Jun
28
I am coming off one of the very best weeks I’ve had this year. Each weekday I was volunteering with a day camp, another lovely service provided by the kids’ grief org I’ve been working with. This was an arts and story camp, focused on all kinds of different art styles with the main activity of creating a little book. The book could be about anything — fiction, non-fiction, something that was related to the person they lost, or not. The pages were regular 8.5 x 11” art papers and could be filled with whatever they chose. Words, pictures, painting, collage.
We had five campers, all girls between the ages of 11 and 13, and I would love to describe them in great affectionate detail but of course I need to be extremely careful about their privacy so I won’t, but in general terms each of them was so unique from the other and I adored them all.
They were at such a delicate age of growing up — something about middle school girls makes me think of the milky stems at the bottom of a blade of grass. Those coltish legs. Grown-up features starting to emerge from the softness of childhood. Bracelets, fingernail polish, hairbands; I’m delighted by it all. I was a boy mom and I was also a middle school girl, there is both an exoticness and a familiarity to this sort of company.
Every morning we started off with a short group ceremony of sorts, sharing something about the people we have lost. I mostly talk about my grandparents and my uncle in this setting, long-ago deaths that aren’t as fresh and impactful as what these kids are dealing with. This is actually something I struggle with a bit, the fact that my experience with death is not like theirs. But no one ever gives me the feeling that this is less relatable or that I can’t understand. And I do think this work has led me to both access old grief that I am not sure I properly processed at the time, and the newer grief of family loss through divorce (which I don’t share about when we are talking about death because it is of course not the same, but I think about it often).
Afterwards we would spend a couple hours working on our books, or just making whatever art sounded appealing. There were two rooms to move between as we chose, and the rhythm usually settled into focused activity with lots of conversation happening between kids and volunteers. We talked about movies, TV shows, cartoons we all loved, favorite foods, school bullies, worst and best teachers, family adventures, all sorts of things. Sometimes one of the program leads would play music from their phone and at one point someone requested Justin Bieber’s “Baby” and every single kid sang along! I wished I knew it so I could sing too.
Then there was snack time and playing outside with a giant Connect Four game and oversized Jenga blocks and buckets of colored chalk and bracelet-making materials and a contraption with two big handles and a rope that could be dipped into bubble solution and used to produce the hugest bubbles I’ve ever seen, then it was lunch, and then the afternoon usually whipped right by and we ended it with a yoga teacher who came every day and we did gentle yoga outside under the trees.
The idea of a children’s grief camp sounds pretty depressing on the surface, doesn’t it? Or like it would just be so incredibly hard. The truth is that most of the time these gatherings, whether it’s a support group or day camp or the late summer overnight camp, are pretty special. You’ve got kids in this rarified environment that is not school or being at home, where they are with other kids who are going through the same thing they are, and while they are asked to be in touch with tough feelings there is so much play and care and support. Sometimes these are the times when they have the most focused attention and support, because of home situations.
Of course sometimes things ARE sad, and it’s often in a quietly devastating sort of way before things move right on, because that’s how kids work. I was talking to one girl who said she had forgotten how to ride her bike, and I made some light joke about how she probably hadn’t – isn’t that the one thing they say we never forget? And she said well my dad died on a bike. Ah, I said, I’m sorry, I understand that then. We just kept coloring and pretty soon we were laughing about Would You Rathers.
I liked everything about this week including the surprisingly peaceful, therapeutic process of making art. Was my art amazing? No. Did it matter, also no. I took an online workshop a while back and the artist who led it said something that stuck with me: “All mark making is healing.”
Yesterday I hauled out the few art supplies I have and sat myself down on the floor with some paper and told myself to just make stuff for the length of an album. I doodled, colored, painted a bit with an old makeup brush, continually shooed away the pets, and oh gosh, it felt good.
I hope I can keep that going. What a gift that would be to embrace from a week that already gave me so much.
Jun
21
For my mammogram appointment yesterday I started things off strong by parking in the wrong building. Not a super big deal except I am less familiar with this parking garage and thus spent some time wandering a backrooms-esque structure 1) when I arrived while looking for the entrance, and 2) when I left, having misplaced my car’s location entirely.
When I got to the imaging center I was checked in by a very young man who was friendly but a little awkward/nervous-seeming and when he walked me in I briefly thought that it would be him doing the scanning and we would surely both perish of embarrassment. But no, I just had to wait in an interior area for a minute before a female tech came and got me.
I could swear the last time I had one there was a little curtain for changing and I wore some sort of open gown situation on my upper half, but this time there was a chair to put my stuff on and that was it! Just strip to the waist and stand by the machine. That certainly felt vulnerable but it did expedite the process because we got down to business right away.
If you haven’t had a mammogram the idea is to get your breast tissue allllll the way onto this flat surface and then a clear lid of sorts gets hand-cranked down until your boob takes on a shape you have never seen it in before. Think flapjack. Meanwhile you get micro-adjusted by the technician until your body is in the right position where it kind of feels like you’re in a weirdly intimate slow-dance with this giant machine and then you have to hold your breath briefly and it does its thing and then you do the other breast, and then the machine tilts carnival-ride-style into a new angle and you do it all over again.
The tech was efficient and easy to chat with and she said it was much more difficult when there’s not much to grab onto, and that her team had agreed that the right tool for the job would be a spatula, but “you know…a medical type of spatula. People feel weird enough without someone using a kitchen tool.”
Now I personally think it would be funny/delightful if imaging centers had a bunch of OXO Good Grips spatulas that were perhaps staff-decorated with festive ribbons and stickers and those were set aside for the A-cup crowd, but sadly I was not brought in as a medical device consultant. (Which is too bad because surely it is beyond past time for fresh ideas regarding cold metal speculums.)
The upside of having this appointment on a sunny Saturday afternoon was that very few people were around, which lent a peaceful feeling to the overall hospital environment and thankfully no one to observe me bumbling confusedly back and forth like Pulp Fiction John Travolta trying to find my goddamned car afterwards.
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