To Spank or Not to Spank

When Sam and I were getting ready to build our house, people were constantly telling us how stressful it would be. We were engaged at the time, planning to get married in the middle of the building process and a number of people went so far as to say that building a house with a partner caused their marriages to end. I had only one person, one lone person, tell me that building her house with her husband was fun. And I’m grateful to that person still because she gave me hope that it was possible.

Approaching Quinn’s third birthday was a similar experience. Everyone, leading up to it, made a point to tell us that “the terrible twos aren’t that bad...it’s three that’s the worst!” The horror stories about toddlers at age three are ominous, to say the least--enough to make you hate the year, before you even get there. This is how self-fulfilling prophecies work. You imagine dreading the phase and so you do. 

Or, you don’t. I’m working to tune out the doom and gloom.

I will confess that it’s not been entirely easy. Quinn is tenacious, intense, even prone to fits of violence. One night, determined not to take the bath that she so obviously needed, she grabbed a mason jar from the edge of the tub and threw it at my head. Fortunately, it missed my head. Unfortunately it did not miss the porcelain toilet; it shattered all over the bathroom. I was so stunned I didn’t immediately react; I just gasped and turned my head to look at her. What I saw next was the scariest part: Quinn was initially surprised too, but when she saw me turn to look at her, she quickly composed herself and looked me directly in the eye. Her gaze was threatening, her eyebrows bent, her message clear: “Don’t push me, Mom; I’m not taking a bath.”

The past month or two has brought increasingly frequent meltdowns, increasingly furious outbursts, and increasingly angry reactions from both me and Sam. Quinn has spent a lot of time in “time-out.” And when she’s in time-out, I can tell you, she is not thinking about what she’s done wrong, she’s thinking about ways to kill us. She pounds on the walls and she screams.

But let me back up a bit. The other thing I’ve been struggling with in the past few months, in addition to my raging toddler, is an increasing feeling of pressure from other people about how to handle her. In fact, some of that pressure goes way back to when Quinn was probably about a year old and she was doing something my dad thought was inappropriate. He looked at her, with wide disbelieving eyes, and then at me...back to her, back to me. “When are you going to spank her!?” he demanded. The idea seemed laughable to me at the time; I definitely wasn’t going to spank her at that age and I wasn’t even sure I ever would. Hitting her seemed absurd.

I’ve had other questions about my parenting choices since, some direct and some just implied. There were a number of challenging moments this summer, in front of family or friends, when Quinn would misbehave, demand attention, refuse to go to bed, or slap me across the face in front of a room full of people. In each of those moments I was simultaneously trying to figure out how to deal with Quinn’s embarrassing behavior and how to also manage the observers’ expectations and in some way explain or justify my choices. What people often don’t understand is that the kid behaves worse because they are there, and I parent differently because they are there. Instead of making a scene, or getting really angry, I found myself trying to smooth things over calmly and positively, so as not to disrupt the mood any more than we already had. But sometimes, I found, people expect you to lose it--they want you to blow a gasket because that’s how they did things, or how things were done to them. In their opinions or experiences, that’s the way you have to react in order to maintain control and raise an obedient, well-mannered kid.

By the end of this summer, as Quinn kept doing things that frustrated us, I started to wonder if all of those people were right. I started experimenting when no one was around to witness my angry-parent reactions: I stopped tolerating any misbehavior, I got mad quickly, I put her in time-out often...I even, recently, tried slapping her hand when she hit me, so the sting of it would send a message. And the other day, after allowing this pattern to repeat for a while, I slapped her on the face. “How do you like it?” I asked her. “I don’t like that,” she blurted out through shocked tears. “Then don’t do it to me...” But as my sentence trailed off, so did my conviction. I realized why I had never reprimanded  her in these ways when people were around: because I felt absurd and ashamed.

