Z is for Zone

Mike calls it a flow state. I sit down at the computer to waste a few minutes playing a game (usually a stupid game, like Minesweeper or Freecell) and then, suddenly, it's 4 hours later. Or, with Law and Order reruns on in the background, I do some machine quilting and realize, looking up, that I'm 3 episodes later. Genealogy on the computer does this to me these days. So does knitting.

Knitting is interesting because at this point, the pattern I'm working on requires no reference materials. I know where I am and what the next stitch is, all the way across. So I can pay attention to other things that don't require my hands. Sometimes this is TV or a movie. Last night, though, it was nothing. I was tired, I realized in a panic I was a long way from finishing this project with only a week to go, and downstairs felt so far away (where the TV is). So I went to bed with the knitting. Propped myself up with pillows and went at it.

When there's nothing else to pay attention to--the book I was reading wouldn't stay open to a page and I was left with nothing focus on--other things start bubbling up. First, a to-do list. A rather far-reaching to-do that included Christmas items, winter preparations, house stuff, church stuff, groceries. I didn't write any of it down and now, 18 hours later, it's all gone again.

After this list of many lists came the nagging feeling that I'm not doing enough to fulfill my obligations and promises as a Benedictine oblate. This is probably true, but, really, I need to give myself a break. So then, for a few rows, I thought about my favorite psalm and then moved on to a few passages in Sirach.

I thought about kids and Christmas and what's coming up in the next week--not a to-do list as much as "remember" list. Then I hashed out Sophia's bedtime separation anxiety that has not subsided with time like I was hoping it would 2 years ago.

Thought about the things I need to write down on a birth plan--not that I have a birth plan exactly, since many decisions have been made for me or by me and the doctor already. But I do have a post-birth list. Play-acted my way through that conversation with my doctor, which is silly because he's agreed to every single thing I've said so far. It was the last doctor I had to fight.

Reminded myself, starting over at the corner, that the crib needed its platform raised and the whole thing moved over next to the bed before we enter that last few weeks of pregnancy and forget. Thought about a car seat, which we still don't have.

Rolled baby's name over in my head a few times. Thought about how it would look in print and in cursive. Made sure, double and triple sure, that his initials do not spell out either an obscenity or an abbreviation of something bad. So far, my google searches have only produced Lutheran church women's organizations, so I think I'm safe.

Tried not to worry about this upcoming surgery and epidural and blood loss. Wondered in vain if I should have had folks I know who have A-positive blood types donate for me, although the doctor has reassured me that this shouldn't repeat. And that was the point that I looked at the clock, because once I get into a downward spiral of worry, there's no turning back to hapy little lists and ruminations. I'm done, unless I turn the radio on and wake Mike up. Or go downstairs and watch reruns. But the bed is soft and Mike needs his sleep this week. The knitting goes back into the bag. Only an hour has passed this time, but I need to stop.



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That's it, friends. I did A to Z four times, and I think that's all I have in me. Mostly because many of the things I say here could be said just as well on South City Musings. Which I suggest, obviously, to those who still want to read what I have to say. SCM is more local in feel--my neighbors, parish, kids, family show up more often. And there's always Conlocutio, while the year lasts (I think I'm about a fifth of the way through). But this one ends here....

Y is for Yule Log

It was the last day before Christmas break. I was in third grade and ten minutes before school let out, they announced that I'd won a cake in the raffle. I was the last name chosen, and my grandfather was already there to pick me up, since my mom was still in the hospital with newborn Bevin. So we went over to the cafeteria and picked up the last cake, which wasn't a third grader-friendly style of cake. No colored frosting, no sprinkles, nothing that looked like a cake my mother would make. It was brown, but I instinctively knew it wasn't chocolate. It was probably fabricated in a jelly roll pan and then rolled up into a log shape. It was coated with a donut-like frosting, clear glaze. But whatever. I had a backpack filled with hershey kisses and candy canes.

We--my grandfather, my brother Ian, and I--got into the Crown Victoria and drove back to my grandparents' house in South County. My grandmother named the cake a "yule log" and cut it open. It was a spiral, like a jelly roll, but filled with nuts, chocolate chips, raisins, and some kind of binding agent like a fruit frosting, all rolled up in a spice cake. I remember her giving me one bite and the declaration of "I don't think I like it," which was about as adamant as I got about anything. I remember saying the same thing about my dad's bourbon-injected fruitcake that same year. And about bourbon a few years later, for that matter.

