Lisa Geichman Prosek

My grandchildren knew me before they even realized it.

When I held one-week-old Carter, I spoke to him quietly and caressed his soft little shoulder as it peeked out from the baby blue blanket. This new little boy, aware of almost nothing but his need for creature comforts, got a puzzled look on his face as if he were saying, “I like that. And I don’t know you, but I know you.”

It was the same when my granddaughter, Quinn, came into the world.

The babies knew me because I sound a bit like their mother. More important, my touch feels like hers.

From the time I first held Carter and Quinn’s mommy as a baby, I held her a particular way and stroked her skin with my own special touch. She internalized these characteristics and now touches her children the same way.

Just as I internalized my own mother’s touch so many years ago.

We first hear our mother’s voice while still in the womb. Once born, we tie our mother’s touch to her voice and make a connection to the time before birth when all our needs were satisfied without our even understanding what those needs were. In this way our mother’s touch becomes the ultimate security. A tangible sign that we’re safe and our needs will be met. As we start our studies in The School Of Hard Knocks, our mother’s touch signals that, no matter how bad things are, we’re still wanted and loved and cheered for, absolutely.

My mother died three years before my sister’s cancer started gaining ground in 2011, leaving the rest of us to care for Beth in the final phase of her illness. Beth’s mother-in-law even left her warm home in Florida to stay at my sister’s house during Ohio’s winter months. This loving stand-in mother gave Beth her medications, cooked for Beth, even hugged her and comforted her otherwise. Still, as hard as she tried, she couldn’t provide Beth’s mother’s touch.

Though my visits to Beth’s bedside mostly involved happy chats about TV shows, movies, and current events while we ate special meals from favorite restaurants, I sometimes reflected quietly about how the cancer worked to conquer Beth’s body. I became aware of my abject helplessness to fend off the deadly invader. In those moments, I didn’t know what to say to Beth. Painful, pregnant pauses that threatened to even further empower the cancer.

Sometimes when those helpless moments arrived, not knowing what else to do, I ran my fingers gently over Beth’s head, bald from chemotherapy. As soon as my fingertips brushed her skin, Beth involuntarily closed her eyes and vocalized. “Oh…” She seemed to be magically drawn into a soothing reverie, and a grin broke across her face. Without fail, a few moments later Beth started conversations about our mother.

“Remember how Mom used to rub our necks and backs and play with our hair?”

We’d then laugh about how we and our brother used to fight over who got to go first for this delightful treatment or who got the longest back rub.

Then, as Beth lay in the hospital bed in her living room, she and I reminisced about special foods that Mom made for us when we were kids or times she comforted us in other ways.

With the awkward cancer-empowering moment behind us, we forgot about the invader and made the most of the day.

Because of the way mothers transfer their touch to their children, in the end, my mother was able to be there for Beth during her baby daughter’s last days, without even stepping into the room.

Mom’s touch transcended the door through which Beth later departed.

The eulogy I gave for my sister, Beth Geichman Clemmer, on April 15, 2012:

If you knew Beth and you’re like me, you think of her as quiet, reserved, maybe even kind of shy. She certainly was never one to want to draw attention to herself.

So, it might surprise you to hear that her life started with a crash. By that I mean that during the first and, I think, last real birthday party we put on for my father—with Mom and Dad’s friends coming over and enjoying adult beverages and hors d’oeuvres served on Ritz crackers, which, of course, was the height of casual partying in the late 1960s—Beth crashed the party when Mom went into labor. I remember watching my mother as she sat on the edge of her bed wondering if this was it. And it was, and the party ended rather abruptly.

One of my parents’ friends stayed overnight with Mike and me while Dad and Mom went to the hospital to get our little sister. I was eight years old and so excited the morning Mom and Dad and Beth were to arrive home that I threw up all over the hallway. Avocado carpeting christened with milky breakfast. Some things you just never forget.

I was the big sister and should have set the example, but it was Beth who helped me learn years later what being a protective and caring sister really means.

In 2002, Beth, Dad, and I took an August trip to Tucson. Now, August isn’t a great time to travel to Arizona. It’s monsoon season, when the average daily temperature rises to the upper 90s and the sometimes-daily downpours can make it seem much hotter. But I had a business conference to attend and asked if Dad and Beth would like to go. And since they both loved to travel, they jumped at the chance.

