A Weekend With Extra Syrup

We kicked off the long weekend with Graeter’s ice cream for our girl and a bottle of Luzon Verde for us. {It’s a really good but cheap organic red wine that has the loveliest label I’ve ever seen. I’ll have to photograph it of course.} At night, after the house is quiet, we’ve been watching Thirtysomething episodes  from the Season 1 DVDs that I picked up.

I never knew as a child how much I would savor, enjoy, look forward to weekends like this. I thought I would look forward to being in exciting situations, travel, cases, responsibilities. I had no idea I would be so amped about, what my daughter refers to as, “stay home days” in between when we get to just BE.

There’s a scene in Away We Go when Chris Messina’s character, Tom, talks about marriage and life with four children. He is talking to Burt and Verona, soon-to-be parents, and gives parenting advice using sugar cubes at a late-night diner to demonstrate.

The sugar cubes are to represent the couple. He adds another, smaller sugar cube to the plate to represent the addition of a child. He uses toothpicks around the cubes and a coaster for the roof to represent the house.

He says, “But what is this? Is that a home, is that a family? No, no. Course not. That’s just the raw material-the people, the walls, the furniture, your jobs, maybe a grandmother….You’ve got the basics. But that’s not a family, that’s not a home. The thing that binds it all together is this.” And with that, he pours maple syrup over the little structure.
“This is love,” he says of the syrup.
“This is your love, guys, your patience your consideration, your better selves. Man, you just have no idea how good you can be!
But you have to use all of it.”
And he empties the pitcher of syrup.
“It’s not like simple masonry where you use a little layer of mortar between between each row of bricks. With this, you have to use TONS of it. For every brick, there’s a half-ton of mortar. Mortar, syrup. It’s all the same thing.”
” It’s the glue.” He explains. “It’s all those good things you have in you -the love, the wisdom, the generosity, the selflessness, the patience. Patience at 3 a.m. when everyone is awake because Ibrahim is sick and can’t find the bathroom and just puked in Katya’s bed …and Patience when you blink and it’s 5:30 and it’s time to get up again-and you know you’re going to be tired all day, all week, all your life… You’re thinking, What happened to Greece? To swimming naked off the coast of Greece? And you have to be willing to make the family out of whatever you have.”

This time last year, on Labor Day of all things, I delivered a dead baby in our bathroom, all the while apologizing for whatever it was that I might have done wrong.  As Chris’s character explains in the movie, a few scenes later, “You just watch these babies grow and fade and you don’t know if you’re supposed to name them or bury them.” And I can’t really put it any better than that.

I haven’t written about it here before for a million reasons, the largest being that I was afraid someone would say something to my daughter, who is too young to understand. In some ways, I feel too young to understand it all myself. I don’t want pity or anything resembling it {people who have been through this will tell you that pity feels even worse in some ways, like I am a product defect or broken and I don’t want that, I promise} but I do feel the silence about it can be a bad thing for all of those people going through it in isolation. With a birth, there is usually so much celebration and a sense of belonging to community and humanity. It’s the opposite with miscarriage. You walk out into the waiting room covered in black and white photos of swollen, full bellies and try to understand what you have just seen:  dark stillness in a familiar shape on an ultrasound screen.  I remember trying very hard to not look scared for all of the women waiting there, careful not to make eye contact or cry so they wouldn’t be reminded that their fears about the fragility of it all are well-taken.

A few months later, I shuttled back and forth to the town where my Grandmother lived as she faded as well. Moments after watching her spirit leave her body, I heard a train whistle outside.  When I walked out of the hospital, the sun was shining and there was wind on my face.   I thought in that moment about how the senses are uniquely human, fleeting experiences. Gifts that will only be here for a moment. I thought about how many of my daily preoccupations have no consequences, no import, no relevance…just no damned point.

It has been a year now and I appreciate every single experience so much more than I did before. I won’t say it has been easy. My husband says it’s like that Peter Bjorn lyric, “I laugh more often now. I cry more often now. I am more me.” I love that.  I try every day, even on these dark anniversaries, to embrace and appreciate the family that I have, instead of  being sad about what I don’t.  All that is left in the end for any of us is the syrup. And we have to use all of it.

Lots and lots of syrup.

**this essay was written while listening to Imogen Heap’s Last Train Home from her brilliant album Ellipse. Click here for a listen.