I always imagined that I would be the tough cop with my kid. I’m a stickler for right and wrong, I don’t put up with b.s. from anyone, and there have been plenty of times I’ve yelled at people. But I don’t like yelling at Quinn. Here’s why: three short years ago she came into this world weighing only seven pounds, with her skinny little chicken legs, and every day since I’ve watched her set her sights on doing new things and apply her persistence to accomplishing them. At this time last year she was just starting to be verbal. By now she can have sustained conversations with people on the phone. She has memorized every single word of a handful of beloved books. I can tell her something once and she’ll remember it and apply it repeatedly with ease. “May I please be excused?” she’ll ask after a meal. “Thank you for making me my dinner, Mom,” she’ll say as she climbs down from her chair with a big, proud smile. 

And when Quinn screws up, or hurts your feelings, she knows it and she manages to process through her anger much more quickly than some adults I know. When she’s given the time and space to do so, Quinn almost always makes a point to apologize. At three she still lashes out when she is feeling emotions that need an outlet, but she is also beginning to develop a sense of how other people are feeling too. And while the time between a strike and an apology might seem long to some observers, the fact that one inevitably follows the other is something that I admire. Frankly, she behaves better than a lot of adults I’ve dealt with in life, but because she is a toddler, there are a lot of people who think she should be kept constantly in line.

I can tell you for certain that if someone threw me in a time-out and then immediately got in my face and demanded that I calm down, “use my nice voice,” and apologize for something I felt justified in having done, I would lose my f’ing mind. And that’s the key for me right now: I can empathize with her. I don’t respond well to belligerent displays of authority, so why would she? I have to find a way that feels more natural and, as I do, I’m confident it will work better than what we’ve been trying lately. I won’t speak for Sam; he and I have always had a really different style as teachers, and we’ve both found what feels right and natural with our students, with generally positive results for each of us. I know he’s going through these parenting questions right now too, and I suspect he feels a bit envious of the dads of old who simply left the day-to-day parenting to the moms; he’s not so lucky--everything in our house is shared, including the parenting books that are starting to pile up.

When we left Quinn’s three-year check up with her pediatrician today, we both felt a bit deflated. Quinn behaved as I suspected she would: she did not want to be examined and she did not fall for the nurse or doctor’s coy attempts to trick her into “playing a game” or taking a bribe. She wanted to do her own thing and, when Sam tried to hold her still on his lap, and the doctor leaned into her personal space with her instruments, Quinn wriggled one arm free and slapped her right on the face. I was disappointed and apologetic, but not entirely surprised. Sam was mortified. 

I had really been looking forward to the appointment--to hearing what the doctor thought about Quinn’s progress, to being able to brag about the fact that Quinn gave up her pacifier herself, and that she was the one who decided she wanted to stop wearing diapers, and that since then, she’s been wearing “unnies” almost all the time. Instead we got bogged down in talking about the challenges of dealing with her behavior. The pediatrician said, in a tone that implied she thought we had long-since figured this out, that “Quinn is obviously a spirited child,” and it was clear that spirited was a euphemism.  And it is, I looked it up: spirited is the nice word for “high needs.”

So that’s what we left with today: a label. That and the business card of a family counselor who specializes in “spirited” children.

I know I’m at a turning point because while I was disappointed with her behavior today, I wasn’t mad. I'm done being mad at her all the time. Instead I feel newly determined to help her find ways to channel all of her passionate emotions in life, to keep finding ways to grow beyond the bounds of anyone’s labels, and to evolve into a civilized but still authentic version of herself.

Five minutes after we drove away from the doctor’s office, with no prompting from us, Quinn said, “Next time, I’d like to say ‘I’m sorry’ to Dr. Parker.” 

I think three is pretty incredible.

Summer 2013

Quinn sat between us last night, on the front row couch at our local movie theater. She had on a yellow tshirt, striped leggins, polka dotted socks and her sneakers, a tall bag of popcorn in her lap. For longer than I imagined she would, she sat captivated by her first movie on the big screen. I watched her watch it, and couldn’t help but smile at all the possibilities that keep opening up.

Our whole summer has been like this--a happy arrival into the warm light at the end of the tunnel. Many of the things we feared would happen when we had a kid, happened--we had less freedom, we lost a lot of sleep, we had fewer adventures. But through it all we’ve kept thinking, someday...Someday we’ll be able to move around more. Someday we’ll travel with her. Someday she’ll enjoy doing things we like to do...

