Piles and Parables

My life makes for a particularly confusing parable right now. This week has too many incoherent threads to be a helpful set of ideas about what I should be learning in this phase. It’s hard when you can’t figure out how to use your own life as a metaphor.

Take today, for example. This morning we woke up, walked the dog on the beach, and had a cup of coffee with Dave (the spectacular chippy) as we went through our plans for the future of our new house. This is a pretty good beginning to a day. While we were talking kitchens and windows and other big and little issues, his phone rang. It was the pile driver saying he’d be at our house today to drive new piles, deep in the sand, to hold up the house as we build upwards into the attic to get the room up there. There are great metaphors here. We have to dig down to be able to go up. We have to lay a firm foundation in places that will never see the light of day in order to build beautiful things way in the sky. You get the point. It’s also true that the house has been at a holding point lately waiting for those piles. More metaphors—need a firm foundation to build walls, once you have a foundation everything begins to move quickly, etc. Lovely grounding set of things there (and I’ve given Dave my camera to take pictures of the thing as it happens so there might be pictures here of that).

But as we were talking to Dave, we were also hyperactively straightening the house. We have a showing today. It’s T minus 2 days until the auction on Thursday. Things have just about never been more uncertain than they are in this house where we live now. On Thursday, we’ll learn things about what the next part of the future holds, but right now those things are unlearnt, are behind a black curtain. So even as the new house is looking more and more clear, the old house is looking less and less clear. What happens next is anyone’s guess. It could sell at auction for a decent price or for a lousy one. The new owners might want to move in early December or in late January. It might not sell at all if no one is willing to pay what we think it’s minimally worth. Then we’ve got the decision about how to proceed moving forward. We are ungrounded with questionable foundations. Thursday holds answers, but the answers will either lead to clarity or to more uncertainty.

And through it all, I’m getting ready to go to Thailand. I’m going to do some work with my friend Aeh there, and, among other things, it’s a growth experience I’m after with this trip. I’ll do a variety of pieces of reflecting—in public and private forums—about my life journey thus far. I’ll spend a couple of days just in transport (it’s 14 hours each way on an airplane, and there will be about two days worth of driving inside Thailand itself) which brings its own kind of reflection and thought experiences. And I’ll have 3 days meditating in a Forest Wat, in the lonely and lovely northeast of Thailand. All the time I’ll be with Aeh, who is making this whole trip possible (and finding a way to pay for it) through his work at a Thai university where I’ll be presenting and consulting about a new curriculum. Aeh and I met when I helped make possible his trip to the US about four years ago when he came to study with me and live with my family while he was still a doctoral student. Now he’s a PhD and is working on understanding the connections between development, wisdom, compassion, and contemplative practices. This is a beautiful set of ideas to be working on, and I’m honoured to be a part of that.

The parables inside this trip are both grounded and also unknown. I am grounded in this friendship, in the intellectual and emotional exploration that developmental study provides, in the transformational nature of coming together to learn about the way we ourselves change over time. I am grounded in the beautiful karma of my reaching out to help a stranger four years ago and now finding myself held and supported by a friend who has invited me to see a new world. There are lovely chances for this man who was my student for many months to now be my teacher and lead me into a new culture and a new meditation practice. And amidst that grounding, I am swimming in uncertainty. I don’t know what I’ll wear or what I’ll eat or how I’ll live inside a culture so profoundly different. I don’t know what it will be like for me to sit in silent meditation in a Thai forest for three days, to sleep in a hut, to see monkeys in the trees. What will I discover about the world, about myself?

But perhaps there are parables here that are useful if I braid all of these strands together. Perhaps this week is about the very nature of life and its beautiful certainties and uncertainties. This week is about making new beginnings of all sorts, and it’s about the way those new beginnings can be smooth or bumpy, known or totally unknown. I’m sharply aware of how my uncertainties press up against the lives of others: Dave bought himself a new house this week and will start working on that soon. At the auction, there will be many houses bought and sold, and many lives changing right in front of me. And on my trip I will visit an ancient country with ancient religious practices which is bumping up against the modern world and which is dealing with its own uncertainty (the bloodless coup there) and the uncertainty of its neighbours (like Burma). We are all of us always standing on ever firmer foundations, and all of us reaching toward some unknown future state. It’s just that this week, I have more reminders of that than usual.

