Qualities of Love

Mihiretu’s cast is now off.  He walks with a limp but in time that will go away; there should be no lasting physical effects of his injury.  What will stay, I think, is his newfound softness, his willingness to be vulnerable, his trust in us.

He asks me many times a day, “Mama, do you yuv me?”

Every time I answer, “I love you so much, buddy.  More than I can say.”

“You yuv me mo’ than Lana? Mo’ than Mae?  Mo’ than Daddy?”

Here I explain that I can’t love one of my children more than the other.  That these five people in our immediate family (like any self-respecting New-Age woman, I include myself in that number), that these five are more precious to me than anything in the world.  I love them, I love him, as much as I can possibly love.  From the bottom of my heart, as my parents would say.

In his newly unlocked passion for me, he is jealous of every person that I talk to.  When we go to pick up the girls from school, he watches carefully for my friend, Ann, in the distance.  When he spots her, he yells, “Don’ talk to Ann!  Don’ talk to Ann!”  If I am daring enough to approach her, for a fix of girlfriend to get me through the rest of the day, he pulls on me and pokes at me, wraps his arms around my head and screams in my ear.  It’s not attractive behavior, but I see where it’s coming from.

“How long w’you yuv me, Mama?” he’ll ask.

“Always,” I tell him resolutely.

“Not when yo’ dead,” he’ll say, peeking at me from the corner of his eyes, hoping that he’s wrong.

“I’ll love you after I’m dead,” I say.  “My dad is dead and my mom is dead but I still feel their love.  I’ll keep loving you forever.”

“To ‘finity and be-ond?”  He’s a fan of Toy Story.

“To infinity and beyond,” I assure.

“You yuv me mo’ than yo’ mama?” he’ll ask.

“I love you differently,” I tell him, brushing his curls from his forehead with my palm.  “You know how you feel about me?  That’s how I feel about my mama.  But when you have a kid you’ll know how I feel about you.”

Pacified, he’ll nod his head, skipping ahead to scout for more of my girlfriends, preparing his karate chops to ward them off.

It was my mother’s birthday yesterday, the first one since she died.  I thought of her all day, of how she loved me, of how I loved her, about how that love keeps on going even though she’s not here anymore.

I think, too, about Mihiretu’s birth mother, about how she must have loved him, about how that love must translate, must travel, from whatever world is next.  He’s got to feel it.  That mama’s love and this mama’s love, my mama’s love, all of it whirling around us in the breeze, holding us up.

Blonde

A couple weeks ago, in the gloom of a rainy Spring Break, with one child recovering from a adenoid/tonsillectomy (Lana), another refusing to walk on his walking cast (Mihiretu) and a third grumping around the house because she was “wasting her vacation” (that’d be Mae), I bleached my hair blonde.

 I say I bleached my hair blonde when in fact I hired a professional. I had fully intended to do it myself (you should have seen my “DIY blonde” google searches) but my sheer-master/hair-management guru, Sloan, made me see the light (Me: “I’m going to fuck myself up, aren’t I?” Sloan, nodding sagely: “You’re going to fuck yourself up.”)

I was blonde as a kid and then, with the help of highlights, had acres of blonde hair in my twenties. When I quit acting at thirty and simultaneously became a mother, I simplified by going brown and short. I never, though, in all those years of real and fake blondeness, have been this blonde. I’m Annie Lennox, Blondie, Billy Idol blonde (I’ve had “Eyes Without a Face” running through my head for days).

Okay, prepare yourself for some generalizations – I’m really good at these. Men, largely, don’t like short hair. I think they find it threatening. Find me a man who genuinely appreciates a pixie cut and I can virtually guarantee that he’s either very cool and sophisticated (like my beloved husband, who, okay, is maybe just humoring me) or, well, gay (and cool and sophisticated).

