Bergen Rose

Yesterday I cried all day. Some chemical concoction in my brain/body resulted in a lot of WAH. Just ask Andy. I was so fuckin sad that the boys were not near me. Later that evening, over paella with friends whose two kids were at sleepovers (the couple was happily alone at home), Andy said to me, “You look tired.” “Yeah,” I replied, “crying all day is hard work.” “Crying?” my friend, Andrea, looked at me. “About what?” “Just that I don’t see my babies three days a week.” “I’d cry too,” said Andrea, looking into my eyes. And she wasn’t just trying to make me feel better. No matter how much we complain, it just feels better, more right, when we’re with our kids.

Lots of people joke that my situation is ideal. We can all use a break from our kids. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” my friend Cate asked me today (she’s known me for 27 years). “More time to yourself?” “Yeah,” I replied. “But not three days a week!”

Anyway, I think there’s gotta be some hormones involved that get out of whack when I’m not with the kids.

Because, even though I often enjoy myself, on a deep, subtle, cellular level, the separation torments me. Sometimes I don’t feel it so bad. But, yesterday, lying face down on my yoga mat, weeping, the pain was intense. And, hey, sisters, we all know what them out-of-whack chemicals can do to one’s mascara.

So, what do I do when I’m not with the boys?

Here’s a list I made a few weeks ago:
Cry
Work, feel good
Play, feel guilty
Feel guilty, cry
Cry, make love, laugh, feel good
Feel good, feel guilty
Cry
Resolve to move forward
Move forward, feel good
Feel good, feel guilty
Feel guilty, cry
Repeat, ad nauseum
Write
Write, become stronger
Feel good
Become productive
Become happy
Become confident
Love them with I’m with them
And also when I’m not.

It’s grief I experience, pure and simple, something you can’t control or predict. At best, I’m starting to manage it. Gotta make the best of it, don’t I? I mean -- I had an ancestor who wrote poetry in the Gulag.

Bernhard Bergen was my grandmother Katharina’s brother. A robust and likeable fellow by all accounts, he survived being impaled by a pitchfork during a friendly lunch hour wrestling match on the farm. He trained as a Mennonite minister in Germany in the 1920’s, which gave him many strikes in Stalin’s eyes: he was German speaking, he was religious, and he came from a landowner class.

The Mennonites’ bucolic way of life came to an end during the Russian Revolution. Many Mennonites, like my grandmother Katharina and her husband Johannes, were lucky to get out before Stalin clamped down. They came to Canada in 1925 and raised ten children here, first in southern Manitoba during the Depression, and then in southern Ontario. That’s where my mom, Susanna, met Peter, my father. My dad, also a Mennonite, came to Canada from the Ukraine after World War Two. My dad was eight when he and his family walked from the Ukraine to Germany, following the retreating German army (some of the millions of Displaced People after that war, or DP’s as they were derogatively called when they got to Canada).

When they arrived in Germany, my great-grandmother Margarethe heard that they had landed in the Soviet-occupied sector and insisted that her clan move to the American sector. They did and my dad was able to come to Canada, which he lovingly called the Promised Land, whereas his cousin, who’d made the same trek but didn’t leave the Soviet-occupied sector at that crucial time, was exiled to a remote, inhospitable part of Russia.

Both men fathered six children. In the mid-80s, my dad and his cousin met in Canada, and shared their life stories. My dad cried when he told me of his cousin’s struggles for survival. My dad was so thankful he’d made it all the way to Kanada. Me too. Thanks to the hardy matriarch who insisted they couldn’t stop until they were safe, though they were sick, starving, exhausted, and entirely vulnerable.

In 1937, Bernhard Bergen, my mother’s uncle was exiled to Orenburg, an early outpost of the Gulag system of prison camps, located southeast of Moscow near what is now Kazakhstan. He was one of 1,245,000 people sentenced in the early 30’s during what has been called The Great Terror. 55,000 German Russians, like Bernhard, died. 20,000 were sent to prison camps in Siberia called Gulags.

There were three kinds of work camps: one was prison, another was hard labour, the third was “mere exile.” Bernhard was likely exiled, sent to a remote, inhospitable place and forced to exist while being engaged in infrastructure construction for the Soviet government. These exiles had to find food, and survived by planting and harvesting and preserving what they could. On June 20, 1937, Bernhard wrote that he got 4.5 kg of flour. “Had the 356th place in line,” he wrote. “Yesterday there were 1300 of us waiting.” The next day, he reported, spirits were high in the camp.

In February of that same year, Bernhard wrote about his children. “Today everything is particularly difficult and trying,” he wrote. “When will the day come that I get a letter from my children? Who can explain such silence?” He suffered separation from his children in a much different context than I do. He didn’t know where they were or what became of them.