(You’ll see there are no new pictures. Dave still has the camera—and the piles aren’t totally done. There are big posts outside the front of the house, though, and depressing new holes on the floor. The lesson here is that even when the future looks clear, it likely isn’t. So now I’ll just float in the murk of it all and keep you posted about what happens next.)

Surf’s up

Naomi has joined the Surf Club, which is a New Zealand tradition for those who live by the beach (which is a lot of kids). New Zealand is a place that takes swimming safety really seriously. Drowning in the sea or one of the plentiful rushing rivers is always a danger, and it is a New Zealand goal to have each person here be a strong swimmer. In the US, some kids have swimming lessons during summer camp. In NZ, swimming is a mandatory part of the school curriculum, many schools have their own (very small) pools, and every kid we know takes swimming lessons through the year. Surf Club is one piece of that.

Surf Club is serious. There is a Thursday evening practice in a local pool for strength and water skills, and there is a hulking two-hour practice on Sunday afternoons on the beach for lifesaving skills, strength training, and ocean skills. As I watch Naomi navigate this world—where all of her friends have been involved for years longer than she has—I have ample time to watch my own reactions as a parent and try to figure out what messages I want to give her.

Take last Thursday night. Naomi needed to pass a 200m swim test at the pool. She had come for a practice earlier in the week and had been able to swim the eight lengths in the appointed time. No worries. But she had been working herself into a froth for days about it, nervously wondering what would happen if she failed the test. By the time we got to the pool, she was a shaking mess. She went in the pool to warm up, got out because it was too cold, sat shivering on the side, non-commutative and freaking out, turtled in silence except for the occasional rude outburst. I coaxed and wheedled and got her back into the water, got her back to start the test. She was panicking and stressed and she wanted me by her side, as is often true in an unfamiliar place. Would I walk all the way down the side of the pool with her? Yes. So I walked a length of the pool by her side, marvelling at how quick and graceful her stroke was. And then she stopped after a single length, not even winded. I urged her to go on, but she was done, seven lengths too soon. I tried coaxing and wheedling some more, but she and I had both reached the end of some invisible rope. She held on to the side of the pool and wept. The swim instructors huddled around her, huddled around me, gently offered that maybe I shouldn’t come to the practice next week, that I was making her nervous. They suggested—with a gentle and unblaming matter-of-factness—that I wait in the car. I felt a rage inside me—not at them, but at little weeping Naomi. She had QUIT!

I walked away as they surrounded her and coaxed her into the pool with the others in her age group to do the regular practice of the rest of the group. I went outside and sat on a bench under the tall deck of the bar upstairs. I looked at the sea and wondered what I was about Naomi’s giving up that made me so angry. Giving up is a major button for me. As a soccer coach for a middle school girl’s team fifteen years ago, I was totally unphased by the loss of every single game (I was not a good soccer coach, apparently). If a girl was doing practice laps and slowed down to a crawl, no worries at all. But if a girl was doing practice laps and stopped, I got really upset. The sentence “I can’t” sets me off.

Michael came out and sat next to me on the bench and we watched the sea together. He gently asked questions about how I was making sense of this, about how she had been making sense of it. He suggested that perhaps the best way to face her was with compassion and curiosity. I laughed—I had spent that day leading a workshop about going towards people with compassion and curiosity. And now here I was actually faced with a situation which pushed my buttons and I was, I decided “pissy and punishing.” I sat on the bench and wondered about whether I should give up my regular consulting gigs and come up with a curriculum to teach people to be more pissy and punishing. I amused myself for a few minutes wondering what role plays I might suggest, what structures I might offer that would help people hold on to that pissy and punishing mindset. I wondered what, evolutionarily, made it easier for us to hold on to a pissy and punishing place than a compassionate and curious one.

Naomi was dramatically upset for the rest of the night. She rushed into her room from the car, slammed the door, and wept at the top of her lungs. Perhaps fearing this would not have the volume she wanted, she opened the door to her room and cried at the top of her lungs that way. I was unmoved by the drama. She came out to tell me she was quitting Surf Club, that she’d never go back. I told her—at first gently and then more firmly—that quitting was not an option this year. Back into her room, more tears. It wasn’t until the weekend that we could talk about it and work out our next steps—she would try again on Thursday, and she’d try again until she passed.

