Painting outside the restrooms in the now closed Borders - Provo, Utah
It is the tree that is tested by storm and injury that grows the strongest roots and bears the sweetest fruit.
I've thought and rethought this post for six weeks now. Mainly because I haven't had time to do much else besides think. The winds of time are blowing a bit faster these days...
I have always said that I would prefer to go through the more intense trials of life, rather than only living through a presentation of relatively banal experiences, never learning to see layers that transcend the surface of things. And boy do I always seem to get my way with that one.
Tree of Life poster at the Broadway theater - Salt Lake City, UtahA few months ago, Chris and I had the opportunity to go to Salt Lake City to see Terrance Malick's
Tree of Life (the last movie we'll be seeing for a while, until we can make the drive to Park City's Redstone 8 movie theater with the ingenious "cry room").
Tree of Life is one of those movies that you can climb through and hang out in, long after the credits have rolled past...you can spend weeks just browsing through your memories and chewing on the leaves for a while. The movie exists as an effectively representative amalgam of how I, and maybe how we all, sift through thoughts of life and time, experience and history, and merge them together into a masterpiece of conscious being. My thoughts are drawn back to
Tree of Life in pieces...I think of the moments of cosmic floating light and its gorgeous operatic overlays and how close that is to how I've always thought of the powers that be. I think of the moments in the attic, a single window in a sometimes empty room, except when the boy riding the tricycle is there, or the tall man, who reminds me of the drunk man the boy walked past with his mother, then the crippled man...all combining, all drifting apart... Some scenes are like those faint memories you have, where you can remember a vague tableau, a few tchotchkes, a pull in a bedspread and a bumpy glass vase suspended next to a headboard that wasn't really wood, but maybe something made to look like wood, and how it always smelled dusty like dry pine needles.
Orem Public Library courtyard - UtahI spent my time thinking of these things first, the moments in this movie, visiting and revisiting and revisiting and revisiting, jumping from winding path to random parcel, as one does with memories until certain times and places and objects fade from possibility and others are more apparently there. I sifted through scene after scene - was the placement intentional, like the event or action itself? Or was it merely a representation of something else, something where the glimmer of a face or feeling is all that is left to remind you of the last resonating moments of the overarching impact that it had in the first place?
And so, life represents life representing life. It is itself, and so much else, and nothing else.
And so my life goes too.
View from my room on the 4th floor of Utah Valley Regional Hospital in the Mother/Baby wing - Provo, UtahI thought of sharing my disdain for the medical community after experiencing 31 hours of hard labor that concluded with me being cut open and my baby being pulled from my abdomen instead of the more "natural" route, and then rethought the whole thing and decided I might praise the fact that modern science may be responsible for my very breath at the moment - had this been the dark ages, neither one of us might have made it. I rethought again, that had modern science not intervened during my pre-term labor in mid-August, I might have accomplished a positive outcome anyway, had we trusted that nature knew what it was doing in the first place instead of trying to make it wait... And then I might have shared the in's and out's of my subsequent medical problems, the feeling of having one's organs moved around and a baby pulled out with an epidural that could barely dull the pain of the last 15 hours of contractions that it was intended for, of badly placed catheters, anti-ergonomic hospital beds, the woes of 31 hours of IV fluid and resulting rehospitalization, and then my baby's concurrent and avoidable troubles of her own that delayed her homecoming for the first ten days of her life... But those details aren't important. For those events, the surface suffices.
Doll high chair in antique toy store in Ogden, Utah
My first memory of being a mommy begins with the scene in my hospital room. I didn't have bearings on where it was, I was in a morphine haze that must have been the only thing between me and the violent pain of the c-section after that botched epidural. I hadn't seen my baby yet because unlike the way the rest of babies are treated when they enter the world, they were trying to get her
not to cry when she arrived. But of course, already so full of life, she took it upon herself to breathe in her new world, crying the prettiest cry I've ever heard, a breath that sent her straight into the arms of the emergency staff of the NICU. So about an hour after she was born, I'd only ever
heard her, so I asked the two nurses when I'd be able to
see her. They told me that as soon as I could walk well enough to get in a wheelchair, they'd wheel me up to the NICU. I'm fairly certain they meant hours, or a day? But, I told them I'd be going to see her right then. They asked me if I was sure, if I was truly okay to walk, echoing those questions unrelentingly. I told them I was fine and then watched as a mat was placed on the floor for me to step on, watched as my incision turned the mat into a monochromatic Jackson Pollock painting, watched the walls and floor sway as my hips and legs did as they pleased when I stepped toward the wheelchair. I heard myself chanting back to the echoes that I was fine, that I could make it, that I would be going to see her right then, and I felt the strong hands and arms of good nurses who were good to take me very seriously, keeping me from making my way toward the ground rather than the seat of the wheelchair. And minutes later, I saw her. My Margo. Bound to earth by mechanical vines and tendrils that worked to keep her rooted here.
Margo progressing in the NICU, after the removal of the IV in her head, arterial line through her belly, and other assorted cords, tubes, and wires...only needing her oxygen and feeding tube and monitors here...So while our branches have been tested in recent storms, we abide. We spend our time immersed in watching a new little life develop a conscious being of her own. In these first few weeks, she has already lived through so much more than I would ever have expected to form the foundation of her understanding, even though as strong as the memories are for us, they will never be part of hers...of our collective memories. And we can only hope that as her timeline began at home on Day 11, we have been quickly replacing any ill-effects of the unexpected grafts that were placed in her first very isolated days.
Flower outside the OB/Gyn's officeAnd we celebrate that life...and living. And we are thankful.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
Margo and her first Christmas tree
Margo and her first Santa Claus
