Celebrating Groundhog Day at the Green Phone Booth

Guest poster at the Green Phone Booth this week: me!  (http://www.greenphonebooth.com/2012/02/shadows-and-light.html)

Never back down. But maybe retreat?

The FSC-certified hand-built bathhouse out in the woods is almost complete, which means that my eco-studio can almost (always few tiny details undone) be rented out as a writing retreat.  No phone, no internet, nothing but peace and quiet and a radiant-heat floor under the redwoods.

I’ve thought about offering it as an activist retreat as well, maybe for cheap or free to earth activists who need some time to rejuvenate.  But seriously, have you ever heard of an activist going offline for a few days?  Could Bill McKibben survive without his internet line to the rest of us footsoldiers of the environment, waiting to hear our next marching orders? (Bill, you are welcome any time.)

Hm, I wonder.  So if anyone knows a full-time environmental activist who could use a break, send them my way.  Occupy the woods.

Stopping. Okay, not stopping, but...

...can we at least sit down for a moment to enjoy a cup of tea?  Please? 

This was a big week.  After all the arrests and teach-ins and protests, Obama said a big, fat, loud "NO" to the climate-killing Keystone XL pipeline.  Wahoo!  Hurrah!  And all that.

I mean, I'm as thrilled as anyone.  Or perhaps, "relieved" is better than "thrilled."  Relieved for just one moment that there is an ounce of sanity in the government, even if you have to dig hard to find it.  But I'm not relieved like, oh, great, that's over so I can move on to other stuff.  I mean, I'm perfectly aware that Big Oil will keep trying to strip-mine our political process in pursuit of profit.

Still, the "We won, but..." emails are making me a little crazy.  So I'm going to drink in the "we won" for now, and save the "but" for next week, after I've celebrated a bit.  After all, my kids have been going through this protest movement with me, and I think I want them to believe for just a few days that the good guys can win, at least for a while.

So, an hour at the teahouse for me, popcorn for them.  Wahoo, hurrah, and all that.  For real.  (For now.)

a million tiny “no”s

On Christmas Eve, my malaise took me for a walk around town, searching for a way to fill the empty space left by the fact, incontrovertible, that my children are not at home with me baking cookies for Santa.  They were with my X and her new partner, doing whatever they do which I’d rather not think about since it doesn’t include me.  Being a middle class American, my hard-wired instinct was to fill this hole in my heart by buying more gifts for those same missing, missed kids. 

Lucky for me, I had two bits of perspective.  One: there wasn’t much money in my bank account, a common occurrence since the divorce.  Two: Facebook.  My daily checking thereof NOT usually something I like to admit to, but when it’s Christmas Eve and your little kids are making their Santa snacks at a home in which you are not welcome, Facebook really doesn’t feel like so much of a time-waster.  More like a life-saving time-filler.  You never know how long one day can be until you are missing your kids at Christmas time.

A friend had posted on Facebook that morning: “suffering pre-Christmas oscillation between anxiety about overconsumption and the desire to delight and thrill my kids. I haven't gotten my kids enough gifts! I've gotten my kids too many gifts! Aaagh!”

And remembering that post saved me.  I let my feet wander through the toy store, linger by the games shelf, and move on.  (Oh, they would love this!  But they have enough, more than enough, too much really.)  When your kids have two houses, you have to be very conscious not to compete for best Christmas, and by proxy, best parent.  Out here in the shopping frenzy of Christmas Eve, everyone was jolly, laughing, hurrying.  I had all the time in the world, not expecting my kids back until noon on the 25th, but I pretended to smile back.  My hands, seemingly disconnected from my shut-down self, browsed the bookstore shelves, allowing a few small items to pile up on a bench, but only if they seem likely to advance the progress of our slowish readers: Mad Libs for the one learning parts of speech, Hangman for the one working on simple spelling.  The honey store extracted a few more dollars as they are a local business devoted to the continued health of the honeybee population, and a few pieces of their honey taffy would fill the kids’ expectation that Santa always puts candy in stockings without adding to the corn syrup and chocolate intake that surely would have begun near dawn at their other house.

To walk through town on December 24 with a hole in your soul and emerge without an enormous sack full of crap requires an inexhaustible source of internal “no”s.  No plastic.  No made-in-far-away non-durable goods.  No non-FSC-certified paper.  No Farm Bill-subsidized corn syrup.  No clamshell cases.  No, no, no.  No pretending that “retail therapy” is anything other than just digging yourself in further, into debt, into depression, into denial that you are part of the problem.  Unless.  Unless, your profligate spending of “no”s adds up to you heading home to discover that the stockings are, in fact, just the right amount full, and the honey is sweet in a cup of tea, and your attempts to be part of the solution, however small, have made the waiting tolerable.  Because the only thing that can fill the hole, the big “yes,” will arrive.  And they will not miss for even one second any of the things you said “no” to.

Open house

“The door’s always open,” I like to say.  I like to have that kind of life, people coming and going, feeling welcome, dropping by.  Staying for a while.

But I never meant for my open door policy to be literal.

“DOOR!”  I yell, over and over, a howling refrain.  “DOOR!” as my sons run down the driveway.  “DOOR!” as my daughter heads into the bathroom. 

“I’d very much like to hear what you are saying,” I intone calmly,  “but I can’t pay attention because the door is open and all our heat is pouring out into the driveway.”  I am proud of the control in my voice since I just read a book detailing how horrific the practice of natural gas extraction by fracking is, and our furnace is fired by, you guessed it, natural gas.

“Sorry, Mom.”

