Laurita Dianita

(photo by Oscar Avellaneda)

In kindergarten, Ms. Clutz asked us to write an “I love my mother because…” paper with a drawing for Mother’s Day. In the big open space on top of that newsprint paper with the lines, I drew a ferris wheel and wrote: “I love my mother because shez gona tak me to the Dixn May Fare,” or some such partially-invented spelling. (Oh how I wish I had the paper with me to scan and post here!) When I found this piece of writing as a wisened 5th grader, I thought, “How shallow I was! I thought love was just about her doing little things for me!”

But tonight, I began a little list in my head of reasons I loved my parents, and they were all small things like that. Of course I love them for big, giant reasons—reasons as big as the lessons and patterns of my life, reasons like the way they’ve helped form my character as a strong woman with integrity or the way they accept me. But I find that little things are powerful in themselves, and powerful as symbols of something larger.

So here goes a very short list of the little reasons that came into my head tonight.

I love my parents because:

• We share fruit and cheese from Costco. One of us goes to Costco and then we split up the food and the receipts. They have the money to buy excess fruit & such, but they don’t like to waste. And they know that I hate to waste food and loathe spending more money than I need to, so they agree to sharing food from Costco runs, as inconvenient as it may be. It’s kind of cute and communitarian of them.
• My dad helped me move furniture on Friday night even with his thumb in a brace. Half-way through, I fed him green curry which he said looked like second-hand food, but smelled good. We ate in silence as he read, with rapt attention, this book I have on foods from the African diaspora. Then we carried more furniture, using my shawl as a sling to make up for the un-opposability of his thumb. My dad, and both my parents, are so tough and adaptable, so curious, and ready all the time with wry, sometimes caustic, sometimes obscene humor.
• My mom and I just went and saw “The Kids are All Right” and then talked about it over beer and dinner. To me, the message of the film was about how marriage is hard and it takes work and you can’t let problems pile up without addressing them consciously and compassionately. It was a message shared poignantly in the film. But I was grateful that it was also a message I grew up hearing, grew up understanding from my parents. I love them for demonstrating that you can’t sweep problems under the rug and that the work of love is worth it.
• I love them for being reticent with their support when I was in the wrong relationships and generous with it now. I love my dad’s enthusiasm for making beer (“Hoppiness is Wedded Bliss Brown Ale,” as he has already named it) and black currant wine for Oscar and my wedding and my mom’s eagerness to help cash in miles to get me to Bogotá to see my amor.

There’s more, there’s always more, and it’s good to stop and note it at times. My kindergarten self, as egocentric as I may have been at five years old, recognized love in the little things, and wrote it down.

(Left, at a District K forum with legislators. My photo.)

(Right, playing Pictionary on Christmas 2009. Photo by Oscar Avellaneda)

We are in Guadalajara, the sprawling city of 7 million that is the capital of Jalisco, México, staying at our friend Arqui’s house upstairs from his little brother Moises (Arqui’s in Anchorage, where he lives and works now). We are stuck here for Oscar’s 30 day rabies vaccine series. Well, I extended my ticket an extra week anyway, but will eventually have to get back to work and leave him here by himself, el pobrecito. It is hot, the air is filled with dust and pollution and the smell of people burning their trash, and the whole place overwhelms us, the whole experience overwhelms us.

I will back up and tell the story of why we are here.

The Coast

Erika flew home to Anchorage to be with her beaux and I flew to Puerto Vallarta to be with mine. We spent a beautiful anniversary weekend in the isolated village of Yelapa that has not a single car or street, but is built over ocean cliffs with stone and cement paths. I am anxious to see my photos of the people we met there, the parents making sand sculptures of their children’s bodies in the sand, the mother playing games with her children during the water taxi ride. Then we spent a day in PV to deal with the dental visit from hell (note to others who prolong needed dental work in order to wait and do it in a country with cheaper dental care: DON’T wait if you really need it because it gets worse and more expensive), and the next morning took off on our ride over the mountains to Guadalajara (me on Erika’s bike).

