Taking action with what you've got

This post has turned out to be a kind of sequel to my July post about the limitations of taking action under adverse circumstances. I didn’t actually plan it this way, but here it is.

Having children pretty much always takes a lot of a person’s choices away—or at least it should. There are examples of parents who go off to do their own thing and voluntarily leave their children to be cared for by others, but barring that, parenting generally means a lot of restrictions on one’s own choices. Parenting kids with developmental disabilities multiplies that constraint many times over.

I did try to make my own choices within those boundaries while my kids were growing up, but the limited range of possible choices felt very restrictive at times. I couldn’t go to graduate school, travel or even work a solid job. I couldn’t choose what I was going to eat without the significant expense and time outlay of making separate meals. I couldn’t up and go someplace for a few days. On the vast majority of days, I couldn’t choose what I wanted to do beyond a few minutes early in the morning.

Night camp with the lights of the grande ronde valley - image by arie farnam

Events came and happened to me. Life got incrementally and sometimes suddenly harder. Any steps I wanted to take, even just to get help for my high-needs kids, were many times harder than they would have been alone. It was like slogging through knee deep mud while wearing chains. I rarely felt like I could take any particular action to change my life for the better. Now, that both of my kids are temporarily in other households, bits of my own agency have returned to me.

This return has dawned on me gradually. In the first weeks, it was all I could do to recover and put my home back together—as if after a hurricane. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in my special chair by the window, enjoying morning chai and the golden light on the tree outside after my meditation practice, and that part of my mind began pining for the mountains again.

This comes on me every few months. I spent a good part of my youth backpacking either in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon or in other countries around the world where I travelled. I loved being in the mountains far from cars and crowds, especially in Eastern Oregon where the natural environment is so magical, wild and relatively clean. The yearning came back that morning with a vengeance, and I was so used to just sitting with it and accepting it as a longing which cannot be fulfilled, that I didn’t go beyond that for some time.

When my children were very small, backpacking wasn’t an option. Even before that, I found that my health difficulties were making it complicated. Whenever I went on a hike with friends, my body ached and my feet were so sore by the end of the day that I was in extreme pain and couldn’t enjoy camp life. I was always too slow for the rest of the group and the length of the hike was beyond what I could handle.

Once my kids were old enough, we did take them camping fairly often, but it was a grueling ordeal. Their disabilities made camp life even more arduous than it usually is and their hygiene even harder to keep up to a bare minimum. At least one of them refused any kind of hike, so we always had to car camp in crowded, noisy campgrounds. Again, for various reasons, it was mostly miserable.

What I long for is not car camping next to a bunch of drunk college kids. It isn’t even hiking 15 miles with a 30 pound pack at a pace that is swift enough that I have to keep my eyes glued to the trail to keep from tripping. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what I yearn for is not that unreasonable, at least not in my current situation.

I am no longer a young girl, afraid to be alone. I enjoy solitude. I have the skills to deal with the mountains. And if I hiked five miles, instead of fifteen, I wouldn’t be miserable and I’d still get away from the noisiest campgrounds. I no longer have to take kids with me who refuse to go to natural places or who can’t stay safe in a camp situation—at least not every day of the week. And for the moment, my work is flexible enough that backpacking doesn’t have to be restricted only to weekends when I have kid duty.

It hit me like a sudden revelation. In this case, despite the many barriers and difficulties, I can do something to change my life in a way that will make me happy.

I realized that one other thing that has held me back with backpacking is always having crappy, second-hand gear. So, I researched and saved and pinched pennies. And I was able to buy not just a new sleeping bag and pad but the type I actually want—not the top of the line necessarily, but a pad that is rated for people with back problems. And my gear is light enough to carry without making those problems worse. I ordered an ultra-light tent for just one person. I’m not going to count on anyone else coming along.

But the tent hasn’t come and the warm season is nearly over for now, so I borrowed an old rickety tent with a busted pole and a makeshift rainfly and tested out the rest of my gear on top of Pumpkin Ridge. I was delighted to find that the specialized pad really is much better than the old, twentieth century gear I’m used to. I made tea and watched the lights in the valley while the sounds of the meadow rustled softly.

