Family

When Sam went away, for five days in early August, to find some whitewater in Quebec with friends, I started preparing for the arrival of my aunt and uncle for a visit I had been looking forward to for months. I felt incredibly honored that they wanted to come; they are eighty and seventy-nine years old, and they have kids, grandkids, and even a great grandkid of their own. I felt so flattered that a trip to Vermont factored into their busy lives.

In addition to my excitement about just hanging out with them, this visit was a chance for redemption. My aunt and uncle had come to our wedding, six years ago, and first seen our house when it was still under construction. I was in love with it from the beginning; everything about our little homestead matched what I had imagined--it was immersed in woods, made by hand, done with family, and an adventure every day. So I was surprised by my aunt’s reaction to the place: I’ll never forget driving her up our road for our wedding day open house, “Oh, Kerry!” she said, “It’s so...desolate!” 

In spite of their surprise, my aunt and uncle were among many of our guests who hiked up the last steep pitch of our icy hill when the cars wouldn’t make it. We still had plywood floors and countertops at the time, and about ten weeks of work still to do. And while I tried to get my car out of the ditch and turned safely back to less icy ground, my aunt and uncle visited the house. I was disappointed I didn’t get to show them around myself, and assumed it was the last time they’d ever be here. So, when my dad asked if they could all come up for a visit this summer, it felt like great good fortune.

There was a lot of cleaning to do; not because my house is really dirty, but because when honored guests are coming I need it to be really clean. Sam once asked me why I need to turn our kitchen into an operating room whenever we have guests. I don’t know the answer, but with three years of baby sludge collected on every stainless steel surface, I wasn’t going to stop to try to figure it out. I wanted the visit and the house to be perfect, so I picked two quarts of blueberries with Quinn, baked scones for breakfast, made fresh peach ice cream to go with a blueberry buckle, and maple ice cream to go with brownies, I scoured Central Vermont for sweet corn before sweet corn was ready, I harvested my first carrots and cucumbers and tomatoes from the garden, made two loaves of sourdough bread, and I scrubbed and polished and dusted and oiled everything in sight. 

It’s not like they would have cared about a little dust; I know they wouldn’t have. Of all the Litchfields, these two have the best sense of humor by far. 

I don’t think any one of us has more fun than they do.

And they deserve it. They’ve raised three amazing kids, survived multiple cancers between them, and been there through the highs and lows of the entire clan. And through it all, all these years, they’ve managed to keep laughing and dancing their way through life. At dinner one night, my uncle was cracking everyone up with stories of pranks he and my aunt would play on Halloween, putting on the makeup from the funeral home where he worked, and laying in wait for kids on the porch. At the same time, my aunt was showing me the bruise on her leg she got from biking. “I didn’t fall!” she insisted, “just bumped into the bike.” I laughed the whole time they were here. 

My memories of growing up with the extended clan are just like that--memories of boisterous fun and laughter. Amy and I are the youngest of all the cousins and, whenever we were with the others, I looked up to all of them in awe. My aunts and uncles had a way of loving all of us as if we were their own, and while I’m not sure I noticed or fully appreciated that when I was young, I know I do now.

I find myself thinking of family more than I ever have, as I want to be sure Quinn feels connected to her people on both sides, so she’ll know where she comes from. It’s hard to put into words what family means, exactly, but it’s the kind of thing you know, unmistakably, when you feel it.

After dinner on their first night, my aunt asked me if she could help me with the dishes. I thanked her and said no, trying to be polite, but she laughed at me and grabbed a dish towel, “Oh come on!” she scoffed, “You’re doing all the work! Let me do something.” There’s no stopping my aunt; I’ve always loved that about her. She laughs at supposed obstacles, completely undeterred. We stood side by side at the sink and I was overcome by this feeling of being at home in a way I hadn’t yet fully been, even in my own house.

I’ve often tried to explain to Sam what my life felt like growing up, in the house with my mom and dad and sister, as a Litchfield. Late that first night, listening to my aunt’s stories as we washed dishes, I couldn’t stop smiling...I felt this overwhelming familiarity, this thing that I know in my bones but that sometimes feels diluted in my life away from the clan. In the years since my joyful smiling mom was the host of our family gatherings, I am often aware of what’s missing...an energy and pace and joyfulness, where everyone is talking and laughing and helping and teasing and bragging and playing. The kind of energy that makes me feel alive.