Women, on the other hand, tend to love short hair. I can’t tell you the number of times – a day – an unknown woman compliments me on my hair and confides that she’d cut hers like that – “but there’s no way I could pull it off”. I think these women are earnest. I think that women also know that men don’t like short hair and it’s nice to have the field narrowed – my short hair makes me less of a threat. 

Men, generally speaking, love blonde hair. There’s almost a Pavlovian aspect to their response. I remember walking down the street in LA and men shouting at me from behind. My ass isn’t J. Lo territory – they were responding to that swinging blondeness. Since dyeing my hair this time, I’ve coincidentally been on a kick to fix everything that’s broken in and around the house (dimmer switches, leaky faucets, peeling paint, cracked windshields). The plumber, the mechanic, even the skylight-guy have been particularly solicitous. I swear I’ve saved money.

Women, on the other hand, can find the blonde a little threatening. If the short hair makes me less appealing to the male species, the blonde makes me more, and the ladies are well aware. For the most part my loving community of women has been enthusiastic about the change but I knew I was really onto something when an acquaintance, someone who refuses to meet my eye though we’ve been at the same school functions for years, said, when introduced to me (again), “Your hair is different,” her nose wrinkling delicately, her sneer barely masked.

I probably sound pretty vain (which I am) and competitive (which I can be) and a slut for attention (why, yes) but I don’t think that’s wholly what this is about. To be honest, my main motivator for changing hair colors was that a lighter shade would hide the silver at my temples more effectively. I’m aging; my blonde bombshell days are behind me. BUT. It’s comforting to add a bit of the terrain of my twenties to the flat (if infinitely more tranquil) landscape of my forties. There’s a woman underneath all these children, I swear there is.

The Lover

Mihiretu has been in a cast for close to a month. And while this period has had its inconveniences (don’t even get me started about the wheelchair in the rain, let alone trying to catch his pee in a disposable coffee cup in the wheelchair in the rain), it’s largely been excellent.

Mihiretu is, confoundingly, perfectly happy laying around, soaking up our attention. While I get plenty of sympathy from people imagining that he’d be going crazy with restlessness, given how active he is, the truth is he’s more peaceful than I’ve ever seen him. I’m always up for a pity party but in this case it’s not party time.

I wrote here a while back that this injury has contained him, something we’ve never experienced. We didn’t know him as a baby, only as a terrible two. This time is giving us the opportunity to make up for that. We carry him from room to room, from house to car, from car to wheelchair. We hold him over the toilet when he needs to poop. We spoon cereal in his mouth as he watches Avatar on the IPad. We take him on long, meandering, treat-fueled walks in the jogger stroller. We sleep next to him. We wake up, uncomplaining, in a puddle of his urine. We sponge him clean. We brush his teeth. We meet his every need and he is delighted.

The other night Ben and the girls went out to a friend’s. I stayed home with Mihiretu. At first he was very upset that his dad was leaving without him, that he was missing the party. But when I told him that I really wanted special time with him, the tears stopped on a dime.

I was lying with my head at the opposite end of his bed so that my feet were near his face. He reached out and poked my bare calf, making the lax muscle waggle.

“What is dis fat fing?” he asked. To which, of course, I laughed, my calf being one of the lone bodies parts on which I don’t obsess.

Egged on, he continued, caressing my leg. “I yuv you, you fat fing.”

I put “Toy Story” in the DVD player and snuggled up next to him, “Downton Abbey” playing on my laptop. He held my hand, every once in a while leaned in and whispered, “I yuv you, Mama.” He even told me, offhandedly, that his penis was hard. All in all, it was an excellent date. Just Mihiretu, me and the good Dr. Freud.

