Holidays 2007

As I've been mentally crafting The Letter that I write each year at this time to friends and fam, I keep thinking about a very dear friend of mine who died this year. She was in her 80s, and was one of the most joyful, sensitive people I’ve known. The last time I saw her was in a coffee shop where she was sitting with a friend. She was ill and having trouble speaking, so we sat for a minute just holding hands, smiling at each other. “How are you?” she whispered. Like always, there was so much and so little to say. I mentally started listing the things I always say…I’m fine, the boys are doing well, Martin is good…blah blah blah... But sitting there, looking into her kind, smiling eyes, I just smiled back and said, “I’m good. It’s just…life.” She didn’t say anything for a minute, then she said quietly, “And therein lies the tale.”

It was wonderful to have a friend who said things like that. And she was exactly right, too; all the tales, big and small, come from just…life, and there is always so much to be told.

Just…life has been good to us this year. Our families are well, and we are working hard at things we enjoy. The boys are 11, 9, and 2, and although at times it looks to me like the only real difference between being 2 and being a pre-adolescent 11 is that you have a more obnoxious vocabulary at 11, the boys are doing just fine. Noah says that the best thing that happened to him this year is that he made two new friends; the worst thing is that his best friend’s dad is very ill with cancer. Jacob says his most enjoyable moments were playing at the Indoo (a fabulous indoor playground in Hamburg) and getting a spare while bowling in NJ with Nana and Grandpa. And I guess Gabriel would say that the highlight of his year has been going from being mostly horizontal to mostly vertical.

For me the most memorable moment is one from our time in Germany. For reasons that I still cannot understand, the five of us ended up on our last day in a large wooded park that had something akin to a “high ropes course” (imagine dangling from steel cables strung between trees about 40 feet off the ground, forced to navigate in torturous ways from one tree to the next, i.e. walking on uneven wobbly boards, climbing through a giant spider web, balancing on a moving plank, etc.). Jacob, who is as agile as a squirrel, was desperate to try it, and since he wasn’t old enough to go it alone, I agreed to do it with him. I’ll spare you the horrific details; I will just say that while my 50-pound son had no trouble skittering across the ropes from one flimsy tree platform to the next, I, who had eaten my way through three weeks of family festivities, and am also terrified of heights, did not fare as well.

The lowest point came when I got stuck in a large wooden bucket, suspended on a cable between two trees, with neither the emotional fortitude nor the upper body strength to carry on. I hung there for so long, panicking, that a small group of British tourists actually gathered below me and shouted encouraging comments, but it did not help. It was while I was yelling down to Martin that I could not move—ever again—and to please find some way to get me down, when I heard Jacob calling to me from his perch on the tree I was trying to reach: “You can do it, Mama! Just a few more feet! Pull, pull!” His sweet voice and earnest confidence made me realize, suddenly and viscerally, that I needed him as much as he needed me, and not just at that moment, but always. (I did make it to the next tree, but told him that we had to take the next short cut back down. He was pretty understanding about it at the time, but later he said to me, “Oma would have finished the whole thing.” And, knowing my formidable mother-in-law, who jumped out of a plane at the age of 65, I had to agree).

The thing was, that was a big moment because it meant that somewhere along the line my boys have stopped being tiny beings who need endless care, and started being people who go about in the world with much to offer. This has probably been long obvious to anyone but me, but when you are stuck in what Martin calls “the tunnels” of family responsibilities and work responsibilities, all you can see is whatever duty is right in front of you. Do laundry, make lunch, pay bills, yell at someone about their homework, make dinner, do more laundry, clean the bathroom, read a story, sing “Wheels on the Bus,” drive to school and on and on. But of course, they—we—are so much more than those things. I see that when Noah asks us if we had a good day, when Gabe comes and gives us hugs. I see it when Jacob offered me “German lessons” (30 minutes each Sunday), which I hope is more a reflection of his good nature and less of his pity for my poor language skills. I try to remember it at the times when all I hear are their assorted lamentations. And I think of it when I read this quote from Garrison Keillor: “Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted.”

I’ll close with another line from Garrison Keillor, who is without question one of the greatest American writers of all time: “Thank you, God, for this good life, and forgive us if we do not love it enough.”

Spring Break Family Style

Everyone knows what kinds of images the words "Spring Break" bring to mind. Some people know this from personal experience, but not me. I have never gone to a warm place to drink and dance around in a wet t-shirt, take God knows what kinds of drugs and have dubious sexual encounters. It's not that I'm a prude; it's that I was not that popular or adventurous, and my dad wouldn't have let me go anyway. The closest I ever came to a Spring Break adventure was vicariously through my younger brother who drove to Miami Beach with three of his friends when he was in college, and they had so little money that they lived off 50 McDonalds hamburgers that they bought on special and kept in the trunk of their car for a week.

