Is that a light up ahead?

I received the following letter from the United States Department of State National Visa Center, twelve days ago:

Dear Elizabeth Hard Shaw:
Your inquiry has been received at the National Visa Center (NVC).
Your request for expeditious processing of this immigrant visa petition was denied by the assigned U.S. Embassy/Consulate General. This petition will continue processing at the NVC. Once all the required fees and documents are received and reviewed, and an interview appointment date is scheduled, this petition will be forwarded to the assigned U.S. Embassy/Consulate General.
For further information regarding NVC processing, please visit www.immigrantvisas.state.gov

I read it, with shaking hands, these official seals always make my hands shake, that is what they are meant to do, no, while sitting on the back steps in the warm early- days- of March sun.

When I got to the part about the request for expeditious review being denied, I cried. I had been counting on that, I don't know why, but I realize now, there is no reason why I should have expected it to be granted. Who am I?

After a brief pity party I wiped my face and went back inside to face my children. I had decided not to tell them about the letter.

That evening, just four hours or so after reading the letter, I got an e-mail from the NVC. It read:

Dear Sir/Madam,

The attached correspondence relates to an immigrant visa referenced on the subject line.  This case is being processed by the National Visa Center. Please read the information carefully and follow the instructions.

Attachment: 

Dear IAN M.:
The enclosed information pertains to IAN RODGER M's interest in immigrating to the
United States of America. The National Visa Center (NVC) has completed its processing of IAN
RODGER M 's petition, case number XXXX; and forwarded it to the American
Embassy/Consulate in PARIS.
An immigrant visa interview has been scheduled for the applicant at the U.S. Embassy/Consulate in
PARIS on April 10, 2012 at 01:00 pm. 

"Interest in immigrating to the United States of America? Why does that wording annoy me?

The attachment goes on for another three boring  pages. I'll spare you.

I should be excited, I know. We have a date. Well an interview date. And I kind of am excited. Excited and relieved. But I'm also kind of irked that every step has to have at least six weeks in between it and the next step. It feels gratuitously cruel, or somehow manipulating.

I mean, dentists appointments must be made months in advance too. But no one really wants to go to the dentist anyway.

But the very widely-spaced steps put forth by this immigration process take a very long stride and an enormous amount of patience, more than the average little girl who is missing her daddy has.

But what's another month, or two, when your daddy has been missing for 10 already?

Baby steps. Progress. Lights at the end of a long, dark tunnel. And all that.

It's good. Really. It's good. It's just not "now" enough for me, right now. 

Sundays are good to us

I have been meaning for months to start doing a weekly, image-driven Sunday post.

Sundays have long since been my favorite day for some reason. This was not always the case. I hated Sundays when I was in high school and college. Sundays meant imminent return to the drudgery of school. The end of freedom.

Since becoming a parent, though I do have this strange Saturday morning anxiety affliction, Sundays often mark imminent return of freedom and the sense of relaxed contentment that comes with it.

Does this mean I hate spending weekends with my family? No.

Proof of that lies in just how much I enjoy Sundays with my children And my children often reflect that serenity right back at me in the form of cohesive sibling relations and the promise of, if not world, then at least domestic peace.

They play well together on Sundays, usually. They get into home, being home, appreciating home, walking to Grant's store for the Sunday New York Times, sitting around the fire, making potions, dressing up, hanging around in the horse barn...

It's the one day home feels consistently good and right to all of us. Here's a compilation of images from the last three or four or five or six or seven Sundays:

 Just them putting on their bathrobes speaks volumes about their complacent moods. The fact that I don't own a bathrobe,  also speaks volumes.

 Today was no exception. The girls, Esther and Isla, shared several increasingly-rare consecutive hours of supreme solidarity. I even fell asleep on the couch to the sounds of their voices, cooperating and mutually respecting, as Esther found and cutomized a stick horse for Isla, then they groomed and tacked up their horses. When I woke up, they were schooling the horses over a jump course on the yard.

 Yup, in their stockinged feet.

Too bad the day has to end.

Curiosity killed the mom

I took Esther to see The Artist last night. We both loved it. She especially. She really glows when she knows she is being invited along to do something adult, with "Mummy." (I've noticed she calls me Mummy and Isla calls me Mama.)

