Maternal Dementia

On Sunday, my children saw me for the first time in ten days. They ran to me with that amped-up fondness that the heart manufactures during a long absence. Into my arms they flung themselves and I received them with equal exuberance, only I held on a little too tight, a little too long, a little too fierce. Quickly they were wriggling to free themselves.

“Happy French Mother’s Day!” They sang this out in unison, prompted, I’m pretty sure, by De-facto who, having made very little of the American Mother’s Day earlier in the month, hoped to make good. Last week’s school art projects helped the cause: Buddy-roo proudly handed over a large blue envelope she’d made that read bonne fête maman! Inside, a picture of a flowerpot covered with sparkles, and a poem, copied meticulously, no doubt, at the behest of the teacher after she wrote it in perfect penmanship on the chalkboard.

Short-pants had crafted, in her class, a small box out of construction paper. Inside it there were tiny notes with micro-messages, mots doux as she called them. “Maman, mon coeur,” or “I love you night and day.” Sweet words, indeed, scratched out in her familiar pen. These hand-made gifts so precious, so heart-felt and so tear-inducing. Damn it.

“Why are you crying?” Buddy-roo asked. Before I could answer, Short-pants chimed in. “Because she’s happy and sad at the same time. Right maman?”

I guess I’ve said that before.

These days tears are everywhere. They reside barely below the surface, wherever I turn. A group of scientists discuss new ways of visualizing biology in order to better understand it, and I’m a little choked up. Thirty strangers sing happy birthday to me, I press the tears down. A liberated Alice returns from the Underland at the end of an in-flight movie and I’m hunting for Kleenex. My Pilates trainer urges me forward in grueling sets of 8 and 12, I’m concentrating to hold the tears in, at least until the workout is over and I’m on the stairs outside.

A taxi drove me to attend a meeting yesterday at an address that I, too, was unsure of. I was dropped at the wrong building, which – no surprise – put me on the brink of tears. Hold it together, I counseled myself. Running mascara has very little professional merit. The receptionist assured me it was only a ten-minute walk to the other #163 Quai-de-Whatever, where I wanted to be. So I walked. On the way, a man dressed in white painted an iron fence a shade even whiter. Does he still have a mother, I wondered, and does he think of her often? A hundred meters later, under a trestle, I passed a hooker wearing short black shorts and an ankle-length black leather coat that flew open behind her with every step of her stride. She smelled of liquor and hair spray as she went by. How about her mother?

Everybody had a mother, at some point. Every time I look at anyone I pass, I wonder, do they still?

Thoughts rush by on a train of remorse. Why didn’t I spend more time with her this last year? My week-long visits every-other month were a stretch to make happen at the time; they seem pathetic in retrospect. Now that my mother is gone, now that I can’t ever visit her again, isn’t it ludicrous that I didn’t go every month? Or that I didn’t just move in?

I run through the last week of her life, a string of images are frozen in my mind: watching her dress herself slowly and carefully, laughing because it was taking so long. How she sipped her special juice drinks with a straw, but elegantly. As she weakened, how she would regard herself in the mirror, as if she did not recognize the not-well person she had become. This image is especially strong because I, too, was in it, off to the side, watching myself watching her talk to her own reflection. “I don’t know how to do this,” she whispered. “Neither do I,” I’d said, unable to contain the tears. But she didn’t cry about it. Ever. At least not in front of me.

This morning my daughters’ longer-and-lankier-than-ever bodies were nearly impossible to stir, their jet lag, now a week old, as fierce as mine is after just returning a day ago. Buddy-roo grumbled and stretched and turned to the side, “scratch my back.” I caressed her, urging her, gently and then more rigorously, to wake up and rally for the day. I went to rouse Short-pants, who sweats in her sleep. I pulled the comforter off her shoulder and swept the damp hair off her forehead. Her sleep was deep, but when she saw it was me, she jerked her arm from under the covers and wrapped it around my neck, pulling my head right up to hers. It was a strong, firm grip, very deliberate.

“You can take your time letting go,” I told her. So she drew me in closer, even tighter.

Tears. Again. My emotions spilling out like an overfilled tank. Or to draw a truly sad and timely analogy, like an oil spill. No small trickling here. Rather a fountain of feelings gushing out because of some sloppy fissure; messy, embarrassing, uncontainable, washing up on the shore for everyone to see.
I have an odd and eccentric empathy for those BP engineers. Some spills are not so easily contained.