Spring Break is an activity for the young and unencumbered. In other words, it is not a family activity. Spring Break is about breaking rules. Students on Spring Break do things that they would not normally do, or at least they do them in a different place and to a different degree. But rules are, to a large degree, what keep family life sane and manageable. No, we don’t eat candy at 9:30 in the morning, we don’t hit people, throw food, sit in front of the TV for three hours, or wear the same underwear six days in a row. And rules are harder to enforce on vacation because you don't have any of your normal routines, so everything starts to be about what rules to relax and when, and to what degree. You have none of the built-in breaks of your normal life, and exponentially more negotiations about behavior.

As a parent, of course, you are the enforcer of the rules, which is not fun, and makes you feel mean-spirited and angry. This year we went to a state park on the Mississippi, and I had visions of myself cycling gently along a sunny path lined with crocuses, smiling at the boys pedalling alongside, but what happened is that I ended up standing in a weird-smelling hotel room yelling, "Turn off your stupid Game Boy and get dressed! We are not staying inside all day and get your underwear off the floor before the people come to make the beds!"

At every meal we engaged in Jesuitical negotiations with the boys such as can they have Coke and if so, can they have refills? If they have refills, can they also have dessert? Do they have to order from the children’s menu if they are almost 11, i.e. not 10 and under, or can they get filet mignon? Can they watch TV later or just a movie? Why do they have to go outside for a bike ride or a hike? Why can't they just stay inside playing Game Boy, watching TV or going to the pool?

And of course you're together all the time. Every second of every day, without any of the breaks you would have at home. This vacation was the first one where we rented adjoining rooms, and yet Martin and I were never alone because we have a 16-month-old who was in our room with us. Noah and Jacob were jumping on the beds watching Cartoon Network at 10:30 at night while Martin and I were crouching in the bathroom trying to read by the light of a dim bulb that wouldn't wake up the baby.

Being together for uninterrupted stretches of time highlights every weird thing about the boys in particular and family life in general. I love my sons, and find them to be funny and interesting people, but only for about 20 minutes at a time. On the four-hour drive, they played their Game Boys, which meant that every three minutes they would say something like, "Diamonds are falling from the sky" or "I need four more pairs of underwear" or "I just froze water and am walking across the ocean." Their eyes were glazed over and I would have to ask three times if they had to go to the bathroom before they would answer. Then they would say "no," and two minutes later yell that they had to go to the bathroom "VERY badly." I stared out the window and worried about their attention spans and my impatience, and the effects of technology and Cheetos on their development, and if this was better or worse than the family vacations I took with my parents and what that means.

And then, there was The Complaining.

The first day, we biked five miles on a hilly bike path, and my oldest son complained every single second of the way. Then he complained the whole way back. Ten miles of complaining in his loud, shrill voice, interrupted only by the sound of him periodically getting off his bike and throwing it to the ground. The next day we hiked two miles up a hill to view the point where the Mississippi, Illinois and Missouri rivers converge, and he complained that his feet hurt, he was bored and he was hot. He picked up sticks and hurled them against trees, kicked his feet against the ground, and yelled at us to wait for him. Then he asked when we were having lunch, whether he could watch TV when we got back, and how much longer was it to the top. At the top he wanted to know how long it would take to get to the bottom, and could we stop at the Visitor’s Center gift shop. Once, my husband said, “It must be hard to be him.”

The thing was that often he was only saying the things that I was thinking but have trained myself not to say out loud. I wonder how long it is to the top and if the baby will fall asleep and if he does, will he sleep later, and what is there for lunch and how long is it until the wine and cheese and am I gaining weight from the lodge food or losing weight from the hiking and is this as fun as it’s going to get?

I loved riding with Gabriel in the bike seat, loved seeing him watch the grackles, loved seeing him in Martin’s arms in the pool. I loved talking to Jacob about the mouse in the book he is reading as we hiked along, stepping over branches, catching glimpses of the Mississippi through the trees. I loved eating dessert with Noah in the lodge dining room, apple pie for him, chocolate pecan for me, whipped cream for both. It was lovely and stressful and funny and annoying. I wished we could have stayed a few more days. I couldn’t wait to get home.

In the car on the way home Noah, who did not say one positive thing the entire time said, "That was such a great trip." And I had to agree that it was.

A Change of Heart: A Valentine's Story

Anne Lamott, in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, writes about a friend of hers who practices a spiritual path called Diamond Heart. Her friend tells her that our hearts are like diamonds “because they have the capacity to express divine light, which is love; we are not only portals for this love, but are actually made of it.”