I know where the boys are at all times, and that their father is taking good care of them. Last week Secundo had infections in both his ears. Steph and I communicated about the little guy every day. Primo’s favourite Floppy (a bunny on a leash) moves from house to house, we track them together. And, hey, I’m writing chick lit when I’m not crying, or making love.

Bernhard Bergen wrote this poem in the summer of 1937, in a Gulag in Orenburgsche Kreis, 1,478 km southeast of Moscow, very close to the border of modern-day Kazakhstan.

Rose,
You, rose, that I spy,
you remind me of good times
when I swam in the goodness of life
without all this heavy suffering.

Now that time is past.My rose blooms no more.
My days have become dreary.
I feel that heated thorn severely.

In truth, the time of blooming passes quickly –
you don’t worry,
you bloom full of goodness.
The time of thorns passes quickly too.

The rose guards its thorns wisely.
A person walking by has only to see the rose and pluck it.
Understandably, the thorn, of course,
pricks him right there on the path.

So, I’ve come upon
this path of real, naked truth.
Enthusiasm gone,
as all my hopes for this life.

Still, a quiet, true faith in roses
-- which do bloom in summer --
(though someone who hopes for
flowers in winter might lose faith)
keeps me alive.

So bloom, rose, and bloom again.
Through the change and chaos of this time.
You provide the inspiration for my songs,
you speak to me in struggle and suffering.

And bloom also for my children.
Guard your thorns, too.
Bloom, bloom, be beautiful
until everything, finally, calms down.

Bergen Rose is the name I planned to give Primo, if he was a girl.

Sun Today

Sun today. And rain. That makes rainbows.

Hmm, kind of like life. Kind of amazing that we can handle it all. Sometimes it seems too much. That’s why I’m not doing extreme yoga right now: I’ve pulled back from the edge. I’m really happy in the valley these days, or on the top of small mountains, the kind we have in Victoria.

Secundo is home sick today. He had a fever last night, and some kind of bilious oral eruption. After he heaved a pile of bubbly bitter mess into my hand at midnight, he sat back and looked at it. “Puke,” I said. “Vomit. Spit up.” Ever the mother, always teaching.

Which is an epiphany for me. Last week I had lunch with a friend who started her current career trajectory at the age of 40. Before becoming a nurse, she was a lighthouse keeper, circumnavigated Vancouver Island in a kayak, was MEC’s first seamstress. Thirteen years after taking her first course at a community college, she’s teaching Nursing at UVic. “Why don’t you go back to university, get your Bachelor of Education, and teach kids,” she suggested. “Age and gender are not an issue in this career, experience counts for something when teaching,” she pointed out. “And best of all,” she paused, and laughed. “You love kids. You can’t fake that.”

For about thirty seconds I remained cold, the no’s came first: I can’t be confined to a classroom, they’d never hire me at this age, Teenagers, ugh. And then my toes got warm, and heat moved upward through my whole body: I do love kids. I mean, I respect them, individually. I remember being a kid. I’ve never really grown up – I’m working at it... I have many skills and passions to bring them -- French, music, yoga, writing. I loved school when I was a kid, excelled at it. I loved my teachers. Many of them impacted me in life changing ways. Wow. Even the thought of going back to university excites me.

So, I begin the process of application.

This doesn’t mean I don’t write the books that are currently being conceived. It means I do it all. At a pace that allows me to mother, and to be a human being. And, best of all, to work toward a career that will reward me with credentials, recognition, admittedly, full days, and also a salary that reflects the intelligent, dedicated, compassionate person I have become.

Love Heels: Synopsis

In a classic wellies-to-wedges tale, Izzie Padma Smith leaves her rubber boots behind to follow her husband to the big city from Morgenstern Island where she was a successful lighthouse keeper and farmhand. When her marriage fails and Izzie is forced to redefine herself, she discovers the pleasure of wearing heels and finds Mr. Right!

Wisdom

“Are we just puppets?” Primo asks at Swartz Bay. Not quite 7 am, we're headed to the Rockies, and he’s asking the deep questions. “Did someone make us?”

“What do you think?” I ask. He says he feels like a puppet.

“How about the hand?” I ask. “Are you the hand too?” He considers this.

Not every utterance is profound. “Die-a-rhee-a,” Secundo chants, as I wash my hands after a particular messy round. “Die-a-ree-ah!” Primo chimes in. And then the chorus: “Poo poo bum bum, die-a-ree-ah!” I roll my eyes.

Near Golden we encounter a colossal construction site beneath an enormous bridge. “Diggah, mama?” Secundo asks before he falls asleep for his midday nap.

“Poor guy,” Primo says, as his brother snoozes through 20 km of construction.

“Dumpa?” is the first word out of Secundo’s mouth when he wakes up. “Menna?” And his dreams come true as we observe dump trucks and concrete mixers in action.

