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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Spring Back

Posted September 07, 2007
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I'm so tired that I feel like my face is going to fall off so, naturally, I visit my gynecologist to try and get diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I point to my left side, which has been hurting, and she pulls a sympathetic frown. When she wants to know what kind of pain, I have to think for a second before I say, "A kind of dullish psychosomatic ache. Unless I'm lying down, and then it really kind of actually hurts." She laughs, which is one of the many reasons I love her. "The left side like that -- it's usually bowel stuff," she says, and when I say, "Like irritable bowel syndrome?" she shrugs. "More like gas," she says -- and I blush to imagine that I might inadvertently pass some right there in her office. "But hey, let's run the blood work and put the cancer issue to rest if it's something you're really thinking about." It's something I'm really thinking about.

And what do you know -- I'm so busy also thinking about lying down on the floor of my office and letting my face fall finally all the way off, thinking about the song I'd like sung at the memorial (Kris Delmhorst's "Sea Fever," so please start learning the guitar chords), so busy wondering if I should designate someone in advance to help Michael with the children's hair, that it doesn't occur to me that I might be coming up short in the iron department. Which is what I find out. So I buy an herbal iron tonic from the natural foods store, and I swig it from the bottle like a cross between Popeye and an anemic wino. It is so punishing and metallic that I'm shocked when it does not swell me immediately with energy.

Perhaps I do not gracefully navigate the change of season. I was weird in the fall, and I seem to be weird again. Weirder than usual. Almost every conversation ends with me shaking my head and saying, "Oh no. No. That's not actually what I meant." I feel like I'm speaking through a computer translation program that is on the "scramble" setting. The "thicken" setting. The "jerk" setting. "I'm sorry," I keep saying, and everyone keeps saying, "What are you talking about? You're fine." Which makes me feel even weirder. I seem to laugh at the wrong times and also, by accident, to laugh scone crumbs onto your jacket, which I then brush off with my hand, which makes it appear that I'm groping your boobs, laughing. Is this a symptom of iron deficiency? Googling, I can find "weakness" and "malaise" but not "generalized peculiarness" or "inappropriate hilarity."

Can anyone keep track of their feelings in this crazy season? The evening before it snows another foot and a half, we actually eat dinner at our picnic table outside: a smugly happy, blue twilight affair that starts, bizarrely, with the kids in T-shirts even though their feet are crunching snow beneath us, and ends, bizarrely, with everyone in fleeces and vests, freezing over our tapioca while we spot the first of the mosquitoes.

We sleep with the windows cracked open, and the children wake with cold, pink faces, with cold arms and legs -- when they wake at all, that is, since the morning mist and the time change conspire against it. They sleep the sleep of submarines, sunk in the deep dark far beneath the morning. When you try to wake them -- hauling them into your lap like dead weights and kissing their chilled cheeks -- they will eventually send up a little periscope of wakefulness, a wrinkled brow or a grimace. They will float up, up, up through the murky depths and then their eyes will finally split open to fix on your face.

To fix on my face, I guess, because I'm talking about my children here. I'm talking about the privilege of holding a waking child in my lap. Because even though we're going to forget to put the hula hoop in the car for Share Day, and there's no peanut butter and also no yogurt, and we will be rushed and missing a brown mitten and there's a foot of snow on the car and I will say to you in the school parking lot, "Did you get your hair cut? It looks great." and you will say, "Yeah, like a month ago." -- well, there's right now: a child's open eyes and me, this beautiful child's actual mother, strong and able and speaking the first, right words of my day: "Good morning, my love."

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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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