Good news

Okay, I have to be upfront and say that as Az gets older, I feel like there's so much I still want to share about her and her journey, but also that she needs and deserves privacy.

I'm not sure how I'm going to balance those, but I think ultimately I will have to come down on the side of her needs, not mine.

So without going into any great detail, I will say we've been making some changes and trying new things, and that we've had some pretty positive early results.

For example, we went to Hamilton last week (it was amazing). And often in the past, if I did some big, grand exciting thing that I was hoping Az would love, we would find at the end that she was entirely focused on the one thing that hadn't gone her way. She'd declare that she had a terrible time, because despite getting do to everything she wanted at the fair and getting a cotton candy, she hadn't also gotten a frozen slushy. It was so hard to be a parent and go through that cycle every time of "this is gonna be so great! -- Oh, this seems like a minor setback. -- Ugh, why do I even do anything for her when I can never make her happy?"

But anyway, Hamilton was terrific, and we both thought so, and someone even traded her seats for a better view (for reasons I won't go into, but it was kind of dumb of them!), and afterwords she got three cast members to sign her program. She looked SO HAPPY all day. And there was nothing, not the slightest thing, that brought her down. Even though traffic was awful and we pulled off in Pinole to eat dinner. She was just... cool. Easygoing. She just rolled with everything.

And there have been some other developments that, in any other household, would probably be nothing noteworthy, but in my case, I immediately called my mom to share the good news.

First, I gave Az a bowl of chicken noodle soup for lunch, and I said I loved her (I tell her all the time). She answered, "thanks for the food. I love you."

I played it cool until I got out the door, but she NEVER EVER EVER tells me she loves me, and she almost never says thank you about anything.

Later the same day, after Lochlan had already chosen a dessert, Azadeh asked if we could try the new gelato place that opened up down the street. So the two of us snuck out and got some gelato. And friends, she is weird about food. She hoards it, hides it, sneaks it, and sometimes eats like she's been in prison, guarding it. Mom and I used to get a small dessert sometimes when we'd go out to dinner, and we'd get three spoons, and she'd be SO greedy and weird about us even tasting it that we sort of gave up on the endeavor.

She NEVER voluntarily offers tastes of food. But I guess a lot of our "nevers" are getting disproven today, because last night she scooped up a bite of the "afternoon tea" flavor and handed it to me to try.   Again, I had to act like it was all normal and cool, but you could have knocked me over with a feather.

Anyway, I KNOW, okay, that saying thank you, saying "I love you," offering bites of food, and enjoying enjoyable events are probably not noteworthy in a household with a neurotypical kid, but I don't have that household, so I'm celebrating -- hell, I'm walking on air!

Bodega Bay

I should probably proofread and edit, but it's bedtime.

I took the kids camping this week. I always intend to do a couple day trips nearby, but unless we do a big week-long thing with family a 6-10 hour drive away, it seems we rarely manage and the school year sneaks up on us before my summer bucket list is crossed off.

I love Bodega Bay, and I found a 2-day mid-week spot despite my last-minute planning. It was perfect -- just a few sites away from the tall sandy hill Az had spent so much time running up and down last time (and even closer to the bathroom). 

It was in the 60s during the day -- sunny on Tuesday, but overcast yesterday, and cold at night. I kept it simple: the one-burner stove, no camp kitchen, and low-prep meals. 

The kids did a lot of running around playing, both at the campsite and at the hill, which I could mostly see from my camp chair by the fire. When I wasn’t stoking fires or washing dishes or making meals, I mostly read the book I’d brought, “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. 

***

I bought it because I’m teaching that new class next semester, and one of the ideas I feel like I need to know more about is “indigenous knowledge.” I had been turning the idea over in my mind a lot. Can I expand the meaning of indigenous to include students like my own, many of whose parents or grandparents are refugees, but who maintain strong cultural ties and practices? Can indigenous knowledge move with you to a foreign land? 

So when we were in Oregon, I saw this book and its subtitle (Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants) and figured I’d better pick it up. I didn’t entirely expect it to be a thrill ride, but I never mind learning new things, even if the text is a little dry. 

The text isn’t dry. I’ve been absolutely absorbed in it. The woman in charge of my recent training introduced us to the idea of “headlining” as a summary strategy, so here goes:

Indigenous Botanist Urges Readers to Recognize Earth’s Gifts, Reciprocate: Essays on cattail goo, mothering, ethical trappers, and mountains of algae.

