For I have sinned

I am about the furthest thing from a Catholic imaginable, it's true.  But last night I was lying awake feeling guilty for a litany of failings and vices from the past weeks.  'How Catholic of me,' I mused.  And this is not to say that my own Jewish culture doesn't have a lot to offer in the guilt department.  As I flopped back and forth under the covers, I told myself to stop spinning about my various shortcomings and try to focus on all the ways I might have been effective or kind recently.  As so many of us writing here have acknowledged, it is not easy to take those night-time demons to the mat, especially when the hours are small.  Part of the struggle is feeling alone, trapped in your mind with what you imagine to be shameful thoughts and deeds. When I was finally awoken by the chattering of the baby in the early morning, it was something of a relief.  As I extracted her from the crib and set about to start the day, I decided I would engage in something of a "confessional" exercise.  Perhaps if I purged my consciousness of some of the low moments, I could make room for fresh experiences.  Forthwith, a detailing of seven mortal sins of late.  Here is hoping that cracking open my humanity can start to heal what ails me.  At least it might make you feel superior and then you can write about all the ways in which you experienced Pride :)

Wrath - I am typically fairly internal when it comes to anger, which, if you read any study on health is not ideal.  Apparently, people who externalize anger (at least express it, if not outright explode all over the place) tend to have lower levels of depression and can experience improved communication.  This article from the American Psychological Association (and there are a host just like it in the literature) describes some adaptive qualities of anger and how to use it to your benefit.  At my worst, I employ the tactic of stuffing down things that irritate me and then completely coming unglued over something relatively innocuous much later on down the road.  This is totally unproductive and moderately to profoundly confusing for loved ones.  I am working on addressing problems in the moment and being honest about my needs.  This is tricky and can feel risky to someone like myself who likes to avoid confrontation.  But ultimately, the confrontation always happens, just maybe displaced, which is no good for anyone.  Onward.  Upward.

Greed - I want more time, mostly.  Of course, I always desire too many cookies, clothes and earthly possessions, but hours in the day . . . what I wouldn't give.  The truth is that I could manage my time better.  There is certainly some whiling away the hours on Facebook/Instagram, spending late evenings watching Boardwalk Empire instead of answering emails, iChatting with a friend rather than ordering groceries.  The balance of stealing some time to which I feel entitled ("me" time) and organizing the day around prioritizing important tasks is the struggle of all good people, right?  And listen to my language: "stealing" some time . . . from what or whom?  Still and all, I want more time for work, more time with my family, more time to noodle on the internet.  There, I said it.

Sloth - Um, please see Greed.  And then sprinkle in all the moments where I sit in the chair at the studio or on the couch at the apartment thinking 'Sarah, stop flipping through the magazine and move on to the next thing.'  How about the time last week when I recalled I had read a study somewhere (I'm big on studies) indicating that dogs have fewer allergies when you bathe them less often, so . . . On the whole, I tend to push myself to make it all happen and there are times when I actually take great pleasure in physical labor and menial tasks.  There can be a wonderful meditative quality to folding, organizing, washing, etc.  But I realize I tell myself that things are just super busy now and fitting it all in will get easier over time.  This is, of course, an exercise in self-delusion.  Everything will just continue to get busier and the tasks and demands on time will simply compound.  Operation Pull it Together in full effect, then.

Pride - I post about 74,000 pictures of my daughter on Facebook every day with captions extolling her adorableness.  I talk about her accomplishments (at 9 months, these include things like almost, maybe, no definitely, actually probably not - but it really sounds like it! - uttering, "mmmmm…" when I feed her bites of something) ad nauseum.  When people ask me about her I always start with, "She is totally @#!&-ing awesome."  Sue me.  I am a new mother.  I got nothing for you here :)

Lust - There are days when I want power and I want it badly.  This is typically applicable in my business.  I want to be huge enough and famous enough that clients line up at my door, the phone rings off the hook and my inbox is brimming with messages where the inquiry goes something like this, "We really want to work with you, exclusively and specifically, and as such, we are writing you this check with a large sum.  Please deposit this check immediately and then show up on the day of our event with whatever florals and decor you feel are appropriate.  Thanks so much."  Until then, I suppose I will continue to work really hard to prove myself in the industry, hone my brand, secure the trust of clients and exceed expectations in the execution of events like my business depends on it.  Because it does.  The mogul situation is still out of reach, as it turns out.

Envy -I always think everyone else has it easier, is doing it better, knows something I don't and so on.  I believe this to be a fairly universal issue but it doesn't make it any less potent. I am particularly uncomfortable with this aspect of my personality, as my life is so relatively rosy.  As previously discussed, I have greater flexibility and more human and capital resources than most working people.  There is real suffering all around me in this big city and my concerns about finding the time to update my website or whether my daughter has enough of whatever thing-of-the-day should consume scant mental energy.  No excuses here.

Gluttony - The unending battle with cooking at home and eating "like a real family," wages on.  We over-indulge in take-out and restaurant meals where we are inevitably served too much of less healthful food.  This is a symptom of multiple larger issues in our house (see above struggles with time management, for example) and the remedies aren't coming easily.  I picture us coming together for dinner each night, discussing important matters of the day, laughing, sharing locally sourced food we have lovingly prepared, nourishing our bodies . . . then I scrape the sauce from the (recyclable?) plastic container from Dao Palate onto day-old rice, popping it into the microwave and feel awful.  Fill the refrigerator weekly, take a cooking class (or seven), continue to try and carve out the time.  How hard could it BE?!  HONESTLY.

Well, now I see why people are into this process of recounting wrongs and requesting absolution. It does feel somewhat cleansing.  The accountability piece is where things get dicier.  Maybe writing it down will catalyze forward motion.  And reading it over will help me be a little more gentle with myself as I strive to be a better . . . well . . . everything.  Wait, is that Greed or Pride or maybe Lust?  Sigh.

 (image via)

Lessons from a weekend at home...

Dear Clara,

Aren’t weekends the very best part of the week? If you think that now, just wait until you start working!  Half of our weekends are usually on the go, discovering something new, but I always savor a weekend at home too.  Here’s what help make ours special:

• Start the weekend with something active: A quick run, a brisk walk . . . on one of the days, usually Saturday, I have been trying to get some physical activity out of the way right from the start in the morning.  It usually gives me a bit of time to myself to think and relax from the week, and I feel like it gives me a pass to enjoy the rest of the weekend without guilt.
• Try something new . . . : Sometimes when you live in a place, you take all of its gifts and treasures for granted.  When I find myself at home for the weekend, I try to always make a point of seeing or doing or trying something new, almost as if I would be visiting for the first time.  It might be a museum or a park or a restaurant or a farmer’s market.  Everyone always has a list of things they’ve been meaning to do or see in their own town, so pull from that list and rediscover where you live all over again.
• . . . but balance with something old: At the same time, try to have little weekend routines that you can attach to.  There’s something comfortable and familiar about coming back to a place or schedule that makes home feel more like home, especially for us since our home changes so often.  We have a “Sunday Routine” that involves going to our favorite neighborhood, going to church, taking a walk and then having brunch in one of a few restaurants in that neighborhood.  Having that comfort of Sunday morning helps us to feel grounded and rooted---with so much else that’s changing, the familiar routine is like a big hug that at once is the end of a week and the start of a new one.
• Enjoy a lazy morning: People say that when you have children you no longer have lazy mornings.  I disagree---for sure, mornings are different.  But we still pick one to lounge around a little longer to savor the sunshine through the window, to read a book, watch a cartoon, have a good laugh over tickles.  We have breakfast at the table, and linger over coffee . . . just little things that make mornings mornings, and that we don’t have the time to all do together during the business of the work week.
• Make time to reflect and be grateful: I use our time at church for this, and while I hope you find that same space and comfort there, I realize that one day you might choose to do things differently.  Whatever that space might be for you, set aside some quiet space for yourself to truly appreciate the gifts of the prior week, even on the hard ones.  Think about what you have done for others and what you could have done for others, so that you reset for the new week with that mindfulness.  Make some room in your heart for gratitude---we are blessed with so much, even when we think we are lacking. Remember, no matter how much more we might think we need, there are always people who have much less, and I mean more than just material things---it might be love, it might be forgiveness, it might be family. See if there is anywhere where you can share a little more, and expect a little less.
• Go to bed early on Sunday:  Pick a cut-off time for yourself and just make that last part of the weekend a little bit about relaxing.  Watch a show or read a favorite book but then lights off . . . the week ahead is so much better if you’re actually well rested.  Get at least 8 hours of sleep, and then call me to thank me on Monday morning.

