A Family Letter, with love, from Us to You

Throwing Stones at Playa Negra 2008 Brian Kershisnik

PREFACE

It's December when reminiscences and musings are thick upon the air as people build lists of moments of their year. Into these lists they cut and paste pictures of loved ones I no longer recognize unless I know the list-making and photo-pasting originals so well that I don't really need the photos. They then sprinkle on a holiday border, tri-fold and enclose the whole slurry in a Christmas card in hopes that the shiny-sweet Holiday outer coating will help it all slip on down. Funny, sometimes. Spiritual, sometimes. Always buzzing with many achievements and goals met and super-performing offspring/pets. Bah, and do I hear a humbug? Humbug! From the Victorian gentleman in the back row and the Mormon mom here at the keyboard.
You may well ask why I would feel this way (not that you ever ask. you are too polite). And I don't know. I love Christmas. And hearing from friends. And good photography (though, now I think of it--no, on second thought, never mind).
But. Here's the trouble. We don't do it. Haven't for years. For some reason, this is my problem, my failing.
It's not like I have no skills. Some things I can do.
But. I have never been good at Christmas greetings, beyond the traditional and basic "Merry Christmas!" spoken with varying degrees of warmth in the street or on the phone.
And Brian doesn't do the Christmas card thing insofar as it concerns writing any letters or mailing any cards. So.

Maybe it's the holiday borders.
Maybe the postage.

Whatever. Since lately I have been facing up to Hard Things on this blog, I thought I would post a holiday letter to test my endurance levels. Maybe it'll become a tradition.

Kershisnik Family Christmas Letter 2009

And What a Year It Was


Untitled (Angels) 2008 Brian Kershisnik

This year Brian painted in Kanosh, was happy doing it and made enough money. We are more grateful to God for this blessing than we can easily say and also to those who loved Brian's artwork enough to part with some of their own material comfort. This year Brian built a beautiful fence across the back of our yard and we are grateful that while we can now toss baby relatives outside, they cannot escape into greater Provo. Brian's back healed not so very long after the fence was completed and now he is reasonably nice. Again, we are grateful.

Rockaway Beach 2009

This year Noah lived in Heritage Halls at BYU, across the street from our new house. He loved it. We actually saw very little of him except on Sundays when he always came for dinner. In the summer, he moved home and we loved that. Then, on his sisters' first day of school, he walked up that same street with his two rolling bags and straight into the MTC without looking back. I watched him walk away, waiting for that last look over his shoulder, wondering if he was really just going to walk right away from us but thinking, this is what you raised him to do. And he did. Then he flew away to Hong Kong to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ in Mandarin and now he lives across the world from the house in Provo. Sundays are very empty, but we are grateful. You can read his letters at eldernoah.blogspot.com.

Dance Company Photo 2009

This year Eden played all sorts of sports and then quit them to dance and have a life. She found out she likes it. In Life there is studying and getting lots of good grades and seeing the results of that. There is having time to have a job and spending the results of that. There is being president of stuff at church and liking that. There is time for friends and dance trips and Facebook and texting and dances and playing and that is really great if you are Eden or one of her friends. You can read about her Life at asyouhappentoseeitwillhappentobe.blogspot.com. If you see her, encourage her to clean her room and we will be grateful.

Rockaway Beach 2009

This year Leah signed herself up for things. Ballroom, band, the wonderful Wasatch choir (before school--eew!), Shakespeare play, ski school--I could pretend the list goes on and on. Oh, wait, the class Christmas party committee. My little over-achiever. Anything, in fact, that doesn't involve a ball. Though she recently confided to me, in a dark, confessional tone, that she is pretty good at soccer. There was a pause while we blinked at each other and she seemed to be waiting for a response. I told her that we loved all our children equally, no matter what path they pursued in life. She hit me, but gently. I was grateful. She has a blog and when she's older I'll tell you about it.

Running Carefully 2008 Brian Kershsinik

This year I worked on learning this new house and how to love it. I started Henry V at Wasatch Elementary. I read (there's a list) 79 books. So far. This year my sisters organized us into a beach house in Rockaway, Oregon where we tried to play hacky sack with our kids in the sand till they fell down laughing. May you all have a beach house memory in your life. I made new friends and old friends. I started this blog, which was/is a Hard Thing. I took care of my children in all the ways I knew. All. It is my privilege and I am eternally grateful.

I wrote a Christmas letter.

You read it.

We are Christmassing together.


Merry Christmas to you, and to yours. Mine are working hard at Merry and Bright. We love you, love hearing about your years, love sharing your lives. We bear to you, as our most precious gift, the testimony we carry in our hearts of the divinity of the baby whose story we tell and celebrate in the bleak midwinter. We are convinced following His teachings will bring love and joy to you this year and happiness in all the years to come.
Let your heart be light.

thanks to Eden and Julie M. for the photos

Catscan

(This is one of Brian's paintings. Cat Gift. You might have missed the protective overlay.)


