Birthday

On Tuesday I started the last 365 days of my twenties. It was a good birthday. I got both the quiet evening at home with cake and loved ones, and the romantic night out on the town with Bryan. I had the three million facebook posts and long skype calls with family far away. There were even a few cards in the mail from the persistent few who have managed to keep up with our ever-changing address. It was a good start to 29.

Like every one does, I took one last good look at the year I was packing away before I wrapped it up in tissue paper and tucked it safely away in memory. I ran my hand over the broken places - some just worn bare from sweet overuse, others chipped from more painful drops. I savored one last time all the people, places and changes that have come and gone and stayed and left. It's been a crazy year. One of the most significant and difficult of my life. But without a doubt, when I look back on this year, I will always remember it as one of the most beautiful a lifetime could ask for. Because it is the year I met Annabelle.

This child of mine brings me more joy than I thought possible. And I had high expectations too. Yes, yes, the first few months were harder than I thought and I haven't completely forgotten the long nights and bone-numbing exhaustion. But I whole-heartedly embrace one of the biggest cliches out there when I say having a child is one of the most wonderful things that can happen to you. They aren't lying. It is simply amazing.

There are new fears. For the rest of my life every time the doctor wants to take a second look at something my heart will stop, and every time I leave her with someone else, no matter how great the reason, a part of me will not relax. But it is so worth it! Just watching her taste watermelon for the first time or go down the slide by herself (yes she did!) or hold her first ladybug makes it all so incredibly worth it. Lately she's into hair barrettes and will bring them to me by the handful to clip into the silky strands of peach fuzz on her head. She also leaves them as her calling card around the house, so when I see two hundred ziplock bags strewn across the kitchen floor, the tiny purple hair clip lying in the middle of the mess might prove a helpful clue as to who is the perpetrator. She's dang close to walking and her new favorite words are "Wow!" and "Yum-yum!" ("Wow" as when she saw me in my new black dress - attagirl, and "Yum" as in when she licked the lotion off my knee - hmmm). She will lie face-down on the floor and cry when you ask her not to touch the fire-poker. But she'll obey. Every day she is more little girl and less baby. I am having so much fun getting to know her.

So as I near the dreaded 3-0, I find myself sailing forward quite happily. The next few years might mean more coloring books than novels, more Disney than dates, more walks than runs...and to that I say, welcome!

       

Animal Dreams

Last Tuesday, I read a piece I had written at a show in a little theatre in downtown Dallas. I’m not going to lie, it was some of the most fun I have had in a while. I got to work with an editor for the first time and she was amazing at helping me find my voice and massage my narrative. I got to wear a black dress, sit on a barstool in a blinding spotlight and have a captive audience sit and listen to what I had to say. I got to bask in a standing ovation (for the entire cast) and the bubbly feedback in the gallery afterwards. I loved it. (Okay, if you corner my husband he will tell you that there was a couple weeks of nerve-wracking re-writes, anxious last minute editing, day-of panic attacks over leaving baby with a babysitter and general bouts of insecurity ranging on everything from toenails to coherency. But I will never admit that. I maintain that it was just awesome.)

Taking a few cautious steps a little deeper into the world of writing has sent me running back into the arms of the books that bring me my deepest comfort and inspiration, which, quite frankly, is just about anything written by Barbara Kingsolver. The other day I was flipping through Animal Dreams and I came across a passage I had highlighted the first time I read it. And it blew me away all over again. It’s a letter between two sisters, one off in Nicaragua trying to save the world, the other in her small hometown trying to find herself. The sister abroad writes:

You’re thinking of revolution as a great all-or-nothing. I think of it as one more morning in a muggy cotton field, checking the undersides of leaves to see what’s been there, figuring out what to do that won’t clear a path for worse problems next week. Right now that’s what I do. You ask why I’m not afraid of loving and loosing, and that’s my answer. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children’s bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don’t get lost.


Codi, here’s what I have decided: the very least you could do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides.