Lamott says, “I absolutely believe this, to a point: Where I disagree is when she says we are beings of light wrapped in bodies that only seem dense and ponderous, but are actually made of atoms and molecules, with infinite space and light in between them. It must be easy for her to believe this, as she is thin, and does not have children." And then Anne says, "I can meet her halfway: I think we are diamond hearts, wrapped in meatballs. I would call my path Diamond Meatball: We would comfort and uplift one another by saying, “‘There’s a diamond in there some where.’”

This is a story about my mom and her life-long friend who know a lot about comforting and uplifting. They are women who know intuitively that (to paraphrase a John Denver song) some days are diamonds and some days are meatballs. Their friendship has seen a lot of both.

********
“I can take you back to the beginning,” she said. “It was thirty years ago, and my father had bought my mother a diamond brooch in the shape of a heart. Then they went on a vacation to Connecticut, and soon after they came home, she realized she’d lost the brooch.”

My mother’s best fiend (I’ll call her Ethel) is telling me this story over the phone, she in New York and me in Illinois. She’s from Rockland County, close to where I grew up in New Jersey, and her voice has the sound of home in it.

“They looked everywhere for the brooch but they couldn’t find it. So they filed a claim with the insurance company. And for some reason, I don’t know how they did this, the insurance company replicated the pin for her.”

When her parents became ill many years later, Ethel cared for them. Her sister (I’ll call her Selma) didn’t help out very much, but I only heard this from my mother, not from Ethel. Ethel and Selma had a difficult relationship, but Ethel was loyal and didn’t speak about the particulars of it. When their mother died, Ethel and Selma found a letter in their mother's desk drawer, written before she became ill and was still of sound mind. The letter divided up her jewelry between the two of them.

“She left Selma the heart brooch, but I got another diamond brooch,” Ethel said. “I thought she was very fair.”

A few years later, their father died. Despite bouts of anxiety that made it almost impossible for her to drive long distances, Ethel made it across the bridge to her father once a week. Again, they didn’t see too much of Selma. And then, in the upheaval of dealing with their parents’ house, the relationship fractured to the point that Ethel and Selma stopped speaking to each other.

“Ethel wanted to sell the house and Selma didn’t,” my mother told me. “And, she wanted all the best furniture for herself. Ethel had the house appraised by three realtors, and then told Selma how much it would cost for her to buy Ethel’s half of the house. Selma agreed, but then at the closing, she tried to get Ethel to take less.”

“And then when they were cleaning out the house,” she said, “Selma sent Ethel down in the basement to clear things out while she stayed upstairs carting away the furniture she wanted.”

“We didn’t speak to each other for five years,” Ethel tells me.

While cleaning out their parents’ house, Ethel chose to take her mother’s dresser. “I had it delivered to our house,” she said. “And I was cleaning it out because I had seen that there was a lot of crumpled up tissue paper wedged in the back of one of the drawers. It was her sweater drawer. Anyway, I put all the tissue paper in a bag and carried it out to the garage, and as I was putting it in the garbage, I heard something fall onto the floor. I looked and it was the diamond heart brooch. The original one. It had been there all those years. If it hadn’t fallen onto the floor I would have thrown it right into the trash.”

“Did you tell your sister?” I asked.

“No, because we weren’t speaking to each other. And I was afraid that she would be jealous that I had two diamond pins and she only had one. Even now that we are talking to each other again, I’ve seen her wearing hers but I’ve never said anything. But I told your mother because she’s like a sister to me.”

Ethel wondered if she should call the insurance company who had replaced the pin and my father said they probably weren’t even in business anymore. My mother said she should take it as a sign.

“Of what?” I asked.

“That her mother is looking down on her. That she did the right thing in selling the house.”

I think it's a sign of her Diamond Heart. My mother and her friend call themselves Lucy and Ethel. Every time I see two old ladies shopping in Lord and Taylor, I think, “That’s going to be them someday.” A few years ago, during a time when I was dealing with some anxiety of my own, they helped me through. Sometime around then, Ethel started calling me Lucy Jr. I take it as an honor.

It's the Little Sins God Punishes Right Away

Shortly before Christmas, I was driving through the downtown streets of the small city where I live, and I saw a woman looking into the window of a resale furniture shop. It was evening, and she was standing in a circle of light from a street lamp wearing a black coat and a long purple scarf. She was looking in the window as if she really wanted whatever was inside, leaning in towards the display with her face close to the glass. I watched her as I sat stopped at a red light, and then in my rear view mirror until I couldn't see her anymore.

I can't remember the last time I saw an adult look at something with such unashamed wanting. With young children, you get used to naked displays of desire. There's never a moment when my kids don't want something, desperately, and I don't mean care or attention, I mean actual things. But as adults, you try to learn moderation, control. I once tried to explain to my oldest son, who is 10 and fierce with wanting, that it was "okay to want things, that everyone wants things, but most of the time, we have everything that we need." I said this in a kindly, enlightened voice, and he, through gritted teeth, said, "But it's never all in the same place at the same time!"