And Essie rises to the occasion of grown-up dates--  her keen little mind opening up to swallow every bit of nuance and information it can get and I can hardly keep up.

On the way home in the car her questions just kept firing out of her mouth, rapid fire, and I was dodging bullets the whole ride home.

The conversation went from suicide, there is a scene towards the end of the film that gets suspenseful and, though nothing is shown, presented the visual of a concept Esther has never before been presented with, or considered. (Trying not be a spoiler here.)

Next we were talking about what would make someone so upset they would want to die at their own hand, and that led to the topic of depression, and then antidepressants, which, possibly, had my grandfather had access to, our family history would contain one less tragedy. I resisted the urge to tell her that sometimes, like right now for instance, I use antidepressants....

Then our talk switched to technology and how I feel it breeds loneliness and discontent, and then we were onto the economy and recession and how stressful money and unemployment can be for people, then she wanted to know what caused the recession, and then the topic came to divorce.... and at that point I was ready to raise the white flag and beg her to just put on her ipod nano, or put on some cheesy radio station, or talk about Justin Bieber.... something, anything, other than these deep topics.

And I am simultaneously wowed by her curiosity and her capacity, her willingness to try to understand so many adult concepts, and cowed by the breadth of her hunger for knowledge and the whole idea of me as a filter for the information she takes in from this world.

She is ten, after all. Ten. And her desire to know, to understand: Why are so and so getting divorced? Why does so and so want to stay with her abusive husband? Will daddy be able to get a job when he gets home? Not to mention her surprising understanding of the riddle that is navigating the socioeconomics of friendships:

"L doesn’t understand why everyone can’t go to the summer camp for a month, or why I don’t just order a pair of $Custom Converse.."

I’m proud of her little big mind. I admire it. But I struggle with knowing how much to feed it and how much to withhold because her appetite for information is insatiable and I don't like how easy it is to satisfy it, as if everything I say is exactly how it is. I hear her repeating things I've said, and hear my judgment and bias in her words, hints of sanctimommy in them, and I cringe.

The kid is paying attention.

I have no recollection of caring what my mom was talking about on the phone, or in the new living room over drinks with Mrs. Robertson, or Mrs. Cone, when I was a kid.

But Esther, she cares. And she is hanging, tightly, on every single word.

The sound of flapping wings

It feels like a crime saying this, in this the age of gratitude and happiness projects, but life feels really stupid sometimes.

Shame on the person who wakes up in the morning and thinks,

My life feels stupid.
Time to make the donuts. We do the same thing every day.
What is it really all about?

But, honestly, I do wake up feeling that way sometimes.

Don't you?

I even felt this way, possibly even more, when I was a professional snowboarder. I spent month-long training camps at the same slopeside hotel--usually the Breckenridge Hilton-- eating, sleeping, training, watching video of myself training, working out, eating, sleeping, repeat.

Not only that, but I put on the same uniform-- first layer, speedsuit, ski pants, fleece, jacket, boots, helmet, goggles, gloves --day after day. I rode up the hill on a chairlift. I rode back down through a race course. I checked my time at the bottom, then rode back up and came back down the course, seeking a new line that would improve my time by three tenths of a second. If my time was less than 6% slower than the boys' time, I was within range.

Why do I always see symbolism in things?

The only difference between then and now is I had a coach telling me how I was doing, urging me on, bolstering that which needed to be bolstered.

I bet you never imagined that something as seemingly glamorous as a competitive sport career could feel like factory work sometimes. And the product is you.

But still, now that I've been "domesticated," the same sorts of things shake me out of my stupor and put life back into relief. It's usually art or nature.

Like this morning, on my gray walk, when that lone Canada goose flew, directly North, over our heads and flapped determinedly into the distant gray sky, calling, forlornly, to someone, anyone, wait for me, as it flew.

And, voilá, life was unexpected again, and I was remembering the number of times we were startled from our stupor  by a flock of massive, honking swans flying just above the rooftops of our sleepy French village, so close you could hear the rhythmic pumping of their fluid wings as they flapped their way towards an instinctual destination.

That was a beautiful thing.

