Make My Heart to Glow and Melt

 I have a penance I’m going to do for you, John. I figured out what it is. It’s not giving up coffee, like I thought it should be. It’s better. It’s something I got from Mary Magdalene and Father John of God, who taught about her at the silent retreat I went to earlier this week. She stood behind Jesus weeping, all the tears leaping from her eyes, falling copiously, like mine at the retreat when I was listening to Father talk about her. 

I don’t know how to write to you. I showed a letter I wrote to you to your father, and he said it was mostly all good, but some of it was too emotional. If he read it at your age, he’d be worried about his mom. I think he was talking about the part where I said I was afraid for you, afraid you are frozen with homesickness. Sometimes it’s hard to know if what I’m expressing is about you or about me. But I’m safe here on my blog about middle aged motherhood. Even if you did have access to the internet where you are, you wouldn’t go near it. 

So it’s safe for me to say, I love you, baby. I think about you every second of every day. I’m scared that this experience of going to boarding school ten hours away with 66 boys that could go all Pat Conroy on you could be permanently damaging, like going to prison is. I’m scared it will change you. Well, I know it will change you. But I’m scared it will not be for the better like I’d hoped. You’re the best, brightest boy I’ve ever known, and I love you forever and ever, like that mom in the children’s book who takes a ladder and climbs in her grown son’s room to rock him while he’s sleeping. Some people think that’s a creepy book, but not moms. Moms don’t mind being that creepy old lady.

I’m doing my penance for you. I got it from Mary Magdalene and the Stabat Mater. It’s not something anyone will ever see me doing, because it’s so very much on the inside. It’s deep, very deep. You might never appreciate it. Good! Never read this. (I don’t even need to say that. I know you won’t.) 

Magnolia Blossom

Like every good magnolia seed pod, I had my start as a fat bud, soft as baby skin, that blossomed into a huge, creamy white, fragrant flower, beckoning to all the little birds and bumblebees. And then I faded, dropping my pretty petals one by one, to bear my fruit. How surprising the fruit was when it opened its coy, pink chambers to release bright, beautiful treasures! Now here I am just beginning to dry on the tree, red jewels still clinging. I’ll be here for awhile, as long as I can, but at some point I will drop to the ground. At some point in the future, far, but not too far, from now, I will lie empty with the rest of this year’s detritus. (Underneath, in the shadows of the lowest branches, can be found a heap of older debris, last year’s and the year’s before and some older than that, going little by little to dust.) Which is most beautiful, they seem to ask, the wedding-white petals or the surprising red seeds or the dried-up dignity of what once gave life?

Wellspring

There was a very large mother at the Quiz Bowl today with her baby plastered to her barely covered, florid breast, from whom I looked away in shock. Was it grotesque? I looked back at her more than once, trying not to seem to watch her baby wallow in warm intimacy and how she hugged her other child to her other side. There was so much of her, belly, arms, breasts, hunched there on her chair with quiet dignity and depth in her dark eyes. 

Can I Keep It This Way?

I haven’t told anyone about my blog. I’m whispering into the ear of the world, a little girl pulling down to herself her grandfather’s big, bristly ear, cupping warm hands around it, filling it with her warm, wet breath. Is it possible to continue like this? There are a few links out there from years ago when I tried to promote it without seeming to. It was the promotion that kept me from writing in it, though, preoccupied with who might be reading it. It’s better this way, like a secret. If you’re reading it, if you’re not a bot, whether you’re a stranger or someone I know, maybe I can bypass social niceties and speak straight to your heart. 

Wedding Day

Chiara Luce, you felt pain when they told you you would die. It wasn’t what you wanted. (At first.) I have felt pain too, Chiara, my heart a chalice full, and I have asked, “Will there be a remedy?” You had remedy. Your remedy was death, and you gave assent. But I want to know, will I see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living?  

If I told you my pain, your heart would go out to me, just as mine does to you. I don’t know what it is like to have a fatal disease, and I don’t think you know what it is like to be thrust through the heart with the lance I have.

I have tried to heal myself. I have tried to be done with the pain. I have blamed myself and my attachments. But in the end I have no choice but to give myself to the process of whatever I am going through. Even if the only thing that needs to happen is for me to be stripped of my attachments, I can’t make it happen myself. I have a sense there will be remedy, but that it will be very slow in coming, in very tiny steps, and that I must rest and be grateful for each one. 

I am resting here on the back stair now, watching the trees dressing themselves in green for spring, and I do feel gratitude, because I sense something you must have sensed too, Chiara, as you lay dying, and I pray I give myself to it as you did, with docility, no matter how hard-won:  He’s dressing me too, but in white, and for himself.

Little Flowers

You have to, young woman, you simply must, go on being beautiful in the world, even though your image is blasphemed and debased all around you. Please go on with your loveliness walking quietly among us. We are thirsty, we are thirsty, and it burns. How can you bear the pain of your degradation? Only smile, and your beauty will be like a cool stream and a sun shining over everything. 

The Natural

He was screeching and writhing when his mother was working on the splinter in his foot, but when my dad took over, such a calm fell that all we could hear were the wind chimes there on the porch, played by the gentle hand of the breeze in the afternoon sunlight. My friend had been picking at the splinter ineffectually. My father took the little foot firmly in hand, saying, “Yep, that’s a deep one.” He expertly picked the skin open with the bent but sterilized pin, just enough to expose the end of the fat splinter so he could grasp it firmly with the tweezers. When the little boy yelped, my dad agreed with him, “Yeeahh, that hurts.”  Besides two little yelps, though, the boy rested under my dad’s capable hands. 

There was something my father was especially suited to offering in this situation, and I want to try to put into words what it was. When I had gone in to ask his help, even though he had supervised his grandkids and their friends all day on the water slide, he had risen fresh as a daisy, differently than if I had asked him to fix a car or a toy. He is always ready, and very able, to help. But something about our circumstances out there on the porch called for his strength in a special way that doesn’t make me admire him as much as just love that he himself in all his particularity exists. He can build things and fix things. That’s cool! But he can also pull out stitches and clean a wound. And even more, you should see him with a baby. I’ve never seen a crying infant that was not soothed in his hands. He is uniquely gifted at wordlessness.

But sometimes he seems to want to be known for words, for wise words, like he thinks it would be better if he were very wise and knew the things to say, if he were a match for the complexities of a voluble woman. Don’t get me wrong; it’s good for him to try to do things that are hard for him. Good for him for working at those things. It can be an act of love.  But I want to express to him the depth of appreciation I feel for who he is without any adornments. If I could only express to him how quiet it was on the porch when he showed up, quiet, but with music.