And So It Begins

One day, not long ago, Quinn looked up at me while I was getting dressed and she said, “Mom, you’re my best fwiend.” She smiled at me and nodded, as if to reinforce it, yup, that’s right, best fwiend. (Not a typo, incidentally; she can’t say r’s bewy well). I responded, as any reasonable adult would, by dropping my earring and starting to cry. She smiled proudly and seemed to be making a mental note.

It was an overwhelmingly sweet moment for me and I thought, right then, I could happily die...with my adorable kid smiling up at me, long before she learns to consider me her enemy. I am not looking forward to that inevitability and I know already I won’t handle it well.

I appreciate the importance of being her mother and not her friend, and yet I hope friendship will be part of it as it was with my own mother. I went through a parent-hating phase, but it was brief and early and for the most part I considered my own mom my best friend too.

This was, to some degree I imagine, out of necessity. We moved twice when I was growing up and each time I found myself on the outside of already-formed pairs. I always had friends, but I was never anyone’s best friend, and I never had a true best friend of my own when I was young. And because I didn’t, it was a focal point of my youth. Eventually I gave up searching and felt lucky to have the kind of mom I could talk to and always count on for support. (And then I went to college and met Chelsey, and then Kim and Julie. And the world righted itself, thank god.)

My hope for Quinn is that she'll have more early options than I did, and I'll confess that it is already something that has me worried: Will she have friends? Will kids like her? Will the world treat her kindly? This seems especially important to me knowing she will never have a sibling, in spite of also knowing that not all siblings are guaranteed friends. As she gets closer and closer to being school-aged, I find myself increasingly anxious about how to get her started off right. So far, things are not ideal. She is the oldest in the “pebbles” group at her daycare right now, and when she becomes a “rock” on her third birthday, she’ll be the youngest. The other day I arrived to pick her up just in time to see her attempting to join a group of “rocks” on the playground; she idolizes them and mentions their names at home all the time. The eldest of the three girls sneered at her, “No, Quinn! You can’t play with us.” And her little followers echoed her, one of them putting down what she was playing with to turn Quinn around by the shoulders and march her off to be by herself. 

I’m sure it would be hard to explain to other adults why I grabbed a three year old by the face and shoved her to the ground, so instead of doing that I just said, calmly, “Hey, Quinnie...” And she looked up, called my name, and ran to me for a hug. I told her she could come  play with me, anytime and for the rest of time, and we promptly left those little twerps there in the mud. 

My hope is that Quinn forgets those things from day to day, but I’m afraid she doesn’t. We are currently getting ready to visit friends in Wyoming whose daughter, Eloise, is just a bit older than Quinn. It will be Quinn’s first time on an airplane, so we’re trying to prepare her by talking about it a lot. The other day, driving to the store, Quinn asked me, quite out of nowhere, “Mom, will The Eloise bite me?” I was a bit horrified. “No!” I told her, hoping that would prove to be true. “Will The Eloise say hi to me?” she asked next. She sounded so worried my heart broke, and then I pictured those three little twerps at daycare again...

I know I sound crazy and I really don’t want to be that crazy mother who jumps in and tries to solve all of her kid’s problems, because obviously that causes problems far worse than not being liked by the snotty kid on the playground. Nevertheless, it’s hard to hold back, and excruciating to watch her have her feelings hurt. It’s my job, isn’t it, to protect her? 

I suppose what I have to do in those moments when the Mother Lion in me starts to flick her tail back and forth, is call up the slightly less vulnerable Quinn who manages to hold her own at home. We recently went thirty minutes in a battle over a tiny bite of boiled potato. I was determined that she would try it and she was determined that she would not. After about five minutes, the potato was irrelevant and the battle between us was the only real point. I pulled out all my bargaining chips: 

If you eat this potato, I’ll read you a book while you have dinner. No. 

If you try just this little bit of potato, we can “play puzzles.” No. 

If you have this tiny little minuscule piece of potato, you can have some Nems! No.

That’s when I knew I wasn’t going to win, when she turned down M&Ms, as if she wasn’t at all interested. 

In the middle of that battle, when she was getting frustrated, she said to me, “You’re not my fwiend, wight now.” And I froze. It had only been a few days since she told me I was not only her friend, but her best fwiend. How could it be over that quickly? When I gave up the potato battle, conceding that she had won (rather easily), she changed her mind again, “Okay, you’re my fwiend now. I’m happy again.” 

I suppose that’s the real work I have to do: not protect her from mean kids, but teach her what real friendship looks like. It’s not fleeting, or capricious, or dependent on one person’s behavior alone. Done right, it’s a team effort, based on the faith that each person will treat the other one fairly and kindly, even on bad days.

Teenage Years

Teaching high school kids is like getting a do-over on your own teenage years. Mine weren’t particularly awesome, so I’m generally glad for the opportunity.

I spent middle school hanging out with the kids who skipped school and smoked cigarettes, and I convinced myself I had a lot of angst. I was angry with my parents, although I have absolutely no idea why. One day, I ran away. It was a great adventure for about six hours, until my mom pulled up beside me as I walked down the street late at night. She didn’t say a word, just opened the door. Automatically, I got in and went home.

