Memories of nightmares

My mama always sighs when the sunshine beams out from all around a cloud. Tonight it was a cool lemon yellow, the shadows all lavender and gray. I was bone tired, lazily listening to the children's chatter about their day, their art projects, watching the fields go by: corn 5 feet tall in the low ones, then a rusty sun burnt patch of soybeans, more corn, but this only up to my knee. The wind bounced off the mustardy corn tassels, almost like thousands of invisible fairies running across them. We were belting out "Jesse's Girl" to the classic rock station, and it was the fourth song I remembered. In a row. My thoughts caught a ride on that memory, how old I'm getting when my kids relate better to pop songs than I do, and all my favorites are on the oldies station. Then the mind swings and hooks on to the lyrics again. I am suddenly back in reality with a jolt, still singing along with all the rest. Except somehow I don't feel old any more; I feel like I'm sixteen.

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I am awake with the stars, my loves all heavy with black velvet slumber, as if the night sky had descended and covered them in the dark. I'm running through memories that won't stop coming. Trying to fly and float simultaneously, for I could feel the undertow of the funneling brain dragging down into the darkness. I remember floating down rivers in gangs of high school and college kids, and going through the whitewater sections, we all would lift our arms and legs out of the water, pointing our toes, clutching tubes so that we wouldn't be caught by a sudden drop or a deadfall's rotting branches.

As each thought spins and catches the next, springs that and the next, and so on - one memory latches on to another. I am sixteen and singing with my best friend and driving way too fast. Then I remember doing my penance on the way home, trying to somehow defeat what fun or happiness I'd experienced. Emotions churned unnamed, almost unnoticed, the steel of my mind's resolution to contain emotion slowly descending like ice through my veins. Numb, I remember putting my hand to my face slowly, and I thought, this is what they mean when they say "her eyes glinted". My other hand slowly grips the steering wheel harder, I set my jaw, I swerve to the left into the oncoming lane, go over a hill almost flying. Then squeal back into my lane after playing chicken with the first car. That sudden, visceral mixture of extreme pain and extreme pleasure that burns up intensely and quickly, then suddenly is receding from your core. Sixteen has been gone eighteen long years and still the memory brings back all that sensation - WHAM! Just like that.

You ride out the adrenaline and rush of the memory of sixteen, fastforwarding lackadaisically through your life. You hit on twenty-one, when you graduated and moved to Minneapolis and bought your first house. You remember the numbing effect of work on all those vagrant thoughts and sensations, the more you could throw yourself into technical details, the quieter were the longings and the broken heart. And there the memories finally stop flowing. You pause, catching your breath. Yes, they're gone.

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I wish I could sleep, shut off, rest. The hours creep by and the panic builds..."How can I live on 4 hours of sleep..." "oh, now we're down to 3 hours! Hurry up and go to sleeeep!" Often these days the gray dawn begins to creep into the bedroom, and I haven't yet slept. So I sigh deep and aching, shuffle out to the kitchen, have a cup of coffee with you. Some kind of mania or hyper-awareness comes occasionally. Almost as if my wires are too finely tuned and respond to the slightest signal. Vascillate rapidly between almost-awake and almost-asleep. Funny, I've always thought it odd to wish someone "golden slumber"; I crave complete blackness, unconsciousness, completely isolated from my mind and body, suspended in some netherworld of sometime dreams or nightmares and long periods of silence when the brain waves slow and the deep whir swelling from their revolutions lulls you into spellbound, still and staring.

Is it wrong to be looking for a shut-off switch for memories and ruminations? Could I dull myself to passive somehow, be less complicated? There is no manual for one's own deconstruction. 

Sometimes it all works out

There are some moments in your life you are pretty sure you can't get back. No do-overs, right? Just when you're sure the joy of that missed moment has escaped you forever, and you give up on healing and agree to making do - sometimes something magical happens right in that space. Sometimes, right in the middle of life's mess, everything goes into slow motion, and you think to yourself, "I think this is what it feels when it goes right." Tonight, in the midst of one of the most uncertain moments of my fledgling mothering career, I got to take a moment back.

And this story, friends, is how sometimes your trepidation turns into pure gold.

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It's a moment we joke about as soon as we get over our own awkwardness. Once you have kids, it's an inevitable moment. One that comes with at least 200% of the awkwardness we felt hearing it from OUR parents. Or at least so I thought. Until tonight.

