mothers

Stick Season

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 1 Comment

My husband and I love to visit the area around Stowe, VT. We’ve been going there for long weekends for the past four or five years. We go whenever it works out for our two schedules, so oftentimes we are there at off-season times. Sometimes we can go during the peak seasons that draw the leaf-peepers or ski bunnies out in great numbers, but often we go during the in-between times when the locals can enjoy having their towns back to themselves, or take a break.

The fall foliage is spectacular, of course. Leaf Peepers have been flocking to Vermont for ages to see the hues of color thrown across the rolling mountains like crocheted blankets. There is a vibrancy that is energizing. Walking and hiking through the colored forests is a feast for the eyes and the spirit.

The wonderland that comes from winter – when the trees are dripping with snows and the landscape is white – is quiet and majestic. It fills me with awe and reverence; there is something holy about it. I become entranced by the ice formations that stretch from the eaves, and the swirling, snowy winds. Skiing or playing in the snow is athletic and exciting. And being cozy in front of a fire, winter is meditative and ripe for contemplation and relaxing deeply.

Spring feels like the whole state is mating: Mother Nature is gearing up for a green and pregnant spring and summer. I love the smell of manure for some reason — it takes me back to times spent out in the Texas farmland country near where I grew up. That smell abounds in spring in Vermont, along with the incredible perfume of budding flowers. There is so much promise in spring and summer. Hope and lightness. Everything feels possible.

The traditional four seasons in Vermont are legendary and I love them. But it is the other two that have taught me the most.

We discovered Mud Season one year: some call it the fifth season. At the time, we’d never heard of it. It is the transition between winter and spring when the dirt roads become mucky from thawing snows. It is amazing in its own ways. To me, it feels like the whole state is waking up. It is mucky and messy, a reminder to me that all growth is messy.

Growth requires mess. When I am growing, my life feels almost unrecognizable at times. I often panic: what is happening, why do I feel like my life is falling apart, that I am falling apart. I feel uncomfortable in my skin, even, as if it doesn’t quite fit right anymore.

Now I can know it’s my own personal mud season. I can relax into the mess of it: come to see it as a good sign. It means I am making a deep change and things are thawing out.  I am flooding my own well-travelled roads, creating muck, and from the muck, I will form new pathways, new ways of being within myself and in the world.

Things will clear up again. The world will feel familiar again, a new paradigm shift will have settled. The newness will wear off and I will recognize my self and my world again. New growth will come, and I will flourish.

Just this week, we discovered a new season to add to the five seasons of Vermont beauty.

Stick Season. We had no idea when we booked our trip to Stowe for Thanksgiving break that we had chosen Stick Season. We had called our favorite local restaurant to make a reservation and instead got a voicemail message that said they were “closed for stick season.” I looked it up.

Vermonters refer to the period of time between the foliage season and the snow season as Stick Season: the fall/winter transition after the leaves have fallen and before snow has settled on the trees. Naked trees = stick season.

Now as it happened, in the days before we arrived, there were early snows which thrust us into a premature winter-like Thanksgiving which was gorgeous.

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But in our last few days there, the temps rose again and the snow melted, and there we saw it: stick season.

I suppose some people may find it stark or bare, the landscape lacking the lush, pregnant greens of spring or the gloriously-colored hues of fall. My husband found it somewhat depressing-looking. I get that: trees are stripped down to their skeletons; the lack of color to the eye. Most of the birds have gone to warmer climes, so it is an empty quiet, not the whispery-full quiet of snow-covered earth.

But to me, there are unexpected gifts to be found in the season of stick.

We could see the structures that are usually hidden by leaves: it was like discovering whole hidden pockets of life within the towns we thought we knew so well. We kept being surprised at discovering homes and structures that we’d had no idea were there.

There were still some shocks of color: subdued colors that are perhaps usually overshadowed by the flashier foliage and fauna of the usual seasons. They broke out against the grey in a muted but welcome visual reminder that behind the brightest and the loudest often stand other beauties valuable of our attention, if we pay attention. Red-browns that were formerly overlooked as they were surrounded by reds and oranges and greens finally had our attention, and my hungry eyes drank them in with gratitude.

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And the trees themselves, so bare and simple without their normal adornment, seemed elegant and brave to me. I felt I was seeing their core essence, and I could feel their presence and wisdom resonating in different ways than when they overflow with their plumage.