I can’t tell you how good it feels. I wish you knew. I wish you’d stop beating yourself up about being selfish, and really be selfish, Codi. You’re like a mother or something. I wish you knew how to squander yourself...


I wish those words were mine. They feel like mine. But I didn’t write them.

On some days I feel like I am squandering myself recklessly. I look at my life and think, “Yes. This is it. This is worthwhile.” On those days I feel like I can touch the walls of that hope too.

But on other days I feel like I am hoarding myself up, too scared to dole out even a little bit. I think about raising a daughter in a refugee camp or not owning a house or, on some days, just being nice to a neighbor, and I recoil into my shell. People have often told me I’m brave (usually for something silly like ordering five star curry or jumping off a high-dive). But when I hear that, I always want to say, “If you had any idea how often I am terrified…”

For whatever reason, today has been one of those days. I feel the nearness of well-known fears breathing down my neck with unwelcome intimacy.

I am so thankful to be surrounded by people who make a regular practice of squandering themselves. They never cease to pull me back into the beautiful fray. They adopt nine year olds out of the foster care system. They work to develop charter schools in low-income communities. They make unlikely friends and plant gardens and write poetry. They go to Nicaragua and stay in the towns they grew up in. They inspire me. I’m thankful for them today.

Dr. Adaha

This morning over breakfast I opened an email from a friend in China. The one-liner read, “Is this your friend?” followed by a link to a BBC news article. I took another bite of blueberry bagel and clicked on the link. I scrolled down and sure enough, buried in a long article about the conflict in North Africa, was his familiar face – dark skin, big teeth, sad eyes. Our friend, Dr. Adaha.  

The article talked about how he stayed in the town we lived in until the last possible minute, (when government troops were finally within shelling range, if what he always said would be go-time turned out to be true), before loading up the ambulance with whatever hospital equipment he could carry and driving across the southern border. But instead of driving on to bigger and better things, he parked that ambulance right in the middle of 80,000 refugees and got to work on gunshot victims and pregnant women. And every once in a while he apparently turns right back around and drives back across the border to carry injured people out – soldiers on his side, solders on their side, civilians, POWs. “Anyone who is desperate” the article quotes him as saying.

God have mercy, this sounds like the man I know.

I wasn’t so sure what to make of him when I first met him. I remember one of the first times I was around him. We were sitting with a few friends on the front porch of their kitchen, swatting mosquitoes as we ate beans and rice out of flimsy plastic plates. Dr. Adaha joined us late, looking worn from his evening rounds at the hospital. But even as he unfolded heavily into a chair he warmed to our conversation and from the many questions tossed his way I could tell he was known for his stories. He told many that night, but the one that has forever stuck in my head, epitomizes all those I have now heard him tell a dozen times or more. With his legs crossed neatly while he ate, Dr. Adaha told us of a battalion of rebel soldiers he had attended to during the war. They were badly beaten in a battle deep in the bush and he was rushed out to treat them. There he found men ripped apart by bullets, bleeding to death in the middle of nowhere. “There was this one guy whose intestines were all spilling out of him,” he said matter-of-factly that night while he chewed his beans. “And he wanted to die so badly that he had stuffed dirt and grass into his open wound.” As he described the man’s injuries, Dr. Adaha started to laugh. “He was so miserable, that he actually tried to kill himself by putting grass in his body…” His eyes squinted tightly and his body shook with laughter. I remember staring at my plate in horror that night and thinking, this guy is crazy.  

And he is. At least by some standards. In a world where he could be making a ton of money in a nice hospital, he lives on the salary supplied by a relief organization (when they haven’t already evacuated). When he could be living in a comfortable home with his wife and three sons, he sleeps in a mud hut alone and thousands of miles away from his family. When he could cash in his seventeen years of noble efforts in difficult place for well-deserved praise and rest, he earns his heroism by working eighteen hours days in a refugee camp most people less educated than him simply visit. Stark raving mad. And I don’t know if I have ever met anyone more inspiring.