For adults, there's a fair amount of shame associated with really, really wanting things. I think this is because most of the things we really, really want are things that we aren't really supposed to have. A pack of Marlboros, a Kate Spade bag, sex with your neighbors, winning the lottery and never having to work again, whatever--open longing for whatever is outside of your norm is simply not seemly. Self-control in the form of dieting, exercise, work, outlet shopping, monogamy--this is what we do. The other day I saw my one-year old son lying on his stomach with his little diapered butt up in the air licking the plastic ladybugs on his "One, Two, Three Ladybugs!" book. Adults don't behave this way.

Yet there are exceptions. There are little indulgences that we not only allow ourselves, but we micromanage down to the last molecule of pleasure. Coffee beverages, for example. There's something like 10,000 possible drink combinations at Starbucks, so at least in this area of your life, you can get exactly what you want, exactly when you want it. I'm not alone in believing that the day must start with the coffee beverage of my choice, and most mornings, I really, really want a latte. I lie awake the night before and imagine it. I worry that I don't have enough cash in my wallet for it. I plan the first hour of my day around it. But, I tell myself, I should really drink green tea. I feel guilty about the expense, reminding myself that a latte a day adds up to the cost of a small car over the course of a year. And the calories, I think, the caffeine!

Then I got this Starbucks gift card from my boss for Christmas. I don't usually go to Starbucks because it's several blocks away from my office. But on one recent morning, when my husband offered to give me a ride to work after driving our kids off at school, I thought, "Great! He can drop me off at Starbucks and I can walk to my office instead of there and back. And maybe they're still using the red holiday cups..." Then when he offered to wait for me and drive me to my office, I thought, "Even better!" But, standing in line waiting for my Cinnamon Dolce Latte, I saw something out the window that I did not wish to see.

"Um, I sort of need to hurry because that's my husband sitting in that van out there and there's a police car behind him," I said to the barista.

"Oh, yeah, sure," he said.

I walked quite quickly out of the store, latte in hand, and flashed the police officer what I thought was a cute "Sorry about that!" smile as I trotted across the sidewalk in my high heeled boots. I got into the van thinking, okay, let's go.

"We can't go," my husband said. "I don't have my license with me so we have to sit here while he looks up my name and address."

"But why did you stop right here on the street?"

"I told him you had sprained your ankle and couldn't really walk so I was waiting here for you."

I looked down at my boots. Several minutes went by. I thought about how no one would believe that Martin lied to a policeman. I sipped my latte and wished that I could tell myself that it wasn't worth the trouble.

"I have to get to work," I said finally.

"Well, can you just limp away?"

As it was a good quarter of a mile of straight road, and the police officer would be able to see me the whole way, and as he had, obviously, already seen me skidding along in heels holding a tall beverage, limping seemed pointless.

A few minutes later, the officer came back and gave my husband a ticket for $75 for parking in a no-parking area. A $79 latte.

There's a saying in German: "Die kleinen Suenden bestraft Gott sofort," or "It's the little sins God punishes right away." I'm not saying that wanting the latte was wrong; I'm just pointing out the obvious: if I had gone straight to my office and made a cup of green tea, things would have turned out differently.

The thing about little sins, though, is that we need them. We need to be able indulge some of our desires. We need not to get stuck in a cycle of perennial wanting. It's depressing and makes us mean. Life is full of crappy things, and we deserve pleasure wherever we can find it. It's good for us. Something inside of me breathed a deep sigh when I saw that woman looking in that store window all those weeks ago. I hope she got what she wanted.

Your Worst Fears Come True

In her fabulous and dead-on truthful book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott writes about her students' inherent fears about being writers: “[They] want to know why they feel so crazy when they sit down to work, why they have these wonderful ideas and then they sit down and write one sentence and see with horror that it is a bad one, and then every major form of mental illness from which they suffer surfaces, leaping out of the water like trout—the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the hand-washing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias. And especially, the paranoia.”

Your don’t have to be a writer to know that for most of us there is an undercurrent of neurosis that runs fairly reliably just below the surface of our day-to-day work of feeling normal in the world. Call it fear, call it self-doubt, call it just basic background worrying; the fact is that the suspicion that something may be dreadfully wrong or may be about to be dreadfully wrong, is, on some level, always with us.

Lamott writes, “You can be defeated and disoriented by all these feelings…or you can see [it] as wonderful material.”

I think this is true even if you aren’t a writer. Maybe if we invite our worst fears, those huge paralyzing ones and the small niggly ones, out to play, maybe they will begin to reveal themselves for what they are...our self-created ghosties that have a place in our lives somewhere, sure, but definitely not in the driver's seat.

So I'm going to give that a try.