Mihiretu, for his out-sized personality, doesn’t want to look different. I guess we brought him home to the wrong county – sorry, kid. But for now it’s not his skin color he’s noticing. It’s his giant orange cast. Whenever we’re out and about, he requires that a blanket cover his lap in the wheelchair, completely hiding his leg. If we weren’t conspicuous before - white mom, loud brown child - now with me hunched over his teeny wheelchair, we make quite an impression. It was weeks before I realized that people were imagining him to be permanently disabled. When my friend, Elizabeth, walked him and the girls down the street for ice cream, she felt impelled to break the tension. “Broken leg, coming through,” she sang cheerfully and watched people sigh with relief. Maybe it’s all these years of people not knowing what to make of our family, but I’m not letting anyone off the hook. There’s a certain passive aggression in me, something that makes me think “I’m not going to put you at ease. I’m tired of putting you at ease.” Mostly, really, I’m just too busy trying to get from Point A to Point B. And so strangers think me some kind of surly saint. Not only do I adopt a black child, but a handicapped one at that. You can almost see my halo if you squint.

And so we wheel on, me and my gorgeous, slightly broken son, him saying, karate hands flying “You wanna piece o’ me?” And more mysteriously, “You wanna piece o’ uncle?”

And: “Mama, I wanna tell you sum-tin. Mama? Mama?”

“Yes, Mihiretu?”

“When yo’ buthday comin’ up?” This is his big pick-up line, when he wants to demonstrate that he’s thinking of me, that he’s fond.

“June, honey.”

Then, reliably, “I yuv you, Mama.” If you had told me three years ago that this boy would be so devoted, this small tornado who glared at me and called me “Poopoomama”, I would have been shocked. And relieved beyond words.

“I love you, too, buddy,” I say, nesting one hand in his curls. “ Like crazy.”

All Apologies

I published something here a few weeks ago (that I’ve since unpublished) in which, I’m now realizing, I made a blunder.

As I grow older, and as I write here, I feel closer to my authentic self. I feel less interested in fitting in, less afraid of what others may make of me. I feel braver, more willing to expose my secrets, my shame, my thumping heart. It is liberating, it connects me with people I never imagined connecting with so intimately. But as I grow bolder, more confident, I’m ever more aware that I need to watch those broad strokes. I can speak my truth, the more the better, but I should only speak for me and, unless I have permission, about me.

The post I wrote a few weeks ago was about how I, probably like most people, can silently judge people. In an effort to speak to my own occasional small-mindedness, my covert bitchiness (the irony, the IRONY!) I used as an example a person I had misjudged and in doing so, depicted her in a less than positive light in a public forum. I didn’t name her but frankly, that’s not the point. The point is that I used this woman for my own purposes, never good, and without checking with her, a cardinal rule for me when I mention someone in these pages.

For this transgression, my deepest apologies. I feel pretty terrible about it, truth be told. I’ve written this current post three different times trying to find the right words. The last thing I want to do, for all my sass and bluster, is to hurt feelings. The true irony is that after writing the piece in question I ended up spending an afternoon with the woman whom I had criticized and found her, of course, to be kind and funny. That sound you just heard was my own foot kicking me in the ass. It was tired of being in my mouth, you see.

The Break

Last Saturday, under a clear blue March sky, Mihiretu, hopping with his sisters on the trampoline, fell in just the wrong way. Ben and I, both in the yard, me sweeping, Ben picking up debris, heard his bones break. It sounded like a small dry branch snapped for kindling. In fact, it was Mihiretu’s tibia and fibula, breaking clean through. As a friend said later, way to go big or go home.

When Ben picked him up, it looked as if he had grown an extra knee half way up his calf. A knee that, queasily, moved, shifted as if there was something alive under there.

We spent five hours in the emergency room. Because Mihiretu had eaten Cheetos right before his injury (and let me clarify here, lest you think ill of me, Trader Joe’s Cheetos – somehow they must be healthier, right?), because he had food in his stomach, no matter how non-fortifying, he could not have anesthesia for the setting of his leg. He was allowed a shot of morphine (at the sight of the needle he squeaked, so plaintively, “Save me, save me, save me”, gripping Ben with desperate claws). A shot of morphine doesn’t really do the trick when you’re manipulating broken bones, particularly a child’s. He howled, begged, “Be done, be done, be done”.

