Legitimate conversations

"Mom ... When you and dad got married did he stay near the front while your dad walked you down an aisle?"

"Yes, Silas, that's pretty much how it went."

"Who was your caterer?"

"Tommy Carlucci. I don't think you've ever met him."

"And who made your cake?"

"Karen Casey ... she lives across the street from papa."

"Did it have bride and groom on top that looked like you and daddy?"

"No. We weren't that fancy. We had edible flowers ... pansies."

"When is your anniversary?"

"September 28."

"Wait ... you mean your anniversary comes AFTER I was born?"

"Well not the first few."

Eleven

Times change.

You wake up one morning. The number after your name ticks up by one.

And you realize something just isn't quite right with your little world.

The sun peeks through your windows and its light is set further ablaze by the color of your soundings.

This can not stand.



And so ... we change.



But as we do, we have to remember. ...

Some things always stay the same.

Joy is ...

107 birthdays ...

Cousins ...

And a bed for bouncing ...

Yes, Ittybit, there is a Santa Claus

He doesn't disappear.

He evolves.

Ten years ago

And still, you are incredibly sweet.



Happy Birthday, Ittybit.

Twenty days

I didn't feel much like writing, I guess.

That's my excuse.

That, and I was feeling sorry for myself.

Sorry that I hurt my stupid ankle.

Sorry that I couldn't run for nearly eight weeks.

Sorry that when I was able to start again I felt like I'd started from square -8.

It is humbling.

Almost as humbling as finding out your fourth grader tells the nurse "Mom is going to be mad if you call her because I feel sick."

And nearly as humbling as learning your first grader walked like a robot to lunch last week because he'd tied his shoes together. And then he cried when the teacher couldn't untie them.

But perhaps not nearly as humbling as being mistaken for a grandmother, being called a housewife, or being asked to have my husband call to authorize this transaction.

But here we are. ...

Hobbling into the Thanksgiving season no worse for actual wear, which I've decided has to mean I need to take all of this discomfort and walking it off.

Abandonment issues

Someone mentioned that today was the 26^th anniversary of the famous October snow storm that took out power in the northeast for about a week.

I couldn't believe it. It seemed like a lifetime had passed. I was in college (first year) and realizing for the first time I had options. Namely, a friend who lived in the city (with power) who would let me crash on her couch while I went to school.

My parents might have had some nostalgic hopes of being together as a family through the hardship.

But I jumped at the chance to abandoned them.

Who wouldn't pick hot showers and late-night-television marathons with friends over studying by candlelight with the parental units as they tried to cook dinner over a Coleman stove?

Turns out I'm more of an opportunist than a survivalist.

These things don't change.

I struggle with what to write here, especially with so much going on in the corner of the Earth that I call my own.

Do I tell you that I worry? Or that I'm not sure I'm happy? Do I tell you I feel anxious and ineffective? That I miss my mother? That I hate feeling any comfort at all that the woman who took her place is delightful. It makes me feel disloyal to the woman she was.

It makes me feel like I've abandoned her again.

Do I tell you that I am not prepared for the future?

I try to push it out of my mind. Think about cheerful things.

The kids are fine and growing like weeds.

Silas went from 32 pounds on his birthday in June to 39 pounds just this past week. It's making me sad that I have trouble hefting the former flyweight.

Annabel is practically a teenager, and acting like one (in the pre-teen positive sense) as she cares about the condition of her clothes and the state of her hair. Tangles are becoming a thing of the past as are mismatched colors and prints.

More often than not, I find I can't recognize either one of them when I search across the soccer field. She's taller than I remember. Her hair is longer. She plays with more assuredness. He is just as fast as the other boys and nearly as tall.

Soon they will be going to high school … and college …

The bus won't drop them here at the end of the day.

Too soon, their homecomings will be brief visits. They will have their own homes elsewhere.

I feel guilty. Like I have abandoned them too, as I spin off into the future where the ground is uncertain.

I need to stop jumping ahead. I need to stay put in the here and now.  

Normal findings

*********
I wrote this six months ago, but I couldn't bear to publish it then. Superstition perhaps? I don't know.
But it's been a year now, and today the findings are still normal. The voice in my head is calmer. I can let it go.

**********

“What are you going to do today?”

And so begins the game.

Twenty questions.

“What was the best day in your life?”

“The day you were born.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“What was the best Christmas present you ever received?”

“You.”

“But I was born a week before Christmas.”

“Still counts.”

“What about my brother?”

“What about him?

“What about the day he was born?”

“This isn't a contest. You arrived first.”

Qualifiers …

They frighten me. Always have.

So quickly our favorite holidays turn on us.