On their second and last night, after Quinn finally went to bed, we all stood in the kitchen and Sam got to hear, from someone other than me, some of the Litchfield family lore. I loved seeing my dad as the younger brother. I loved watching him look to my uncle for clarification or added detail. I loved hearing my aunt’s recollections of dating my uncle and babysitting for my dad. I loved hearing, again, the story of when they tried to pull his tooth out, tying it to a doorknob and slamming the door. I loved cracking up, while they cracked up, over the fact that the tooth never budged. I loved watching them laugh together and interrupt each other and correct each other and remind each other of the events of their lives. I tried to soak it all in, this bringing back to life of my family history. My lovely Auntie Francie, my legendary Uncle Rea, my always cherished Uncle Dale who lives farther away, the grandmother I never knew, who evidently used an electrical cord to keep all five of them in line...no wonder they couldn’t believe I wasn’t spanking Quinn when she climbed out of her crib!

When you grow up and you leave home and you find yourself mingling with other clans, the source of your own being gets watered down in a way. You behave differently, a little better perhaps, and that’s probably just as well. But it’s good to go back to the source periodically and be your original self, untempered. To be with people who share your sense of humor, people with whom you can say anything and don’t have to worry, too much, about being polite...people whose presence brings back what was magical about growing up in the first place.

20 Years, Part II

Here’s the thing: it’s impossible for me to have any one single feeling about this 20th anniversary. In some surprising way, it also feels like a celebration. I can’t think about my mother--my beautiful, amazing mother--without also thinking about my daughter. And Quinn is all possibility, all new beginning, she is oxygen. And breathing the world in with her is like having part of my heart resuscitated after all these years.

There are so many different kinds of love in this life. When my mother was dying I couldn’t see into the darkness ahead of me; I couldn’t imagine a future without her. I didn’t know what anything would look like or whom I would be. I had spent my whole life looking to her for guidance. Inevitably, of course, I did go on, advancing into that darkness one day at a time, and as I did, my eyes adjusted. 

I slept for most of the first year. My dearest friends still called, they made me come out and spend time with them. I remember being at a Thanksgiving gathering in Maine at Chelsey’s house with all of them--our annual crew team turkey dinner. I felt hollow and had little to say, but they let me just be there with them. Moments like that kept my heart beating, though just barely, for months--they kept me in stable condition. And then, a year after my mother’s death, I finally woke up from my long nap. I took a trip with strangers on the ocean, came back and began to live again...began to start imagining myself in the future. 

One adventure led to another. I went to graduate school, lived on a boat for a week, moved into my first solo apartment. I met wonderful people, I read great books, I shared a plot in a community garden. I went out and danced. I laughed. Eventually I got a job; I felt useful. And from there, I got another job and I gave away most of my belongings, put the rest in storage, and began my 2.5 year adventure, traveling, living out of my backpack and my truck, seeing what some of the world looked like. And in that time I met Sam, and I came home to Vermont, and we built a house, got married and got pregnant. I did a lot of living, all with a clear sense that that is the only possible thing to do--to not waste it, not waste this too-short life.

In the early months of my pregnancy, I thought I wanted to have a boy. I told people I did--I’m mostly tomboy, I would say, not very girly. As a teacher I had often had simpler, easier connections with male students. Girls were more complicated for me. The night before our 20 week ultrasound, when we would find out the sex of our future baby, Sam and I got in an argument about something. I found myself hiding in the bathroom with the family photo album my sister assembled for me for Christmas one year. I looked at pages and pages of photos of my mom and me. I sobbed. I didn’t know how to have a baby without her. And I realized, all of sudden, that I desperately wanted a daughter. I had turned my back on the ocean and never saw the wave coming--it knocked me off my feet.

Girls are complicated for me because I want so badly for them to have good lives. I expect a lot of them. I expect them to respect themselves, and to demand that the people in their lives treat them well, all the time. I expect them to earn the respect of others by being smart, and working hard. I expect them not to be coy or give themselves away. I expect them to participate, to be independent, to have a clear sense of right and wrong. To use their voices. That’s a lot, I know. And it’s understandable why some of my relationships with girls over the years (especially my poor sister) have been challenging--who wouldn’t find me overbearing? But those things are ingrained in me--they are my mother’s lessons for me, and they’ve helped me have an incredible life. 