The Bike Ride Over the Mountains

[At our first campsite]

The first night we stayed by a beautiful little stream outside of Las Palmas under a giant tree, which, as very romantic as it was, was accompanied by about 70 nasty bug bites on my legs. This was followed by a hot and dehydrated day of climbing about 3,000 feet and feeling more exhausted than I have since running Crow Pass 13 years ago. Then a night of sleeping in the plaza of the pueblito of Estancia after the teenagers that had gathered there to sing and joke and play Norteños on their cell phones and the middle aged men who had gathered to drink Coronas had all gone off to their homes and the dogs began their caucaphony of discussing whatever it is that rural dogs want to discuss all night…needless to say, it was not the best night of sleep. The following day we climbed about 3,000 feet more, but with better food and drink and earlier in the morning and with good conversation and humor. We then descended and rode a long time into the beautiful little colonial town of Mascota with its cobblestone streets and clay tile roofs. In Mascota we met curious young men and women at the carníceria and a kind old woman in the comedor, and I was finally able to take better care of the nasty blisters that had been forming on my butt from the unfamiliar seat. Then a heartbreakingly long and hot and steep ride up to the damn/lake where we were to camp, a delicious sopa de res, and a night of feeling angry and agitated by the pendejo restaurant owners on the lakeshore who decided to get drunk and blare the jukebox late into the night, after it had already been blaring all afternoon and evening. We took a rest day in which we decided in late afternoon to ride down the hill and camp by the river to avoid the late night party scene at the lake. This led to an evening spent playing in the river with and teaching two curious little grade school aged “chayoteros” (farmers/vendors of the vegetable chayote, photos of whom are on the link) about camping gear, and another night of sleep interrupted every hour or so by Norteños playing loudly from someone’s big truck, some borrachos, somewhere.

[Oscar's photo with my little half-broken Canon of the full moon rising over the lake. Peaceful view, not peaceful music blaring.]

Not Just Another Mexican-Hating Gringa, Really

So, there are some themes here, right? Men drinking and (mostly) men playing music–specifically, Norteños–at all hours, often with big trucks involved. See, I love Norteños, love their springy polka rhythms and funny lyrics, and especially corridos, the story songs, but I was getting worried for a while that their constant presence, their being pushed into our every waking (and potentially sleeping) moment would spoil me on them. I also love México and was getting worried that this would spoil me on México. I kept telling Oscar that it’s not like this in the South–he’ll see–, that it’s more sensilla and indigenous and that when I heard music in the streets in Oaxaca it was most often a funeral or wedding parade with lots of brass instruments. And of course, I told him about Gil and Cynthia and Claudia, my dear friends from Oaxaca who questioned gender norms and machismo, anti-indigenist sentiment, materialism, the worship of US Americanism, etc. But I said these things most of all to remind myself, to assure myself that I’m not just another Mexican-hating gringa, another First Worlder afraid of the Third World (or Second? Where does Mexico fit in this scheme?)

I’m not just another gringa, but I find myself critical as always of machismo and more critical of the Mexican government and the ways in which corruption and inefficacy seems to trickle down into even the smallest institutions and businesses than I was when I lived in Southern Mexico 7 years ago–maybe because I’m farther North, maybe because I’m older and understand systems better, maybe also because I never had to deal with the medical system before, having never had rabies exposure…so, on to that story:

Love in the Time of Rabies

On Saturday, Oscar’s mother’s birthday, after a 5:30 am morning and a really hard 4 1/2 hours of riding, mostly climbing, we stopped at a shack covered by a roof of wood and straw where an old woman was making tortillas. She prepared us food over the fire as I cleaned my wounds and then we sat down to eat the most amazing meal of cow heart in a guisado of tomato with beans and freshly-made tortillas. As I think back on it, the Carolyn Forché poem keeps running through my head in which she writes, about revolutionary El Salvador, something like “You can’t eat heart in times like these.” I don’t think it quite fits, but there is something to the gravity of it that I like in this situation.

