Giving Our Children Experiences

Giving Our Children Experiences

Northern lights and Big Dipper shine brightly over a city

By B.J. Hollars

We’re on vacation in Duluth, Minnesota when I receive the text:

Skies should be amazing tonight.

The heads-up comes courtesy of my photographer friend back home, whose knack for tracking the Northern Lights is akin to a bloodhound chasing a scent. For weeks, he’d been pestering me to join him in the dark, to witness the celestial miracle I’d been missing. And for weeks I’d turned him down. There was always some reason not to rouse myself from bed (“Big day tomorrow,” “Wife will kill me,” “I’m beat”); each reply a white flag confirming that the comfort of my covers was too great.

But tonight his message takes on a new urgency.

You’re so close, he promises. Just a short drive away.

I hem, haw, but at last, am out of excuses. Given my northern locale, I am indeed on the doorstep of the Aurora Borealis.

I glance over at my droopy-eyed four-year-old sprawled in the hotel bed; his face lit by the glow of the television. It is the wrong light, the wrong glow, and I want to show him the right one.

“Okay,” I clap, “Grab your shoes, adventure time!”

“Nah,” Henry says, waving his own white flag.

“Hey, since when do I need to persuade you go on an adventure with me?”

(The answer, I know, is since he discovered the hotel had cable.)

“Come on,” I retry, reaching for the remote. “Quit being a zombie.”

“But I like being a zombie,” he moans.

Five minutes later, my zombie and I are buckled into the minivan.

“Keep your eyes to the skies,” I say, “we’re about to see something magical.”

Or we’re about to see a whole lot of nothing. Frankly, it’s hard to say. As my photographer friend had warned, without the aid of a camera, we weren’t likely to witness the spectral green glow in all its glory. Still, I figured we’d at least see something. After all, this wasn’t exactly a needle-in-a-haystack situation. How hard could it be to spot bright lights in a dark sky?

Five minutes pass.

“Is that it?” Henry asks, pointing.

“Nah,” I say, “that’s just the sky.”

“What about that?”

“Nope. Just more sky.”

This goes on for 25 miles or so, until at last we reach the town of Two Harbors.

“What about that?” he asks.

“Nope. That’s a gas station.”

“That?” he asks irritably.

“Nope.”

We drive a few miles more, pulling to the side of the road to witness a strip of white-gray fog rippling through the clouds overhead. It’s the lights, at least I think so. And even if it’s not, I’m committed to making a good show of it.

I sigh, clear my throat, try hard to hide the disappointment in my voice.

“There they are!” I gasp. “Henry! You see’em?”

He does not. How could he with his eyes closed?

“Buddy, wake up,” I call louder. “You’re missing the lights!”

But he isn’t. Not really.

I wave the white flag again, and U-turn us back toward Duluth.

It’s then that I see it: the purple glow illuminating just beyond the tree line to my right. At first it’s so faint it hardly registers, but then, as we drive deeper into that darkness, it surges in strength.

“Henry!” I retry. “The lights! For real this time!”

But I can’t compete with a four-year-old’s dreams. A glance in the rearview confirms that he remains ragdoll limp in his car seat, a big boy overflowing well beyond all those straps. Just yesterday of course, he’d fit that seat just fine, and the day before he was practically swimming in it. But I blinked, and now I see him differently.

If you blink, you’ll see the Northern Lights differently, too. And in the worst case, a blink might cause you to lose sight of them completely. Neither the naked eye or the camera lens can halt a celestial body in flux. Nothing can halt a body in flux, either—no matter how much you wish you could.

Back in the hotel parking lot, I unbuckle him, then hoist him into my arms. His eyes flutter wide long enough to find the world just as he’s left it—quiet, dark, not a Northern Light anywhere. I lug him across the street, adjusting my arms in search of a better hold. But my hold isn’t the problem; my problem is that my boy now defies holding.

I shift his weight to one arm, then reach for the hotel door. Upon doing so, I glimpse our reflection in the glass and confirm what I feared to be true: we have lost our natural fit, have become two people whose angles no longer add up. All I have left is the snugness of his head nestled into my neck—the only concession the universe has to offer me.