Good dream, bad dream

I dreamed I got out of bed in the middle of the night and went into the bathroom to put water on my face.

As I looked up, groping for a towel to wipe my face, there, standing at the sink right next to me, we don’t have two sinks in our bathroom, was Ian, looking just like himself in one of the plaid flannel shirts
I bought him, stretched tautly over his deliciously- broad shoulders, and blue jeans and his blue eyes.

He was just standing there, casually looking into the mirror, as if he had been there all his life. 

I screamed and threw myself at him.

“What are you doing here,” I shrieked. “How did you get here?”

“I wanted to surprise you,” he said, as calmly and evenly as he says just about everything.

I should have known right there that this was a dream because surprising people, or planning anything ahead of time, is not Ian’s style, but I wanted so much for this dream to be true I ignored all of that.

And I held him, just held him, until I woke up and he was not here.

Damn.

The antidote to Britney Spears

Dear sporty college girl we saw at the Middlebury hockey game last night,

You appeared out of nowhere, resplendent in a baggy T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes, wired for sound with earbuds in your ears.

My daughters and I spotted you at the same time as you sprinted the row of stadium steps--casually down, swiftly back up again in a surge of power-- propelled by ambition, visibly strong legs, and, I’m guessing, your playlist.

You were oblivious to what was going on around you-- the women’s hockey game, the regrettably small number of spectators, me and my family.

My girls were mesmerized by your motion--the very vision of you moving, muscles flexed, through the crowd. As you ran past our seats and continued on your lap around the stadium, my youngest, Isla, left her seat and jogged to the stairs in a perfect emulation of you.

She wasn't chasing you. She was being you.

She ran up the first flight, then hopped down again, then up the second, tripping only once on her dress, then back down again. Then, as she headed into the third flight, she looked up to see you coming back down on your second lap.

Startled, she  jumped aside and you smiled at her as you passed-- the smile of a young girl who remembered being an even younger girl. She chased you up your last sprint, her short skinny legs, clad in stripey tights, no match for yours, yet undaunted by the competition.

As you disappeared around the corner again for another stadium lap, she followed you this time. All the way around.

I watched her from my seat. She looked so small at the other end. She fell again, and bounced back up. She moved so swiftly. So determinedly. This, my child who normally whines if she has to walk more than a block.  And you, so far ahead of her, with no idea, still,  you were being followed. No idea the part you were playing in my child’s fantasy. No idea what an inspiration you were.

She followed you up and down the three flights of stadium steps and around the stadium again. This time, on the far side, I noticed she had been joined by two more little girls, one ahead, one behind. Each running. Each inspired by the sight of you. You did another stair circuit and were gone.

Isla came limping in from her last lap, jogged straight to my seat, and put my hand to her heart, underneath her dress.

“Feel my heart,” she said, her eyes wide and her cheeks splotched red with life. 

I did.

It was thumping. Wild and steady against my hand.

The heart, at least I think that's what it was, speaks

This morning I awoke to the sounds of some unidentifiable piano concerto on VPR's classical station. (Who am I kidding. They are all unidentifiable.)

It was not unpleasant. Sometimes piano concertos are.

No. It was beautiful.

The soft plinking notes pressed the residual overnight gloom right out of the room and I realized two things: I was alone-- Isla had had a good, wander-free night. And, I felt completely at ease, a' l'aise, in my skin and in my home. My bed was soft in all the right places and firm in all the right places and warm all over. And my heart was soft in all the right places, and firm in all the right places and warm all over.

I raised my thick head off the pillow to glance at the clock. 6:10. I pushed my head back into the pliant warmth and dozed some more.

I got up to pee and stood in front of the double windows that face out to the barn. It was just before sunrise when the whole world, even the air, is soft-edged. Submissive.

The mountains, the trees, the air, the sky, the barn, the sleeping horses. It all looked, and felt, so welcome and familiar. So permanent. Unmovable.

I had a flashback of looking out our back window in France in the dark winter mornings. I felt nothing of that loneliness, that desolate sense of homesickness, I often felt upon waking up there.

"That's because this is my home," I heard my voice cutting into my reverie to say, as I continued on towards the bathroom, "and France was not."

I had spoken out loud. Or someone had.