All my love,

Mom

Having Two

A few years ago, when I was newly pregnant with Charley, my husband and I had our first real married fight. It was at the beach in Chicago. It was July and the water was frigid, but the sun warm. The beach was fairly crowded and in front of us there was a family of four. I don’t remember much about the fight, I knew there were important topics discussed, but I have thought of that family many times since. A funny thing happens when you become pregnant: you become hyper-aware of every mother, father, baby, and family near you. You scrutinize their every movement. Would I be a mother like her? With a baby carrier and no stroller, her hair long and unkempt? Or would I be like the mom over there with the shiny new stroller, and tapping away on her iPhone? You notice which mothers are thin again, which dress well, and become depressed by their small numbers. It must be motherhood, it makes you fat and haggard, you conclude, clutching your belly nervously. That’s what I was doing during our first fight, when I was barely pregnant and still wearing a bikini at the beach. I was silently inspecting the family in front of me. The parents were on their beach chairs; they had dark hair and looked relatively fit. The kids were cute, older, maybe just in elementary school, a boy and a girl, and they played and crawled in the sand quietly. The parents were talking, and occasionally laughing, but I couldn’t hear their words, the wind carried them away. Instead, I noticed their facial expressions and actions. The looked happy, but lurking there underneath the happiness was this tired, bored feeling. They were at the beach, but not really there.

Now, as a parent, I completely understand them.

We spent this past weekend with our five-year-old niece, which was a taste of having two kids. It was exhausting. Her energy was totally different, and the sweet moments between her and Charley were rare. Instead I spent most of the weekend feeding them (on opposite schedules) and mediating conflicts (seriously, I need a law degree for this). It was the constant, ‘she has this turn,’ ‘you have the next turn’ that really wore you out. So I finally understand the couple at the beach with their two kids. It wasn’t that they weren’t happy. Instead, what I didn’t see was all the work it took to get there. But perhaps the journey matters more than the destination?

Four Feet

I signed up for my first race in the spring of 2008---a half-marathon, in Rochester, to be held in early fall. Never having run more than five miles consecutively, I spent my summer training, hydrating, and icing my aching knees. I slept at my parents' house the night before the race. The next morning, my mom was up with me before the sun rose, making coffee and puttering around, while I obsessed over my pre-run meal, my running outfit, and oh my god, why don’t we have enough safety pins to hold my bib in place? As I crossed the finish line hours later, after a grueling 13.1 miles on what turned out to be an unseasonably warm and humid September day, after witnessing more than one runner collapse on the course around me, and after looking for an exit route on the course for 8 miles, I declared that I was done with running. Finished. The End. Two weeks later, I started looking for my next race. And so began my short stint as a distance runner. With several half-marathons under my belt, I decided it was time to try my hand at the real thing, and set my sights on the New York City marathon.  Now, marathon running requires a certain level of commitment, even at the amateur level. Your entire world revolves around running, carb-loading, and hydrating properly. My husband endured months of early nights and pasta dinners;  my friends, I’m sure, grew tired of hearing me ramble on about my upcoming long runs; and my mom, well, she supported me in the only way she knew how: by telling me I was crazy. Unsurprisingly, she had a saying about marathon running. If God wanted you to run that far, he would have given you four feet! Lacking a competitive bone in her body, she also casually asked me, as I agonized over IT band pain for weeks before the race, if I couldn’t run as planned---or if I couldn’t finish---would it really be that big of a deal?

Nonetheless, my mom arrived in New York the day before the marathon, my sisters and brother-in-law in tow, to cheer me on every step of the 26.2 miles. As my sisters and I leisurely strolled around my Brooklyn neighborhood that afternoon, my mom started on a pot of sauce for dinner. We returned home to a feast, my mom doling out pasta and homemade meatballs in my tiny kitchen. My alarm clock went off at five the next morning, and while the rest of my family rolled over for a few more hours of sleep, my mom, once again, was up with me before dawn. We sat and drank coffee, and discussed, one last time, the four points in Brooklyn and Manhattan where they planned to cheer me on.  This would require a bit of hustle out of the group, and my mom, at a strapping 5 feet tall, was not to be outdone by her younger (and taller) counterparts. Not one to wear sneakers even in her backyard, she gamely came prepared with a loaner pair from my sister, ready to take on the streets of New York.

I saw my family first at mile six. With my body and mind already failing me, I found myself choking back tears at the sight of them. They were there for me again and again as planned --- my mom’s head barely visible over the crowd, my sisters and brother-in-law screaming my name, my husband looking on with pride --- as I hobbled forward to finish out the race. I learned later that as I was running, my cheering section ran into their own set of problems. My mom, in a pretty white sweater, was the unlucky target of a low-flying bird, and spent the rest of the day trying to camouflage the obvious stain. My sister, innocently using the bathroom at a McDonalds along the course, with my mom standing guard outside the door, found herself face-to-face with an overly aggressive patron who couldn’t wait his turn. By the time I finished, bruised and battered, we shared more than a few good laughs over a post-run meal.

My mom passed away three years later. We spent the last two weeks of her life in the hospital, sitting vigil by her side, pacing the hallways, hoping for a miracle. When she died, I was left with a hole in heart, and strangely enough, a sharp pain in my right calf. A wrong step left me gasping in pain for months afterward, and running was all but impossible. The hows and whys of this injury were unclear, and quite honestly, probably nothing more than a random coincidence. And yet, maybe it wasn't.

In those weeks leading up to her death, I realized in a panic that I had no idea who I was---or would be---without my mom. People assured me, repeatedly, that she will always be with me: in everything I do, and really, in everything I am. I scoffed at this initially; after all, it requires an astonishing amount of faith to believe such a thought, at a time when my faith has suffered a serious blow. But, as I limped home after each attempted run, I thought of my mom. As I stretched my calf in yoga class, I thought of my mom. And as I laughed at the irony of it all, I thought of my mom. As it turns out, she's with me every step of the way---whether I'm on two feet or four.

The Crystal Punch Bowl That Wasn't

My grandmother turned 90 last month.  She lived through the depression on a small farm in rural Missouri, married a soldier during World War Two and raised three children.  So when she told me she was interested in recording her ‘life story’ I jumped at the chance to hear anything she wanted to tell me.  I anticipated being enraptured by her tales of living in Alaska and Germany in the sixties, looked forward to hearing stories about my dad growing up, back when everyone called him Butch, and of course stories about the farm, before electricity and indoor plumbing.  I didn’t expect to be sidetracked by a plastic punch bowl. We were looking through the teak buffet table that has sat in the living room as long as I can remember.  My grandmother was telling me about the silver they had engraved and the Rosenthal plates she and my grandfather brought back from Germany.  In the back corner, was something I couldn’t quite make out, so I asked. "Oh that," she said, "that’s a plastic punchbowl I bought for your cousin’s bridal shower."  Not a remarkable piece to be sure, but it’s what she said next that has stayed with me for months.  My grandmother told me that when she was a young military wife, in the forties, she thought she needed to have a crystal punchbowl.  This wasn’t said with any sort of entitlement, if you knew my Granny you’d know she’s not one for thinking she ‘deserved’ this or that.  No, she and my grandfather entertained at times, and he was an officer in the Army; it was something she thought they should have, like wine glasses or nice china.

A crystal punch bowl.  When my grandmother was married, roughly 70 years before my own wedding, she thought a crystal punch bowl was a vital part of her kitchen.  As it turns out, she never did get her crystal punch bowl, and in fact never needed a punch bowl of any sort until a few years ago when we hosted a bridal shower with a dozen guests; and then she went out to her local big box store and bought a plastic one.

The first thought that occurs to me is how different my life is than my grandmother’s.  When I registered for wedding gifts 6 years ago, I didn’t even list any fancy china; I knew I wouldn’t use it.  If someone had even mentioned a punch bowl to me I would have laughed.  But then I got to thinking, maybe I have a punch bowl of my own.

Of the items I registered for years ago, aren’t there some that do little more than collect dust?  Or even today, that purchase I was thinking of making, the current must-have; will it cause a fit of chuckles in a 20-something a few decades from now?  Or will it become a cherished heirloom?  Maybe it’s impossible to predict.  I don’t know.

But I can’t stop thinking about punch bowls . . .

This Time Around

It’s incredible how different a second pregnancy can be. With Charley, my first,  it was months of agony and uncertainty. My stomach ballooned almost immediately and before the end of the first trimester I had already shot up two pant sizes. I was sick everyday and depressed for most of it. Even the small baby clothes couldn’t cheer me up. Hours after buying a striped onesie, I would burst into tears and retreat to bed. It was hard to conceptualize that the little onsie would soon be filled with a screaming little person. This time around, three years later almost exactly, I have a toddler to keep me busy. He points to my belly and says, “Bay-bee!” He starts conversations about everything, wants to know the word for every object and emotion. This is such a fun age and I am worried he will always be my favorite. I was the oldest child and my husband was the baby. I understand the older sibling role. I’ll be more prepared to bond with Charley than this next baby. I'm relieved that having such a fun, active toddler will hopefully distract me from the monotony of staying home with an infant. After he was born I wished for these days when I could take him places and hold a conversation, and they have finally arrived.

Most of the time during this pregnancy I actually forget I am pregnant. Friends ask me, “So, how are you feeling?” and it takes me a second to remember they aren’t talking about a cold. I have started to feel little kicks and movement. Even still my body is in a gradual change. I’m wearing my old jeans with a belly band, something I could never do with Charley. I don’t feel that different. Well, apart from a few things. My hair is fantastic again, thick and growing fast, and the sex is so much better! With my first I didn’t even want to hold my husband’s hand or snuggle. I was uncomfortable and didn’t feel very sexy. This time around the hormones are raging and I take any excuse to rub up against him I can get. It’s certainly helped our relationship after the rocky first six weeks of morning sickness.