And then Sunday dawned grey and cold and raining. This is her on-the-beach day. I finished fixing the house for the open house and walked down the beach to find her in a too-small wetsuit (and I thought she had to be wrong about that—it was so big on her last year), jumping up and down to keep herself warm and hurling herself into the sand as directed—and then into the sea. If she had quit then, if she had said “I can’t” when faced with the raging sea (which frightens her on a sunny day), if she had complained about the sand chafing inside her wetsuit—all of these things I was prepared to forgive. Unlike the mysterious behaviour at the pool, where the quitting was bizarre, this quitting here would be justified. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I was prepared for it, and I faced the idea with equanimity and compassion.

I didn’t need any of those things, though—just a warmer hat and maybe a pair of gloves. Naomi dove in the sand, leapt through the waves, jogged along the shore. She did it without complaint or fretting. And I discovered—as I have rererediscovered in so many situations—that we can never understand another person’s demons, never really make sense of what drives or moves or frightens those we love the most. Why would I be less curious and compassionate about one potentially-frightening scene rather than another? Her quitting in a setting I didn’t think was scary or uncomfortable (like the pool) troubled me, but her quitting in a setting I’m not sure I could handle (like this beach on this windy cold day) seemed reasonable. On one hand this makes sense—we understand the things we understand, after all. On the other hand, it’s absurd for me to react differently to the same outcome in different situations. It isn’t me, after all, who determines what’s overwhelming or scary to Naomi. I’ve learnt that lesson many times over the years of dealing with scary noises and monsters under the bed and (this one still drives me crazy) her ear-piercing screams upon the discovery of a bug. I am compassionate in the face of fears and worries I share, and I am irritated—and sometimes even angry—in the face of fears I do not. How many other people’s fears and demons to I diminish because I do not share them? How many times do I privilege my own experience? Thousands? Millions? Billions of times?

Tonight, one week from the huddled Naomi terrified and quitting at the pool, she was back again. This time we talked about it, planned the whole thing out. We decided this was just a “dress rehearsal,” that it wasn’t the real thing. We decided that Michael and I wouldn’t watch her, but would be close by (nowhere that required us to move the car, was the bargain). I watched her (from a perch where she couldn’t see me) sitting with her friends, waiting her turn for the test. She was alternately laughing and joking and urging them on and chewing on her nails and looking terrified. When it came time to do the test, she stopped after two laps, but then began again a few minutes later, slowly backstroking her way down the lanes, zig-zagging across the pool. She was off time by 50 seconds, but still emerged strong and engaged. She hadn’t been really trying, she told us, which made it all feel so much better. Now she knew how much time it took when she didn’t even try and she was convinced she could do it next week—certainly those 50 seconds would be easy to recover if she tried a little. I do not yet understand this logic either, but the outcome of this is clear. For this week, at least, the demons are gone, and she’s just a little girl swimming and laughing with her friends. And I am a mother who is incrementally wiser, and who can see the bravery in the smallest acts and courage in the arc of an arm slicing through water.

Clueless

Some mornings it all goes so smoothly. Today was one of those mornings. I got up and did yoga and then Michael and I threw the ball for Perry in the park right next to our new house (high tide, big waves so no beach today). When Michael left for work, I got the kids up and got us all ready to go. We were a little late but all so cheerful about it and everyone helping everyone else to get out the door. Rushing up the hill, we told each other how much we loved each other, and promised to have lovely days, and it was a delight. There are mornings that are so unlike this you’d almost imagine that I am two women living inside two different families. And there’s some real truth to that, I suppose.

It was a seriously mixed weekend. Friday was Michael’s NZ birthday and the kids were off school for a teacher work day. So we went into town and wandered from kitchen store to bathroom store and looked at fixtures and cabinets and toilets. And then we had a lovely dinner with the last of the Rob gift certificates and came home on the train with a magnificent sunrise following us. Saturday (on Michael’s actual, US birthday—you have to celebrate for two days if you move across the international date line), we went to the Lamb and Calf fair at a local school. Then more kitchen and bathroom studies. Here’s what we learnt about New Zealand this weekend.