Their stark, bare beauty reminded me of my mother, towards the end of her battle with cancer. I had always seen my mother’s beauty. But at the end, it was if she had been stripped down to some pure essence of her soul. It was as if anything extraneous had fallen away and what was left was the sheer perfection of her human spirit. She radiated a kind of centeredness and a knowing that I could not yet know. She was stunning.

Those trees in stick season felt that way to me. They know things I can not yet know. They know a bigger picture than I can conceive of. I am drawn to be with them, to feel their wisdom, to allow my own excess of spirit to fall away, to strip my own spirit of what I can to get down to the skeleton of who I am. To remember what really matters to me in this world.

Those final days with my mother brought me a clarity of purpose that I had never known before. At her side, I knew I was exactly where I was meant to be, doing the most important work of my life.

It was her stick season, and she knew it on some level. Being in Vermont’s stick season brought it all back to me, that clarity of perspective that being with a dying loved one can bring. It’s one of the many gifts that death can offer.

Stick season. I feel like at this time in my life, I am in a kind of stick season right now. I have the desire to become stripped bare of my habitual ways of being in the world. I am finding out who I really am underneath the masks and the costumes of the plumage of my spring and summer. I am sitting with what is really there in me and letting myself feel naked and vulnerable. I have come to know my pure essence, and I am in the process of allowing my self to be truly seen.

Dead branches drop off healthy, living trees all the time, and wood knots appear in the trunk where branches died. Knots are imperfections that cause living wood grain to grow around them. Isn’t that amazing? In the brilliance of that living and growing wood, knots have formed. They are a testament to the life force within a tree, to their growth ability.

I will no longer hide my knots. I will know that there is a kind of beauty in them, too.

I know that there will be new growth in me again. I will dress again in my plumage, but it will reflect the new colors of what I have found within. Mother Nature gives me comfort and faith in the process of growth: she evidences that truth every day of every year. I need not fear what is happening. It is just Stick Season, after all.

#treetherapy #vermont #theseasons #stickseason

 

 

All About Joan, Epilogue

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 3 Comments

Nine years ago almost to the day, I finished the second show of our two-show Saturday, and headed home to the actors’ house. I was feeling really unsettled and irritable.

As I walked out to my car, I ran through my day and night, trying to find some logical reason for my mood. It had been a perfectly normal day. Another great show. Nothing to explain the deep dread I was feeling in my gut. The unsettled sense in my bones.

I found myself driving aimlessly through the fairly quiet streets of the city, crossing over the river bridges again and again. This city in Illinois was unique in that you can literally drive across a bridge and be in another city, and then drive over another and be not just in another city, but another state. Without intending to, I was going back and forth, back and forth, from one city to the next, over and over again.

Something about the way the dark water was moving under the bridges in the light of the cloudy-mooned sky seemed to reflect something dark moving through me. At a certain point, I was literally overcome with emotion and had to pull over on the roadside. I felt so utterly sad, so desperately powerless, so…lone.

When I finally hit exhaustion, I drove back to the actors’ house to try to sleep. Just one more show to do, tomorrow afternoon, then I could make the trip down to see my Mom.

The next week was our last week of the show. It was bittersweet. I was sad for the closing, but relieved, too. I was looking forward to being able to just visit Mom for a long visit before heading back to NYC. The traveling back and forth on my days off had built up an accumulated tiredness that lurked just under the surface of my passion for the play and for my mother. My emotional and physical resources were being stretched thin.

Back to the actors’ house. The new cast for the next show had just moved in. We’d been a cast of four, swimming in the abundant space of the big many-bedroomed, two-story house. The cast for the new show was huge, and the peaceful house was now filled to the brim with with people, pep and parties.

My room was right off the common room, and as I made my way through it to my room that night, I did not bother to interact with anyone. Normally, the people-pleaser in me would have mustered up an insincere smile as I passed. This night, not only did the lively chatter and the blaring TV not suit my mood, it grated on my nerves.

I tried to sleep but was restless. Around 1:30 AM, desperate for some escape into sleep, I stuck my head out the door, asking that they have some respect for the rest of the house and take the party elsewhere, upstairs, anywhere, so that I could get some sleep. I’m sure I seemed like the biggest wet blanket ever, but God, did I feel awful. I finally fell into a fitful sleep.

The next morning, I started awake to find a voicemail from my father. I knew when I saw the message that something was up. I will never forget that feeling in my gut, looking at my phone, seeing his name. And before I actually heard his voice saying the words, my body already knew what had happened. From somewhere deep inside, it gave a kind of primal groan – half silent, half aloud. I threw on clothes and grabbed my purse and keys.