On Wednesday I had a CT scan. I had had some pain in my neck and ordering tests is what my doctor does in the face of pain, so they scheduled the scan for Wednesday afternoon. I told them during the scheduling, just like I was supposed to, that I am allergic to iodine. Last time I had a scan, an MRI, we all found out about that allergy.

You can feel the iodine zipping through your veins; from the needle in your arm it races down into your hand and at the same time, from just below where your elbow bends, up and then on through your neck and right across your face. You can taste the metal as it moves through your mouth. It feels warm and oddly cozy as it passes down your torso and legs, maybe because scanning rooms are so darned cold that even an illusory warmth is comforting. And if you are like me, at the moment the iodine passes across your nose and palate, a moment I already find funny because it reminds me so clearly that I am divided cleanly down the middle, two symmetrical half people glued along a central axis and trying to get along nicely, just at that moment, you start to sneeze. In response to your sneezing the room fills with people in a swift and uncanny way. And probably because of the sneezing, you can't see where they
come from.

That sneezing was a revelation. I would have said, had you asked me (though you would never have asked) that I perfectly understood allergies and the human sneeze reaction. Had had, in fact, rather a lot of experience in that area. Not, of course, I would have humbly submitted, as much as some people, but enough, in my opinion, to say that I perfectly understood. Turns out I did not understand the sneezing that allows for no breathing, that sucks air up stupidly, in a messy way and without caring if there is enough left over for human respiratory needs, just shoving and grabbing air any old how to throw and throw into sneezes. It was so unexpected and so profound and extreme that it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to me. Add hysterical laughter to the list of oxygen-hungry activities I was attempting to undertake simultaneously.

No one else laughed.

Afterward, they told me that if I ever had to have another scan I was to be sure to tell the schedulers about my allergy. Nurses and a doctor came and repeated those instructions several times. They were worried I would forget. Probably because of the enormous amounts of antihistamine flowing, along with the iodine, through the IV and my veins.

I didn't forget. But I did forget that I would never be allowed to drive myself to a test again.



Bri is gone on Wednesdays. He explained to me for a long time (this is the part he will re-explain) that he would do whatever I needed him to do and if what I needed him to do was come to Provo on Wednesday and drive me to the test, that was fine and he absolutely would and it was going to cost us hundreds of dollars that would be better used to pay for the test and that he would do it of course, I just had to tell him and he would find someone else to drive me. I just had to say what I wanted and he would do the other thing.

I had a really strong reaction to this. Really. I wanted to throw something at him through the phone. I felt like I was going to cry, or start screaming. I felt like I couldn't breathe. I realized I was going to have to tell my children so we could work out the timing. I was going to have to ask for help and that was something I felt I could not do. Could not. Die first. Run away. Suffocate.

Where on earth was this coming from?

Oh, well, actually I knew where. Exactly where. This was an overpowering, unconsidered instinctive response. Hide. This was an unreasoning fight against a terrible fear. I was going to have to show myself. I was going to have to tell. I never tell. I hide the blood and clean the cut when I get home and I don't limp on the way. I did not have a single person I wanted to show this to. If my kids read this they will find out for the first time that I ever had an MRI and no one will ever know why. I never tell. I hate phone calls, but of all the hateful phone calls. I was going to have to tell.

I didn't swear because my children are making me quit but I prayed and then called a friend and she just said, yes, she could do that. Like nothing. She drove me and she asked why I needed this test in a very loving way and I told her and I lived through it. While she drove carefully (she's a very careful driver and always on time) I deeply searched my soul, really questioned my inability to ask for help and realized that my heart is sort of broken and that there is something terribly wrong with being unable to reach out to people when you need help. And resolved never to do it again.

In the check-in line at Imaging I heard several people giving their information and they were all referred by my very own same doctor. Hmmm.

They still use iodine, even if it makes you sneeze like you need the Exorcist. They pump you full of prednizone and benadryl the twenty four hours before the test, and you have a suppressed allergic reaction which for me was two sneezes, one before and one after the scan, and terrible throat and eye itching. And you are very, very weird and it lasts for days. Everything just seems far to big to get around. For example. The nurse asked me to sign a paper--but I had an IV in my right elbow! She explained, oh no, honey, that was fine; flexible needle, see? Which, to my immuno-distressed self, was just so much more horrible. Ok, accommodating the IV by being careful, that's icky and probably painful, but bending..?? And then she left me to get dressed saying that the IV needed to stay a part of me for a while in case I --you know, sneezed or something--but said to remember that needle wouldn't give me a bit of trouble. Bendable. Right. Thanks. I thought about throwing up and put my head against a rack full of old deer and fish magazines and waited for her to come release me.