B.J. Hollars is a Brain, Child contributing blogger. He the author of several books, most recently From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us About Life, Death, and Being Human, as well as a collection of essays, This Is Only A Test. He serves as the reviews editor for Pleiades, a mentor for Creative Nonfiction, and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. For more, visit: http://www.bjhollars.com

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Author Q&A: BJ Hollars

Author Q&A: BJ Hollars

Hollars_Author_Photo (1)BJ Hollars is the author of Bear Country, which appeared in our October 2015 issue. We connected with him about the writing process. Here are his responses.

What inspired you to write Bear Country?

I wanted my children to remember what they are likely too young to remember now.

What was the greatest challenge in writing it?

Writing this essay was a means to stare directly into grief. The challenge, for me, was figuring out where the emotions ended and the story began. It was hard to know which moments in this essay were important to my family, and which moments might resonate with a wider audience.

How do your children inform your writing?

They are the people I write for, and often, the people I write about. My primary motivation for writing is to provide them a few glimpses into some of the more poignant moments in our lives. The downside, of course, is that when too much time is spend preserving poignant moments, there is less time to make those moments.

How do you balance writing and fatherhood?

This is no easy answer. As I write this in my basement, I can hear my children’s feet pattering just above. A better father would leap from the computer and run upstairs to join them. And yet, the work must also get done. The balance, I think, comes from waking earlier than they do, and staying up later. Those are the moments when the best works occurs—the moments when you’re sure you’re not missing anything more important.

Do you share any of your writing with your children (if they are old enough of course)

Sometimes I try, but they’d much rather me read a Berenstain Bears book.

Return to the October 2015 Issue

Bear Country

BJ_Henry_Bears1

By BJ Hollars

One night as I wandered my empty house, I took to the typewriter in my basement to compose my first and last letter to my mother-in-law.

“Just a brief note to wish you well,” I typed, “as you begin the next round of challenges that lay ahead.”

The “challenges” had a name, but I didn’t want to burden her with the language the doctor’s used.  I doled out platitudes and promises instead, the kinds of things no one ever expects anyone to make good on.

I began by mentioning future visits, future plans, the activities we would one day do.  Next, I thanked her for the birdfeeder she’d gotten me for Christmas, told her I’d come to calling it Caryl’s Bird Sanctuary (even though my most dedicated visitors were squirrels).

It was a difficult letter to write, mainly because while those near to her in Indiana knew she was dying, from my vantage point 500 miles away in Wisconsin, all I knew was that she was still alive.

***

From her place on the front lines my wife kept me abreast of the situation, though the news she shared was always bad news, and the bad news just got worse.

“She’s still here,” my wife whispered one night from her place in her childhood bedroom.  “She’s like 20 feet away from me right now, but…it’s like she’s already gone.”

It was all the motivation I needed to return to my typewriter, hopeful that in my second attempt I’d muster the courage to move beyond filler and type what I’d never said aloud.

“Thank you,” I wrote, “for raising your daughter.  I see parts of you in all the best parts of her.”

My words weren’t much, but they were all I had to convey to her what I felt she most needed to hear: that her legacy would live on in her progeny, and that her job—now done—had been done well. They were a small kindness, one I offered because I feared I wouldn’t have another chance; but also because the words allowed me to be there without being there, thereby sparing me the worst of it.

The typewriter offered no backspace, no correction fluid, no way for me to grow shy and take it back.

As I wrapped up that second draft, my wife called yet again.

“We’re trying to move her downstairs,” she whispered.  “But she doesn’t want to go.  She knows once she does, she’ll never come upstairs again.”

I said nothing.

“I mean, we’ll have to move her tomorrow regardless,” my wife continued.  “Which means this is the last night she and my dad will ever sleep in that bed together.”

I folded the letter and stuffed it into the envelope.

***

A week or so prior, our lives had been quite different.  I was in my office at the university prepping for classes when I received the text from my wife who was home with the kids.

bad news, she wrote—no further explanation required.

For a few days we’d been awaiting Caryl’s test results, and though she’d already beaten back cancer twice, we feared the odds would be against her on a third bout.

I picked up the phone, asked my wife what exactly her mother had said.

“That it’s not good,” my wife repeated.  “That there are tumors all over her body.”

“Like…benign?”

“No.  Not like benign.”

An interminable silence, followed by my wife’s voice:

“Go to class,” she directed.  “You have to teach.”

Five minutes later I entered a classroom.

“Good afternoon,” I said.  “Today we’ll learn about academic register.”