The adults ate that cake up. These days, I probably would too. But I like my dad's fruit cake. And bourbon. Things change.

X is for Xmas

My mother is offended by using X to stand for "Christ" in Christmas. Since I used XC as an abbreviation for Christ all through high school theology courses and college, it doesn't bother me so much. Not enough to get up in arms about, and definitely not enough to think I shouldn't use it for "X is for."

Christmas season started early this year, but seems shorter somehow than usual. Thanksgiving was late, Advent was early, and I can't turn my head because an inner ear infection is playing carnival fun house games with my balance. But Sunday, we went out in the sleet and flurries to cut down a Christmas tree with my parents, and then last night, while I lay on the couch trying not to think of a Tilt-A-Whirl, Mike and the girls decorated the tree.

This drove me almost insane. I guess I didn't realize how involved I was with Christmas preparation. When I say "involved," I really mean "in complete and total control." Several times I had to just shut my eyes and bury my face under the denim blanket as Sophia skipped around the tree with a glass ornament in her hand that dates to the 1940s. Maeve put all her ornaments pretty much on two branches. And everything is bare from 4 feet on up. But Mike didn't get out all the ornaments--I can finish it tomorrow when the girls are at school and try to even things out. In the end, the girls can say they decorated the tree.

I remember 8 years ago my pastor at the time saying the CS Lewis once wrote that pain is God's megaphone. I haven't fact-checked that, but it stayed with me. Not that I believe God punishes us by giving us disease or heartache or complicated lives, but I have often found that when plans change for negative reasons (disease, heartache, complicated lives), it quiets me down eventually and makes me take stock.

There is no way on earth everything is going to get done this Advent, this Christmas. Last night drove that home for me. Not only was I queasy and wanted to get off the ship, but I'm 33 weeks pregnant. I cannot be balanced on a chair in the front windows putting up Christmas lights this year. If Christmas presents can't be purchased online, they aren't going to happen this year. I'm thinking cut-out sugar cookies are beyond my attention span and stamina this year.

And, not related to Christmas, but I can't attend the trial in Columbia this year--this week--where my sister may or may not have to testify against the police officer who killed her friend in 2004. This one bothers me more than candy cane cookies and wrapping gifts and making things just so. This one feels like a failure to me. But it can't be helped. I can barely make it up the stairs--there's no way I could drive to Columbia and sleep on my sister's couch and do what I did last time. Perhaps there's not as much of a need. It's a retrial, and the girls have gone through this once before, successfully. All their friends are scattered around the country and have rebuilt their lives with new support systems. They don't need me to cook them dinner and fill them in on trial details while they wait in the vestibule to testify. My life, it turns out, is far more complicated now than it was in May 2005 when Rios was convicted the first time. What was I going to do, have Sophia go home with friends every day this week? Send Maeve to my mother-in-law's house? My last parish council meeting is this week; I'm helping a neighbor out with babysitting tomorrow. Atrium is Thursday. Sophia's recital is Saturday afternoon. Someone else has to fill that role this time--if it needs filling at all.

So I have to cling to what is most essential this year. I cannot be all things to all people, but I can make sure we have an advent wreath. I can take care of the Kris Kringle situation on the block between our kids and others. I can keep the bathroom and the kitchen clean. I can play Christmas music non-stop and think before I speak to my husband, my children, my family, my friends. I can talk to my sisters on the phone every night this week and try to be there for them the best I can. And maybe next year I can go back to what I used to do--or not.

W is for Winter

Sometimes in Winter...

Mike wakes me up as he goes to bed. I crawled into bed at 8:30, but now it's 10:45 and he's home from going out with Rob. We chat a moment, and then almost immediately, like taking a stage cue, he is asleep. And I am awake.

The heat is on, and it is too hot. The ceiling fan, however, would make it too cold. The electric blanket is off, rejected for being too hot. But the vaporizer blowing near me is making me too cold. I took off the flannel pants for being too hot, but the jogging shorts have now made me too cold. I roll over on my side, inhaling the breath from the vaporizer--literally, since ours is shaped like a penguin that breathes on you, and stare at my bedtable.

Vaseline. Vick's Baby Rub (the same idea, just made from eucalyptus and rosemary). Chapstick. Saline nasal spray. A glass of water that really should go down to the dishwasher in the morning. Neosporin and bandaids, but, actually, those aren't for me. That was for Sophia before bedtime, a little annoying cut on her knee. If I ever needed a photo of what winter means to me, I've got it right here.