It’s lovely, and it’s sad, and there is some crossover with The Sixth Extinction, which I also recently read. We have really fucked things up, my friends. But also, there is so much that is so beautiful, and I am grateful for it. It felt especially apropos to be reading the book with my feet in the dirt, my back to a blackberry patch that housed one family of quail and another of turkeys (at least). 

And not only apropos, but synchronicitous, as many things were this week. The night before we left for the trip, when I had been thinking of waking up on Grandma’s birthday, Lochlan reminded me that his stuffed duck was special because it was from Granny Vida. I heard the fluttering of a scrubjay in the bishop pine above me just before the sputtering of the fire, and the rhyming onomatopoeia delighted me. I stopped on the side of the road to pick a little fennel, then not a mile later, saw another woman doing the same.

As I read about a school field trip which ended in the spontaneous singing of “Amazing Grace,” my eyes welled up. The song is important to me because it was played at my Grandpa’s funeral some 20 years ago. But singing on school field trips, that too is something I love and miss, as we haven’t been able to take my kids on our usual Yosemite or Point Reyes trips in a few years. The kids don’t all know the same campfire songs or folk songs we grew up with, but they can all sing the songs from Spanish class together, or listen to us old teachers sing Beatles songs and, inevitably, The Cat Came Back.

And as I sat there, tears deciding whether they would fall or subside, wool socks growing almost too warm with my feet pressed against the fire ring, the night growing imperceptibly darker, a guitar sounded and voices rose up together to sing, “Peaceful, Easy Feeling.” The kids were already in bed, and tomorrow morning would be Grandma’s 92nd birthday, the second without her. 

***

Grandma got into geneaology when you still had to use family bibles and Mormon libraries, and she went full-tilt into it, joining associations, creating ahnentafel charts that had to have the daisy-wheel printer paper edge torn off, and going to meetings and conventions. She bought a computer. When she found a great-great-grandmother born in Indian territory, she floated the idea that maybe we had some indigenous ancestry. Who knew, right?
I’m not only sure now, that we did not, but moreso that it wouldn’t matter if we did. If this mythical great-great-great-grandma Cherokee princess (aren’t they all?) existed, we aren’t enrolled in a tribe, we weren’t brought up with those customs. They aren’t ours for the taking.

But there’s another part to it. If you played cowboys and Indians when you were a kid, you might have wanted to be the good guys -- the cowboys, obviously, with their white hats, vs. the sneaky, arrow-shooting savages who said “how” and spoke broken English. 

As most of us grow up, though, we idealize indigenous culture, realize, however shallowly and narrowly, that we mostly destroyed something pretty beautiful. So we smudge sage and get tattoos of dreamcatchers. (Because, boy almighty, aren’t colonizers something else?)

But it isn’t those tokens of culture that we harmed -- it was people, and our shared humanity. We collided with another group of humans and very nearly wiped them out, like a big rig hitting a motorcycle. 

***

Yesterday on the beach I saw something white and smooth. I thought it was an interesting rock, or maybe a shell. I tried to pick it up and it was held fairly fast by the sand. Unusual. I pulled a little harder, brushed some sand away, and thought it was connected by a series of roots. Was it a strange plant? Was it a rock or shell tangled in a plant? It wasn’t until it came free in my hand that I realized it was in fact a bird skull. I had likely ripped it from its vertebrae. The skull itself was clean and dry, so it wasn’t particularly gross. I took a few pictures of it for a friend and left it on the beach.
A short time later, I saw a mole crab upside-down, dead, I assumed noticeable for its bright orange eggs and for appearing to be intact instead of gull-eaten. I took a picture, flipped it over, and took another. Lochlan crouched by me and gave it a gentle poke as I put my camera away. “I think it moved, Mom!” I doubted it, but let him poke it again to show me. It bounced back slightly from the pressure, and I prepared to break the bad news, but then it wiggled its legs to make a run for it. A wave came in.

I’m not a spiritual person, but I respect the seriousness of Earth (I almost wrote gravity) and of life and death. But I also think it’s beautiful that energy doesn’t die, just changes. 

***

Today we went to a beach that was much more foreboding. We parked high on a cliff, and the parking lot itself was eroding, the emptiness encroaching past the guard rails so that several times I had to tell Lochlan to look down instead of out to sea.