It only takes one thing to change the experience forever.

Life's ups balanced by life's downs.

“So … What ARE you going to do today?” She asks again.

She worries about me. I know I don't smile as much as I should.

The corners of my mouth are always pulling in a downward direction.

Sadly, she's never known me to be overly smiley.

I tell her not to worry. I explain what it means to be a "natural frowner." That I don't want to be a frowner … it just happens.

She's taken to just asking me to translate my expressions.

"Are you upset? Angry? Did you stub your toe?"

“No, no. I'm fine. Just have a lot to do today. Have to get started as soon as you get on the bus.”

“So … what ARE you doing today?” she asks again.

“Oh … I'll putter around; walk the dog, feed the cat, clean up the breakfast dishes, finish up some work I've been procrastinating … get a follow-up diagnostic mammogram … and maybe, if there's time and inclination, I'll go shopping. For Christmas presents.”

I didn't tell her that middle thing.

I didn't really want to think of it, either.

When I counted six months forward from the last time -- the time they found possibly suspicious looking calcifications in an area of my left breast … that weren't there nine years ago … before children … before breastfeeding … before I had anything as big as a family to lose – that put the follow-up smack dab in the middle of Christmas.

Merry-frickin'-Christmas.

My husband was nervous, too.

His questions skirted the issue even better than my answers.

“What do you want for Christmas?”

“I really don't want anything.”

“No really? What?”

“The only thing I want is to not have cancer.”

I can't say such things to my kids.

It's Christmas. And they still believe in all the magic it promises.

I tried to go on as usual. I tried to put it out of my mind, but I didn't. I didn't shop, or write cards. I didn't even walk the dog or clean up dishes. 

Instead I sat in a room with a half-dozen other women – all of us dressed in a kimono-style uniform –

one question bouncing around in our heads: “What if I have cancer.”

I don't have cancer.

The woman with my folder smiled when she told me.

I smiled, too. First time all day.

But can't say I felt enormous relief. Not after sitting in a room with women just like me. Only maybe some of theme weren't as lucky.

Holding my breath

A friend wrote about that feeling that might be summed up by people in our lives in a single word: Disillusionment. But how it's really something much more complicated.

She wrote about how a momentary thought breeds other momentary thoughts. Usually harmless day dreams of what life would be like in an alternate universe. Where you've made different choices.

It stirred me.

When I'm at my worst - I think of disillusionment as moribund.

A death spiral. Nothing good will ever be again.

The clinical amongst you might call that depression. I'm sure it is that and more.

But it's complicated.

At the point of disillusionment we try to measure our worth against the perceived value we've placed on others.

It is a losing strategy.

There's always a thumb on the proverbial scale.

I keep having to tell myself that my shortcomings are each important cogs in some machine I can't fully comprehend but must trust.

We could be self assured and be wrong. We can be angry and be wrong. We can be happy and be wrong. We can be kind and wrong. We can be wrong any number of ways. We will be wrong many number of ways.

We can be right and be wrong.

But if we have hope we can be wrong and move on.

We may not know how our stories end but we know they will. Someday.

So today, I must remember that there is always something else. There is always a place to go. To be. To explore. To rediscover.

This life is insignificant and everything - it is tiny and huge - and no one, especially ourselves, has all the tools needed to measure it with any real precision.

Importance is relative.

Placement is arbitrary.

Happenstance can be amazing.

None of it matters.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Eat the Bird

Is it strange to wake up the day after Thanksgiving and realize you and nine or 10 of your friends and relatives sat across a table from one another to share a meal yet never once shared in conversation the things for which we are thankful?

Is it horrible that we never took the time to reflect on what it was that got us to this place?

History?

Happenstance?

Luck?

Good or bad?

Perhaps.

For a moment I felt a twinge of guilt ... as if the failure to verbally examine gratitude made me as ungrateful as if I'd spent the last Thursday in November greedily shopping for things I didn't need.

It didn't last long. I know what I am grateful for and for whom; and trying to put those thoughts into words doesn't give them any more weight.

I am grateful for everyone who has ever made me laugh ...

or smile  ...

or feel important.

And yet, perhaps more surprisingly, I'm just as grateful for everyone who has ever made me irritated or anxious or feel at loose ends. For all the things that have frightened me. Saddened me. Made me think about the world and all the parts of it I can't control.

As I sit there, looking over at my parents, it feels wrong to be thankful for things that just plain hurt.

Thankful for acceptance.

It just makes a speech about gratitude seem as awkward as the silence. 

Young Man and the Pee

The water seemed warmer this August than any August since my youth.

I'm sure it had NOTHING to do with my son.

