Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Belligerence
Some stuff you can’t swallow.
You can be the parade marshal on the high road but still decide sometimes that the high road’s not for you. You want the low road instead, the one where you can paint graffiti on parked rail cars and pull garbage cans into the street to make people swerve into the ditch.
Sometimes, you want the low road so you can call a spade a spade, so you can unload the wheelbarrow of crap that you’ve been handed, dump it on the offender’s front lawn and ruin their tulips. With no apology.
High road folks wear white shirts with no coffee stains, low roaders wear yesterday’s t-shirt, the spots and grime evidence of engagement. You can’t be neat and clean and run your motor on the low road. I know that much. You have to have the stuff that goes with not letting disgusting things slide. It gets messy.
I also know this. When you get to a certain age, people think you’re too tired or weak to worry about. No threat. No consequences. Such a miscalculation, such ignorance. Old people’s power is all wound up in their age. At 76, I am a ten-thousand-watt low road.
And I know how to drive.
____________
Photo by Wil Stewart on Unsplash
10 Little Ways to Improve My Life
What’s one small improvement I can make? Heck, how about ten?
Buy wine in bottles, not boxes.
Scrub the shower before the Health Department comes.
Water the plants without them having to beg.
Pet my dogs more. Also the cat.
Dress up and show up more.
Figure out how to tweeze my own eyebrows.
Turn my back porch into an urban sanctuary and maybe the front porch, too.
Change the blade in my razor.
Reread John Steinbeck.
Cut my Protestant work ethic down to size.
________________
Photo by Jeff Siepman on Unsplash
A Hundred Cups of Honey
I was not a natural as a newborn’s mother.
I was unsure, tentative, sensitive, and defensive. A co-worker laughingly joked that I had the “worst adjustment to motherhood anyone had ever seen.” I laughed with him but what he said was true. I had no idea what I was doing, couldn’t ask for advice, and took every observation of my parenting as searing, soul-crushing criticism.
I am a birth mother to one child and adoptive mother to three. The birth and adoptive experiences are in no way comparable except that, in both situations, one is taking on responsibility for the protection and development of a child.
Having a birth child is visceral and fraught with worry from the moment the first cell splits. Everything from there forward is a test of body and heart and instincts. The birthing process is intensely physical and largely out of control – one is carried forward during a birth, either on the wings of angels or drugs. Or time. For me, it was time. When I finally relinquished my bravado during labor and asked for drugs, the nurse said it was too late in the process for the drugs to have an effect. Too bad I hadn’t asked earlier.
Adoption is much more cerebral. One makes a studied decision to adopt, because, except for those people who actually get direct instructions from God, adopting is a calculated risk. Is a foreign adoption a better bet than a domestic one? Is an older child easier to adopt than an infant? What about sicknesses and disabilities? And then, once an adoption is finalized, the challenge is very focused. How do we make this child feel part of the family? It is a strategic and tactical challenge because, let me tell you, love is not enough.
With adoption, I felt strong and competent, not that some of our problems didn’t bring me to my knees, but I rarely doubted myself. As a new birth mother, I did nothing but doubt myself.
It began that same night.
The nurse brought my newborn to the recovery room where I was by myself in a hospital bed looking out a window onto a city street. It was so cold outside and the hospital so old that there was frost on the inside of the window. I remember wanting to etch my name or draw a flower on the window’s frozen glass but it was too far away to reach so I just held my baby and waited for the nurse to return to take her back to the nursery. What was wrong with me that I didn’t want to hold her or feed her? The nurse nodded and smiled while taking the baby back in her arms, cooing to her all the while, “Mom’s pretty tired, honey, let’s give her time to rest” and I felt her disapproval fall on me like the snow blowing outside.