I haven’t bought anything new for the next baby, and it still feels surreal. Every few days I look toward my husband and marvel, “We’re going to have another one of these . . .” It’s usually after Charley does something ridiculously cute, or horribly stressful (toddler tantrums, inopportune pooping). I feel like soon I should buy a little stuffed animal, or a blanket or outfit, just to start warming up to the idea of meeting this person inside me. I still remember the very first things I bought Charley. We were visiting Baltimore, checking out the Johns Hopkins campus where I was supposed to go to graduate school (never happened). There was a little gift store down by the harbor and in the children’s section were a bunch of small stuffed animals that rattled. We chose the owl, and Mr. Owl is still his favorite thing to sleep with every night. He looks a little gray and weathered, but the love is still there. I wonder what the next one will attach to like that?

Time is on my side

While my daughter is still an infant, I am trying to adhere to a schedule of spending at least two solid weekdays alone with her, despite the fact that I own and run a business.  “Alone,” in our household, means that my husband (who also works for himself) might tag along and spend some portion of the day with us, as well.  This is quite obviously living the dream and I mean that in all sincerity.  Like so many people, all I ever wanted in life was to create a family and to have one in which the adults prefer palling around together to any other activity.  The addition of the portly, charming baby (who, I might add, has been impressing even total strangers of late with her glittering, two tooth-bud smile, full-body laugh and enthusiastic hand-clapping) is just the definitive bonus.  We have these epic moments, often only the two of us, where we find ourselves sitting on a blanket in the park in the middle of the day, staring up at the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building.  We are saturated in, practically oozing happiness.  But lest you think we are busy having it all (wait for it, Schadenfreudes) you should know that organizationally, domestically, we exist in a state of utter chaos---a ceaseless game of whack-a-mole. There are, as they say, absolutely not enough hours in the day and it is my perpetual struggle to prioritize appropriately.  On the days when I am solely focused on the baby, I make an effort to really and truly be present during her waking hours.  I have the great privilege of a somewhat flexible schedule and the even greater privilege of being her mother.  It is in this spirit that I strive to keep work emails and tasks tucked away in my pocket or purse.  I look at the mounting pile of laundry or the creeping clutter in the apartment and decide that it can wait.  I shrug off the light sense of despair over the two primed walls that we were supposed to paint last winter.  I tell myself that she will never be exactly this age again and that I will look back on this first year and know I didn’t miss a thing.

I am acutely aware that most women (or men, for that matter) do not even have the option to do this and I feel almost a sense of responsibility to parents everywhere to take full advantage.  Of course, this means I have to work harder and smarter when I am on the clock.  It also means that I am on the clock longer and at odd hours.  Ultimately, it means that we sort of live in a college dorm and have to run to the bodega at 7:30 PM to buy an $8 roll of toilet paper because we ran out and nobody had the chance to get more.

Meanwhile, as is my wont, I am plagued by the notion that everyone else must be doing it better---they have to be, right?  During a recent trip to the playground this was confirmed, as I zeroed in on a few other mothers and observed their whole set-up.  Each one seemed to have the diaper bag completely dialed in, down to the perfectly portioned organic snack foods in an eco-friendly/non-petroleum/possibly Swedish baggie.  Their strollers were tidy and their children even had on accessories.  They had brought galvanized tins of French sidewalk chalk and appeared to have organized play-dates.  When I arrived on the scene, my daughter was assiduously chewing on the rubber case from my iPhone (almost certainly made in China).  My stroller was pandemonium---it included incongruous items like dog poop bags, my diluted vitamin water bottle and a calcified, half-gummed whole wheat dinner roll from a restaurant adventure the day before.  I plunked my daughter on the padded playground surface and watched as she crunched fall leaves between her fingers and attempted to stuff them in her mouth.  She was not wearing shoes or a bow in her hair but she seemed pretty thrilled.  We did not have an adorable German tube of bubbles (why is everything good European?) and I hadn’t even remembered my nursing cover.  We embarrassed the family with an awkward lean-to situation using a cotton drape, which she repeatedly tore away with a whipping motion, exposing my breasts to the most populous borough in the city.

So, I am coming around to the idea that I actually only have so much bandwidth.  The letting go of certain practical elements of daily life in favor of more time for human relating seems a fairly obvious choice to me.  While I aspire to be a person who deftly balances her infant on one hip while folding fitted sheets or doing the taxes, it turns out that I only can/am willing to (?) do one thing at a time.  Most tasks, therefore, are sort of shined on or phoned in until they have the good fortune to be in the pole position.  I keep the goals small, so then when we have a fully stocked fridge or I send out a birthday gift, I feel like I have summitted Everest or passed the California bar.

Although I mostly feel good about the way I am partitioning my time for now, like every working mother I grapple with needing and/or wanting to be in two places at once.  Who knows how this will all change as she gets older and as my business evolves?  It is a little disheartening to realize that I did seem to need the “excuse” of a baby to finally feel justified in prioritizing enjoyment.  Why didn’t I do this before?  And why do I still feel like I’m “admitting to something” when I tell you I spend entire days, in the middle of the week, not just being with my baby, but actively trying to do little else?

Needless to say, I want my daughter to be proud of her mother as a role model and an entrepreneur.  But I am hoping she doesn’t have to feel this from a remote place.  I want her to experience that I am as available to her as I am to my work.  She will doubtless have a wide array of things to discuss with her therapist about her home and family.  I figure I won’t just hand her the line that her mother always had too many things on her plate.  I want her to work a little harder for her gripes.

This Mother's Work

I'm more than happy to introduce a special guest contributor this week: my cousin Michelle. As children, we spent summers, holidays, and many a weekend together. Now, as  adults, we unfortunately see each other much more sporadically, as Michelle currently lives in Baku, Azerbaijan, as the Program Director of the American Bar Association's Rule of Law Initiative in Azerbaijan. Impressive, huh? Michelle writes about her mom here. My aunt, or "Annie T" as we call her, holds a special place in my heart, too.  She and my mom were night and day, but as sisters-in-law, they shared a deep respect and love that bypassed any and all differences. Personally, I'll be forever indebted to my aunt, for the love and support she has shown my sisters and I since my mom died. Clearly, commitment to family was one thing my mom and aunt shared in common. And with that, I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did.

By Michelle A. Brady

There’s a picture, stashed away somewhere in a drawer or closet at my parents’ house in Rochester, of my mom and I relaxing in our bathing suits and inner tubes at my grandparents’ old cottage in the Finger Lakes.  It’s the summer of 1982 and I’m five years old.  I haven’t seen the photo in awhile but I remember that we are smiling and laughing.  A couple months later, that September, I carried the picture with me to my first day of kindergarten.  I cried the entire morning, missing my mom, and feeling perhaps, that our five years of intensive mother-daughter bonding were about to end.  Years later we would recall that day and joke, because as an adult it seemed I was always eager to get away.

Over the years my mother and I have laughed and cried together, shopped, danced, and traveled together, and yes, at times yelled and said hurtful things to each other.  Despite our ups and downs and growing pains, I am forever indebted to her for one thing in particular, because without it I would not be the woman I am today.  This one thing she gave me above all else was the example she set as a working mom, laboring tirelessly along with my dad, to provide a better life for me and my brother.  That example, and the values it instilled in me, has made all the difference in my life.

I never thought it weird that I had a mom who worked full time.  From kindergarten onward, my mom went back to work, remaining at Eastman Kodak Company---along with my dad---until retirement many years later.  I stayed with baby-sitters and at after-school latch key programs and, quite honestly, never thought twice about it.  In fact, I have positive memories of using these morning hours at the baby-sitter to watch cartoons: G.I. Joe, Jem, and Transformers, in particular.  I ate snacks in the afternoon at latch key and finished my homework while waiting for my mom to pick me up.  And when I was older, I’d arrive home to an empty house and immediately call my mom to inform her I’d arrived safely and that yes, of course, I would get started on that homework right away!

Having a working mom, though, often proved to be a major lesson in organization and planning ahead.  When I was in junior high, my dance lessons really took off.  This required cross-town transportation to dance class right after school, in order to be dressed in my leotard and tights with hair pulled back by 4 p.m.  More school days than not, my paternal grandmother was tasked with this responsibility.  Like any doting grandparent, Grandma Kay arrived on time everyday in her Cutlass sedan, smoking a cigarette and carrying a Wendy’s large chocolate frosty, because every budding ballerina needs some carbs before a workout. Hours later, my mom would arrive at the dance studio with dinner and a ride home.  I would often collapse into the seat, sweaty, exhausted, and not too happy with her efforts to catch up on the day.  Yet she paid for the classes and costumes, supported me at competitions and recitals, and even joined a mother-daughter tap class to spend more time with me.

