“Better a man who has conquered himself and enlarged his soul.”–Nietzsche

Say What?

Thanks to anyone who hung in there with my last few posts. Writing helps me understand myself a little bit better.
There are many things on my mind today, but I think I’ll linger on the subject of “Hot Yoga.”
On my bus ride to school every day I pass a benign looking building, except for the sign out front that declares, “Hot Yoga.” For the past four weeks that I’ve taken the bus, I’ve wondered about Hot Yoga.
Wondering is as far as my curiosity carried me thanks to my bus buddy. She distracts me from my queries to talk about our supply list or how late we stayed up the night before stuffing our binders full of page protectors.
But then I went to dinner at the house of my sister’s friend. It was delicious. Halibut in coconut curry sauce. Conversation covered all kinds of tidbits from school, to vacations, to an invitation to Hot Yoga.
I choked on my coconut sauce. “Hot Yoga?” I sputtered. “What is Hot Yoga?”
My sister’s friend laughed. Hot Yoga, she explained, is yoga in sauna-like temperatures. The heat supposedly relaxes the muscles to send them into a deeper stretch. She then pulled out a book to show me a picture of an individual positioned stomach down on the floor with legs stretched behind him, up over his head. All I can say is that, yes, it’s true, and no, the description doesn’t make sense.
But, this lovely lady cautioned, the first time you go, all you can do is lie there, because the experience is so intense. She apparently crawled out of the studio afterward.
I brought up these details with some of my school friends, who all seemed to know what I meant by Hot Yoga before I had the chance to explain it. I must have smalltownitis, since I’d never heard of it before. Groan, Yuck, Bleh, they all responded in that order.
Hot Yoga claims to clean the body of toxins, one of them said. It sounds like it certainly does the job, because people who dared to walk into a Hot Yoga house and managed to escape by crawling out reported that they threw up.
I’m sure it is no surprise to hear that I have no intentions of accepting the free guest pass. I’ll just stick with Hot Dogs, or Hot and Sour Soup, or Hot Tamales. Thanks anyway.

Never Give Up

Part III of III

For years I kept a closest full of empty boxes for a moving day that never came. I saved the boxes for crystal vases, knick-knacks, anything. I wanted to return to the coast.

Eventually I had to make room in the house for our first baby. I was forced to clean out my closet. With my belly obscuring any indication that I still had feet, I stood on a chair and pulled down each box, flattening them one at a time, all by myself. It was slow, laborious, just as my first delivery was about to be. Here’s what I wrote:

 

Making room for a new life

meant cleaning out the closet

filled to the ceiling

with empty boxes

 

Saved to hold

the dishes, crystal and keepsakes

for the moving day

that never came.

 

With each box

I flattened

the long-held desire

of my spirit

 

Forced to release        

the life fantasized

for the one

to be lived.

 

At the time I thought I was surrendering to life. I see it much differently now. I’d say it’s the point at which I gave up. There certainly are times to give up, but not at life.

In the words of Mother Theresa, “Life is life, fight for it.”

Sometimes losing the game after a valiant effort is what it takes to really win—not on the scoreboard—but at life. Life is learning how “to be obedient to events,” said child advocate Maria Montessori.

Nothing could ring more true to a parent with a special needs child. So much about wrapping my head around the fact that I have a child with a disability has been about facing myself—surrendering—allowing her to change me. It hasn’t meant being fatalistic or giving up. It’s been a lesson in acceptance. I can’t make it go away, no matter how many therapies I schedule or how many specialists I consult.

I think my white flag finally went up when the swine flu sent me into my panic swim. The protective layers wrapped around my heart like the paper skin of an onion began to unpeel. The deeper the layer, the thicker it got until at last all that was left was my core.

By that point my daughter couldn’t take any more. She was exhausted. Worn out. Tired. Not one more therapy. Not one more day of school. She was done.

My spirit finally broke free in a blast of emotion powerful enough to knock a man down. My head felt as if it split open. I saw my life. I had given up. Not when my daughter’s intense needs came along but years before.

This moment manifested in front of someone I didn’t know well. It was intense. We all were crying. This person forced me to open my eyes and I could see that they cared. And that’s what did it. Someone who cared.