I stumbled out into the common room and started lurching in a daze out towards my car. I passed some girl who had awoken early — I don’t know what she must have thought was going on – I am pretty sure I was white as a ghost, and I may have been crying. I waited until I was out on the street before calling my Dad back. It was if the house did not deserve to be the place where I would hear the words that she was gone.

He answered quickly, and we spoke as I wandered in the middle of the street. My father and I decided that since I already had a flight to go home the next day, I’d just keep it…no need to miss the show to get back that night. The funeral home would not be open…Monday morning made the most sense. I’d have a day and a half with him to sort things out, and then I’d fly back to Illinois to finish my contract out that week and drive my things back to NYC after the last show that next Saturday. Then I’d return to Texas.

I hung up with him, faced with getting through the rest of the day and night. I knew I would do the show that afternoon…that my mother would want me to…that I wanted to. That is what you do, as an artist, as an actor. You bring your life to the stage. Your truth. No matter what. But what to do with myself until I had to be at the theatre?

I knew one thing. I did not want to be around the actors’ house with those chatty, happy people who didn’t know me from Adam and had no reason to care about my loss.

While in Illinois, I had met a local woman, who, it turned out, was in town caring for her parents. She’d given me her number for some reason. Midwestern kindness. “If you need anything while you are here…” I barely knew her, but she was my next call.

That woman met me at Appleby’s and sat with me until it was call time. A total stranger, yet she sat with me and got me through those awful first six hours of shock. I hope to be there for someone some day in the way that she was for me. At a moment’s notice, she dropped her day’s plans to sit with a total stranger. I do not remember a thing we talked about, but what an Angel she was.

It’s funny. You can know someone is going to die, but it doesn’t prepare you for anything. The actual death still rocks your world. It’s just as shocking. I’ve since lived through sudden loss and additional prolonged deaths, and there isn’t much difference when you actually get the news in terms of the affect of the actual grief and the loss.

When it was finally time, I went and did the show, which was actually a grace. Having something in my life such as acting — it is an anchor, it grounds me to the world and to my core. It was a blessing to have a show that day. I figured I could either be heartbroken outside the world of the play or take my heartbreak and transform it within the world of the play. You bet I picked the latter. My cast mates and the production team were incredibly kind and supportive. I will never forget their loving kindness.

Afterwards, I quickly went to gather some things, and then I treated myself to a hotel out by the airport so that I could have some quiet and not be in that house! The next morning I boarded a plane and flew down to be with my father and begin to make all the necessary arrangements.

I later found out that my mother had begun to feel distressed that last Saturday evening just around the time I left the theatre. While I was driving across those bridges, over the river over and over, so distressed, she was experiencing great physical distress and fear. And that hour I was tossing and turning? That was around the time when my Mother actually died. It’s strange, but I believe that some part of me knew what was happening with her. They say energy can travel across time and space. I know it did that night.

I miss my beautiful mother every day. But I also feel her in my bones, hear her melodious voice in my mind. Her presence is strong in my heart. Her words come back to me as the years pass. All those talks we had at the end are stored in a bank in the back of my mind. She gave me so much to draw from. I see her in my reflection in the mirror more and more as I get older. And I do not mind at all.

Her death changed my life.

She was the heart of our family. All families have one. The person who is the love center. That was my mother. Our family has had to reconfigure. We’ve had to try to find a new balance. But the truth is, the heart center can never be replaced. You go on as a family, and love as before, of course. But you always feel the absence of that missing heart.

People came out of the woodwork to offer condolences. Baggers at the local supermarket sent flowers to our house. It turned out that she knew all their names, and their kids names, and their stories. Friends from my childhood that I had long since lost contact with came to her memorial because they had felt seen and heard by my mom. She had so many friends from high school and college and beyond…I’m talking real friends, not just acquaintances.

If I can live my life even one tenth of the way she lived hers, I will have lived a life of great value. I am so grateful for all she has given to me. For all she continues to give me.

My priorities shifted as a direct result of losing my mother. She left me with a legacy of living and loving better. Of having true curiosity about life and of others. I saw that all that remains when someone dies is how they made you feel. It made me wonder what I would leave people with when I die. It made me want to be more like her. To make people more at ease. To take more time to really see and be with others. To listen more. To make them feel seen and heard.