In ninth grade, she made me tryout for a swim club. I loved the water and grew up swimming in the lake at my grandparents’ house, but that didn’t prepare me for competitive swimming. I nearly drowned trying to figure out how to do flip-turns on that interminable afternoon. Dozens of other kids, spread out over six lanes, swam laps around and around me. The coach was merciless and without humor, and her swimmers were unbelievable--intimidating in their endurance and strength. At the time I didn’t understand why my mom would humiliate me like that, and I have no idea what she had to do to convince the coach to let me join the team, but she did it. I was terrified and my mom was thrilled. She seemed to know that swimming would save me, and she forced me to keep going back until I started going back on my own. 

That year I stopped hanging out with the kids who were skipping school. I stopped pretending that smoking and drinking and being angry at my parents was cool, and I started doing laps. For the first time in my life, I had an identity. And just after I started to sort that out, we had to move. 

My parents worried any gains would be lost--that my nascent confidence and sense of self would disappear and I’d slip back into my old ways. In an attempt to avoid that, they moved us to a town that had a swim team, so I could keep swimming and hopefully stay out of trouble. After we were settled into our new house, and I started classes at my new school (of about 1300 kids), we learned the swim team was only for boys. I don’t remember processing that setback with them, but I do have a clear recollection of their consistent message for me through all those challenging years: you can do anything you set your mind to. Eventually I was the captain of the boys’ swim team, and by my senior year, there was a separate team just for girls. My mom never missed a single meet.

In spite of the few small victories of my high school years, I remember that time to be primarily a battle. In part this was due to the fact that, by the time we moved, I had come to believe that right and wrong were very distinct things. As a teenager that was really confusing at times, especially when I took my beliefs out of my house and into the world. The only good thing about being a black and white thinker is that choices are easy to make; peer pressure never bothered me, but I know part of the reason for that is because my mom was always there to back me up--she was always cheering me on. In high school, after we moved, I had no problem standing up for what I believed. I spent a lot of time standing up, but I didn’t have a lot of people standing with me, other than her. And when I had a hard time dealing with the gray world around me, my mom was there to translate what I didn’t understand. 

I don’t know if it’s ironic that I’ve ended up teaching high school English, or inevitable. 
What I do know is that I understand the world a bit better now, and spending my days in a high school, surrounded by high school kids, allows me to look back on my own experiences with better perspective. In between conversations about books, or trying to explain what makes a good thesis statement, I have a lot of opportunities to hang out with kids and talk with them about what’s going on in their lives. Always I am reminded of those same conversations I had with my mom. 

Sometimes I have a chance to offer some perspective, for whatever it’s worth. But just as often the kids help me see what I wasn’t able to see when I was a kid myself: that the process of making sense of it all is a pretty incredible process. Not easy, per se, but incredible. As a kid, I wanted to get through it just as quickly as possible. I wanted to advance beyond the murkiness of adolescence, to what I imagined would be a more black and white adulthood. But watching my students every day, it’s easy to see the beauty in what they are in the process of doing: becoming themselves. 

My mom didn’t warn me that adulthood would be confusing sometimes too, at least if she did I don’t remember it. But fortunately I had enough time with her to internalize the key messages: Solve problems, don’t run away from them. Work hard. Have confidence. Believe in yourself. Stand up for what you believe. Set goals high. Do the things you imagine doing. Celebrate the victories.

In the course of each school year I watch kids struggle to make sense of the gray world and try to find their places in it. Many of their struggles are the age-old struggles, but for the kids doing the struggling, the struggles are brand new. There is a lot for them to sort out: What values, of the many imparted by parents, and peers, and our culture as a whole, do they value for themselves? What personal boundaries do they have? And what goals? What aspects of their character will be their armor? And where are the weak spots? How should they comport themselves? And what expectations should they have of other people around them? Who will validate them in life, and who will condemn them? And of those, who matters most? Or at all?

I do my best to give good counsel when I’m asked, and knowing that I still think back to some of the things my own high school teachers told me, I am cognizant each day of the incredible responsibility it is to be one of the voices they hear as they try to answer the big questions for themselves. And as I’m trying to sort out what to say, my mother’s voice is still, every day, in my ear. Somedays I come home and feel I’ve done an okay job, and other days I wish I could revise something I’ve said or done. But every day, I come home and think about what a privilege it is to be part of the process--no matter how peripheral my role is. And every day still I wish I could pick up the phone and talk it over with my mom.

The Darkness and the Light

Yesterday we were driving from Pennsylvania to Boston, after a visit with Sam’s parents, for a quick visit with my family, before heading home to Vermont after our long vacation road trip. We took Route 84. I hadn’t looked at the map, and was just following Sam’s directions and the signs. I was caught off guard, in the middle of that beautiful day, to see a sign that read: Newtown/Sandy Hook 1 Mile. Immediately I started wondering about the families, and thinking about the children. I tend to react viscerally to tragedy, even when the tragedy is not my own, and I sensed myself starting to get pulled toward the kind of sadness that is hard for me to get out of easily. 