We had stopped at the shack to eat rather than eating our previous night’s leftovers like usual, because we intended to break for a few hours in the shade to sleep and repack. However, this plan was quickly interrupted by the family’s dog biting Oscar out of nowhere, us realizing that there were potential rabies-related behaviors in the dog and that the family had never vaccinated it, cleaning the wounds, and quickly getting on our bikes to ride the 15 K down the mountain to Anteguilla where we hopped a bus to Guadalajara. Once in the city, we checked into the first hotel we found and adventured out on the buses to 5 hours of walking and calling around from hospital to hospital and chatting with women in pharmacies (where, by the way, the women wear peach-colored dresses with collars and double buttons up the front, which I thought was interesting and old-fashioned) only to be told that the Cruz Verde should have the rabies treatment/vaccine but they don’t…and no one else does. We asked each other, “How is it that everyone points their fingers at an institution responsible for toxicology that acts as though they’d never even considered treating rabies?” and, the next day, upon making dozens more phone calls “How is it that even the medical emergency line doesn’t have a working number for the Secretary of Health that is responsible for rabies?”…and we don’t know the answers. We know only that the giant holes in communication between institutions is something we see reproduced between business people and clients and, we would find on Monday and also in my follow-up dental apt. on Thursday, between patients and medical providers.

Upon returning to our hotel, my earlier suspicion that there were fleas was confirmed by many little bites and Oscar squishing one open, and so we spent the next hour or so re-packing, demanding my money back, and calling Arqui, who got his kind friend Enrique to come pick us and our bikes up in his little sedan to go to Arqui’s house, where I left all of my clothing on the patio outside for fear of fleas. And so, it was while undressed for fear of fleas, on the dark cement porch at 1:30 in the morning, that Oscar knelt down and told me how strong and wonderful I was and asked me to marry him, slipping onto my finger the beautiful ring he had had made for me in Puerto Vallarta while tears slipped out of his eyes and down his cheeks. Of course I said yes. How could I not want to marry this man who proceeds with so much strength and grace after being bitten by a dog, this man who rubbed ointment in little circulitos on my aching bug bites with the intention of calming me down while Norteños blared around us at the lake, who is so strong and competent and curious and kind and smart, who has talked sweetly on the phone about our future for months now despite what I now see are incredibly trying days?

¡Viva Public Health!

So, the sleepy now-fiancés slept on a bed (a bed! a bed with an absolutely perfect mattress!) and woke up to a morning of laundering the fleas out of the clothing and cleaning the dusty house (dust from the streets coats everything in only a day or so). We proceeded on to phone calls all day, and finally a plan to proceed to the Secretaria de Salud in the morning…because, being government, they were closed on the weekend. Just as my dad telling me over the phone that the rates of rabies in Jalisco had dropped almost off the charts since 2000 had calmed us down, so too did walking into the Secretaria de Salud and seeing signs over the doors with the words “epidemiología” and “estadistica.” I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that por fin we were in the hands of people/an institution with a public health perspective. Maybe that’s just grad school heady Laura needing to grasp something in terms she could be comfortable with, but I think it’s also that a public health perspective is so qualitatively different than the “It’s not my problem” perspective we had gotten from the hospitals and the profit motive from businesses and vendors that often means cheating people outright.

[Mi Osquitar in the waiting area of the Secretaria de Salud, waiting for his consultation, nervous.]

After a visit with an oldish doctor who could stand to improve in clarity of communication and some extremely young nurses who forgot tell Oscar the side effects and contraindications of the vaccination, Oscar began his first of five injections of rabies vaccine. (After his fever and weakness started, we went back to ask about side effects.) In the US, this vaccine would have cost thousands of dollars. Here, they’re giving it to him for free. This is, indeed, a public health approach. Despite everything else, ¡Viva México! ¡Viva la salud pública!