Birthdays are not to be shared. It’s the one single day you get to yourself, the day you were born – the day you opted into this planet. It’s your day. There’s no reason to be magnanimous about it.

I know this because the double birthday party I celebrated years ago with Debbie West was an exercise in being gracious, a task that was really too advanced for my consciousness at the time. Her mother made the most elaborate gingerbread house cake with colorful jellybean trimming. The sixteen candles – our ages added together – dispersed across its roof were too hard to blow out in tandem, the song lengthened uncomfortably at the point of our names. Debbie’s, of course, came first.

Most of the gifts we received were identical – the same duets of birthday wrapping paper folded around matching puzzles, coloring books and Spirograph kits. Except the Barbie Dolls that Susan Olsen brought: Each gift tag was carefully labeled with one of our names in the fine, formal handwriting I recognized as Mrs. Olsen’s, but obviously her mom must have randomly assigned the boxes which were packed with fraternal twin Barbies.

Debbie got the blonde doll. But she was a brunette. Shouldn’t she have gotten the doll with the matching hair? I opened my box in sync with her, noticing the hair color instantly. Before I could stop myself the words popped out, “but I want that one!” The doll in question, of course, the one in her hands, not the one in mine.

I’m pretty sure that everybody heard me, but it was as though each and every person – young and old – tacitly agreed to ignore what I had blurted out. My 8-year old self was too young to be gracious was nevertheless old enough to know that this was not the appropriately thankful response to a gift. I stared at the doll and pretended to love her, knowing the eyes of a roomful of good girls were upon me. But I could not contain the tears that naturally manifest after such a disappointment, tears which burst out from me at full volume.

“It must be too much excitement,” I heard my mother say, “all these girls and all these gifts.”

This is why when Buddy-roo has a moment like this, I redirect her frustration as a good parent should, but inside: mountains of empathy. I suppose if you asked De-facto for his point of view on my birthday spirit, he might suggest not that much has changed.

But birthdays are something. You gotta make them happy, or else they’ll make you sad.

Later at home, after the party, my mother placed the doll prominently on my shelf. I let it sit there, untouched and unloved, eventually letting it fall to the back of the queue of dolls and stuffed animals, neglected, rejected – the other Barbie.

My hands are dry, parched from the handling of paper and the folding of cardboard box covers. My mind reels at the level of organization hidden within the disorganized mess of boxes and files stowed away, every box like another chapter of her life, the files of all her correspondence, drafts of her speeches, even all her travel receipts. My heart breaks, reading love letters my parents wrote to each other in college, his familiar scribble, eighteen times in a row writing out “I love you.” Or finding a letter my mother’s father left for my grandmother in an envelope that read: “to be opened only in the event of my death.” In it, his humble words of reflection on their life together and the tasks she would have ahead of her to continue without him.

There is a physical, mental and emotional labor involved in cleaning out my mother’s house, but especially so as we addressed the backroom, the room that waited behind a closed door, the room where our family’s stories have been stored for so many years. It is not a small room; it probably measures 15 X 20 feet. It was packed to the gills with files and crates of papers and memorabilia, magazines, empty boxes that were re-used every Christmas and board games we no longer played, old carpet remnants, photo albums, family scrapbooks. It must be said that you couldn’t really walk into the room except for the thin path to the blue recycling bins, kept just next to the 50-year-old standing freezer which contains jars of something that might have put there more than thirty years ago. We have yet to defrost it; that thaw is for another trip, I think.

She saved everything. A long box with our baby books, faded with time and love, and underneath them, all the tiny, corny, welcoming cards sent to her when each one of us was born. Every grade school portrait and class photo. Every single report card. The piece of paper that was pinned on my brother’s shirt so he would be shuffled off the school bus to the correct first-grade class (the pin still attached). All our schoolwork – I think she saved every piece of paper that came home, all of it stowed in reddish brown legal brief envelopes tied up tight and stacked in a cupboard in the backroom.