In two and a half years of living next door to Dr. Adaha, I came to love his stories. I never failed to be surprised at the things he would laugh at and the things he would not. He once swore the crocodile in the river near his boyhood home was sixty feet long, sixty feet, and he looked positively annoyed when I burst into laughter at the tale. But he could speak of a child soldier shooting a verbally abusive POW in the head and chuckle like he had just told a great joke. But I came to realize that when he laughed at these narratives of intense human suffering, he did not expect me, or anyone else to. He laughed because he had been there. And we had not. He laughed because, really…what else do you do? It seems like when your choices are to laugh a little or to sit in the dirt with your head in your hands and weep, some days, most days, you will choose to laugh. Then you wipe your eyes, and get back to pouring your life into some of the hardest, greatest work imaginable.

The past couple of weeks Bryan and I have been encouraged to see progress in our own plans. I will share more details soon but for now it looks like we may be working with the same community of refugees that Dr. Adaha is in the near future. Which means that someday soon I may be hearing some of his stories again. And I have this deep feeling, somewhere between terror and hope, that maybe one day I can have the great honor of laughing with him.   

(To see the BBC article about Dr. Adaha click here )

Apple Cake

Wait, you thought I was going to spend 15 minutes a day writing on my blog? Ha! Where in the world did you get that crazy idea? Seriously people, let’s be real. 

(Ok fine, I was going to spend 15 minutes a day writing on my blog, but that, obviously, has not happened. Why, you ask? Well, life happens.)

But I’m writing now. Bugaboo is down for her nap and the laundry is in the dryer. I just mixed together an apple cake that is baking in the oven so the whole house smells like apples and cinnamon and coconut. It’s a nice moment to sit in. The apple cake recipe is one I’ve had for a while but only recently used. My recipes have travelled around the world with me in a ziplock bag as of late. They used to be all handwritten neatly in a big green checkered binder that had dainty sketches of fruit in the borders and “From the Kitchen of __________” written in a cute font across the top of each page. But during one of our trips out to Kenya last year, in an annoying act of irony a horde of starving termites ate their way through the pages of ingredients leaving behind chewed up paper and tunnels of dirt. I cut out what I could salvage and put the recipe scraps in a termite proof baggie. It’s just as well since the ziplock bag look is probably a little more my style than country-kitchen anyway. At three AM last September, when we were frantically sorting through the contents of our house to decide what made the two-suitcase evacuation baggage allowance and what to leave behind for whatever civil war brings, the bag of recipes made the cut. At the time is what a mindless decision. Ziplock bags don’t take up much room afterall. But now I can’t help but wonder if there was something more to it.

Though carted around the world rather unceremoniously, that ziplock bag holds pieces of me that have been collected for years and will be savored for many more I pray. There is tons of stuff from my mom. Rather innocuous “Healthy Muffins” and “Baked Oatmeal” balanced out somewhat dramatically by all her Thai stuff: “Taud Man Goong”, “Neau Pad Prik” and “Gang Keow Wan.” There is my mother-in-law’s lasagna and blueberry bread, two that never fail to please the husband and my Aunt Sharon’s white chicken chili. There is a recipe for chocolate pudding that came accompanied by a tin of cocoa, delivered by a bush pilot whose wife had heard I was sorely in need of chocolate. There are recipes from strangers, mostly sweet old ladies who slipped hand-written note-cards in envelopes at wedding showers once upon a time. Most are stained and splattered from days that I frantically threw something together for an unexpected guest or just wanted to make something nice for a loved one. There are recipes that I have made over and over and over again and those that I have never tried that are just waiting for the right spirit of adventure to take hold. 

