Pam Mellskog: Mommy Musings

TURNS OUT THAT FOR YEARS, lyricist Ira Gershwin kept his late brother’s unpublished compositions– sheets and sheets of music titled “Melody 37” and “Melody 5,” etc. – in a closet.

Millions of ears otherwise unfamiliar with the sound of the American Jazz Age would recognize George Gershwin’s published work. In 1987, United Airlines licensed his 1924 hit, “Rhapsody in Blue,” as its signature commercial orchestration.

When George died of a brain tumor in 1937 at 38, it ended his intensive, 12-year creative collaboration with Ira writing music for Hollywood and Broadway.

But Ira didn’t die until 1983 at 86.

So, George’s many unpublished melodies just sat in Ira’s closet until then – music written, but never played.

I learned this tidbit on Saturday night from Andrew Litton, the Colorado Symphony’s artistic adviser, who conducted and performed some of Gershwin’s hits and recovered melodies at Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver.

As the symphony lifted those fresh Gershwin tunes from page to stage during the concert, I also heard an echo of my little boy, Ray, saying his name for the first time in mid-April.

He was almost three-and-a-half years old then, and he said it softly while pointing at my computer screen.

My laptop computer usually sits on our kitchen counter, and it frequently “falls asleep” into a random slide show of family photos pulled from the hard drive after 15 minutes of inactivity.

To watch it, Ray stands on a cream-colored step stool painted with a calf snuggling next to the mama cow – both of them with big eyes and batty eyelashes.

So, there stood Ray to say “Ray” – the name we gave him on his birthday, when the Down syndrome diagnosis covered him like a mask – and I glanced at the screen to see what photo prompted him to speak.

The image reflected him with Pat Winders, his physical therapist at The Sie Center for Down Syndrome at the Children’s Hospital in Aurora.

They were goofing around in front of a tall mirror, taking a break from trampoline jumping – his next developmental milestone then – in April 2012.

Pat considers rolling over, sitting, walking  and jumping as hardwired within a child.

Like Gershwin’s long forgotten sheet music, it is all there. Physical therapy just helps the child find it, helps the brain make the proper connections with the body to move.

Ray walks now.

But walking happened before talking, so talking is the melody in the closet – the music inside my boy with just a few shared notes, and those notes often whispered: “Daddy,” “Mum,” “cat,” and “milk…”

Someday I will hear the song, not just the snippets, and I will give Ray a standing ovation.

For now, though, it is enough to note Ray’s closet – each of us also has the kind without skeletons – and to wait for him to share those melodies.

Before I went to the Gershwin concert last weekend, my family and I enjoyed lunch at a backyard graduation party.

All of the parents relaxed eating their chips, fruit salad and sandwiches because a tall fence enclosed the yard and kept the little ones safe from the street.

After running around after lunch with the older kids, Ray fetched a bottle of water from the cooler.

He often comes around me like fog, like a boy with no meow on cat paws.

“Mum?” he said.

He put the bottle in my hand for me to open, and that communication – that connection with my little guy – sounded to my heart like the first bar of “Melody 1.”

Sing, son, sing.

Pam Mellskog can be reached at Mellskog@msn.com or at 303-746-0942.

Andy, 5, practices his construction skills in the backyard on May 7, 2013. “I’m building this house for me and for the lady I pick when I grow up,” he said during a break.

AS ALL THREE OF MY boys relaxed in the sudsy tub one night last week, Carl told Andy that his school friends called the brown birthmark under his chin “poop.”

“Yeah, Tarl,” Andy said, mispronouncing his brother’s name at day’s end. “My school friends call my knee birthmark poop, too.”

Pause.

“I guess we’re just the poop family,” he said.

I laughed and remembered for the first time in a long time the patchy port wine-colored birthmark that runs up about a third of my left arm.

Strangers used to comment on it.

“Oh, honey! Did you spill hot chocolate on your arm?” one tourist said as I dipped truffles at Galena’s Kandy Kitchen in Illinois, where at 15 I got my first job.

As I shampooed their hair, my boys quickly moved on from the birthmark lament to chatter about orcas.

