Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Bleeding Heart

Posted June 09, 2008
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Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.

Birdy and I are out in the backyard, squatting down to admire the wildflowers. The faint breeze makes it feel as though the earth itself is exhaling, breathing out the perfume of violets and lilies of the valley. Birdy touches a stem of tiny white bells with one finger. She is in pants and no shirt, wind-swept and pink-cheeked and framed by the dazzling green of the newborn world, and I cannot take my eyes off of her. I feel like I'm turning the pages of a beautiful old picture book. I'm willing time to stand still even as the downy shelf of clouds scuds past overhead to remind me that it won't.

"How was there ever a first seed to plant?" Now Birdy's studying the bleeding hearts, and her eyebrows are so pulled together that she looks like a caricature of bafflement. "Chicken and the egg," I say, unhelpfully, and she stands up to look at me, asks, "What?"

These are the moments I envy parents who have God in their repertoire of answers. I can see how right and good it would feel to respond with that kind of peaceful and passionate certainty. Then again, I do believe in nature itself. I look at the leafing trees and the sprouting kids and I see its creative force at work - a force that is mostly scientific, but only mostly. Out towards its edges, nature blurs into magic.

What do you believe? What do you believe in?

For instance, I believe that Ben is a reincarnation of Tiny - the cat who died while I was pregnant with him. Okay, I don't exactly think this in my mind, my rational mind that is springy as a trampoline of logic, bouncing out any rogue superstitions that try to come tumbling in. But how else to explain the way that Ben's hair has the exact same intoxicating smell of corn chips and spit as Tiny's fur? Or the way he runs to the window at the clang of the garbage truck - without the trembling whiskers, true, but with the same rubbishy enthusiasm? How else to explain the lazy, loving way he tips his chin up for a tickle? Or the way I feel, waking with the fragrant weight of him next to me?

While I'm confessing to my irregular ideas, let me say that every single time I have ever said, "Wow - the kids haven't barfed in ages!" somebody barfs. What is that about? I even stop myself from saying it, for months on end, just biting my lucky tongue. But then, just this week, I couldn't resist. "Honey," I said to Michael. "Has it been over three years since Ben threw up?" And then the very next morning he woke with an upset stomach - or a stomach that was more deeply disturbed than merely upset - and promptly expelled its malingering contents into a bucket. (Yay for older kids not vomiting all over themselves! Birdy complained, indignant, "I put my head right near the bucket, and the smell of Benny's barf made me gag!") Did I jinx him? Or was he starting to get sick, and something about the way he looked triggered in me the mention of barfing? I don't know.

And I don't know if my practice of gratitude actually keeps the children safe, but that's how I feel: that my daily thankfulness creates layers and layers of a kind of protective lacquer over these people I love beyond reason. It is beyond reason, all of it, isn't it? Beloved children die every day, and it's not because their parents weren't grateful enough, that much I understand. I force myself to look at photographs of the grieving parents in China: it's a moral imperative, on the one hand, to bear witness to the pain of others; and it's a fear, on the other, that to turn away is an insult to grace.

Have you ever looked at a bleeding heart? Each perfectly pink, perfectly white-tipped perfect heart hangs, in perfectly graduated order, from a perfectly arced perfectly green stem. If Calder had ever worked with a jeweler to create his mobiles, this is what they would have come up with, except that a person would never attempt something so surreally exquisite. I'm looking from the perfect pink flower to the perfect pink-cheeked girl, and I say, "Flowers are pretty so that the bees will come to them - that's what pollinates them. But the first seed? Sometimes nature is a kind of magic, and that's the way plants started." And Birdy nods in her sober way: as far as she's concerned, this is a perfectly rational explanation.

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Bleeding Heart

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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