***

Today we’ll learn about stage IV pancreatic cancer.

Which, as I soon learned myself, is the cancer and the stage you want the least.  It’s the one that leaves little room for treatment, and even less room for a son-in-law’s assurances that everything will be okay.

Because statistically speaking, if you are diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer, only 6% of you will be okay.  The rest of you will not be.  Pancreatic is often considered to be one of the deadliest cancers, not because it claims the most lives, but because the lives it claims it claims quickly, generally within the first year and often much sooner than that.

Caryl was proof. She was diagnosed on January 28 and died 17 days later.

Hours after receiving my wife’s text message, I walked home in the cold in perfect silence—up a hill, across a bridge, and finally, onto my street.  I passed the elementary school, the outdoor ice-skating rink, then slipped inside my house.

I worked my way down the dark hall—bypassing the dog and my infant daughter, Ellie, until arriving at my three-year-old son Henry’s room. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed my wife’s silhouette alongside him, her body filling in the space where his Berenstain Bears books weren’t.

 

It was all the motivation I needed to return to my typewriter, hopeful that in my second attempt I’d muster the courage to move beyond filler and type what I’d never said aloud.

 

“Hey,” I whispered.  “You up?”

We met at the kitchen table moments later, opening wide the bottle of emergency wine and retrieving a pair of glasses.

Our conversation toggled between stunned silence and logistics, the latter involving who needed whom where and when.  The answer was obvious: my wife’s mother needed her daughter and grandchildren there and preferably now.

I sat helpless at that table as my language skills reverted to a Neanderthal state:

“So…this is bad news,” I said, repeating the text message.

My wife reached once more for the wine.

***

On Valentine’s Day, just days after my family’s most recent return home to Wisconsin, my wife was woken by a phone call from her father.

“You’d better start driving,” he said, “if you want to say goodbye.”

Later, I’d learn the facts surrounding that phone call.  How throughout the night Caryl had repeatedly tried to pull herself up from the bed, her anxiety growing along with her fitfulness.  This went on for much of the night, prompting my father-in-law to sleep with his feet propped on the edge of her bed, a cautionary measure to ensure he’d wake if she did.

There is a name for it—terminal restlessness—but none of us knew that then.

All we knew was what the nurse had told my father-in-law: that it was time to rally the troops.

My wife and daughter made up the first wave, while Henry and I stayed behind to perform all Berenstain Bear-related duties.  By which I mean we distracted ourselves in the books’ colored pages, taking refuge in a wonderland of tree houses, talking bears, and problems that always resolved by the last page.  There was a tidiness to their narratives, an inevitable answer, and no matter what the problem (a dentist’s visit, a messy room), the Bear family always endured.

Throughout that day, Henry and I took one trip after another down that sunny dirt road deep into Bear Country.  We were momentarily bachelors, and since there was no one to tell us enough was enough, we overindulged in the saccharine tales.  Henry sat rapt on my lap until the books ran out, at which point we drove to the library for more.

Since it was Valentine’s Day, we celebrated with a post-library visit to the record store.  There, we searched for records to make us feel good, his small hands flipping expertly through the dollar bins, a perfect imitation of me.

Eventually, he settled on a Broadway production of Peter Pan, while, I—after much deliberation—snagged a Stevie Nicks’ solo album.

My wife called as I walked our loot toward the register.

“Hey,” I said.  “How’s it going?”

“Okay,” she said.  “I guess my mom’s been asleep all day.  They don’t think she’s going to wake up again.”

I steadied myself by placing a hand in Henry’s curly hair.

“What are you guys doing?” she asked.

I told her about the record store, about our adventures deep into Bear Country.

“Sounds pretty cooooooool,” she said, her voice offering me a flash of our lives before the night of the emergency wine.  “Well, I better go.  It’s super windy out here.  I love you.”

“Happy Valentine’s,” I said.

***

Last Thanksgiving my wife’s family piled into cars to purchase an obscenely large Christmas tree from the lot just a few blocks away.

“This is our last one, Beej,” said my father-in-law as he slipped on shoes and cap.  “One last real, live tree.”