But I kept thinking about Carl and Andy’s birthmarks and future teasing, and I quickly decided against ever spending a cent on birthmark removal.

A birthmark prominent enough to draw second looks can teach a person to be gracious toward the nosy and dismissive of the heckler.

Sure, an unblemished left arm would have looked better in pictures when I wore that pale blue spaghetti-strap dress to the 1981 high school prom.

But that’s sort of the point.

I don’t live in a picture, at least not yet, and it behooved me to view that birthmark as my reminder to get past what I call gingerbread girl thinking — that mindset that wishes to be frosted like all the other cookies in the box.

Paul and I had a great time at the prom, and I never thought twice about going sleeveless.

Then came the call from my parents when I was in my mid-20s.

They had read about a laser surgeon who specialized in a new birthmark removal procedure. He worked in the Twin Cities then, and I lived there then. What’s more, my insurance miraculously would cover it.

So, why not?

At first, I sat still as the laser targeted the birthmark like a zillion snapping rubber bands.

In minutes, it fried my skin into a black, quilted surface, and I left the doctor’s office smelling singed.

The multiphase laser treatment lightened the birthmark by sealing tiny vessels close to the skin’s surface that caused the discoloration.

But I only underwent a few procedures.

I got tired of bandaging it and babying it after the laser treatment every six to eight weeks.

Mostly, though, I got tired of fussing over a birthmark I all along had accepted as my sign to keep little things little and big things big.

I understand why the church pianist of my preschool years in Evanston, Ill., might take a different stand.

A purplish birthmark covered one side of her face as if paint had been poured from a bucket on half of her head.

When she played the piano, her unblemished profile coincidentally faced the congregation.

But when she stood and turned to take her place in the front pew, it startled me.

Even as a young child, I wondered how she walked through life with a mark on her face that took aback everyone who met her.

I would not begrudge her or anyone else a birthmark removal opportunity.

However, judging by the way she played and the way she walked, I suspect that the church pianist let the birthmark become a beauty mark.

Instead of hiding, she stepped up on the built-in dais, glad to offer others more than the eye can see.

I am somehow partially responsible for causing physical birthmarks on my boys.

Until they turn 18, I am fully responsible for leaving them there.

By then, though, I hope what marks them most will be invisible, but obvious — comfort in their own skins.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Pam Mellskog can be reached at Mellskog@msn.com or 303-746-0942.

MEN, NOT WOMEN, UNDERSTAND THIS about boys – that they like to pee on things and write their names in the snow with it.

But even my husband would have pitched a fit if he were on duty for bath time at our house last week, when Carl, 7, figured it would be funny to pee on his brother Andy, 5.

The incident offended me so much that I forgot both what I know second hand about boys and that the LENA Digital Language Processor would record every word of my tirade.

All day, my third son, 3-year-old Ray, wore the LENA – a smart phone-sized, high-tech recorder – in a special red shirt with a snap pouch on front as part of a toddler language research project conducted by the University of Colorado.

The device recorded everything he said and heard within a 6-foot radius for 16 hours on two consecutive Thursdays earlier in April.

So, I am sure that my yelling at Carl during bath time at the end of the first day and my yelling at Andy in the middle of the second day for sounding off like a tornado siren when I was on the phone now exists as evidence that Mama’s got a fake ID.

She is still a person hoping to pass herself off as perfect.

The gentle souls who work at Ray’s preschool, where all the other kids participating in the study attend, would never holler doozies like this at a child: “What in God’s green earth were you thinking when you peed on your brother to be funny, Carl?!?” or “Andy! You are driving me crazy, bloody crazy, when you start screaming the very second I get on the phone!!!”

I haven’t checked the preschool training manual, but I’m pretty sure that saying “bloody” about anything other than a First Aid incident is not OK when speaking with young children.

Here’s the deal. I knew LENA was listening to both incidents.

So, duh, right?

But the journalist in me just doesn’t have much energy for cover-ups.

So, I let ‘er rip. I ran off the mouth at my kids without censoring, even though I know frustrated mothers – like problem drinkers – forget that what makes you feel better for a moment will make you feel worse for a day or days.