My sister and I would call out to each other, “Oh my god, come see this.” A carton with her budget records from the 1970s and envelopes filled with tax receipts from the same decade; a notebook in which she kept a record of every dinner party she hosted in 1967-1968, who was invited, what she served, how they were seated at the tables (and shifted for dessert), and all the thank you notes she received after each occasion; the diaries she kept in college, filled with the practical details of her day (“up at 7…”) but also an occasional reference to someone she had a crush on who smiled at her in a special way; scrapbooks from her youth in Havana, with theater programs and letters from her school and small calling cards bearing her maiden name; a large box, and then another, with all the condolence notes she received when my father died, and the record of how she acknowledged of each and every card.

One of the sagging cardboard cartons contained every letter I ever sent home from college. In the same box, a notebook with the letters written during my semester abroad in Denmark. I remember where I was sitting when I wrote most of them, at a square wooden table at the Café Peder Hvitfeldts in the center of Copenhagen, a Carlsberg Porter to my left to fortify me. It was stunning to see all these letters again, collected together. I drew my finger down the lines of little words, my fine, tiny writing filling every blank space of the page and it all rushed back to me: being a 20-year old stretching my legs to another continent. How strange and exotic it all felt, compared to life in my rural hometown, or even the small city that hosted my university. I was tasting Europe for the first time and it was thrilling. I remember writing home with all the details – some of it more than my parents ever needed to know – because I felt compelled to convey to them how I was getting it all, doing it all, growing into the woman that I imagined they hoped I would become.

The letters are painful to re-read, quite honestly, as now with some years under my belt I can see in them the naïveté and the obnoxious optimism I possessed. They are trying too hard to express something that I realize now I never needed to write because my parents knew it all along: mom, dad, I’m doing you proud, which somehow seemed so important then, and well, still is now.

Standing over this pile of letters, I realized it’s not just about grieving her death. Or my father’s. Or even preparing for the grieving of the loss of this old house – which when we sell it will be like saying goodbye to another family member, a friend that has hugged our family close for 53 years. Each time I open one of those crumbling boxes filled with the dust and dead cluster flies and the memorabilia of my earlier days, I am grieving a part of me, too, some part that was young and impressionable and looking to my mother for help and advice and approval and that just as my mother is gone,
so is that little girl. I wouldn’t mind to still be her, and just let someone collect my report cards while I run out to the orchard to play. But I have my own collecting to do, while my little girls run about and skip away.

Maybe nobody likes to admit to this, but I will: We mourn our grandparents and our parents and we miss them and their goodness and their guidance but we are also mourning ourselves and our own inevitable passage to the stage of life they were in before they died, which signals our own departure, too.

As my mother dies, so do the impish girl and the rebellious teenager and the emerging young woman that I used to be. As long as she was here, these parts of me lived in relation to her. Now that she is gone, I feel as though I’m on the threshold of another place in my life: it is papered with wisdom and prudence, furnished with a bit of grace, a shrug of humility. It is a place that she inhabited so effortlessly and left it in such lovely condition for me to step into – probably because she had that back room to store everything else.

After the reading of the 23rd Psalm, not even five minutes into my mother’s memorial service, Buddy-roo tapped my arm. “This is not so interesting to me,” she said. There was still an hour to go in the service, and we were in the front row. “But can you stick it out?” I whispered. “For Grammy?”

She wriggled around to put her head on De-facto‘s lap. “If you scratch my back,” she sighed, handing me a Fisher Price motorcycle with a tiny person, borrowed from my childhood toy stash, “with this.”

I drove the tiny vehicle up and down her back – along her legs when she motioned for me to do so – happy to be caressing her. I can’t say I didn’t appreciate her restlessness, but this was one of those times I really needed to keep it at bay. Please Buddy-roo, I prayed, hang in there.

The chapel was packed. The count – we learned later – was at least 300 people. My mother was a woman engaged in life and in service; the communities she engaged with and served turned out. Beyond her extended family, who flew or drove in from points all over the east coast, a throng of friends from every part of her life came to remember and celebrate her.

When she was a bit younger than I am now, my mother lost part of her hearing. She never let it stop her, and as a result became an advocate for people with hearing loss. She wrote books and gave speeches, served on boards. She was even involved in drafting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. My mother had instructed us to arrange for an audio induction loop; people in the designated pews could set their hearing aides to pick up the transmission and hear every speaker in the service. We also invited a sign language interpreter, a long, elegant woman who brought every speakers words to life with her agile hands and her expressive face. Short-pants, whom my mother had taught to finger spell, was riveted. Buddy-roo wanted to know who that woman on the other side of the stage was waving at. The signing – it’s such a beautiful language – managed to hold her attention, too.

