REFLECTION -- FOR MY MOTHER

All the memories exist somewhere between the busy days, packed schedules, children’s lives, school, and work

The love and laughter of my own now distant childhood reside in the stolen moments of reflection

I close my eyes, turn down the hyper-speed of my mind and reflect

It is to the long, slow, easy days of summer I return

I am a teenage girl sitting with my mother on our front porch

I see us huddled together in waves of conversation and laughter on warm summer evenings

Engaged in talks of my heart’s wishes on love and life’s possibility

My constant wondering and questioning if my heart would be fulfilled, if it would remain unbroken

I can hear even now my mother’s wise countenance and certain reassurances that life will always work out

She just knew that

I sometimes doubted her, resisted her insight but wanted to believe her

I reflect now that she just knew

Not necessarily that life turned out

But that we do survive in tact, better, wiser, happier

And that laughter is the best healer

That it takes a thousand muscles to frown

And just one to smile

The wishes of the heart may need to grown up

 

Still her counsel that life works its way out is true

It has

Witness the love and the connection and coming together

To celebrate and cherish the ones we love

To cherish the Mother we love

I’m attached to the reflections of those summer evenings

As I am attached to her, my mother

And to those sacred memories shared with my mother many years ago as a hopeful young woman

When she had the wisdom to emulate resilience and innocence 

This wonderful world of memories forms me, molds me, and shapes me

As a woman who has, too, become a mother

And the best that I can wish for and dream of now

Is to offer to my children

The same wise words that life will indeed always work out

That it takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown

And trust that someday they, too, can share a similar reflection

Thank you mom for it all!

 

(I wrote this October 6, 2006 for my mom in celebration of her 70th trip around the sun)

I Am So Vulnerable and So Alive

Chicago

          Chicago streets in February can be brutally cold with a dampness that enters your bones and stays there. Clybourne Street that afternoon was quiet, practically deserted.  As I meandered along with my head and chin close to my chest to preserve some warmth, she was suddenly standing in front of my path.  She was small framed, ghastly thin even in her oversized beaten up dirty parka with a broken toothed smile.  I had the weight of tomorrow’s journey on my mind and she, her presence and need, could not be easily ignored.  My own needs and fears made me open my heart to hers.  Her request was for $30 dollars.  Her excuse was to buy medicine for her waiting babies at home.  It did not matter that this was probably a story she told herself and others like me over and over again; I was making myself completely vulnerable in a few short hours to complete strangers.  I took it as a sign that this stranger, a fellow human being one of my species, needed something.  Even if the money would be used to buy something other than Tylenol, what mattered is that I found the presence of mind to reach into my heart first to our common humanity and then my bag to hand her $30.  Her gratitude was immense and she asked for my name and address to pay me back.  I knew that would never happen nor could it, I was shipping off, leaving the Windy City for other shores.  The payback had happened the moment we crossed paths, and I decided not to ignore her.  She reminded me that I would have needs along my path, and perhaps an absolute stranger would answer one of them and reach deeply into their heart as well.  I was only 26 at the time, having spent 5 years at graduate school and my work.  I was leaving and doing so all because of a common thread that has wound its way around my life – love.

          I find myself in my mid forties reflecting back on my life, its path, its broken path, the many offshoots and side trails, the travails, the disappointments, the suffering, the common humanity experiences that have made certain moments stand out.  I am a mother.  Sometimes a real M-O-T-H-E-R!  I mother boys and they just keep getting older and bigger and lovelier and more disobedient and more opinionated and more independent and that is lovely and painful. I hate it and I welcome it.  Tired to the inner core yet reenergized when I take precious moments out for me, my being, to tap into the core of humanity, this world, this universe, my own mind.

          At their ages of 10 and 13, they tap into life in a way I never knew was available.  Of course, what generation of parents doesn’t say that about their offspring?  I began Motherhood with an intensity and passion that was borderline addictive in its quality, if not its intent.  I began to obsessive compulsively attempt to right all the wrongs and heartache I ever felt from a very early age on.  From diaper selection, to whether or not to co-sleep with my newborn, to length of time to breastfeed, to vaccinate or not, it all became a whirlwind, full of anticipation, anxiety, trepidation, absolute terror at messing up, to unfathomable joy and longing.  I wanted to help re-create my being and do that via another being.  My children would be grounded in this world in a way I never was or more accurately was never raised to be. 

          I recall the moment I received the confirmed news of my first wanted pregnancy.  I was sitting in a doctor’s office cloth gown with my legs dangling off the exam table having just peed in a cup.  Upon entry to the office for a routine annual exam, I had a hunch and big wish that I was pregnant.  My nurse midwife came in and without having to say anything, I read her smile.  I broke down and sobbed, racking, life altering sobbing.  She examined me and told me that my uterus was already the size of a small lemon.  Just think, my baby is a tiny minute collection of cells resting and floating inside of this lemon drop of a womb.  My body had manifested life inside of it.  My egg had embraced my husband’s seed and we were to be parents.  Yikes, no way, yes way.  It was all so expansive, impossible to get my racing, disjointed thoughts that quickly turned into fears around the idea.

          As I drove up to my office, there was only one person I wanted to talk with and that was my mom.  Funny, not my husband, not the future father of my babies.  My mom.  One and only. 

AN URBAN LATE NIGHT TEA

Shadow woman

Straighten your spine

Tuck under your chin

Walk on

Hold your cup of nighttime tea

Honey!

