I want us to be better

Seven years ago, my four-year-old son went into sudden kidney failure. And by sudden, I mean sudden, following what seemed like a typical end-of-summer cold. Matt took Isaac to the doctor while I prepared to start another school year. His doctor thought it could be a virus, but he took one look at our son and ordered a urine catch and blood work. When the tests came back a few hours later, the doctor called and said the safest place for our son to be was the hospital. Immediately. So we found ourselves tossing toothbrushes, pajamas, and Isaac's stuffed beagle into a backpack and the soup that hadn't finished cooking into the sink. My brother and sister-in-law came over to stay with Suzannah and we drove to Mary Bridge Children's Hospital, where I spent the first few days of the new school year.

Instead of meeting my students, I met with a pediatric nephrologist. I held my sobbing son through an EKG, many blood draws, an IV, a failed attempt to get him to drink a huge cup of sludgy medicine to lower his potassium levels, and albuterol treatments. 

We spent that first night in the Emergency Room, waiting for a kidney ultrasound. Isaac fell asleep on the padded exam table behind a privacy curtain and we wrapped him in Matt's sweatshirt to keep him warm. I watched the clock discard the minutes, my eyes burning. By the time a bed was ready, it was five o'clock in the morning, and I was covered in my son's dried tears and the remnants of the medicine he had thrown up all over me. We tucked him in with his stuffed beagle, and Matt and I curled into each other on a small pull-out couch where we dozed for an hour or two.

It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, but all things considered, we were so lucky. We took him home a few days later, and several months after that, all his tests came back clear. 

Last week, I took him in for his well-child visit and middle school immunizations (the ones that are required for school, a mandate which people do not seem to be protesting, interestingly enough). I am grateful for every single one of those vaccines, and I am grateful for my son's health. He is a boisterous, active, healthy, hilarious, absolutely wonderful kid and I am grateful for him always, but particularly every September now, when I remember the moments in the hospital when Matt and I were brought face-to-face with everything we stood to lose. 

And the thing is that I never believed we would lose him, because such a loss is unsurvivable. Right? 

But here's the other memory that stays with me: the children we met that week on our floor who would not be sent home with their families after a few randomly frightening days. 

I still almost can't breathe typing this. 

I remember, for instance, sitting in one of the game rooms with my son and a child in a purple bathrobe, completely bald, smaller than my son, dragging an IV pole over to a table with coloring books and games. I still think about that child all the time. Where are they now? Are they okay? Are they also getting ready to go back to school? Fourth grade, maybe? Fifth? Sixth, like my son?

When I think about hospitals filling up with COVID patients these days, I think of that child. 

When folks who showed nothing but love and support for my son seven years ago post on social media now that we need to open up, get back to normal, and live -- I think of that child. I think of that child and I think of my son when those folks post, "If you're scared, you should stay home!" I am honestly too afraid to ask these people if they believe that our "right" to not feel uncomfortable in a mask is more important than a vulnerable child's right to an education. Or to a place in our society. Just stay home. Don't inconvenience us with your "underlying condition." Don't ask us to value your life as a necessary part of our community. Don't ask us to care about a person we don't know.

You cared about my son then. What if things had turned out differently? Would you say the same things?

We're starting another school year, together again. We need it so much, and I will do anything to return safely in person. I will wear the mask, even though I don't love teaching through a mask. Teaching through a mask beats teaching through a screen, and all of that beats spreading a virus to folks who cannot be vaccinated yet. To vulnerable folks. We are going to have to take some risks, yes. But we also have the tools to protect each other, and some of us just don't want to use them.

I think of my son and all the what-ifs. I think of that child in the purple bathrobe. I think of the parents holding their children in a hospital room, or waiting for one.

Today I looked at the pictures of my son in the emergency room, small and swollen and wrapped up in my husband's gray sweatshirt, and I cried and cried. I looked at the picture of my son curled up with his stuffed beagle in his hospital bed. I thought about how lucky we are, and how it could have been otherwise. I thought about the folks who love him, and about all the folks who don't know him, and about all the other children currently tucked into hospital beds, or waiting for them. I thought about how in a week ago in Dallas County, Texas, Judge Clay Jenkins said, "If your child's in a car wreck, if your child has a congenital heart defect...and needs an ICU bed, or more likely if they have Covid and need an ICU bed, we don't have one. Your child will wait for another child to die."

Don't fucking talk to me about percentages, because those are children. You are talking about someone's child. 

I thought about how terrifying it was to rush my son to the hospital seven years ago. I cannot fathom how terrifying it would be now.

Percentages don't mean a lot when you're a terrified mother holding your baby in a hospital. 

I think of the parents of that child with the purple bathrobe.

I'm so thankful -- so far beyond thankful -- that my state now requires vaccines for school staff and masks for everyone, regardless of vaccination status. Anything less is failing our kids. Period. But I see protests even in my city, because some people believe that individual comfort matters more than someone's life. And I see what's happening in other parts of the country. This is why my anger is spreading like a can of spilled red paint. This is why I cannot fully embrace the back-to-school joy I've missed so desperately. 