My husband reassured me that humans typically do not listen to the recordings or read transcripts. Instead, researchers study the computer analysis of the language environment LENA recorded.

Math wizzes at the LENA Research Foundation in Boulder write algorithms that estimate the number of adult words spoken; the number of turn-taking interactions between child and adult; and the number of child vocalizations.

But I could not help imagining a seated circle of graduate students holding note pads in a dimly lit university board room. As my rants replayed through surround sound speakers, these students and perhaps would-be parents put down their pens and raised their eye brows.

At this point, it helps me to remember that God records everything – all of my words, my thoughts, my deeds – and that he issues the mother ID anyway in care of Pam or Tricia or Nikki or Kristin, etc.

If I hold that ID like a recovering alcoholic holds a sobriety medallion, like someone humbled by mistakes and grateful for progress, I inch closer to becoming the Mom I want my kids to know.

This afternoon, I heard the “clink” of the toilet lid hitting the toilet tank.

When I walked into the bathroom, I found Ray for the first time pulling off his own diaper and climbing on the toilet without coaching – a real feat for someone with developmental delays.

I clapped and clapped and said and signed, “Big boy!”

He flushed the toilet, laughed and said, “Ud ob!” – his version of what I must say more than I know, “Good job!”

Pam Mellskog can be reached at Mellskog@msn.com or 303.746.0942.

IT TOOK A CERTAIN HOUSE GUEST – a pawn shop owner turned corporate finance manager – to put my so-called Wall of Shame in perspective.

I liked this guy from the start because he spoke with an accent no movie star studies, but that I recognized instantly as downstate Illinois.

He sounded like home, even though I grew up in the northwestern tip.

Still, I wished I had rented a storage locker before my husband and I brought Jake to the guest bedroom in the basement.

I never did for the same reasons women put off buying jeans in a bigger size.

Instead, I tried to explain about my boxes of junk– about why my Mother or I saved my first grade workbooks or the horse figurines off my dresser or the blue tassels from my white drum majorette boots.

Though these boxes lined one wall of the downstairs living room and gobbled up square footage, and though my Mother-in-Law reminds me of the burden these boxes would put on my kids when I die, I told our guest that, obviously, my boxes had not oppressed me enough to unpack them.

He laughed.

“So, you think you’ve got junk?” Jake said after meeting the Wall of Shame.

Five minutes into the conversation about his old pawn shop business, and I believed that he understood junk on a grander scale and viewed my stuff as dust bunnies.

But the month after this visit, in October 2011, I put the house on a diet, and she’s still losing weight.

To stay motivated, I picture her on a digital scale and keep celebrating how far I’ve come in my de-cluttering campaign –although, I had better not die any day soon.

Reading letters to and from my grandparents and picking up that baby food jar I decorated as Santa with felt and glue in fourth grade takes time.

Still, the wall came down last year.

I can only do this kind of life-sized project in fits and starts. So, two big plastic tubs and a few other boxes remain stashed in different places.

But I am going to open them.

As much as I love history – my history, your history, our history – I learned a simple lesson sorting my Wall of Shame.

I learned to store keepsakes in my heart and not in my boxes – my journals from grade school forward and my photographs being a caveat.

Living lighter feels good. Now that I’m almost free of fretting over unsorted stuff, I’ve got more mental wiggle room to consider weightless tokens from this life I lead.

The one image I am carrying this week happened on Sunday morning when my friends and I led the singing at church.

My oldest son, Carl, 7, walked down the aisle with a herd of kids to sit at the front for the children’s message.

When he spotted me, he smiled and blew three kisses.

What box can hold the best stuff?

Pam Mellskog can be reached at Mellskog@msn.com or 303.746.0942.

BEFORE THE MUSIC STARTED, THE deaf folks sat together in cream-colored choir robes with their hands folded as thousands of people climbed the steep steps to their seats at the Minneapolis Metrodome.

I did not know at first that they were deaf.

But when the on-stage choir stood and lifted their voices to open the Billy Graham Crusade that June day in 1996, the deaf choir stood in their section opposite the front and lifted their hands.

