Going To The Mattresses

*Author's note: if you are unfamiliar with The Godfather, this post will make little or no sense to you. While I would recommend familiarizing yourself with The Godfather for the pure cinematic beauty of it all, if that's of no interest to you, just skip this one and I'm sure I'll post something else sometime soon.

I am a wartime concigliere. Do you speak The Godfather? I never read the books, but I do enjoy the movies. How can you not, really? DeNiro, Pacino, Duvall, Brando, cannolis? What's not to love? I sublimate my pacifist tendencies in a horrid fascination with organized crime. We will explore this at a later date.

Sometimes in life it's time to "go to the mattresses." In the seasons of life as they come and go, there are times of peace and prosperity and times of chaos, tumult and uncertainty. This should go without saying, but it seems we are almost always surprised when the season shifts. There are people who lead well in maintaining peace and prosperity, growing it, cultivating it. There are people who are good in a crisis. I am the latter. I am a wartime concigliere.

I'm not bragging. Give me peace and calm and I will be a neurotic mess. I get panicky and walk around with a constant feeling that there is something huge I'm missing. It is, oddly, in times of nothing much going on that I excel at the art of self-castigation and anxiety. But give me a crisis, give me a large undertaking or an uncertain situation and I can take a deep breath and calmly wade into the fray. I can sort things out and take charge and soothe frazzled nerves; make tough decisions and lead others. It is only after the situation has passed that I fall completely apart.

In several areas of my life, in the last several months, I have had to "go to the mattresses." So, I don my crisis shirt and plan my strategies. I have a real crisis shirt, by the way. It has the Chinese characters for "crisis" on it. The characters that combine to make the word "crisis" in Chinese are the characters for "danger" and "opportunity". It's all in the perspective. (I can comfortably and smugly say this because of my particular personality makeup, as if it was something I did when really, it's just who I am and I don't think I really made myself that way. Just playing to my strengths.) My crisis shirt has gotten a workout of late and instead of feeling overwhelmed or lost, I am calm, energized and alert.

This is part of my space this year: to acknowledge and understand these things about myself, to see how they can be used, and to stop wishing I was otherwise. This thing I must acknowledge is double-sided. It means that I can be dependable and efficient in a crisis and that people will look to me for help. This is help that I should willingly and cheerfully give. It also means that I will need to remember to reach out for my own help when the need for a wartime concigliere is past. That I will need to re-instate Robert Duvall, so to speak, because I will fall apart and tend to grow restless in peacetime.

Which one are you? Are you Tom Hagen or Vito Corleone? 

Matters of the Heart

My mom went in for a check-up earlier this week because she's had that same old nasty cold that won't go away. It's totally normal to feel dizzy and short of breath when you have a cold, right? Enough is enough, she decided, and went into the doctor to beg for the big drugs.

My mom is a strong woman. She's lived and raised her family all over the world. She survived her childhood, married young, sent her husband off to war, got him back again and spent the next forty-some-odd years working hard by his side. She's a humble, make-do sort of person. She learned way too early in life to accept whatever life throws her way and to deal with it the best she could. She buried her husband and the love of her life four and some years ago and then pulled up stakes and moved out west. At a time in life when a lot of her peers were settling into retirement - their golden years - and enjoying grandbabies and gardening, she was starting over. Suddenly single and in a new place - new friends, new work, new fears, new life. My sister and I, we live near enough to her to visit without a plane trip, but not near enough to see her every day.

She's a fiercely intelligent, independent woman and in spite of her sorrows, has made inroads into a new life here in the Pacific Northwest. It has been tough, though, for her adult children - also fiercely independent - to find a way to fit comfortably into her life. I suppose this is the way that it goes when you are suddenly all on your own roads and the Mommy-Daughter dynamic doesn't quite fit. We have all been challenged in our own unique ways over the last several years, and it would seem that the process of growing up never really ends. The bedrock of all of this, however, is mutual faith, love, and respect. These get garbled occasionally in the telling of it, in the showing, but they are there in such a way as can only exist when you know that this woman has poured her heart out over you for the whole of your life in the best ways she knew how.

The shortness of breath? The dizziness? Maybe the cold. But probably also owing to the heart abnormalities the doctor turned up in her check-up on Monday. The EKG showed some troubling issues and an echo-cardiogram is scheduled for this next Monday. My mother, the woman who has lived and made a home on three continents and countless cities, who has survived war and death and poverty and all the things that life has handed her, is scared.

I'm a mother now, too. I understand the sitting up all night with tiny bodies that are not well. I understand the urge to throw myself down in front of these small people to protect them from harm. I understand the madness that overtakes you when you feel like you must get it right, that there are lives at stake. I understand the stone that lives in my gut when I go to bed and count up all the things I have done wrong, the ways I have hurt my little people, the ways I could have done better. I understand that a mother's heart is a complicated and often treacherous place to traverse. I understand that my own mother has done these things for me all my life and that no matter how I have chafed over the years at her methods, they have come from the same wild, instinctual place as my own love for my children.

It is my turn. I am leaving tomorrow to go to my mother. She is the one who needs me now by her side, to be strong for her, to hold her hand, to help her through this scary place. She needs someone there to help her get comfortable, get rested, get organized, to be in charge. I think of the times when I've been really sick over the years, just wanting my Mama to make it better. I fill that role with my own two now and realize that the Mama is there "making it better" while she cowers inside with fear and uncertainty, putting on a brave face for the people who need her most. I have asked my mom to put aside her brave face and let me walk through this with her. Whatever struggles we have in relating to each other as adults, of this one thing I am certain: she has given me her heart over and over again my whole life and I am adult enough to give some of it back when she needs it.

I will be gone for the next week, taking care of matters of the heart. If you are of a mind to, please pray for both of our hearts. They work hard and are sometimes so fragile.