riding bikes

I just got off of the phone with my mom. She's recovering from endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography surgery, having had some bile stones removed. She'd been on some pain killers and some sleeping aids that were causing her to slur her words, so I asked her if she was drunk. "Not yet," she quipped, even though she has probably never been drunk a day in her life and hasn't had alcohol since being diagnosed with Alzheimer's nearly eleven years ago. After speaking with Mom I always get to reminiscing . . .

When I was a little girl I lived at the end of a long, sloping gravel road so I didn’t learn how to ride a bicycle until I was seven—no flat tarmac to roll along.

One day I asked my mom if she wanted to go for a bike ride in the nearby paved neighborhood, even though I had never seen her on a bike. But, delighted with the surprise invitation from her littlest of six, she happily agreed, so we grabbed our bikes and pushed them up the rocky road, then mounted them and sailed off down the quiet, shaded street.

After we had ridden a few blocks we turned right to coast downhill between the modest pastel homes, each with its small grassy front yard apron. Warm wind fingered through our hair, hers short brown and slightly quaffed and mine straight, long and thin, shiny and golden. Her white and red printed smock ruffled at her sides like a Spanish dancer in a drifting current. I closed my eyes and let go for a few seconds, sopping up sun rays on my thin tan arms. Clear tick-ticking of the freewheel offset the flat humming of our wide, slightly deflated tires rubbing against the hot pavement. I glanced back at my mom, so fair, plump and pretty, and she smiled. I smiled back. It was a perfect moment.

We leisurely passed a house where a friend was bouncing a basketball in her driveway. The girl called out to ask if I wanted to play. I looked at my mom questioningly and she just replied “okay” and continued on peddling around the square block for home. As she rode away out of sight I felt empty, sad and lonely. We never got to ride bikes together again.

I think of that moment a lot, miss her terribly and in my mind I go on bike rides with her and Calvin all the time.

Version originally published 1.23.11.

Mom

apogee and abyss

To have dived deep with a thousand fish,
sailed mile-high steering a flying ship;
To have body surfed at the Golden Gate,
and cut black diamond in the Matterhorn’s gaze.

To have crossed the Danube, Seine and Nile,
touched Grand Canyon rapids and Kilimanjaro’s smile;
To have reveled in some grand hotels,
and huddled in the darkness where Maasai dwell.

To have eaten dim sum on Hong Kong Island,
ostrich in Kenya and chitterlings in Oakland,
Edam in Haarlem and kimchi in Seoul,
tapas in Madrid and in Rio de Janeiro.

To have scaled the Great Pyramid’s sacred steps,
and descended into its black depths;
To have slept and dined in Turkish homes,
and swum among Grecian ruins.

To have been lied to, cheated on, discharged and laid off,
robbed blind, psyched out, picked on and put off;
To have been overworked, hard up, in debt and at risk;
To have covered up, undermined, gambled and lost it.

To have dropped out, boozed up, dragged on, passed out,
thrown up, miscarried, broken down and cut out;
To have lost a brother, scattered ashes of my dad,
now to watch my mother melt away into sand.

To remember all of these things that I’ve felt and done—
none have raised me up or dragged me down like my son;
my little boy is both despair and utter bliss,
Calvin is my apogee and my abyss.

photo by Michael Kolster

shit happens part deux

Often I wonder what difficulties parents of ordinary kids Calvin’s age grapple with on any given day. Perhaps they wrestle with lying, or bullying, or stubbornness, greed, mischievousness, sloth, argumentativeness, apathy. I started thinking about it when Michael and I were struggling with Calvin while changing his dirty diaper.

He’d had what we call a blowout ... and it was massive. We were headed home from a Sunday drive when the shit hit the fan, so to speak. It wasn’t hard to tell from the thick aroma filling the car—along with Calvin’s writhing mania—that we were in for some trouble. It soon became clear that the lava had flowed up and out the back of his diaper and onto the car seat. Somehow Michael managed to get him upstairs unscathed. But changing the diaper of a wiry, shrieking, three-and-a-half foot imp who is spazzing and flapping and tensing and trying to grab his poop-covered wienerschnitzel all at the same time is not easy. So Michael took the helm, held his arms fast and lifted his legs while I began swabbing the poop deck. But there was so much crap everywhere that we realized we’d have to hose him down in the shower.

After the water draining off of Calvin’s body ran clear we dressed him and tossed his soiled clothing into the laundry. When the cycle finished I transferred it to the dryer and found a few soaking turd-stained peanut halves in the bottom of the basin. I fished out the nasty nuts with a plastic bag and tossed them into the garbage. When I told Michael what I’d found he asked me, “Did you eat them?” to which I replied, “No, but Rudy might’ve,” knowing that one of Rudy’s favorite treats is cat dung.

And though we might not have to battle a naughty or misbehaved kid I imagine we are going to have to struggle with Calvin’s dirty diapers for a number of more years—perhaps forever—if he doesn’t begin to make more progress, learn faster, develop further. And a lot of that depends upon how many seizures he has and how many drugs he must continue to take in an effort to keep them at bay. Needless to say, that shit sure stinks.