There's no such thing as a bad birthday party ...

 













As long as there is cake.

Breathing room

It's been a long, angsty, nothing-bodes-well kind of week.

But we're all still here and hanging on.

Thursday afternoon offered a pretty good moment. The Champ graduated from the Marilla Cuthbert Academy for Unspeakably Charming Children.

I expected to cry ... and I did ... but not how I'd thought it would happen.

We were leaving and I saw my family skipping up the sidewalk into the afternoon sun. We'd never be in this place again. I wasn't sad so much as relieved. Small days may be over but big days are still ahead. Onward we go.






Perhaps the best part of the week happened near the end of the day today.

A new beginning of sorts.

We went to pick up our first CSA share at a local farm.

After a little walk around the place ... visiting the horses, pigs and sheep ... we found our way back to the gathering barn.

This week's bounty: Squash, zucchini, radishes, turnips, arugula, lettuce, cilantro and something called kohlrabi, which the internets informed me can be eaten raw in salad or cooked in a stir fry.








We did both.

Ittybit ate it by the fistful as we sauteed the remainder with chickpeas, curry sauce and leftover beef.

It feels good to expand our horizons.





And get some breathing room.

First gift: Laughter

The Champ: It's your BIRTHDAY, mom. You should have a piñata!

The Mom: What a great idea. But what kind? It should look like something I'd want to hit with a stick. 

The Dad: I know! It should be a Dad piñata.

The Champ: NO! That's not a good ... well, OK, maybe it is a good idea.

Ittybit (shaking her head): There's a joke in there somewhere.
The Mom: It will be apparent as soon as he presents me with a vacuum cleaner as a token of his appreciation.

It's a good thing you live here ...

"Mom? When our house gets old can we move into a different kind of house?"

"Someday you will move into your own house."

"What!? Wivout my parents?"

"Hard to believe, I know, but it's true. Someday you'll be the daddy."

"But I don't even know how to juggle. I can't use a chainsaw. And I don't have a driving license or a van!"

"Good thing you live here then."

Just so you know ...

Your REAL FRIENDS will never tell you ...

1. You look horrible: Do something with your hair. Try a flatiron or something. And how about wearing makeup someplace other than the imaginary twitter-facebook-flickr world you live in?

2. Would it kill you to smile?

That's why the universe gave us mothers and strange people who talk to us on the street.

Boy, friend

And so it begins.

A boy. 

They'd exchanged phone numbers at school. Ittybit promised to call later that night.

Which she did. After dinner and before homework.

It was a big deal. ...

To me.

The telephone was my first, tenuous, connection to independence. It offered my mind a mode of transportation and a mechanism for planning that started simply enough with a single universal question: "What are you doing?" followed by the closed-circle response: "Nothing. What are you doing?"

Boy? Girl? It didn't matter who was hanging on the line, it only mattered that the line existed and that it connected me to a disembodied voice.

For the primary school set -- too young for Twitter and Facebook -- Alexander Graham Bell's invention as relevant as ever.

The rules of communication haven't changed much, either.

"Smile when you talk," I tell her. "They may not be able to see you, but they will be able to hear the smile in your voice.

"Remember to be polite: tell whoever answers your name; ask if you may speak to your friend; always say please and thank you."

Phone etiquette isn't innate. It takes practice, and recently we'd been having our share of practice.

Still, I couldn't listen as she dialed the boy's number and waiting for someone to answer.

I clanked around the kitchen, trying to buffer the exchange.

It reminded me ... a little too much ... of my own first phone call to a boy.

I had been in second grade, too.  I didn't even know to be nervous. He was, after all, a friend I spoke to each day. A boy whose name happened to line up next to mine in the alphabet, as did his chair in our teacher's similarly ordered classroom.

To be able to continue the conversation at home, after school, is a strange magic not dissimilar to running into your first-grade teacher at the supermarket and feeling as if your world had been turned inside out. The first time it happens it's disorienting.

Some of that was happening as I ran through my the script I'd practiced.

Hello, I am … , may I speak to … ?

Silence.

The boy's mother wasn't impressed. Her voice, quick and sharp, told me all I needed to know about my mistake. And she wasn't going to let her son talk to any girl so forward at the age of eight.

More than three decades later, I have to wonder if David Sedaris' witty and scathing review of an elementary school nativity play wherein he writes: “6-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin,” could have been inspired by a similar experience.

Honestly, though, I hadn't thought of that moment until this one, in which my daughter was chirping away into the handset asking a boy questions I didn't get a chance to ask.

“What are you doing?”

My stomach tightened even more as she charged my way with the phone.

“Ok, I'm going to get my mom and you put your mom on the phone, too.”