Country Bumpkins

We have until Tuesday to make sure Oscar isn’t showing any symptoms of rabies to then fully relax, but we’re confident he’ll be fine and we want to get the hell out of the city this weekend and go to Arqui’s mom’s house. We are such country bumpkins, such Alaskans. I don’t know about Oscar, but I don’t think if I’ve ever missed Alaska as much as I did a few nights ago while suffering from food poisoning and smelling the neighbors burn trash and being hot and dirty because the house didn’t have enough water left in the tank to shower or wash dishes…all I could do was try to imagine the mountains and clean glacial lakes, the snow and the air and the trees, and imagine us there, try to dream about home.

The Upside

But we’re here, not in Alaska, and it’s not all bad. We are eating lots of delicious fruits and vegetables for cheap and trying new ones. Guadalajara seems to be a queer-friendly city; or if it’s not outwardly friendly, at least lesbians, gay men and trans individuals seem to feel safe enough being out because we’ve met and seen a number of them. And there’s certainly more options for women and girls to wear their gender than in the campo, with the roqueras opting for baggy t-shirts and jeans and less makeup. Plus, Oscar and I often get to exchange those looks of joy when we watch multiple generations of family members enjoying their children and when we notice the casualness with which men touch one another, not always avoiding one another so as to not look gay, like American men do. We love the way buses stop wherever people put out their hand and how people pass their money forward to the driver from the back of the bus when it’s crowded. And we loved the simple kindness of the people in the pueblitos and of the women in the corner store in this neighborhood.

Plus, we are learning! Living in this house that didn’t have water for a few days and so learning how to catch water at every opportunity, siphon water from the bit that remained, use gray water to flush the toilet, wash dishes with as little as possible, and begin our nightly ritual of washing one another’s feet in a bucket before bed has made us way more conscious of how to conserve water and how much even we, little environmentalists, waste when we are in the US. Now, we are not going to use gray water like this back home because it stinks, but we will take these lessons with us. In general, scarcity like this makes one aware both of how much government services are important for quality of life (and grateful that we have them) and of privilege and waste, how imperative it is that those of us in the First World don’t continue to consume resources at the same devastatingly quick level. Catching and reusing water, walking or riding a bike or taking the bus, not languishing in the shower, buying produce from local markets that don’t use extensive packaging are all little things that México will remind me of when I return. I am grateful for this.

And most of all, I am grateful to be problem-solving and working and cooking and sleeping next to the love of my life, the very good and beautiful man who I will marry. Who will not have rabies.

[My engagement ring! Mexican silver and turquoise, crafted esp. by a local jeweler in Puerto Vallarta, per Oscar's instructions. Now I have to find him something fitting and beautiful and local as well. No luck yet, but I'm searching. This photo is from the not-so-romantic location of the Secretaria de Salud.]

p.s. Next installment I want to reflect on diet, overweight and obesity here. I am astounded by how like the US it is.

Update 7/10/10: Here are Oscar and my engagement rings together. I found him one a week or so later. He has never been used to wearing jewelry, but now he loves it & wears it & kisses it before bed. It makes me so happy that we both, from afar, have these symbols on our body of our committment:

1.)  Boil the jalapeños:

Yeah, seeds and all.
I mean, I know you’re Colombiano
y no se come picante allí,
but you know that story your mama tells?
The one where your abuela
made the sopa without cilantro
“for Nachito”
and your mama put the cilantro back in
(she flicks her hand as she re-enacts it)
because she knew she’d be eating with him
for the rest of their lives?
Well,
since I’m your future wifey
and you’re the chaparro de mi vida
and I’m your aguacate tree
growing in Alaska
to whose roots—and fruit—
you will come flying back
and we will sit across kitchen tables
from one another
for the rest of our days,
pues, te tendrás que acostumbrar.