With my white flag waving, I no longer need the old ways of doing things: The approval-seeking and the proving, for what? To show I know what to do? That I know how to care for a child with so many needs? I see now that I spent my life striving toward an unattainable standard set by people who keep moving the target with the shallow goal of keeping themselves in control. I am supposed to set myself aside so that they feel better about themselves? I don’t need to know the answer for the countless physicians who, in their white coats, fix their glare on me and give me option A or B, awaiting proof that I am a competent parent. Would you like to rip out her toenails or run the risk of repeated pain and infection?

It comes down to this. My daughter’s suffering saved my life. That’s a lot for a mother to face.

I have learned that I must climb aboard, sit back, let life unfold, and be open to the people and events that cross my path.

“When life asks…answer with love,” are the words of poet Nancy Wood.

–Jennifer Sandmann

Never Give Up

This is the second of a three part post.

A few people over the years have pointed out to me that I have courage. This is something I didn’t know about myself, as brave is something I can’t say that I’ve ever felt. Whenever I’ve had to do something hard, it’s been with fear and trembling. But this is where the poets say courage comes to play: Looking what we’re afraid of in the eye.
If you’ve seen the movie, “How to Train Your Dragon,” it’s like when Hiccup reaches his hand out to touch the fierce dragon he eventually names Toothless. Hiccup reaches out, his arm shaking, his head turned away, until the tips of his fingers feel the dragon’s muzzle. He looks into the dragon’s eye. They become instant friends.
By now I have an angel of courage figurine on my bookshelf. She is standing with her arms stretched upwards in triumph. She was given to me by a minister friend who told me I had been a mom of courage to her. My friend is one of just a few people who know all of the possibilities that we have faced with my daughter. We haven’t shared most of them as we live in a town where misinformation spreads as fast as wildfire.
For me to blog about this aspect of my character is quite a big deal as it feels like bragging to me. I come from a corner of the world that seems to pride itself on not raising children who think they are “too big for their britches.” This mindset “kept me in my place” as long as it could. My daughter just wouldn’t let me stay there.
Quotations about courage have caught my eye from time to time. C.S. Lewis says courage isn’t a virtue in itself, but it is each virtue at its testing point. It takes courage to be honest. It takes courage to endure, etc. Poet Nancy Wood says, “Your courage goes with you, Your example stays behind, So the sweetness of your time may be known.”
My minister friend was struck by something I shared and it wound up in her sermon. I had yet another appointment scheduled with yet another doctor. This one a neurologist from a fancy children’s hospital. He wanted to test my daughter for yet another scary disease, which it turns out she doesn’t have. In sharing this with my friend I said, “that was my fear.” I didn’t want another useless test, but I went anyway, knowing I needed to continue to hunt for answers.
My next test of courage will come in a few months when I take my daughter to yet another specialist who wants to sedate her and stick needles under her skin for a nerve conduction study. This man supposedly is very smart. Without ever having seen my daughter, he asked the question: Does she struggle to make it through the day? Yes, she wilts. When I have raised this issue with my daughter’s other care givers, they have merely shrugged.
So off I go, putting my daughter through yet another miserable test, but this time knowing I may finally get the answer I’ve been looking for. So far I’ve had only half answers, such as, her muscle fibers are smaller than normal, but we can’t say for sure what this may mean for her future. How does a mother do this? Courage.

–Jennifer Sandmann

Never Give Up

This is the first of a three part post.

Never give up. I did and I didn’t even know it.

I remember standing in my backyard and leaning against the fence on one of the last days of an Indian summer. I had just taken a phone call from a doctor. The ultrasound of my daughter’s brain had been normal, but he wanted to continue with an MRI of her head and neck. I gazed over the field, turning brown and dead with the fall, and rather than landlocked I felt as if I were adrift with no land in sight and nothing to hold on to.

It was the beginning of my descent. The fall was more like a piece of wood slowly becoming water logged until it no longer floats, rather than a sinking rock. Perhaps I had been balancing at the edge much longer than I knew, but it was definitely the point at which I fell in and didn’t resurface until almost 18 months later.

My daughter suffered the entire time I was adrift. I was paralyzed by the judgments coming our way. She was limp, couldn’t lift her head, and was sick with respiratory infections. This is just a bit of what they all said. Is she okay? Maybe you could keep her at home until she gets over her cough. Why are you putting her through all of that testing? She’ll be fine, she just needs to outgrow it. Why aren’t you doing more? Are you sterilizing her bottles? You aren’t keeping up with your responsibilities. Have you finished that thing I asked you to do? Why don’t you call? No wonder she isn’t sleeping, the colors in her crib are too bright. Have you tried letting her cry herself to sleep? She wasn’t sleeping because she couldn’t breath, something a sleep study told us when she was two years old.