We discovered, at the lamb and calf show, that lambs are every bit as cute as you might think they are. We’ve seen them scampering in the fields, we’ve held and fed them, and so we knew this was true. But this was a school fair where the local farm kids could bring their pet lambs to the fair with them, on short ribbon leads. These pet lambs, washed and brushed and like walking cotton balls, were so beautiful that Naomi announced firmly that she was now a vegetarian. Only she’d still eat chicken. But no mammals, she decided. Not ever. This new promise was sorely tested by the fact that the only non-mammal choices at the fair were fish cakes (yum!) or some kind of egg or salad dish. So she had a steak sandwich for lunch. But other than that, she’s a vegetarian for sure!

The other main lesson—and this one was new to us—is that there is apparently some statute in New Zealand that prohibits the useful exchange of information around kitchen renovation projects. This must be a serious and long-standing law with firm penalties, because it was followed so stringently by every person we dealt with. We were impressed with the consistency of our experience in wildly different shops.

So, at the first store, a custom cabinet place. We told the English kitchen designer that we were new to this whole world and just wanting to gather some information.

“Yeah,” he agreed, “it’s really different here.”

We communed for a few minutes on the immigrant experience and moved on to cabinets. He showed us the different grades and offered a variety of rationales for why one grade was better than another. “What’s the difference in cost between these?” we asked.

“Ah, I couldn’t answer that,” he said. “It just depends.”

How about a rough measure—nothing we’d hold him to—was one twice as expensive as another? Three times? And were we talking $10,000 in cabinets or $100,000?

“Impossible to know,” he explained sadly.

To give us even a rough, within 40k guess, he told us, he’d have to come and measure our kitchen and then design it and then we could talk. “I couldn’t possibly estimate,” he assured us. “I wouldn’t have a clue about how to do that.”

Store 2. Italian cabinets.

Me: “These look seriously expensive.”

Cute Sales Guy: “Yes, they are a bit dear.”

Me: “How much does a typical kitchen cost?”

CSG: “Well, there’s no such thing as a ‘typical kitchen’ really.”

Me. “How much would THIS model kitchen cost?”

CSG: “About $80,000 give or take.”

Ah, we have a number at last! Glorious precision!

Me: “Waaaaaay too much for us, I’m afraid.”

CSG: “We are trialling a new line—nearly as good but much less expensive. Would you be interested in that?”

Me: “Yeah, if it were enough less expensive. How much less are you talking—50%? 10%? 75%?”

CSG: “Oh, I couldn’t begin to estimate.”

Store 3. Inexpensive, off the rack cabinets store (Home Depot like).

Me: “Can you tell me the difference between these different benchtop materials?”

Sales guy with many missing teeth: “Those are a hell of a lot of money!”

Me: “Do you have any idea how much they are—like by the metre?”

SGWMMT: “I don’t think that’s how they’re priced—I think they have to come out and measure and then give you a quote. I don't think it's by the metre--they just figure it out somehow. I don't know how they do it--I just know they’re a hell of a lot.”

Me: “Do you have any idea of the relative price of them—like which is more expensive than any other?”

SGWMMT: “Expensive? They’re all more expensive!”

Me: “So are they all about the same price?”

SGWMMT: “I don’t have a clue. I just know they’re expensive.”

Me: “Who here in the store might have more information about these benchtops?”

SGWMMT, looking around, helplessly: “I don’t have a clue.”

This, by the way, is not the end of this pattern. We met with three other people and had three other conversations that went like this. No estimates, no baseline price per metre, no sense of this kitchen is 30k and that one is 65k as we would have known in the US. No sense of this store does cabinets with a 15k average kitchen and this store does them with a 150k average kitchen. In every case, you design the kitchen first—getting all the details right—and then and only then do you get any sense of what this kitchen might cost. This seems like a lot of extra work for them and a lot of extra work for us if the cabinets might be totally outside our price range. I found myself achingly missing those little two pagers you can get at every kitchen place in the US with the baseline price of the cabinets (by the running foot) and the top range price if you got all the extras. Clearly the law that prohibits the exchange of this information in New Zealand is protecting someone (me?) from information overload. I’m impressed to be in a country of such law-abiding citizens.

So, after two days and dozens of kitchen drawers opened, benchtops felt, colours flipped through, the New Zealand kitchen scene is totally clear: it turns out, we don’t have a clue.

(pics today from the fair and M's birthday and also the back of our house with the back porch and woodshed knocked off.)