2.)  Slice the onion:
And try placing it in the blender
but poniéndome aguila
because before I know it
you’ll kiss me with that onion
on your breath,
whole slices tucked away
into your teeth.
I’ll say “¡Guácala!”
and never understand it,
how you find the sweet
in its so acrid flesh.
But I quietly admire you for it,
this iron mouth of yours,
the way you see through
even the worst.

3.)  Skin and mash the garlic:
And this too I must guard
from your habit of drinking it
with cayenne and
waiting to do so, of course,
until I’m soon to come over.
The smell of it:
“Ay, Oscar, ¿Porqué
lo tenías que comer ahora
before kissing me?”
And I search out the line
between asking you
to be considerate
and control.
Then toss the garlic in the blender
with everything else.

4.)  Enjoy:
Disfrútala, with fish, with sopa,
with cuidado, mi Colombiano.
I learned in the cloud forest,
the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca,
from a small woman who
cooked her beans in a clay pot,
to make salsa verde sin tomate.
Y así, mi amor,
when you eat it,
the sweat beads up,
glints of light over the
redenning skin,
across your brow,
across your nose—
your nose, mi amor,
that perfect bridge of shadow
and light
that bridge of indígena and
Castellano.
None of our ancestors
ate like this,
the people of wheat,
the people of potatoes.
But we are adaptors
and you sweat your way through it
like we work our way through
each other
building bridges across
continents and
spirits and
bodies,
from which we’ll create children
to pass the recipe on,
learning, over time,
to endure.

______________________

I was inspired to write this because a creative little girl who I taught in math was surprised when I told her that her poetry teacher, Ashley Skabar, was also a professional food writer. She asked, “Does Miss Ashley write her recipes as poems?” I replied, “I don’t think so, but that’s a great idea,” and I went home and began working on this recipe-poem. I am bringing the original to Oscar, drawings and cursive and all, for part of an anniversary gift. We will celebrate our anniversary together in Jalisco, México, eating comida picosa, camping, biking, swimming in rivers, reading the stars.

It has been nearly a year now since I graduated from the University of Michigan with my Master of Social Work degree, packed up my apartment, flew home, moved into a new place, started my job, and found Oscar again to promptly fall in love with him.

It seems appropriate, then, to reflect on what this year back home has meant to me, what growth has arisen from my first year as an MSW, my first year of being with my life partner, my first year of really returning to Alaska to stay.

If I were to heed the mantra my dad always repeated from Shakespeare that “brevity is the soul of wit” and tell it in the, uh, wittiest? way possible, it would be simply to say that:

This year, I have grown more compassionate with myself and others.

But now I think I will un-heed his advice and flesh out the story, starting with the two people who have had the most influence over this growth: My best friend, Jessica Laura Russell and the love of my life, Oscar Avellaneda.

Here is Jessica Laura (who I write as JLR). She is hugging me as we say a long goodbye on the day after her wedding:

Oscar took the photo with his Hasselblad, proud and happy that his girlfriend had such a good friend. In this photo, JLR has just given me a book that her wife recommended for me called There’s Nothing Wrong with You. I am holding it in my hand. It’s a fun and easy to read Buddhist guide to getting over self-hate and treating yourself with compassion. Oscar and I read it together on the Caltrain back to the airport and in bed at nights. We took what we liked from the book and incorporated it into our practices with one another and with ourselves.

But still, even with this resource, after Oscar-Laura fights or during moments of acute insecurity, back when Oscar and I were still so unfamiliar with our own and one another’s fears, when we were trying to figure out how to communicate across difference, when we had not yet learned to take time-outs and clearly communicate our needs (not like we always do it right now, but we’re better), I would sometimes call Jessica Laura. She would tell me to treat my vulnerable and fearful Laura (my Laurita) with compassion rather than disdain, to acknowledge the vulnerability in me and feel sorry for it, but not give it so much power. This helped me to meet Oscar more calmly. And she would tell me how she and her wife deal with the others’ fears and needs, how they negotiate and forgive, how they have patience with their own and the others’ growth, but mainly, this idea:

Guilt and anger to try to change you or change someone else doesn’t work well.