My friend drove me home and dropped me off. No children were worried. No one asked about the test results or lost sleep or thought I might die. No one else found out. The doctor's office did not call within the twenty four hour period in which I was supposed to hear from them. When they finally did call, today, Friday, they kept me waiting for twenty minutes while they--what? tried to remember what they wanted to say to me?--and I tried to decide whether being kept waiting that long was a good sign or a bad one and why it would be a sign of anything, anyway.

Test results: nothing.

"Wait," I say on the phone as the tech is hanging up,"wait. I came in with pain. The test shows nothing about that."
"Right," she says brightly, hanging up again.
"Wait," I say, "what do I do about the pain?"
"What? Oh. Oh. Well. I'll have to ask about that...the doctor is gone now...maybe Monday...can you call on Monday?"

Oh sure. Absolutely. It had taken more than a month to ask the doctor for help in the first place..



the photo is Noah's

Tiny Actors--You Could Put Them Almost Anywhere

These are little actors. They are really amazingly small.











Here, they stretch.











Here I have put a penny into the picture so you can see how small they actually are. Nothing in this photo is in focus, but you get the idea. This is a metaphor for early rehearsals. Nothing is focused, but I tell myself they are getting the bigger picture.






Sword play.






Cut. Parry. Move your feet. Now exchange. And again. Now do it in front of the group. No, it's alright, everybody falls apart in front of an audience. Let's do it again.










Today I assigned fight partners. Today we decided who lives and who dies and who will carry the dead from the field named for the castle that stood hard by. Agincourt, they called it.








The French court. The English were excused today after fight training. Only Exeter remained to deliver Henry's message of scorn, defiance, slight regard and contempt. Photo taken by Chorus, who had to hang around to give the French their cues.







Reading. Reading lines. Trying to understand the push, the passion, the movement of this story. Is this before the traitor scene? Am I English in this scene? Is my other character dead? Are we going to do it again?!? Trying to wait for your line. Trying to pay attention. Trying to stay awake.











Good work, tiny, shiny-bright people. Memorize. See you after vacation.

Two Fires

This is the fire pit I built for my bishop in my backyard.
He wanted to have a party for all the new families in our ward— I think this desire took him by surprise— anyway, he didn’t plan it much, he just asked at church on Sunday if we would have it at our house on Friday.
I tried to figure it out. What did he want? How many people were we feeding? He said he thought six or seven families. Probably. He said he didn’t want me to micro-engineer this. (?) I said ok, but does that mean no planning at all? Can we get a firmer idea of how many people? It turned out to be twenty new families and about that many again of the ward officers he wanted the new people to meet.
The party was announced in Priesthood and Relief Society.

I talked to the Relief Society presidency.
We made plans, we discussed them, we discarded them. They asked what I was going to do when it snowed? I told them the bishop checked the weather forecast on his iphone at church and it wasn't supposed to snow.

I decided to make it all desserts, just massive sugar offerings, and fires to stay warm by, since we would be staying outside. The bishop said he didn’t want this to impact my house at all.
Hmm.
I needed to build another fire pit.

On Friday morning the snow forecasts got serious. People started calling me. What are we doing now, since it's going to snow? I asked my bishop what the fallback plan was. He said, no fallback. He said, are you micro-engineering this? (Micro--?) He said the weather will be great. He waved his hand vaguely. Don’t think about it anymore, he said. Great weather, he said.
I called Bri. He texted his friend the bishop to ask what the fallback plan would be.
No fallback plan. Don't think about the weather anymore.
So I built another pit and got wood and made cookies and didn’t think about it. A seasoned friend said, the bishop doesn’t want you to plan this because he didn’t.

I sat for a while on my back steps looking at my firepits and thought about a lot of things. I thought about how I decide something is going to work out well or badly. I thought how it is I begin to worry about a possible future. I realized I had decided to feel that the bishop was going to be right. I would have the party as he had requested and just do whatever I could with whatever happened.



And we had the party and lots of people came. Great weather, as foretold.


It didn’t snow. It was lovely, really; not too cold to be outside, but only just.


Everyone kept right close to the fire to stay warm but no one burst into flame.



This is Saturday morning.