Buddy-roo pointed to my name in the printed program. “Why are you in there?” I whispered back that I was going to speak. Her eyes widened; the expression on her face reflected the nerves brewing in my gut. My father, a natural public speaker, used to say that if you weren’t at least a little nervous before giving a speech, then you didn’t respect your audience. Either that or you were afraid of crying uncontrollably in front of a large crowd. Buddy-roo pointed to the lectern. “You’re going to go up there?” I nodded. (Maybe now it was getting interesting?)

Each remembrance of my mother was tear-provoking or pride-inducing, or both. After her friends and colleagues lauded her, and my brother and sister delivered such poignant words, I wondered why I ever thought it was a good idea to speak, and regretted putting myself after almost everyone, near the end program. I made it through my speech without any serious faltering, but let the floodgates go after I’d returned to my seat, during the eulogy. Short-pants squeezed my hand. Buddy-roo decided she should cry, too, just to keep me in good company.

Now that all the busy-ness of the preparations and organization of the service are behind me, and the relief of it being over is satisfying and settling. There is a sense of being finished with something important. But just as things end, others begin – the completion of this event only means that something else is starting. I am vaguely nervous about this: there is now room for the feelings I couldn’t afford to feel up until now. I woke up at 4:30 am this morning, part jet-lag, part emotional turmoil. I’m restless as hell and on the verge of tears.

As for Ex-facto, we exchanged a few good-luck text messages over the weekend. I ran into his niece at my favorite hometown pub, and he stopped by to visit us on his way out of town on Sunday. De-facto instantly befriended his youngest son, who’s the same age as Short-pants, teaching him how to knock croquet balls around the back yard, and running with him through the apple orchard beside the house.

When my mother’s memorial service was finished, our family was escorted out of the front pews and down the center aisle and out of the chapel. Buddy-roo, after sitting still for more than an hour, sprinted out of the row. She skipped in wide dancing steps from side to side, prancing all the way down the aisle. I walked behind her, in the shadow of her joy, getting the quickest glimpse of the next generation preparing to take charge.

It was sometime last summer that my ex-husband called me to tell me of the latest coincidence in his life. He’d been driving around with his daughter – who I knew best, actually, when she was the same age as Buddy-roo or Short-pants – looking at places to host her wedding. A sobering piece of news: that someone you knew when she still believed in Santa Claus is now getting married. Just another marker of how time halts for no one.

A wedding. Mazeltov and all that, I thought. My ex (let’s call him Ex-facto) went on to say that while driving to one of the venues on her list, he recognized a landmark red-and-white-striped ice-cream parlor and realized how close he was (a mile) to my childhood home. Of the half-dozen places she was considering, this one was actually right in my little hometown. The venue in question was a ruin when I was growing up, but has since been restored to a majestic mansion with picturesque views, a perfect spot for weddings and other celebratory occasions.

A disclosure is in order: Yes, there was a man and some vows, many years ago. Our divorce was relatively elegant, as divorces go, and we remain not only cordial but compassionate toward each other. Our correspondence, though not regular, is frequent enough and always slightly nostalgic. He kept in closer contact with me when Short-pants was in the hospital, and also called me this winter when I was taking care of my mother. When Ex-facto’s daughter, the bride in question, was a student abroad, he encouraged her to come visit me in Paris. I was nearly 9-months pregnant, but I wanted her to experience French café society so I urged De-facto to take her out to some of our favorite bars in the neighborhood. I think what she enjoyed most about that night was running into our friends and answering the question, “so how do you know each other?”

Between De-facto and Ex-facto there is a striking sense of mutual respect. Ex-facto’s regard for De-facto, he tells me, is enhanced because of the things I write on this blog. For De-facto, it is the result of two precious tickets that Ex-facto once secured for him to see the New England Patriots play in the Superbowl. I suppose that could make a friend for life.

“If we choose this place for the wedding,” Ex-facto told me, “we’ll want your mother to be there.”

If she lives that long, I thought. By then, my mother had already outlived her doctor’s estimates; she was living month by month. On borrowed time, as she liked to say.

When my mother died, it was her wish to be interred quickly and quietly, and also her suggestion that we take our time organizing a memorial service, without the stress or urgency to make it coincide with her burial. Given the inclement weather last February, her wishes were more than sensible. After the private burial, we selected a Saturday in mid-May for her memorial service, dreaming of a sunny spring afternoon that would create hopeful dispositions and easier transportation.