Halloween

I used to feel confident on Halloween. The weekend before we’d have prepared, carved our pumpkin, laid in supplies of candy, and perfected the costumes. On Halloween night itself, I would know to take the kids out after quite an early dinner and before night fall. We would go with friends and wander from house to house, knowing that the better the Halloween decorations, the better the candy was likely to be. We knew not to stay out too late or else the big kids in really scary costumes would show up. We knew to allow an extra 45 minutes for the post-trick-or-treating obligatory sorting and trading of candy (slightly longer for Naomi, who would also make a written inventory of her candy to protect against culling mothers) . Halloween 2007, kiwi style, was not that kind of event.

First of all, in the places I’ve lived before, Halloween is about the crunch of leaves under your feet, the crisp bite of air that might make your mom insist on a jacket over your princess dress. Not here. Here it’s a spring event, with blooming flowers and late-glowing sun. Because of this (maybe?), there are no decorations, no jack-o-lanterns. A friend told us she had carved her first pumpkin and was anxious because she had put the lid back on it and left it burning. Will it burn down the house? she asked us knowledgeable Americans. No way, we explained, assuring her that we left the pumpkins lit on our front stoop each year. Hers were lit inside the house though, she told us. We glanced nervously at each other and were less reassuring. We’ve never thought of a pumpkin burning inside the house.

The kids were confused too sometimes. Little AG, MG’s daughter, who turned out to be the best part of fun. The daughter of an American mother, AG has always lived in New Zealand—all her life until now in the far north, in a place where Halloween isn’t celebrated at all. So it came to be that she was six and experiencing the glories of Halloween for the first time. While my children were bemoaning the relatively low key, small scale of this Halloween, AG was reveling in it. Or at least she was once she got the hang of it.

At first we had to explain it all. So there was the question about whether costumes could be pretty or just had to be scary (we thought probably both were ok, which was good news because she was lovely). Then there was the whole trick-or-treating conversation, which went something like:

“What is trick-or-treating?”

It’s when you go to someone’s house and they give you candy?

Why do they do that?

Because it’s Halloween.

But why do they give you candy on Halloween?

Because that’s what happens on Halloween.

But WHY does that happen?

And so on, going ahead each time until we ran out of answers, which sometimes happened rather quickly (why DO we do this??).

Then the first trick-or-treater came to our house and Aidan grabbed the candy bowl and ran out to the gate to give it out. I stood surprised as the father of the little fairy princess actually did a trick—a juggling routine—and then cheerfully accepted the candy from Aidan. AG, who had run out with her bag, skipping cheerfully up the path, came back dejected. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

”It’s not fair at all!” she said, pouty-faced. “He took three pieces of candy from us and didn’t give us anything back!” More descriptions of the way things worked on Halloween. Those didn’t fully take either. Walking up the hill, candy bags painstakenly chosen and decorated, AG stopped short in her tracks. “Oh no!” she cried, “we have to go back! We forgot all the candy at home!” Aidan looked at me, the most mature and knowing expression on his six-year old face (or maybe it was the mustache), “She really doesn’t understand this thing!” he said.

There were others who didn’t understand Halloween either. There were prepared families, with chocolates in bowls just like at home. They had candy wrapped in little bars, just like I’m used to. The most adventurous families even had “gummy body parts” so that children could eat the stray nose or ear. But then there were some folks who looked surprised to see small children in lovely dresses (Naomi and our friend AG) and weird wigs (Aidan). And those families punted and gave bags of chips destined for their own children’s lunch box, lose candy (here called “lollies”), and even the odd gold coin here (Mommy-we got TWO dollars!!).

Surrounded by all these folks new to Halloween, we lost all of our own knowledge about the thing. We forgot to carve a pumpkin (here pumpkin is a food item and not a decorative item). We had no idea which houses to visit. Some houses have signs that say “no Halloween.” One had a helpful sign that said “Halloween here.” We wandered along, a little pack of Americans in fancy dress, through this rumply magnificent village, over dunes covered with houses, through backyard veggie patches, under flowering cherry trees. Occasionally we’d come upon little packs of New Zealand ghosts and princesses and super heroes. And then we went back to our house, the kids trick-or-treated from us (thus damaging AG’s sense of what Halloween was about). And we tucked our candy-filled children into their beds just as the springtime sun was sinking into the Tasman Sea. Just another Halloween night in New Zealand.

