Getting in and out of pickles is a life skill.

I wake up and have to choose.

On my last post, Dee commented that motherhood is more of an offering than an investment. Whew. That is a mouthful. An offering.

I wake up and have to choose. To consume? To invest, strings attached? Or to hold my hands out: an offering?

Telling stories is an offering, making art is an offering, writing books is an offering. My life is an offering. Listen, listen, we can live a different way. Lightly, kindly, with dancing hands and feet. Each poem is an offering. Each meal is an offering.

I wake up and I have to choose. Sometimes the night sits heavy on my heart. All those fears that came to visit me, the feeling of being in the middle where I cannot see the way forward and the way back is full of sorrow and impassable anyway. Choose to open your eyes, lovely. Make your coffee, take a breath. Share a story.

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Okay, here is a story, a snapshot: (This snapshot will immediately turn into something more like a tangle of yarn in the bottom of my knitting bag: You have been warned.)

Today I have promised to buy two people slices of cake. Two. These two are my sons. One of them, Isaac, is getting cake because he was brave and got through the scary time of being rushed by two dogs and bitten and going to the hospital. I know!

(What is going on with us, lately? Maybe this is just life in a big family.)\

The other son, Leafy, is getting cake because he got all the stamps on his sheet in Thai class. It’s VERY kind of his Thai tutor to continue to give him the stamps and the prizes, because he’s not exactly a kid anymore. Come to think of it, Kenya still gets the stamps, which makes me wonder what exactly are the parameters of being a kid in this class?

This could be the title of our life right now. What are the parameters of being a kid? And what are the parameters of being an adult, and what is the line between the two? And what is a household boundary and what is being treated like a kid and these are the conversations we have since we have adults and kids and adult kids all under one roof.

Two dogs, as well. Seven people and two dogs, and sometimes guests, under a roof that doesn’t always keep the rain out. I’m not complaining, I’m the most blessed woman. I know the transience of time, the way I will look back on this with love filled eyes.

If it was me, receiving cake today, I would buy a slice of red velvet. But I’m guessing Leafy and Isaac will buy cheese cake. (Edit- wrong, Isaac chose red velvet cake, and Kenya threw a wild card and gave me money to buy her a slice of cheesecake as well.)

Probably I should just turn Solo loose on learning to make cheesecake. It’s the kind of thing he’d figure out quickly.

Example: He’s been craving sweet potato gnocchi like the kind we had once at a foodstall in town, so he asked me to buy some sweet potatoes. After a mishap with the first ones I got, which he baked and then realized were full of bugs, I found some bug-free purple sweet potatoes in the market and brought them home.

If there’s one thing I do, it’s forget to take a photo of the finished product. 😆

Solo got straight to work, and in a few hours presented us with gnocchi in a pesto sauce he created with cashews and some slightly wilted Thai basil that I had in the fridge.

IT WAS SO GOOD. It was so good. And purple! So, the question is, is Solo an adult or not? He is only fourteen, but he has adult gnocchi skills. It’s one of the things about Solomon— you offer him some ingredients and he sort of goes swoosh swoosh and comes out with something genius amid very little fanfare.

Like the time I gave him some linoleum for cutting and suggested he make a lino print for T-shirts because we were doing a handmade gifts only Christmas, and he came up with this mind-blowing design. His first time!

Kenya wearing Solo’s amazing shirt to do her last chemistry exams.

Lest this turn only into a brag post, listen my friends: My days are filled with questions about whether my adult kids are going to be okay because of things I discover they cannot do. In other words, things I forgot to tell them. Let’s say I’ve been more concerned about listening well to one another and picking flowers and printing T-shirts than every single practical thing they need to do. Yikes. Will they be okay?

But then, I could ask will I be okay? I am and I will, and STILL I find that a large part of life is about fixing large holes of my own (or Chinua’s) making because of things we didn’t know how to do. Things we still don’t know how to do.

Here’s a story that is about that, and also about gnocchi, because every story I tell is somehow connected to some other story.

One day Chinua and I were driving along a road on an island in the Millennium Falcon, our big station wagon. This was once upon a time… six months ago. We had just recovered from MOMID MIMEEN and were busting out of the house for our first drum lesson, feeling blissful about finally getting back out into the world.

Chinua teaches West African drums, and I take his classes, and he’d been given the opportunity to teach on the island. But 1. Google Maps doesn’t understand Thailand, and 2. it was storming. Trouble commenced. Google routed us up over a hill with a dirt road, and at one point, the road was swamped and crumbling, water streaming across it. Chinua chose a point on the side that looked smoothest and the least like off-roading.

Heroes. But the wood wouldn’t hold.

This was his fatal mistake. The smoothness hid the fact that it was soft—incredibly, puffily, quicksand-like soft. MilFal sank in up to her axles, and that was it for us. A couple of men drove along behind us and tried to help pull us out with their truck and some of the logs they had just bought for their construction job. These were wooden poles, and they just weren’t strong enough to hold our car, despite us all getting thoroughly wet and trying our hardest and our helpers being remarkably cheerful about being late to their job and wading around in the water and rain. They took a photo of the situation to send to their boss, so they could explain why they were late.

Chinua caught a ride with them so he could still teach the class, and I sat in the car and steamed, not emotionally (I was actually a bit blissed out, I like weird moments like this) but literally, with dampness and heat, until I managed to find a tow truck with a winch. Winches are great, by the way. Underrated. They really do the thing they’re meant to do.

Anyway. A few days later, my friend Naomi told me that she was talking to the woman who used to make sweet potato gnocchi at Street Vegan, a little gem of a restaurant here in Pai. The gnocchi Solomon loved. The woman had the picture of us and our car stuck in the mud! She knew we had been stuck because the men who stopped to help were her workers, building her new shop on the island.

The same shop that she closed down here in Pai, where we ate sweet potato gnocchi and Solo had it for the first time and wanted it ever after, so that when he couldn’t get it here anymore he had to make it himself.

And here’s how this all comes together: While I waited for the tow truck to arrive (two hours, if you are wondering) I saw many people approach the same washed-out bit of road and get out of their cars or off their motorbikes, stamping on the ground to find the hardest, most solid part to cross over.

That’s how you do it! Chinua and I didn’t know, so we got ourselves in a pickle and then found a way out. And all these years later, well into middle age, we still do that.

So sometimes kids will magically make the best gnocchi you’ve ever eaten and sometimes they will just have to figure out how to get themselves out of pickles, and the moral is that I don’t need to entertain every single worst case scenario out there.

I can trust and so can you, we can trust that the same wildness we get ourselves through in this world will not swallow our kids whole, even if they do sink up to their axles, every once in a while.

(HOW’S THAT for tying it up? I didn’t even know that was going to happen.) Offerings, you guys, offerings.

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I am glad I chose to write today. I feel better already.

The Millennium Falcon up to her axles in mud.

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