The Off Season

The ocean sparkles as we stand on the open beach on this blustery cold day.  Winds whip our faces as we feel the breath almost pulled out by the force of it. Carmen in her 8-year-old self, wrapped in winter coat runs towards the water, waving her arms here on Assateague, a National Seashore. A wave comes up and sloshes into her shoes. She screams and runs back to me, face beaming. How can the sea melt so many dusty thoughts in an instant?

I want to give her this. Freedom, quiet, simplicity.

We come here for two nights when school is off the week of Thanksgiving. Life at home for her is full—twin sisters, many animals, stressed parents. My life is full too. She and I have gone on trips since she was three. We have a rhythm together, an ease. When she was three, it was band aids one after another in the car, wrapped around all ten fingers—good for 45 minutes. Now I bring paper, pencils, crayons, scissors, and tape in the car. Three hours we drive, with a sense of adventure and anticipation. Familiar yet new. This time she spends an hour drawing a detailed face. Most of all I love the total focus. She is absorbed and doesn’t’ speak much. I gaze at her in the rear-view mirror as she leans over her paper. She shows me the drawing later and I am enthralled with the depth in the eyes of the figure.

I want to give her this. Time and space with no urgency. Immersion and focus; freedom.

She asks to sleep over the night before we leave and to get up at 5 a.m. to leave.

“How about 6?” I say
“I want to leave at 5!” She remembers our trip to Cape Cod when we had to leave so early.

I’m game.

“OK! I’ll wake you up and we can get on the road, watch the sun come up.”
Sure enough I wake her, and she pops out of bed, gets dressed while I pack up the food for lunch and dinner.
I am used to prepping for a road trip. For me this is freedom, simplicity adventure, even creativity. I love the early morning drive on the road. I’m giving this to myself, to her and to us both together.

 It's the off-season.  No one else is staying at these cozy, warm welcoming cottages. For this reason, the owners let us in get into our cottage early. We unpack with delight as we scurry around to put food away, blocks out, books piled up. We are warm, cozy. She unpacks her suitcase into the dresser, hangs up coats. I make the other bedroom into a music room, with violin, mandolin, and hammered dulcimer. I smile to myself. This is fun!

There are twin beds in one bedroom. She wants us both to sleep in there!
“Great idea!” I say.

“Let’s make up the beds with extra blankets.”
She chooses hers and sets her stuffy on the pillow. We are excited and lighthearted, working together to create hominess.

I want to give this to her, give this to myself. To make space for this experience, an alchemy that may nourish us both for eternity.

Then we dash to the beach where the wind blesses us and we laugh with delight at each other.
She shouts to the ocean, arms up and face wide open,

“You are my best friend!”

A favorite activity—church thrift store—where we find toddler clothes for her sisters and a blanket for her parents—only $5! Treasures. She remembers the bank where I got cash last year. The church ladies only take cash, no checks or cards. Hahaha.

There is an ease here, no screens or movies and no requests for them.

We take out the pizza dough and go about making our dinner. The kitchen includes a table with chairs. It opens easily into the cozy living room. The rhythm of cooking, helping, eating our pizza and brussels sprouts is reflected in my sighs of relaxation. Then cleaning up. When we are here together, just the two of us she puts dishes away, sweeps the floor, and proudly wipes the table.

 I feel myself slow down inside. I ease into the comfy couch after dinner.  I put my feet up, sigh, and lean back to relax. She plays with the blocks on the floor nearby.

“Look grandma! I made a castle for my dog!” I lean up to see,

“Wow, that’s cool.”
She carries on for another blissful twenty minutes, totally engaged.

Then we play a few tunes—me on mandolin, she on violin. Harmony. She gives me this.

She had asked to learn violin—over and over a few months ago. I said,

“OK. I’ll see what I can do, check with Mom, and find a teacher. You must practice!”

“I know. I just want to play the violin!” she exclaims with certainty.

I like to respond to a genuine yearning, and this seemed to fit the bill. Indeed, she now has a lesson each week and practices the required minimum of 5 minutes a day, at least 4 days a week.

Her enthusiasm and natural musical ability brought out my yearning to pick up the mandolin again, which is tuned the same as the violin. She gave me back that yearning, and I opened the door again to music. We play together, that evening, going over the same tune again and again. My love of music and harmony sparked by her. What a gift.

Later, at bedtime We put things away, neaten the blankets on the twin beds, and get ready to read a story. Carmen says, “We come here and we do some love,” beaming at me as she cuddles in her blanket on the bed. When she was three, she would cuddle into me. Now she gives me a hug and appreciates her own space in her own bed. Her evolution of who she is reflected in simple actions.

Before we leave two days later, we head back to the beach one more time. It is the open ocean, at Assateague National Seashore preserved without any houses or even campgrounds. On the way there, we pull over on the road when we catch sight of the herd of wild ponies grazing in the marsh. I am grateful for the people who saw to it that we could preserve land for all to enjoy.

The sea is roiling still. The clouds are dark gray, and the wind is cold. At first, she doesn’t want to get out of the car.
“It’s ok. I’ll be a minute,” I say as I jump out to pay my respects to the sea.
But she leaps out and runs to me, then dashes down the beach back and forth. We are gulping in the air and the sea all at once.