For the decade I’d known them, my in-laws had never wavered in their commitment to the real, live tree.  Year after year, my father-in-law was burdened with the work that it entailed: hauling it into the living room, screwing it into the stand, then rigging a network of wires to the wall to ensure that it stayed upright.  For those of us who simply enjoyed its pine-scented yuletide cheer, there was no question that the work was surely worth it.  Though I imagine this answer wasn’t so obvious to the man charged with carrying it out.

The rest of my in-laws were out the door when I realized my mother-in-law wasn’t among them.  She had never been one to miss anything, least of all a family tradition.

“I’ll stay back with Ellie,” I called to my wife, nodding to our dozing daughter snoring in my arms.  She nodded, and as I watched the headlights from those cars fade into the night, Ellie and I made our way upstairs to Caryl’s room.

She was huddled in her chair, her space heater just inches from her legs as she stared into the glow of her iPad.

“How’s Dr. Sleep?” I asked, nodding to the Stephen King book stationed at her bedside.

“Oh…it’s fine,” she shrugged.  “I don’t know how much I like it.”

I nodded, continued on with the small talk.

We chatted for twenty minutes or so until the family returned with their tree.

“Well,” I sighed, starting toward the stairs, “I guess we better go check on the damage.”

She didn’t follow me.

That was the moment I knew she was sick; that it wasn’t “our” last tree, but hers.

***

 

Throughout  the evening, my eyes focused not on the screen, but on my son’s fascination with those bears. I wanted to remember him that way: riveted, and not yet burdened by our burdens.

 

While driving home from the grocery store on Valentine’s night, my wife called to inform me of her mother’s death.

“She’s gone,” she said.  “It’s over.”

Stunned, I parked the car in the drive and then proceeded to preheat the oven.  Henry and I had spent the last half an hour or so ranking pizzas in the frozen food aisle, and given the extreme care he’d put into his selection, I felt I could hardly deny him his reward.

I stuffed Henry with supreme pizza, then had him wash it down with a 16-ounce can of peach iced-tea.

Comfort food, I told myself, even if he didn’t yet know he needed it.

That night, Henry and I ventured even deeper into Bear Country, watching a marathon’s worth of Berenstain Bears TV episodes from the DVD we’d checked out at the library that day.

We crowded into bed and wrapped the blankets tight around us, then watched as Too Tall and his gang peer-pressured Brother Bear into stealing a watermelon from Farmer Ben’s field.

Throughout much of the evening, my eyes focused not on the screen, but on my son’s fascination with those bears.  I wanted to remember him that way: riveted, and not yet burdened by our burdens.

Later that night, once the TV was muted and Henry was fast asleep, my wife would recount the details of her mother’s death.

How she, her dad, and her siblings had gathered for dinner around the living room bed, when, in the midst of their taco salad, she faded.

My wife stood to grab a napkin, glanced at the bed, asked: “Why isn’t Mom breathing?”

Life continued: calls were made and dishes placed in the drying rack.

An hour or so later, after the counter had been wiped of Doritos’ dust, the hospice nurse arrived to confirm what was already known.

Meanwhile, back in Bear Country, I guided Henry through his nightly prayers.

“…if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

“Amen,” I said.

“Amen,” he said.

Then one of us fell asleep.

***

In the week’s that followed, grief’s pressure points hit hard and fast and often.  One day my wife diced an onion and began to cry, not for the usual onion-dicing reasons, but because her mother had simply loved onions.  Another day she stared at the toenail clippers and was overcome with the memory of clipping her mother’s nails the week before her death.

Today, while driving, my wife asked:

“Do you want to know the saddest thing?”

“Not really.”

“She just renewed her passport.”

***

There was a time before the cancer—or between the cancers—when everything was fine.  It’s hard to remember that now, even though we have the pictures to prove it. All those photos of all those smiles; we had no reason not to.

At the funeral home, these pictures scrolled past on several screens, giving family and friends a place to rest their eyes.  The pictures had no chronology.  There was young Caryl alongside old Caryl alongside Caryl and her kids.  There was happy-go-lucky Caryl alongside first-bout-of-cancer Caryl alongside Caryl in the front porch family photo.

I’m in that one, too, smiling with a newborn on my lap.

Seven months after that photo was snapped, my wife asked her mother if her life had gone as she’d hoped.

“Sure,” her mother replied from her deathbed, “up until now.”

***

I won’t say much about the funeral, except that I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a front row seat reserved for anything.

I didn’t want it, and thanks to Ellie’s wailing, I didn’t even need it.