While my mom was busy with my dance lessons, my dad was similarly busy with my brother and his hockey and lacrosse activities.  During the winter season---which is excruciatingly long in Rochester---my mom would often cook chili on Fridays, a low-maintenance meal that could simmer all day and be ready when we arrived home late after my brother’s hockey game.  In typical pre-teen fashion, I didn’t appreciate this practical dinner choice in the least; in fact, I hated that chili. So one Friday, knowing my fate for dinner, I “came down” with the stomach flu at school.  This, of course, required my mom to leave work early and pick me up at a school.  She was calm and quiet as we drove home, seemingly concerned about my well-being.  But within just a few minutes of questioning, my mom had me confessing that no, I was not actually sick; I just didn’t want chili for dinner that night.  In hindsight, I’m sure my mom didn’t appreciate having her work day interrupted like that, but she never said a word to me. And I never did eat the chili again.

So many of my childhood memories are connected in some way to my mom, and especially, to her role as a working mother. When I look back on it all now, as a 35 year-old single woman, living out my dreams halfway around the world, I realize the extent to which it has affected me. My mom gave me the example of a working mother who handled stress at work and paid the bills at home; a mother who cleaned the house and organized everyone’s schedules; a mother who was tough and forceful when necessary, and equally conciliatory and compromising; a mother who did all of this while remembering every detail and splitting responsibilities with my father in a gender-equal way.  Above all else, I witnessed first-hand the benefits of organization, multi-tasking, and motivation, and along the way, saw the rewards of goal-setting, hard work, and investing in education.

I haven’t told my mom nearly enough how much I appreciate the example she set for me.  So I will tell her now, and then again the next time I see her in person.

Thank you, Mom, for showing me what is possible, and for selflessly paving the way for me to realize my dreams.

All alone, together

I got the shocking call last Sunday afternoon.  She told me that he jolted awake suddenly in the pre-dawn hours and just as quickly he was gone.  This prince of a man, this decent, loving husband and father had died.  Out of nowhere.  WHAT?  Weren’t they just . . . ?  Didn’t we just . . . ?  I struggled to process this dreadful information.  I wanted to rail against God.  I wanted to offer some words of comfort until I could get there, something trite, like “This is part of God’s plan, it is beyond our understanding.”  Of course, I didn’t believe that.  My rage would be directed at the ether.  My efforts to soothe would be built on a false premise.  I don’t believe there is anyone up there or out there. It is precisely at times like these that I desperately wish for some kind of faith.  There are people all around me who have a version of God.  This God provides a structure for living and dying, solutions to complex problems, answers (or diversions) where there are none.  I don’t have anything close to this.  I was never very good at science but it is all I have.

I used to hedge a little more when talking about this highly sensitive topic.  This was for two reasons: I was concerned about offending anyone and I had some mildly superstitious notion that I would leave the door open, just in case I should have occasion to call God into service in my own life.  As a younger woman, I talked of feeling “spiritual” and that I could imagine “a force greater than myself” in the universe.  I never really had any idea what I meant when I discussed this.  I thought it made me sound less off-putting to others but mostly, it made me less terrified of having no guiding light.  I would describe how we are “all connected,” relate experiences like seeing something extraordinary in nature and how this could grant access to the sacred world.  The truth is, I have seen the sunset over the Pacific, a baby moose in the Tetons, Halley’s Comet and a human child emerge from my own body.  In each case, I have thought, ‘What an absolutely stunning miracle . . . of science.’

The older I get, I am increasingly convinced of the randomness of life.  I do believe that everything always works out in the end, in the sense that we learn to cope with whatever circumstances bring.  What I mean when I say things like, ‘I am exactly where I was meant to be,’ is that it requires an active acceptance of chaos to get from one day to the next.  This is more of a mantra than some philosophical statement about a grand plan.

I challenge anyone to explain to a woman who has just lost the center of her life and the father of her young children that all will be revealed.  NO.  There will be no reasonable explanation and if the logic of it is outside our comprehension, then it is useless anyway.   What we can know for sure is that she will move forward very slowly, moment-by-moment, until it is less and less surreal.  The heavy boulder of pain will eventually be massaged into tiny pebbles that rattle around in her mind.  New rhythms will develop and her children will grow.  She might create a novel iteration of a family, not because this was all supposed to happen just exactly like it has, but because she will simply handle what she has been dealt.

For a long time, I wondered whether this lack of a divine center meant that I was a lost soul (lost brain?).  But I can tell you with conviction what it is that makes me found.  My family and friends (also considered family) are at the core---I live for them and with them in this life, in the here and now.  I do this not because it is written or commanded or foretold.  I do this because it is right and feels good and creates community.  I don’t need to understand the meaning of life to know that when someone is ripped from it too soon, it creates a searing pain.  I don’t require the threat of hell or a judgmental God to treat people with kindness.  I know that I should “do unto others” because I, myself, have feelings.  I also know that nobody is perfect and that when I fail as a human (often spectacularly), the person from whom I need to beg forgiveness is the person I have slighted.

In the tradition of my Jewish culture (and yes, for many people, Jewish religion), in the New Year we do a self-assessment and make a commitment to do better in the coming season.  One rationale for this is to ensure that we are inscribed in the Book of Life for another year.  The warning here is that God will only allow those to survive who have done good, been of service and been authentically sorry for ways in which they have harmed others.  This begs the question whether the people who have died this year somehow weren’t all they could be?  And you see how it begins to break down.

I do appreciate the concept of personal inventory, making genuine apologies (at least once a year) and being intentional about your humanity in the year to come.  This year I hope to focus on being even more available to this most treasured friend that has experienced devastating loss.  I won’t talk to her about God and providence.  I will talk to her about how powerful his presence was and will continue to be in this life.  I won’t talk to her about fate.  I will tell her that I know he is gone too soon and that nothing about this is just.  I won’t be equipped to provide any enlightenment.  But I will visit the kids, get down on the floor with them like he did, and keep his memory fresh for them.  I will do this because I love her and I loved him and this is what people do.

Mercy, Mercy Me

By Natalie Friedman Strange thoughts visited me in the days following my grandmother’s funeral. For example: while driving to my son’s preschool, the car windows open to the fine spring air, my radio tuned to an oldies station playing Marvin Gaye, I thought: “My grandmother never heard Marvin Gaye in all of her ninety-five years.”

My grandmother never listened to the radio. She never owned a record collection; I doubt she knew what a CD was. The lack of music in her life was tied up with other lacks and other losses, and those are what made me cry in my car as I turned up the radio and slowed down to circle the parking lot a few times.

I grieved for my grandmother in my own private way after she died, and this included making mental lists of all the things she had never done. It was the inverse of what most obituaries are supposed to do: rather than celebrate achievements, I was reckoning the gaps and spaces and silences and had-nots. My grandmother had never driven a car. My grandmother had never been to the top of the Empire State Building or the tip of Statue of Liberty’s lamp. My grandmother had never been to high school or college.

There were, of course, many things that my grandmother had done, things I have never done and may never be able to do. She had baled hay and milked cows and planted vegetable gardens. She had attended several births. She had seen her eldest brother return from World War I covered in lice and raving mad. She had nursed a sick mother and had buried her in a too-early grave. She had been taken to a ghetto and then to three concentration camps. She had walked out of them all alive, supported by no one. She had returned to her hometown, to a place from which nearly all her relatives had disappeared, and she rebuilt a home. She bribed a long line of greedy men to spring her husband from a Soviet gulag. She buried that husband in a too-early grave. She had crossed an ocean with an only daughter, at the age of fifty-three, to start a new life in America. She had worked in a factory, sewing neckties. She had crocheted over two hundred and fifty lace doilies, curtains, and decorative scarves, and had baked more than a thousand cakes from recipes that she kept filed in her brain.

But despite these facts, I felt that my grandmother’s life had been thwarted, unfullfilled, stunted. Perhaps it was arrogant of me to think so, I who had been cosseted by my comfortable American life, I who feel it my due and my right to have any kind of life I want,  to be happy. My grandmother did not have the gift of happiness---she was a depressive her entire life, and I often wondered if she would have been depressed even if life would have treated her more gently. Or maybe life would have treated her more gently if she had been less depressed. She used to say that God smiles at those who smile at God, but she seemed never to have had the ability to smile.

I think that she was unhappy partly because of temperament, and partly because she had been born in a particular place and moment in history. A traditional Jewish household high in the Carpathian mountains was not fertile ground for cultivating female happiness or achievement. My grandmother used to say that she was a very good student in school, so good that her teacher suggested she might be sent to another city to study at the girls’ gymnasium. Her father, my great-grandfather, told the teacher that a girl only needed to know how to put the right shoe on the right foot.

My grandmother was able to summon up her father’s exact words nearly eighty years after he had uttered them, and she repeated them to me and my sister with the frequency of those who remember and do not forgive.

So she had only what amounted to a middle school education, and yet she was one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. She spoke several languages. She could do mental math with lightening speed. She knew all the names of all the people who had lived in her village, and could trace their family histories almost as far back as her own. She remembered the exact moment when she happened to hear, over a contraband radio, that the Russian army was advancing on the Nazis in April 1945. And she remembered that the Scotsmen who marched into Bergen Belsen with the British army to liberate her and the other surviving Jews were playing bagpipes and wearing kilts.