I, on the other hand, didn’t like traveling so much. Flying terrified me. The season’s violent storms moving from the southwestern states up to Ohio heightened my fears because we had to fly right over and sometimes through those storms. The plane tossed and felt like it was being bounced from one side of the sky to the other. Beth knew I was scared, and she held my hand. I didn’t realize how hard I was squeezing her until she disengaged for a moment and shook out the pain. And she had to do that several times. She later said I was squeezing so hard that I cut off her circulation. But, every time, she enthusiastically offered me her hand again. No words. Just an outstretched palm that made me feel calm and protected.

Beth radiated excitement about our trip. She looked out the plane’s window, watching the ground when it was visible and at other times staring straight into the storm. She wasn’t at all afraid of the challenge.

As I watched my sister, I remembered that Beth and I had a secret. It was just a few days before this trip commenced that she’d had scans and a biopsy because the doctor suspected cancer. As always, Beth thought more about others than herself. She asked me to keep her secret so as not to unduly worry the rest of the family. After all, what if it turned out to be nothing?

As I sat there on that bumpy plane watching Beth stare into the storm, knowing what storm she may have to come to face, realizing that my little sister was braver than I, I still had no idea how brave she could and would be.

As Beth confirmed later, I happened to walk through the lobby of the resort where we were staying as she was on the phone getting the diagnosis. She indeed had cancer. She wasn’t crying. She didn’t even look upset. When she saw me watching her, she turned away to shield me from the news.

We went through the rest of the trip as though nothing was wrong. We even visited Tombstone, walked through Boothill Graveyard where famous and infamous cowboys lay, and talked about my childhood fantasies of being a wild outlaw. Beth never let the specter of cancer mar her journey, or ours. She was all smiles, as usual. Bright, happy Beth.

The morning we were leaving the resort and Dad was downstairs putting our luggage in the rental car to take us back to the airport to another scary plane, Beth turned to me and asked, “Can you keep a secret?”

“Yes,” I whispered, fearing what she’d say.

And then she said it. “I have cancer.”

I grabbed Beth and hugged her, and she hugged back. And, when Beth hugged you, you knew you were being hugged. She put her whole self into it.

As we held each other and I tried to hold back tears, Beth said, “I’m gonna beat this. I’m gonna beat this.”

And she did. She beat cancer. She never let it get the better of her.

Cancer tries to take away everything. All the light in someone’s life. All the hope and future, right from the very start. It offers its dark grizzly hand and says, “It’s over.”

But Beth didn’t buy that. She courageously went through surgery and chemotherapy treatments to fight off the invader. Throughout it all she maintained a positive outlook—up until the very end, even when she knew she was going to die. She refused to look at the dark side. She beat cancer for ten productive, happy years. She brought light into our lives, reminded us that every day mattered and that we had a choice to use it the way we wanted. And she helped us learn what real courage looked like and showed us how we could emulate it.

Instead of focusing on cancer…instead of allowing us to focus on cancer…Beth focused her life on home and family. She especially reveled in holidays, when we all got together. She not only made cookies for us every Christmas, but she also made sure she made what we liked, and she got her deepest pleasure out of our enjoyment. There was nothing she liked better or wanted to do more than please others. It made her beam.

Everyone who took the time to get to know Beth knows how she always focused on the good in people. We, none of us, are without faults, some worse than others. I’m certainly included in that last batch. But Beth looked beyond those faults, no matter how vivid they were, to the good that lay inside every person she knew.

If we’re going to honor Beth and her memory, we should remember the great lessons she gave to us. That adversity doesn’t have to envelop our lives in blackness or even shades of gray. That smiles and laughter go far to help us get through bad times. That there’s good in everybody, and we can work to help each other bring it out. That love really can conquer all. That life is an adventure that should be joined without delay.

And Beth did love an adventure. Hiking. Scuba diving. Camping. Boating, which was one of her family’s favorite activities.

My husband, John, and I went with Beth and Jim once to Cesar’s Creek. It was a beautiful day in early October. Just chilly enough to allow us to appreciate our jackets. Cloudless azure blue sky. Trees draped in their glorious red, orange, and yellow autumn clothes. Glints of light dancing on the lake’s water as Jim steered the boat to favorite spots. The sun shining on Beth’s face, making it even brighter than usual. She made sure we enjoyed the food she’d packed. She belly laughed as the fishy water waves jumped up and hit me…which she knew I didn’t like.

