Heavy

My dog, Ernie, is lying on the shiny saltillo tile floor, limbs splayed in front of him, I open my eyes and see him looking at me. I am lying on my shiny red  couch in the middle of the afternoon. If I move just a little tiny bit, I can feel the coolness of the leather before it warms from my body. My eyes feel as heavy as Ernie looks. I just want to be here, on my couch, all day. He sticks his tongue out and licks the floor. I do not. I’ve read and I’ve napped. I keep planning how I can feel productive today. I’ve got lots of ideas.

It is super windy outside, the air is laden with smoke. Two fires in Arizona, one in New Mexico, one in Colorado and it feels as if it is all collecting here in our valley – between mountains. It’s unpleasant. A day that I would rather skip. But it seems to continue. And continue.

  

There is a darker side to the joyful side of Midwifery. And I truly accept it. And I sure do feel it.

He Did It!!

Falko did it! Let me tell you a little bit about my husband. I have never met someone who works as hard and as willingly as he does.  It has gotten hard sometimes. We moved to the states in 2000, he did speak English, but it was, let’s just say, passable. It was OK. He would be understood.  He had a degree in History. Not something super useful in Taos – especially without a firm feeling for the language. So he waited tables and he did construction. He put me through Midwifery School and supported the family by working so hard at jobs that were not necessarily fulfilling. He honestly didn’t complain. He really didn’t. Just a different kind of work ethic, I guess. I mean, he worked long hours. 

He had always loved medicine and had hoped to become a Doctor. He’s from East Germany – it doesn’t work like it does here. At least then, it didn’t. A long story – but he wasn’t able to study medicine. So he studied History.  

After 12 years of being here and 12 years of working through the winter on constructions sites and/or serving good German food to the skiers and hikers, he will be doing something different! 

He aced 2 and 1/2 years of prerequisites for Nursing School. Literally. I’m not really allowed to be writing about this, so I will at least keep it short. I want to brag about him though- I am BURSTING with pride for him. It’s not easy taking University classes in a foreign language. But he did – and got perfect scores in every single class for 2 and 1/2 years. And so he got in to Nursing School. We found out last night. He was working (Waiting tables.) I checked his email, compulsively – Kaya called it obsessively, every 3-4 minutes. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.

Finally at 8 ish I made myself go across the room from the computer and not look for one half hour. That’s when it came!

It’s not easy starting over in the middle of your life. 

And this he does with grace. With fun. With joy. He’s such a happy guy and I just can’t believe he’s mine. For always. I am so lucky. 

The Beginnings

Kaya’s Day!

Kaya loves to dance. There isn’t a moment I can remember these last few months – maybe years, where Kaya doesn’t twirl through the living room instead of walking.  I’m happy she has found such a passion. She loves to act and she loves to dance. I know she is dramatic. 

Today was her recital at the TCA. Madeline. Beautiful. Even more stunning was the support all of these kids had! The auditorium was jam packed with people even standing in the aisles. So much love for our kiddos! 

So wonderful to see these kids dancing their hearts out. Our row couldn’t stop laughing, chatting and pointing at all the children we knew. (Or had even been present at their birth. How did they grow up so quickly – they just slid out, bloody, vernixy, alert and curious. Now they are dancing and looking so grown-up.) 

Oh – and in a minute they will be our next generation of young adults in our town. 

I love these performances. I can see my beaming and ecstatic child and I can see all the others growing up. Marked by yearly and summer stage presence.

I’d like to introduce Kaya’s new Dance blog. She is quite the blogger these days! It’s new. (Always finding fun ways for her to explore her writing. Homeschooling!)  The blog is called Pirouette! Take a peek.

Pulling Weeds

I am sitting on my red couch, my feet slipping on our shiny tile floors. The rain is thundering down onto the roof.  Soaking the ground, creating the most magnificent smell ever. The sage, the grass, dirt from all the flower beds I have created soak the air with their scent.  It’s dripping from all the gutters. The dogs are sleeping by my feet.

I’m home alone.

My family is off in the world. Finals are over. Everyone is busy.

These days when the phone rings in the middle of the night, it may not even be for me. It could be the labor and delivery dept. at our local hospital calling for Treska. She has had the good fortune of being part of a teen internship program there. It’s a crazy world – a sort of circle. She experiences surgeries, births, c/sections. All of it. Politics.

Treska will intern and help out at the Birth Center again for a few weeks before the Summer semester of UNM begins. So happy to have her there again. So grateful for that opportunity.