And so, the night before my ultrasound, I found myself facing the fact that even though having a daughter would probably be really hard, it was a challenge I desperately wanted. I knew if I had a daughter, and she was anything like me, she would have opinions of her own, and she would not like to be told what to do or how to do it, and I knew she would likely fight me in my quest to make her the invincible woman I would want her to be. And she might even hate me for it. But still, I wanted the chance to try.

I know there will be rocky times ahead, but I also know that loving Quinn is a lot like loving my mom...in a strange way I can’t quite explain. I imagine my mom standing on the edge of a flat plane, her back to the abyss, she is smiling. The world is flat. It’s the same way I feel about Quinn--I can’t see a life beyond her, or without her in it. I know that makes me sound vulnerable, or crazy, but love so big, so primal and biological is, well...it is the most raw feeling of being alive I’ve ever experienced. And I’ve jumped out of a plane, I’ve inched my way up the face of a 1200 foot cliff, I’ve gone over waterfalls in a boat. I’ve done the adrenaline drug and it’s just not as good as this primal kind of love. Nothing is.

Somedays I think I would give just about anything to have my mom back; I have 20 years of stories to tell her and lots of places and things I’d like to show her.  But other days, I have this strange sense that she’s not gone, just out of reach. And I suppose that’s what Quinn has done for me--filled that void, revived that most sacred and personal part of my heart. Nothing could replace my love for my mother, but being a mother comes very very close...in some ways it's even better.

Quinn is having a lot of fun learning names right now. For a long time if I would say, “you’re beautiful,” she’d say, “I’m not beautiful...I’m Quinn!” Periodically, when she’s feeling sassy, she’ll call out for something: “Say-um! Sam! Where’s my bear?” And she calls me Ker sometimes, or Ker-Mom, or Love--the name Sam uses for me. The other day, driving to school, we got talking about names and she asked, “What’s my name?” I told her, “You are Quinn Claire.” While she obviously knew the first part of the answer, it seemed to be the first time her middle name registered for her. She spent the rest of the drive trying it out: “Quinn Claire...Quinn, Claire...I’m Quinn Clay-ur” She emphasized each new syllable, trying them on for size. I was speechless, listening to my still-tiny daughter taking possession of my mother’s name for herself. Clay-ur. Claire. 

More than at any other time, in these twenty years, I have a clear sense of connection to my mom. I hear myself speaking her words to my daughter. I can imagine her love for me when Quinn is in my arms. I receive Quinn’s laughter and kisses and questions and I am having the conversations with my mother that I never got to have. I hear answers to questions I never had the chance to ask. I feel like the vector between them. I feel like some of my mother’s energy, dormant in my cells for so many years, finally made it back into the tangible world. She goes on. I breathe her like oxygen..big love fills my lungs.

“The only thing worth grieving over 

[is] that sometimes there [is] more beauty in this life than the world [can] bear.” 

-Collum McCann 

20 Years, Part I

Twenty years ago, this month, my mother died of lung cancer. She was 46 years old, and would have turned forty-seven the next day. I believe she died angry; she was not at peace. 

There is much about her death and dying I can understand now that I could not comprehend at the time. First and foremost is my understanding of just how young 46 is. I was twenty-one then and didn’t realize that I was not yet even close to my prime years. I didn’t yet understand the value of being rooted in a life of my choosing, and I didn’t anticipate the sense of beginning-possibilities I feel in my own life now at 41. I knew she was robbed, but I didn’t fully understand just how much she was denied.

My parents married at 24, had me at 25, and my sister at 29. They had owned two houses by the time my sister came along. They accomplished a lot early and no doubt worked hard to do so. Their plan, by the time we were older, was to move to South Carolina (or somewhere else warm) once we were both out of the house. They imagined playing more and working less, getting my dad away from the 1-2 hour commute into Boston each day, playing more golf, more tennis, and enjoying being free, finally, of the daily work of careers and parenting they had dedicated themselves to from the time they were very young. We buried my mom two weeks before Amy went off to college. They had already, a couple of years before, taken a trip, without us, to South Carolina to look around. They liked it.