“I, who am that shadowy presence with whom you try to bargain when you are afraid that things are going to go terribly wrong in your life, am here to tell you, finally, that yes, it’s true. Those headaches you get, and the dizziness you sometimes have, and that tremor in your hands? No, it’s not just stress and anxiety like the doctor said. It’s the beginnings of a degenerative nerve disorder that will slowly destroy your life and force you into a situation that you must accept with dignity and stoicism despite the gnawing adversity your life has become. And yes, if you had been diagnosed sooner, you would have had a better chance at early treatment, but everyone ignored your deeply-felt conviction that something was dreadfully wrong, just as you always feared they would.

Yes, your husband is either going to leave you for someone who has all the qualities you lack, and he will be fulfilled and happy while you will be eaten up with bitterness, jealousy and resentment. Or, he will contract a horrible illness which will either require you to become his full-time caregiver, a role you will have to take on gracefully and without complaint lest you seem mean of spirit, or will cause him to drop dead, leaving you with the task of raising your grief-stricken children alone.

And your son’s habit of lining things up in neat rows, and refusing to leave any task unfinished once he’s started? No, it’s not just typical childhood quirkiness. It’s the beginnings of OCD, triggered no doubt by some anxiety that he feels about his home life, meaning your mothering behavior, which is never as good as it should be. The OCD will go along nicely with the latent bipolar disorder that is the real cause of your other son’s mood swings and obnoxious attitude. Yes it’s true that if you had raised him on macrobiotic food and limited his intake of sugar, his life would be problem-free, and he would be a calm, happy person with a future of glowing health before him, instead of the inevitable mental health crises that will thwart his chances at a fulfilling life. And yes, it is your fault.

Your credit card debt is never going to be paid off, you won’t have enough money to live on after you retire, and you’ll have to work at Wal-Mart when you’re 72. After a lifetime of work, people will forget about you after you retire, your children will avoid you, and you’ll spend the last years of your life incapacitated, senile, and hostage to a health-care system that makes you feel disempowered and feeble. And no, you’ll never be sure that you’ve done something meaningful with your life.

Of course, it’s a real possibility that whatever your worries may be, they will pale before the inevitable global crises of world war, terrorism, an avian flu epidemic, and/or the effects of global warming. One morning you may wake up to find that your city has been plunged into some stark morning-after type of reality where nothing is the same as it was, and the stockpiled cans of ravioli and paraffin in your basement will be pitiful protection.

And by the way, you won’t ever lose that last ten pounds, and you’re never going to feel good about your body. When you finally realize that you’re never actually going to look any better than you do now, you’ll hate yourself for spending all your good years worrying about the size of your ass, or that you had a terrible disease. You’re always going to wonder if you should have made different choices in your life, and no, things aren’t ever going to get easier. Thank you for your attention.”

I feel better already. Now you try it.

Truly, under the right circumstances, writing can be a therapeutic act that helps us order our thoughts and to see when our perspective has really gone off the rails. Writing helps us to see more of ourselves, and hopefully, to be kinder, more tolerant, and more self-aware people because of it. And that's what the world needs, isn't it? Yes, it is.

Why Laundry is Better Than Meditation

About six years ago, Jack Kornfield, meditation teacher, writer and psychotherapist, wrote a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. As someone who feels sort of pressured by concepts like enlightenment, mindfulness and just being in general, I was thrilled when I first saw this book. Its common-sense title gave me a secret feeling of relief. I hoped it meant that I wasn’t the only person who was deeply uncertain about the possibility of finding joy in the mundane aspects of my life. I even hoped it would say that ecstasy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, just to take the pressure off. But it didn’t really do that. It was more about how ecstasy is actually all it’s cracked up to be, and with the right mindset, you can find it pretty much anywhere, like the laundry room.

This depresses me. Not because I can’t get into it, but because it just feels like so much more work. The clear, calm, glowy states that I associate with “enlightenment” and “awakening” don’t correspond to the dirty, chaotic, exhausting reality of life with three small children, a job, a house and a husband. I know this is my fault. I know that a more enlightened person would say that I’m looking at it all wrong, that’s it’s all about finding beauty in imperfection, and that being “awakened” doesn’t mean feeling blissful. I know, I know. But still. It just nags at me, this crotchety, put upon feeling that “I already have so much stuff to do, do I have to feel at peace with it as well?”

Sometimes when I first wake up in the morning, I try to practice deep breathing, to start off the day with a feeling of calmness and gratitude. Usually what happens is that I fall back to sleep, but one recent morning, as I lay there breathing, I started thinking about the laundry. How I had seen it the night before, so much of it waiting to be folded that it had formed itself into a sort of floppy sculpture, loosely arranged in the shape of the baskets it was in before it was dumped out and rooted through. The legs of a little pair of khaki pants formed one corner, one leg folded up and one folded down. The whole pile looked sad and a little deflated, like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter when it’s not on anyone’s head. And as I thought about how long it would take me to fold all that laundry, I had an unexpected thought: “Laundry is better than meditation.” Then a second, sort of corollary thought: “Laundry is better than meditation for women with small children.”