My grandma’s fine skill at observation and her attention to detail filled her brain and helped push out some of the pain she carried around. It’s not for nothing that she was a talented craftswoman, able to knit and crochet and sew. She focused on the small things. It was only when she wasn’t busy with her hands or baking some exquisite cake that she talked ceaselessly about the past. When I was old enough to sit with her at her tiny tea table and listen, then she relaxed her hold on the small necessaries that kept her going. The sad, ugly truths came pouring out, and they were ornately detailed, too; but after a while, she would turn to me and say, “How about a tea? With lemon and sugar? I’ll fix it for you.” And out would come a delicate porcelain cup, a small silver spoon, a pretty napkin, a fragrant slice of homemade cake that melted on the tongue---lovely weapons against ugliness.

Her many talents, her skillful hands, her way with words, her capacious mind---had she been born in a different time or place, she could have been anything she wanted. She could have used her great mind every day in the ways she wanted to use it. But even that is a fantasy: how we use our minds isn’t always up to us, and that painful irony was made very clear to me as I watched my grandmother slowly lose her grasp on the details and particulars, until one day it even lost hold of the things like who her grandchildren were or where she was living.

During the last two weeks of her life, when she was barely responsive, my sister and I talked about the possibility of her death and what her funeral would be like. We knew it would conform to the strictest of Jewish Orthodox standards, because that was how she had been raised. Although women are forbidden from public speaking before a mixed-sex audience in that tradition, we somehow imagined that we would give a eulogy for her. My sister had some touching anecdotes she wanted to share, and I wanted to talk about how my grandmother had been a true survivor, a tougher-than-nails scrapper. We planned and we revised and then we laughed and said, “She’ll pull through; she’ll be out of the hospital and back to her old tricks soon.” And then she died, and the night of her death, the rabbi called our mother and asked her for details of my grandmother’s life so that he could write his eulogy, and I began to see that my sister and I would be silent at that funeral.

When the kindly people at the funeral home asked us if we would like to take a last look at our grandmother, and they lifted the lid of her coffin, and we saw her lying there looking small and pale, her mouth, without dentures, puckering inward as if she had just tasted a lemon, I wanted to shout, “THIS IS NOT OUR GRANDMOTHER! This is not my indefatigable, determined, storytelling, memory-rich grandmother!”  And I wanted to stand up where the rabbi was standing, and shout out my eulogy to the gathered guests, to tell them that they had no idea what reserves of strength this woman had had; that she had been a difficult, pained, tragic woman who had never been given the opportunity to flourish, but who had nevertheless loved us with a fierce and unwavering passion born out of the deepest, deepest fear of loss, the deepest, deepest hunger for life.

I guess this is my eulogy, this flimsy essay. It will have to do; after all, how do we ever capture, in words, the essence of a person? The complexities of a woman’s life? How many grandmothers lie in their graves with a booming silence all around them, the silence of no one knowing how to tell their stories?  And each story is perfect, delicate, ornate, like a dainty teacup, a scrap of lace, a sweet pastry, a song by Marvin Gaye.

Original image by Wrestling Entropy on Flickr

Never Forget

My husband and I bought our first home together, a condo in Brooklyn, just about two years ago. Apartment shopping in New York is certainly not for the faint of heart, something we learned after our first round of open houses. After months of searching, we found our diamond in the rough. It lacked the dining space I held out hope for and the corner windows and light our last apartment afforded, but had a parking spot and other amenities that made us cheer, while allowing us to stay in the neighborhood we had grown to love. We moved on a hot and sticky Saturday in August. After saying goodbye to the less-than-quaint walk-up apartment that we---and many families of mice---had called home for the last several years, we drove around the block to our new home, moving vans in tow. My parents arrived on cue, to help with the moving efforts.  After coordinating my sister’s move in Rochester the day before, they were on the road to New York first thing in the morning, to help with their second move of the weekend.  For three days we cleaned, unpacked, argued over where to hang each picture, and of course, ate. We drove to New Jersey to buy our first grill---a housewarming gift from my parents---and on my mom’s urging, we picked up shrimp cocktail and strip steaks, for a celebratory dinner that night.

My favorite moments of that weekend were the conversations with my mom, held over cups of coffee each morning. Long before my husband or father roused, we solved the world’s problems and tackled lingering interior decorating questions. Just the two of us. I’ll never forget my mom, sipping coffee in the perfect morning light from our eastern exposures, and telling me definitively: “You’re going to be happy here.”

I might never forget my mom’s confidence on that beautiful morning, but I have pushed it aside, more often than I’d like to admit, over the last couple years. It's particularly poignant to be writing this today, on 9/11 of all days, in this adopted city of mine that I have such a troubled relationship with. New York and I don’t always see eye to eye, to be sure, and I let that conflict overwhelm me at times. But this, I’m realizing, this is why I’m here. To share a piece of my mom and to connect with others, certainly, but just as importantly, to keep myself in check---to remember the wisdom and no-nonsense advice my mom handed out, wanted or not.

As I continue to share my mom’s stories here, I’d also love to hear from you, dear readers. How and why do these relationships, as mothers, daughters or otherwise, connect us as women?  What is your story? And will you share it here? If you think you might, take a look here for submission guidelines. Make sure to include the title of this column, "You Remind Me of Someone," with your story.

Thanks for reading---and I hope, for sharing.

On Living Close to Family

Without trying to, I’ve lived close to at least one side of my family for my whole life.  When I was choosing colleges, while I contemplated far flung schools with catalog-created fantasies (strolling through crumbling stone archways at Oxford, living in a Gothic Southern mansion at Duke), I ended up at Berkeley, the school where my dad had attended and continued to live less than two hours away from.

This meant that when I got the flu my sophomore spring, my dad hung up the phone after I called and showed up at my doorstep that afternoon, bearing cleaning supplies to take care of my sick-filled apartment and chicken noodle soup to heal by belly and soul.  When I moved to San Francisco after college, my dad was there to take me sailing and out to a nice dinner after I got rejected from job after job.  When an adverse reaction to medication caused me to faint and hit my head, my dad moved in with my roommates and I for three days, playing cards with me and watching my pupils for sign of a brain bleed.  An IKEA couch that needed assembling?  Moving from one apartment to another?  Help was only a phone call away.

I live on the East Coast now, and have been similarly spoiled to be close to my mom’s side of the family, who were born and raised in Brooklyn.  My aunt has become my go-to source for intellectual stimulation and emotional comfort, popping over from suburban Scarsdale to discuss men, politics, entertainment, and life over cheap Mediterranean food.  My mom, who fled the cold of New York for Atlanta, hops on the two-hour flight several times a year, to make sure I have enough culture in my life (Broadway plays are always a must-do on the weekend agenda) and color in my clothing (“it’s so much more flattering than all that black you wear, sweetie!”).

It snuck on me as the unconsidered yet blaringly obvious fact of my move to London:  this is the first time I will be living on my own, an ocean away from my family, my points of stability and unconditional love and comfort and constancy.  I’ll have my boyfriend---my partner in all of this---but the support and interactions that come with a romantic relationship differ so greatly from those offered by family.  Yet it makes me ponder something I’ve never before factored into my thoughts or decision making (sorry, Mom and Dad!):  the value of living close to family.  I’ve chosen the cities in which I’ve lived based on their worldliness, their amazing restaurants, their walkability, their job opportunities.  While the dynamics of family relationships have morphed as I've grown older (although having my dad show up with chicken soup when I'm sick will make my heart tingle even when I'm 50), the relationships themselves have been omnipresent.  Family, so consistently, blatantly there, has unintentionally slipped to the backburner for being there in physical form.

I don’t know where Zack and I are going to move when his graduate program ends in two years.  I don’t know how much at that point family will factor into our decisions after having experienced the other end---the being far after being so close.  Do you try to live near your family?  Or try to live far away, or not factor in it at all?  I’d love to hear your take.

I Say Goodbye, You Say Hello: A Facebook Story

By H. Savala Nolan I’m in the doctor’s waiting room. I’m on the couch during commercials. I’m waiting for my latte. I’m in bed, restless. I’m waiting for my boyfriend to get dressed. I’m in the train station. I’m lined up to board my flight. I idle, therefore, I Facebook.

In moments of quiet—moments I might use for serenity, to smell the scents and see the colors of the world around me—I grab my phone and tap the icon, a plain blue square with a friendly white “f” just slightly off center. Behold: my friends. I’m idle, but they are busy. They are fawning over baby animals, baying for blood because of politics, announcing spiritual truths, loafing in tropical sun, sitting down to the best meal ever, cataloging the day’s humdrum  triumphs and defeats, staring alluringly into the eye of a camera, getting engaged, having children, praying over dying aunts and granddads. Despite myself, and despite how over-stimulated, drained, or jealous  it can leave me, I log on. I can’t seem to help it.

Everyone is ambivalent about Facebook. How can we not be? Status updates—the meat of the log-on—do one of two things: elevate the boring, or degrade the profound. Both are bothersome. It exasperates me that some friends think hundreds of people hang on edge, craving  ruminations on how much they love coffee, every day. (And yet, the prosaic is the real juice of life, how we string our days together—why shouldn’t we honor it?) I’m uncomfortable when my friends announce the death of a relative with a stroke of text—silent, clinical, hovering in ether—transmitted to people who will read, dash off sympathy, and forget. (And yet, we know people all over the world. We can’t make 478 phone calls or address 478 letters. This is how we live now.)

