I am not the praying kind, but you can hear me occasionally mumbling to the universe in general, sometimes begging, sometimes announcing gratitude. Last week I could not help but whisper to the trees around me, ” I am so, so grateful.”
It was on a hike with my son in the Robert Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, located in the Oakland Hills of the East Bay region of San Francisco. A skyline path around the rim of the volcano offers breathtaking views. A bit later you descend into a forest with ancient redwood trees, brooks meandering, occasionally forming small pools. Monarch butterflies flit around, in January! Eventually you climb back up, a steep, steep ascent through stands of eucalyptus trees, those best smelling of all invasive plants.
I could not help but think back to another time when we walked under eucalyptus trees in a park not far from the current one. Walk is a generous word – my son moved forwards on crutches with superhuman determination to get back on his feet. Finally out of a wheelchair after a catastrophic paragliding accident on the cliffs of the Pacific, multiple surgeries for broken back and other shattered bones behind him, he was set on regaining his mobility. Then, we lasted for probably 20 minutes, my silent prayer, “Let him walk pain free again.”
Now, we hiked for almost 2 hours, the only thing confining the length of the hike or slowing his step being his huffing and puffing mother.
There are temptations that parents face when confronting a suffering child: (false) promises of improvement (when you have no clue if, or when, or how complete healing might happen) and comparisons to one’s own list of life’s disaster and ways of overcoming them. Either one might make you feel better, but betray and/or burden the child. I don’t know if or how much I yielded to those temptations 6 years back. The months spent with him during recovery are a blur for the most part, hard memories tentative and quickly pushed away when reemerging. But I do know that I tried not to yield.
I was surprised when I came across the poem below, by a poet whose intellect, politics and endurance I admire. It features a mother squarely beseeching, no, scolding her son not to take the easy way out, given that she herself is persisting in her struggles. Here was a parent not shy to admonish, to lay out her exertions as a demand that they would not be in vain.
Likely these lines should not be read as announcing a debt (worst kind of parenting), but read as a model (hopeful kind of parenting.) Not as an obligation, but as a desire to convey strength.
Life will hold other challenges for our children, and maybe one day I will not bet able to shut my mouth and instead utter the last line of Hughes’ poem not exactly under my breath. “And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”
It will come from love, though, and the unending desire to protect your own from harm. However many times I have seen this young phoenix rising from the ashes, I still have written in my heart: “Don’t you fall now.”
A prayer, not a demand.
Mother to Son
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
Here’s the music….