31/21: Thankful Tuesday: 'Tis People, 'Tis People

This is Tuesday, so I am joining in the Thankful Tuesday party over at Micha Boyett’s blog, Mama: Monk . These thankful Tuesdays are the just the kind of weekly discipline I sometimes need to shake me out of the cave I occasionally hole myself up in. Like the discipline of meditation, the discipline of being thoughtfully thankful has its own sweet blooming, no matter what you plant or subsequently feed it. So , having emerged from under the dark duvet and having secured the flyable items that are potential storm projectiles, I am sitting down here to focus on the graces and blessings that I think I missed being thankful for this last week. Mea culpa. Alleluia. We are indeed an Easter people!

And I am grateful especially for:

• Our local Down syndrome association, which hosts the most amazing annual general meeting and dinner dance where everyone is full fed (for free, both cash and gluten) and loudly served the hottest dance music that keeps everyone—from the tinnies to the grandparents—dancing. 

• The fulsome tribe of DS mamas and their wry edgy humour and bear-like love of their babies, even when they are babies no more and are exploring where their raging hormones are leading them. These mamas who laugh and share and snark and gently correct the clan of adolescents at the table, while nodding vigorously in recognition at some tale of poor or sketchy mothering. Who, in nodding, give new breath and energy to the going forward, to trying new strategies, and most importantly to laughing at our own foibles.

• Parents of the young dancers taking Kids Propeller dance who come to Jessie’s defense when she arrives late and we complain, a bit, just a bit, about her lack of responsibility. They all, each and every one of them, share small stories, bits of her teaching that we never get to see or hear about, that demonstrate her care and growth in that role. The ways their children relate to and love Jessie. The ways that she encourages this care. May all adolescents have such defenders and fans as they separate from their parents. 

• My friend CG, who drags me out to small town Ontario to eat pulled pork in Irish pubs and sit in old leather-backed movie theatre chairs in a small theatre with an even smaller audience to listen to the compelling and richly plaintive voice of Lyn Miles singing sad coal mining and forlorn love songs. My friend who drives through rain with me and listens to me rant and whine and is still game for a conversation about God and churches and Greek philosophers and vegetarian cuisine. Who will read my blog and email me offering home and hearth and a place to work while the workers work on our house, complete with delicious dinner, including dessert and maybe even candlelight if the power goes out. Who also throws in reassurance that my daughter will in fact be fine, will live a good life, and we will get to see that sooner than we think . . . and so she offers me comfort in all the broken bits and places that need a bit of tenderness. So I am immensely grateful for my tenderizing friend, CG.

That, I realize, is a lot to be grateful for, and more than reason enough to crawl out from under the duvet. So. What are you thankful for?  

31/21: Bittersweet

Yesterday’s Retro Jessie postwas bittersweet. In typing it up again (the whole series was done on a different and incompatible computer system), the irony of re-posting a letting go piece from 1996 just when we are struggling with that same process right now, left me deflated and somewhat depressed. Perhaps, if it weren’t so close to Halloween or the days were lengthening instead of taking on those long November shadows, the reposting would make me laugh, or just refocus me on the love part.

Instead, my sadness was fed by a Sunday morning sermon on Job and a car full of CDs by women singer-songwriters with dark and love-lost stories of loneliness and aging regrets.  I came home, went to bed, and pulled the covers up over my head. I let my family fend for themselves (I think this made them happy) and in my head argued that I was regenerating positive energy. Or not. Whatever.

Let us just say that there are points in the transition years where I have no idea whatsoever about what we are doing or where we are going. While there is the Jessie-defined North Star—a clear and welcoming vision of a bright and loving future—the getting there is a very bumpy ride with many detours and sinkholes and one-lane reductions. I am very slow at learning what I am supposed to be learning (and obviously have not learned it yet). I know it has to do with letting go, and letting go again, but I also know, because it is Jessie, it has to do with support, and that particular mix for an adult achieving independence is a particularly tricky concoction. 

Oh I wish we still had that Harry Potter potion maker that Jessie got one Christmas, and that in addition to elixirs of life, polyjuice potions, and veritaserums, there was a nicely package potion for parenting into adulthood. But, alas, we sold it at the last garage sale and I am not sure we had any potions left.   

At heart, this transition bit makes me see just how much I struggle with loving and letting go. And I read about other families going through a similar process and find them all so much more, well, positive. And energetic. And loving. And witty! Oh I long to write about this period with wit and humour and good grace. But mostly I just yell. Or answer cell phone requests for redirections after getting on the wrong bus. Or drive to pick up said lost traveller.  

So, for today, I will not detail the yelling Saturday morning we had trying to let natural consequences reign, but will leave you with the only photo we managed to take at the previous evening’s Down Syndrome Association’s annual  general meeting—which is a wonderfully attended dinner dance (free for members!) for families and friends of all ages. 

Jessie and drummer boy sat at a table of more than nine young people their age, and we had to drag them away at the end of the evening. It was a Halloween theme; I can’t remember exactly what drummer boy and Jessie were, except that there was some underlying punk theme. I will post another time about having to read the riot act about dirty dancing at a family dance.