And Kaya is dancing every day but Fridays and Sundays. And those days are spent twirling in our living room. Piano playing – two big recitals for her coming up. One this Saturday and one next.

 

 

And Treska has been invited to present a slide show for Pecha Kucha. It is the Remarkable Women of Taos edition. She will show 20 slides for 20 seconds each. She will be speaking of her passion for birth to a full audience. Her unrivaled enthusiasm. With photos. Next week.

So it has been busy and my mind has been full, too many thoughts and complexities I have been trying to unravel. Just working through life.  Each challenge that has come my way, I try, sometimes too desperately, to do the right thing. I am definitely motivated by a desire to resolve open questions. Make good. Feel good. Grow and model the best behavior for the girls.  I wish things rolled off me more easily. That sure would be something to teach my daughters.

The garden is good for me.  That is where I find myself in all of my free time.  Building rock-lined flower beds. Digging up the beds. Planting, replanting. Walking.

 

Weeding. Weeding and weeding. I love it. I love the mindless occupation. It’s how I fall asleep when I awake at night. I weed my mind’s garden.

 

Take me to the River!

My day started with my close friend spontaneously coming over with her baby girl. (Now 3!!) And this friend isn’t superbly spontaneous. Well, she is – I stop by her house at the drop of a hat often – and she is always welcoming, but she doesn’t get out of the house much. (Between her baby girl, goats, chickens, chores and now TURKEYS, she’s kinda, um, busy.  Oh and bees too!)

Anyhow, she called while I was still in bed. I slept super late this morning. Don’t know why. She called, I told her I would call her back in 10 minutes, Falko had just brought me some coffee. She hung up and called back 2 minutes later.

“Coffee?” she said, ” That sounds great!  Can I come over in about, let’s say, 10 minutes?”

So she did.

Lovely. Hope she does it more often!

After coffee, bagels and tea, lots of kids books that we have kept over the years, she and her sweetie left.

Falko and I went for a hike. We have access to millions of trails outside of our front door. The ground is dry and the sun was hot, but the air is still cool. It has a sharp pine smell outside, and sage too. The dirt is sandy, my feet in my chacos get dusty quickly.

We have a route that we take, but are constantly searching for the river that we know is close by. The dogs love the walk, bounding everywhere. Lizards run across the path all the time – Ernie tries to get them, but never succeeds.  They dart quickly!

Today we found the river. It is so breathtakingly beautiful, I couldn’t even contain myself. It was lush, green and wet. An acequia running next to the river – grass in between. Boulders jutting up. I can’t believe it.

Of course no one there but us.

And then we walked home. Back through a grassy field. Down a dry and dusty road. Around a gate. Through the woods…..

Up and through the piñon trees…. crunching the  pinecones.

and Home.

 

Not born in the Water

 The baby wasn’t born in the tub, but it sure was born! Another birth at the Birth Center this morning to a powerful pusher. Lots of family waiting in the waiting room, lots of talk, some snacking and patience.  I took a quick nap, sweating in the sun, when I got home. 

Falko brought me blueberries when I awoke. I ate them with whipped cream while Kaya made banana bread! I can smell it now as it sits here on the counter next to me. Warm and steamy. We will wait to cut into it. Wait until Kaya gets home from ballet. 

I actually slept a fair amount last night. I watered my gardens. Checked for sprouts! (They are a’coming!) And look forward to my AWESOME  girls getting home and an early dinner. The rest of the week is busy with a trip to Albuquerque for a Public Health conference. We are presenting. 

Then a trip to Santa Fe with Kaya. Maybe another birth.

Maybe another bouquet of flowers for a newborn baby? 

Homebirth 40 mins from town……

I waited for the phone call all morning, afternoon and evening. This was a seventh baby for this mama living on the outskirts of town. I knew she was in early labor and we always think those multip mamas are going to go quickly…they often don’t!  The girls all had plans for the day – ballet class, rehearsal for hours for the one, and a b-b-q with friends for the other. Falko and I were home alone….. oh luxury! It was wintry – surprisingly cold outside for the time of year and I didn’t work outside, didn’t plant or dig.  We made a fire. We read. We ate.

After a big dinner of salmon, boiled potatoes and asparagus I headed to bed early. I knew it would happen sometime…..

The call came at 1:30 am – I had gotten some sleep, but my bed was seriously cozy. Warm. It’s hard to leave a sleeping, cuddly husband behind. Really. I sleepily got ready.