Just for something to do near Revelstoke I explain conception to Primo. “There’s one egg,” I say, “and a million sperm. And the sperm race each other to see which one can get to the egg first. And when it touches the egg, the baby starts.”

Primo absorbs that info. He’s quiet for a while, and then he says trimuphantly, “So I won!”

I laugh at his perceptive assessment.

“And you won,” he adds. “And Secundo, and Andy, and Steph.”

With that perspective, we’re all winners, simply because we are. Something my mom’s been telling me for years.

Saturday Morning

I wake just after 6. (I woke up early even before kids.) The kitten -- Little Black -- purrs and her whiskers tickle my face. I reach my hands out of the warmth of my blankets and touch her face. I slept alone last night. "Why don't you sleep in the boys' room," Andy suggested to me on the phone last night from Canmore where he's gone to climb ice. So I slept on the double bed we set up for them when it became clear that their bunk beds weren't working yet (we ended up on the floor in a pile on a futon every night). I had good dreams, warm dreams of Andy.

As it is the first official full day of my writing retreat I immediately went to ... the kitchen and emptied the dishwasher. Then I folded and sorted laundry and cast about for many other household tasks which seemed extremely pressing. The house is tidy, the floors so clean you can invite your mother-in-law to eat off them.

And here it is: 7 am, and I'm sitting at my desk. The sky is clear, a pale lime green at the horizon and clear, faded denim blue at the top. A few people are up, every now and then a car passes by on Cedar Hill Cross. Little Black swats my ass at the back of the chair as she dashes by. I turn to find her looking at me, whiskers bristling. As I reach for her she flips around and runs down the dark hallway, her white paws flashing. She's a black cat held by the scruff of her neck and dipped in white paint. She thunders about on her delicate feet. I'm glad she's not squished on the road.

Words from a cousin inspire me this morning. "I have no idea how I could cope to not be with my sons every day," she writes. "They become such a huge part of our soul. I so wish that you did not have to have any days or nights without your boys, but the fact that you are willing to do a 60/40 split with Steph right now just shows how much you love them and put them first in your life even though it hurts so deeply."

Tears, of course. And the coffee's ready. I sip, sit down to write. Feel hope rise with the sun. The kitten tilts her water bowl up and laps water from the far side. We all do things our own way. We can't really help it.

Thank you for following along. It makes a difference to receive your love, your words of encouragement, your support. It means, dear cousin in Calgary, that this morning I can sit my butt in this chair, watch the screen through my tears, and keep my fingers nimble as words spill out over the keyboard. It means that I can allow the story to come through me, through the density of my bones and blood. Despite the sadness in my soul, I feel joy and peace and the great equanimity that accepts everything as it is.

"You are doing your absolute best to cherish every moment and experience that you share with your children, and you are writing about these treasured moments which will be such a gift to look back on as they grow older."

OK, here I go.

It would have been a clean kill. A blow to the head with a cast iron frying pan. A little blood and brains with the scrambled eggs. Or maybe an overdose of ativan in his artichokes. Oh, shit, he hated artichokes. Had all these particular tastes. Had to put this with that, and these with those. That’s what you know about your lover after ten years. Every last little detail. How he spits out his toothpaste. Where he scratches first in the morning. All the pauses and twitches. The most vulnerable spots. The spots where it hurts the most when you push hard. Which is what you start looking for when one of you falls out of love without the other’s consent.

Friday night, sleepy time?

We've entered the dark season. One of my favourite times of the year.

Andy laughs when I say that. "You love them all," he teases me.

Secundo doesn't know if it's time to get up or time to go to sleep. "Wate up?" he asked just before 6 this morning? And then, not quite 6 pm, he cocked his head at me and asked, "Sleepy time?"

"Just dark," I said."

We ate mashed potatoes and had pancakes for dessert. Secundo came up with the postres. Rooting around in the frig, he found the last egg and suggested, "Pan-tates."

After syrup Primo lay on the pink loveseat in the living room in his pj's and asked me to massage his feet. "More tickly, mama," he requested.

Then Steph came to pick them up for the weekend.

"Go home?" Secundo asked me when Steph arrived. I nodded. He ran to get his coat, placed it down on the floor in front of him, stuck his arms in the armholes, flipped it over his head, and voila, he was ready to go!

I kissed the boys good bye and fought tears for a few minutes. I always feel a pull into the quicksand of grief, failure, loss when they leave. But my brother Joe, with inimitable timing, called to remind me that this is the first day of my weekend of writing! I am writing a novel, did you know?

Then I sat down at the computer. And wrote the first line. Two, actually. Here they are.

If I had killed him when I wanted to, would I have any chance at true happiness? Say I’d done my time and was found to be rehabilitated, what would it take to put this behind me? Was I ever going to wake up in the morning to hear birds chirping and feel the sun of hope rise inside me?

OK, that was three. Hey, I'm a writer.

Stay tuned!