This summer we accomplished a lot. We got her in a canoe without her screaming to get out. We took her rock climbing with some friends (the little people snacked while the four adults took turns belaying and climbing). We had some good long walks, went berry picking, went to swimming holes and had some picnics. And we even got her in a plane and flew across the country.

In June, as we were getting our school year wrapped up, we were putting finishing touches on our summer plans--the perfect blend of family and solo adventures. The first of which was the big adventure: a trip to Wyoming to see our friends, Scott and Julie, and their daughter Eloise who is just a bit older than Quinn. Scott and Sam have been friends since they were about five years old. Julie and I were like old friends the first time we met; it’s not often I can be my unedited self right from the start. With Julie I could.

Getting to them involved an early morning flight out of Boston to Denver. A subway within the Denver airport to get from one terminal to the next. A bus ride from the airport to the rental car agency. Then a seven or eight hour drive to Wolf, Wyoming. All but the long drive would be new experiences for Quinn. I was worried and nervous a few days leading up to it. I was worried about getting Quinn and all of our stuff through the airport under time constraints. I was worried about missing the flight because toddler pace is so excruciatingly slow. I was worried we’d be those people on the airplane with the screaming toddler. I was also worried that by the time we got to our rental car we’d be so exhausted we wouldn’t make it to Wyoming. 

But Quinn wasn’t worried; she was excited. She was excited to use her new ladybug suitcase on wheels. She was excited to see Nonna & Poppa who live near the airport. She was excited to go on an airplane, even though she had no idea what that meant. And she was really excited to meet “The Eloise.” 

The travel day was almost effortless. Quinn was so engaged in everything going on that she was easy to deal with and fun to watch. The only minor snafu came when the flight attendant told her she had to put her seatbelt on so the plane could take off. She’s not particularly fond of being told what to do and, up to that point, we had managed to disguise most of our commands well enough that she just went along with them. But when the flight attendant leaned in and told her what to do, Quinn started screaming, as I knew she eventually would. “I wanna get off!” 

My reaction was to succumb to the inevitable humiliation and slouch back defeated in my seat. “Here we go,” I thought. Sam’s reaction was to lean down to her eye level and start talking in a very soft, high pitched voice, very very quickly. “Quinn! It’s okay! Don’t worry! It’s okay! We just have to put on our seatbelts...It’s just so you’ll be safe. Please put on your seatbelt! No, no, no, don’t cry, it’s okay. Really. It’s okay. Listen...” 

The truth is I have no idea what he said to her. I just remember thinking, “Oh my god, he’s totally panicking.” I became less concerned with Quinn than Sam. I wanted him to calm down, slow down, and stop the insane chatter. But before long, Quinn stopped screaming and just started staring at him. I’ve been calling it The Filibuster ever since: he just kept talking, as fast as he could, without a break, until she wore down and gave in. She was mesmerized, I was laughing, and Sam was winning. 

After that, we read Peter Rabbit about a thousand times and she gave me “haircuts” by rubbing my hair around in all the wrong directions. I looked like a wreck when we landed, but I was feeling pretty good.

And in the week that followed, I felt better and better. Within moments of our arrival, Eloise was taking Quinn in to see her bedroom and her toys. Scott and Julie were cooking the first of many incredible dinners. And we were settling in to our vacation on 12,000 acres of beautiful Wyoming grassland. We felt really spoiled.

We spent our days planning and executing all kinds of two-family adventures: truck rides out over the grassy hills to find good swimming holes, trips into town over 25 miles of dirt road for coffee and cupcakes, group hikes, picnics, some fishing for the dads, some more hiking and polo watching for the moms, lots of chicken feeding and kiddie pool time and cupcake baking and family meals, and daily vigils by the picture window watching early evening thunderstorms rolling in from the Bighorn Mountains.

Because Julie is even more organized than I am, she had both families settled into the same routine almost immediately--I loved it! And I especially loved the evening routine: One parent would accompany each kid to her respective end of the house for the bathing, toothbrushing, book reading, back rubbing and negotiating. One parent would help with dishes and general clean up. One parent would put the chickens to bed and water the garden. After all creatures great and small were tended to, four parents would meet in the kitchen to pour another cocktail and commiserate in hushed voices. It was so good for our spirits to be with friends who are almost exactly where we are in life...fighting the same battles, sharing the same joys. It bolstered us. Standing in the backyard, on the Fourth of July, the four of us watched fireworks on the wide horizon in two different towns. It was a good metaphor: when you’re in the fireworks, your own are all you can see. It’s nice to step back and see you’re not alone.