Drove the long road to this little town.  Passed no cars. Saw about 10 deer on the side of the road this frosty night. It was dark, it was flurrying. But still there were some stars. Oh New Mexico!

It was an old single-wide trailer. Lots of cars parked out front. A pick-up truck jacked up HIGH off the ground. Tires as big as my small Subaru.

The wooden stairs leading up to the door were wobbly. I opened the door and was greeted by many smiling faces. A teenage daughter warming herself by the pellet stove. Smiling. A crocheting student a huge flat screen playing Friends.

The woman was in the back, slowly laboring. Quickly laboring, actually. I began to crochet. (I was second midwife this time….the midwife that comes in to assist and be present to stabilize. Come at the end and leave when everything is surely perfect.)

I began to crochet. The mama’s girlfriends were with her, the husband gave me a tour of his home…offered me a turkey sandwich. Offered me orange juice. So kind to be thinking of us.

Soon after she had to push. And two pushes later her baby boy in her big bathtub. With her friends, her daughter, her husband and the little birth team from the Birth Center.  She felt a bit shocked – and we were shocked at her grace, her beauty.

I went back out of the room to give this very modest woman her space and some privacy. I crocheted, drank some orange juice on the cozy couch. There was a scary series on the flat screen that I avoided at all costs. Hugs all around. Birth stories by her friends and then off to return to my cozy bed.

Still had the warm and sleeping husband, I crawled in, got spooned and went to sleep. A lovely homebirth. A lovely waterbirth.

Remember please! Details are changed to protect identities.  These birth stories are, also, not recent. They have happened within the last 12 years. 

Living close to the Mountain

 

We’ve been spending every moment we can outside. It has left some of our indoor projects a bit neglected, though. This April has been, perhaps, the best April I have ever experienced here in this temperamental high desert. Sunny, warm – Spring weather. It has been so lovely that we truly appreciate the dark and rainy days that we need so desperately. Thunderstorms have started.

 

We have amazing hikes and wilderness access from our new home. (A treat many of us here in Northern New Mexico have!)  Falko and I have been exploring like crazy. We’ve been looking for the river we know is so close – it has led us for hours. We have sage at the top of the mesa, and huge Ponderosas down deep in the arroyo. We’ve found adobe houses/cabins built in the 60s and one in the 80s – disintegrating and returning to the land from which it came.

 

And then back home again to work outside. I’ve planted cornflowers, cosmos, sunflowers, mammoth sunflowers. I planted one Asiatic lily, hardy outside, I hear.  Yesterday I bought a lilac bush and some Sweet William. Planted them all. I love watering.

I love standing there and searching for sprouts! Found them yesterday, finally, on the first bed I planted.

I planted one vegetable garden raised bed too! Kale, arugula, snow peas and spinach. Yesterday I found the neatly rowed sproutlings popping through! Relieved. I seem to always think that nothing will grow. And then it does. And even well!

Going outside now – this sunny morning to water. And search the ground for sprouts!

Love this season!

It has been all about the gardening and the beautifying of the land around our new home for me. The April weather has been incredible…. I usually dread April.  I think it is Spring and really what happens here is WIND! and MUD!

But not this year. It is warm and sunny. Not too windy. And lots of change. Again. Good. So I have been aiming to do at least one outside project a day. I’ve been concentrating on making flower beds. This entails finding and carrying rocks to make borders.  A seriously zen like activity. Carrying rocks for an hour. Back and forth, back and forth. I kinda liked it!

I have become obsessed with planting cornflowers aka bachelor buttons. They are cold hardy and we still have more than a month until our last frost. I heard, today, that we may have a hard frost to 21 on Saturday night! That is a 50 degree difference from daytime to nighttime! Wild – truly intense.

I ordered an entire pound.  They say a pound for an acre of land. I am only planting small little plots – but I will replant a bunch too, so I have enough! I can scatter away! More than enough really. Thand god for abundance!

I also bought a 1/4 lb of cosmo seed. Notice I have picked very resilient and hardy, easy to grown flowers? I am desperate to be successful.

I have planted one of our outside vegetable gardens completely: russian kale, arugula, snow peas and spinach! Nothing has sprouted yet – I just cannot wait!!! I am sick of buying greens from Cids when I know that we will be drowning in them soon. Yum!

So everyday a little more seed here, a little more there…..

A little project here and there. It’s how I roll.