I watched them intently, spellbound by the look of words such as “glory,” which happens by holding the left hand at waist level, palm up, and clapping it once with the right hand before pulling the right hand back to the shoulder while wiggling that hand’s fingers.

To witness them singing this way gave me new glasses, helped me to see in what I call a “signs and wonders way” – that is, to notice other mute messengers, animate and inanimate, that point to something worth wondering about.

Who knew that people who cannot hear and do not speak still enjoy singing through signing?

In early March, I pictured the deaf choir afresh while attending a Christian women’s conference, one staffed with an interpreter for the hearing impaired, at Northwestern College in St. Paul where, coincidently, Billy Graham served as president from 1948 to 1952.

A college friend of mine in the Twin Cities invited me because the keynote speaker happened to be our newest favorite author – Ann Voskamp, who wrote “One Thousand Gifts” (Zondervan), the New York Times bestseller memoir of her count to 1,000 blessings.

As Voskamp spoke, a young woman stood in the shadows beside the stage and shared signs and finger spellings that disappeared like the smoky tail of a twirled sparkler.

I use my hands to communicate with my son, Ray, 3, because his Down syndrome causes speech delays. I know sign language for “milk” and “stuck” and “potty,” etc.

He signs with similarly practical words.

Then, one day this winter Ray set the table for our family with the right number of plates– a sign-and-wonder moment for me, considering that my boy operates on perhaps half of the intelligence he might have enjoyed.

Because signs and wonders come in so many packages, I wanted to ask the conference interpreter to sign “mystery” about ten times in a row so that I could catch at least a glint of it.

Instead, my friend, Kristin, and I strolled between conference sessions under the arches and the herringbone pattern of acoustical ceiling tile in the on-campus chapel where she got married in 1993.

The Vatican finished building Nazareth Chapel and the attached four-story hall in 1923 and ran it as a seminary until 1970, when the nondenominational college established in 1902 bought it.

Since Protestants do not build with polished red Numidian marble from Africa, the chapel stands as a gift from the sensibilities of our Catholic brothers and sisters.

I appreciated that more when I flew home after the brief visit and reviewed my photos.

Even with my old friend, the one who walks with me so well, I realized that I moved too swiftly past the marble. I overlooked how it freezes the space into a rarified place – one replete with signs that invite someone like me, someone with hands ever busy making sandwiches and tying shoes, to wonder about how stone goes from undiscovered to hewn to polished.

Pam Mellskog can be reached at Mellskog@msn.com or 303-746-0942.

DURING OUR RECENT DATE AT the coffee shop, my son stopped fishing for marshmallows in his hot chocolate to comment on the Starbucks’ logo.

“That looks like an evil grandma!” Andy, 5, nearly shouted, before making his scared rabbit squeak and stuffing another chunk of rice crispy treat in his mouth.

An evil grandma?

Who else but a kid would call the serene Starbucks goddess that?

Conversations like this happen all the time because kids – at least my kids – seem to wear invisible goggles that pull background into foreground.

I dig this quality in them, partially because of my on-the-job training in 2001 at the newspaper with an outstanding photographer.

He taught me to study the sidelines and the rafters and the hills – to look past where eyes naturally want to focus to gather more from a scene.

So much in the background explains the foreground, he said.

Of course, like every parent, I treasure close-ups of family and community life.

But he was right.

Two photographs I shot in 2012 gave me a fix on background that causes pause.

I shot one at sunset at a rest stop off the westbound lane of Interstate 80 in Nebraska last November. I wanted to remember the bare branches frozen against the peach-pink sky in their reach for the sun as people came and went around the clock.

The other one caught my eye in June as I sat in a hay loft at my folks’ farm in Illinois.

My two older boys – Carl, then 6, and Andy, then 4 – were chasing each other through the rusty stanchions in the old milking parlor below. They were climbing the ladders built into the walls of this barn and hunting for its trap doors.

As they explored, I rested my eyes for just a few minutes on the light streaming through the barn’s paneling, wood worn by decades of storms and sun into the beginnings of toothpicks.