Two days later—after the house was filled with flowers and the ashes were placed on the shelf—my entire family was brought down by the flu.

My children puked in unison, my wife following soon after.  For a while, I was our only hope, and in an effort to give my wife a rest, I transported the sick kids to my parent’s house just a few miles away.

That’s when I, too, became sick.

My mom helped out the best she could, but Ellie would have nothing to do with her.  She insisted I hold her continuously—no exceptions—which meant I soon found myself cradling my daughter in my left arm while wrapping my right arm around the toilet rim.

As my body heaved its insides out, it was all I could do to hold tight to her.  I trembled, wiped away my spit, tried hard to block out the smell of stomach acid.  Ellie watched curiously, gave me a grin, then gripped my arm as I gagged awhile longer.

Eventually, my mom swooped in to snag my daughter.

“Don’t worry,” she shouted over Ellie’s wails, ” it’ll be fine.”

She was right; it would be fine for me.  I still had my mom.

***

For weeks, Henry and I sought solace in every Berenstain Bear book we could find, scanning the library’s shelves again and again, hoping for something new. And while we indeed learned a lot about cleaning messy rooms and visiting dentists, those bears remained mum on the subject of dead mother-in-laws. Surely the solace we sought resided somewhere down that sunny dirt road deep in Bear Country. But despite our best efforts, Henry and I could never quite find that road, that country. Instead, we took refuge in the only country we had. The terrain was rough, the route unmapped, but we walked every step of it together.

Author’s Note: The week before Caryl died, Henry and I walked into the living room where her bed had been moved. “Grandma, how was your day?” he asked. “Good,” she told him, glancing at me “I received a nice letter in the mail.” Later, I’d find that letter folded on her bedside table. No one’s spoken of it since.

BJ is the author of several books, including the forthcoming From The Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us About Life, Death, and Being Human and a collection of essays, This Is Only A Test. He is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Return to the October 2015 Issue

 

October 2015 Issue

October 2015 Issue

Oct 15 Cover FINAL

Rebecca Muscat
The Autumn Tree, My Mother & I, 2014.

 

Table of Contents

 

Editor’s Letter: How Are We Doing?

Essay: Cities of My Body, by Liz Rognes

I began to cry softly, afraid that my choice to do a line of blow had jeopardized this life I had with him—this beautiful distance from the darkness of drug use, this life of books and mornings and dog walks, this life of music and love and happiness. My past and my present were polar opposites, two cities that could not be any more different or further apart, but that night they had appeared in the same room. Two versions of me had inhabited my body.

Essay: Leading the Children out of Town, by Jill Christman

This is when I surprised myself. What should I have done? What would you have done? Should I have yelled? You irresponsible freak! You let your kid, your baby, play alone in the street? But I didn’t. The moment was so uncomfortable, so weird, a kind of joke came out of my mouth, an excuse for this poor excuse of a father. I laughed, I laughed, and I said, “I guess we were kind of like the Pied Piper, leading the children out of town!”

Essay: Fisheye View, by Jody Keisner

The fish were the first living things we had brought into our home, under our care, since the winter day almost four years earlier we had brought Lily home. The feeling of new-mother anxiety rushed back at me; I inhaled sharply. I couldn’t bear to let anything die in her room: plant, fish, or other. Especially the other.

Essay: Bear Country, by BJ Hollars

I worked my way down the dark hall—bypassing the dog and my infant daughter, Ellie, until arriving at my three-year-old son Henry’s room. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed my wife’s silhouette alongside him, her body filling in the space where his Berenstain Bears books weren’t.

Backtalk: Our readers answer the question: If you could do it again, what would you tell your new mother self?

“Skip the parenting books for the first two years.” – S. Pilman

Fiction: The Night Mr. Li Won Jeopardy by Mai Wang

The Chinese residents of the Big Yard called Mama “Lucky Hands” because she drew the winning hand in their late night poker games week after week.

Poetry: What No One Ever Told You by Rebecca L’Bahy

There is a bird in your throat, a rock in your ribs.

Poetry: Lessons by Laura Lassor

Motherwit: Child Psychology 101 by Sue Sanders

Author Q&A: Brain, Child writers Jill Christman, Liz Rognes, BJ Hollars, Jody Keisner, and Mai Wang, discuss writing and parenthood.