While I lay in the dark, coyotes howled off to the west—a sound I find comforting, though I’ve seen others panic at it. I know from experience that coyotes won’t mess with a camp. Around about 4:00 in the morning, I was awakened by the thud of hooves nearby in the meadow—several elk or deer passed through. And again, I could be confident they would keep their distance.

To be clear, I am arming myself with high-end pepper spray and hope to soon have a dog. Taking action on your own is not about being reckless. But there is a great deal to be said for finding a way to do what you want that is not reliant on others or on circumstances.

A big part of what has made this possible is the improvement of my health, but that too has been a matter of taking the metaphorical bull by the horns. I am nearing two years on a strict ketogenic diet modified for diabetics and the results have been astounding.

My doctor has taken to telling me “whatever you’re doing, just keep doing it.” Another doctor wants to claim the original diagnosis must have been wrong because “no one can beat diabetes like that.” But I know I haven’t actually beaten it. It will come back—not just eventually but within hours—if I fall off the wagon, which I’ve found out by making the occasional unintentional mistake.

As the sun peeked through the pines on the ridge, I heated water on my tiny, lightweight stove, added tea powder, MCT oil, butter and dehydrated coconut. It makes for a fortifying, healthy, ketogenic drink that keeps me running for hours in the morning. I did my exercises on the ridge top, balancing in various poses above the crackly leaves of mule’s ear and the spiky dry grasses. Then I shouldered my pack and hiked down again.

Since my child-care duties have been relieved a bit, I’ve started a daily exercise routine, primarily to strengthen core muscles. I go to acupuncture and the occasional massage to help the arthritis in my spine. I can’t guarantee I’ll always be able to backpack and it took two years of hard work to get even to this modest level of fitness again, but this is my version of taking charge of my life.

My next adventure will be to apply for the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Eastern Oregon University over the winter. It will take a minor miracle in financing, since there is only one scholarship for one student and I need to be the one chosen in order to make ends meet. It will also take my childcare supports staying put, which is by no means guaranteed. But by next summer, I hope to be a graduate student who occasionally gets to go hiking.

The morning rays of a new life have come and I’ve taken up the work of rediscovering my own agency. Sure, it’s tenuous and quite different from what I hoped and dreamed thirty years ago. But it has brought me back to the core elements of what my soul needs.

In another life

In the spring and early summer—before my big transcontinental move—a lot of people, whether students or friends, wanted me to make plans for October. I sounded like a broken record, repeating over and over, “I have no idea what my life is going to look like in October.”

After twelve years of being all too sure what the next season or two would bring, it was a good—if also terrifying—feeling. There were far too many things I couldn’t predict.

Now, the reality reminds me of that saying about things one might have done “in another country, in another life.” Here I am and it is very different.

I used to wake up to dawn light and a view of my verdant garden. Now I struggle out of thick pillows and comforters in darkness when the alarm on my phone plays.

Image by Arie Farnam

I used to have to go out early and hike up a hill to feed chickens and tend to large greenhouses. Now I have to open curtains to just barely see out of tiny basement windows and I only have to tend to hydroponic plants under artificial lights and fish that make plant food.

I used to eat yogurt with huckleberry preserves delivered by a local farmer for breakfast. Now I eat my mother’s homegrown eggs and whole-wheat English muffins from Safeway.

I used to tutor students in the evenings. Now late morning is my work time because that is when their evening falls. I used to spend most days alone battling depression and isolation and practical survival for my kids and myself. I also used to have a little time to write, not much but some. Now I spend almost every day on the phone with doctor’s offices and bureaucracies or helping with the crises of multiple high-needs family members. I haven’t had time to even feel guilty for not writing.

I used to eat a lot of meals alone. Now I only rarely eat alone. The cooking schedule has changed and expanded. There are a lot more mouths to feed at random times. Half of the raw ingredients are partly or completely different. I used to be able to easily order a very limited selection of groceries online. It was easy but that was all I could ever get. Now, I can get anything I can dream of, if I can get to the store which is once a week at best. There is no online shopping anymore and only very sketchy public transportation.