But here is the real trouble with Facebook: I never talk to my best friends anymore. In high school, Louise and I sometimes chatted on the phone for 6 or 7 hours a night. We talked about seniors we pined for (their leather jackets and spiky hair and the pretty girls they dated). We talked about music (Green Day and Nine Inch Nails). We talked about diets (cabbage soup) and drinking (did we dare?) and what color to dye our hair (purple). Adulthood at 30-something renders that omnipresent intimacy impossible; she produces reality television, I practice law, we are busy and live 2,000 miles apart. But even in our roaring twenties, we still spoke almost daily. Now, after the entrenchment of Facebook, it is typical for us to go nearly a month without speaking. Recently, with aching disbelief, I realized that the sole reason I know anything about her life is because of her status updates, which tend to be pithy and unremitting, headlines refreshed every few hours as if she were a newspaper. But could that be true?  To test my theory, I blocked her from my newsfeed. A month passed. Radio silence, except for my birthday, when she called. But before that, I couldn’t tell you if she was alive or dead.

At first, confirming the fallow state of our friendship chagrined me. I felt wronged—by her. What sort of person has time to broadcast her whereabouts, food and beverage intake, disgruntled moments, workouts, and crowd-sourcing inquiries upward of a dozen times a day, but cannot find time to connect with her best friend, one on one? To be sure, this isn’t all Facebook. She and I hammer out resolutions when, periodically, I feel I’m single-handedly doing the work of friendship. Perhaps we are simply growing apart. I, of course, could have called her; but why would I? I had Facebook. And so our affinity for Facebook—the estranged, thoughtless intimacy of it—allowed the primary challenge in our incredibly important friendship to become to the substance.

Then, after a few weeks, something unexpected happened: the irritation waned, and I began to miss her. I began to miss her in a way I never did when following her every move and thought online. In fact, I couldn’t have missed her on Facebook: she was everywhere, always.

Yes, I missed her, with the fresh, affectionate curiosity that used to precede a phone call to say hello. And I realized that, despite the constant “updates,” I missed my other best friends, and some family members, too. I didn’t want the curated comic book of their lives; that’s what Keeping Up with the Kardashians is for. I wanted noise,  texture, and monogamy, not silence, a screen, and a stranger “liking” what I wrote. I wanted interjection. I wanted to hear laughter and sighs, and remember that I know some voices so well I can see the speaker’s facial expressions over the phone. I wanted to see, or at least recall, familiar bodies that take up real space. I wanted the moments of silence that come, they say, about every seven minutes in a conversation. And I wanted to hear my voice, too. I needed the grounding and fruition that comes from contact, not the bargain-basement copy that comes from interface.

So I blocked everyone I’m close to. It was a strangely anxious goodbye, as if I were strapping myself into a space shuttle, only perhaps to return. My  mom, my best friend, my boyfriend. All the inner circle, and the next-to-inner circle. Gone.

But suddenly present. Suddenly, again, real. Suddenly, again, in my awareness because they are not constantly in my face. Just like a fish can’t think about water, maybe we can’t truly contemplate—or properly love—people who are always in front of us in the most superficial ways. Good though it may be to “keep in touch” by knowing my brother-in-law ran four miles today, that news is the emotional equivalent of junk food. I don’t see my loved ones when I log on, and I feel a pang of, well, love. After a few days, I think, Hey, where are Jane and Quinn and Melissa and David? How are they? What are they doing these days? It’s like letting yourself get truly, empty-stomach, slightly-on-edge hungry; then you truly want to eat! If you graze all day, you never feel hunger, and you’re never satisfied by what you eat because your eating isn’t connected to satisfaction.

Now, if I want to know what’s up with my brother, I call. And I was surprised to discover that calling was scary. It turns out that I, a social butterfly, have developed a Facebook-induced shyness. Calling feels so forward, so direct, so daunting. But only for about a minute. Then you come to your senses. You give yourself an inward smack across the cheek, and snap out of it. Afraid to call my brother? Are you kidding? I’ve known him for 32 years, and we get along! What’s there to debate? Call. And I do. And we are, as in the old days, family. It feels great.

And there is a bonus, though it’s not one Facebook’s shareholders would be thrilled to know about: I log-on less. Much less. After all, what is there to see? The photographs of puppies that my Mom’s former best friend is currently into? The engagement news of people I never liked but was too meek to ignore when they requested my friendship? The wit and attitude as my cousin’s pals outdo each other’s comments? How entirely, intensely boring.

Especially when there is a city outside my window, and sunshine, and late-summer fruit, and music, and people. My friends, my family, and myself, to be seen and heard.

Lessons from the Hamptons...

Dearest Clara,

Summer has nearly come and gone---most people believe it ended this week.  But I still stand my ground, and will to the end, that autumn doesn’t really begin until September 21^st! So in my book, there are still summer days to enjoy in this next couple of weeks that bridge us to the cooler seasons.   People are right to some degree though, it is somehow not quite the same once you pass the Labor Day mark.

To celebrate summer’s last real weekend, we finally made a trip up to the Hamptons, on the New York Coast, visiting the friends we’ve been promising to see for two full summers now, and I’m so glad that we finally made it.  I had never been before, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  I was afraid that it would be a very long drive for a beach that would be different than what we’re used to---something crowded and full of everything we’re trying to get away from in the city---but it wasn’t that at all.  In fact, our weekend did nothing but exceed my expectations, and we’re already looking forward to that next summer invitation.  Here are a couple of things that I’ll keep in mind from this trip:

• Keep your eyes open:  Let’s face it, the Hamptons are a bit of a see and be seen kind of place.  I’m terrible at people-spotting---in Washington, senators, politicians, and world leaders pass me by nearly every day without my noticing, and celebrities in the Hamptons were no different.  If you keep your eyes open better than you mother, I bet you get some pretty cool people watching.
• Try everything on for size and find your niche:  I had mistakenly thought that “the Hamptons” were a singular destination, but it’s not so at all.  It’s a collection of small towns, each with their own distinct personality and crowd.  If it’s your first visit, give them all a try with an open mind and then settle in to the one that fits your own style.
• It’s windier on the water:  The beach alongside this coast is wide open, and the wind can pick up very quickly.  Bring layers and an extra hair elastic, and be careful as currents form in the cooler water.  But wind isn’t necessarily a bad thing, retreat to beat the heat here and who knows, you might even take a surfing lesson or two.
• Eat (and drink) local:  This little stretch of island is gifted with so much abundance, especially in the summertime, you can’t help but to want to take it all in.    Fruits . . . vegetables . . . lobster . . . fish . . . take advantage of all that’s here when you make your choices for what to make or what to pick off the menu.  Even the local rosé would give the south of France a little run for their euros.  It makes you feel more summery just having summer’s gifts right there.   Don’t be afraid to stop at the roadside stands. Those extra treats will come in handy when you find yourself interminably stuck in traffic on Route 27.
• Prepare to share:   The Hamptons are a more is merrier kind of place, just the way I like it.  There always seems to be room at a house for another overnight guest, room at the table for another couple to drop by, room for a few more on the beach blanket. If you’re staying at someone’s house, bring hostess gifts for more than you think.  Some parts of summer are best enjoyed with others and in this respect, the Hamptons nail it.

All my love,

Mom

Not what they expected

Standing in the Shampoo aisle I turned to my husband and half-joking asked ‘Which one will make your mother like me?’

My in-laws are perfectly lovely people, who don’t speak a lot of English.  I am a perfectly lovely girl who doesn’t speak Bengali. My in-laws are also coming to visit. For a month.  And while I find them to be perfectly lovely people, I’m still stressing over every little thing: is the apartment clean, do we need new towels, will she like this shampoo, etc. Its silly, and I know that, but I'm still anxious.

You see, I don’t know my in-laws that well.  We communicate in broken sentences and third person translators.  Every morning when we lived in Bangladesh as my husband and I walked out the door to work, my mother-in-law would ask Kamon Achen? How are you?  Every morning I responded Bhalo Achi.  I’m fine.  It’s the response I was taught, and the only one I know.  So every morning, rain or shine, I’m fine.  Besides the lack of communication, prior to last year, I had spent a very small portion of time with my mother and father in-law.  I quite literally met them three days before our wedding.  They spend the majority of their time in Bangladesh and I spend the majority of my time in America, so we’re not exactly crossing paths at the grocery store.

Which brings me to the second issue: as you may have perceived, ours is a cross-cultural relationship.  I love the fact that my husband and I come from different cultures and grew up worlds apart.  I love hearing stories about what it was like growing up in Dhaka, where my husband went to school, what he did for fun, even where he took girls on dates.  But I am acutely aware that my husband’s parents expected him to go away to college and then come back home and marry a nice Deshi girl.  In fact my father-in-law specifically gave my husband three rules when he left home: Don’t do Drugs, Don’t Marry an American girl, and Come Back to Bangladesh.  It wasn’t that he had anything against pale girls like me, he had just never seen it work out.  Every cross-cultural relationship the family had witnessed ended in disaster: people split up, kids were caught in the middle, finances became tangled. They just didn’t think it could work.