It's not even winter, technically. And the part of me that worries about global climate change welcomes winter with open arms. Please be cold, please snow, please ice our streets and make me want to shoot myself trying to park my car. But the rest of me? The parts of me that have to endure our freezing bathroom as I step out of the shower? The part of my brain that decides to hibernate, making the rest of my brain sad and befuddled? We hate winter.

Maybe it's because of too many years in Texas. Too much reliance on forced air heat? Maybe just the reality of how exhausting ice storms are, and in St. Louis, that's the typical precipitation for winter. We do get snow, which is pretty and energizing and usually gone in three days' time. But we get ice. Sometimes we get ice on top of snow on top of ice. And the city does not plow our street, as it is tertiary (side street) and unneeded for emergency vehicles. Never mind that the fire house on the next block often heads up the wrong way on our street in the winter time, scooting around on the ice, endangering parallel parked cars.

The dry skin, the nosebleeds. My hair, oh God, don't talk about that. I get this fuzzy dullness, starting right about now and lasting until I can smell spring in the air, in the thawing mud in my backyard. Little things. Like yesterday, I couldn't remember the other name for garbanzo beans. My vocabulary starts to slip away and soon enough, I'll be reduced to "Cold. Close the thingy. Hurting me."

And we live in a mild area. Really. It's a river valley, where two of the biggest rivers in the US meet, in fact, Missouri and Mississippi. So we don't get blizzards (I've had this explained to me but it's too late in November to remember the logic) like they do just west of us. It's more than the "heat island" effect, too. It's the humidity and the standing water or something. So we get, like I said, pretty little snowfalls and picture-perfect icings. Except when the icings get too heavy. And electric transformers blow. And trees crack and all of it crashes to the ground sounding like glass shattering all over the neighborhood.

I hate it. That doesn't make me very original, I know: wow, she hates being cold! How novel! I have tried for 16 years of living here to embrace winter and be excited and happy about those crystal blue skies and bright white sunny days and hot chocolate and good slippers. But you know what? I'm not an Austrian nun. No warm woolen mittens or schnitzel with noodles (what the hell is that?) is going to make me happy until it truly does melt into spring.

At which point, I will wring my hands wondering if winter was long enough, if my kids saw enough snow to satisfy, if it means we'll have a scorching summer or a mild snooze in the hammock. I'm never happy about the weather.

V is for Vater und Mutter

German language headstone, St. Paul's Churchyard, St. Louis, Missouri

U is for Urban Ancestors

Over the river and through the woods
To Grandmother's house we go

I've finished my American genealogy. I have gone further on some lines, thanks to other people's work, mostly, but I have made it back, with two exceptions, to whenever such and such ancestor crossed over the Canadian border into New York (William Donnelly) or arrived by 2nd class cabin in New Orleans (the Wibbenmeyers) or steerage in New York City or Baltimore (pretty much everyone else).

Part of being an American, I think, is believing in the myth of the farmer ancestor. Even if we don't go over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house (my kids go across two streets and an alley to get to my parents' house, but literally go over a river and through woods, albeit on the interstate, to get to Mike's), our parents did. Or their parents did. And in many cases in my tree, this is probably true. The aforementioned Donnelly family farmed near Rome, New York. The Wibbenmeyers lived in Apple Creek, Missouri, which I don't even think today is an incorporated area. The Broadheads moved from Virginia to the Ozarks. People walked to one-room school houses (some taught only in German) and the Missouri census takers wrote down how many cows and chickens they had.

These rural folks in my background don't bother me. Yeah, the infant mortality rate kind of gets to me after a while (14 children, but only 4 survive to adulthood, and even then, one dies in her twenties...repeat this story 8 times and you have my German ancestors). But there's something hopeful, I guess, about it being 1880 and having your own farm and all your children can read and write--and then your sons grow up to be accountants and doctors.

My grandfather's line, however, isn't rural. No, I take that back: his grandmother Theresa Eilers is from Lively Grove, Illinois. But her husband George grew up in the St. Vincent's German Orphans Asylum on the north side of St. Louis. From what I can gather, most of the children in the orphanages in St. Louis in the Victorian era were not orphans. They were children of the indigent. Most likely, he and his brother were dropped off there by a single mother with no support system, or perhaps their mother died and the father, having to work, had no place for them. Rarely, they were scooped up on the street by police or charitable groups. Since George was living there at age 5, I'm thinking he wasn't committing any crimes yet.