My eleventh grade American Literature teacher once explained that he was an “energist"; he believed that all living things are made up of energy and when a given life ends, the energy would not be extinguished, but rather transferred to some other aspect of the universe. The idea didn’t originate with him, but he had made it his religion, and his explanation was my first exposure to such an idea. For some reason it made real sense to me, in a way that my family's Catholicism never did. And, the morning after my mother died, I felt I had proof. I walked out the front door of our house and found the two rose bushes on either side of the steps fully loaded with brilliant orange blooms. There hadn’t been any flowers the day before, but there were the morning after the men came, in the middle of the night, to carry her body from our house. My mother loved her roses and tended them with great care, and when I stepped out into that first day of my new life, I knew she existed in those gorgeous orange blooms. 

Some years later, when I read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in graduate school, I found more validation for the idea in the final verse of “Song of Myself."

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

In the nearly twenty years since my mother's death, I have only been to her grave once since she was buried, and only then because my aunt was buried in the same cemetery. While I have never had the kind of comfort a belief in heaven would provide, I have never doubted that my mother's energy departed her body as air.

And yesterday, as that mile of highway rolled by outside my window, and we got closer and closer to the Newtown exit, where twenty beautiful kids lost their lives, something else happened that struck me as one of those impossible to deny, presence-of-some-spiritual-energy moments.

Just as I was thinking about the lost children, my own child’s voice grabbed me from the back seat. It started with this: “Mom! Come back and sit with me. I miss you!” 

I thought of the mothers of Newtown who would give anything to climb back and hold their babies, and I knew I couldn’t deny my own. As Sam drove down the highway, I climbed over the center console and into the backseat, and sat down next to Quinn. And when I did, it was like I entered into some sort of crazy emotional vortex. Quinn just started blurting out thoughts as fast as she could speak them: “Mom! I love you! You make me happy! And I make you happy! And I missed you! And I miss Dad! And I love him! And I make him happy! And he makes me happy! And you make him happy! And you love him! And you love me too! And you missed me! And! And! And!” 

And then, just as soon as the whirlwind began, it stopped. And Quinn sat smiling and out of breath. And I looked out the rear window at the Newtown exit behind me, and had an overwhelming sense that something mystical had just happened...just exactly as we were driving by.

That was only halfway through our drive. Further on, when we made it to Route 95 in Massachusetts, and saw a sign saying that it was Marathon Monday, I thought back to the couple of years I worked at Copley Place and went out to join the crowds at the finish line in hopes of catching a glimpse of someone’s victory. (I feel those viscerally too and always get teary when I watch athletes standing on podiums in the Olympics). As we drove, I thought how fun it would have been to be at the marathon with Quinn. 

At about three o'clock, when we were just outside of Boston, approaching a point roughly parallel to the Back Bay, I happened to turn on the radio and I heard the rapid controlled panic in the voices of the announcers. We struggled to make out what was happening. Some time later I realized that at that time, only ten, twenty, then thirty minutes after the two bombs exploded, they were still struggling to make out what was happening too. Police cars started whizzing past us in the left lane. An overhead sign told us the Copley ramp was closed. We heard that some of the victims were “gravely” injured. 

It’s ironic that just last week I was wondering about that aspect of my present life which has me always on guard, scanning the horizon for some unidentified threat that might harm Quinn. Sometimes when I catch myself going into Mother Lion mode, I try to tell myself to calm down, to not be ridiculous. I don’t want to live in a bubble. Even more, I don’t want to want to live in a bubble--I don’t want to lose that part of myself which has allowed me to have so many great experiences. I don’t want to always be afraid that something bad is going to happen. “We’ve only got this one life,” a friend reminded me the other day, and I don’t want to waste it living in fear. And yet, there is no denying that there are things to fear. 

Last night I read that at the beginning of yesterday’s marathon, there was a 26 second moment of silence to honor the 26 people killed in Newtown, and the 26th mile of the marathon was dedicated to them too. A number of Newtown residents had traveled to Boston to witness the tribute; many were sitting at the finish line. Yesterday was a beautiful spring day, perfect for putting the darkness, if only briefly, out of their minds...out of everyone's minds.

Maybe it was coincidence that Quinn was a love tornado at the exact moment when we drove by Newtown, Connecticut yesterday. And maybe it was coincidence that not long after Quinn's Newtown explosion of love and joy, our drive paralleled the disaster of the marathon--an event which was in part, by design, a remembrance of Newtown.

Maybe those were coincidences, and maybe not. It is hard for me right now to separate them in my mind.

Sometimes, in the face of rational people who think only practical thoughts and believe in simple explanations, I am tempted to feel silly for worrying about unseen threats, and absurd for believing, even now and then, in the presence of something mystical. But after yesterday, I am resolved: whenever I feel bad for these things, I'll look at Quinn’s face and let the self-consciousness relax its grip and melt away. I can look at her face, that is made of my own flesh, and I can accept the fears that are real and that coexist with the magic that is sometimes waiting where we are passing through.

All At Once

“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

-John Green, The Fault In Our Stars

I often tell people that I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted to have a kid until Quinn was three months old, and when I tell people that, I’m not actually kidding. I made the conscious choice, but I really had no idea what that choice meant. And even though I stayed awake through Quinn’s first night holding her and staring at her and thanking her for being okay--on that first night at the end of the day on which she was born, while Sam slept in the other bed in our hospital room--even then I didn’t love her in a way that I could fully identify. And in the first three months after that, as I tried to figure out what she was all about and what happened to life as I had once known it, even though I was focused solely on her existence for 24 complete hours of every day, even then I couldn’t quite put my finger on what she meant to me. After three months I started to find her more lovable each day. By six months I was really enjoying hanging out with her. By eight months, when we were on vacation on the Outer Banks, and she was sitting up on her own in our borrowed beach house, smiling a lot and happily playing with toys, I started to find her really irresistible. But then, sometime after that, I fell off the cliff.