Once the date was chosen, I called around to local inns and hotels to reserve a block of rooms for the extended family we expected to attend, and found it problematic. I managed to secure the very last rooms at one B&B, but I was surprised to find that otherwise, there was, literally, no room at the inn – or the hotel, or anywhere. My hometown is known for its summer tourism; it’s on a beautiful lake with lots of sailing and water sporting. But sold-out in the middle of May?

“There’s a wedding,” one of the hotel clerks told me.

What are the chances that Ex-facto’s entire family (and his first ex-wife and current wife) would descend on my hometown at the same weekend as my entire family will assemble there for my mother’s memorial service? Is this some sort of cosmic joke? Some strange vertigo-inducing vortex uniting our two families, again, par hazard, on this auspicious date?

I mean, you couldn’t make this up.

Do you think we’ll bump into them? I can imagine my aunt encountering my ex-mother-in-law in an elevator and wondering why the other seems vaguely familiar. Or Ex-facto’s cousin, studying my Uncle Buddy (who’s pretty memorable) in the breakfast room, puzzling about where she’s seen him before. Ghosts of the past inhabiting the present.

I suppose this is how life works. A tiny baby, like my new nephew, born last week, slips out into a waiting, welcoming world. A poised bride steps in a purposeful gait down the aisle toward her groom. A beloved woman, laid to rest, is remembered with words of tribute, gratitude and affection. For each one of us, there are significant moments marking our passage through life. And sometimes these moments overlap in rather extraordinary – if slightly awkward – ways.

My mother’s voice, all those years, was something to roll my eyes at.

It was a scolding plea to pick up my room, take my papers off the table, move my shoes from the hallway. It was the never-ending question: “How was school today?” Or an occasionally mystified, “what do you mean I didn’t buy the right kind?” The voice of a woman entirely incapable of differentiating Lee from Levis from Wrangler; the voice of a woman who never once in her life wore a pair of jeans.

My mother’s voice, those years, strong and clear in conference rooms and at speaker podiums – an articulate, educated, diplomatic voice. A voice that incited admiration and rarely faltered. A voice I didn’t disbelieve, but yet I couldn’t fully appreciate it. How could I? All listening is selective, especially when there are things we don’t want to hear.

My mother’s voice is now a voice inside my head: a memory, a childhood song, a compliment, a reprimand. It’s a beckoning call from the back porch. It’s a gentle whisper from the other room.

My mother’s voice. I hear it when I speak to my children. Please pick up your toys before the cleaner comes. Please clear your plates when you leave the table. You can’t go out without socks. Now my own voice, that of a mother’s, echoing the voice that once annoyed me as much as it soothed me.

Sometimes I hear my own voice, responding to a sweet prideful request to “watch me!” or “look at this!’ with a half-listening, half-present, “Yes, that’s great.” Once Short-pants said to me, “Mama, do you know what I mean? Are you listening?” Or Buddy-roo, who said to me yesterday, “I’d like you to close your computer, maman.” I am often caught in the act of being distracted and pretending to care: A wake-up call that my voice isn’t always the mothering voice I want to speak with.

Soon enough they will roll their eyes at me.

Now I know what it was that I heard in my mother’s voice: the voice of a woman trying to juggle a full life, a voice answering the call of work, of her colleagues, of her community and of her husband and her children, a voice calling out to herself amidst a grand chorus of voices, a cacophony of demanding, needing, wanting voices. A voice occasionally gasping for air. A voice I recognize differently now, now that it is also my own.

There’s wired and then there’s wound up, and you might say I’ve been operating in both categories these last few weeks. The story is the same old tale, threaded through the fragments of my life told again and again on this digital journal: too much to do and not enough hours in the day to do it all.
I could use a month of Sundays and still be behind.

It doesn’t help that in the middle of the usual juggle, an upcoming business trip to a rather exotic country requires a visa for entree, the application of which has cost me more time than I can afford. I could boast that my passport is too full of stamps from all my travels, except the lack of consecutive and completely blank pages created havoc with the process. I was instead directed to go to my own consulate to beg for an insert of extra pages before I could even make an application to go somewhere else. And along the way a dozen little setbacks, enough to make me sweat and swear.