House beautiful, and not

We have had two open houses now, two to go before the auction. We spend Sundays cleaning the nearly perfect house, making it actually perfect. We pull freshly-baked cookies out of the oven just as the realtor puts up the open house sign, and the sun sparkles through polished windows and onto beautifully dog-hair-free floors. As I was leaving this weekend to allow the strangers to wander through my house and open up my closet doors, one woman stood in the lounge and asked, breathlessly, “How can you BEAR to leave this place.” I looked back through the open wall of windows, the irises in their vase, the perfectly primped and plumped house and told her honestly, “I don’t know!”

This clean and perfect house fills me with joy. I wander from room to room, seeing only beautiful things, only the grace of empty surfaces with a paua shell here or a vase of flowers there. The lovely clean spareness inside lets the views of the outside in, the green canopy of the back deck through sparkling sunshine, the tropical garden of the front.

These breathless visitors to this house—in whose numbers I occasionally count myself on these dreamy still mornings—don’t see what goes on back stage. They don’t know about the twelve boxes of books lugged to the other house in order to give the bookshelves an airy feel. They don’t know about the cartons of toys and dress up clothes and, of course, just regular old junk that is safely boxed up and out of sight. And they don’t see the real preparations before the curtain goes up on open house days.

A typical Sunday afternoon, pre open house, has me barking orders at the children, putting away any evidence that humans occupy this space. I thought steam would come out of my ears this Sunday as Aidan blew his hot breath on the freshly-cleaned window and then wrote his name in the fog. When I find Naomi’s clothes in a heap in a soggy post-bath bathroom, I find myself practicing my deep breathing before calling her name, shrewlike, and saying “What do you think I don’t like about this picture!”

So each time I’m lost in the reverie of wondering, “Why don’t we live like this all the time? It’s so beautiful!” I realise, I do NOT want to spend my life worried about shoes left out or a book left carelessly next to a cup of tea. I have long admired those who keep their houses spotless (you know who those people are) and thought with some gentle envy about the gifts which allow this magic to take place. But it turns out not to be a gift so much as just hard hard work and a shift in priorities. And I can do it, and I can be delighted about the results of it. And, from this perch, I can say I do NOT want to live this way. Perhaps I’ll work harder not to clutter the surfaces, perhaps I’ll put more of my junk in a box with a lid—or better still, acquire less junk in the first place. But I am too round and three-dimensional to live between the pages of a magazine. And so I’ll keep the set clean while the curtain is up, and then I’ll look for a future that is somewhere between the line we’ve struck during this on-the-market period and the life I usually live.

(of course, to complete the lemonjuice-in-the-papercut theme of the day, here's a video tour of the new house. think it's ready for a magazine??)

Bombshell

Ah, another magnificent Thursday at the beach. Yoga had been especially good—with the real hard work which leads to really deep relaxation. The sky was a neon blue. The waves were crashing on the sea wall and sending a cool mist over us in the warming spring day. I live in paradise, remember?

Michael and I had heard at the café that a truckload of material had been delivered to the new house, so after yoga we took our blissed out bodies up the hill. While we walked, we discussed the merits of the New Zealand “no worries” lifestyle as I worried a little about the fact that you can see the progress on the house from the street below—nothing subtle about the missing window and the stacks of wood. The building plans weren't into Council yet. Would we get in trouble for all this? Were we breaking rules? In the halfway realm between my general fretting and my blissed out yoga state, we rounded the curve on the road to find a man walking briskly down the hill carrying a big camera. At the foot of our driveway was a police car. Three or four more cars were scattered along the side of the road behind it (this is not a suburban street, mind you—this is a tiny one-way, one-lane, one-block track. I’ve seen maybe four cars driving down that road altogether in the eleven months we’ve lived here.). Our first thought, of course, is that doing work without plans in Council is a horrific offense, perhaps one that the press even came to chronicle. Our second thought was to turn around and walk slowly and nonchalantly back to our other house. Which we did.

On the way home, Michael called D, the builder (whom, for those who haven’t been following, we love). Here’s what I heard:

“Hey D, hate to bother you right now, but are you up at the house?”

(Michael looked at me and nodded.)

“Great. Have you noticed there are a lot of cars up there, like a police car and everything?”

(Pause.)

“You found WHAT in the shed?”

(My heart began to race.)

“Did you say A BOMB?”