Once I was home, the woman at the La Leche League told me to keep trying, that breastfeeding was a natural function and I should just be patient. So I kept trying and it seemed to work. I nursed so much that my nipples became raw and cracked but still I wondered if I was doing it right. The baby was eating and sleeping and crying, not on any schedule, just seemingly randomly, and then my in-laws visited when the baby was about three weeks old. “How do you know if she’s getting enough to eat?” My mother-in-law, the sweetest person I’d ever met, stood in the kitchen holding my daughter and rocking quietly back and forth. I quit breastfeeding a week later.
It wasn’t the nurse or my mother-in-law. It was me. It was my self-doubt crawling out of my skin and landing on the faces of well-meaning people.
These were feelings I never had as an adoptive mom. Instead, I felt fearless and almost heroic, fueled by the comments of friends and even strangers about what a good thing I was doing, how great it was that we were giving abandoned children a second chance, much of it over the top praise, often embarrassing, but I let it drip on me like honey. I carried extra cups to gather it all up and save it for later. It was shameless and wonderful at the same time.
Last night, I looked at my very pregnant daughter and thought, bring cups for honey, my dear. I’m going to build you up like you rescued twelve orphaned children from a burning building. That’s what you deserve. That’s what every new mom deserves – birth moms, adoptive moms, the confident moms, the anxious moms. We deserve all the honey.
Five Takeaways from Six Days on the Road
Always have the fixings for a sandwich in your vehicle. Then, if you miss the elusive but delectable Steak ‘n Shake, which has burgers to die for and amazing milkshakes, you can pull up to the parking lot of St. Julian’s Winery and make lunch while your dogs lie in the sun and passers-by make nice remarks about your little red camper van. We bought red and white wine, vodka, and bourbon at the winery and then we made ham and cheese sandwiches with a side of potato salad, washed down by water out of a gallon jug. It was deluxe.
Travel with a good sport. A complainer can shit-can a great trip in minutes. I am often the complainer, but I tried my best not to be on this trip. I complained bitterly about the overbearing NO ALCOHOL admonishments from 25-year-old park rangers until we made a fire and my husband, the Intrepid Howard (IH) went in the van and filled two coffee cups with red wine. That was also deluxe. The park ranger came by later, scaring the shit out of me, to tell us we were camped two sites down from the site we said we were taking. Luckily, IH saw her coming and hid the coffee cups. Otherwise, we might be in the pokey, as they say in Michigan.
Take it easy on the fudge. We were doing okay until we hit Mackinaw City where there was, of course, the inevitable fudge shop. So we had to. If you’re from Michigan, you know that fudge buying anywhere within fifty miles of Mackinac Island is obligatory. They give you a little plastic knife to cut the fudge into little, tiny pieces. So spare and civilized, but, apparently, the little, tiny pieces stack up. IH just stopped in to say that he’d ‘gained a stone’ on this trip. He’s not alone.
It’s up to you, but I draw the line at taking a shower in a shower that had leaves and twigs on the floor. And while the park ranger might say that the hot water is working, it doesn’t matter if there are six drops a minute coming out and you are standing naked in a 45-degree morning (with leaves and twigs on the floor). So, because of my shower snobbery, I showed up at my old friend’s house in Hastings not having had a shower in three days. She made us breakfast and gave us homemade cinnamon rolls anyway.
You don’t have to know where you’re going to go there. We just drove and figured it out as we went. We used a paper map because if you don’t know exactly where you want to go, GPS isn’t all that helpful. We pulled up next to people mowing their lawns and asked them for directions. We got lost. And then found. Like the song says. You can get found driving around the countryside. I know this from experience.
Day 5 of the Michigan Mitten Tour
Lordy.
We are in the ‘rustic’ campground at Yankee Springs State Park outside of Hastings where there is one pit toilet per 12 acres and ALCOHOL IS NOT ALLOWED.
This has been repeated to us at least a dozen times and stamped on our site ticket. Not on our hands. Not yet.
We are 70++ people drinking cheap wine out of coffee cups but we feel 17 again, hiding our cups under the seat when the ‘fuzz’ drives by.
