Problem-Solving Skills

I'm indulging a little pre-baby reminisce because sometimes it's nice to remember my son while he was in utero and not constantly puking on me. Some months ago Kelly and I purchased a new garage door to replace an old wood door that was in the middle of falling apart. I could put my foot through it with minimal effort so off to Kelly's favorite place on Earth.

We pulled into the pick-up yard at Menard's in our bright red Prius, convinced we were going to be able to transport home a 16 1/2 foot garage door. The two dudes helping us, let's call them Jacques and Cousteau, looked at us like we were insane. We were, but damnit if we weren't going to make this work. Jacques immediately sent Cousteau off to track down invoices to confirm they were handing us the correct garage door. Clearly there was a pecking order. Roughly 15 minutes later Cousteau returns and Jacques grabs the invoice and begins directing him on the forklift. I pulled the Prius up to the door, turned off the car, and got out to see a pair of incredulous faces staring back at me. Jacques and Cousteau were not believers. It was going to feel really good when it worked.

I set to work transforming the cabin of the Prius into a giant flat bed truck. Kelly began inspecting the situation. You could literally see all of the equations and angles in the air around her head as she's sizing up space and playing Tetris with the three boxes she's working with. This is her moment, she will have many more. My menial task complete, we were ready. Jacques and Cousteau were nice enough to carry the boxes into the hatch of the car and I helped guide them in from the front passenger door. The first box (the parts and instruction box) fit like a glove. In my excitement I teasingly exclaimed to Jacques and Cousteau, "And you thought we wouldn't make it fit! Look at that. Plenty of room. This is going to be cake." They were not appropriately conciliatory in their demeanor or tone...there was a reason for that: the next boxes were the ones with the actual garage doors in them.

Yep. The actual door panels hung a solid 6 feet out the
back of the hatch. NBD.

As they lift the first box of panels into the car I can immediately spot the problem. This, I will add, is progress when it comes to mine own cultivation of better problem-solving skills . The next part, coming up with a solution is where the wheels tend to come off the wagon for me. When left to my own devices my solutions are either non-existent or terrible. Jacques and Cousteau slid the box up flat on the parts box. As they set it down and the weight of the panels settled they bent like melting glass and rested on the ground. My heart sank. I was not expecting this. I was flummoxed. I had never been more out of my league. Who takes a Prius into a lumber yard and expects to haul a garage door home?! I began to form my apology in my head, "Sorry about this guys, clearly this isn't going to work. We'll have to come back when we can borrow a friend's truck or something," when, from the back of the car came a voice. Confident, clear, matter-of-fact, "Just turn it up on it's edge." Oh right Kelly, like just turning it on it's edge is going to fix the 6 feet of door that's still hanging out the back, good one. Sometimes it's like you can't just admit defeat and...oh, huh, that seems to have done the trick. I'm used to this feeling. Kelly does this to me all of the time. Jacques and Cousteau, on the other hand, this is there job and they done got schooled.

The drive home was uneventful save a few stares from other motorists afraid whatever was in our car was going to come sliding out into the front of their vehicles. Problem number two was glossed over on the drive home by yours truly assuming that I would be able to just carry the panels into the garage on my own. No dice. Kelly being pregnant meant no help from her so I was left to my own imagination...I began taking inventory of things in the garage. The gears in my mind sort of clunked for a minute, kind of like the sound of an engine knock just after the transmission drops while driving down the road. The only thing, ONLY THING, I could come up with was unstrap everything and slam the accelerator through the floor board in hope that the garage door would slide out the back hatch. It was a really terrible idea so I decided not to share.

Kelly spots a Tonka truck amidst the wall of stuff she's currently stashing in the garage until such time as she has a deaf and hard of hearing preschool classroom again. This is her solution, a child's toy. I would have looked at the Tonka truck and thought, "Kelly would be so disappointed if I tried to use that." See?! This is what I'm talking about. I have no feel for this problem-solving stuff. I have two gears in this department: brute force (which, surprisingly, I lack in spades) or panic. There's a finesse to this stuff, a certain creativity that I've never quite grasped. The French call it je nais se quoi. That's a thing. Wait, maybe this is like predestination? Predisposition? Predetermined? Predilection? Fuck, I don't know what it's called. Let's just boilerplate this and say I suck at solving problems. It's probably genetic. Thanks mom and dad.