Happily, my husband and I are proving to be the exception to the rule. But I still wasn't what they expected.  I know they like me now, I know they see that both my husband and I are happy with each other. Without a doubt, all of the tension and worry is on my end, not theirs. So perhaps I should just chill out and release the anxiety that's knotted in my chest.  But I think its much more likely that I'll buy more towels.

And then, on Friday, we’ll pick Abbu and Mamoni up at the airport, have a nice dinner, and then drive back to the small town we currently call home.  We’ll help them unpack and Mamoni will pass me the gifts she brought me from Bangladesh.  My husband will complain that ever since we got married his parent’s spoil me instead of him.  The knot in my stomach will ease, and that will be the start of things.

Myanmar, A Land Of Pagodas (And Smiles)

I’m sitting on a plane flying from Yangon to Bangkok. My journey throughout Asia is almost over---in seventy-two hours I will be in Milan again, less money in my pockets, but certainly richer and more conscious than I was when I left Italy a month ago, unaware of all the things I was going to see and learn in the days ahead. I’m writing this piece on a ripped piece of paper. On the back, a list of do’s and don’ts in  Myanmar---some basic rules our guide gave us and that we were supposed to follow in order to behave respectfully in the country.  I’m wondering---did we do something wrong? Were we good and considerate guests? While I’m trying to retrace all the things that happened in the last 10 days in Myanmar, many images and stories come vividly to my mind.

“Accept or give things with your right hand. However, when you offer something to a monk, a nun or an elderly person, use both hands.”

I’ve always been curious about the way monks and nuns live. There are many different kinds of Buddhist monks. In Myanmar, all men are required to become monks at least twice in their lifetime---once when they are young and once when they are adults. So, while some children decide they want to be monks forever and stay in the monastery for good, some others opt for shorter terms, which can last from a few hours to a couple of weeks. Myanmar is a land of temples and pagodas. There are thousands of monasteries all over the country where men can retire and learn the basic principles of Buddhism. During this period of learning they leave everything behind and every morning wander from house to house in search for food. Once they return, they sort through the offerings. Some of the food is eaten straight away for breakfast. The rest is saved for the last meal of the day, which is normally at noon.

“Try to speak Burmese, the local language. Simple “hellos” and “thank yous” are  always greatly appreciated.”

Myanmar is also the land of smiles. Just by saying “mingalaba” (hello) or “chei-zu” (thank you) we got the biggest smiles we have ever seen. Despite a land rich in natural resources, from precious stones to natural gas, families in Myanmar are poor, and the average salary is between $60-100 a month. But no matter how much people make, they are always happy to offer you a cup of ginger tea, and fried peanuts and chickpeas with sesame seeds . . . so yummy!

“Remove your shoes before entering a private house and be ready to share and learn.”

One day, on our way from Bagan to Mount Popa, we stopped at a private property where a family of nine have been making candies and liquor out of palm trees for generations. Myanmar people are the best at using whatever resource nature has to offer. They cut the palm leaves, collect the drops in coconut shells, and boil the liquid until it becomes a paste. Before the paste dries, they make small balls of candies, which harden under the sunlight. The candies were delicious . . . I had so many of them that I think I got myself cavities! My husband and I really enjoyed the day, watching people work at their own pace, while sharing their family tales with complete strangers like us.  There was Kyi, who was intertwining bamboo and making hats and small purses. And then there was Htay, her husband, chewing tobacco leaves while boiling palm sugar and making liquor out of it. Grandma was all for the grandchildren, who were home from school for a holiday. They were running around, laughing out loud and screaming words unknown to us. But, even though we had no clue about what they were saying, we were sure of one thing---those were words of happiness, a universal language as sparkling as palm tree drops, which resonates whenever one has the capacity of hearing it.

Excerpt from Mandalay, by Rudyard Kipling

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,

There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;

For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:

"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"

    Come you back to Mandalay,

    Where the old Flotilla lay:

    Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?

    On the road to Mandalay,

    Where the flyin'-fishes play,

    An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

My Story: Epilogue

My mother came to visit me in early spring, nearly two years after I was married, just a few months before I finished my last college classes. In the previous four years, I had only scraped by three years’ worth of credits. I knew that the end of my classes would not bring a walk across the stage or a diploma to hang on the wall for me. But I also knew, deep in my heart, that it was the right time. It was time for me to be done with school for the present; to focus my energy on taking care of myself and keeping things running smoothly at home. I had learned that it was possible for me to go to school part-time—but when I did, I found I couldn’t do anything else. Keeping one or two classes each semester was a grueling effort for me, demanding all of my time, attention, and energy, and leaving absolutely nothing left of me when I was finished.

It had been a difficult decision to make, but the raw grief that I had felt two years before, when I first realized that graduation might not be in the cards for me, had mostly dissipated. I was tired now, worn down by the endless barrage of health problems and the pressure to keep up with what should have been a light load. I was ready to be done, ready to have the energy to explore other parts of myself again.

That week, as my mother and I sat together at my kitchen table, she asked me if I felt like I had had a “good college experience.”

The question took me by surprise. I had certainly not had a typical college experience; after my first few semesters, I’d had to pull more and more away from the rigor of the academic environment I loved. By necessity, I’d had to learn to find my own identity in something other than the world of scholarship. I’d spent the past two years discovering how much there was to love in my newfound role as a homemaker; I’d learned to take satisfaction in keeping a house of order, and to approach a new recipe with the same zeal I’d previously felt for literary criticism.

I sat at the table, the silver afternoon light of late March diffusing through the windows, and thought about it.

“Yes,” I said finally. “I have.”

Then I added that focus of the last two years had certainly not been a quintessential college experience, but that they had still been good. Very good, in fact.

“I feel… fulfilled,” I said, realizing as I said it that it was true.

Somehow, in the slow passing of days and weeks and years, fulfillment had crept into my heart. I realized, sitting there at the kitchen table, that I was content—that even though the path my life had taken was so different than the one I had expected, I was still happy. My days felt full of beauty; I had learned that even something as simple as loading the dishwasher could feel meditative, fulfilling, if I only opened my eyes.

So yes, I thought. Typical or not, my college experience has been a good one.

.   .   .   .   .

It’s been more than two years since that conversation with my mom. Like everyone, my life is filled with ups and downs, and I still have far too many moments of doubt and insecurity. And yet, the contentment remains. The fulfillment remains. I have come to love this life I’m living, even if it’s not the one I had planned for myself. It’s a continual process, a journey of discovery and delight.

And when I look back on it, even with all the bumps, I can’t deny:

I’m glad to have had the ride.

On Time

Since we’ve made the decision to move, everything seems to be moving at a quicker pace. Actually, it could have started moving at a quicker pace when I found out I was pregnant for the second time; an allusion to what will come of two children underfoot. Like any good holiday weekend, we are spending time with family. Yesterday, as the grill was smoking, and music was playing (Nina Simone) my dad was in the process of fixing the old screen door. Charley loves my dad, his Pop-Pop, and was right there with him, with his own kiddie toolbox, a weathered paint-chipped yellow tackle-box my dad had given him. He is barely as tall as Pop-Pop’s knee, and took out his little plastic pliers, to match my dad’s real metal ones, to twist the door frame. There was much grunting and production involved. And I stood just inside the porch watching them thinking, These days are numbered, and it almost made me cry. Something about being a parent makes you see time more clearly, see that it will pass, that it is a constant. This is a comfort for stressful periods, when you think you can’t make it any further, and a sadness for happy periods, when you wish the night would never end. It’s striking me much more with this second pregnancy. I see my husband and our life together stretching infinitely ahead of us. We have so many memories yet to make, traditions to start. I want to make renting a beach house every summer a tradition, we’ve only talked about it for several years! We have our ritual of only $20 gifts for each other at Christmas, a chance to be creative and thrifty. And I see my past with my family, all the memories already made, history that won’t be forgotten. So many family vacations and apple picking trips, beach days, and snow days, and all the days in between. I am standing in the middle wondering, How did I get here?

There is truth to that Talking Heads song:

You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? 

But perhaps I am feeling overly nostalgic because my brother, my LITTLE brother will soon graduate college, and when we visited a quaint Pennsylvania college the other weekend, and had lunch at a hipster café, I felt old. More than the extra pregnancy weight and the tiredness of chasing a toddler, I looked at the young college girls, so oblivious to anything else but themselves, and thought ‘I don’t see myself there anymore’. They were giggling, wearing their sweatpants to breakfast just rolling out of bed at 11 am, ordering their omelets with only egg whites, and nobody looked twice at my toddler running around.

I am scared of the day when weddings and births turn into funerals, and wonder when that day will come. When it does, there will be an irreplaceable chasm that opens up. I know there will be comfort in my own family, my roots I am just starting to set down. But I will wonder how I made it that far, and how I will carry on.