There were days that summer when my mother was dying that a neighbor would come to visit with her. And increasingly, as the summer went on, a visiting nurse would come and bathe her. When either of those two women were in her room with her, my mother had her door closed. I didn’t understand then why she would choose to spend those hours with strangers, rather than us...rather than me, but now I imagine those visits were two small things she did for herself, in the midst of many things she was still trying to do for us. I imagine she needed time to talk openly about how she felt, with someone who could handle hearing about it. 

I wanted to be her confidante, as she had been mine my whole life, but I was definitely not capable of talking calmly about her dying. I was only capable of tending to things for and around her, driving her to the hospital for her treatments, making her tapes to listen to on her headphones when she was there, watering her gardens, making her iced tea, cutting her roses for her and bringing them up to her room. I cried all the time and she comforted me. She smiled a lot, and hugged me a lot. She didn’t cry often with me, and when she did she was quick to make a joke and turn things around. Even while dying she was taking care of us.

The work that I do to keep my family going is minimal in comparison, yet sometimes I still get frustrated when I feel like I’m the only one who registers what needs to be done to keep the family-train moving. Like my mother did, I pay the household bills. And I anticipate the grocery shopping that needs to be done to ensure Quinn will have something decent in her school lunches for the week. I know how long it’s been since her nap blanket at school has been washed, and when it will need to be washed again. I see the last-minute panic that will happen rushing her out the door and realizing her bag no longer has a clean change of clothes...I see it before it happens and get the laundry done. I have only one child, but taking care of her and keeping the house running takes up a lot of mental space and a lot of physical energy. My mother had two daughters; I can only now imagine how important those few hours were to her each week, when she closed the door to us and allowed herself some private time, as her days ran out like warm water through her fingers.

And those talks with outsiders, those warm sponge baths on her deteriorating body, those must have been the things that allowed her to put on her brave face the rest of the time...to comfort us, instead of relying on us to comfort her. Still, in spite of her efforts to keep us smiling, her anger cracked through now and then. Her temper was short sometimes, and the rage that came out once or twice was like nothing I’d seen from her before. 

Throughout our lives, my mother made sure to do everything equally for both my sister and me. Anything she did for one of us, she always did for the other. When I graduated from high school, four years before my mom got sick, she threw me a party and baked an elaborate cake: one half was shaped like the state of Massachusetts where we lived, the other half was the state of Vermont where I was headed. Connecting them was a bridge with a graduate crossing over. High school and college team colors were worked into the frosting; it was elaborate. My sister graduated high school about a month before my mother died. The day she baked my sister’s cake was a difficult one for her. I don’t remember what I did to make her mad that afternoon, but I do remember that she threw a flower pot at me, aiming for my head. Fortunately I had quick reflexes, and fortunately we had enough time left before she died to laugh about it together. But looking back on that day now, I see it as one piece of evidence that she was never accepting of her fate. 

And that’s another thing I understand better now than I did then--just how much was at stake. 

Do not go gentle into that goodnight. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

-Dylan Thomas

My mother was tough. I’ve always admired that about her. She fought for what she cared about. She was a clear-headed, purposeful, and tenacious fighter, and also capable of big love--big enough that I can feel it still.

Wolf, Wyoming

Wind on open grassland is like the ocean: a steady march of waves against the shore with incoming tide. Here the waves are green and gold and ceaseless--no coastline to mark the end, just prairie wider than your vision, even as you scan the broad horizon looking for the terminus with your sweeping gaze.

The sound too is like the ocean: wind through tall grass, through stiff spruce at the edge of the meadow, is water crashing against sand. Only the paper flutter of Aspen leaves anchors you to the Earth, to solid, knowable ground. Aspen leaves and the chitter and whistle and melody of birdsong.

Here, by the house, the trees hold up the sky. Step out from under them, walk down the red gravel road, and the weight of it all--the interminable expanse of sky--presses down on you. It is impossible to take it all in. Impossible to be still as your mind measures and scans and rescans. As you try to find the edges of what cannot be contained or defined.

Writing it down is my only meager tool to make sense of the magic of this life. Words, like prayers, called up and offered in the hope that some understanding will come. They come of their own accord, words whose source seems somewhere outside my own thoughts, originating in some unseeable spirit, allowing me, momentarily, to grasp this ephemeral experience of being human and alive.Words, like prayers--a meditation. I am the gold finch pulling seeds from the feeder in the roar of tumultuous wind, riding golden waves of sweet grass and sage. So much that cannot be contained. We are temporary vessels transporting infinite energy.

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.