I stretch a tight smile across my face, holding the phone and waiting for a stranger's voice to come on the line.

This is awkward.

Hello? Her smile is stretched, too. I can hear it.

“Hi,” I inject a small laugh into my voice for effect. “I think our kids are interested in setting up a play date.”

Without much fanfare we set a date and exchange information. And within a few days a boy from school is playing in the backyard with our daughter, collecting specimens of rare weeds and putting them in an old umbrella for some convoluted purpose.

A broken bumper shoot is a typical centrifuge for whatever pseudoscience my daughter has devised.

Together they battle a rising wind and a meddling brother until the boy's mother comes to collect him a couple of hours later.

By all accounts it was a success. Plans are made to play some more another day.

He climbs into the car, she bounds into the house.

The phone is ringing.

“I'll get it,” she hollers.

I open my mouth to holler back, but stop mid objection. It's probably for her, anyway.

Words of wisdom

What would I tell my younger self?



My awkward pre-teen self?



My newlywed self?



My pregnant self?

What would I tell her that would save her even one ounce of pain or regret?

The interwebs has been talking a lot about what sage advice we'd give our youthful selves in the hopes of maybe reducing our mistakes or merely dampening the turmoil they cause us.

Anything that, were we to have really listened, might have made a difference. Perhaps even providing a guide for weary, fearful Googlers as they make their way down the path we and generations before us traveled.

I've thought about this a lot over the years.

Thought about all the things I'd have done differently.

Of course I've grown and changed. I've learned how to listen to advice that spoke to me, and tried my best to ignore advice that wagged its finger in my face.

But I've loved and loathed so many aspects of each situation I've found myself in that I also find it hard to point to any one of them and lament … If somebody had just told me …

in this way …

so I could understand.

Life doesn't work that way. It isn't about doing the right thing the first time. It's about finding the right thing for ourselves in our own time.

Maybe we're supposed to have regrets.

One of my most painful regrets as a parent happened in the hospital, after the birth of my daughter, as my newly emptied body floated on a roller coaster of hormones and fear.

She had been with me for nearly 10 months, an active mass of fetal flesh that would change my life forever … and I was afraid to be alone with her. I sent her to the nursery every chance I got. “What if …” became the scariest proposition in my mind.

I'd done all the classes, talked to all the mothers I knew. But experience taught me the most.

Going through it. Waking around the clock. Spit-up. Crying. Dealing with the fear and uncertainty of every decision. Finding a solution after losing count of my failures.

And then having to find another solution when everything changed again.

When my son was born a few years later I was hesitant, too. Late-pregnancy tests showed a medical condition that could cause kidney damage later in life, or even be linked to Down Syndrome.

It was a frightening time filled with feelings that I hadn't done all that I could do. It was a time that I also wondered to myself: "What had I done?"

When he was born healthy but for the wonky kidney, none of it mattered. Only him.

I couldn't let him leave my side. The nurses had to come to find him for weigh-ins and tests. They had to wrestle him from my adoring gaze and serpentine arms.

Then the guilt.

The differences.

Nearly five years later I still want to have had a different first experience. I want to have made different choices.

I want to go back and give my daughter all the first-days' love I gave my son. And there's nothing I could say to myself that would change that desire. The only thing I can do is move forward and understand that this entire process of living is made up of experiences we'd either rather not have or have had differently.

By constantly looking back, though, don't we just build up a mountain of regret we must overcome?

Sometimes I think we think about what we could have done differently so often, we search for answers so exhaustively, that we forget life is a process built on missteps and failure. We understand ourselves best through experience. We trust ourselves best for having gone through it. We want to spare people something they maybe shouldn’t miss.

Instead of telling my younger self what to do differently, I will whisper to my future self: “Try to relax and enjoy what is now.”

An amazing life

Last weekend we celebrated a special event.

The 105th birthday of a man my children call great grandfather.

Born in 1907, in Kansas, Ralph Miller started his life as the son of a farmer growing watermelons, plucking turkeys from cedar trees for Thanksgiving dinner, becoming lost in a blizzard in an alfalfa field, and, on one occasion, getting his head stuck in the mud of the nearby swimming hole.

He went on to become a scientist who worked on encrypted communication during WWII. He has 49 patents under his name.

He also helped create all of this joy:

Hope reminds you ...

In this case, hope came in the form of a second (and third) opinion.

And it could mean that I might be able to take a picture of my parents like this again one day.

And though it's too early to tell if my mom might be able to walk with Silas during his preschool graduation -- or even witness it knowing that he is her grandson -- it is a hope that, even if remotely possible, is too sweet not to savor for a moment.