Compassion does.

I was many many years struggling with this one, though now it seems so obvious. I think I didn’t know what the alternative to criticism, guilt, and anger was. To offer an easy example, “I shouldn’t eat more; I hate being over my good weight. It shows no discipline!” never worked well. Taking myself seriously in a positive way, seeing progress, feeling good about it and continuing that progress does work to maintain a healthy weight.

And so, it was through compassion and patience that Oscar and I have grown into very healthy problem-solving. It’s through compassion for himself that he now feels comfortable articulating his needs or offense in a constructive way at the moment rather than bottling it up for later. It’s through compassion for myself that I stop from getting angry at whatever inherited tendencies I have and don’t like and just try to manage them instead.

The funny thing is, Oscar thanks me for teaching him compassion, and I feel like I was a new student in it, while it was Oscar who taught me acceptance. I’ve never accepted anyone like I accept Oscar, and maybe I am capable of doing this because he’s just the right man for me and I am ready, but also because he sees me completely, every part of me, and accepts me—while still pushing me to be my best self, as I do him.  This is a picture of us in Girdwood at the state-wide youth conference where our Photovoice kids presented. We are ready to go to sleep, which shows in what Oscar describes as his “sleepy, happy, in love face”:

This was a night in which both of us needed compassion, patience, listening, acceptance, and guidance. We were both vulnerable and frazzled but met each other there and supported each other. What I learned through late nights like that and through the daily practices of acceptance– me accepting Oscar when we sit for hours correcting his punctuation or even when his poor time management drives me crazy, Oscar accepting me as he shows me how to deal with technology or even when my practices of criticism drive him crazy–is this:

Growth = complete acceptance + faith, truth, pushes  & opportunities

I always knew about the truth, pushes and opportunities part, and I guess I always had faith in people that they/we could grow and that’s why I pushed them/myself and sought honesty and truth.  My parents did a wonderful job of raising me and Claire with these principles. But for a long time I thought that acceptance meant complacency and I was afraid to ever be complacent, static, satisfied with where I am or where others are. What I failed to understand was that without the safety, the home base of acceptance, growth can’t take off in the same way. In truth, maybe our need for acceptance is like healthy attachment in babies—the ones with healthy attachment to their caregivers are the ones who can explore the most.  And maybe that’s why patients need non-judgmental health care providers and clients need non-judgmental social workers in order to grow towards greater health and control in their lives. We’re not so different than babies.

This picture, taken by our friend Steve Nigl, is a great illustration of the mutual acceptance and enjoyment I share with Oscar that fuels my ability to do so as a social worker, friend, daughter, sister:

There’s Oscar, being silly. There’s me, probably being overly serious or having some expectations about what this photo should be like. There’s us, just being with and enjoying our sometimes opposing characteristics, and out of it comes a photo neither of us quite expected but both of us love.

Oscar giggles and is amused by my mistakes, offended by some, and able to address them with dignitiy and acceptance so I can grow. This is what love is supposed to be, and I think this is what social work is supposed to be too.

I can’t really separate what is personal-only and what is social work. I practice my professional training in my relationships and vica versa. Over this last year, I strived to do “strengths-based” assessments and change processes both in Mt. View and in my personal life. Just as I struggled to accept Oscar’s sense of time, I had to adjust for and be patient with the senses of time held by many of the community members in focus groups or interviews, or now with the Latina patients for whom I serve as interpreters, or with clients and colleagues in my grant-writing work.

And luckily, when my professional training was not enough to control the rancor I felt at service providers/managers who I felt were unjust, Oscar was there to remind me of meeting people where they’re at and with compassion, and also the need to work around people who are barriers.