But I know that all work and no play makes me a dull boy, and so in honor of cinco de mayo, I treated myself – and a friend – to a fish pedicure, a most extraordinary beauty treatment that involves allowing a hundred little fish to nibble at your feet.

It started as a bit of a dare: my friend sent this link to me, knowing that I’d take the bait. I organized dual appointments so we could sit side by side and compare notes during the treatment.

Peering into the tank of tiny and apparently ravenous poissons, I must admit my hesitancy before plunging my pieds nus into the school of tiny garrarufa fish. They swarmed around my feet; there was no hesitation on their part to start munching away at the callouses on my toes and heels and ankles – and on the skin all over my feet, for that matter.

It was slightly irritating at first – unsettling more than anything else. But after adjusting to this sensation of something actually eating your feet, well, it was interesting. A bit like tickling. Or more like a continuous series of little electric shocks. Not really pleasant, but not entirely unpleasant, either.

Twenty minutes later my feet were as soft as they’ve ever been. All the little pieces of dead skin chewed away by little minnow-like friends. Twenty minutes later, I forgot about all the time I wasted on that silly visa. Things are in motion, it will all work out. Twenty minutes later I was unwound and unwired. And funny how everything on my list could wait.

Our days are filled with affection. My children, being completely bilingual, are adept at American hugs and French calins, and dispense these joyously (mostly) throughout the day. But there is something especially poignant about the morning cuddle, the first and most delicious caress of the day.

It is as if the toxins of their tantrums, their princess demands, their bêtises and all their mis-targeted mischief – all the moments of yesterday that made me close my eyes and count to ten before asking (not out loud), “why did I have these children anyway?” – all of it washes away overnight, flaking off during their sleep and disappearing through the dream-catchers hanging above their beds.

They rise in the morning, semi-conscious and automatically innocent. The footfall of tiny feet down the stairs, uneven and still stiff from an overnight of motionless sleep, groggy in the sweetest kind of way, waking me enough to skooch over and make room for the small body that nudges its way under the covers and curls up like a spoon within my embrace. Even several days dirty from country house living, the skin smells sweet and the hair is scented with the sweat of swing-sets and forested play.

Almost immediately, breathing lengthens and loudens, and sleep reigns again as if the trip from the bed upstairs to our bed downstairs was a quick flight between REM stages; like they could wake up and have no memory of how they got in bed with us.

Short-pants is curled up beside me and her soft long limbs intertwine with mine. Buddy-roo will stumble down any minute. There is a bond that is renewed with each and every morning hug, a reminder that we all fit together, our DNA is shared, so then why not a few moments of pillows and sheets? We revert back to the moment when we were in constant embrace, those babies in my womb and De-facto‘s thoughtful arm over my big belly. Ages ago it seems, and yet reenacted every morning.

Last night, the last drive of our spring break trip, a tour that took us to Italy and slowly back through France, visiting friends along the way before a respite at our country house, driving sometimes in 10-hour chunks. The final leg took only 4 hours and 5 minutes; we managed without even a bathroom stop, allowing De-facto to beat the previous record by 2 minutes. This morning’s cuddle is particularly cherished, then, as it marks the end of our spirited (but tiring) voyage and the return to Parisian routine.

I lay half-awake, staring out the dormer windows, listening to the sound of our city street coming to life, caressing the soft skin of my child, breathing in tandem with her. Slowly I let the thoughts of my day ahead creep in, the things to do after being gone nearly 20 days may be daunting, but I am fortified by the sweetness of this moment, to be savored until, say, the two of them break into battle just about the time of my second cup of coffee.

She changed into her pajamas in the living room, doing a funny kind of half-dressed jig to entertain us, happy to laugh and happy that we were laughing with her. I said something that made her run away from us – a pretend threat to pinch her, or a comment about her lack of underwear. She turned too quickly and stubbed her toe on the base of the couch. (We are at our country house, where there’s a sagging, old futon with odd parts of metal protruding from the bottom.) She shrieked and exploded into tears.

De-facto and I remained seated at the table. It’s not that we are insensitive, but early on we agreed to be the parents that wait a beat (or two) before coddling our children after they have hurt themselves, reserving our rushing-over-to-console-efforts for those boo-boos that actually merit such earnest concern. We were, perhaps, too cavalier about this when Short-pants was a little toddler. She’d tumble and we’d quickly suggest to her, “you’re okay!” Later we came to understand that she thought “you’re okay,” meant “ouch, it hurts!” After a fall, she’d jump around, in obvious pain, shouting, “I’m okay! I’m okay!”