The apple bread recipe is my Granny’s. I made it for the first time over Christmas and did so cautiously; there have always been other more experienced aunts and cousins around to take up the apple cake mantle if Granny herself didn’t. But it turned out good. I think I made it today because I have been thinking about her a lot. We recently found out that, after a scary fall, she won’t be leaving the nursing home where she was recovering. Her memories are already starting to leave her quietly, as though they just slip out of the room when she isn’t watching. The newest trivial ones fade first, like what drawer she put her clothes in or how to operate the CD player or who came by to visit in the afternoon. I imagine these memories bowing out respectfully, making room for the treasured images that come with raising five children, marrying the love of your life, or being a little girl. It’s as though memories themselves hang on to a sense of priority and rank as long as they can. 

I fear that making an apple cake is probably in the first or second tier of memories. And the thought of Granny never making an apple cake again makes me incredibly sad. But I made one today. And because some of her is in some of me, I feel like she had a part in that too, whether she remembers it or not. The aroma of baking apple cake fills my whole house just now and it makes me feel attached to something just out of my reach.

Fifteen Minutes

I must apologize to all my readers in advance - those of you I know personally, those of you I have never met and those you who aren't really reading this blog anymore now that there are no longer any exciting stories about life in an exotic place (sorry about that) - the next few weeks of my blogging life may be a bit odd. So I mentioned that I signed up for a writing class while we are here in the States. I went back and forth about the whole thing really. It's the first five week course in a series that is ultimately supposed to help you end up with that 300 page novel you have secretly always wanted to write but know you never really will. Yeah, it's one of those classes (the first one, introductory level, no serious commitments, so dear sisters who still resent me for my unfinished manuscript of "The Naladite Ring" which I abandoned at age eleven can just calm down. I'm afraid that project remains on hold.) The whole thing intimidates me out of my gourd. I mean, what is scarier than sitting in a room full of talented adults who all assume you must think you are talented or else why else would you have signed up for this and bearing your blood, sweat and tears on paper for the world to see. It feels like one of those dreams where you look down and realize you are sitting in one of your college classes with nothing on but a wash cloth. And then you just try to act normal and hope no one notices. Yeah...like that. (Other people do have those dreams right?)

But at the end of the day, I'm going to be more miserable if I don't try this. The one self-indulgent thing that seems to have survived the violent pruning of motherhood is writing (and yes, that is over sleeping and pooping some days) so I figured, it must be something important to me. We might as well see where this goes.

I had my first class on Tuesday night and...it was awesome. Yes, I am still scared to death but my head is already swimming with new ideas and previously unthought thoughts. Our professor is a published novelist (Suzanne Frank anyone?) who is just beautiful and snotty enough to be impressive but not enough to be distasteful. On Tuesday she wore boots and a flouncy skirt complete with gold bangles and a chain necklace weighed down by a dozen four inch turquoise crystals. It looked a bit dangerous but made sense of the time-traveling romance history novels set in ancient Egypt that I hear she writes. Not exactly my cup of tea (at least not that I would admit) but what she had to say inspired me. And scared me some more. It made me feel better that most of my classmates seemed just as nervous as me. Most seemed to be middle aged women looking to be the next Stephanie Meyers. But not all. I sat next to a banker who was in there just to become more "well-rounded." Last year she took a drawing class for the same reason. That, my friends, is guts.

Anyway, back to my original apology. One of our assignments (of many) is to spend fifteen minutes a day writing. The likelihood of me doing that on top of all my other assignments and being a wife and mama AND blogging is about as likely as me making cordon bleu for supper after working out and organizing my closet. Which means it's not going to happen. So I am killing two birds with one stone here and my fifteen minutes ends up on my blog for you to deal with. Sorry about that. But thanks for your patience.

Gotta run. Time's up.

P.S. - She also said to make sure your blogs are never just stream of consciousness because who really wants to read that. Oops. Sorry again.   