My son still sleeps with that stuffed beagle. I think mothers understand this: sometimes I tiptoe into his room after he's asleep, even now, even as I'm preparing to send him to middle school. I still need to see the steady rise and fall of his chest, to ground myself in the gift of his presence, to offer a desperate prayer of thanks that we still get to have him, and beg the universe to show mercy to our babies when the adults around them turn away. 

I want the world to be better. I want us to be better.

I know how to breathe in the water

When your child challenges you to a water balloon fight on a hot afternoon in late July, I believe in saying yes. Always. Even if you're not wearing a swimsuit. Maybe especially if you're not wearing a swimsuit, because there is something about getting soaked in shorts and a tank top that feels whimsical and freeing. Although I do have to say that fifteen years into motherhood, I still frequently put on a swimsuit for an afternoon of Serious Water Play in the backyard, because that signals commitment, and I am a mother who pities the parents who do not find joy in this, at any age.

I've written about this before, but my perfect summer happens in my backyard.

We didn't make it to Bozeman last summer, or almost anywhere else. Our story isn't unique. We're in a Pandemic (yes, still). Matt changed jobs. The IB Global Conference was cancelled. By this time last year, we had just learned that we would begin the school year remotely, which was both a relief and a source of anxiety and dread. Last year at this time, we were about to leave for a quick trip to Glacier National Park, where we met my parents, my brother and his family, and Matt's parents. It was the only time all summer that felt something like normal, the only time all summer where I could just breathe. And I did, mostly by swimming in Lake McDonald. Put me in the water, and I am home. 

I know how to breathe in the water.

*

We did make it to Bozeman this summer, and I was so grateful. I missed the smell of my parents' house. It's a smell they probably don't notice, but to me, it smells exactly like home the moment I walk in the door, the smell I've known for most of my life. I love it so much, in exactly the way I love the smell of my own house after we've been away for a week; it's a very specific smell I never notice any other time except after days away. 

(How many homes is a person allowed to have? I have asked myself this question for years. My best high school teacher told me one night before I left for college that I would put down deep roots wherever I went. And it's true, I think. I can still smell, in my memory, the apartment I shared with Carmen in Moorhead, Minnesota. Or the smell of the heavy, late summer air there. Home is the way the air smells.)

We also spent a few nights in Glacier. We didn't camp this time, like we have since my son was in diapers. I've missed it, those nights spent breathing the sweet pine-scented air under the stars, settled into the quiet of a tent, with everything that matters held in that space. COVID changed things, yes. But pandemics do eventually end, and at some point in the last few years I have learned how to set boundaries for myself and for my family. We'll share communal spaces again, but until then, we'll gratefully accept my mother's gift of a cabin and days at the lake. Paddle boards, kayaks, the sun setting over the water. The cool water of Lake McDonald against my body, which I prefer over any kayak or paddle board. It's a strange thing: to so fully enjoy the water, to acknowledge that this lake is warm enough to swim in all afternoon, which it shouldn't be. Growing up, it wasn't. We are incinerating the planet, and this is obvious in a heartbreaking way when I visit this place where the glaciers are shrinking into snow fields.

Pam Houston writes in Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country: 

For now, I want to sit vigil with the earth...I want to write unironic odes to her beauty, which is still potent, if not completely intact. The language of the wilderness is the most beautiful language we have and it is our job to sing it until and even after it is gone no matter how much it hurts. If we don't, we are left with only a hollow chuckle, and our big brains who made this mess, our big brains that stopped believing a long time ago in beauty, in everything, in anything.

Montana is burning. It's too hot, too early. Again. I returned to my home state hoping to breathe the sweetest air in the world, but smoke filled my lungs instead. Weeks later, friends there post pictures of a red sun in a yellow sky.

Montana might never truly welcome me home; I'm an Outsider now. And yet. And yet. My soul still knows how to breathe in the water there, and the Montana prairie is not so different from the ocean tides. I'll always love it.

*

I moved to the Pacific Northwest twenty years ago. I've lived here longer than I've lived anywhere else: my entire adult life. I was born in a prairie town, grown and nourished near the mountains, returned to the Midwestern plains, and given my wings to wind up exactly where I am now. All of it, all of it, courses through my blood. My heart beats to the rhythm of the ocean tides and prairie winds. I cherish my trips home. But home is also here now: in the Pacific Northwest, in the mountains, at the coast, and quite literally in my backyard.

*

Matt and I were extraordinarily lucky to stumble into our little house, in this neighborhood, just six weeks after we were married. Before we had kids, I spent August afternoons reading in the shade of our enormous tree, or reading in the sunshine on our deck (I won't tell you which books led to my most painful sunburns, but I remember them clearly). After Suzannah was born, I spent countless afternoons in the backyard with her, taking pictures while she splashed in the little plastic wading pool we bought at Target or Toys R Us. I remember sitting on the edge of the deck trying to read while she ran through the sprinkler. One of the books I was supposed to teach for IB Literature still bears her scribbles; she grabbed my blue ballpoint pen after she tired of the water, and I didn't really care for the book anyway -- it was a complete chore to read (and I no longer teach it). Temperatures hit 100 the summer I was pregnant with Isaac, and I sat in that plastic wading pool while Zannah poured water over my belly. The next summer, Isaac kicked his fat legs on a blanket on the grass. And after that...well, the yard was his, too. The sprinkler, the lawn, the deck. The concrete patio that replaced the old, rotting deck. The swing set and sandbox, built by my husband and father-in-law before my son's first birthday.