She sat on the couch and screamed again, her face in a grimace, red with tears. “I’m always hurting myself!” she cried.

Short-pants does stumble a lot. She trips and falls more frequently that most children her age – and I know that 8-year olds can trip and fall a lot – but she is constantly nursing a hurt toe, foot or knee. She moves with short, jerky motions, especially when she is excited, which often causes her to bump into something and bang or bruise one of her appendages.

Part of this is related to a broken leg at age 4 that was, unfortunately, set incorrectly, a fracture which, though we’ll never be sure, we believe is related to her brain abscess. She had just learned to walk again after a coma and two brain surgeries and six motionless weeks in a hospital bed. She overestimated her strength while hanging on a bar in the park, fell on her leg and broke it, after which she spent eight weeks in a cast and then had to learn how to walk again. Except after the cast came off, the leg was longer and slightly turned. This would set anyone back a bit, let alone someone with a little neurological story like hers.

We were diligent about physical therapy, until one day it felt like she spent too much time going to medical appointments and that maybe the best therapy for her was to just be a playful kid. The French doctors all agreed, a bit too readily, “Her legs will even out, you’ll see, pendant la croissance.” During the growth. I could tell they were mocking my concern – I was one of those obsessive (American) mothers and if I’d just relax it would all be fine.

This is the line we walk – all mothers, not just mothers who’ve been hospital mothers – the fine line between advocating for your child and obsessing over her. I don’t want to hover and try to direct everything in her life. But to what degree is my role as parent to make sure she has the best care possible and that we’ve done everything we can to help her? It’s not that she has to have perfect legs and run like a gazelle and win every race. I just want her to be able to move comfortably and do the things she wants to do. And when she’s an old bat, I don’t want her to be in pain because her pelvis and back are all messed up because her leg was never attended to.

We’ve waited a few years, and the croissance is indeed happening, in amazing spurts, but her leg is still longer and it’s still crooked. She’s not really getting stronger or more coordinated. If anything, she’s discovering that she’s not as swift or steady as her school friends, and starting to shy away from physical activities where she knows this will be apparent. We try to encourage her, with modest success (De-facto has her playing basketball and the practice is helping) but we don’t want to nag her and make it larger issue than it already is.

A few weeks ago, I decided it was time for an expert opinion, so I returned to one of the PTs who’d worked with her before. He was terrific – said all the right things to her about finding a physical activity she loves and practicing and working at it. He gave me that look that said I know you want me to fix this and I can’t, but she can, if she works at it. He gave us some exercises to do together, but of course, I haven’t been so diligent about it. I’ve not been very diligent about my pilates, either. It probably doesn’t help that her mother is much better at laying in bed and reading than running laps at the basketball court.

I looked at De-facto. “I wish I knew what to do to help her move more fluidly,” I said.

“She’s missing a little part of her brain,” he whispered back. “She’s a miracle, remember?”

I do remember those awful days when Short-pants was in a coma, when all I wanted her to do was survive. I bargained with someone above to keep her with us in any condition. A funky leg that makes her a bit uncoordinated and a left side that isn’t as strong as her right side? No problem, we’ll take it. Just give her back to us. That’s what I would have said. More or less, it’s what I did say.

Short-pants hobbled over to the table and folded herself in her father’s lap. I listened to him talking to her in his low, soft, reassuring voice. He explained it all to her, how maybe she falls and trips a lot because of the operation on her brain, and how it takes her a bit longer to learn to do physical things. He put all those big-person concepts into littler-person words so she could understand. And maybe, he said, it all had to do with the thing that was in her brain, but maybe not, we’ll never know for sure, but what we do know is she can do anything she wants to do, just sometimes she has to work longer to get her body to learn how to do it.

He always knows the right way to frame things for the girls, to tell them the truth without talking down to them or being patronizing. He’s the best explainer there is.

Short-pants rested in his arms, taking in all he said. I watched from across the table, admiring the two of them in their embrace. Then she pushed herself up, out of his lap and limped around the table to me and curled her lanky legs up in my lap.

“Don’t worry, mama,” she said, “I’m okay.”