(By the way, the other big lesson of the year is that we won’t get anywhere if we continue to surrender leadership to those who are not leaders, those who cannot think and act creatively and humanely, and that we need to stop being complacent about the social services or education or whatever else status quo…but that’s another blog entry entirely.)

So, what are the consequences of these practices of compassion and acceptance as vehicles for growth? What have Jessica Laura, Oscar, the buddhist book, my social work training, and other dear and wise friends like Jay Pearson and Virginia Speciale helped me to do?

• Have fewer headaches
• Make & show more art (hence, two exhibitions, a photo in next month’s Hip Mama feminist parenting magazine, submitting photos for a juried show soon in Anchorage, 5 finished collage and painting pieces for Oscar…it feels good)
• Get farther along the path of outgrowing some of my old communication patterns of defensiveness and “you statements” that inevitably never work
• Have a successful relationship and future husband and co-parent
• Talk myself out of negative thoughts
• Reflect on my teaching, meeting facilitation, grant-writing, project management, etc. without so much guilt and stress and with more forward movement—because with compassion, critique is less damming and more useful
• Oscar and I made the New Years Resolution to take ourselves seriously, which is like a nice way of pushing ourselves to be disciplined, but from a place of faith instead of criticism. So, taking myself seriously, I intend to compete well in mt. bike races and the Xterra trail triathlon this summer, and maybe a bouldering competition or two.
• Use technology with more competence, comfort, and flexibility—from flow charts to Google platforms to photo software to this blog
• Form some new friendships, I think a little smoother than in the past
• Form meaningful relationships with the future in-laws, including with Herbert, Oscar’s Army Ranger brother, who is soooo different than me that it’s sometimes surprising to me that I  love him, but I do. This relationship, and that with Rodrigo, the kind-hearted boyfriend of my (courageous, creative, check out her blog) future-sister-in-law, Erika, opens up a new understanding for me of the military and what it’s like to be in the military and to be a professional warrior.
• Grow patience that I never knew I had. I mean, what choice do I have while Oscar & Erika are riding across the Americas? (www.quehubo.info). It sure helps in teaching.

I have learned and done many other things this year and have grown with friends and family, building community here in Anchorage with wonderful people and loving my friends and family from afar, building a little career while also dabbling back into teaching and gaining insight into education, traveling for conferences & family, and helping with my mom’s campaign for State House (http://www.barbaranortonforstatehouse.com). But this is what really sticks:

I need to and CAN practice compassion and acceptance, that elusive goal that I never understood very well and always saw as antithetical to change, and now find not only reconcilable with change, but necessary for it.

And I have a lot more growing left to do. I look forward to it.

On last weekend’s “This American Life,” which was actually an old show, the theme was “Somewhere Out There.” It was about finding the one. There was a great story about a young white American man named Eric doing an exchange in China and singing Chinese opera. He fell for a musician there named Yuen Yuen, lost touch with her when he came back to the states, and then, years later, upon returning to China, tried against all odds to find her in Beijing with very few leads. It was a fairytale story of how they found one another and came to be in love. But then it became less fairytale like–she came to the US on a fiancé visa, so they had to get marry sooner than they were ready to. It was rough for a few years. They had to rely on their falling in love story to convince themselves they were worth the work, that their relationship was too magical to let end. But they got through it…and this is the quote at the end of that story that made me bawl when I heard it and choke up later when I recounted it to my own amor:

Narrator: The story of how they met began to feel less and less important. And they didn’t talk about it as much. Now, they have a different story.

Eric: Which is the story of struggle and pain that we, uh, sort of passed through and fought through and overcame. And, y’know, that’s a story that you don’t tell in public. Because no one ever asks, “How did you two stay together?” Everyone always asks, “How did you two meet?”