It was all too much for me, and I withdrew. Some people recognized the signs while others took it personally.

Here’s a poem that I wrote when I finally came up for air:

APPROVED
stamped in capital red letters,
may as well have marked my forehead,
for approval gauged the way of my path.
until life overwhelmed my sense of order,
and I sunk and I drifted until at last I surfaced
and found that the water washed away the mark.

It was news of the swine flu that finally forced my head above water, but I came up in a panic swim. Children were dying in Mexico. The flu was headed this way. The newscasts always concluded with the footnote: The latest victim had underlying health conditions. It offered me no comfort, not with a baby who’d already had pneumonia four times. If you’ve ever cried hot tears, then you may have some idea of the depth of the pain I felt.
I was in a race against the clock. So far the doctors had filled me with more questions than answers, and I needed answers fast.

If I were Queen for Day

Thanks to my 93-year-old grandma I was among the millions up in the middle of the night watching the royal wedding of Prince William and the incredible Kate Middleton.

Grandma lives with my parents and I’m caring for her while they’re away this weekend. She was juiced to watch the show live and wanted me to wake her for it. I botched the plan by not knowing how to set my cel phone’s alarm, but my hunched over old grandma came through for us. I awoke at 3 a.m. when a hard-of-hearing old lady threw open my bedroom door and whispered, “JENNY!” at the top of her lungs.

I bolted out of bed and saw her standing there in her powdered blue pajamas. I followed her walker, clunk, clunk, down the hall and sank into the easy chair in her room. The volume on the TV was blaring for any time of day, but it was excruciating at that time of night. I suggested she put in her hearing aids. “WHAT?” “YOUR HEARING AIDS!” “OH, THANKS!” she hollored, and stabbed at the television with the remote to lower the sound.

There we were. Old lady. Young mother. Half asleep. By now she in her fuzzy lime robe and me in my cotton pink one. Both of us wore wistful smiles. Could it be that even an old woman still longs to feel like a princess?

The evening earlier while soaking at the hot springs I debated with my Dad and a new friend whether the marriage would last. We concluded Kates’s got the chutzpah but wondered if it would be enough to survive the papparazi. It just couldn’t go unnoticed that William stood at the altar beside his bride, the same place where as a boy he buried his mother.

Kate next to him looked beautiful. Yet I found the sermon’s message of spiritual beauty to be particularly stunning. The aged guy in the goofy hat spoke eloquently on the subject. The love he describes makes his opening line possible, “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” He pressed on to talk about how two people in love help one another become their deepest and truest selves. My guess is few relationships reach this depth.

“Faithful and committed relationships offer a door into the mystery of spiritual life in which we discover this; the more we give of self, the richer we become in soul; the more we go beyond ourselves in love, the more we become our true selves and our spiritual beauty is more fully revealed.”

If I were queen for a day, I would wish for love. Love begets princesses far beyond the spires of Westminster Abbey.

–Jennifer Sandmann

 

 

After the party

After the party 

Pointy party hats, empty soda cans, and crusty cheese greeted me this Sunday morning when I tiptoed down the hallway to the kitchen. Didn’t want to wake anyone up, because I’m much in need of mommy time, and a little bit more banana birthday cake.

My son’s third birthday party is behind me. It’s the only time I’ll ever celebrate that marvelous little boy’s third year. I kept the party to family and his best friend, and I’m happy I did that. It was enough for both me and him.

I called my mom the night before the big day and got Dad on the line instead.

Well, I said, I think I’ve gotten carried away.

That’s okay, came the reply, it only happens once a year, and before you know it, there won’t be any more little boy birthdays to celebrate.

That was all the affirmation I needed to press on with party preparations, which required about a two-day sprint to pull off. It’s not that I went overly elaborate. But with a three-year-old and new baby in the house, having company takes that much effort. Party hats, party blowers, hamburgers, a monster truck cake, and cool party favors including pet worms were the extent of it. My husband gratefully nixed the homemade ice cream a half hour before the party started. Breyer’s filled in nicely.

My little boy’s third birthday is over, and I’ll look back with no regrets.

Got to go. I hear my son’s new Mack truck coming down the hallway.