After thinking about this more, I realized that there are in fact several things about doing laundry that are more satisfying—I might even go so far as to say more beneficial for mothers of small children—than meditating. For example, there is no guilt associated with doing laundry. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Doing laundry, especially when there are people around to witness your efforts, is not only guilt-free but virtuous. Further, if you have a sensitive partner, or even possibly sensitive older children, your doing the laundry can be guilt-inducing in them, resulting in an activity that makes you feel not only smugly productive but also superior. Meditation is not like this. Retreating into your room to meditate results in explanations of why “Mama needs to lie down for a while,” which make you feel not only guilty but mentally ill. While meditation can give you some spiritual high ground, like when I say to my husband, “I really need a break. I’m going to do my meditation CD,” instead of disappearing into the bedroom with a bottle of white wine and a copy of People, laundry gives you the domestic high ground which, in the short term at least, is much more gratifying.

Laundry is also better than meditating because it gives you solitude under the guise of performing a domestic activity. Once when my 8-year old son wandered into the laundry room, I set him to work sorting socks and he has never returned. This is the opposite with meditation. Somehow knowing that Mama is not doing anything except sitting in the dark in the bedroom seems to cause a combination of great anxiety and great curiosity among my family, and usually, just as I feel my breathing start to slow, the bedroom door creaks open, and I can feel a small presence, silent, yet radiating with wounded neglect. And one time, when I was drifting off into a dreamy, Jon Kabat Zinn-induced daze, my husband opened the door very, very quietly, and crept in whispering, “Sorry, I’m just getting the laundry.” See what I mean about the coveted domestic high ground?

Finally, laundry is better than meditating because with laundry, there are few expectations of perfection, and of course this is true with or without children. You’re not looking for ecstasy in the washing machine. You just hope that things get clean and that you won’t have to pick ten thousand pieces of shredded paper towel off the wet clothes. But with meditation, there’s always that state of grace that’s the spiritual equivalent to the runner’s high, or Kim Cattrall’s perfect orgasm. It’s just more pressure because, well, what if you don’t get there? Have you failed at “just being?” This is not a question that arises with laundry. With laundry, you have the irrefutable proof of a completed task. Everyone knows that you’ll have to do it again two days later, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s done now and you did it. For that moment, at least, your load has been enlightened.

Morning Ride

A typical ride to school with Noah, 10, Jacob, 8, and Gabriel, 1. Sometimes, all you have to do is sit back and listen.


Jacob: “Are we going to be late?”

Mama: “No, we’re not going to be late.”

Jacob: “We stayed at home for quite a while after I had my coat on.”

Mama: “That’s because you put your coat on 20 minutes before we had to leave.”

Noah: “Gabe, keys for the baby!”

Gabriel: “Ha!”

J: “Cheese for the baby?”

N: “Keys! I gave him his toy keys.”

J: “Oh."

N: “Mama, did you know that the explorer Ferdinand Magellan left with 300 people and only 17 returned?”

M: “I didn’t know that.”

N: “He left with 300 and only 17 returned.”

J: “I think Columbus just had one other person.”

N: “No he didn’t. He had a lot of people. But he was an idiot. He thought the earth was flat.”

J: “No he didn’t.”

N: “Yes he did.”

J: “No he didn’t.”

N: “Jacob, I think I would know. I’m reading about him right now in Social Studies.”

J: “Well, I’m reading about him too.”

N: “Yeah and you’re in third grade. He was an idiot. He was supposed to go east but if you go east you crash into Europe and don’t get to Asia. They said east and he went west.”

J: “That has nothing to do with if he thought the earth was flat.”

N: “Did you know Columbus wasn’t the first person to discover earth? I mean, America? It was the Vikings but they were killed by the Indians.”

G: “Aach.”

J: “All the restaurants are closed.”

M: “That’s because it’s 7:30 in the morning.”

N: “Mama, what did the Energizer bunny get arrested for?”

M: “What?”

N: “Battery!”

M: “That’s funny.”

N: “Do you get it? Because the Energizer bunny is like…the mascot for Energizer batteries?”

M: “I get it.”

N: “Because he’s like made of batteries and he just keeps going and going.”

M: “I get it.”

J: “It’s raining. It started out nice and now look at our windows.”

N: “Jacob, can you imagine if you had a car that was gray, but then you washed it and it was really red? It was so covered with dust that it looked gray but it was really red? And then it got smaller and smaller from the dust coming off? It was a dusty old car that was red underneath. It could be a witch’s car.”