The old barn, the one my parents re-roofed and topped with a new cupola after they bought it in 1974, had morphed on the outside from red toward a tin color since I played there as a girl.

Then, my brother and I climbed together to the loft, each of us holding a tail of the two ropes tied to the center beam.

How many times did we put our toes on the edge to swing into what felt like outer space?  When we let go, we found a soft landing in the mess of hay below.  

Those were good times, and I missed my brother last summer as he was then – as a boy who went spelunking in the cave by the Galena River without fearing bats, and as a guy who later taught me how to drive his motorcycle and Dad’s stick shift dump truck in the hay field alongside the barn.

None of these memories comes with photographs.

Before digital photography, when photographers paid to develop film – bloopers and all – most people focused on foreground stuff.

But that sunny day in the barn reminded me why our life together is so much better than birthday parties, and why background is worth a shot.  

Pam Mellskog can be reached at Mellskog@msn.com or 303-746-0942.

Then 6-year-old Carl (left) plays pirates with brother Andy, 5, on Feb. 9, 2013.

ANDY GOT KICKED OUT OF Sunday school last September— albeit temporarily — for  introducing himself as “Butt Crack” after the teacher circled up the kids on the carpet and asked them to say their name aloud to start off the new school year.

After he blurted this, an assistant ushered my four-year-old boy out to sit with my husband and me in the back row of the sanctuary during the sermon.

I think of him now as my four-leaf clover, that boy of mine with Down syndrome. Like the plant with four leaves, not the usual three, Ray comes with something extra: three chromosomes, not the usual two, on chromosome 21.

I’m not driving us into the Land of Cliché here. In this St. Patrick’s day post, I am just playing with the Irish concept of lucky.

So, why did those islanders pluck four-leaf clovers from meadows overrun with three leafers?

They did it for the same reason suburban kids notice them in manicured lawns. Four-leaf clovers represent a hiccup in nature, and rarities typically bring value or at least that delicious lucky feeling.

But because children born with telltale almond-shaped eyes come with a certain degree of intellectual disability, society and plenty of parents might stammer — nay, refuse — to call anything about this difference lucky.

The grain of lucky goes with getting something not earned, like winning concert tickets from a radio station by being the 10th caller.

But the more I grow as a mother, the more I realize that this difference in Ray is a lucky one.

First, he seems to enjoy his life as much as the next kid with the usual chromosome tally. Three-year-old Ray loves to play at the park, eat ice cream and learn how to pedal his tricycle.

Second, parenting a son who needs more support gives me fresh eyes on that typical child, the one who makes developmental milestones without therapy. What a marvelous story most children tell when they grow up like thousands of generations before them into fully functional adults.

Third, I have begun to appreciate the story of “The Little Engine that Could” as being a relative one.

The student who struggles to grasp quantum physics at Harvard is facing the same good fight that Ray faces now as he struggles to graduate from sign language to spoken communication.

Parenting Ray humbles me, reminds me that everyone — even geniuses — can sit on their duff and only do what comes easily.

Or they can press their shoulder into life — into their relationships, their work and their charity — to invest the time and make the mistakes required to self-actualize, to move up another level.

Finally, my special-needs child makes me feel lucky because he has sensitized this writer in a way no book or workshop could to the power of message making.

In a society that can throw hurtful words in Ray’s direction, words like “retard,” I am reading the transcript of our home life more closely these days.

Every child grows up in a house full of messages.

The messages begin with “You are,” according to Jim and Lynne Jackson, family resource specialists at connectedfamilies.org.

For better or worse, those messages become defining when they are the norm, the Jacksons write.

So, if the goal is to send potential-promoting messages, those messages will communicate love and acceptance in word and deed: “You are …”

Fill in the blank.

Not always, but often, lucky is as lucky does.

Happy St. Patrick’s day!

Pam Mellskog can be reached at Mellskog@msn.com or 303-746-0942.

Ray, 3, goofs around with cousin Christian, 8, at Grandma and Grandpa Van’s house in Grand Rapids, Mich., over the 2012 Christmas holiday.

MY NEPHEW TURNS DOWN kids who want to touch his right hand, kids who want to study its deformity with their elegant fingers.