The Hand-off

It has been nine months and I still think about you first thing each morning.  The shower drain is streaked with the tears of 284 days.  I worry that I am forgetting you, forgetting the little things.  Then, I will reflexively feel around for you on the bed or think I hear you in the other room and I know you are embedded in the fibers.  When no one else is home, I wander over and put my hand in the clay mold that bears your name and your print.  I run over the ridges and indentations and am stung with memories of holding your hand as you slept solidly on my lap.  Every.  Single.  Evening.  For 11 years. The first day I met you we formed a quiet but immediate connection.  You tumbled my way through a flurry of sound and movement all around us.  We sat on the floor together and you nuzzled up close, warm and curious.  I tried to keep an open mind, scanned the place for anyone else to hold my interest.  But you were it.  You had my number and I had yours.

Those first months were all halcyon hazy summer.  You flopped on your belly in the dirt as I dug up weeds and planted patches of color all over the yard.  You refused to sleep alone and forced us to cozy up on the kitchen linoleum at your side or bring you into bed in the wee, small hours.  The canyon trail with the sloping hillside was your favorite sunset destination and after 10 straight hours of managing tragedy and illness, there was no better way to end my day.  You caught a bad cold early on and I sat through that birthday dinner frantically counting the minutes until I could get back home and continue nursing you through.  Nothing else mattered as much.

Nobody had ever seen anything like you.  The way you moved, the way you talked.  You could tear around the yard, scooting and leaping into the pool or settle into a nest of pillows on the couch and in either mode, you were utterly fascinating.  To a person, every one was impressed by the limitlessness with which you adored.  You wanted nothing more than to be with.  Your only enemies were balloons and footballs.  You had the most ridiculous face, defying all explanation … it made no sense.

In the later years, you happily abided five major moves, three of them cross-country.  You integrated a series of new family members and seemed to let go of your former incarnations without incident.  Everywhere we landed was home to you and every new person a comfortable lap.  You just had to get your bearings, get the lay of the land and you were off to races.  You were an inspiration to me in this way.

In the final months, you noticed my lap disappearing.  Our nightly ritual was growing increasingly less convenient but even this you soldiered through.  It required maneuvering and creativity, but you managed to nestle into new positions along the way.  Reluctantly, when there simply wasn’t the room, you opted for the second best lap in the vicinity.  I wish I had known that we were in a countdown during that time.  Or perhaps I am glad I hadn’t.  I was so busy with this other countdown, you see.

That last day was simply too much.  I was supposed to be elated and basking in the celebration of a new life.  In actual fact, I was the shell of a person.  I felt guilty for not wanting go — I truly wanted to cancel the whole thing.  But then, how do you cancel something like that?  How do you explain it to people?  ‘No,’ I thought.  ‘It’s time to start the transition.  You will regret not having marked this occasion.’  And I still think that is right, even though I was scarcely there.  It was all happening to someone else.  I look at the pictures and think, ‘Oh, she was there?  Did I talk to her?’  The only things indelibly imprinted from that day are his whispers in my ear, once to tell me it was time to go and the second time to tell me she was already gone.  I spent the car ride back telling myself it was OK that we weren’t there, that they were all surrounding her.  What a spectacle I must have been arriving at the hospital — stuffed into that silk dress, belly protruding and wild with grief.

She turned eight months today.  We half-joked that we hoped she would be imbued with your spirit, your passing converging with her birth.  I often think you would have loved her and how amazing it would have been to see you two together.  She is so delighted by everything these days, so fully engaged, she would have patted your haunches and squealed like she does with Ruby.  People kept telling me that her arrival would soften the blow of your leaving.  By all rights, the two should probably not even be comparable.  Of course they are and also not even close.  She’s on my lap constantly, much more than even you were.  She glows with your light, absolutely shares your disposition, there is no question.  Still, if you were here, you would shove her over just enough to divide the space and I would totally let you.

Mimi

If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still hear my grandma’s voice. I can see her standing at the stove, frying eggplant, and explaining to me how it was done. She never divulged much more than a little bit of this, a little bit of that, always followed by Capisce? It was one of the only Italian words she remembered, and I loved repeating after her. Ok, Grandma---I understand.  My grandma---Frances Camelio Panzer, known lovingly as Fritz---was born in Italy, sometime around 1915. Her birthday, or more precisely, her birth year, was always a source of confusion. She lied about her age until the end, and fittingly, my mom realized after-the-fact that we might have misstated her birth year on her tombstone. Her own mother died when she was a child, and soon after, her father set off for the US---for Rochester, specifically---where his sister lived. The rest, as they say, is history.

Even though her command of the Italian language was limited and her memory of her birthplace hazy, my grandma made me so proud of my heritage. Growing up, I thought everyone’s grandparents grew all their own fruit and vegetables in their backyard. Strawberries, peaches, tomatoes and zucchini mingled with rose bushes and bird feeders in their postage-stamp-sized yard. My grandma and her sisters canned the peaches and tomatoes, and the rest of us enjoyed the fruits of their labor all year-round. I can still taste the perfect sweetness of those peaches.

Family came first, something my sisters and I learned from a young age. Thursdays and Sundays were reserved for family dinners, and my grandparents came over each week, red sauce, dessert, and other treats from their yard or the public market in hand. Without fail, my grandma made a beeline for our basement, to get started on our laundry immediately. What she didn't finish left with her and returned soon after, stiff as a board, but smelling like sunshine and fresh air---like home. My mom used to yell at her, "Mom! Can't you sit down and relax with us?"---a phrase that my sisters and I found ourselves repeating to our mom years later, eyes rolling, as she endlessly straightened and dusted and swiffered while at each of our houses. My sisters and I were forced to take piano lessons for years, and our lessons just happened to coincide with Thursday dinners. While we painstackingly worked through our lessons, our parents and grandparents sat at the kitchen table, drinking their coffee and enjoying their own mini-recital. Luckily for them, two out of the three of us---myself never included---remembered to practice each week.

For more years than I can remember, we took a family trip to Disney World. My grandparents must have been in their 70's at the time, yet they didn't miss a moment of the action. From Disney to Epcot to Breakfast with Mickey to luaus at night, they kept pace with the rest of us. When my parents went away on a much needed kids-free vacation each year, my grandparents came to stay with us. We woke up to our grandma in the kitchen, fresh pancakes and Caro syrup on the table. Slim her entire life, her theory was "everything in moderation," paving the way for bacon, alongside those pancakes, more often than not. We spent the week enveloped in her hugs and kisses, and $20 bills appeared at our dinner plates each night, courtesy of our grandpa.

We have pictures from Christmases through the years, my sisters and I tightly clutching our new Cabbage Patch dolls. Each year, my grandparents stood in line for those prized and always understocked commodities, showering us with these spoils and more. I remember my mom telling us one year---a statement that has since been burned into the front of my brain---that Christmas didn't start for our grandparents until we got to their house. We were, quite simply, the center of their lives.

My grandma was lucky enough to hold this role for more than 25 years. Though they traveled extensively in their golden years, my grandparents never missed a soccer or field hockey game, a school play, a graduation, a holiday.  My own mom unofficially became a grandma---a Mimi to be precise---5 years ago, when Rachael was born. Though not tied by blood, this didn't seem to matter to either of them. She was Mimi, plain and simple, and it was clear from the start that she was made for the role.  Rachael and Mimi had their routines---their "things"---when they were together. In more recent years, my mom was known to pull up a dining room chair, letting Rachael climb on to "help" with the measuring and the mixing in the kitchen. My sisters and I laughed, as we recalled being banned from the kitchen growing up, our mom telling us it was easier for her to just do it herself. Rachael liked to join my mom upstairs, jumping on the beds while my mom tried to straighten around her. Before they came back downstairs, Rachael would ask for some of Mimi's special---and expensive---lotion, and my mom always obliged. Rubbing her little hands together, Rachael declared it was mmmmmmm...deeeelicious!---just like Mimi taught her.

My nephew joined our family two years ago. My sister and brother-in-law gave my parents a card the Christmas before he was born, to announce their news. It stated, simply, "Merry Christmas to my Grandparents." I'll never forget my mom's reaction upon opening that card---the initial gasp, the tears, the hugs. She was going to be a Mimi again. Even at 70, and even with a full-time job, she found the time to stop by my sister's house most nights after work. She checked in on her sweet baby---her Chunka---and without fail, tidied up while there. She told me that she'd do the same for me some day, just as soon as we moved back to Rochester. No pressure, of course. For a year and a half, she was my sister's first phone call when Hudson was sick, when they needed a babysitter, for parenting advice. Now pregnant with her second baby, I think my sister must feel the sting of my mom's absence in ways the rest of us can't quite imagine.

I never doubted that my mom would be my first phone call when I had children of my own, that we would take family trips to Disney World, that she would know how to soothe my babies when I wasn't able to. I always trusted that my children would know the sound of my mom's laugh---that laugh that filled up the room and then some. That I would get the chance to see the pure joy and love in my children's eyes someday, wrapped up safe in my mom's arms. Everyone says that our kids will know their Mimi because she lives on in us, because we'll tell them her stories. They'll learn to not sweat the small stuff, to look for the first cardinal of the season, to make a wish on the Thanksgiving turkey's wishbone. On some days, this makes me smile. But then, on other days, I want to kick and scream at the loss, both my mom's and her grandchildren's.

There's a saying about best laid plans, but boy, did we have plans for my mom.

For our Mimi.