Mission accomplished you bad-ass little Tonka truck.

The Not Doing

A dear friend recently shared with me some not so great news and, as these things so often do, set my head and heart cogs a-turnin'. It's completely cliche and somewhat paternalistic to say that losing a child changes you. Everything changes us. That's life. It moves and shifts and in the middle of it all we're trying to figure out what to do with it. This blog has been my way of sharing pieces of my own path through all of this. The journey of trying to get pregnant. Losing Rhys. My transition out of Christianity and into Taoism. The birth of Adryn. And it's all been a bit of a rambling adventure, much like this post. While we were talking my friend said something that I felt in my bones, "I can't find meaning in this." I've heard that or something similar frequently over the last year working as a chaplain on an Oncology unit. Sometimes it's exhaustion, sometimes it's fear, sometimes it's a deeply honest assessment of reality.

There's a concept in Taoist philosophical practice called Wu Wei. It means non-action or actionless action. It's the place where action and being flow freely and yet remain balanced with the world. Spontaneous, compassionate, and simplistic, it is a state of naturalness that is the result of accepting the most honest depiction of ourselves and the world around us and not, as is so often the urge, as we might want them to be. I never really made much sense of it until I was sitting in the hospital recovery room with Kelly the night Rhys died. I wanted to rage and fight and push back against what had happened that day. I wanted to stand up and say no, this is not right, these things should never happen. But the only thing I seemed able to do was sit with that loss. I sat in my sadness, not really sleeping, aware of how long Kelly and I had waited to get to this point, and then losing everything we thought we'd finally found. We each cried throughout that night, sometimes alone, sometimes together; sometimes silently, sometimes loudly. And It was so completely counter-intuitive to my very western mind, such the antithesis of the protestant work ethic much of my cultural baggage is steeped in. And yet, that sitting with and being deeply connected to everything that had happened was essential.

Since Rhys, I've noticed that it's the not doing that really does. Putting to bed some of these notions of control or triumph have helped with that. There isn't much in the eddies of life that I have a great deal of say over save the way in which I interact with the world around me. Learning what it meant to deeply connect with my sadness and be honest about my fear has given me the opportunity to touch pieces of myself that have both empowered and cultivated in me a greater capacity to live. I think we rush to find meaning, or perhaps more accurately, rush to nail down a meaning. Meaning provides us with a sense of understanding and I've found that understanding (or thinking I understand) can be a seductive partner when I'm trying to control the world around me. My grief has provided the framework to be rather than subdue or change or rush to "feel better", something that I'm thankful for and something I continue to struggle with.

And meaning is such a fickle thing too. Rhys' birth and death meant something different to me than it meant to Kelly. It meant something different to friends and family members. Sure we share similarities of experience, but everyone's perspective is their own. We all come to the same scene with different collections of stuff that make us, us. There is a maddeningly beautiful reality in all of that. For me, Rhys is not an angel in heaven, he is not in heaven, he does not exist in a place where one day, when I die, I will recognize and be with him. For others, this is what he means, and while at times I find myself wanting to push back against that, I have no right or reason to. I don't own him, or his life, or the meaning people might derive from it. I don't get to control that. So, again, I'm learning to sit with these things, to accept and to share. To both allow the voices of others and (the more difficult thing for me) share my own voice in the process. This whole meaning-making thing is exactly that, a process. There's no blueprint for this stuff and sometimes I even fear that pegging down meaning is a sign that I've stopped seeking and stopped being. "I can't find meaning in this" is an okay place to be in my book.

There's a story attributed to Chuang Tzu I like about two goat-herders, Gu and Zang. Zang liked to spend his time gambling while Gu spent his time reading books and furthering his knowledge. One night, while Zang was completely absorbed in his gambling with friends a goat from his flock wandered away and he was lost. That same night, Gu was immersed in a particularly fascinating book and a goat from his flock wandered away and was lost as well. It serves, for me, as a gentle reminder that judging one's actions as good or bad, sinful or righteous, isn't the point. The point is remaining awake, paying attention, participating in the present, sitting with ourselves and the world around us. The point is being and I've found that there's a whole lot of not doing that helps me be.