(We stopped walking and stood on the side of the road in the wind.)
”Wait D.. Did you say YOU FOUND A BOMB IN THE SHED?”

And so he had. One of D’s guys, cleaning out the shed (which will someday be a guest cottage which will surely be named “the bomb shelter”), came out with a cool and old piece of metal. D, recognising it for what it really was, asked him to please put that down and called the police. The police said please move away from it and called in the Army who sent the bomb squad to my new house.

You see, Paekakariki was a staging ground for US troops in World War II. The soldiers left behind memories, silk stockings, the occasional child, and, in some houses and sheds in the area, the random munition. D has not seen a bomb before, but he’s seen hand grenades, and so he knows the routine.

We arrived back at the house to take pictures as “the bomb squad” (a handsome guy in a track suit) dealt with the threat (by carrying it to his bomb squad minivan). He let me take a picture of it before he left, but wouldn’t let me keep it because, it was, after all, a bomb. It wasn’t stuffed full of explosives as the ones they used against the Japanese would have been—this one was just a test bomb used for training purposes. Still, it’d blow up when it hit the ground to let you know where it landed. So I’m delighted to have the thing out of the shed for good.

D teased us over a glass of wine later that as Americans he’d expect that we’d have lots of experience with bombs. We all found it amusing that the first bomb we’d seen—and an American bomb at that—was in the back shed of our new house on the beach in New Zealand. (D also laughed and laughed at our worry that we’d get in trouble for working on the house before the plans are in. We are a source of constant amusement for him.)

Other reactions to our news:

K, ever the pragmatist, told us to call the village newspaper. When I told him the photographer for the regional paper had been there, he said he’d figured—this is big news in the region. When I asked this morning why we weren’t in the paper (two front page stories today: “At the ready: biggest book sale here” and, in bolder type “Beagle test ‘abuse’ protest”), he responded—with more shock in his voice than he had about the bomb—“But that only happened YESTERDAY!” reminding me to leave behind my citified ways where newspapers are printed ON THE VERY DAY you read them.

Aidan thought it was the coolest thing he’d ever heard and wished he had been there.

The woman who lived in the house before us and whose three children played in that shed was less pleased.

And Naomi, in classic pre-teen style, was totally embarrassed that there was a bomb in our shed. She’s not entirely sure why she’s embarrassed (“Maybe because people will think we’re terrorists?”) but she feels it acutely.

Ok, the pictures today feature the bomb from the shed. Then there’s the picture of the shed, overgrown with flowers belying its dangerous state. And there are pictures of the house, transforming into something else before our eyes. As a friend told us when we were worried about both Council permissions AND the bomb simultaneously, “Tell them there were two bombs, and one went off in the house.” And you’ll see that that, indeed, is what the house looks like right now.

Motherhood

Wednesday was traumatic.

Naomi’s orthodontist had decided that what she needed next was to have her two upper canine teeth pulled. He had been to a conference in Brisbane which had offered data suggesting that if those teeth are late coming out, they can mess with the incoming mature teeth and push them around. We checked with our favorite dentist in the US, who happens to be Michael’s father. Yep, Dr. B said, that sounded right. The removal of two teeth that would fall out anyway, he said, could save us $7000 in orthodonture in the future. Bring on the Novocain!

Naomi had been totally cool about this idea for the several weeks since we found out about it. Until, of course, the week of the appointment. At which point, she freaked out. Michael had asked me what we’d do if Naomi wouldn’t go. “Wouldn’t go?” I scoffed. “She doesn’t have the choices here!” Michael, reassured by my confidence, felt pleased that I would deal with it.

So it was that I found myself in the minivan in the parking lot with Naomi as Michael went inside to check her in to the dentist and she quietly refused to unbuckle her seatbelt. She was not going in. She knew what was in that office. There would be needles and there would be blood and she had heard about a terrible sound that comes when they pull the tooth out. No way was she going in. Hmm, so this is what Michael meant. I cajoled. I reasoned. I reached over to bodily move her from the car and she scampered back to a place she knew I couldn’t lift her from. Then, using all of my negotiation skills—which I teach others to use, if not in quite this way—I began to bribe her shamelessly. I talked about the excellence of the drugs that they’d use to kill the pain. I promised her a new pair of jeans which would make her the envy of her friends. I pointed out that if I had to carry her screaming into the dentist’s office, she’d be so embarrassed as the local high school had just gotten out and teenagers in uniforms were milling about everywhere. There—drugs, bribery, and shame all in the course of 60 seconds. If she had kept resisting, I was willing to take out my wallet and start peeling off 20s. “Ok kid, how much are we talking about here? What’s your price?” But she glanced at the high school students, muttered something about really really really nice jeans—she got to pick them and I didn’t have a say no matter what—and got out of the car.