Change for Gas

Sometimes when I lay in bed at night, after I have already drifted out of full consciousness but before I have completely crossed the threshold of a dream, I walk through our home in North Africa. I think I am so desperate to remember, to cling to a reality that is already fading around its edges that this practice  brings me comfort. I usually start on the front stoop and spend a moment with my hands on the wood frame of the door feeling the grainy arch of the incessant termite tunnel winding up the wood under my fingertips. It’s mid-afternoon towards the end of the rainy season so the air is still and hot, but already beginning to hesitate a little at the approach of evening. I gaze up at the hill to my left and watch a herd of goats lazily make their way towards the top. In the splotchy camouflage of the hillside I can’t find the small boy tending them from some shady perch, but I hear the small stones he tosses clatter pleasantly down towards our back fence. A hawk soars overhead motionlessly. I watch it for a moment and then turn and walk through our living room, my bare feet making sweeping sounds as they graze the cement floor. I notice the disarray of our bookshelf and make a mental note to organize it sometime. A lizard scurries across the wall and disappears behind a big clay water pot propped in the corner which holds up the leather-sheathed sword that Bryan bought from an old man on the streets of D___ one day. Nimir flicks his black ears in the direction of the lizard but grants him a reprieve and stays reclining on the couch. I move into the kitchen, past our green gas refrigerator, its pilot light buzzing quietly behind it. The long sheer blue curtains I asked a tailor in town to make out of a tobe to keep the dust off my pots and pans stirs very faintly as I walk past my cabinets. They don’t keep the dust off of anything. On the island I see my cracked wooden cutting board and a pile of inverted lime halves in a sticky puddle, the byproduct of the limeaid now cooling in the fridge. My cookbooks slump on the counter (I confess, Better Homes and Gardens looks a little incongruous in this particular kitchen) and near the stove is a tiny Arabic coffee cup full of singed matches used to light my temperamental oven. Above me I hear birds waddling across our tin roof, their claws scratching loudly as they click-clack overhead like fat women in high heels. I’m at the back door now and I pause in the doorway again. The porch is dotted with a few empty basins, a bar of soap flecked with ash and two wood and rope footstools from the market. Just beyond the porch is the path to our shower and beyond that our sloping bamboo fenceline. In the distance I can see out over the tall grass to the stony path that winds around the hill, a shortcut to the main road. But at this time of day no one is on it. 

I inevitably fall asleep before I ever make it off the back porch. Somehow this nostalgic taxidermy of memories is soothing to me and I enjoy, even if a little sadly, the process of not forgetting. But if remembering a place and familiar things is what puts me to sleep at night, remembering people and imagining where they might be is what keeps me up. I try to keep my thoughts in check, balancing full-hearted prayers with senseless fear mongering in my mind. But sometimes I let go a little bit and imagine familiar faces and where they might be right now. I see Aisha sitting with her small children under a scraggly tree with dozens of other women, all waiting for the UN food distribution for the day. She is thinner than I last saw her, though still beautiful which makes me uneasy for different reasons. Without her husband here she is vulnerable. All the same I am almost guiltily glad for the marriage problems earlier in the year. There is another tree in the distance where women with swollen feet wait for the pains that will bring their babies into this difficult world. And for now, she does not sit among them. I think of Daniel too. He is scavenging for plants and abandoned sorghum to feet his grandchildren hiding in the bush, his gnarly hands still as strong as men half his age. The days are cannibalistic, each twenty-four hours eaten up in a search for enough food and water to survive another twenty-four. The family occasionally sees others hiding in the scrub brush and they exchange small pieces of news or messages from a relative. But mostly they keep to themselves. They cannot risk attracting the attention of the antanovs overhead.

But yesterday we got an email that put to rest some of the darker of these daydreams, if you can even call them that. A friend from K___ wrote to say that our guard had shown up at the refugee camp across the border and wanted to see if we could get him some cash to buy fuel to drive our ATVs to the camp as well. The beautiful absurdity of the email made me laugh out loud. Hi. Just checking in to say we need some gas. The car still in a war zone. Hope you guys are good. Ok, well, thanks and hope to hear from you soon. My Lord, are your families with you? Is everyone ok? Who all is where? Is anyone left behind? And for goodness sake, how in the world do you have access to email? This is what I want to yell out in all caps across the world. But I have to be patient. The answers will come, though maybe slowly and in pieces. 