Her death made me see people, the world, differently. I grew up buying what was sold to me on TV — MTV was born in my youth, after all. I believed what I was surrounded by in all forms of pop culture: that celebrities and stars were the people of the greatest value. The beautiful people – the movie stars, the models and the rockstars – were the ones to admire and aspire to. It shaped my whole value system.

But after my mom died, that changed. I know now the beauty and honor in the quiet, ordinary heroes, the ones who live lives that maybe no one ever notices or reports on. The ones who love and listen and give for no acclaim. Who give their attention to others with no expectation or need to be adored back. Those people are the real rockstars of this world. I admire them and aspire to be more like them today.

More like my mom, who was one of those. A true star.

 

All About Joan, Pt 5

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 6 Comments

I remember well the last Mother’s Day with my mother. I had come home to Houston to be with her, as per usual, on my day off from the show I was doing in Illinois. It being Mother’s Day, I wanted to bring her a present.

It is odd when you are trying to pick a gift for someone who has been told that they are, in essence, dying. Certain gifts seem ridiculous, and some seem insensitive: a purse or some piece of clothing or jewelry. At this point, my mom didn’t leave the house, or have outside visitors, so such things seemed unimportant and unnecessary.

“Things” in general had long since become less important, unless they could somehow bring joy or add quality to my Mom’s life.

After wracking my brain, I settled for some kind of flowers or plant. I stopped off at a florist on the way to my parents’ house and picked a blue hydrangea plant in a blue and white ceramic bowl. She loved the color blue, I loved hydrangea, and I loved her, so it seemed the best fit under the circumstances. I figured it was at least something pretty to look at.

We had a particularly intense visit.

My mother had just reached the point where she and my father had to admit that they needed a nurse to come in: she could no longer get herself up out of a chair or sit up in bed unassisted. I had been noticing her failing body strength the last few visits.

But it had been a delicate subject to broach with them. As had other such conversations that had become necessary as her disease progressed.

First had been concern that the three steps up from their bedroom sitting area to the bed area had become a danger for her. I had become secretly terrified she’d fall and break her neck. So I very carefully brought it up to my parents, trying to seem casual so as not to belie the quiet hysteria I felt deep inside.

Such conversations with your parents are so surreal: to be both the child and the adult in the situation at once is strange.

They ended up moving the bed down into the bedroom sitting area, which was a great solution until even that was too much for her.

She eventually moved into Ground Zero – the open kitchen living room area. A hospital bed replaced the couch. She was in the center of things there.

Each new shift in her physical condition had required carefully approached conversations. I’d sense a hope in my parents that was a kind of invisible protective veneer surrounding them, one that colored their perspective of what was actually happening. It seemed to make them a beat or two behind in seeing the changes that were occurring.

Intuitively, I knew I had to take care not to puncture it. I had to ever-so-gently lead them to the realizations. They could not be forced upon them, or rushed.

This most recent concession that my mother’s physical freedom had become so altered was a particularly tough one for both of them. This Mother’s Day fell in the final few days of their time on their own in their home before a full-time hospice care person entered the picture.

As was true of our other weekly visits, we mainly spent our time together talking. Being together.

My mother talked of her life on those visits, and asked me about mine. There were times the conversation went to very serious subjects. Intimate information was exchanged. Old wounds were healed. Our relationship returned to what I can only describe as what I imagine to be the pure essential love between an infant and its mother.

And we laughed. A lot. And talked of lighter things. But throughout all of our talks, there was a subtle rhythm to them that I now realize she was orchestrating. Bits and pieces of those talks, that seemed so casual at times, come back to me as my life progresses. It turns out, she had been implanting motherly wisdoms all along. Mothering me until the very end.

And while I felt our beautiful closeness at this particular visit, I also felt a distance, too. She was moving through an internal process that was singular and private: it was something that neither my father nor I could be a part of.

When I left, I said what I had taken to saying every time: I love you. You know that, right? You hang in there and I’ll see you next week, OK? She hugged me and gave my cheek a little pat. I hated leaving her. It was always hard.

This particular time, for some reason I have never since been able to fathom, I wasn’t particularly afraid I wouldn’t see her again. I let my guard down for a moment. It wasn’t in the forefront of my mind that it might be my last time to see her.

