The Miracle of Three Arms

This scene from Costco yesterday: A mother with three young children – one is a baby girl, perhaps two months old; the other two are boys, maybe four years and two years old. The older boy is sitting in the cart with bulk food items all around him, and he is managing the inventory with contentment. The two-year-old is having a meltdown and running beside his mother, crying and yelling to a pitch that grates all nerves – the mother repeating calmly but firmly the single directive, Stop, Stop . . . though it does no good. He is in meltdown mode, the kind of which my father and his generation used to say only a “good whack” could snap him out of – my mother called it “shock therapy” – and though I never tried it on my own children, it seemed to work for my parents.

Back to the scene – the baby lay in her “dish” in the the front of the cart looking up at the bright lights of this world to which she has been brought; chaos is swirling round her, the cart going faster as the noise gets louder, the lights big and bright. Her small mouth makes only the oo-shape, but no sound comes forth; her eyes are bigger than her oo-shaped mouth. I passed this group once in the aisles, going in the opposite direction, and I felt only irritation at the grating din of the two-year-old – though I admired the modulated Stop, Stop that never veered off course.

I had come to Costco for one dinner item, so my trip was quick, and I had no cart to wrangle with. I was surprised when I found myself in the checkout line beside hers only a few minutes later. My view was superb, for I lagged behind by only a fraction. My sentiments changed as I viewed this poor woman with children growing out of her – the food items toppling o’er and propped even in the baby’s seat – the two-year old still screaming inconsolably. Once parked in the checkout line, she picked him up to hold him closely, his croc-clad feet kicking her bellywise all the while. She had the facial expression of those cows or dogs you see when they are nursing calves or many pups and they cannot move for fear of disturbance to the rankling young – and the hurt it might cause her own body – and the screams of protest and hunger it might arouse – and the tiredness . . . it is an ultimate submission to a younger set. I saw all of that in her face – the history and evolution and universality of it all. I began to understand that her well-modulated Stop, Stop may have come from this level of submission and tiredness and personal need – and not from a good parenting book she had read. She could muster no more.

Then it came time for her to load the bulk food items onto the counter for check-out. I could blame none of those food items for the demise of the two-year-old’s nervous system – yogurt, cheerios, fruit snacks, bananas, orange juice. She tried hard to provide easy but nutritious foods to her young.

Continue:  She is unloading food with one hand while the two-year-old still squirms and kicks and cries in her arms – and just then the four-year-old abruptly stands up inside the cart, his head or shoulder bumping the baby’s dish so that baby shows shock on her placid face – where did that come from? – he reaches round to pat baby’s head and face with a firm open palm while she is trying to dodge his pats with her blinking eyes.

And somehow the mother manages to steady the baby’s dish with one hand while lending a lift out of the cart to the four-year-old with another arm – continuing to hold the two-year-old – somehow unloading bulk food items – reaching into her purse for the Costco membership card that someone has requested . . . all of that. And instead of jumping out of line to help her as I realize now I should have done, I thought of that miniature Russian icon I bought long ago when I was a young mother – it is called The Icon of the Mother of God of Three Arms – and its significance has to do with the miracle of restoring a prayerful man’s arm that had been cut off, but for me it has always represented the far more mysterious phenomenon of the woman who tends to many things . . .

. . . and I saw her bend over with that screaming two-year-old still on her hip to retrieve items from the bottom shelf of the cart – cases of things – and I saw pendulous breasts nearly reach to the floor – and that look of pale submission on her face. Her feet and arms and legs were pale as milk too – and this is the end of summer when we all have our summer tans if only by osmosis. I think, as she bends over, that it must be a hormone that does that, that makes a woman agree to all this – for I know it is not just this trip through Costco that she will endure, but the trip through the parking lot, the buckling-in of squirmy children, the loading of food into the van, the unloading once she’s home, the hunger and cries of children, the tired two-year-old, a nursling who will speak up in turn . . . it is 3:00; she will think about dinner, there will be no naps, no tea, no five-minute bathroom break. No impulse of hers will evolve into a complete thought. All thought will be snipped, cut short, formed halfway in the brain. I used to think about brain synapses when I was a young mother, those junctions or connective things that form in the brain when babies and children (adults too) are learning and thinking. I always felt that my own brain synapses were being snipped in half by a great orange scissors (as I imagined it) because I could never complete a thought or sentence. I am still amazed that the brain knows how to heal once the children are grown – it knows how to perform the miracle of restoring its own synapses of thought and learning, to re-connect and complete its own sentences in the brain – and even to write them!

