird, how the photo won't load properly. But there it is--the fractured picture of a particular church that I thought might crumple and crush me, like Samson in the temple in the movie "The Ten Commandments," as I sat through dozens of masses as a secretly pregnant 16/17-year-old.

And so here I am, struggling a bit with my echolocation, in my hometown. But my mother is here, and next week, after a thirty-hour drive spread over an as yet undetermined number of days, I will return with her  to the land of the whales where I will listen for their sighs.

Free Kindle BooK! One More Toot of the Horn for "Saying Goodbye"

I posted about this on my other blog yesterday, so pardon the redundancy if you're a regular reader there.


The free download of Saying Goodbye--a book in which I have an essay called, "Holding Him Softly," is available only through the weekend. You can, of course, purchase the book in the e-version or in hardcopy anytime.


Here are a couple snippets of reviews:


Tender perspectives helping readers with their own goodbyes. If you have ever had to deal with loss, read this book. It will make you feel better. -- Christina Johns, Midwest Book Review, Oct. 18, 2010 

The stories are about love, really, not sadness. Despite all the sadness and grief that come with saying goodbye, there is love and joy and comedy on the Other Side. -- Gretchen Little, Squidoo.com Lens, Oct. 29, 2010

This book gets to the heart of what I teach in my class on death and dying - that life is filled with loss of all kinds and we can learn from each one and ultimately experience life more fully. The stories in this book do a wonderful job of showing that out of loss there are new beginnings. I recommend it for any teacher of death and dying classes. I also recommend it for anyone who is struggling with a loss - no matter what kind. -- Professor Jann Adams, Department of Psychology, College of Idaho, Aug. 25, 2011 

And I think it's worth mentioning that the book was the #1 free download in the Death & Grief category, and #2 in the Nonfiction/Literary Criticism & Theory Category. (kind of a weird category, this second one.)Also it  ranked in Health, Mind & Body as #25 and Advice & How-to as #27.


The book is a solid anthology that includes writers from around the world. A great gift for someone who is retiring, moving, moving on, grieving, graduating, kicking a habit or experiencing any of life's goodbyes.


Oh--and if you read it and like it, it would be so cool if you reviewed it on Amazon!

Thank you kindly. We now return to our regular programming where I write about life, love, divorce, the weather, and other intractable problems and great joys.

photo credit: Androidzoom.com

Waiting for Super Moon

Last night I went looking for the moon. I wanted to see it rising over the red tile roofs of my condo complex--benign brightness and beauty, a silver river of light pouring out of the darkness. Instead there was a dirty blanket of sky, one corner torn and scrap of light showing through. 1983, the news reports said, was the last time the moon came so close in its orbit. In 1983 I'd already been in Los Angeles nearly a decade. Mr. Ex and I were in love then. Maybe I was in a play. Maybe I saw the moon that night before going into a rehearsal, or maybe I was captivated by it standing in an alley between scenes of a performance and came to my senses in a panic wondering if I might be late for an entrance. I don't remember that moon. Maybe Mr. Ex was already changing then, two years out of law school and  besotted with our relative wealth after years of scraping by. Maybe he looked at the moon and saw his future, unbelievably large and bright.

I had no children in 1983. Although my son was thirteen years old and somewhere under that moon,  I didn't know where. I didn't know his name. Maybe he was in a park playing basketball, or going into a movie theater to see Star Wars for the the twentieth time. Motherhood was my secret then. A part of me covered over and not allowed into the light. Mr. Ex and I had agreed we wouldn't be having children, but maybe by 1983 with our checking account growing fat, that resolve had begun to wane.

In the year of this moon, the light resides in my children. All three of them. It seems something of a miracle that both of my daughters, now grown women, are asleep in my house tonight. And just four nights ago I stood in my son's backyard with him and his wife and children as we took turns peering through a telescope at the moon.

One night years ago as Mr. Ex and I lay in our bed in our apartment, I heard yelling. Across the street the homeless man who sometimes stayed in the crumbling house owned by an ancient silent film actress was  patrolling our block with his shopping cart. We called him "Ratso" after Ratso Rizzo from the movie Midnight Cowboy.  "Diane," Ratso bayed. "Diiannne." A jolt of paranoia ran through me. Did he mean to say my name--Denise? Was he calling me?  I stood at the window. In the moonlight he pushed the cart down the middle of the street, limping behind it with his shoes in the basket. "Oh moon. Oohhh moooon," he cried, "Thou art woman. And man has walked all over you." Ratso and his cart and his shoes were illuminated, shining in the dark street as I watched from my window. Maybe that was the night of the Super Moon of 1983.

The photo above was taken in Vermont in February of 2009.