Beth held my hand as I walked along the wobbly dock. As usual, she knew more than I how to navigate the bumps, and she took me safely to the shore. It was just a few years ago, but Beth was physically strong… and so joyful.

I bet boaters on that lake today can still hear Beth’s peals of happy laughter. I hope we all can. She hopes we all can.

I’ve been running from it for a long time, but today is the day when it became necessary for me to write my little sister’s obituary.

I’ve never written an obit before. What do I say?

Do I say that when Beth was a golden-haired little four year old, eight years behind me, she walked through the house on her tippy toes? Do I mention that she loved American cheese as a tippy-toed child but refused to eat the single slices if they broke when she carefully peeled back the cellophane packaging? Do I include that till her dying day she loved Hostess Ho Hos? Or that, to my knowledge, there is only one picture taken in all of her 45 years that shows her not smiling a big, genuine smile?

What about the way Beth faced cancer? Because so many will say that she “lost her battle with cancer,” shouldn’t I say that Beth actually won the battle? Shouldn’t I say that she never let cancer get her down, that it never was the focus of her life? That her family was my sister’s uppermost concern even on her last evening alive? Beth lived to protect those she loved at all costs, and that persisted despite my coaching her for years about how to learn to put herself first, at least on occasion. She never bought into that. I should have known she wouldn’t.

Do I mention those of us left behind whose lives now seem a bit darker? But shouldn’t I say that even as Beth’s voice has fallen silent, her deep, heartfelt laughter still echoes in our memories? If we close our eyes and listen, it seems like she’s still with us, hoping that we’ll get as much out of our day as possible because, after all, each of us has only one life to live and we have to make that count.

Certainly, it seems appropriate for me to mention that we are terribly proud of the way the little tippy-toed girl turned out.

Wouldn’t it also seem appropriate to say how much I love my little sister and, though I already miss her terribly, that I’m so glad that she’s finally at rest? That I respect and admire her courage, tenacity, and tenderness more than words can ever convey? That the gifts she left us all will shine forever? That I am so grateful for having known her?

Since late October, my family has been increasingly devastated by my sister’s cancer, which has continued to progress despite aggressive treatment.

When faced with such life-and-death crises, my first impulse is to shut myself off from the world, and this means that my writing stops. Like a flower that closes when the night’s darkness approaches, I often wait for the brightness to return to write again. But life’s most complicated cycles last longer than 24 hours, and I’ve no time to waste.

Though I’ve made some feeble attempts to write during this difficult time—telling myself I needed to write, that writing is therapy and healing—the page has been the last place I wanted to be. The page is the place for truth, and I didn’t want to face it.

We are losing Beth.

There: I’ve written it. It didn’t hurt to write it any more than it hurts to think about it. So, why am I running away from writing?

It seems to me, when I’m not running, when I’m thinking clearly—when I’m thinking as a writer—that the page is right where I need to be now that adversity’s fog surrounds me.

Most particularly, memoir provides an especially well-fitting outlet for times such as these. I can tell my page—myself—what I need to hear to get through and understand my feelings. I can share the harrowing experience of losing my sister with others so that when they face their own problems they won’t feel like they’re blazing a path. They won’t feel like they’re alone. They’ll know that others have been there and understand.

I think one of the problems with writing through adversity is that there are so many unknowns.

I tell my students every week that writing is a process of discovery, that they should have faith in the process, that they shouldn’t worry if the words and the story want to go in another direction from what they intended at the outset.

But now I find myself a hypocrite, unable to be willing to let the words go where they want. I think I’m scared because I don’t know exactly how this story ends yet. I don’t know how I’m going to feel. I’m afraid of what I’ll see and how it will affect me.

But isn’t all that scary stuff what writing is about anyway?