J: “A witch wouldn’t need a car. She would have a broom.”

N: “Good point.”

J: “There’s the Cub Scouts sign. There’s Alex. And that jerk Preston.”

M: “Jacob, that’s not very nice.”

N: “Who’s the one with the helmet?”

J: “The guy or the kid?”

N: “The kid.”

J: “That’s that jerk Preston.”

N: “Mama, are Austria and Australia the same thing?”

M: “No, they’re two separate countries.”

J: “Noah, Australia is the Land Down Under.”

N: “There’s Father Willard’s house. That’s where Father Willard lives.”

J: “He needs to paint his front door.”

N: “We’re there!”

J: “Are we late?”

M: “No, we’re not late.”

J: “We were at home for quite a while after I had my coat on.”

M: “We’re not late.”

J: “Can we get out?”

N: “No! Get closer to the door. It’s raining!”

M: “You can get out. Be careful. Don’t forget your lunches.”

N: “Bye!”

J: “Bye Mama.”

Doors slamming.

Silence.

G: “Ewch.”

Holiday Greetings

I hope these holiday greetings find you savoring some of the peace of these holy days. I’m writing this letter in our dining room which is also my “office.” In front of me is a lovely stone statue of a woman whose head Gabriel just broke off. To my right, on the floor, are a small yellow school bus, a Thomas the Tank Engine, and a copy of Good Night Moon. Just beyond those, hanging over a chair in the living room, is Noah’s tae kwan do uniform, which needs a patch sewn onto it. In a place of honor on the coffee table is a lampshade with the lid of a teapot glued onto it, which was Jacob’s anniversary present to us. And on a chair to my left are three pairs of Martin’s pants that need to be taken to the dry cleaners and a dried flower arrangement knocked over by the cats. As I sit and contemplate this scene, I am reminded of a saying I heard earlier this year—“It’s Good to be the Queen.”

Martin told me about this saying. It’s actually from the web site http://itsgoodtobethequeen.com that “celebrates” mothers of “only boys” in their efforts to “raise responsible and respectful men.” Yes, well. I liked this idea at first. I even got a little refrigerator magnet that says “It’s Good to be the Queen,” and I put it right next to my “Because I’m the Mother—That’s Why” magnet. I tried to feel “empowered” by being the “only source of estrogen” in my “castle.” After a while, though, I started to detect a flaw in this idea. The flaw is that it’s no good being The Queen if you are the only one who thinks you are The Queen. Being The Queen depends upon having subjects, not a refrigerator magnet. A real Queen would not have to listen to remarks like, “You’re a good cook, Mama, except when you make things that are disgusting.” Or, when asking one of the princes why they have not scooped out the litter boxes, hear, “No offense, Mama, but I really think that should be your job.” I didn’t see anything on The Queen web site about the honor of being a pregnant female in a house full of males, but last year, when Jacob asked Martin, “Why is Mama’s behind shaped like that?” and Martin, gesturing towards my stomach, said, “See here, where her belly is sticking out so much? Her behind has to be that big to balance it out, or she would fall over,” I myself felt more like a cow than a Queen.

Maybe the Queen thing works for some women. My suspicion, though, is that it’s a way for mothers of boys to pretend that they aren’t really just frustrated women trying to understand why everyone in their house smells weird, eats too loudly, and thinks it’s really funny to see how many days in a row they can wear the same pair of socks. (It’s three weeks, as Noah told me. “But I had to sort of bang them against the wall before I could wear them because they had gotten kind of stiff”). In all honesty, what I really think when I read things about parenting, or talk to other people about their family lives, is that most of the time we are asking ourselves, “Am I doing this right? Are we happy enough? Healthy enough? Is everyone really okay?”

I don’t know the answers to these questions. And as Garrison Keillor says, “Life doesn’t stand still. We ask the big questions, but by the time we get close to answering them, we’ve moved on.” So the smaller things are easier to talk about. Noah, for example, who is 10, is really into his fish and his aquariums. Sometimes I’m afraid he’s going to become one of those pale adolescents who keeps lizards or some other creature that feeds on live rodents, but for now he loves his fish, and is happy to talk about them, in great detail, to anyone who’s interested. He’s weird and funny and intense, and seems to become more so as the years go by. He made me promise not to tell anyone, but he was chosen “coolest kid in his class” last year. He’s also a fabulous big brother to Gabriel, who likes to stand at the piano bench and bounce up and down while Noah plays (very loudly). Noah definitely gets the most smiles from Gabe, who thinks his big brother has hung the moon.

