Letter #16 - Our parents, part 1

Dear boys,                                                                                                        02/13/14

                I can see it in my mind – I am in the middle back seat of the jeep driving from Dakoro to Maradi, and the African sun is lying low to the west, but the landscape is still brighter and warmer than Virginia noon. Africa night is a woman, no doubt, and just as surely Africa day is a man, but in their endings they start to overlap each other. She sheds her brooding and he sheds his harsh distance.  In the later moments of his life the African sun mellows and his light is fuller, deeper, more embracing. He stops trying so hard to light the world, and the inviting gentleness draws me. In the African late afternoons of this trip I am finding myself resenting social norms, the presence of others, my T-shirts and zunis. I wish I could just shed all my layers under this sun that I have missed more for all the American light pollution and the bright fluorescent bulbs. I wish I could just let this sun that is really, fully sun touch every part of me. 

And in the wishing I of course am connecting to Christianity. And to relationships. Our brooding mysticism, our estranging illumination – they can be hard to love until time mellows them. 

Time… time is what I have always felt I did not have. Are you boys like me? Maybe it was the result of our frequent moves or of living with a four-years-here-one-year-there timetable. I always lived under the sensation of something coming or going, starting or ending, no rest, and no time. Seize the moment, because it’s almost over. I am starting to learn to relax. The Lord will give me enough time in the moment, enough time in the relationship, enough time before death to receive what I am given. 

Time and relationship and receiving gifts and wishing for deeper knowing. They are all subconscious but they wrap around what I am thinking as I leave Dakoro… what I’ve been thinking over the past year. Let’s be real – we’ve each had our grievances with our parents. They’ve had theirs with each of us. But there might be a day when we are shuffling around a cramped hospital room trying to find places for all of us and all of our children to see the person in the impersonally white sheets on that uncomfortable bed. If we’re anything like anybody else in the world, we’re going to wish we had invested in what we had instead of resenting what we didn’t have. 

I started thinking about this when I explained to a patient with high blood lipids that my dad was also hypercholesterolemic but brought down his cholesterol levels with dietary changes and exercise. I warned the patient to get his cholesterol under control before it caused severe coronary artery disease and resulted in a heart attack or stroke. Then suddenly I started seeing Dad in my stroke and heart attack patients. I was picking up patient charts and the name on the label was “Eckert, Timothy L.” I started wondering what Dad’s nurse thought about him, about his attitude, about his children. Were we that annoying "useless" family that sits in the room tensely and bickers in the hallway? Was he the patient who hadn’t seen five of his kids in ten years, whose one hovering responsible child was refusing to make decisions because the absent kids were rushing to book their flights in, or whose children were all attempting to have individual pow-wows with the doctor and case manager because they all had different ideas on how to handle his care and didn’t want to work them out together? When he couldn’t make decisions, did any of his children really know and love him well enough to say confidently, “we are making the decisions that Dad would have wanted and we are at peace with them”?

I also started thinking about this when I turned 25. Mom was 25 when she had me. In some odd way, being the age my mother was when she had me has made me far more curious who she was, what it was like to be her, why she made the decisions she made. When Mom was my exact age (25 and 6 months) she was married to her tall handsome dark-haired interning pastor Pennsylvania husband boy, sleeping alone the nights he worked at Philhaven, working as a bank teller, 8 months pregnant with me, climbing the rickety-looking metal staircase to the second story apartment I have driven by a few times, playing piano or organ for services at some church (I forget where) in exchange for the freedom to play their piano on her own. I am not Mom. I’ve never seriously dated, I live with three other girls, I graduated 2 years later than she did with a degree in a different field, I didn’t attend Bible school or work with refugees, I haven’t changed denominations (I don’t even really know what denomination I would want to commit to), I can’t make the piano say whatever I want it to say. 