What I experience now is love so big it makes me delirious--profoundly, unabashedly happy and sad all at the same time. 

In the happy moments, it is Thoreauvian, in the woodchuck-eating sense: “I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour [her] raw.”  I get ridiculous. I kiss her incessantly and it drives her mad, but then she later asks me, “Mom? Wanna hug? Big fat kiss?” And so the cycle continues. It is delicious, savage delight. 

The sad moments aren’t so much sad as they are an awareness of the potential loss of happiness. The threat of losing her somehow, when I acknowledge that threat, overwhelms my fragile composure. It is a painful jolt that I knowingly inflict on myself, like a finger in a socket; I'm not sure why. Perhaps it is to keep myself on guard, always scanning the horizon for a car, rogue wave, killer bumble bee...who knows. Perhaps it is to keep myself on guard to notice, enjoy, appreciate each moment, knowing there are not an infinite number of moments to be had.  

Two years after Quinn first started sitting up on her own and smiling happily at her toys, we are back on Cape Hatteras, thanks to the continued generosity of friends*, staying in the same sweet beach house. Only now Quinn is pushing her own babies down the road, with her own stroller, and she is digging holes in the sand at the beach, and collecting shells and following plovers as they try to escape her. She seems taller, and more grown up than I thought two year olds were supposed to be. She is happening so fast, I can’t comprehend it. 

There is much I can’t comprehend:

Quinn: I don’t wanna wear that shirt, Mom. My eyes are too cold. 
Me: What? 
Quinn: Mom! (squint. squint.) My eyes are too cold!

In my clearer moments I acknowledge the tenuous comfort of this unfortunate truth: “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” -from Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

At some point, when the Earth started spinning on its axis at an entirely unprecedented speed from what we'd formerly experienced, with whole days and nights whizzing by outside the bounds of predictable patterns, Quinn came to be and I fell in love all at once. And the faster we spin through our revolutions, the less able I feel to pause and comment on what is going on. I want to document each new phase and phrase, each new accomplishment, each sweet moment before it dissolves, but the moments are starting to happen so fast.  It is “an elegant universe in ceaseless motion,"** and I'm just trying to hold on.

*Thank you Betsey & Bill, for sharing your special place and for the gift of these memories. 

**Thank you John Green for your wonderful book The Fault In Our Stars.

Fragile

This is a story that is hard for me to tell.

It is a story of my father standing in a mine field of broken glass after everyone has gone to bed. The story of his trying to help: of hanging the cleaned glasses up in the rack, the last gesture of many before going to bed himself. It’s the story of his not having them securely in place and them crashing down onto the stone counter below, exploding all around him in the darkened house.

By the time I jumped out of bed, pulled on some clothes and made it downstairs, by the time I stepped barefooted into my clogs and rounded the corner to the kitchen to find my stunned father looking around at the glittering shrapnel trying to imagine where to begin, I already knew what he was thinking about: his granddaughter’s pudgy bare feet, her fleshy little hands. He had already imagined her bleeding and it was more than he could bear.

It was simple enough for Sam and me to shift into gear, picking up the big pieces first, getting the dust pan and brush, the vacuum. It was an easy task, just a couple of irrelevant glasses. My dad wanted to clean it up--to make it right--but it was easier for me to do; I wasn’t shaken, I wasn’t worried about baby feet, I was just worried about him, shattered and looking on, trying to block the thought of his granddaughter’s bleeding feet out of his mind, feeling upset about a simple accident and two irrelevant glasses.

When it was all cleaned up I went downstairs to tell him again it didn’t matter, to smile at him, hug him, tell him I love him, thank him for all of his help. I found him standing still in the middle of the basement, his arms by his side, still feeling stunned and guilty and trying to decide what to do.

After I went to bed I thought of the solution, but by then I couldn’t bring myself to go down and stir it all up again. I should have told him: if I broke one of your glasses, I would feel terrible, but you wouldn’t care at all...you would insist on cleaning it up and insist it didn’t matter. And it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter at all. I laid there in tears thinking about my dad, suffering from his embarrassment and worry through the night.

There is no physical thing in my entire house that matters as much as he does. I can barely express how much I love him and how grateful I am for the growing love my daughter has for him and for Louise. 

Louise: my dad’s wife, my daughter’s Nonna. A woman I have never been able to call stepmother only because it feels like a betrayal of the mother I’ve lost, in spite of how important she has become to me, and to all of us. A woman whom my mother would have loved, whom my mother was already making room for before she died--a kind of magnanimity I’m not sure I’ll ever be capable of. 

The second thing my mother told me, when I walked into her hospital room after she was diagnosed with cancer, was that I needed to allow for someone else in my father’s life, this mandate coming long before I ever allowed for the possibility that she might someday die, never imagining it would happen in four short months. 

My mother didn’t want my dad to be alone. And she wouldn’t want her granddaughter to be grandmotherless. And even though I’ve justified not referring to Louise as my stepmother, by saying I don’t need another mother, it’s becoming more and more clear to me how much I do need her. And Quinn needs her too--she needs all the grandparents she can get, for as long as she can possibly have them.