But I have something new to imagine now. I still don't know where Aisha and Daniel and many others are but I know where one family is. I see Abdul and Ibrahim and their families hanging out in the boonies with our, (I’m quite sure absolutely trashed) ATV waiting for some gas to get them all the way to the camp. I don’t want to make light of the horrors. I can’t imagine the conditions they must be in. But they’re alive. And they’re together. And Maslow would lead me to believe that if they are at all concerned about the future of this motorized hunk of metal and rubber, then they must be in at least some sense of the word, ok. This makes me very happy. And it makes me dare to believe that maybe someday I won’t have to imagine anymore but will get to see and taste and smell and hear and hug really, really hard all my future memories myself.
 

Date

It’s so intimidating to write after being gone for so long. Much like my body that has been plied with holiday sweets and then left to gel in the car for hours and hours of long road trips, my brain is out of shape and weary with disuse. I have weeks and weeks of backlogged things to write about but I’m sitting here at a complete loss of where to start. I’m taking a writing class this spring and I am a bit concerned that I will hardly be able to complete articulate sentences much less whatever else will be expected of me. But just like the Yoga video I contorted my stiff self awkwardly through yesterday, I guess my only choice is just to get up and get my mind moving again. Let’s all pray that, unlike my abs today, my creative muscles will be a little less sore tomorrow.

So, we’re back in Texas after a long pilgrimage from Louisiana to Georgia and Arkansas and back again. For reasons that are varied and complicated, the holidays were bittersweet – genuinely and deeply sweet, but with an underlying tang of heartache. But now, after three months of living out of suitcases that have been hauled from the trunk of the car to a relative’s guestroom half a dozen times or more, we are settling into a place where we can just be. We are sinking are toes slowly into a house that though not really ours, is kind enough to pretend to be so for a while. The pattern on the plates is unfamiliar, but the dishes offer up food I cooked and that tastes like a thousand memories of meals gone by. With each passing day, whether by my daughter’s toys drifting further across the house like flotsam on some quiet tide, or the new towels that smell less like Walmart and more like Bryan’s soap, the house warms to us. It’s a place where we can just be us, which in this season is a gift.

Last night Bryan and I went on our first date in nine months. Perhaps to the skepticism of a younger version of ourselves, we opted for the somewhat cliché black-dress-Italian-restaurant-lingering-dinner-and-a-glass-of-wine kind of evening. And it was good for our souls. We haven’t been alone over a meal in longer than I can remember, and yet just like my mother always said we would do, we spent the first half just talking about how amazing our daughter is. (I mean really, did you see how incredible those two little teeth are? She’s growing them perfectly, and all by herself! She’s absolutely brilliant.)

But somewhere between the bruscetta and the cappuccinos, practically midsentence, a unexpected lump welled up in my throat and I started to cry. In the past three months there has been a lot to cry about, happy tears and sad, but for some reason I have been mysteriously dry eyed. In moments of acute stress and deep joy I have been strangely composed, (at least on the outside), something downright bizarre from someone who can’t watch Tangled without a box of Kleenex on hand. But last night, a few notes in a song or a combination of flavors or a tone of voice pressed up against a place inside me that had worn a bit thin and I felt something give. And the tears came pouring out. Some tasted like grief and loneliness. Others like joy and intense gratitude. One or two still had a lingering hint of surprise from things no longer surprising at all. But they all tumbled out together. When I finished crying into my starched white napkin, smearing my eye makeup and making our waiter uneasy, I looked across into the eyes of a man who simply smiled and held my hand. He didn’t ask for an explanation or appear worried or hurt. He just let me take a deep breath and said, “It’s all going to be okay.” And I believe him.