I thought of the woman with many arms all the way home from Costco and on my way to yoga class that evening . . . all last night while I was falling asleep, and this morning when I woke up – and finally, while writing this snippet, I forgave myself for not writing that book of mine when the children were young and I was a mother not working.

Hobo Bags

My self-education in the stock market comes at a time when there is no winning that can’t be snatched away like a red cape from the bull’s pathway. Each time the caboodle goes up, it comes down too – as though not one stock could think independently, but rather must follow the herd. Either all arrows are red, or all arrows are green. We all go up, we all go down. The vicissitudes of the market, as the saying goes.

I’m really tired of watching things go up and down – while never funding what I really want, which is a trip to somewhere I’ve never been. What use are those graphs in vivid movement if I never leave the house? I stay put, a graph in flat line.

The end of summer – and August, my least favorite of all the months. August is when tolerance is pushed past the limit, when nothing more can be done for summer and nothing much can be started for fall. It’s a seedy month – when all the flowering has been done, but the dead and drying leaves refuse to let go. It’s a time of suspension – in the air, in our actions, even in the way the insects drone without end. I walk outside at night or early in the morning, hear those herds of cicada that can’t be seen, and I think, they are flat lined too. Waiting.

I won’t be able to tolerate seeing that movie that promises to be all the rage – “Eat, Pray, Love.” I won’t even read the book. All I know is that it’s about a woman who takes off from the responsibilities of life for one year to travel the world and experience Life. She divides her year between three countries, Italy, India, and Indonesia. It’s a spiritual quest too. And of course she falls in love at the end. It is written in part or in whole from the real life experience of the author. She came home to write the book, and it was an instant success.

Yesterday, while waiting to get my hair trimmed, I flipped through a magazine and saw a page of “gear” that we must own now that the movie is coming out – it’s called “The Eat, Pray, Love image.” For example, there is a canvas striped hobo bag that you could buy for $190; a blue chambray shirt with a nehru neckline, $112; bright pink canvas espadrilles for walking the markets of New Delhi and tasting new delights from the hands of another – at $100 or so. It’s the gear, the look, the lifestyle – though few of us could replicate the Julia Roberts toothy grin and thick hair that piles atop her head in Bohemian fashion. We should all run out to adopt the look of the middle aged woman (who doesn’t look middle aged) who has fortuitously taken a year to travel the world and experience all that few of us can even imagine.

Women at middle age, realizing that they have maybe 20 years left before they are immobile or at least compromised – they wake from the instinct of giving life to others and they crave to experience life for themselves. They want to have Fun, as our contemporary Cyndi Lauper told us when we were young – that is, we want to travel, eat foods we have not cooked ourselves, see people and places for no good reason other than to experience Life. Women are the natural born keepers of life – which is why they give birth – and, after childbearing years are done, they still have the impulse to live life which is really just the continuum of giving life.  That’s why the marketeers think they can peddle this book and movie to us, that we'll latch onto it like life itself.  It’s odd, however, that in the course of my own “travels” – to the bank, grocery store, yoga class – I’ve heard women say, “No, I don’t want to see that movie, “ or, “I can’t bear to see that.” One woman said, “I got to New Delhi with her and I tossed the book in the trash.” I think most women know the difference between real Life and the improbable one that is sold on the screen or in a book. The first question everyone has is, how'd she get the money? This particular subject of wanting to experience our lives while still mobile is too treasured and touchy for most of us to face in facsimile form.

I looked for a long time at that striped hobo bag in the magazine, knowing I had one similar to that (for much less money) when my children were young and diapers were kept there. And the blue chambray shirt – to this day I call it my uniform -- I had several.  Julia Roberts is smiling . . . that familiar hobo bag slung o'er her blue shoulder . . . you too can have this life, she seems to say.

I think most women by the August of their lives know the difference between marketing, the stock market, and the markets of New Delhi.  Let the real one stand up.