Unfathomable fortune.

May 31, 2024May 31, 2024 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

In the late afternoon, I listen to public radio and move firewood from the outside stacks into the barn, where it will dry again all summer until the autumn nights when I gather my kindling and birchbark. On Monday, the wood delivery guy will come again, with a load of green wood to dry all summer in the open air. Lord, I think as I stack, let the sun shine this summer.

When my daughter appears, I pull off my leather gloves, and we sit on the steps, talking about the Trump verdict. A hummingbird darts between us, onyx and ruby. Later, I’m driving north in the narrow Black River valley to hear GennaRose Nethercott read in the gorgeous old East Craftsbury church. In the parking lot, I join a few friends, talking talking about the verdict, another of these moments with a historic tinge. Crows peck in the farm field behind the church freshly harrowed up. The end-of-May evening is rich with a mixture of cow manure and lilac. Vermont loveliness.

19 years ago, my youngest was born. She fit perfectly in my arm, snuggled from my elbow to fingertips. I kept thinking, How is this possible?

A few days after she was born, the season’s first nubs of corn emerged through farm fields. To bring this child into the world, I had been cut and sewn by strangers. Here we were, our tiny family, a few days later, passing these fields on our way home from the hospital, me marveling at the season already passing from spring into summer, this six-pound baby miraculously given to us. 19 years later, when I return home in the dusky evening, we drink tea and eat almonds, talking talking, this great big world crammed full with so many things…. Enough said. For this day, our immense unfathomable luck.

18th Birthday.

May 31, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Here’s the thing: 18 years is a whole lot of parenting. 18 years is hardly a heartbeat.

My youngest was born by caesarian at 8:13 a.m. Leaving the hospital a few days later, corn nubs had emerged through the soil. As we drove by farm fields, I admired the new corn, marveling at its beauty. I had seen corn growing my whole life. And yet….

Perhaps that and yet sums up parenting. As a little girl, my youngest wore a green fairy tutu from her grandmother for about two years straight. These days, we are past the days of tiny teacups and Go, Dog, Go. Our family dynamics are now getting down to the hard questions: what does it mean to be a woman? what shall I do with my life? and how many times does sunscreen really need to be applied on a senior skip day at the beach? The questions go on….

blessing the boats

(at St. Mary’s)

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that
— Lucille Clifton

Birthing Day

May 31, 2019May 31, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

14 years ago I walked down to our sugarhouse in the early morning and leaned against the doors, a piece of me longing to remain there, static, still, until eternity. We never locked anything in those days. I was there to simply close the doors with an eyehook as we expected to be gone for a few days.

Unlike my first pregnancy, I knew at a certain point in my second pregnancy that this child would be born by caesarian. While I was leaning against the rough boards of those doors, my husband and 6-year-old daughter were breakfasting on oatmeal in the kitchen.

I was utterly unprepared to become a mother again. I hadn’t even begun to imagine names for this child — girl or boy, that morning we still didn’t know. But all pregnancies end, one way or another, as everything does in this world. On this 14^thanniversary of my second birthing day, I’m always reminded of being on that extremely ancient and utterly contemporary world journey of motherhood, of bringing babes into this world, tending them, raising them, all the while gradually letting go. An infinity of mothers have passed through this earthly realm, and yet, what sacred largesse.

Living the Dream—With Pie

February 2, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Twenty years ago, I was about to cross over into motherhood. I was incredibly curious to see my baby’s face, to meet this brand-new person who had been growing and swimming within me for nine months. Eventually, she was born via an emergency caesarian. On the table, my first flooding impulse, when the surgeon held up my baby in his gloved hands for me to see—even before the flooding relief that she was born healthy and well— was I know you. Her eyes were wide open. Across that cold and noisy operating room, she stared directly at me.

Twenty years later, so much living has gone down between us. Playdough and Charlotte’s Web, a million meals, diapers to driving, broken hearts and happiness: the stuff of life.

Journeys, More Journeys

May 11, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Near the end of the last century — which really wasn’t all that long ago — my then-boyfriend and I spent a lot of time driving around the country. We were so young, and time seemed like an endless well we might draw from forever.

The other night, driving to the airport in the descending dusk, I remembered blood-red sunsets as we made our way across the midwest.

I think of the decades of my pre-children life as two-dimensional, although I know that’s not true. But when I became a mother, my own life grew, too, in ways I had never imagined.

In Burlington, I looked for a cup of coffee, but in that end of the city nothing was open but a Shell station where I saw a man bent over, mopping the floor. I stood in the new spring warmth and didn’t go in.

At the airport, two taxi drivers were laughing outside, talking in an accent I couldn’t recognize. Inside, it was just myself for a while, leaning against a wall and reading, and then slowly the airport filled up. Neighbors unexpectedly met each other, and I heard the update about a maple tree, blown over in a recent thunderstorm.

Then from that infinite night sky, my two daughters appeared, one tanned and one sunburnt, bursting with stories of their journey.

The only journey is the one within.

— Rilke

Frijoles Canyon, New Mexico

The Great Wide World

March 9, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Early this morning, on what promised to be an incredibly balmy Vermont day, I read with intense fascination a few pages my father had emailed me. The pages were from Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die, about a horrific and bizarre murder of a young girl. Having two daughters myself, I read with agony. In this excerpt, Nuland clips in a lengthy written piece by the child’s mother. She described her own sensation of warmth at the murder scene, and a calmness in her dying child’s eyes, as though the actual event of dying had been cosseted – or eased– in some inexplicable way for the child and the mother present at her violent death.

While I have been fortunate beyond measure never to experience that kind of trauma or grief, three times in my life I have had a wholly mystical experience at pivotal junctures.

At the caesarian birth of my second child, lying prone on the table, I had a forceful urge to rise up and leave the room, that I would suffocate imminently if I did not move. With the anesthesia, of course, I couldn’t do more than raise my arms and head, and then abruptly I was external to my body. With a clear understanding that I was drifting towards the ceiling, as if I were a helium balloon, the voices of the operating room lessened, words receding into murmurs. I had a profound sense of calm, and I had no regrets about slipping away. Then I heard an infant crying, a thin, plaintive wail, and I thought (this seems quite odd now), Whose baby is that, crying and alone? I thought how cold it was in that room for a baby. Later, I thought I had pity for that baby, but perhaps, more accurately, it was empathy. Abruptly, I realized that crying baby was mine, and instantaneously I was back in my body in the OR, begging to hold my newborn.

I first met this daughter through sound, not through the flesh of a vaginal birth or a wet and squirming infant laid against my bare breast. Yet the bond between the two of us is impermeable. My impulse to nourish and protect this child – to mother her – is as mighty as any universal law, consistent as gravity pulling falling apples to earth. Repeatedly over the years, I’ve thought of that Shakespearian line There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Those wonders, certainly, are far more faceted than simple pleasure, in our world filled with such joy and such incredible grief. And yet, reading this morning, again I realized how wide is our universe, infinitely wiser than its players.

As a confirmed skeptic, I am bound by the conviction that we imust not only question all things but be willing to believe that all ithings are possible.

– Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die