Please share.
Give to cure epilepsy: http://www.calvinscure.com

Just so you know, that's a chocolate donut

welcome to my world

friday faves - the calvin quotient

Every so often I hear parents talk about how time flies and how quickly their little ones are growing up. My husband and I, on the other hand, continue to experience what I like to call the Calvin Quotient, which can be described, in a way, as an expansion of time.

Since just before Calvin’s birth we have been bombarded by an array of challenges dealing with his health, the medical establishment and simply learning to cope with the loss, grief, stress and complication that accompany having a child with disabilities, with epilepsy. Our lives quickly became jam-packed with appointments to see dozens of specialists for Calvin’s various health and developmental concerns. This frequent and regular exposure to unknown territory—both emotional and physical—and characterized as much by our fatigue as by our bloated calendar, felt as if we were experiencing in one year what another might experience in the course of several years or perhaps even over a lifetime.

Coupled with this intense, insane pace and its steep learning curve, and contributing to the Calvin Quotient, is the nature of Calvin’s development itself, which has always been painfully and utterly protracted. New skills have taken Calvin weeks, months, often years to develop, and at times have been all together lost due to seizures and drug side effects. One could say that Calvin is eight going on one or two.

So, while perhaps time flies when you’re having fun, and contrary to what one might think having read what I've just written, I have found great reward in Calvin’s quotient. That is not to say that I don’t wish every day that things were different. Of course I, like any parent would, wish that Calvin was healthy and better able to explore a child’s world of possibilities. But he is not, and because he is not I have learned a great deal, about things I'd never have imagined, in very little time. I have felt depth of emotion I'd never felt before. I can sometimes revel in spending hours upon hours watching him, touching him, listening to him (as long as he is not shrieking) and all the time in awe of him. We while away the hours in each others presence—in each others arms. No, our boy Calvin is definitely not growing up too fast.

Please share.
Give to cure epilepsy: http://www.calvinscure.com

Originally published 11.18.10.

the karma of pee

I’ll never forget the time that I peed on the starting blocks at Mercerwood Shores Club, remembering the incident in great part due to the fact that my siblings never let me forget.

I must have been seven or eight at the time. We six girls, in our various hibiscus and paisley printed nylon suits, had stepped up onto the slanted wooden blocks awaiting the man in white to fire his gun. But there was some sort of hitch. Perhaps the gun had jammed or a lane was missing its stroke-and-turn official; I can’t be sure. All I know is that—suddenly—I had to go ... and I had to go BAD. Maybe it was raw nerves or simply that I’d drank too much Kool-Aid or eaten one too many cherry popsicles before the race. No matter, I simply had to pee and I didn’t think I could hold things up further by excusing myself to go to the bathroom.

So I figured, what with all the commotion behind the blocks, nobody’d notice the stream of yellow liquid trickling down my leg. After all, the starting block was yellow. But I was wrong, and my brothers and sister made sure I knew it as soon as the race was over. I probably cried in utter humiliation and have never since lived it down, but hey, at least I won the race.

Then there was that time in ninth grade geometry. I was one of a handful of girls in a class of mostly boys who, quite simply, cracked me up. I remember most Bobby and Dean, the smart boy who had asked me to the ninth grade dance and I’d only declined because I’d already turned down another boy’s invitation so I didn’t think it would be nice to accept his. Well, Bobby and Dean and a few other boys had me in stitches most of the time, whispering and gesturing behind our teacher’s back as he drew triangles and parallelograms on the chalk board. This time Bobby said something that made me laugh so hard that I couldn’t help but open the floodgates—completely. When the bell rang and class was dismissed I glanced back at the puddle I’d left in the curved plastic chair. I clutched my aptly named PeeChee folder, which was covered in inky doodles, behind me so as to hide the wet spot on the seat of my pants, and very simply walked away.

And how could anyone forget the time that I peed another girl’s pants ... while she was still in them, no less. To be clear, we were both in them. My friend Pam and I had somehow procured a ginormous pair of painters’ overalls and figured it’d be funny if—before swim practice—we’d get into them together and become the two-headed girl. So, we climbed in back-to-back and buckled ourselves in forgetting to consider that we wouldn’t be able to bend our legs. The pool deck was down a long, steep flight of cement stairs. So with our teammates’ help we hilariously teetered down the stairs straight legged like a walking vector compass. By the time we reached the pool deck we were in hysterics and I just couldn’t help myself from wetting my (our) pants. You should have seen the look on Pam’s face when she realized what was happening, and she squirmed and hopped like a jumping bean, taking me with her right into the pool.

Now, pretty regularly, my eight-year-old son Calvin wets his pants, his pajamas, his bed and sometimes his car seat, no matter what kind of precautions we take. It seems each day I’m dealing with a leaky situation, water-logged diapers, drenched clothing. So I guess what I’m getting at is that there must be some sort of karma of pee and, if there is, I’m the living proof.

friendship

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Calvin and our friend Ellis