“I think Flexibility should be one of the Young Women’s virtues.”
--Cassandra Barney

Never Lonely When You Have a Blog

Brightly Colored Burdens/ Brian Kershisnik

This blog follows me around. I've only been with it once and already it is bumping into my mind time, reminding me it has needs, making suggestions and nudging me a bit, altering my direction. "You could do this instead of that, it would be good for a blog."
"You should take a photo [I never take a photo unless at the Grand Canyon or the Tower of London a non-English-speaking tourist with a pathetic smile and frantically bobbing head hands me a camera and I simply can't get someone else to do it. Nor have I ever before used brackets. I never got that far in math.] should take a photo and write about this. It would be great for the blog."
"You should take note of this childhood story you happened to remember. Maybe you could connect it to your day today. Maybe there is a passable essay in it. It would be great for the blog."
How did I become so suddenly connected to something with needs and demands? Another being that must be fed? How did I join the world of the blogging? I never join anything. God intended I be a member of His church and had me born into it because He knew there was no way in this world I would ever join. I don't make commitments, I don't even make friends. Ask anybody. I am a lousy committer. I got married this one time, but other than that, all my commitments God gave me. If I try to make a friend, I try and it is this awkward thing. I would simply walk away from this bossy blog except that people have read it. Read it and told me that they did. Read it, told me and asked how often I am going to post. Read, told, asked and suggested a posting schedule. Nudge, nudge.
Here is what I have been thinking about today. Looming blogs shape your thinking.
I read a book called My Grandfather's Blessings. I read it with a book group but really, we didn't have a discussion, more of an homage. Two of the women in the group had already read it and loved it too much for anyone to talk about it, in case they might take some sort of issue with it. So we only got to tell our favorite parts and I never got to say what it made me think about, so I want to say it here.
The author, who works with terminally ill cancer patients, talked about how the dying are often so free, that they really learn to see themselves and what they want from life when they realize they could die. I thought about what I would free myself from if I were dying. Phone calls. I hate making phone calls. I would quit making phone calls. And I did feel as if a great weight rolled from me at the thought. I would start living now. I would be happy now and for the rest of whatever life I have left. No unwanted phone calls. I would not wait till someone told me I had only a short time to live before walking myself away from the phone. I would be as brave as I thought the author of the book was suggesting I be. I would go in the direction my soul was nudging me. No more guilt and avoidance and prevarication. No more manipulation to get Bri to do it. Just no more.
And so how was I going to do this?
How was I going to do this and live?
If I were dying I could say to the bishop that I wasn't going to be the kind of Relief Society secretary who made phone calls because I hate it and if I were dying he would say it was ok. In fact, he would say it was ok and ask me what I wanted to do instead and then probably let me do it. Because I would be dying. What I want is to live but to live like the dying. No more phone calls or okra or old carpet or politness to nasty relatives or whatever. But I can't simply stop making phone calls or eating vegetables or being polite. I have to live with these people. I can't buy new carpet just because we really need it and my life would be so much brighter if the yucky old stuff were gone. That's not the way we live. Someone has got to make phone calls and that person has got to be me.
Just how do you do that?
Just who is going to make the phone calls?
How can I say that it makes my life terrible and I want to stop?
How do I join the living at my time of life?

The first one

The first one is because I am not sleeping at 3am. All of everything I have read about not sleeping says that you shouldn't lie in bed trying to sleep, you should do something else. But I never have, I just try to sleep, and try and try for years and years. Sometimes I feel a little bit ridiculous, like I'm pretending I sleep, like I never will sleep, not really, not ever again. Like I'm a little kid pretending I went to bed when I was supposed to, when my mother told me to before she went out for the evening and left me in charge. Like we didn't spend the last hour before she and my dad got back watching every set of headlights that turned off of main street toward our house looking for-- what? The shape? The headlight profile of our parents' car? I don't know, but whatever it was, we knew it. Pretending we hadn't spent the time it took them to drive two and a half country blocks flying through the house, cleaning up at the speed of light, turning off all the lights on all the floors so that what our parents saw as they came up the street must have looked like a brilliant Chinese lantern with four (sorry, baby sister, you weren't born yet in this story) frenetic blurs rocketing about and then the light in one space after another blinking out till the whole lantern was dark and quiet. All of us in our beds, trying to look like sleeping people, sleeping people who just happened to be completely of breath. My mom came in to look at us. Gentle snores to improve the effect. She bent down close and whispered. "Liars." And that's how I feel, sometimes, lying in the dark trying to sleep. Lying. Trying. Lying to sleep.

So I thought I should try something else and see if it works. Try, try, try. I am trying. I am trying harder. I am trying something new. I am trying blogging. I am not trying to sleep.

How sad this glow must look from outside my bedroom. How sad and tiring. Look, the people say to each other as they walk by my window. Look at that poor person blogging and not sleeping. How pitiful. Yes, yes it is. Why are you people walking by my window in the night? You should be home in bed. Some of you would be sleeping, I know people do it, I've seen a lot of that from my husband and two of my children, but some of you could be blogging. Cozy, to blog in bed, the blankets and the laptop keep you warm. Good thing the battery was charged. What it doesn't do, I think, is make you sleepy. Just tired.

I'm trying this. I'm not lying here, I'm really trying.