For Quinn, my dad and Louise are like one person. She says Nonnapoppa as one word, and she has begun to develop her own relationship with them, separate from any relationship I might have originally thought had anything to do with me. They communicate in their own way with her. And negotiate in their own way. And they can get her to do things we cannot--like eat half a chicken breast, multiple slices of cheese and an entire banana for lunch. She has never been willing to try a bite of chicken in her life.

When they were getting into their car this morning to leave, after three days of taking care of her while we worked and her daycare was closed, Quinn stood in the driveway getting increasingly upset. “I wanna go in Poppa’s car! I wanna go in Poppa’s car!” she said over and over. And just before Louise closed her car door, Quinn thrust her arms out: “I wanna hug Nonna!” And then, inevitably, “I wanna hug Poppa!” They each climbed back out for a last hug. I stood there and cried, not wanting them to go. Not wanting that sweet thing to end: my daughter, loving my father and her Nonna as her own.  When they started to drive away, Quinn insisted we catch them. So we all piled into the front seat of my car and we followed them down the hill to wave goodbye once more. 

And when we got back to the house I cried again, thinking about my dad’s anguish over the broken glass and feeling his embarrassment and wishing I could make it so he never felt those things at all. Ever, or for any reason. To sense your own parent’s vulnerability is to sense the fragility of life itself. 

My dad, my hero growing up, is someone I now deal with anxiously, trying to balance my desire to do things for him--to spare him over-exertion or potential harm--with my desire to let him still be the invincible man he was, before I came to know that that’s not how life really works. I am conscious, through every visit, of his mortality, always worried about how much time we might have left. Rationally I know it could be me first, tomorrow or even today, you never know. But emotionally I feel myself worrying about losing my second parent, about Quinn losing him too. Ten years? Twenty? Twenty-five? I know no amount of time will really be enough, when I watch Quinn laughing at his silly faces, increasingly able to express her own feelings for him. “Poppa’s cwazy!” she will say, laughing, “Get outa hea, Poppa!”

I hope I will always be able to call up the image, from our last visit, of my dad squatting down across the room from Quinn, with his arms spread wide, thinking that would trigger her to run to him for a hug. And Quinn, in her gray camouflage long-johns studying him for a moment before squatting down herself and spreading her arms wide too--like two sumo wrestlers, squared off and laughing. I want to always remember that and the high-pitched sound of her voice this morning, when they called to say they’d made it home, as Quinn squealed excitedly into the phone. 

“I lub you Nonnapoppa! Bye-bye!”

It's All A Blur

In December I read Fahrenheit 451 with my ninth graders. If you haven’t read it, Bradbury’s novel tells the story of what happens to a society when people, for one reason or another, stop thinking critically. It happens in stages. 

If the antihero, Captain Beatty, is to be trusted, people bring their problems on themselves. They get intimidated by complex ideas, and they stop doing the necessary work to understand what's going on. As a result, they stop reading, and stop thinking, and become consumed with nonsense.

If we consider Faber’s point of view, another character from the novel, we realize also that when ideas get reduced and oversimplified, when we are no longer surrounded by quality ideas, and the pace of life increases at the same time that our leisure time is reduced, these things also contribute to a society's deterioration. And, if we lose the right or ability to act on the things we learn, think, and believe, then we lose the impetus and ability to think at all— even if we want to. Our brain, like an underused muscle, loses its strength. 

Fahrenheit 451, first published in 1953, offers a clear warning. We are meant to be put on guard so our own world doesn’t turn into a world like this, where people become disconnected from each other, and disconnected from nature and, as a result, less and less concerned about taking care of what’s around us—our friends, our loved ones, and the natural world that sustains us. We are supposed to see the consequences of a society in which no one thinks critically, and no one acts; we are supposed to see that such a society will cease to exist...

Right now, the wind is howling outside my windows, blowing leaves past horizontally, over newly exposed grass and mud. The next cold front is blowing in over the mountains, pushing out the weather system that caused rain here for the past 24 hours. The snow is nearly gone; yesterday the temperature was in the fifties. Today, the temperature is plummeting again, with wind chills below zero expected for tomorrow. The world is seizing up.

Last week I went to see the documentary Chasing Ice--a visually stunning depiction, through time-lapse photography, of the effects of climate change. The film is beautiful, and devastating, and it makes perfectly clear that climate change is undeniable.

With my eleventh graders, I’ve just reread The Grapes of Wrath. If you haven’t read it, you should. A man made ecological catastrophe, people displaced from their homes, millions of people devastated by economic and environmental ruin. And among them, Steinbeck’s Joad Family. 

“Literature has no practical function, but every day people die for lack of what is found there.”

-William Carlos William, paraphrased by Richard Bausch.

Here is why you should read The Grapes of Wrath: Tom Joad and Ma Joad. Rose of Sharon. Pa and Uncle John. Al and Ruthie and Winfield. You have to spend time with them to understand whom you’re dealing with; you have to make the drive from Oklahoma to the green California valleys to know their depth--so simple, on the surface, and yet so rich in character it’s easy to imagine they are real. 