I took my sandals off to walk on the sand, which was much coarser. I almost immediately spied another skull, this one a fish with surprising broad teeth on top. I turned around and saw human skulls carved into the sedimentary cliffs all around.
Azadeh went running from the surf. Lochlan and I climbed to get a better view.  The rocks abraded my feet. We sat and looked for pinnipeds, and we saw only sea birds, but Az called out, “A seal! Or maybe a selkie!” I smiled. She can be sarcastic and mean and surly, but there is still magic for her, and I am glad. 

It doesn’t matter that today is Grandma’s birthday. There’s nothing left to celebrate or to mourn. It is a normal day now. No cake.

But I’m thinking about her. I had cause to think about my college Psychology of Death and Dying class. Grief, the professor had explained, can be intensified both by how close you are to someone emotionally and how close you are to them physically. Do you see them often? Live in the same town?

I feel stupid, even, for mourning her like I do. She was ninety. She wanted to go. Many people don’t know their grandmothers at all, don’t spend the kind of time with them that I did, don’t have their until they’re in their 40s. She lived close to me, was loving to me, accepted me even when she didn’t understand me. I was so lucky, but also, Jesus Christ, I know what I lost.

***

I am wearing my homemade shirt with the floating otter family that says, “families belong together.” I worry that someone will say something mean to me, in front of my kids. Getting water for dishes at the campsite, or at a Starbucks in Petaluma. I can’t believe the sentiment has become partisan, but it has. Lochlan wants me to make him the same shirt, and I still have the screen and can easily make more. But what will the other preschool parents think? I can’t emblazon a political statement on my sweet baby and send him into the world, can I? He just likes the otters.

He slept last night with his head on my mattress. Azadeh was in the next tent, but close enough that I could hear her breathing, ask if she was okay when she rustled uncomfortably. Families do belong together. I can’t imagine being separated from these two. Hell, I’m going to break apart when they move out as they’re supposed to when they’re grown. But now? Lochlan still needs my help with the button on his pants! I can’t imagine them being taken from me and held in a cell like a dog kennel. These children are so soft.

We broke down a couple years ago and hired a housekeeper -- the woman who worked for my grandmother, in fact, who had an opening when Grandma moved into the senior aparments. She sent me a message a few weeks ago saying there was a family emergency and she had to go to Mexico. She filled my mom in on more of the details, which are not mine to share, but they are a reminder to me of just why people are fleeing to try to find a better life in the first place. This story has a grandmother, too, terrified for her grandbaby. How do you leave your extended family? How do you stay under the threat of violence? 

***

The drive home is unusually long due to road work and accidents. I have a lot of time to think, and I am thinking about the book, about how to reciprocate the earth’s gifts. Solar panels? A bee waterer? Planting wildflowers? I imagine building the herb spiral I’ve been thinking of, getting into my garden and just losing myself in a brick-by-brick maze of pollinator plants, doing what I can from a very small sphere of influence. 

We pass a trio of weeping willows, a tree Lochlan has been hoping to see for weeks. It hangs low to the ground, I’ll say, and he’ll point out an oak whose branches nearly sweep the ground. No, not quite. But here they are, and I point them out quickly. But Lochlan is fast asleep. I hope he is dreaming of selkies. 

I think I have to think bigger than my bricks and pollen. I think to give back to the Earth I have to recognize that one of its gifts is us, people. Our shared humanity. Our grandmothers. So I have to keep giving the world, its people included, my kindness. I have to do right by them, even if that kindness sometimes looks like marching outside my Congressperson’s office. 

One of the worst slowdowns today was at the Yolo Causeway. No surprise there. I check my rear-view frequently for motorcycles splitting lanes, so I saw the red flashing lights long before I heard the siren. I moved slightly right to let the fire truck pass in the shoulder, then two CHP cars. Only the fast lane was closed off, but after I merged and saw six vehicles and two motorcycles pulled over, I got a sick feeling. Bikers had been zipping through between us for hours, often at two or three times the rate of the cars, and the cars are oblivious. Shit, the car in front of me had heard the sirens and started to move *into* the shoulder. 

As I passed, I saw that the paramedics were helping a woman who was sitting up on the shoulder, and I felt tears well up again, this time of relief. It is too easy to be careless, to fail to look out for those more vulnerable. And we owe each other better.