I don’t know why I dropped that awareness. I’ve replayed that last goodbye over in my mind a hundred times. Berating myself for not having said more profound things. The truth was, we’d already said the truly crucial things we needed to say to each other, and for that I am truly grateful. I don’t know what it is I think I could have said at that last goodbye. I just know it still comes back to circle my mind at times. I guess it is all a part of the way the mind deals with grief, those senseless replays and circles.

The next time I visited my parents’ house, the hydrangea was still there. But my Mom was gone forever.

All About Joan, Pt 4

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I never saw my mother as more beautiful then when she was dying. I know that’s strange to say, but it is the truth.

As a little kid, I thought she was gorgeous. I’d pore over old black and white photos of her and her twin sister in high school. She looked like a movie star to me.

She was always a pretty lady, though she herself could never own her own beauty. She’d brush off compliments like they were flies on the rim of her iced tea glass. (Remember sun tea?! She got on that bandwagon big time when that hit the ‘burbs.) But during my middle childhood, she stopped putting much time into her looks.

I learned from an early age that being a female in Houston meant a heavy investment in one’s appearance. I developed an intense concern over how I looked, especially my weight, and constantly compared myself to other girls. So I remember wondering why she didn’t seem to care much about how she looked. Now I realize she was probably just tired from taking care of three kids and a husband. (And maybe depressed, but that’s not for me to diagnose, right?)

Once I was out of the house and off to college (the last of her three children,) she started to give more attention to her self, treating herself to nice clothes and wearing makeup. It being the eighties, she especially loved shoulder pads (yikes, remember those?) I think she thought they made her hips seem smaller. She was always self-conscious about her weight.

Throughout my early adulthood, she thrived. She became very involved in a charity organization, eventually holding several offices. I loved seeing her stretch her wings. She was a smart lady and loved people, and they loved her. The Empty Nest was a terrific departure point for her life. She and my Dad had a great time after we were all grown and gone. Until she got sick, of course.

Cancer does something oddly beautiful to some people. It’s as if it strips away all excess of the ego’s physical manifestation down to the spirit-bone. What remains is pure essence. And her essence was simply beautiful.

She had dwindled down to a size that was next to nothing, which of course she teased that she’d have loved if only it didn’t come with the other consequences. Her hair had been lost to the chemo fight, so she had taken to wearing little soft cotton caps. Just in the last months of her life, her hair started to grow back, the lightest dusting of silver-white. Against her porcelain skin, and the bone structure that showed through in full force without any extra softness to shape her face, she was stunning. She had taken to wearing a navy kaftan-style robe of the softest cotton. To me, she again looked like a Hollywood movie star from the Golden Age. She was just missing a gold turban.

I still have one of those little caps she had taken to wearing at the end. I keep it along with one of the hundreds of Beanie Babies that she had collected. She was an avid collector of many things: antique cut glass, Brownware, Fiesta ware, to name but a few (and I do mean but a few.)

She loved decorating the house for all holidays, including Presidents Day and graduations. Much to my father’s chagrin, she had a whole room dedicated to these decorations as well as part of the attic: there were drawers filled with easter eggs and bunnies, a wardrobe filled with Santas, a closet filled with turkeys, ghosts, and black cats and such…you get the idea.

And the Beanie Babies. Oh, the multitudes of Beanie Babies. When my brother’s two beautiful children were born, she began collecting them with a fervor, planning to save them for the children that they would have one day. She became an E-bay specialist, hunting down the hard-to-find ones with the skills of an bounty hunter on the tail of a high-paying felon.

My father ended up donating all those Beanie Babies to the children’s hospital that my mother’s charity supported. But I chose one to keep as a sort of talisman – a little pony, that I keep along with her little turquoise hat.

For the first two years after she died, they traveled everywhere with me. On the tours, they were the first thing I unpacked in the hotel room. Once home again, they were on my bedside table, the first thing I would see when woke.

I needed them in a way that is beyond logic.

After my Mom died, it was as if a giant invisible hand had turned the kaleidoscope of my life, shifting the pieces so that they settled in a new pattern, one I didn’t recognize. I felt adrift, and it was a terrifying sensation.

That little Beanie Baby and her cap were touchstones as I found my way in the New World that held no Mother. Maybe they also helped me feel connected to her loss as the rest of the world around me continued on its way, as it must. Physical proof that she had existed, and that I loved her.

Today they sit on a shelf in my office, part of my small collection of muses, totems that bring me strength and support. They still carry the beautiful spirit that was my mother, and I am so grateful for them.

Pt. 5 to come.