Last week, proctoring a study hall, I heard two girls talking over the noise of the printer in the next room. They were discussing the novel. “I’m in love with Tom Joad,” one told the other. “I’m in love with Ma!” came the quick reply. And I agree with both of you, I thought, smiling. 

It’s hard to know what happens to the Joads after you fall in love with them. I’ve spent days talking with kids about whether Steinbeck meant for his novel to be hopeless or hopeful. At some level, I think the answer is both, and I tend to lean toward happy endings generally, but that’s beside the point. What you do know, undeniably, when you make it to the end, is that nature is not forgiving and that humans have an unnerving capacity both for selfishness and for selflessness. And if Steinbeck is to be trusted, it is profoundly clear that no one is going to make it in this life alone. 

Another night last week, here on campus, I watched Beasts of the Southern Wild. I set it up for students to see, but only two kids showed up, and only one lasted to the end. When it was over, she and I were the only ones there, and we struggled to talk about what we had just experienced--neither of us yet sure what to say, both of us sort of stunned by the images and speechless about some of the themes. 

The next morning, serving breakfast, I saw her again. We both agreed we liked it more, as the swirling images had begun to coalesce. One image, in particular, made the whole film worth it for me: tiny Hushpuppy in the arms of someone we assume to be her mother, all limp limbs and heavy head on the shoulder, surrendered to the safety of the embrace.

I’ve been at work, in some form or another--teaching, running dish crews, supervising dorms, holding parent-teacher conferences, announcing results at ski races--for some part of every single day this month. “Mom’s working” is Quinn’s latest phrase. Saturday will be my first day off in 32. I'm going to wake up and not run out the door. Quinn and I are going to "do baking" and make "pancake balls." 

Then we're packing up our peanut butter crackers and we’re going on a “benchure.” We’re driving south so she can see her Nonna and Poppa, and I can see my sister and my nephews. We’re probably going to spend some time making tea. 

And every time she says, “Mama, want a kiss?” I’m going to say yes (but that's probably stating the obvious). And hopefully, sometime soon after we get back home to Vermont, the world will feel right again.

Be Right Back

If I were to drive to Newtown, Connecticut, I would cover 260 miles. It would take me about five hours. And yet even from this distance, for the past week, I’ve been carrying Newtown’s babies, whom I have never met, around with me through each day. I have not yet been able to shake the grief.

Last Friday I could barely get through my afternoon classes. All I wanted to do was go to pick up Quinn. I spent Saturday morning with Kim, on a fortuitously planned breakfast date. When I arrived, my eyes were red from crying, and hers were too. I was so thankful for my time with her--we could have sat in silence for two hours and known so many of each other’s thoughts. I needed her understanding company to begin to process it all...sometimes only a best girlfriend will do. On Sunday, Sam went to work to grade papers; how he was able to do that, I don’t know, but I was glad to have Quinn to myself for the day. She and I set up my tent in the basement. We filled it with blankets and pillows and stuffed animals. We stocked up on Goldfish and books. We zipped ourselves off from the world and watched the snow fall through the mesh window of the tent, and the basement’s double glass doors. The bad guys won’t find us here, I thought, but did not say, as I watched her offer Goldfish to Winnie-the-Pooh. 

We read the same book over and over again. “Caps for sale!” we yelled, as the peddlar walked down the street with his caps piled on his head. “Caps for sale!” And we worked on flashcards too. Every day Quinn comes into the possession of so many new words. N is for number nine. O is for oboe. P is for the piggy on the puzzle. Q is for the lady with the crown on her head. 

I wonder what of these moments she remembers from day to day. They are heavy with meaning for me, things I imagine remembering long after I lose everything else, but Quinn is so blissfully unaware of how fleeting it all is. One night this week, long after I had put her to bed, Sam and I heard her talking in her room. Sam couldn’t tell what she was saying, but I could. “Caps for sale!” she called out in a restrained, past-her-bedtime, half-whisper half-shout, “caps for sale!”

When I start to cry, and force her into a hug, Quinn gets pretty still. She waits it out. She watches with concern. I wish I could explain to her how unspeakably sad I feel for the families of those twenty perfect little people. First graders mostly. Six and seven years old. Just babies...

...It wasn’t until I was in the fourth grade that I finally relinquished my belief in Santa Claus. I was ten years old and my teacher had us doing a Christmas project. The first graders in our school wrote letters to Santa and put them in a big red mailbox in the lobby--special delivery to the North Pole. Secretly, our teacher collected them. He brought them to our room and explained that we were going to write back to each of the kids, on Santa’s behalf. I imagined myself doing an important job--helping Santa who was inevitably too busy to write the letters himself. 

My peers had long since stopped believing, but I had a kind of awkward, lingering loyalty to the idea, stemming from an important experience I had had. I had woken up one Christmas Eve in time to see a reindeer leg pumping the air outside my second floor window, working to get lift off for Santa’s sleigh. It was proof; as implausible as the whole thing was, I had proof, and I cherished it. 

The letter writing exercise didn’t complicate my belief at all. Not until Mr. Nellist cautioned us not to talk about the project outside of our classroom, because we wouldn’t want the first graders to know that Santa doesn’t really exist.

I think I managed to wait until I got home to cry. I was embarrassed and sad all at the same time, and uncomfortable with the maturity forced on me by the news.