The before X-ray was completely terrifying, bones splintered and at odd angles. The after X-ray was, confusingly, not that much different. The orthopedist seemed proud of himself but we left the hospital texting our magical friend and pediatrician, Nelson, for a referral for a second opinion.

Today we went to Children’s Hospital Oakland. Mihiretu went under general anesthesia with a rock star of a pediatric orthopedic surgeon and emerged with a much straighter leg and a bright orange cast.

It’s been a long few days. The pain up until now has been considerable, what with those bones rubbing together so Ben and I have been taking two hour shifts at night. I haven’t left the house beyond leg-related appointments and walking the girls to school. It requires both of us to take our Ethiopian prince to the toilet, Ben carrying him like a bride and me holding his feet (“Hold my feet, Mama, hold my feet!”), trailing like a bridesmaid.

But. Within this bundle of extra work and worry, there is a little gem. He’s vulnerable right now, my Mihiretu. We keep joking about how it’s like having a newborn and today it struck me that this is our newborn time with him. I’ve always regretted that I didn’t know him when he was small, defenseless and all sugar. By the time he came to us, at two and a half, he was all motion, noise and sass. They say that adopted kids often need to return to stages they missed with their adoptive parents, to get “re-parented” in the lingo. It seems like maybe that’s what we’re doing right now. He sleeps (when he sleeps) with his arms twined around our necks. He lays on the couch during the day, watching “Beyblades” on the IPad and snuggling into me as I read my novel. Our house has the quiet, purposeful, satisfied feeling it did when the girls were babes. This boy, who will be in a wheelchair for the next four weeks until he graduates to a walking cast (redefining “hell on wheels”), is finally being forced to stay still so we can love him.

High Point

Since my mother died, I’ve been wandering the hills. Like a modern-day Elizabeth Bennett, I’ve been roaming the heath, though I doubt that she was listening to “This American Life” on her IPhone.

I’ve always loved to hike though I’ve never really done it alone. I’ve always been a runner but, until now, only on the road. I have this great irrational fear of snakes, you see. So much so that when Ben and I are hiking he’s forbidden from making sudden moves or utterances lest I think he’s spotted one. He can’t even say the word “snake”. He must refer to them as “strings” as in “This tall grass too stringy for you, honey?” This I got from “The Poisonwood Bible” – apparently there’s an African tradition that if you say the word “snake” you’ll conjure it.

But my mother died in November and the urge to be outside has outweighed my fear of the (hopefully) hibernating serpents. And so I have been walking or running up on the trails. Alone. I want to be alone not so I can think about my mom but so I cannot think about her. I’m not ready to think about her.

It’s familiar, this phenomenon. When my father died, I spent the first six months busily turning my romantic life upside-down, the perfect twenty-three-year-old solution to avoiding one’s feelings. This time around it’s IKEA shelving units, an age-appropriate substitution. We turned our office into a bedroom for Mae, which has called for a house-wide reorganization. There is an element of, ironically, a snake shedding its skin in the reinvention of my environment. I’m changing my exterior space to echo the changes in my interior space. Today I’ll go to IKEA for the fifth time in two weeks. I even managed to buy the same wrong-sized wardrobe drawers twice. I waited twenty minutes to return them, then promptly made a bee-line to Aisle 12, Bin 24 to buy them again. It wasn’t until I had them home and built that I realized my mistake. It’s easier at this point to think about storage baskets and throw pillows then it is to face the world without my mother in it. Six months after my dad died I went and found a therapist. I imagine that in another couple months I’ll be ready for the grief counseling that hospice so kindly offered.

Along with IKEA, better than IKEA, I have the ridge above our house. I walk the kids to school and then hike up the hill behind it, where I can walk or run for hours on end. Out on the ridge, with the world spread below me, I can get some perspective. There’s more than just me, more than just my mama.