I'm supposed to want more. More square footage? More house, less yard? Newer? Bigger? I wasn't thinking about "forever" when we bought our house, only about how we loved it then. All these years later, I still do, and even more in Quarantine, when my daily walks introduced me to so many neighbors I'd never known and showcased spectacular views of Puget Sound, only a few streets away. I've learned that what I need is not the same thing as what we're conditioned to want.

*

I love our summer travels. I do. Our trips have mostly always been to Montana and Minnesota, because our families are there, and I have no regrets about that (Montana and Minnesota are wonderful places to be, in any season). I've had some wonderful trips around the country for the IB Global Conference each summer, and once Matt and I went to Vegas on his company's dime (I'll go anywhere and enjoy it when I don't have to pay for it, but I'd be okay not going back). I have a list of places I want to go and things I want to see and experience in the next few years. But I've also learned that the summers I love best are the summers that give me the most time at home here in the Pacific Northwest. We keep discovering places that fill and feed my soul near my home here. At the coast, in the mountains, on the trails to the Sound near my own house.

(I almost wrote, "in my home state." Is this my home state now? I think of the privilege inherent in claiming a state this way in the first place. In having a childhood bedroom that still exists somewhere else. Surely, claiming a home shouldn't be limited to those of us who still have a bed in a place we lived in decades ago.)

*

I spent some time this weekend reading through old journals, which is a thing I tend to do in late summer, before I dig into preparing for the next school year. The year after I moved here, after I chose this place to begin my adulthood, my "real life," I wrote about returning to a place of wet and green Januaries after Christmas in Montana, about how I felt like I was going home. And yet, for years after I left Montana, I still wrote about weeping as I drove east or west out of Bozeman -- to Moorhead, Minnesota or to Washington. Bozeman is a hard place to leave. But those tears meant that a heart can expand to hold these other places, too, and to call them home.

*

I've lived here, in this state, in this little house, longer than I've lived anywhere else. 

My dream house is this one, I think. Maybe a few streets closer to the water, so I could drink my coffee with a view of Puget Sound instead of having to walk to that view in the mornings (all summer) or the afternoons (when I'm teaching). What I have is close enough. My perfect summer day happens right here, when I pour myself a glass of iced green tea ("Enjoy your alien pee," my son says) and read in the backyard until it's time to cook dinner, which we also frequently eat in the backyard. My perfect summer day happens when my children fill water balloons with our backyard hose and throw them at each other, and at me. My perfect summer day happens when all we need is a backyard hose, a sprinkler, a grill, a fire pit. A comfortable lounge chair, or one of the Adirondack chairs I bought in May, along with a side table -- perfect for that glass of tea, a can of lemon-flavored La Croix, or a Pinot Grigio in the late afternoon.

I'll never say no to the water. 

*

School starts again a month from now. I'll be teaching full classes in person again for the first time in a year-and-a-half. My daughter will be a sophomore. My son will be a middle-schooler, which is harder for me to process, since the last time he attended in-person school he was only in the fourth grade. But the world happens to all of us. We'll figure it out.

In the meantime, we'll run through the sprinkler, we'll have water balloon fights, we'll spend afternoons at the beaches in the state parks near our home (two of them are ten minutes from our house, in two different directions, with sandy beaches and swimming and trails), and we'll make one last drive to a National Park and a beautiful lake in the mountains near the sea. This is what feeds my soul.

But even if I don't want to drive those ten minutes on a hot afternoon in late July or August, I can bask in summer days exactly where I am. I've never needed more than our back yard, a slip 'n slide or sprinkler, a camp chair under a towering tree that shades our home. I've added better chairs, I suppose. We have that fire pit. A patio umbrella. A grill, for when we don't want to heat the kitchen. But the magic that happens here is simple: an arc of water from a garden hose, catching the sunlight like diamonds. A book. A glass of iced tea. Dinner on the patio, maybe. The cool night descending over the water, the breeze that pairs with our bedroom fan to ruffle our bedroom curtains.

And always, the water. In whatever form my children want. Because isn't this it? The moments we miss later?

(Maybe it's the Pisces in me, but I'll take the water in any moment, on any day. I want the hose, the sprinkler, the slip 'n slide, the spray park, the pool as much as my children do.)

So I say yes to the water balloon fights, the water gun fights. I suggest the spray park, or the beach when my son whines that he's bored. I don't care what we do there, whether we splash in the water or dig in the sand or buy hot dogs or hike the trails near the water. I love it all. It's a life I couldn't know I was choosing all those years ago. It's a life I wouldn't trade.