Admittedly, Scott and Julie’s fireworks seem a bit more mild than ours. Eloise is literally the nicest toddler ever...she shared everything with Quinn and, when Quinn swatted her away, or gave her a dirty look, or refused to share any of her few things, Eloise just offered Quinn more things. They were challenged by each other, regularly, but I think they loved each other too. Two months later Quinn is still talking about Eloise and we are still savoring the magic of those Wyoming days.

A few weeks after our return to Vermont, Sam and Quinn dropped me off at the ferry dock to cross Lake Champlain and meet up with Char on the other side so we could embark on another canoe trip, this year closer to home. The Nine Carries Route in the Adirondacks was a good concept, but somehow, preoccupied with whether or not we’d be up for the long portages (up to 1.6 miles), and whether we’d be able to pack light enough that we could carry our packs and the canoe at the same time, we failed to notice the ratio of portaging distance to paddling distance. This “paddling” trip was a lot like backpacking with a canoe. 

We camped in some of the darkest, dankest mosquito-nest campsites I’ve ever seen. And, on one occasion, when Char made a slight misstep off a slippery log with the canoe up over her head, she sunk to her crotch in mud, with both legs. I’d show you a picture but I can’t because I was laughing too hard and scrambling too much to take one. I’m not sure she’ll ever forgive me for failing to document that feat. What was also a feat was the fact that on the 20th anniversary of losing my mother, a date I worried about for weeks, if not months in advance, instead of being totally depressed, I spent the time cracking up. When you find yourself hiking up and over miles and miles of shitty trails, with a heavy pack and an essentially useless canoe, swatting bugs and sweating your ass off, there’s really nothing else you can do.  

Next year we’re planning a river trip.

Sam and Quinn came to pick me up at Char’s camp and, from there, we drove down for our summer visit with the Jacksons in the Poconos. This year the Madrid clan was home, and the California clan was there, and the local cousins came too for an afternoon picnic and birthday party for Jesse. It was a short visit with a lot of family news to cover, so we didn’t truly feel like we had enough time. With loved ones, I suppose, it is always that way. 

The next adventure was Sam’s. It finally worked out that he could get away for a real trip. With two other guys, he traveled north into Quebec to find and run some new rivers. There was map work to do, and a language barrier, and the water they were looking for was remote. I knew he was having a good time when I heard his message on the answering machine one day: “Hi, Ker! I’m just calling to let you know we made it off the river today, and now we’re headed into the wilderness a bit. I won’t have cell service; we’re not sure what’s up there. I’ll call when I make it back out.” The excitement in his voice was unmistakable; it’s good for him, I thought as I listened, to get back in touch with his adventurous self...it’s also good we have life insurance.

He came home happy, but I wouldn’t say satisfied. For Sam, scratching the boating itch is like scratching poison ivy...it just makes you want to scratch more.

And that’s okay, really, because we both feel like we’ve finally arrived to that place where the future we imagined for ourselves is possible. The place we’ve been working to get to for years and years. Even before Quinn came along, we were always working toward something. Toward a house, and gardens and land with a view. Toward a time when there might be a little money in the wallet so we could afford to leave the driveway. And we imagined having a happy, adventurous kid who would want to come with us. 

When we went climbing that morning earlier this summer, after I got lowered down from my climb, Quinn showed up next to me and whispered, “Great job, Mom.” And when we were riding the bus from the rental car agency back to the airport after our Wyoming vacation, Sam and I looked down at her between us and realized she had one arm around each of us. And last night, when I was saying goodnight, she hugged me and said, “I had a lot of fun with you at the movies tonight, Mom. Thank you for taking me. I love you.” And the same again today before her nap, "Thank you for taking me raspberry picking, Mom. I had a lot of fun."

It’s taken a long time and a lot of work, but the work has been good, and we’re proud of the results, and every day Quinn is our reward. We are really grateful.

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.