My children have suddenly become every parent's worst nightmare on the playground with the under 12 set. In what felt like one giant Hindenburg-esque fail bomb of parenting misjudgment, I had THE talk with all three of my girls last night. I wasn't planning on taking the "tell them early or you won't be the one telling them" approach this far. Seriously. I definitely planned on waiting until they could pronounce "sperm" and sign a legally binding contract to die virgins. Okay, okay - maybe just until they're 25.

Perhaps one shouldn't embark on such lofty parenting tasks as this armed only with Youtube, Google images, and one hastily selected parenting book from the Christian bookstore (back when you still went to there). I was counting on my wit, which went out the window about the time I turned purple from laughing and scared the living daylights out of the kids who thought I was going to die on the spot, choking on my ice cream sundae. I think it was around the time I got the question about what to call certain wrinkles or maybe it wasn't until someone wanted to rewind the "squirm" video set to the Jaws theme song so they could watch the egg "eat it" again. (Yes, I'm a feminist, but I swear, not that kind. This takes "man-eater" to a new, terrifying biological level.) At this age, just the facts, right? Unfortunately, the "squirm" video's death march music and the tape-worm looking sperm animation may have scarred them for life. Double unfortunately, I'm a nurse, and I have WAY too many facts in my head to try the "just the facts" approach.

I've been known to fail on this one before. The topic seems to induce some kind of language diarrhea that surreptitiously removes the "age appropriate" filter from my lips. My son asked me why he couldn't reach down my shirt once and somehow he ended up getting it out of me that when he was married, he *might* get to touch his wife's boobs. *Maybe*. He wanted to get married when he was like three, so I might have jumped the gun on sharing that little nugget of information.

This may be why I find myself gasping for oxygen and turning to my inner self with a look of utter shock ("did I really just say that?") at the end of such conversations. Somehow, we got from hormones, periods and pimples to what-WHY?-where, when, how and crescendoing waves of giggles that brought the males of the family to the door with questioning looks. (They, unlike the girls, had the good sense to take my firm advice that they resume watching How It's Made and reading Popular Mechanics in the front room.)

I never pictured I would end this hallmark moment uttering, "No, we canNOT look at the photos of dead people's [parts unnameable except in one's bedroom while laughing hysterically like a hyena]."

Sometimes I seriously wonder if living with nurse parents is scarring them, scaring them, or (maybe?) it's the coolest thing on earth.

Night light

Moonset, 3 a.m.

If you keep the shutter open long enough, there is enough light in the darkest night to show us what our eyes alone cannot see. Time alone unveils the images of nightscapes as with time alone night passes into day.

Light dawns in the darkness for the upright.

(Ps. 112:4a)

Can you get over the hump in a friendship slump?

The kids in the back seat are staging a conversational attack on public school when she piped up, in a soft voice, "I might actually make a friend." She paused, "I used to want lots of friends, but now I think I'd be happy even with just one." My heart fluttered, thudded, then sank. I remember that feeling. I had it so strong when I was a kid. Just one friend who really wanted you around. Just one whose mother hadn't forced them into playing with you.

You could hear it in the tone of your mother's voice as she answered the brand new cordless phone out on the stone stoop when evening was already starting to cool, sinking kind of, and then the sound of her lowering herself with a little thud onto the stair, holding the broom absolutely still and balanced next to her. You couldn't hear the words. I'll never know exactly what was said during this exchange, but I know the few neighborhood friends I had were reluctant ones.

What is it that I experienced, and now my children are experiencing? Is it the trifecta of friendship doom: living in the country, being homeschooled, and afraid of making friends at church?

This one, beautiful dear one, she holds her heart so openly. She has "friends for the day" - at gymnastics camp, swimming lessons, gym, the park on a sunny afternoon - that seem to partially fill her friendship tank. But she, perhaps the most, longs for true friendship where you see someone all the time and you can call them on the phone and it's not wierd at all.

The false starts at making friends feels like an almost visceral cycle - the leap, the balancing and almost falling, the inevitable dismount that jams your knees and makes you even less likely to climb up and try again. Does this get better in public school, I wonder? I always thought that was the key, when I was dealing with this myself as a tween. But I don't know, because I never went.

What has your experience been? Do you homeschool or public school (or were you home or public schooled) and what kind of friendship difficulties or successes do you remember as child? What made things work? What made things not work?