Christian wishes that they would not look once much less twice or more.

Then, he met a girl named Olive on the school bus and, instead of pocketing his problem when she got nosy, he let her hold his hand.

The bus driver watched the mid-December exchange between them in the large, rectangular mirror above the windshield, and it moved her so much that she called my sister-in-law at home that afternoon.

Christian gets that Olive – like my third son, Ray – has Down syndrome, a genetic condition that causes intellectual disability.

He understands that something about that makes it harder for Olive, 6, and Ray, 3, to talk like other kids their age.

So, Christian this semester began to learn sign language, which the bus driver models when the bus idles.

During our family’s recent holiday trip to Grand Rapids, Mich., to visit my husband’s clan, this 8-year-old nephew wanted to show off those skills.

From him, I learned new signs that I consider most useful — for instance, the sign for “silly” and another sign Olive taught him after she noticed the hand he often hides.

Christian signs “silly” while watching his brother, Luke, and Ray play with sticky spiders from Santa on Christmas day 2012.

When she started messing with him to touch it, Christian pulled away.

The physical condition goes way back to before his birth, way back to that moment when amniotic bands in his mother’s womb inexplicably snapped and like a bull whip wrapped around the three fingers in from his pinky finger.

Another band then lassoed his index finger above the second knuckle.

Ultimately, their stranglehold caused the three middle digits to fuse and, in both cases, cut off circulation to the fingertip joints, which killed bone and skin forming beyond those bands.

But a well-developed tender spot in Christian’s heart made him indulge Olive’s curiosity, and his indulgence allowed her to pass new judgement — allowed her to give him something ordinary people might not be able to give.

She examined the differences between her hand and his hand, which functions as if in a mitten.

Then, Olive looked up and fanned the fingers of her right hand over her face before closing them at once at her chin, which is to say “beautiful” without a word.

Pam Mellskog can be reached at Mellskog@msn.com or 303.746.0942.

MR. ROGERS’ MOM GOT it right when she said: “In times of tragedy, look for the helpers. They are always there. Perhaps on the sidelines, but the helpers are always there.”

I grew up watching her son, Fred Rogers, open the door to a living room set on PBS’s “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” – a television show for young children that launched in 1968, three months before my first birthday.

To settle viewers, he routinely shed his jacket and his dress shoes and modeled zipping his sweater and tying his sneakers before moving into his casual world of puppets and pretend play.

There, Mr. Rogers shared simple lessons and songs geared to help children “feel good about who they are, and who they can become,” according to the web site.

Achieving that goal, for kids and adults, seems remote in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in Newtown, Conn., earlier this month.

No one knows yet why one man fatally shot his mother at home along with 20 first grade students and six staff at the school two miles away before shooting himself.

Some blamed the killer’s behavior on a combination of unaddressed mental health issues, lax gun control laws and a culture that glamourizes violence.

Others figured evil incarnated in Adam Lanza and visited their town like an Apocalyptic horseman.

Whatever the explanations, dozens of morticians came from around the state to help Newtown’s funeral homes manage, and the American flag flew once again in 2012 at half staff.

The situation dispirited some Newtown residents enough that they boxed up holiday decorations.

Our Christmas tree here in Colorado still stands.

But I look longer at candlelight these days and cherish that flicker more, especially since I have a first grader – a six-year-old son who still has all of his baby teeth.

Which brings me back to the wisdom of another mother in another era, back to Nancy McFeely Rogers.

As someone who raised her boy in a small Pennsylvania town during the Great Depression and World War II, surely she sensed darkness at the door many times.

She survived the reality of many going without and many keeping a death toll during those years.

Yet, she focused on the so-called helpers and encouraged her son – who became a Presbyterian minister and alumnus of the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Child Development – to do likewise.

Seeing all the helpers at the Connecticut school-turned-crime-scene makes nothing right about the incident.

The act of viewing them more intentionally just helps me look harder at my palms and appreciate that those who help, not those who hurt, are legion.

Pam Mellskog can be reached at Mellskog@msn.com or 303-746-0942.