Hiatus

Last Thursday I woke up before the alarm, contemplating my re-entry into the blogosphere, which I had decided would begin that day. Where would I start? What sort of pithy synopsis could I give that would fairly and entertainingly encapsulate the last 4 months of our lives, if indeed I still had an audience to be concerned with? Would I start by announcing the pregnancy, the gender of the baby in my womb, the nightmares and fantasies that have ensued since I peed on the stick in the bathroom at work, not long after writing the last post on this blog? Or would I start with Sydney, her various transformations, her struggles and triumphs, our adjustment to the idea of life as a family of four? I lay in bed, listening to the slight, muffled sounds of my daughter's morning stirrings, and realized I was looking forward to writing again.



But then. Sydney and I were having breakfast when Cade called downstairs with the news that Ashley Morris had died. I sat, stunned and uncomprehending, while Sydney happily dragged her waffle through the dregs of syrup on her plate. I started to cry. His wife, I thought, his babies. What kind of fucking sense did this make? I heard Cade upstairs, getting into the shower, and later, when he kissed me goodbye and agreed--in that soft, quiet way he has that always makes me feel like a raving lunatic--that this was terrible and made absolutely no fucking sense, I was struck again by the essential singularity of our psyches. I had no idea what he was feeling. Shocked? Scared? Disoriented? He always seems a little resigned to me, like he has come to expect that bad things happen and so when they do they don't come as a shock, but how accurate is that perception? I wanted so much, in that moment, to know, to understand, to merge. And I didn't want him to get into his car and drive away, into the bad, big world that takes good people way too soon.

I didn't know Ashley very well, although blogging is a funny thing: you get to know people intimately without the myriad of face-to-face interactions that normally constitute a relationship. And Ashley was such an open book, a real person, an often kind and sporadically vicious person who called it like he saw it. I liked that about him. And when we did have the occasion to talk face-to-face, I was always struck by the timbre of his voice, the softness of which was so incongruous on his large frame, his large persona. I liked that about him, too.

I'll attend his funeral tomorrow, along with many, many people who knew him much better than I did, with my unknowable husband and our child, our son, kicking his way into life in the soft, dark, safe interior of my belly. I'll try to be brave, like we all have to be, and push away the panic that rises in my throat when I drop my daughter off in the morning, when I kiss my husband goodnight and goodbye, when I think of everything I have to lose and how it would, or will, feel to lose those things.

We should feel happy we have so many things to lose. We should feel happy. We should feel terrified.

Thanks a lot

I really love Thanksgiving, not only because it involves copious use of decorative earth tones, but also because of what it compels us to do: to take inventory, to reflect, to be grateful. It's a beautiful holiday, and I've always loved it, way back when we would gather at my grandmother's house for dry turkey and two kinds of pie, me with my crystal goblet of milk and a ready exit before dessert (I've always hated pie); those wild years when we took part in throwing together our church's annual dinner, the most memorable of which being the year our refrigerator konked out on Wednesday night and we had to thaw 15 turkeys in our bathtub; the years I'd come home from college and my mother cooked, these elaborate, gourmet feasts, with wild mushroom stuffing and pumpkin pie with graham crucker crusts, which I ate, despite my life-long loathing of pie; the Thanksgiving we spent in Sarasota, in my tiny apartment with the incongrously beautiful French doors, when my mother and father tolerated each other's company for the first time in years, for long enough to enjoy the very first turkey my younger sister ever cooked, and we all played Trivial Pursuit; the first Thanksgiving I spent in New Orleans, when my entire family, including one very tiny nephew, made the 12-hour drive from Orlando to feast and to tour the house on Trianon that Cade and I had purchased the afternoon before; and of course the Thanksgiving two years ago when, having just returned to New Orleans after the storm with our two-month-old daughter and whole lot to complain about, we stood in the pre-feast prayer circle in Ama and I watched Cade's mother cry, like she always does when she tries to say grace, and I suddenly got it, I knew, I understood why she could never manage to get through the silly thing.