And the Blakes. Still my grandfather's line, but his father's side instead of his mother's. The story, as well as I can tell it, completely embellished, of course, where I don't have enough raw data to go on, goes something like this.

Edward is born in 1835. Survives the potato famine and comes to America, alone, around 1850. Meets and marries Bridget Kidney in Kansas City, Missouri. Bridget was born in 1840 in Ireland and was in Kansas City by 1858. She also traveled alone. In Kansas City, they have two sons, Edward and Richard, but leave them behind when Edward Jr. is under the age of 10, in order to move to East St. Louis, Illinois, and open a saloon.

It was probably a good place to open a saloon. East St. Louis, back then, was a huge industrial center. It's still 40 or 50 years before the race riots and strikebreaking of the late 1910s. Steel, stockyards, railroad lines. Working men who liked to drink.

They take in a niece, Mollie, and later she takes their last name. And then, 16 years after moving to East St. Louis, Edward is dead. He's committed suicide using what appears to be a popular method: Rough on Rats, an arsenic compound used as rat poison. Bridget and Mollie stay in East St. Louis, and eventually Mollie marries William Rigden and they remain together until Bridget's death in 1904.

Back in Kansas City, Richard becomes a teamster and lives in a boarding house. I don't know if he dies young or moves west or what, but he disappears from official records. Edward leaves the aunt and uncle he's been staying with since he was 8, and moves to St. Louis. He doesn't move to East St. Louis, though, doesn't go help out Mom, but marries a woman named Jennie who lives in Kerry Patch, who already has 3 children living with her from her first marriage, along with her father-in-law and a brother-in-law. They live in a three room brick house without a cellar, with windows only in the front of the house, since the house is built on top of the houses next door on both sides. They have one son, also named Edward. Jennie is a self-proclaimed witch and probably keeps her neighbors talking. Or afraid. Depending.

Edward works as a bricklayer, and, as opposed to both his parents, can read and write. But he's dead 5 years after he marries Jennie (and three years before his own mother dies), leaving her with a 4 year old and all those other people. Jennie outlives all her children except the young Edward--she has two daughters die in childbirth. She dies after her son is married--she sees the birth of her first grandson, but not the second (who would be my grandfather).

All I know of my grandfather's upbringing is that it involved being poor enough to steal coal from under the fence at the power plant. He finished 8th grade but went no further until he was already married with children.

I can drive by the addresses where Edward and Jenny lived, where their son Edward and his wife Anna lived--the houses are gone, though, razed in the 1940s in favor of housing projects and poorly planned in-fill houses. Most of the places torn down in the sweep did not have utilities. In contrast, my house was built the year Bridget died, and it had indoor plumbing, electric, and gas from the start. Now, I know my grandmother grew up in Maries County, Missouri, in a house where the back part was a literal log cabin with no heat (that's where her brothers slept), but there is something gripping about urban poverty that bothers me.

Maybe poverty is gripping and horrible wherever you live. But something about the Blakes' story seems so much more desperate than all those farmers.

Maybe it bothers me because their church was razed along with everything else, while I can go down to Apple Creek and visit the Wibbenmeyers' little Catholic church. Maybe it's because all I have is the raw data--I don't know if they had friends or neighbors who looked out for each other like I do. Maybe it's because of the story of the suicide. Or maybe it's because it's so close. It isn't over the river and through the woods. It's right here under my feet, like the brick streets covered over with asphalt.

T is for Trying

I'm trying to be a good mom for the last two months of this pregnancy.

I'm trying to get dinner on the table every weeknight this month.

I'm trying to knit a sweater by Christmas.

I'm trying to maintain a social life as it gets colder and people get busy.

I'm trying not to lose track of the time.

I'm trying to remember where I put my social security card.

I'm trying to sleep on my left side as often as I can.

I'm trying to finish too much sewing in too little time.

I'm trying to stay ahead of the laundry.

I'm trying to come up with a plan for the holidays.

I'm trying to think of a gift for my brother. And my father-in-law.

I'm trying, really, not to be a bitch every waking moment from here until mid-January.

I'm trying not to think about relearning breastfeeding.

I'm trying not to rely too much on everyone around me.

I'm trying to get this girl scout troop official for the school year.

I'm trying to be involved just enough at my daughters' school to know what's going on.

I'm trying to maintain distance at the same time to save my sanity.

I'm trying to remember that prayer is often important in all this.

I'm trying to breathe deeply.

I'm trying to keep it all tamed down.

Mostly, I'm currently failing.