Isn’t being a writer about using words to make sense of the world, especially when it’s been turned upside down by a monster? Is there a more important time to try to make sense out of things than when my baby sister is being taken away forever despite her tenacity and courage and faith? Isn’t it important to describe and understand the terror I see in my dad’s eyes as he faces the prospect of losing a child? Shouldn’t I be willing to record how losing my beloved sister is ripping a gaping hole in my heart and how it feels to know the abject helplessness of not being able to do anything to stop the cruel process of destruction? And what about that awful feeling of knowing that at some point I’m going to be called upon to actually abet the process by helping to make final arrangements and writing my sister’s eulogy?

Yes, most certainly, I need to get started. But I’m going to need a mantra to keep me going through the darkness and tears.

Writing is therapy. Writing is healing. Writing is record. Writing is truth. Writing is life.

By 7 a.m. a year ago today I’d already been to two grocery stores buying the perfect turkey and other Thanksgiving fixings and had the turkey in the oven cooking two days early because I was afraid my little toy poodle, Ebie, would die without having his favorite food one last time.

I’ve wanted to write about Ebie in this blog so many times. I’ve sat down with ideas, made notes, chosen pictures. But I’ve always aborted the process because I just haven’t been able to fully face the fear that I wouldn’t have the courage, insight, and sensitivity to make his story as profound as it should be. No doubt I’ll fail today, but I’m writing anyway.

During my lifetime I’ve lost my mother, lost a career, lost my idea of self, and had to rebuild my entire existence. But losing Ebie was the worst of it.

He welcomed me every day—first thing in the morning and whenever throughout the day he hadn’t seen me for two minutes—as though he thought of me as a special gift. Like I knew all the answers and could give him everything. Like I saved him.

The reality is that he saved me. As someone who’s suffered depression for years, I often came home from work crying and had otherwise difficult days. Ebie always met me with his happy little face, showered me with loving kisses, licked the salty tears off my cheeks, and grabbed his gingerbread man to start a romping game to take my mind off my troubles and make it all okay.

Ebie endured serious illnesses for seven years—the entire latter half of his life. Epilepsy. Immune-mediated hemolytic anemia—a horrible condition that shifts a dog’s immune system into overdrive and destroys life-sustaining red blood cells. And then came diabetes. Ebie eventually went blind and lapsed into dementia. Still, never did he let his problems shadow his optimism.

He took his twice-daily medications, including insulin injections, as though they were simply momentary impediments, and then he kept frolicking forward.

Perhaps part of his joy was that he didn’t know how sick he was. He didn’t know that he could be fine upon rising in the morning and dead from an immune problem by noon. He didn’t know that his slowly darkening world would one day envelope him in total blackness, as we knew awaited him.

Yet, even during his last week, though he repeatedly struggled with blood glucose readings low enough to cause seizures and even kill, didn’t have the stomach to eat, had to venture outside for potty in single-digit temperatures when he wanted to stay tucked in a warm bed with me, Ebie didn’t lose his joie de vivre. Or maybe he didn’t want to appear to us that he lost his zest for living. Maybe he went on just because he thought I wanted him to. He knew how much I needed him.

I often think of how difficult it was for Ebie to die. Did he think he was disappointing me?

When he fell into the final deep sleep, he took my heart with him, along with all the hope and brightness I think I’ll ever have.

Now, when I close my eyes and go back to even those sad last days when the long good-bye had started, I can feel his furry little cheek on mine as I hold him close and whisper “Mommy loves Ebie” over and over again. When I open my eyes and realize that furry little cheek is gone forever, it’s like a million knives.

When Ebie ate his last bites of turkey that morning a year ago today, he only had twenty-three more days to live.

This year we’re not making a turkey at home for Thanksgiving. We’ve thought about making barbecued ribs, a pot roast, even coneys. But what seems the best is getting out of the house and escaping the memories. I just can’t stand the thought of not seeing Ebie sitting in front of the oven waiting for the delectable treat cooking inside.

Then again maybe we should stay home and let the memories come, even the most painful ones, because this year even more than any other I feel so grateful for having known and loved Ebie. For all the years of fun and laughter he bestowed upon me. For all the times he sat by me sharing Fritos. For having the exquisite joy of being able to feel his warm little body beside me as I slept. For hearing his happy bark when he heard the garage door and knew I was coming home. For the way he lived. For the way he helped me live.