I started writing this post yesterday, before I heard the terrible news that the husband of a beloved Abeona teacher was killed in an accident yesterday morning. My plan was to put down a list of the shit I'm grateful for, and I intend to do so momentarily, but my mind keeps returning to this utterly kind woman, always with a smile and kind word for or about your child, who is no doubt experiencing unutterable grief, even as I write this. She will probably never read this post, but I have to say it anyhow: I'm so sorry, Kynisha.

So on to the grateful shit. Where to begin?

* I'm grateful for my husband, who is not above braiding the hair of his daughter's My Little Pony, who never asks me to be anyone or anything other than the person I am, but who ardently believes that I can become anyone and anything I choose to become.

* I'm grateful for my beautiful buttercream baby, my precious girl, who just the other night heard me complain to her father over dinner at Popeye's that I wished I had ordered a side with my chicken, who broke her much-desired biscuit in half and held it across the table, saying "For you, Mommy." No, no, my baby, you've got it mixed up: it's for you, munchkin--everything we do is for you.

* I'm grateful for Abeona House, where last Friday I stood in the backyard and kept Sydney from raiding the potluck table and watched her teachers dance their hearts out to Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots, who played on the back porch of the school for 2 full hours. Does it get any better than that?

* I'm grateful for my family and for Cade's family, and for the fact that both parties seem to, in turn, be grateful for the other. How often does that happen?

* I'm grateful for my job, for the opportunity to do clinical work, and for the fact that I stuck it out, despite my initial reservations.

* And I'm so goddamn happy to be home, to be here, to dance in the backyard of a nursery school on Oak Street on Friday, then turn around and feast on ridiculously delicious poboys at a street festival on Oak two days later. I'm grateful to live in a town where celebrating life and community and good food are an everyday occurrence.

Hey, Syd

Sydney loves my candy-apple red i-Pod, the one I use for jogging, the one she's not allowed to play with. Last night she discovered that the device plays music when you hold the ear buds up against the side of your head and stand very, very still. She gazed at me, wide-eyed, listening to Ben Folds' 'Zak and Sara.' After a minute or so she handed the headphones to me and made a sour face.

"I no like this song, Mommy."

"You don't like Ben Folds?" Ack.

"No." The tiny blond head went side to side, emphatically. "I. No. Like. This. Song."

"Wanna listen to another one?"

"Yeah!"

And so I scrolled through my playlists, sort of discouraged by the fact of my flesh-and-blood's questionable taste in music, until I hit on something I thought she could not possibly resist. Perhaps it was a test, I don't know, and god knows to what depths I would have sunk if she had declared this, too, unacceptable, but thankfully she took to it almost immediately. The volume was turned up high enough for me to hear what she was hearing, and as the opening bars of 'Hey Jude' filled her ears I witnessed a moment of pure astonishment, of joy, and when I asked her if she liked this song--say yes, please say yes--she grinned at me and nodded her tiny head and said, emphatically, "YES." And so we listened to the entire song, all seven minutes and seven seconds of it, all through the naa-na-na-na-na-na-naas, to the bitter end, the two of us sprawled on the living room rug, with the iPod.

So there you have it. My child is a Beatles fan. Now I can die happy.

Too Cute, Had to Share

True Love

Deep Thoughts

Jeffrey Cade and Sydney Cade outside a fire station in Cade, Louisiana

Please remind me why I work outside the home

On the way to Abeona House yesterday:

"Mommy?"

"Yes baby."

"Bye-bye coming."

"What's that?"

"Bye-bye comin'. Mommy go to work."

"Ooh, you mean we're about to say bye-bye, 'cause Mommy's going to drop you off at school?"

"Yee-ah."

(Silence)

"Mommy?"

"Yes baby."

"I love you."

(Mommy's heart breaks into a million peices)

Traumatized

Our office closed early yesterday, as client after client called to cancel their afternoon appointments and the director of the agency--my boss--threw her arms wide and declared herself a new person. "Before the storm, I would never have done this," she confided, breathlessly, as we gathered up our bags and raincoats. "I never would have closed the office." I thanked her for letting us go home and she advised me, before hurrying off down the hall, to make sure to use the bathroom, "in case you get stuck." And I had a moment of clear, sharp panic, followed by a wave of nausea so intense I had to stop and contemplate whether I was really able to drive myself home.