This year Quinn is old enough to start the Santa routine if we choose to go through with it. I feel conflicted about lying to her, in large part because I'm not at all good at lying, but also because it seems like a bad way to earn her trust. She won’t understand the Santa concept completely right now anyway, but I suspect that whatever seeds we sow this year, will take root for next year and the years beyond. And so we have a choice--to lie or not to lie.

But, do we really have a choice? Do we really have a choice given the world around us? It strikes me that Santa Claus is a good early test for us--of how to deal with information and influences that we can’t control. The good news I suppose is that the outcome of this lie is fairly benign; at least for a few years it will bring her joy. And I suppose that is at the root of all the lies we tell our children--the desire to bring them joy, the desire to keep them free from worry, the desire to allow them to feel safe, when really there are no guarantees. 

Charlotte and Daniel. Olivia and Josephine. Ana, Dylan, Madeleine, and Catherine. Chase and Jesse, James and Grace, Emilie and Jack. Noah, Caroline, and Jessica. Avielle. Benjamin. Allison. I wish someone could have kept you safe.

One night this week, I was in the kitchen assembling some sort of dinner. Quinn came running up. She put one hand on the counter and tipped her head to the side to look up at me. “Be right back. Okay? See you in two minutes!” I had never heard her use these expressions. She ran off, calling over her shoulder, “See you in two minutes! Be right back!” 

I wish they could all come back.

The Pendulum

In the past month, I haven’t been able to write because, just as the joy sometimes seems too much to contain, so too does it leave the body, and the space it vacates sits empty for a time. And this, for me, can be debilitating. I am one of those people for whom everything is loaded. Every milestone, anniversary, birthday. Mostly I feel glad once they’ve passed.

Last week was our fifth wedding anniversary. We had a week off from school leading up to it. We got caught up on projects, tried to put school out of our minds, tried to relax. But too much time off, we’ve both decided, isn’t always good for us. I tend to stew. And, I think I’m contagious; either that or Sam also has a latent tendency to stew. Too much time off and we have a lot of time to look around and see all the things we have yet to accomplish. 

In the midst of last week’s normal kind of worries, I had a weird thing happen that required a doctor’s visit and will require a brain scan, and the exhaust system on my car all but fell off, and Sam’s beloved chainsaw kicked the bucket.  My dad spent a night in the hospital. A photograph of Boone showed up on television, in an Apple commercial, and for some reason that made me feel violated rather than proud. I was happy to see Corey’s photograph purchased by such a big fat trendy company, and at the same time a little weirded out that our shared memory of a beautiful summer afternoon with friends was now selling mini-iPads. Everything made me feel vulnerable. And exposed.

On the day of our wedding anniversary, Corey was kind enough to hang out with Quinn so Sam and I could go on a date. We went to a movie, then out to dinner. We saw the new James Bond film, and I loved it. I was desperate to love it--I needed something fun to lift me out of the funk. When we got to the restaurant afterward, Sam announced that he thought the movie was "okay." Just okay. I watched as the balloon deflated. By the end of dinner, we cycled back in conversation to Quinn, as we always do. She always lifts me up. 

Sam  got a big smile on his face. “I was thinking about Quinn when I saw those girls standing outside the movie theater on their own,” he said, “It’s hard to believe she’ll be doing that someday, but she will be!” He said it as if that would be so great. I burst into tears. “I can’t actually talk about that right now.” But he persisted, trying to tell me how great it will be. Vulnerable and exposed, I tried to explain it to him, “Parenting--it’s all a slow tearing away of the thing you most love. How am I supposed to be happy about that?”

Sometimes Sam and I are fundamentally unable to understand one another. His optimism, his excitement about Quinn’s future...I recognize those to be good, healthy things. And yet, I can’t always join him. Letting go is not my strong point. Neither is uncertainty, nor a lack of control. I’m very bad at goodbye.

And yet, time marches on and the unavoidable greets me, inevitably, at the beginning of each new day. Yesterday, I turned 41. Yesterday, the funk still firmly in place, I felt lonely. In the morning, trying to get Quinn ready to go off to school, she asked me to pick her up. She’s getting big, and sometimes my tiredness overwhelms my desire to hold her all the time. “What, are you a baby?” I asked without thinking. And then I heard what I had said. “Nevermind! You can be my baby as long as you want to be.” She pointed a finger to her chest. “I’m Quinnie!” she announced. It was the first time she’d ever done that, ever identified herself by her own name. It felt like a great birthday present--my daughter realizing her own identity, accepting the name we chose for her. But, it was bittersweet--I’m Quinnie also means I’m not a baby. I asked her to tell her dad what she had said, and she did it all over again, this time pointing a finger to the center of her forehead, “I’m Quinnie!” she said proudly. And I resolved never to say again, “don’t be a baby...be a big girl.” I’m done rushing her. 

The rest of the day I wandered around the house trying to clean and prep for Thanksgiving. I wanted to be doing something more fun, something celebratory, but I couldn’t think of anything. My car was in the shop, getting the exhaust system sutured back on, and Sam was outside continuing with the never ending clearing, stacking, and burning.

