salvation

when i said good-bye to my great-grandmother for the final time at clarkson i also asked that she let her daughter-in-law helen know how much i missed knowing her. i didn't say that bit out loud. i thought it really hard and hoped with all my seventh grade might my comatose grandmother could pick it up in the air as she passed through to heaven. like a note you find in your lunchbox at school.

when i said good-bye to her son at the same hospital for the final time my sophomore year he told me to get back to college and study hard. i smiled and told my grandfather how much i loved him in my head. i hoped it was something he'd pick up on his way out, too.

my family had sat in quiet wait at clarkson so many times that my great-aunt mused how she'd grown accustomed to the place, that the sadness and angst of sitting in the family lounge had worn off even as she knew this wait would be short and our last. aunt betty had picked her head up from her book and gently expressed the odd feeling i had in my stomach. what i imagine we all had.

i used to daydream about giving birth there in omaha. just so my kids could be real nebraskans like their mom, so they could come in to the air my loved ones had exited. what i have are full-fledged iowa kids born in the same northeast iowa hospital as their father and uncles. it was a livable plan b and more sane than driving five and a half hours in labor. not that i didn't get a little excited for an unplanned clarkson birth when at thirty-six weeks and five days owen was giving me fits at his uncle's wedding. because pregnancy makes me loopy like that and forget how much i depend on our ob/gyn and adore our birthing center and the short post-natal hour drive home with a newborn you fear will choke on his or her gurgling and bumps. have-mercy-on-a-new-mom bumps that remind one how a tahoe's suspension is really a truck's, not a car's.

and so it felt like a homecoming pulling into the hospital parking lot two weeks ago. i wanted to get the kids and explore what had remained and what had changed from my memory. the old brass wall plaques next to flat screens. vern and i went directly to the nicu and signed in behind our three-day-old niece's divider in the log book. we fell into that comfortable routine of sitting and waiting and watching our loved one sleep as the machines beeped and scrolled and pumped her blood in and out. the family lounge. football. hand sanitizers. and repeat.

a dear friend asked if she would be baptized, this little baby whose physical being had been saved by a bypass machine. i considered the added complexities of last rites and just-in-case baptisms to the clarkson routine as i listened to the brief explanation that in her family we didn't. then i considered how i hadn't even considered it.

God loved this babe so much he had already armed her with anne as her mother. untethered. anchored. the safest place on God's earth was with anne for with anne there is always God. in a stunningly beautiful mix of humor and hormone and hugs.

when i said good-bye to eisley for the first time i told her how happy i was to see her and in my head i told her how much we loved her and more. as if her soul could pick up my thoughts better than any audible words i'd have said. like the air was already well primed to carry this type of message for me.

plus there were two nurses in the room and they didn't need to hear how i amuse myself sometimes while switching laundry by imagining the reaction the purse snatcher had when s/he saw uncle charley's picture in her mom's purse. the ps must have known anne somehow to have access to her locker. i always wondered if, as anne was dating eisley's dad sean then, the ps had acquired some cash and as bonus an assumption that anne was carrying on a secret affair with another guy. or funnier still, if the ps had never met sean and thought sean liked to dress in high-styled 1970's fashion - which at the time had not come back into popularity.

sanctuary, a prequil to salvation

my cousin is the sister God gave me, and there are studio portraits of us as babes, toddlers and pre-schoolers our mothers had taken to prove it. He blessed me with more, but she is the one who shares with me that familial heritage and knowing. she knows how our grandpa's neck smelled. she knows how the back of my mother's hand felt. she knows how our family sounded when they laughed in chorus. she knows my dad was a good man, and the beautiful pieces of my dad's family as well. she knows me. listed number three in my baby book of first words is 'anne'.

after mom slid through an icy intersection and into a train that mangled her car and shattered her universe, i was given mom's purse. tucked deep in a pocket was a picture she had kept there for nearly my entire life of dad's baby brother. given to her by the photographer, the very last picture taken of uncle charley the day before the dark night he drove into a cow standing on a dirt road, rolled out of his open window and was crushed by the car my grandfather had given him - fulfilling his promise to do so if my uncle kept straight a's from kindergarten until that year. that year my uncle charley turned sixteen. what that picture, gifted to her, meant to my mother was unmeasurable.

the year i turned eighteen my world rolled onto its side, and as a sick finale just before my nineteenth my home had been overtaken by grief-stricken grandparents who armed their grief with blame and loathing towards my father and by association, his entire family. my father they directly blamed for causing the accident with the strain he had placed on their baby girl. physical abuse. separation. betrayal. financial ruin. causing her to be so exhausted, emotionally and physically, over that year as to be completely unaware that she was about to take on a locomotive as she drove to work that december 30th. and in darker conversations and musings: that mom had intended to do so.

no one had more animosity towards my father than i did. anger that was stiffening into apathy. no one carried more right to it than me. in that emergency room when my father entered i could see the torture in his bright blue eyes. lost. with the one person in his whole world who really understood and loved him unconditionally in a heap of bruised muscle and blood and tubes. i didn't want to feel for him. i did. i hurt for him more than for myself, my brother, and certainly my grandparents. and that hurt only made me more angry at him. and completely disgusted with my grandparents.

i gave dad mom's purse. i didn't trust him with mom's treasure. lost in his relationships, his handicap, and his clutter. i didn't trust my grandparents who were angling for possession of the checkbook and house key. inaccessible in their grief and warfare. i didn't trust myself. i could barely hold on to the edge of the earth so tilted it was. i needed this one thing to be safe. but more to the point: i needed this tangible connection to my family when it was whole, that my mother had kept close to her heart for so long, to be in the company of someone who did not hold the ropes of doubt and hurt and mistrust pulled on either side of me. someone whose only concern was me and let my doubt and hurt and mistrust be my own, and never borrowing from it. someone untethered and yet so wholly anchored.

i gave the picture of my uncle charley so beloved by my mother to anne. she put it in her purse.

maybe a week later someone broke into her locker at work and stole it.

where was i again?

i cannot multi-project task.

annual green bay vacation photo books. postings of current pictures in on-line albums. finding my desk and the receipt for maddy's duplicate hat and mitten set. Christmas photo books. meal plannng. baby books. blogger. neither can my computer. so as it forbids me from looking through my friend's Christmas album on snapfish as i upload ours to shutterfly, i thought some thoughts and came over here to quickly jot them down.

because while i could be organizing the desk or putting clothes away (or calling united airlines, shed list item #1), i cannot convince myself that the computer can actually upload all by itself without my keeping it quiet company.

i hit 'edit posts' rather than 'new post'. there are plenty to edit. i forgot how much jotting i do. as an example, this, unpublished post #11 titled "the n word". i thought to myself, "what on earth were you about to say regarding the n word? the word that comes up so infrequently in our corner of the globe i practically forget it exists until february's black history month rolls round again?":

pbs doc shelter

in trying to decipher what the heck that meant i forgot what i ran over to jot down in the first place.

substitute caleb for on-line albums, maddy the fridge and owen my ransacked office corner. my jotted blogger notes for 50% of every request, story and quip i begin aloud. insert aggravation that i cannot accomplish what i seemingly should and yet always find time to eat whatever i want and direct that at the children, coupled with guilt for being short with them for no reason and voila. you have how well i multi-parent.

caleb raced to tell me something the other day, reached my attention and then stumbled over his lips. he furrowed his brow, squished his eyes and finally sighed, "oh. i just lost my words again."

i've heard that line before. as if it couldn't be any worse, i'm rubbing off.