During the last six months, I’ve been feeling more overwhelmed and unnerved by the blank page than usual. When I have written, I’ve spent much more time thinking about how the work fails than how it succeeds. I’ve found it far easier to totally avoid writing than to do it, even though writing stands as the one thing that makes me feel truly fulfilled, productive, happy.

When my asthma kicks up, tries to suffocate me, and reduces my life to the drudgery of simply trying to breathe through one day at a time, one puff of my inhaler at a time, my doctor prescribes a round of steroids. It doesn’t cure the problem, but the treatment helps to ease the symptoms so I can look ahead and feel like I’m improving until the asthma-causing inflammation burns itself out. Usually, just a few days’ worth of medication gets me going, and I forget the sometimes-excruciating feeling of not being able to breathe.

So, taking a lesson from that, I’ve decided that I need a round of steroids to jumpstart my writing. As no bottleful of prednisone will help with this, I’ve decided to sign up for NaNoWriMo for the first time.

My mission, as it is for others, will be to write a novel of at least 50,000 words. But, maybe unlike others, I don’t want these words to be polished. I want them to be raw, ending in work not finely chiseled.

I usually concentrate on writing memoir and screenplays, not fiction. And, the way I look at it, writing a quick, unpolished novel–new terrain–will provide the opportunity to succeed by granting me room to write material that’s quite imperfect. By writing without strings, without wires, without need of any safeguards, I’ll be learning, having fun, and producing writing that blasts through my creative asphyxiation.

What’s more, I intend to write this novel during my normal waking hours, not while hiding from the Self-Righteous Censors in the wee hours of the morning when I’m so bleary eyed and muddle headed that I can’t hold more than one thought in my mind at once. I’ll write out in the open, with light shining on my page, because I know there’s no possibility of failure as long as I put my fingers on the keyboard and let the characters tell their story.

The idea for the novel came to me last year, and it’s been sitting in a file. It’s not an outline–just a mini-page of random notes, literary wishes instead of ideas. For months, every time I’ve looked at that file on my computer, I’ve thought about NaNoWriMo. Should I? Should I not? Should I spare myself the chance of failure?

But, today I signed up, and the plan’s a go. And today I begin to remember the joy of writing.

On that day ten years ago, I looked up at the breathtakingly beautiful clear azure blue sky before I walked into my office building in Columbus, Ohio, and felt that everything was right. Things had started going well for me at work and with my family. For the first time in a long time, my guard was down.

Not ten minutes later I saw an Internet photo showing a huge hole in the side of one of the towers at the World Trade Center. Soon, I stood before the TV in my office and watched a jetliner ram the other tower.

I knew my world had changed forever. My knees buckled, my hands shook, and I sank into my chair.

My thoughts jolted to my nineteen-year-old daughter, my husband, my parents, my siblings. My two poodles and five cats. I wanted us to be together, holding each other.

Still, a part of me was glad to be alone. I felt so unnerved and vulnerable. Terrified. I don’t like people seeing me like that and needed some time to rebuild my protective walls.

But when the towers fell and I heard the eerie noise of the first responders’ personal alarms screaming for help, it was just too much, and I ventured out of my office to find my colleagues. While I was on my way to the conference room, where the big television sat, my supervisor hugged me. I appreciated it, hugged her back, and meant it. Then we all sat around the table watching news reports and looking for Flight 93. Hoping. Praying. Fearing.

We weren’t always such a great team. We argued over petty points, sometimes undercut each other. But, as we sat around the table, we understood each other and wanted the same things. Security, stability, peace.

As we tried to absorb and believe the unbelievable television coverage from Ground Zero, what struck me most was the terror on the faces of the dust-covered people and how they clung to each other. Strangers intertwined. Nobody wanted to be alone. The trauma was too great.

I left work at noon. On the drive home I heard reports of gas stations jacking up prices to outlandish levels and people waiting in line to pay the prices before anybody else got there to get all the fuel. I started wondering what our lives would be like the next day, the next week, six months later, ten years later. I couldn’t even imagine it.

What did we have to look forward to if one minute the sky was a beautiful clear azure blue and everything was okay and in the next few minutes almost 3,000 people were dead?

I didn’t want to live in that kind of world.

Every day for weeks I woke up at 3 a.m. to sit in front of the television while workers sifted through debris at Ground Zero. Watching was all I could do to help. It was my duty.