I used to have the time and floor-space to do a significant exercise routine every day to stay healthy. Here the ceilings are so low that I can't stretch my hands above my head or accommodate an elliptical machine, and my body never did good with the jarring of jogging on pavement. But I do get to go to the mountains on weekends and climb the steep rugged path to the windswept ridge top for stunning views and a bit of exercise.

I used to have to deal with hostility and overt discrimination every time I left the house. Now, I’m bewildered with the number of people who offer to be helpful and kind in small ways and all I really have to do is remember the exact steps of various processes to get what I need to survive.

My biggest worries used to be about my son getting beat up at school or endlessly sitting in classrooms while teachers marked test papers and showed cartoons instead of teaching. Now my worries are about my son riding his bike with his gang of instant friends and not locking it when he throws it down on this or that lawn to run in to various houses for a snack.

But now I also have to worry about my daughter’s medical appointments, which we didn’t have to worry about before because none were possible and she just went without. I worry about my mother who is helping with my daughter and her many struggles. I worry about my grandmother with dementia who thinks I stole her couch. I worry about more here but less of what I worry about is hopeless.

My neighbors used to be openly judgmental and unfriendly but economically comfortable and mostly shut behind big walls with loud dogs. Now my neighborhood is friendly and gregarious with scruffy, unfenced yards and half-joking warnings to watch out for this or that druggie or thief on the corner. My son used to not get invited to even his best friend’s birthday party or sleep-over because of interethnic bigotry. Now, there are plenty of sleepover possibilities and I try not to worry about my son bringing home bedbugs or witnessing the kind of run-of-the-mill domestic violence I witnessed at friends’ houses in low-income places like this when I was a kid.

I used to take weekends to go to my father-in-law’s farm in the flat marshes of South Bohemia, where the skies are always gray and the huge stone farmhouse is empty and sad. Now I go to my folks’ place up on the pine-covered ridge, where the sky is almost always crisp blue and the log cabin is so full of kids, chickens, dogs and a kitten that you end up stepping on them.

I used to struggle to find enough people to invite to a holiday dinner and I had to cook everything all by myself and play the perfect hostess if anyone came. Now, I have more than enough guests and some of them bring food. My mother is also in the thick of it with me.

People ask me how I’m doing and if I like it better here. And they are a bit disconcerted when I am not enthusiastic one way or the other. I have to stop and think: Well, how IS it going this week?

The answer is that it is very different and I am just barely getting my feet under me. The answer is that in the balance, yes, it’s better. And in the important matters of mental health care for my kids and safety at school it is way better. But it also isn’t easy. I’m tired, overwhelmed and even confused most of the time.

Autumn sunlight sparkles off of the Czech cut-crystal decanter and vase I bought across the ocean. They do nicely to collect and refract the light that filters into my recessed window. Bits of light dance over the autumn tomatoes ripening on the wide sill, and just outside I can see brightly colored leaves in the dirt beyond the screen.

I slip out into the yard to uncover the few remaining tomato plants that I covered last night to protect them from frost. Wind chimes tinkle from the branches of the yard’s only “tree,” which is actually a lilac bush shaped to look like a small tree. It has lost most of its leaves without much show of color, but a tree in the back alley is neon yellow and further down I glimpse ruddy orange.

I can find beauty and nature anywhere, even in a basement. I am growing plants under grow-lights too, though mostly they are still small and weak. I do miss my garden, the rolling terraces of green, the oak, fir and linden trees, the plums, cherries, blackberries, raspberries and currants… I miss the herb beds and the greenhouses and even the smelly chickens and the daily chores they required of me. As the nights grow cold, I miss the sauna we built beside the root cellar.

But even as that life had some good things in it, they were there because that was all I had. I had years of time to build up that garden because outside the garden, there was hostility and closed doors. Here I don’t even know what is outside beyond the frantic pace of family life, but some of the things I thought might only be possible “in another life” whisper to me.

If the pace ever slows, there might be writing or studying or teaching or community. I feel too old or at least too sick and too tired to be starting all over again, but there is still something in a new place and a new chance that sparks long-buried curiosity.