I love this quote. I love this lesson. I love stories of how people stay together. I guess that’s why I love cheesy Brad Paisley country songs–because they’re about his wife; they’re about pregnancy and daily life. They’re about staying in love.  I’ve seen enough in my little 27 years to know that a lot of the  falling in love songs and movies don’t last long, that they don’t just live happily ever after.  I think we do children a great disservice when the majority of their stories end with only the beginning of the beauty and work of real relationships. (Side note: we also do them a great disservice with the myth that everyone already knows how to have sex so you don’t have to talk about it. I hate that one.)

We all need help holding our relationships–with partners, with friends, colleagues, sisters and brothers and parents–together. We all need help communicating and giving and negotiating respect. We need more stories about this. So thank you, This American Life, for that brief and beautiful articulation and I hope that we create space for more such stories.

p.s. My parents have been together for 30.5 years. Oscar’s parents have been together for about that long. Another family I grew up with, the Blouws, have been together 40-some years. I have access to some stories.

Can you be crying? My friend, my

–everything!…

How large and salty now is the

taste of that in my fist.

-Marina Tsvetaeva, 1924

My love, Oscar, left last Thursday on the ferry with his sister Erika and their friend Will to bike from Bellingham, Washington to Bogotá, Colombia. Or, as we are all trying to convince them, to take a train to California and bike from there.

Oscar and I held one another as thick wet snowflakes came down in straight lines from the sky all around us, the white illuminated by headlights, standing out before the heavy green of the spruce in that rainy town of Whittier, Alaska. Oscar said to me, “Look at the snow. I will always remember this hug by the snow falling.”

We pressed our faces together and he began to whisper sing to me the song by The Cure to which we began to fall in love at my sister’s birthday party: “Show me show me show me how you do that trick…” I answered back, tears warbling the notes: “…the one that makes me scream, she said. The one that makes me laugh, she said…”

And then tasted his tears on my lips.

Tasted my tears on his cheek.

Both on my fingers as I touched his face.

And I thought of Tsvetaeva: “How large and salty now is the taste of that in my fist.”

But sometimes we want to quote poets at the wrong moments. Tsvetaeva had “reached the end of ending” when she wrote that, and this goodbye is not an end. It’s the beginning of a journey that Oscar has been planning for years and needs to take, the beginning of our relationship and our communication being given new challenges. It is the beginning of certain kinds of growth, alone growth and growth as we explore and expand in the world, as I grow into new jobs and new friendships, as I learn to self-soothe and Oscar becomes more intentional about the ways he wants to live his life. It is the beginning of many love letters and a commitment about which neither of us hesitates.

So, while this long absence does, at times, feel tragic and I hear Tsvetaeva again in my head–

though the time of the train is set

and the sorrowful honor of leaving

is a cup given to women.

–I pretty much stay away from feeling sorry for myself.

Love has survived much harder things than this.

(A collage I made for the cover of my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary mix CD of love songs)

I have been meaning, for the last few weeks, to sit down and write an essay of some sort about love. I’ve been writing it in my head as I drive, and saying, “Once I finish Christmas presents and this program plan and this research summary and lesson planning for the math unit in the after school program, then I’ll sit down and write the essay.” But I haven’t finished anything except Christmas presents, and I may be forgetting the words that I intended for the subject.

When I write this essay, it will be about mature love. It will talk about how fluttery dramatic and unreal love songs don’t move me, but songs about families and long-term loves do.  My best friend and her wife’s wedding vows did. Old couples do. It will talk about the way I’ve learned to love more maturely and how relationships are about so much more than that love rush and those emotions and the hasty commitments that might arise from taking emotions as enough. It might reveal the way that Oscar and I show our love for one another lately by talking about house design and interior decoration and what we mean by it is, “I am committed to building a life with you.” It’ll be way more eloquent than this.

I’ll write it and I hope you’ll read it. In the meanwhile, it is Oscar’s last 10 days in our shared city, and then he takes off on his bike journey from Bellingham, WA to his home city of Bogotá, Colombia (check out the trip site: www.quehubo.info). I won’t see him again until April or so, so our mature love will be put to all sorts of tests. And I have faith in it.