And when I’m really tired of the constant, repetitive “DOOR” call, I lose it a bit:  “You guys are going to lose your privilege to go outside ever again!”  As if.

After weeks of trying, failing, and failing again to get my kids to close the door without a reminder each and every time, the kids’ annual cookie party this week came as a relief.  A million kids running in and out requires full-on surrender to a wide-open door, and the continuous baking means the house is plenty warm without having the heat on.  Open house, indeed.

Best of all, the whole house is full of laughter and sugar and mouths stuffed with pilfered M&Ms.   And I notice that on each of the gingerbread houses the kids make, the door is propped wide open, letting in the love, even if the heat is escaping.

Whoa, Nellie!

The holidays are rushing forward on a constantly accelerating intake of sugar.  My feeble attempt to counter the trend by baking cheese straws from a healthy-food-for-kids cookbook was derailed by the fact that the cheese straws, though whole grain and healthy, aren’t in the least cheesy, despite my having added more cheese than the recipe called for.  So the kids continue to chip away at the shingles of their organic gingerbread houses decked with non-organic, artificially dyed M&Ms.  And start each day with a dose of chocolate from the chocolate advent calendars (surreptitious grandparental attempt to convey the idea of advent to my non-churchgoing brood).

Yikes.  Just days away from our annual cookie party, I’m trying to figure out how to prevent a complete crash-and-burn scenario.  Spurred on my the success of my “No”vember campaign, I look to the month for inspiration, but all I’m seeing in the “Dec” of December is “decathalon.”  I gotta slow down.  Take a breath. 

And when I do that, I see it.  The “duh” of the D month.  December.  Decelerate. 

So today, maybe the kids will keep sneaking sugar, but I can drive slower.  Literally.  Just get everywhere a little later.  And while I’m at it, save gas.  Do a little thing for the earth and for our family at the same time.  Feel more relaxed.  Happy, slower, holidays.  

 (And if you live around here, see you at the cookie party!)

Winter spirals: a million tiny lights

After the excitement of a house-full-of-life Thanksgiving, my winter spiraling starts.  The reality of the long, cold nights, even longer when you work them, and the mounting dread of a prolonged, not-by-choice, no-kid period before Christmas (oh, the vagaries of the family court judges) conspire to send me sliding down, around, and down further.  The empty house during my non-custody days, as I sit holed up in the only bedroom that I heat when we are not all home, echoes with nothing.  And in that dark, shivering spot, it begins again: the easy tears, the sense of defeat, the ache in the chest, the feeling that I just can’t do this divorced lifestyle, really can’t, the harsh judgment of myself for not being grateful enough for what I have. 

The feeling of relief when, driving, I see a warning sign for high winds on the bridge ahead, and I realize that my car is small and light and might just get blown off, twisting down into unending darkness of water below.  The tears again, when I’m not expecting them.  The loss of hope that we can do anything to save this planet for our kids.  The sense of warm comfort that comes with contemplating not being alive, letting the world just spin and heat up without me on it.  This is my winter spiral, and I so don’t want to have to get back on those white pills that I spent six months getting off of this year.  Damn it.

I cross the bridge without incident, and get home safely.  For now.  And I go through the motions of adulthood: work, the hardware store, the post office, the grocery store, the bank, trudging through the to-do list.  Next up: evening holiday school event, and the start of my kid-custody half of the week.  I make sure supper is ready and warm for when we get home, and head over to the school. 

The room is dark and quiet as I take my seat, alone.  My ex has delivered my daughter to her teacher and the boys will arrive later with the sitter for their own turns (hard for boys to stay quiet for too long).  More parents filter in through the opaque doorway, babies squawk to lighten the somber mood, siblings whisper in their seats as we wait in darkness for the kindergarteners.  My ex ducks in, takes a seat a few rows back.  I relax in my chair and breathe gratitude that her new partner isn’t here too.

The teacher leads them in, singing.  Such sweet voices, timid in the darkness.  They take their places on a bench facing the center of the room, where a team of parents has created a spiral pathway out of greenery and logs cut so they stand on end at various heights within easy reach of a kindergartener.  The teacher tells a story of children and friendship and the power of love, and then the pianist starts to play, and my healing begins.

One by one, the children are given an apple with a beeswax taper in it, and each walks the spiral to the center where she lights her candle from the large pillar in the center.  As she walks back outward, she chooses a stump on which to place her apple with its light.  Over and over we sing a child to the center and then back out.  The pathway emerges from shadow into soft light. 

In the candleglow, I have lost sight of the self who could not find her heart, her will to live.  I feel only gratitude that despite the logistical complications of children and sitter and maintaining a reverent mood, I will now sit through two more consecutive spirals to watch my sons’ classes, as I have for the past five years.  In order to reach the light, you have to walk through the darkness.  How fortunate are my children that year after year, as they grow taller and taller, they enact this ritual.  How I hope they remember this somewhere deep inside, so when they face their own black winter spiral, they recall that there is a light somewhere.

Preparing for the second spiral, I am sitting in the dark with my arm across the shoulders of my little boy, suddenly a pre-teen granddaddy longlegs, skinny limbs bending every which way out of his folding chair.  We watch his brother’s class walk the spiral one by one, and when they are done, the room full of small lights, he whispers to me: “It’s hardly dark anymore.” 

I send the two younger ones home with the sitter and return to the dark room alone to watch my spidery son and his long-legged classmates light their own candles.  And he is right.  My shadow-lurking heart is watching, and letting the light in, and it is hardly dark anymore.