The 5 minutes in the waiting room were interminable as I tried to keep the conversation going (“Look at the fish. I love fish don’t you? Which fish is the most beautiful?” blah blah blah) and tried to keep her from bolting. When she was in the dentist’s chair at last, bib around her head back, me holding her hand, that I finally heaved a sigh of relief. I had done it. I had gotten her to the chair. Now it was the dentist’s problem.

I took about two grateful breaths and looked around and panicked. Wait—it wasn’t just Naomi who was in the dentist’s room. It was ME. He was going to use needles and there would be blood and that horrible tooth-sucking sound of an extraction. And I was going to have to BE IN THE ROOM the whole time. In the midst of my panic, I held Naomi’s hand and told her calmly that I’d be there as long as she needed me, and if she wanted some time alone with the dentist I’d just slip out the door and be just outside. No, she wanted me to stay the whole time. I told her that if she fell asleep it would be no trouble at all and I’d just slip out the door. The dentist assured me that she wouldn’t fall asleep. I realised at that moment that I was stuck in there. Her hand was on mine like a death grip. Michael was useless to me unless I could get him to come and switch places. Where was that marital ESP that people talk about? “I NEED YOU I NEED YOU” I chanted in my head. “I’M GOING TO PASS OUT IN HERE.” No answer. I needed an emergency stop button, a bat phone.

I twisted in my chair and held her hand as I stared hard at the wall. Interesting that this fellow had gone to this seminar in Dunedin once. Sounded fascinating. (Hand me another one of those sponges” he told the nurse.) And he got a certificate too. (“Ok, the bigger ones I think now.”) Ah, and he’d been a dentist since 1979. (“No, the upper ones. Yes, both”) That was good. (“Ok, Naomi, now you’ll feel a little pressure.”) And what a lovely poster on the wall there. (“Bite down hard on the gauze now. Half way there.”) I wondered what would happen if I passed out, imagined the trajectory of my head onto the floor. I gave myself a variety of stern talking tos—this was Naomi’s pain not mine. Where was my motherly compassion? I tried reasoning with myself: Get a grip woman, you’ve been through childbirth twice yourself (yes, I answered, but only because I wasn’t allowed to be in the waiting room while it happened). And then, in the middle of all this noise in my head, the dentist smiled and pushed back from Naomi and told us she was finished. Finished!!

I stood up as he gave me directions about how to clean the wound, etc. My head got light and dizzy and I thought if he talked for one more minute I’d throw up on him. I wonder how many moms and dads do that. He stopped talking, I thanked him as graciously as I could as I bolted. I marched past Michael nervously in the waiting room with an, “She did great and now I’m just going to take her for fresh air,” and Naomi and I were outside, drinking big gulps of fresh air. She was touching her numbed lip and drooling blood. I was breathing from my belly and trying to say the alphabet backwards. In Spanish. We decided that the thing that would help most was to sit in the car with all the doors open and hold each other. Which we did.

Naomi recovered nearly instantly. At dinner that night she was chattering about how scared she was and how great the dentist was (all true) how now she knows all these things and giving advice to Aidan (who now desperately wants a tooth pulled). I was sobered by yet another piece of what it means to be a mother—that we don’t have to just work to protect them and raise them and teach them to put their napkins of their laps. We have to sit with them as they break their fingers (as Aidan did last year) and get their teeth pulled. And my heart opened for those parents who sit by bedsides of children who are actually sick, who are in real pain, with real needles and real surgery. How do they find the strength?

But life goes on. Last night at dinner she said, “Hey, I can feel my new tooth growing in already!” she poked her tongue in the hole. “Cool, I can feel it, it’s poking and its…no wait,” her expression changed. “Oh, it’s just a piece of broccoli.” She shrugged and walked off, her new jeans clinging to her wispy 10 year old body. I felt a surge of love so big it threatened to make me faint.