Jacob is in 3rd grade, and is very into building things. Actually, he likes “found objects,” meaning that he collects junk and makes stuff out of it. We all know not to leave anything lying around in our house or Jacob will smuggle it downstairs and glue it to something. He’s really good at building. He recently assembled a table and some chairs that have been sitting in the back of our garage for 8 years. He also began riding his bike around the neighborhood by himself this summer, which, if it had been up to me, would never have happened. But Martin encouraged him in this without telling me about it, and one afternoon when he was at work, Jacob sidled out the door with his helmet, and, without making eye contact, said that he was “going to ride around the block.” “Are you kidding me?” I said. “Mama,” he said, “Papa would let me do it and Papa would be proud of me.” So I had to let him go. For parents who let their kids ride all over their neighborhoods, this doesn’t sound like a big deal. But there aren’t any sidewalks where we live, and people aren’t used to kids on bikes, and I’m not used to him actually growing up, so it was a big deal for me. But he was so proud and determined, and he is, as he keeps telling me, “Eight years old.” This summer I realized that Noah and Jacob are still young, but they’re not really little anymore.

Gabriel is little. He turned 1 in November, and is a cheerful, calm, strong boy. We’re not completely sure where he came from, because he’s large, blue-eyed, and very easy-going. He loves his brothers and is happiest when he’s right in the middle of whatever they are doing. He is indeed the light of our lives, and there’s a completeness about our family that we never anticipated. I had a 4-month maternity leave after he was born, and then worked half-time for another 6 months. Now I’m back to working full-time, but I can do part of that at home. Martin also has a flexible schedule both for his practice and his work with the Center for Men and Masculinity http://menandmasculinity.com, and we’ve been blessed with a wonderful babysitter who comes to our home three mornings a week. So it’s hectic sometimes, but we are both doing work that feels rewarding and engaging, and we feel lucky to be able to manage our time as we do. A friend said to me this summer, “When you have young children, the days are long but the years are short,” and does that ever feel true.

This year, I am somehow more aware than ever that parenting is one long, ongoing prayer. One of the guiding quotes of my life is by Meister Eckhart who said, “If the only prayer you ever say is ‘Thank You,’ that would be sufficient.” Outside our living room window the sun is setting, and the winter sky is breathtakingly lovely. And for this moment I think, “Yes, we’re all okay, we’re doing it right, we have more than enough.” So today and everyday, I am saying ‘Thank You’ for this most blessed life, for those we love, near and far, and for all the things that hold us together.

A Small Story for Shelley and Her Collection of Everyday Miracles

I wrote this for a friend of mine who, despite pretty hard life circumstances, was very skilled at finding joy in everyday places. This is something I figure we can all use some help with.

When my husband Martin moved into his current office, he inherited some plants from the previous occupant. When you look at these plants, you instantly realize two things: 1) why they are in an office and not living happily and well-tended on the windowsill of someone’s sunny kitchen, and 2) why their former owner, who had moved just down the hall, left them behind. They are prototypical “office plants”; they have apathy written all over them. Their leaves are dark and listless, and their pots stained and functional. They embody the quiet, stoic tolerance of inadequate living conditions that every person who has ever spent more than one afternoon sitting in a cubicle understands. They are the kind of plants that, if you glanced over at them in the middle of a long, dull afternoon, they would sigh and say, “Yeah, you don’t always get what you want, but what can you do?”

Martin, however, is blessed with a happy combination of incongruous abilities: he can both appreciate the pleasure in the small and humble details of life, and also remain oblivious to things that are aesthetically displeasing. He didn’t get rid of the plants. He just accepted them with a basic tolerance for other living creatures sharing his office space. He watered them and left them alone. He didn’t trim them when long, straggly shoots started to form on one of the plants; he didn’t pay attention when the leaves of this plant started to turn a glossy green tinged with pink, and wind around one of the picture frames. He didn’t really notice the tiny, firm buds forming on the bare offshoots that kept growing up around the window.

And then one day, he did notice that the buds were becoming longer. A day or two later, strange and beautiful flowers began to appear. Each bud unfurled into what looked like a tiny, upside-down umbrella of waxy pink flowers. Each little umbrella had eight or ten perfectly formed blooms of firm, light pink petals with dark pink centers. They were flowers so startling in their uniqueness, and their incongruity to the rest of the plant, all you could was stand there and stare at them.

This went on for days—each day a new bunch of tiny symmetrical clusters opened. It is still going on now, with the flowers becoming fuller, more robust, and exuding a heavy, musky scent. Martin showed them to the former occupant of the office, who said that he had had those plants for more than fifteen years and that they had never done anything like that before.

So what do you do when the miracle of unimagined potential unfolds right in front of you? I guess you slip it quietly into your soul, hoping some of it will rub off on you. You hope that your own bumbling attempts at perfection aren’t keeping your life from unfolding into something as beautiful, something whose outline lives just beyond your vision. And you hope that if you are patient and lucky, and pay close attention, maybe someday you’ll be able to see it again.