Thursday, January 10, 2013

The Story of a Girl Who Wanted a Baby

The girl wanted a baby more than she wanted a man. When other girls were writing their name with some guy’s last name all over their notebooks, the girl was writing lists of names she might bestow on her daughter one day. It did not occur to her that she would give birth to anything but a girl.  
Eventually, there was a man. The girl, who thought no man would ever want her because she was not enough of anything, married the man because the man wanted her.   It’s true. The man did want the girl on some days. He especially wanted her at night and in the wee hours of the morning, whether she wanted him or not. Usually she did not.
The girl followed the man because she had to. She shut up because the man said to. She stayed out of his way except when she couldn’t. And one day, the girl got pregnant. It is not surprising, given how much the man wanted her.  The girl was happy then. Sometimes the man seemed glad, except when he felt tied down and then he wasn’t. (Glad, that is.)
The girl took care of that baby, the one she hoped and prayed would be a girl. There were no sonograms, no decisions to be made about knowing vs. not knowing. The girl would have to wait. While she was waiting, she took care of that baby. The girl ate more food than she ever ate because the baby needed to eat. She wouldn’t take pills for the headaches she always had. The baby came first. Even though the man thought he should come first.
There was a fight about the doctor. The girl insisted that she would have the baby in the city, with the doctor who had been her doctor since high school. The man insisted that the city doctor cost too much money and said shouted, “You will have the baby here in the country. The doctor here is good enough.”  The girl shouted back, “I will save my own money and pay for the doctor I want.” The girl won.
One day, the girl fell on some ice and everybody thought the baby might come early. But the girl went to her mother’s and stayed on the couch. Two weeks passed and the baby finally settled down to wait a while longer. The girl went home to the man, and for a while, the baby protected the girl from the man. Maybe you know what I mean.
Finally one night just when the man and the girl were ready to go to sleep, the baby signaled it was time. It was late and snowing and the hospital was forty miles away in the city. The girl was afraid the man would be mad about the snow, because she had defied him. But he was quiet and didn’t make the girl feel bad or sad as they drove through the weather.
A man at the hospital asked the girl what she last had to eat. She screwed up her face and said, “popcorn.” She had heard that women sometimes throw up during labor and she was mad at herself for not thinking ahead better than that. She didn’t think she wanted to vomit popcorn. The pains were speeding up. The man disappeared because this all was too much for him. The girl did not want to drug her baby so she would not take anything they offered for the pain. The voice next to her, the voice of a friend who rose from her own bed to be with the girl, urged her to relax, to breathe deeply, to count and to not think about the lightning bolt searing her body. The girl did not scream. She did not cry. (She also did not vomit popcorn.) She listened to the voice, she breathed deeply, and she struggled to resist pushing even though she wanted to do that more than anything in the world (except perhaps have a coke).
A man in a white jacket knelt down beside her with a needle. “What’s that?” she demanded, suspicious because she had said, “No drugs.” “We have to give you something because your blood pressure is too high.” The friend nodded, “You must,” she said.” And so the girl let him have her arm. More time passed, and finally the girl pleaded, “I have to push, I cannot wait any longer.”
The girl was wheeled into the delivery room full of lights and people and metal. The calm voice was still next to her, and she pushed because they said she could. Someone went to get the man to see if he wanted to come in. Someone else said, “He doesn’t want to.” The girl did not care. She did not want him to ruin the moment. Her friend was next to her and soon her baby would be as well.
The girl had her girl. It was 4:48 a.m. January 11, 1976. The girl was happy. She gave the baby the most beautiful name from her long-ago list. And she vowed to take care of that baby no matter what the man said or wanted. And she did.
Happy birthday, Julie Katharine. You are forever my jewel.
P.S. We escaped the man. 

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Losing Momentum

I lost my momentum. It’s as simple and as complicated as that. ’m not sure why I just stopped writing after about 18 months of almost weekly outpourings. It isn’t that I got too busy. I’m always busy, and in some ways, since I was taking courses in the doctoral program at the time, I was busier then than I am now.  If you take into consideration the fact that I was under constant time pressure to do homework, write papers, and study for exams, it just doesn’t make sense. Despite unwavering deadlines, I managed to carve out time to express what was going on in my head. And then I stopped.
This stopping is familiar territory for me. I have not always been aware of that but this year – no, last year now – it happened often enough to seep in to my consciousness. I finished my coursework in the doctoral program one year ago. Without missing a beat, I studied like mad for one of four comprehensive exams I needed to take. I passed that exam in January. And then I stopped…stopped studying….stopped reading anything related to academics… just stopped.
I picked up my guitar and started practicing again. The last time I played had been the winter my mom passed away – my sister and I had taken our guitars to mom’s home where we were spending half-weeks each while she was in hospice care. We practiced playing Christmas hymns for the Christmas eve service we would conduct in the living room at her bedside. That was December 2005.
I bought a lesson book….relearned the chords, the notes, the runs, one page at a time. I practiced daily no matter how late the hour. I regrew fingertip callouses… nice ones. It felt great. I felt alive – as I have always felt when playing music has been a regular part of my life. Then my long-planned kitchen renovation began. And I stopped playing. Not a gradual miss a day here, miss a day there. I just stopped. 
I took a six-week series of tap dancing classes. This required a weekly Sunday night local train trip into Manhattan in the middle of winter. It did not matter to me what I had to do to get there. I loved it. I couldn’t wait from one week to the next. After the series ended, I joined a regular class on Sunday evenings, and never missed a one. I felt alive – as I always have during the “dance period” times of my life. And then in the early autumn, my elderly uncle who lives in western New York state had a stroke. My aunt and uncle have no children so nieces, nephews, and godchildren came together to help out. My presence was needed on a consistent basis on the weekends to provide relief for those closer residing help-givers who were on duty during the week. The 350 mile distance from their home to mine was too far for me to make it back in time for my dance class on Sunday nights. And so I just stopped.
The crisis has passed. My aunt/uncle are in Florida for the winter. He’s playing a better game of golf than he has in years. I am free on Sunday nights. But I am not dancing.
Not dancing. Not making music. Not writing. Three things that feed me, fuel me, give me hope, fulfill my need to create. I should add ‘not studying’ to the mix. Not that studying feeds, fuels, provides hope or makes me feel creative. But it is a necessary ingredient to keep moving toward the doctoral goal that I’ve set for myself.  
I’m not one to make New Year’s resolutions as I view them as a set-up for failure. But the passage of 2012 in to 2013 is as good a time as any to resolve to figure out what makes me ‘just stop’ so I can ‘just stop’ letting it happen.  
What have you stopped that you need to jumpstart?