Life went on. During the next few weeks and months people were friendly. We all had American flags flying outside our houses. We spoke to each other in stores and made way for each other in the street. We worked together to try to rebuild security, stability, and peace. Or to build something like them.

We have at least made it past the once unimaginable ten-year mark.

Yesterday, my one-year-old grandson and his daddy built a tower out of blocks. They also built a robot to guard it.

The smell of saddle leather thrilled me as Patches, my very own pony, stepped along the gravel road. Her brown and white head slowly bobbed up and down next to Pa’s as he led us around the block on which sat the little green house he shared with Nanny. Short for six years old, I could hardly stretch my legs down far enough to reach the stirrups. Still, I felt as much like a wild cowboy as a little girl in West Portsmouth, Ohio, could.

In my beloved cowboy hat and boots, I nearly lived my dreams during the latter end of several Augusts in the mid 1960s when I punctuated the long luxurious summer breaks from school with week-long stays at my mother’s parents’ home.

One day, as Pa, Patches, and I walked around a corner, I heard a neighbor’s male pony begin to call out. Patches forgot herself and started rearing, which she’d never done before. Pa jerked the reins to regain control, grimaced, and jumped around trying to stay out from under the pony’s hooves while still managing to reach up and readjust his striped engineer’s cap. My little hands clung to the pommel, and my knees squeezed the fenders.

I’d seen enough episodes of Gunsmoke and Bonanza while visiting Pa and Nanny to know that a horse could suddenly go wild and throw its rider, which almost always ended in a painful death, at least in my imagination. So, I did what any cowboy with a will to live would do.

I jumped off while the pony’s front legs were in midair, somehow landed full on my feet, and lit out down the hill towards Pa and Nanny’s house emitting a piercing scream that would put a siren to shame. My running down that steep, slippery, gravel slope at full throttle without skidding on my face for several yards seemed like a miracle to me even then.

When I saw Nanny burst out of the house, her expression told me she thought she’d find me bloodied and Pa dead. In an instant, I found myself gratefully enveloped in Nanny’s arms and knew I’d survive. I never even bothered to look back to see about Pa’s fate, but soon I heard his high-pitched laugh–“Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee–as he led Patches back into the yard.

Later that afternoon, while the cicadas sang in the afternoon’s heat, Nan and I perched ourselves in the living room, watched her TV “progrums,” snapped fresh green beans, and chatted. I told Nanny lies about mean things my mother had supposedly done to me, and she feigned sympathy while the smoke from her Salems danced in the light streaming in through the picture window’s once-white sheer curtains. “I’ll have to speak to her about that,” Nanny said in the tone mothers use when they need to discipline their children. She suggested sneaky ways I could get back at my mother, and we giggled while reflecting on the ramifications of such bold actions, knowing full well they’d never come to fruition.

An hour or so later, a hunk of fatback joined the beans in a pot to simmer while Nanny boiled ears of corn, sliced rich red homegrown tomatoes just off the vine, and made corn bread from scratch. Soon, we drank buttermilk with our supper and thought we dined like royalty.

By 9 p.m., we snored in bed, exhausted.

Maybe the next day Pa and I went “downtown” and had a milkshake at Smith’s Drug Store as we waited to pick up Nanny after her shift in the men’s clothing department at Montgomery Wards. Maybe we went to the hardware store, where I begged for a new stick pony and penny-pinching Pa relented. Maybe Nanny encouraged me to run my fingers through her sparkly jewelry and let me wear some of her clip-on earrings. Maybe Pa and I sat on the stoop in front of the little green house as he sliced an apple I picked off the tree, and we munched while I soaked up tales about Billy the Kid’s adventures, which I hoped to emulate someday.

As the glorious days passed, I longed more and more for home and looked forward to the new school year. Still, I left Pa and Nanny’s hiding tears from my parents as we drove home to Dayton.

Though the annual trips to my grandparents’ home lasted only a few more magical years, Pa and Nanny gave me dreams and memories that still buoy me in times of sadness. Only later did I come to understand that my grandparents treasured our visits as much as I did because those golden days offered respites from the vicious inner demons that haunted them, some from as far back as their own brutal childhood years.

Writing is tough. Who would disagree with that?