Being in my body feels right because my mind is on vacation, it’s on a grief sabbatical. All I have to do is climb the hill in front of me. Which is an apt metaphor for grief. You put one day in front of the next, allow time to work the rough edges. I put one foot in front of the other and in doing so step away from my mother, which is the only thing I can do. I can’t go backwards, I must go on ahead. She’s gone and so I have to walk away.

Or maybe these wide, open spaces, this big sky, is the only place I have any hope of finding her. Maybe I’m actually walking towards her, trying to locate her amid the hawks and the falcons.

Every night at the dinner table, we each reveal our high points and low points. Mihiretu confuses high and low so he often says something like, “My high poin’ is Teacha Kawi mad at me”. When we ask his low point he says, “Teacha Kawi mad at me.” Ben reliably says his high point is that present moment at the table, reunited with us at the end of the day. If Mae’s friend, Zoe, was absent from school, that’s always her low point. Lana’s reports vary but they’re always long and detailed. I realized today as I was gazing at Mount Tam from the top of Loma Alta, that my high point is literally my high point. Climb high enough and you’ll feel better. Or at very least you’ll feel.

The Rock Star

We bought an IPad a couple weeks ago and it has been a hot commodity. Mihiretu plays Angry Birds, Mae plays Spellcraft and Lana, it turns out, uses it for a purpose all her own.

She asked for the IPad last night before she went to bed. Much later, after Ben had tucked her in, he brought it to bed with him. While I read my novels, he surfs craigslist for strange and varied vehicles (“Look, honey, at this old school bus!” or “That’s a cool pick-up” or “Nobody wants the big Airstreams”). This has long been his favorite pastime, first with the computer, then with his IPhone and now, hallelujah, with an IPad. He’s come a long way, baby.

As he turned on the IPad, he saw several videos on the desktop, all of Lana’s face.

There is a Justin Bieber imitation. She’s not a fan – I don’t believe she’s ever even seen a video – but Justin Bieber is this year’s Miley Cyrus so the second graders are all atwitter. In these she’s naked from the waist up (her favorite outfit, really, and what she deemed most Bieberesque). She speaks as if she has a heavy cold, her accent is vaguely Southern. Her hair is swept across her forehead in a cunning imitation of his famous locks.

She says, “Hi, I’m Justin Biebah and I’m gonna SING for ya. But first I have a few words to say.” Here she brings her hands in front of her face in desperate upturned claws, her face contorts with pain and she moans “Nevah say NEVAH!” She drops her hands, relaxes her face, sweeps her hair across her forehead and says, matter-of-factly, “And I just said ‘never” so I should go to jail shouldn’t I? Well, first I’m gonna sing my song and then I’m gonna march to jail.”

Then, nostrils flaring, she sings tunelessly, expressively, “Oh, this is my song. It’s my best one so far.” And it goes from there, something about “I’ve got a chicken and I’m saying HEY!”

My favorite video, I think, is an extreme close-up. She says, very simply, by way of introduction, “I am a girl but I have a very funny name. You will hear it in this song many times. Heeeeere we go.” Her brows draw together, her eyes widen and her voice deepens as she sings, “Bob, Bob, Bob, that is my name. Robert, but Bob for short. Bob, Bob, Bob, that is my name but” here she pans out to a wide shot and her voice raises three octaves “I am a GIRL!”

The best thing about these videos is that she is alone. She has no audience beyond herself and so what we see is very pure. Purely goofy, yes, but here I have evidence of the essential Lana.

The world sees a blond, blue-eyed child, generally quiet in public, seeming particularly so in contrast to a brother who is always either racing, jumping, climbing, teasing or screaming. Acquaintances, until they truly know her, imagine her as docile. In fact, she is possibly the strongest personality of the bunch – and that’s saying something, given the bunch. She is publicly reserved and privately outrageous. She is my secret extrovert while Mae, who strikes the world as bold, is my secret introvert. Mihiretu, of course, is no secret.

I will treasure this bit of – what is it? video? bytes? IPad magic?. Whatever it is, I will hold it close so I can remember this covertly wild girl, this angel with the devilish sense of humor.