Waiting for Mama, Berkeley, CA

Mama went on a phenomenally unusual (for her) week-long meditation retreat last week.  Since she gave birth to the first of these kids, she had never taken that much time for just her, and she returned a remade woman.

We all made it through the week intact (a feat made nearly inevitable by my current status as work-at-home, self-employed Baba), but lordy did we miss her, and lordy were we happy for her to return. After a long drive from the Santa Cruz mountains, she texted us to say that she was at the local market picking up provisions. From that point onward, I couldn’t pry the kids off the porch.  And when mama finally arrived, I couldn’t pry them off of her.

This time I convinced him to get outside the vehicle as I washed it (last time: he stayed inside and listened to a Sondheim musical).  He had that huge spray nozzle thingie in his hands for a mere moment, and he instantly understood why Baba has so dadgum much fun washing the vehicles. And he was danged good at it, too.

I tried to convince him that going on a dump run was about as much fun, maybe more. “Huge piles of garbage, taller than that building there!” I said. “Ginormous tractors just pushing the garbage in a huge pile! So much flying dust they have to spray a mist of water down on the pile every so often! Can you think of anything more fun than that?”

As it happens, he could. Spraying the nozzle thingie with soap and water all over the side of the truck. I’m going to keep working on him about the dump run.

Courtesy his sister, who knows whereof she colors all over someone’s face, based on personal experimentation.  I can’t say what in the Sam Hill they were aiming for here. One version was a dog, I remember that. But it kind of took off from “dog” and headed in more of a “Dali” direction.

Feeling a bit less verbal here, a bit more photographic. For perhaps evident reasons. World’s a bit spinny lately.

Whenever I hear the sound of an ambulance, I pause and do a little tonglen. It’s a Buddhist meditation practice, intended to take in pain and send out compassion and relief. Wherever there is an ambulance or fire engine siren, I know someone, somewhere, is in distress. So I try to do what I can to relieve it. Not much, but something.

From the other side of the country, I’m not sure what I can do. But I can say that doing tonglen, as a distance healing of sorts, also heals the healer. A bit. Here is a pithy instruction in how to do it from my main teacher, Pema Chödrön. Mostly it’s breathing in and breathing out, but slowly, and with very focussed intention. If you are in distress, or feeling very heavy hearted about others in distress, it may help.

And may love and a sense support from near and far flow in abundance to all who need it in Boston right now.

View from below, Memorial Stadium, Berkeley, CA.

I was heading to an event up there, on the balcony of the top floor of Cal’s remodeled Memorial Stadium, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Having managed not to read the directions explaining how to enter the building, *cough*, I had a little time to spend outside it, watching my chums schmooze.

After reading about you in the ADVOCATE, I’d like to say some things.

When you were very young, you became emotionally alienated from your
mother/mother figure(s).  Maybe she was absent.  Maybe she was mean, or weak, or
too girly.  She didn’t connect with you well, and didn’t give you the mothering
you needed.  You came to identify with males, and continued to crave that mother
connection, but transferred it to other females.

See [URL of some wacky antigay website].

That is the truth.  You weren’t born that way.

Your kids do need a dad, but you are not a dad.

[URL of another wacky antigay website]
[URL of yet another wacky antigay website]

“Gays” have been useful to the Left.  They have been exploited by both
parties.

The ex-gay truth will prevail.  It will not cease to be true.

Mrs. Dad, ever of the theater world, quipped: “It’s like you’re an off-Broadway show and you just got picketed! This is great!”

I am happy to report that Woefully Ignorant, as I’ll call her, is off the mark on the psychological profile. Except for the part about my craving that mother connection. After she died of breast cancer when I was 30, a decade into my Sapphic career, I definitely craved that mother connection.

Aside: I was an English major in college, and I thought it was only we literary critics who engaged in armchair, distance psychoanalysis of strangers. Funny!

Anyhow, since this is a multi-media site, abetted often by the visuals, I thought I’d toss in a sweet image of Mom and me as a tyke:

I know, right? Move over, Olivia De Havilland. Yeah, and don’t tease me about the bowl haircut or the Sunday dress. It was in the mid-1960s; we were visiting my grandparents and had just gone to church. I wish I had more recent images to share. Like, oh, ones of her with my kids.

She did bake cookies with a friend’s kids one time. That’s as close into grandmothering as I saw her able to get. Died before my sister had her kids too. So. That’s the mom story!

Hey, but Woeful: you know what will never cease to be true? LOVE! That I firmly believe. With mom in heaven, in my heart, hovering wherever she did or did not relative to my growing understanding of myself. And the love in that woman’s eyes that you see in that picture (yes, taken by my Pops, who loved her then and loves her still), was so ginormous, so consequential–20 years after her departure it’s still operating under its own momentum–that I have a bunch extra to share with you.

Hope that prevails.

Yep, I’ve ridden in her car. As a passenger. And yep, she drives fast and doesn’t really spend a lot of time looking in the rear view mirror. Only when necessary.