I watched them run ahead toward the grand dining room, confident, at ease. Short-pants set her book down on a table and grabbed a plate, Buddy-roo was already surveying the buffet table and deciding how to choose among the abundance. They forged into the crowd forming around the tables, picking through the platters of seafood, pasta salads, Italian meat and fried vegetables and filled their plates. On the way to their table, they stopped to chat with adults – new friends and old – engaging them in conversations about how the conference was going. My big little girls, so poised and polite. I stood aside and watched them, shaking my head.

We have been taking our girls with us to the CREA conference since its inception in 2003. That first year Short-pants was just under 2-years old. The hotel found for us a babysitter who spoke only Italian, so each day I made little drawings of bottles or a sleeping child next to the hands of a clock, indicating her schedule. I was also pregnant at that first conference; Buddy-roo was the wild idea growing strong-willed in my belly.

Which is to say that the girls are well loved among the community of leaders and participants who return to CREA each year. Many are friends we know from years attending the Creative Problem Solving Institute, (CPSI), the original creativity conference (which also happens to be where De-facto and I first met). The one year that I came to CREA alone, I was chastised for not bringing the girls. “They are our inspiration,” my friends said.

We are not the only people in this clan who have children, but perhaps we have been – up until now – the only ones crazy enough to bring our young creatures to the conference for the whole week. This has never been easy. Both De-facto and I are usually running core programs that require our attention as facilitators for most of the very long days, and there’s always a bit of extra planning and adjusting of the program to do in the evenings that requires our time and attention. A wide menu of concurrent activities calls to us at any given moment, not to mention nights dancing at the CREA pub or hanging out at the bar with friends. There’s a lot to do without the kids around, let alone when they are tugging on your shirt for some mama-time after missing you all day.

We’ve experimented with different child-care formulas: hiring a local babysitter through the hotel, bringing our own babysitter from Paris, using the mother-in-love, taking turns trading the kids off to each other. It’s never ideal and there’s always the feeling of being totally stretched. Yet it has always been worth it: our kids have something special in them as a result of rubbing up against all these open-minded, open-hearted adults, some of them eccentric, many of them equally as childlike, all of them in awe of the sacred uninhibited spirit that lives in children who have not yet had their creativity taught out of them. This community covets that spirit, and in turn, keeps it burning in our children.

This year, with a bit of coordination in advance, a few other CREA friends brought their children, too, and we initiated the first unofficial CREA kids program. Ten youngsters from the ages of 6 to 14 – an entire pack of CREA-rats – made the Grand Villa Balbi Hotel their playground. My friend, la maman créative, brought her mother to help with oversight and to work with the kids to produce a journal every day about their activities. The mother-in-love and other CREA leaders and parents helped us to create a schedule of events and activities for the kids. There was a session on creativity by playing with light, another on meditation. Two about knitting, with fingers and with needles. One leader even organized a Harry Potter tour – arranging in advance with locals in the town to pretend not to see the kids when they passed by in their invisibility cloak.

Short-pants herself facilitated a session on how to make mandalas, which I was unable to attend because I was running program. A bunch of the kids helped la maman créative to lead a session titled Taking time to be Creative as a Family. De-facto was there for that, but unfortunately, I couldn’t attend – a session I was running was scheduled at the same time. The irony of this wasn’t lost on me.

I did find one opportunity to play with the kids: We rolled out a 10-meter long sheet of blank paper on the sidewalk in front of the hotel and set out jars of paints and brushes. The instructions were this simple: paint. “What do we paint?” was what most of the adults asked. The kids didn’t wonder why or what or how. They simply got down on their hands and knees, picked up a brush and some color and started painting. They didn’t need instructions. They just started.

The beautiful thing about seeing the gang of CREA-rats running around the conference is that you see immediately how they belong there. It is in their nature to be creative. There is no hesitation to step into the flow of their imagination. Most children don’t even know that they are being creative; they are simply at play. It is their way. This is, perhaps, why their presence at the CREA (or the CPSI) creativity conference is not only natural, it is just what we need.

(If you’re interested in attending one or both of these creativity conferences, the next CREA is April 13-17, 2011 and CPSI, which has an official youth program, is coming up very soon, June 21-25. You can also read more from other bloggers who’ve been to CPSI: Jonathan Vehar, Cynthia Rolfe, Amy Basic, Gregg Fraley, Pablo Munoz, Whitney Ferré and Missy Carvin.)