It is very dark here. This is good but also scary because there is no way I’m going to a pit toilet in the black of night with or without a flashlight. To me, a flashlight just makes things scarier. So it’s peeing freestyle which has its own drawbacks. I don’t need to tell you – coordination and leg strength are key.
We drove through Holland which has a big tulip festival every but we couldn’t find the tulips. “Sir,” Howard yelled out at the guy next to us at a red light. “Where are the tulips?” The nice man responded, “You’re a week late. It happens every other year.”
And then we saw, all through town, the denuded stalks of tulips everywhere. Organized and relentless deadheading. So efficient and organized.
I’ll drink to that.
Also, we made a fire.
Day 4 of the Michigan Mitten Tour
Some guy thought Mullet Lake south of Cheboygan reminded him of Hawaii, so he started a town and called it Aloha. It’s on a road that dead ends at a state park of the same name. Way to define your world.
Today I figured out how to drain the grey water. This was a simple operation which I convinced myself would be complicated and messy and draw an audience from all of Aloha to watch, sort of like, years ago, when we were backing our boat into the water. Or worse, bringing it out. ‘Just gun it’ is a phrase from that time. And others times actually, but with different vehicles.
I like the physical work of camping. Even though we ditched the tent and the cots and the sleeping bags and the cooler and the camp stove in favor of a camper that has all that stuff already in it, there is still a lot of work. It’s just so much more civilized. I don’t have to crawl to the door on my hands and knees to get outside. That’s deluxe.
I make coffee in a wee percolator and breakfast on an actual stove looking out the ‘kitchen window.’
We are not rugged. We have lots of USB ports and red wine in a box. We’re having chili dogs for dinner with fudge for dessert. We are vacant and boring and oblivious to nearly everything – which is the point of camping.
I leave you with a picture of a tree I took this morning as the sun was beginning to shine through the clouds.
Day 3 of the Michigan Mitten Tour
Tornados followed us out of southern Michigan but we were unaware until a friend checked in to see how we were.
We were, at least momentarily, carefree.
This morning I nudged open the shade on the long window on my side of the bed. The wind blew hard while the sun came up, leaves shaking and branches waving. Barn swallows darted everywhere, their choreography perfect and unknowable. The clouds, in little puffs blown inland by Huron’s brisk wind, blended and shifted, stories started and reimagined. The sky was the bluest blue. And so I watched in my half sleep, not remembering another time when I’d relinquished all worries and things to watch the sky. There is no photo. How could there be?
Driving up Route 23, we came upon this sign on a sugar factory in a town that time forgot. There are a lot of those in northwest Michigan. I had to take a picture. And a picture of my beloved traveling companions.
Good night, all.
Day 2 of the Michigan Mitten Tour
It’s cozy in here. Especially when it’s raining. You have to not mind the creatures you are with. It also helps if you don’t fall apart after hitting your head on the same piece of low ceiling fives times.
I might have a concussion.
Lake Huron is just a few feet away. It’s huge and flat and shallow like a big pond in a forest clearing.
On the way here we stopped in Port Huron and a freighter motored by. I always wonder what it would be like to paddle up alongside in our canoe and pat a freighter on the side. But I always wonder if I can touch semis passing us in the freeway.
Dreams.
Michigan’s thumb is beautiful. It’s a secret though. Keep it to yourself.
Day 1 of the Michigan Mitten Tour
A lot of plowed fields ready for planting, two lane roads with nobody in sight, a map spread out on our laps, going down the wrong roads over and over until we wised up and gave all our devotion to US 12.
Two thirds of the way across the southern edge of Michigan, right about where the end of the mitten hits your wrist. That’s where we are.
Tomorrow, the thumb.
Meal Prep for Tonight’s Street Outreach
Sling hash for homeless
Side salad, extra pickle
Say hello, my friend
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
Recent Comments