But I am like her. I used to scoff at how much she loved children – her own or anyone else’s – and now I love them the same way. My half-finished projects are all over our house, proof that my natural creativity surpasses my endurance. I get distracted while cooking and leave the kitchen trashed. I prioritize people over order, but I can plan and organize and enjoy it. I love to travel, I love to write, I can lose myself in music too. I pause at little moments, but my mind moves so quickly that the pause seems nonexistent in retrospect. I pick up languages naturally. I think in pictures and reason intuitively and my conversation is like my train of thought – hard to follow. Sound familiar? I am like Dad, perfectionistic, worrying unnecessarily, driven even when I can't believe I am doing things. But I am a little more like Mom, I think.

Ever since I turned 25 and realized, “when Mom was my age she was pregnant with me,” I have found myself looking for her in the mirror. And I do look very much like her – her body with Dad’s facial features, even her blood type… someday I too will probably need Rhogam shots. When I brush my hair I know it’s the color hers was, and I imagine myself 25 years from now with darker, graying hair – I hope it’s as flattering. When I look up from washing my face, I wonder what she saw when she met her own eyes in the mirror. Before I shower, sometimes I stare at my beautiful body and realize that I have the 25-year-old body she chose not to have. I look at my stomach – flat, except for the pudge where my overindulgence in chocolate goes – and imagine it stretched, rounded out, shifting with a different life inside it. I don’t want to be pregnant now, and the thought makes me shiver and turn away thankfully, but sometimes I am a little wistful because it feels like living next to a mystery I can touch but not open. 

When I took my Maternal Nursing class, the chapters on pregnancy were so terrifying they made me nauseous. I called Mom, who thought I should be an OB nurse, to inform her that I couldn’t even handle the concepts. And because “I just want to know – did you have all these symptoms – nausea and stretch marks and constipation and hemorrhoids and waddling gait and trouble sleeping and forgetfulness and etc. – when you were pregnant with me?” I can hear her laughter on the other side of the phone. “Most of them, but they weren’t as bad as they sound.”

“Mom,” I said, “I am terrified of losing my body like that just as I’m beginning to like it. How could you do it?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Honey, we all lose our bodies at some point. I knew that I would lose it some way, and I would rather lose it for you.”

Remembering that conversation still makes me cry, partly because that kind of love is so pure that it’s hard to get my mind around it. Partly because I can only believe her – she has always been that giving for me – and I am sorry that I am not that giving to her. Partly because I hope that as I make my own choices I will make them with that much pure love. Partly because ever since my first cells sent greedy tendrils through hers demanding her blood, I have taken and taken and taken from her, but to her I am still a gift.  She gave me away graciously to college, to my new ideas, to my criticisms of her, to a job farther from her "home base" than she would like, to showing more skin than she was comfortable with. But she still takes me back with warm voice and open arms when I call crying on my way to work, or when I show up after midnight in the house on Hilltop Road.

Sometimes I wonder if I am one of the women my mother could have been. Sometimes I wonder if that is all we ever do, every generation – whether we each take our turns, unaware, at becoming one of the people our ancestors chose not to be, hearts beating their melded blood into experiences they turned away from, fulfilling the curses and prophecies we didn’t know we made or that were already written into us. Maybe this is my uprooted, homeless way of trying to build my sense of “tribe.”  I want to know that I am a part of something that keeps going. I want to know that I am worthy to keep it going, and that I am strong enough to pass on the blessing but not the curse. I guess what I really want is to meet my mother and father and daughter and son in the mirror, the hospital room, in between, with the kind of Love that loses itself for each other and counts the love as a gift it is blessed to give. 

I pause here, because it is strange how similar my desire for my family is to my reasons for saying goodbye to Africa this visit… to recognize my mother for who she was, to be able to lose her without regrets, to be able to count the loss as a blessing. 

As I’m visiting Niger, I’m discovering that I want more wholeness: a more whole goodbye to the place that was mine, and more whole hellos to the family that is mine. If we’re going to receive the blessings and let the curses stop with us, we need to know our parents and our family members better and love them more. So the second part of this letter is me trying to know our parents by finally being able to place my childhood memories of them in an adult understanding of where and how they lived. Maybe we can open a layer of the mysteries we’ve grown up with, or the parts of them that live in us. 

Our parents gave us Africa. What else did they give us? And what did they lose for it? Maybe as time mellows them - and us - we can open ourselves a little more to who they are.

More later.

Said enjima,

Tabitha