Blend into the apartment’s white wall

And your self-portrait

Your body outlined

In folds of its own shadow self

Becomes art

Reality

Heartbroken, once again.

But a good feeling washes

Over, survival

Cold and alone

Drink hot, sweet late night tea

Walk on

Into life.

 

(Written on March 6, 1991 -- alone, heartbroken, alive in Chicago)

A LOVE POEM

Let me rush in

To hold you when

You cry

When all the world

Feels like it is caving

Inward upon you

Come bring your head

Into my embrace

Cry, wipe your tears

And little runny nose

On my shirt

Know I’m here

Always waiting to hold

And hug you

And hold me, when

I cry and become

Confused and angry

Anger is a cover for

The fear and frustration

We feel

Masking our loneliness

And insecurity

Love and kindness

Are what our deeper

Spirits crave

We are at peace in

One another’s embrace

My son, even as I falter

I love you

Eternally

 

(This poem was written September 9, 2000 for Kailen)

LOSING JUICE

Tom - the greenhouse worker

Full of herbs, full of memories

You mockingly state, “A greenhouse full of germs”

Your characterization of your disease is “losing juice”

Missing words, synapses disrupted

Inside your mind’s inner realms

A retrieval system gone awry

You search for simple words, like “wall,” that most of us take for granted

Excavating to find the missing words

And I, many states away from you

Am touched by your story, your voice

I sit in my after-hours traffic

With cars passing me like they want to fly

I sit and I listen, suspended in the world of your loss and frustration

You reach for something deep inside of me

Evoked by your honesty

Losing juice, but finding hearts through the radio waves

 

 

(This was written for a total stranger Tom DiBlasio from Chantilly, VA who was interviewed by Noah Adams on "All Things Considered" and aired on

December 12, 1999)

 

 

Dear Noah Adams at NPR – "All Things Considered,"

 

Thank you for taking me on the journey of Mr. DiBlasio and his family and the disease, Alzheimer’s, with which they must live every day.  They are swept up in a world that only those impacted by such a condition can understand.  Right from the start of your piece, I felt a part of their family, their frustration, their fear, and their courage, if only for a short few minute radio segment.  Thanks to NPR’s commitment and compassion.  You bring people together.  Stories like his create a bridge for us to reach out to others’ lives, their heartaches and their joy.  I can only trust that the science and effort of those in the medical profession can shed light on Alzheimer’s for Mr. DiBlasio’s and others’ sake.  And thank you, Mr. DiBlasio for your courage to tell your story to me and others. 

 

Sincerely,

 

Jean Marie Gunner 

 

 

 



THE SOUND OF MY LIFE

The sound of my life…

The sound of it echoes past the shadows of my childhood,

Sweeping through the hollows of my young womanhood.

I hear Grace, my Italian neighbor’s resplendent voice, “I brought you some homemade chicken soup.”

I hear my brothers and parents and me decorating the Christmas tree.

I hear our laughter, our teasing, our play on a long journey down to Florida to visit my grandparents.

The sound of my life…

Is like a song from all my day dreaming and fantasizing, about the adventures I might someday take,

Or the fascinating job I might someday pursue.

The sound of my life…

Is the loss of certain dreams, and the lack of excitement I might feel when contemplating a new pathway,

And all the uncertainty and hesitation and anxiety that is life sometimes.

The sound of my life…

Is the fear that I am not a good enough, interesting enough example for my children.

The sound of my life…

Is that I love my son with every ounce of my being.

The sound of my life…

Is stillness and silence.

It is the sadness to know certain opportunities are passing me by,

The angst that I don’t capture the moment and do more.

The sound of my life…

Is the solid knowing that all my dreams are unfolding in their own good, sweet time.

The sound of my life…

Drums on and I feel swept up in everything happening to me and around me.

The sound of my life…

Is the laughter and glee of my son.

The sound of my life…

Is the devotion of my husband.

The sound of my life…

Is the new life that grows even now within me,

With all my doubt entwined with passion and conviction

That is this life.

The sound of my life is my life.

 

 

(Written April 4, 2000 -- I was expecting our second son and I felt the magic of new life within me and the presence of my family around me)

A WINTER POEM

Love etches itself indelibly

Upon my being

Never fading

Only transforming

Mixing one moment

With the next

Creating color, shape

Sound, motion

A sensory chorus of

Past, present, future

Dreams forming now

As we near each

Moment to complete

Wholeness

I sigh, I turn in bed

My gaze finds a focus

A fix—the movement

Of the tree’s branches

Outside my window

Quivering one moment

In stillness the very next

Nodding at me in a reminding way

That this tree, too, has shaken fiercely

In the winds that have

Come 

Reassuring me that

The wild winds do blow

On to other places

And eventually dissipate

Remarkably the residual

Damage heals itself

A transformational reality

Of nature

The tree speaks to me now in utter truth:

“So my too legged friend

You too will quiver,

You will also settle in peace and

You will quake.

It’s just life.

What we like to call

The cycle of things,

Be still when you can and drop deeply,

Consciously, deliberately

Your roots so when

You are put to the test and

Life’s gust whips around you in frenzy, you will

Remain intact,

Steadfast, in the moment

And firmly rooted

To the Mother of All."

 

 

 

(Written January 17, 2005 on a cold and blustery winter morning as the wind blew outside my bedroom window)