The stillness inside resonates with the stillness amid that moving ocean.

The off-season, the quiet, the ease, the alchemy of time that reverberates into eternity.

Chickens Little: Revelations on Mothering

“OK, I will take the four chickens in my back yard. That means you make sure they have a secure place and provide food. I will keep an eye on them.”

This is a gesture to my 30-year-old daughter, Meli, a way to support her in a stressful time. Chickens became her go-to pets during the pandemic. She cuddles them and coos to them. She also has an indoor variety she learned about in her chicken chat group, which is why I have the large ones in my yard. That’s not all the pets. She also has rabbits, dogs, and cats. And actually she has three children too, an 8-year-old and two 2-year-old identical twin girls. I am learning to be flexible and creative in how I play my role as grandma and as mom.

Luckily, she has a handy father-in-law who comes over, hammers, screws, cuts, and builds a very sturdy, cage-like thing to surround the coop. “What did I get myself into?” I think, as I stand at the back door watching this project happen. She loves them and finds comfort in these birds. I see one lean into her when she makes kissing sounds in the chicken’s ear.

One light brown chicken sits in the grass in a sunny spot and lifts one wing in the air.

“That’s how they get sun. It feels good to them.”

My daughter is crazy about chickens. Her chicken chat group keeps her informed. Indoors she has a flock in a large cage in her living room. I remember how I pined for a dog for years as a kid. I cajoled my parents with persistence. But chickens?

Then she gets a tiny rooster who can make eggs fertile. Before we know it, she’s raising tiny chicks in an incubator. She gives some away and sells other. Then, she keeps a few! The flock is growing. There is no telling her to get rid of some. Her chicken group assures her she is doing everything properly.

I pause and consider what is making her so enamored of chickens? We adopted Meli at age 2 weeks, young for adoption. Her 35-year-old birth mom was going to give her up at the hospital but ended up taking her home for a week. Being in health care and almost a midwife, I am acutely aware of the importance of those early hours and days for bonding and having a sense of security and love. After a week at home, the birth mother called the agency and said she had to give her baby up. The word from the agency was that when they picked up Meli, she had diaper rash and seemed hungry. I ponder what that early experience set up in her. Just wondering. She saves and nurtures animals.

Around this time, Meli and her family were invited to go with the in-laws on a rare, few days away at the beach. Meli left me with an incubator full of tiny quail eggs. They were brown and the size of an egg-shaped malted milk ball.

“Don’t worry Mom,” she says, as we stand next to the tiny eggs in the incubator now perched on my mantlepiece.

“Maybe the day before we get back, they might start to hatch.”

Wide-eyed, I stare at the fifteen tiny eggs, mulling over what one does with baby quail.

“OK,” I say.

Not even 24 hours later, I peek at the incubator and see movement. There’s a tiny brown fluffy thing hopping around. I let out a screech.

“Yikes!!”

I take a photo with my phone and while up close, I notice a neat line of crack along another tiny egg. Someone is working his way out!

I call Meli. “Hey, they are hatching! What do I do?”

“Oh, cool Mom! They are okay for twenty-four hours. Then you’ll need to give them water and food.”

As I look back at the cracking egg, a little beak sticks out. Oh my!!

Now I have what seem like giant chickens in the backyard, checking on them each morning. These tiny ones are inside. I shake my head.  “Geez!”

By the end of the day, before I go to bed, there are nine, yes nine of them hopping around the incubator.
The next day, my daughter’s friend brings quail food, and we determine to put water in a bottle cap. When I lift the incubator lid, one tiny fluff drifts to the floor. “Oh!” I catch it and pop it back in. Still hops around. The water? They seem to know what to do.

When we picked Meli up, at age two-weeks, she was a healthy content baby. We even had a lovely moment holding her close, eye-to-eye, talking to her. I kept saying, “We are your Mom and Dad, and we love you.” She met our gaze and looked from one to the other and then broke into a toothless newborn baby smile. I know from years of study the importance of bonding, first moments, warmth connection. I wonder what she seeks now. Kahil Gibran says

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.…

This is true of all children and especially clear of adoptees. Parenting is challenging. To give fully when they are small and helpless, to empower them to step up, and hope they can navigate. Yet they have their own destiny and mission in the world. I must be discerning—when to lean in, be supportive; when to lean out, have a healthy boundary; not lose balance by leaning in too far or out too far.

I am asking myself to “please remember that you are not just a mom an adult watching your grown daughter learn about life. She is teaching you a lot a well, by asking your help and showing her vulnerability in caring so much for chickens.”

Can I get it? Can I weave my way through to lean in and help while also creating a healthy boundary for myself. Once a mother always a mother. That is one of the most challenging roles on the spiritual path that I know. How easy and tempting to focus on her and what she is doing, forgetting to watch myself and what I am doing.

Finally she comes home and bursts through my front door to dash right over to the incubator full of her tiny fluffy balls. She opens the top and takes out a few into her hands, eyes gleaming.

There’s a flurry of checking them over, counting them, seeing there is enough water….

She looks over at me smiling.

“Thanks Mom!” she says.

I know I did more than watch eggs hatch.

Now she is the mother hen for these chickens little. Somehow this seems right. I welcome them, cracking out of their eggs. She takes over, loving them up and cooing over them.