Hold Me Closer Tiny Dictator

5 days after beginning my new job as baby manager and holy shit. My life is now controlled by a small tyrannical nearly 9-week-old dictator. I'm rooming with fucking Kim Jong Il. Yes I know he died...and was reincarnated IN THE GUISE OF MY SON. To be fair, it hasn't been all horrible, just mostly. The kid cannot be put down for any reason. If his ass or back touches anything other than my arms he immediately breaks down. At first it's funny because he begins with a sort of whimpering whine and his face morphs slowly into full-on meltdown. Then, the screaming begins and does not abate. I'll get small moments of composure when I walk outside and do a lap around the yard or turn on the water faucet for a minute. At this point, there isn't much I haven't tried. Occasionally, huge stress on the occasionally, he'll let me stand in one place and just pat his bottom. 8lbs of raw baby is incredibly exhausting to tote around all day.

Also, I've completely forgotten to eat most days. It doesn't even enter my mind until Kelly gets home and I'm all, "Man, I'm famished." I've forgotten to brush my teeth a few of these nights. Also, I don't think I've flossed this entire week. Do we still have floss in the house? Maybe that's why. It's entirely possible we ran out and I haven't picked any up at the store with all of the time I have being consumed by El Presidente Munch.

Fast forward to our 2 month appointment yesterday and what does he do? He looks straight at nurse I'm-getting-ready-to-stick-you-with-needles and smiles.  The first words out of my mouth were, "Unbelievable! What the hell is that?!" I then had to remember I was in public and public decorum must be upheld, or some such shit, and had to actively refrain from repeatedly exclaiming, "What the fuck?!" Of course, as the nurse reacts in high-pitch squeals, he SMILES AGAIN EVEN LARGER. A third smile later (because, apparently, he already knows how to rub salt in the wound of my heart) he's on the scale, lying on his back...not crying. Even though I've suffered through 4 days straight of screaming fits when I put him down for three seconds to, ya know, change the clothing he so casually vomited all over or eat a bite of food. Why do I need to eat a bite of food? SO I CAN CONTINUE TO SUSTAIN YOUR LIFE.

We basically geared up for 48 hours of hell after his vaccines. Irritable, inconsolable, probably running a fever and probably crying all day because of that. So, basically, like every other day this week minus a fever. When I pressed for a solid answer on what to expect in the next 24-48 hours the doc began to spew unicorns and rainbows from his mouth. Apparently, early term babies usually don't have very negative reactions to the first round of vaccines, and, are you ready for this? GET REALLY SLEEPY FOR 24 HOURS. As long as they're waking up to eat, it's totally fine. In my head I thought, fuck, if this kid sleeps 24 hours straight I'm cutting my losses and moving on. There is no way in hell I'm waking him up.

He took the shots like a champ and, I swear, almost immediately feel asleep in his car seat. The same car seat with which he shares a very intense love-hate relationship, heavy on the hate. We Carpe Diem'd the shit out of our good fortune and ran to a local pizza place to grab some dinner before heading home. Munch is completely passed out after his harrowing experience with the vaccines and after we sit down Kelly and I kind of look at each other for a minute. We audibly exhale at the same time. We're both acutely aware of the delicate balancing act that is required. No sudden movements, no loud sounds. Just sit quietly and calmly and bask in the glory of the moment. When the appetizers got to the table I began inhaling them at ludicrous speed, knowing full well this was not going to last. Kelly, thankfully, settled me back down. Alas, the best laid plans of moms and dads...

A family of three sat back down a few tables away from us. Where they came from I've no idea. They were not there when we walked in and somehow magically appeared at their table with their pizza being immediately served. I was a bit confused and then the toddler began making a lot of noise. Mom and dad were useless so I took matters into my own hands by staring the kid down with eyes that burned. I gave him the biggest stink eye I could possibly muster. So help me god if he ruins this moment for us. It was apparent that mom and dad were quickly loosing containment, or had no real intention of keeping containment in the first place because dad handed him the fucking pie server. THE METAL FUCKING PIE SERVER, with which he proceeded to bang repeatedly against the metal pole next to their table.  The moment was lost. Munch woke up with a start wailing his head off, I tried to swing the car seat to settle him while Kelly bolted down the rest of her pizza and then we traded so I could finish. We were gone within seconds.

The moral of the story is twofold. Firstfold, I'm in talks with the doctor to schedule a rotating, every other day, vaccination schedule for Munch because he was mercifully sleepy (angelic even) all day today, and secondfold, those parents at the pizza place are the worst fucking people in the world.