But, for me, the least of the difficulty occurs when I’m at the keyboard putting one word after another. And that process can be so difficult that my straight hair nearly curls because my brain’s pushing so hard.

What’s even more difficult is getting my butt, brain, and heart in the seat to write.

I spend much of my day thinking about writing. But I don’t make it to the keyboard as often as I should because people important to me depend on my being present in their lives.

I don’t want to disappoint my family, my friends, my students by being negligent. By not helping when called upon, and sometimes even when I’m not. I want to go to bed at night thinking I’ve done my best to be what everyone needs me to be.

And I’m not just addressing the time folks want to share with me and me with them. Even when I’m away from my people I think about them, worry about them, wish them well, try to figure out their problems.

By the time I get to the keyboard my mind is so cloudy that I often haven’t the peace of mind to work.

Why do I allow this to happen? Why do I so often feel that my allegiance to my fellows supersedes my allegiance to myself?

Writing is solitary work. It requires me to spend a good bit of time alone. Not just physically alone, but also mentally and emotionally alone. I like that state of being. It suits me. It feeds and refreshes me.

The secret is that I often like writing better than I like being with those I love. Because when I’ve finally gotten beyond my obligations to others and put my butt in the seat, targeted my brain and my heart, and started tapping the keyboard making text, I’m in the zone, I’m happy. My brain and my heart no longer have to dissect my motivation and make value judgments about what I’m doing and what I should be doing. By then, I’m doing what’s best for me. What I need to do to be happy and fulfilled.

I’ve worked to support others. Now it’s time to train my efforts on my own self. I have to do a better job of stealing a few moments every day to feed myself so I can be a stronger human being.

It’s time for me to put myself first.

By the time I held newborn Carter in my arms, it was all over. He’d won my heart. But getting there was quite a journey.

All I could think about when I saw the photo of my daughter and son-in-law holding a positive pregnancy test was how I was going to look sitting in a rocking chair with my soon-to-be gray hair wadded up in a bun.

I was too young to be a grandmother. I had my whole damn life ahead of me.

I knew my reaction wasn’t textbook. They expected me to cry, jump up, and hug my daughter. Instead, I stayed glued to the couch, painted a smile on my face, and searched silently for the words I was supposed to say. “Congratulations!” finally came out of my face. “When are you due?”

I’d been taking care of people for years, and I wasn’t ready to add to the list.

Okay. I got over that. I started passing by the usually avoided baby section in stores. I started caressing pink little-girl dresses and sparkly ruby slippers as I walked by. I remembered when my own daughter was young. I could handle that again. I could play Barbies with a little girl.

Then I found out she was a boy.

I didn’t know what the heck to do with a boy. I didn’t know what a boy liked to play with or how he’d think. I remembered how my brother managed to get a major injury every week from the time he was six years old until he was grown up. And I’d never done booboos very well.

That’s where I was on the day Carter was born. I feared I’d never connect with a being so unlike me and for whom I was so unsuited.

Then I saw him. He resembled my daughter. Years seemed to disappear. Sometimes the lines between being a mother and a grandmother blurred right before my eyes.

While I was disoriented, I had to learn all over again how to take care of a baby. Hold Carter’s head. Realize that he’d develop in stages. That he wouldn’t be able to recite or even understand The Gettysburg Address right out of the womb and that I would have to find some way to communicate with him.

Instinctively, I did for Carter like I did for my daughter. I held and caressed him. Because my touch was like his mother’s, Carter bonded with me. The more I saw him, the more I wanted to see him.

I helped Carter manipulate his little toys. I played with them differently than others, in atypical combinations. I put the stacking cups upside down on Carter’s workbench. It made him think. He accepted me for what I was and looked forward to what I’d do.

Later I learned that climbing played an integral part in our relationship. I served as Everest to Carter’s Sir Edmund Hillary. I got a hug every now and then. It melted my heart.

I’ve taken care of Carter when he was miserable with teething and a bad cold. I’ve given him lunch when he was joyful, breakfast when he wasn’t. I’ve put him to bed when he was grateful and when he was grumpy. No matter what, I did my best, not always doing the right thing, but always trying. Carter forgave my shortcomings.

It was a year ago today that he came into the world. I’m still not sure I know what being a grandmother is all about, but Carter and I are on our way to finding out.

And I’m looking forward to it.