It was just before 2 p.m. and word on the street was that there was water on the street--and lots of it. I got in my little car and headed down Causeway, shaking, gulping down wave after wave of panic. I waited for the water and tried to calm down. I called Cade on my cell phone and was not a very nice person. "Tell me which way I should go," I demanded, then snapped and sighed as he thought about it. I drove through water at Jefferson Highway and had to focus very intently on my breathing, on not passing out or throwing up. I drove through more water at the foot of Oak Street and realized that what I was having, what I had been having, was nothing short of an acute stress reaction. I mean, shit. It was textbook.

The funny thing is, it has nothing to do with The Storm; this has everything to do with the afternoon, just about 5 years ago, when I went to pick up my friend Jen at the airport and got stuck on I-10 headed back into the city. Silly me: I assumed an accident, or rubber-necking, or construction or something. Sure, we'd had two tropical storms worth of rain in a little over a week, but the deluge seemed to have successfully resolved into a trickle, no harm done. And I'd just moved to town the year before, so I had no idea that the particular section of the interstate on which I was sitting was just west of that horrible little dip, the part that always floods, the part that on that afternoon had flooded so horribly, and so rapidly, that several cars had been consumed by the floodwaters, the rescue helicopters had been dispatched to the scene, and I was stuck, oh my god, on this road, with no way out except to drive over the sodden grass and onto the service road, where more and more cars were stranded, stalled out, stuck, and I turned up and down each road, through ridiculous waters that should have flooded my tiny little car, until I realized that there was no way home. We made it out to Cade's parents place in Ama and I knew, in some deep, sacred place, that I had landed a phenomenal in-law situation when, after I rejected her offer of hot tea and asked for something cold and alcoholic, Jara laughed and brought me an Abita.

In the end we were just fine, of course, and returned home the next day to a randomnly puddled but otherwise recuperated city. But apparently I was affected by all of this; apparently I can no longer drive through thunderstorms without losing my shit. But next time, I guess, I can use my deep breathing, guided imagery, positive self-talk, and one other, brand-spanking new technique I learned yesterday, in the kitchen at Abeona House, as I took one last moment to steady myself before fetching Sydney from her classroom: alternate nostril breathing.

Whatever works.

Man, On the Street

Life has seemed to slip past me lately--not the nuts and bolts, doing-the-laundry-mopping-the-floor sort of life (although that too, regrettably) but the inner life, the reflecting, the observing self of which I have grown particularly fond. I'm not sure why, although I do know that I have difficulty with minutiae, those small but very important details that allow one to, oh, I dunno, survive, and my tendency in situations wherein I feel flooded with details is to split--to silence my introspection. I imagine my observing self and my physical body almost like a bitter couple on a doomed vacation. It's raining outside and while Body is busy unpacking the bags and ordering room service, Self is slumped in the corner, neglected and petulant, ready to hop the next flight to anywhere but here.

But anyway.

This morning I had an early session at the Uptown office, and on my way to Metairie afterwards I decided to stop at Audubon park for a walk. This is a rare treat these days--an impromptu, mid-morning walk, sans stroller--and I relished every second of it. It made me aware of how little I've relished lately, how acutely deprived my senses and sensations have become, how desperately I needed to see and hear the man I've come to think of as the 'violin guy.'

Do you know the one I'm talking about?

I first encountered the violin guy several years ago on an early evening jog, as I rounded a curve near the front of the park and, pausing for a moment to fiddle with my i-Pod, heard a few bars of 'Amazing Grace.' It didn't take me long to locate the source: a paunchy, bearded, middle-aged guy, in shorts and a t-shirt, standing at the edge of the pond with violin in hand, playing a technically imperfect but surprisingly beautiful rendition of a not-surprisingly beautiful hymn. Since that day I've come across the violin guy on several occasions. Sometimes the music is moving, startling in its simplicity; other times, like today, it's a more mundane, man-on-the-street-with-a-guitar sort of experience. But I always take notice, like I do so often in this city, whether it be an impromptu brass band on a corner of Frenchmen, or a wild-haired octagenarian riding sideways on a Vespa down the middle of Magazine. And it never fails to pull my observing Self out of that silent corner and out into the street where, rain or shine, she is called to action.