This morning, I got my 41 year old self up early and out the door for a haircut in Burlington--few things rival the ability of a haircut to improve my state of mind. After that, my first dermatology appointment, to have a patch of skin sliced off my face for a biopsy. Quinn has been picking at it for months; “Boo-boo, Mama?” she’ll ask and then kiss my cheek. Somehow this self-maintenance feels like a birthday celebration and so I work to prolong it. I showed up here at Barnes & Noble with a bandaid on my face, shameless now that I'm older. I got in the wrong end of the line for coffee. When I was finally pointed in the right direction, a preview to future experiences of disorientation, I reached the counter and asked for a cappuccino. “Would you like that wet or dry?” the counter guy asked me. What!? I confessed I had no idea what that meant, secretly thinking there really is only one correct answer to this question, isn’t there? I felt even older when he explained the issue of the foam-to-milk ratio, knowing somehow, in the 20 years since my college coffee shop days, I totally missed this.

Settled at a table, next to other women who are also on their computers with their earbuds in and their coffee getting cold, I enjoy slipping away into a relieved anonymity. I can’t take my eyes off the couple in front of me. They are even older. The man’s hand shakes as he lifts his paper coffee cup to his lips. The woman scans and rescans the room, holding, but not drinking her coffee. They don’t look at each other. They don’t talk. It’s as if they are strangers. It depresses me and I imagine telling Sam about it later. I know Sam would see it differently, “they are so familiar to one another,” he would think, “they don’t need to talk.” From my point of view, right now at 41, 5 years married, it makes me feel unspeakably sad. I project myself into her, resigned after all the inevitable years, to the silence.

An hour later and they are gone. And in their place, two women and a toddler.  A pot bellied little girl-baby with blond curls and an insatiable curiosity, she sneaks up to other tables and reaches her little toy car up to the table tops and then grins at strangers, waiting for them to discover her surprise, her accomplishment. She runs around a display out of sight and then pops back into the room, her arms spread in a wide ta-da! She is irresistible, younger than my Quinn, but evocative of her nonetheless.

And so it is, the balance of young and old. The dichotomy of this life. The boundless joys, the silent resignations. The company of strangers. The familiar love of familiar love.

One week after our wedding in 2007, I borrowed Sam’s truck to bring a load of firewood over to Char’s camp. Sam stayed home with the dogs. Char’s camp road is miles long, a single irregular dirt lane. That November, winter came early and stayed, both here in Vermont and across the lake in the Adirondacks. I drove slowly once I left the pavement. The corners are blind, and there were patches of ice, but it was a clear sunny day and I didn’t expect to see the other car. I touched the brakes lightly. The other driver did the same. And slowly, very very slowly, we slid inexorably toward one another and collided head on. 

It’s amazing how fragile a big heavy truck can be. The whole front end of my new husband’s old truck crumpled. 

The next day I drove home feeling a bit anxious about breaking the news to him. Not because he would be angry, because he doesn’t get angry, or judgmental about such things. He is kind in this way--accidents happen. I’ve had to learn this from him; somedays I respond the right way from the start, and somedays it takes me a few tries to get it right. Nevertheless, I worried about the inconvenience, about the bummer and the expense of it all. I parked the truck at the bottom of our hill, a quarter mile from the house, and walked up. The snow tires weren’t on yet and I knew I wouldn’t make it up, and this gave me a chance to explain it to him before he could see it. 

Sam, my new husband of one week, saw me walking up the driveway and met me halfway. The first thing out of his mouth was, “I have something to tell you.” 

“That’s good,” I said, “because I have something to tell you too.” 

I can’t remember exactly how he explained his story, but essentially it was this: “I lit the front porch on fire.”

“That’s okay," I told him, "I destroyed your truck.”

And so began our marriage--tested from both sides, simultaneously, each of us on equally shaky footing, both of us glad things hadn’t been worse, neither of us hurt, the still under construction house still standing, the truck still driveable. Both of us laughing.

Five years later and we’re still problem solving, still trying to make the dollars and sense line up, still working and worrying and trying to hold it, and ourselves, together. The corners are still blind, and sometimes there are patches of ice. Slowly, but not as slowly as I would like, we slide inexorably onward, conscious of how fragile this big life can be.

PS: There were many bright spots on my birthday...the early morning voicemail from my sister, always the first to call, my dad and Louise singing on the phone, another call from Jerry, a tired new dad who, amazingly, remembered. Cards in the mail from my cherished friend Jean, and my parents-in-law, a dear uncle, and an aunt. An email from my Aunt Nancy in Arizona who relayed a Thanksgiving memory of my mom, another email from my Uncle Du, also thinking of my mom and sending, from Heaven, my Auntie Francie’s birthday wishes to me. My crazy friend Julie who can make me laugh in any circumstance. An email from a much-missed fellow Scorpio, in England, or Copenhagen or Africa? Another email from a much-admired Scorpio friend in Montreal. The sound of my dear friend Kim’s voice on two voicemails--her determination to reach me so appreciated. A long email from my cousin Colette, which I still need to answer,  and one from my friend Rebecca who made it to the computer despite her exhaustion at the hands of her newborn Henry. Finally, a midday call from Char to wish me a happy birthday and let me know her flight to Ohio got so messed up she cancelled it. She called to ask if she could come to our house for Thanksgiving...I was so happy I cried. A feeling of loneliness is hard to maintain in the midst of so much love. Thank you all. I miss you.