For Father's Day, I'll Let Him Speak for Himself

Sam’s lacrosse team has gone to the championship game of the state tournament three times in the past four years. Always his team is a mixed bag of boys who have played some lacrosse before, and many who never have. Because of the ski season, they start playing two to three weeks later than all the other teams in the league. And because we are a boarding school, these boys play together as a team for the first time here, unlike some of our opponents who have been playing together for years. In recent years, the team has tripled in size from what it was when Sam first arrived at our school. And while he usually has one other young ski coach around to help drive vans, and keep the stats in the book, maybe do some drills with the kids, Sam coaches by himself. Other teams we’ve met in the championship game have had a sideline full of coaches. We just have Sam.

Photo credit: Jill Maynard Nolan

Two years ago, we won the state title in a game that was, literally, unbelievable. We’d had a great season. We’d lost only one game in the regular season and then beat that same team in the semi-finals. The year before, the boys lost by one in the final game, and so in 2012, they were primed to win. But we were down by one goal as the clock started to run out; I couldn’t believe it was happening again. I couldn’t believe we’d made it to the championship a second year in a row, only to lose again by one goal. But then the unfathomable happened: with only 1/100^th of a second left on the clock, one of the boys put the ball in the net and tied it up. We lost our minds. And the momentum of that tying goal was enough...with almost no time elapsed in the sudden death overtime, we scored and won the game. It makes me tear up just thinking about it. 

Last year, we lost in the semi-final, but that was a minor hiccup in the long view of these past four years. When this season began, last year’s season-ending loss faded in the distance as we won game after game after game. We won all eleven games of our regular season this year. And then we won the first two of the championship tournament. In our semi-final game, against another strong team, we won with ease; the boys played beautifully, connecting with each other as if they’d been playing together for years. Our record going into the championship final was 13-0...an accomplishment the school has never seen before.

Two years ago, when we won the title, I was determined to write about the victory here, but somehow I never did. I wanted to record the story, for the future Quinn, of what a great coach her dad is, and what a good luck charm she seemed to be: since her arrival in the Gumby fan base, they had gone to the tournament both years. That year, 2012, the only game they lost was the one she didn’t attend. When they won that emotional championship game, after the boys dumped a cooler of water over Sam’s head, after Sam, who is relatively unemotional on the field, hugged players all around him, I handed the not-yet-two year old Quinn over the fence to our Athletic Director who set her down on the turf, and I watched as she worked her way through the legs of giants to find the legs of her dad. He picked her up and held her in his arms when the team posed for photos, and he held her in his arms as the team accepted its trophy. 

Amazingly, she seemed to know what had just been done.

This year, the championship game had a different feel. We hadn’t lost a game all year. We had already beaten the team we were playing, but still we knew it could be a tough game. What we didn’t know going into it is how things outside of our control would affect the outcome of the game. We didn’t know that we wouldn’t get credit for one of the critical goals we would score, because we never could’ve imagined that with four referees on the field, it would be possible for such a goal to go unseen. Evidently, it was. And evidently, the ample photo and video evidence, and the reaction of the stadium full of people would not count for anything. Evidently the goalie for the other team was never asked whether he’d let one it, and evidently he didn’t feel compelled to tell anyone. The game was tied with three seconds left on the clock when the other team scored a goal. It was the 7^th goal they scored in the game. We “scored” one for them by having a ball fall out of our goalie’s stick and drop in behind him; so the scoreboard, for our opponents, said 8. We scored 8 goals, but only got credit for 7. 

In the days since this game, I’ve been struggling to make sense of the disappointment and my sense of the injustice of it all. Struggling to deal with my frustration for the lack of accountability for the refs who altered that game. Sam has been going over it again and again too, but he has done so with the composure that so many people who encounter him on a lacrosse field always notice. When he asked me to proofread the letter he wrote to his boys, the night after the game, I knew immediately I wanted Sam’s thoughts to be the thoughts saved here for the future Quinn (with his permission):

Guys,
I’m assuming lots of you are still feeling some of the sting from last night--I know I am. I also know, from my time on a lot of lacrosse fields, in a lot of places, over a long period of time, and also from life in general, that this sort of disappointment is part and parcel of being an athlete and being a human.  Things don’t always work out--we don’t always get the results we want, or even the results we deserve. The goal that the officials missed last night hurt us--through no fault of our own.  That’s deeply frustrating, but it’s also part of being alive and being a competitor.  There will always be factors that are out of your control.   

And the truth is, before we start crying too hard over our fate, there were a lot of factors in our control, factors that we didn’t turn to our advantage.  It’s hard to make sure that every factor you can control works out for you in every game, over a fourteen game season; you guys did an incredible job of doing this for thirteen straight games--in the end, the one game where we didn’t do our job as well as we could have is also the game where some other factors came into play.  Unfortunately, this game is the one we wanted the most. 

It’s clear that the officials (or at least the person who is responsible for the officials) are well aware that factors beyond our control impacted last night’s outcome, but it’s also clear that that is not going to change the result.  Perhaps knowing that will change how you feel about it--that’s something each of you will process in your own way, individually. 

What I am feeling is just an enormous sense of gratitude for having had the opportunity to work with all of you and to go on the sort of run that we went on this spring. I imagine that each of you will undertake future endeavors that will follow a similar sort of trajectory--a whole lot of hard work, leading to a whole lot of success, but in the end, the ultimate goal might (or will) prove elusive.  Would you go back to the beginning and stop yourself from starting in the first place? I hope not.  This is where we learn resiliency, determination, toughness. It’s also where we learn about the value of the relationships we form with teammates.  Those relationships are far more important than whether we won or lost last night. Looking at how that game, and its result, unfolded, each of you should be able to see that a single game’s outcome can be totally arbitrary (up to the gods, if you will) but the work you and your teammates share is not.  That’s the real result I hope you’ll focus on.   

Again, thank you for giving me the chance to work with all of you guys this year. I’ll leave you with two quotes, from a couple of my favorite people--one is a former president, the other is a spaced out kayaker who has done some incredible things on this planet. 

Take care of yourselves, and each other, 

Sam 

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”  -Theodore Roosevelt

"You've got to be big enough to be small enough to let the world be awesome and it will"  -Jim Snyder

Photo credit: Jill Maynard Nolan

Congratulations team, on an incredible season. You made us all proud.

"You're Good at Vacuuming"

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, 

but people will never forget how you made them feel." -Maya Angelou

We were finishing up dinner one night last week, having some homemade chocolate chip cookies for dessert. Sam was drying dishes and putting them away. Quinn was on a stool at the island in our kitchen. I was somewhere in between. “You make good cookies, Mom,” she said. “I do,” I agreed, shamelessly. “I’m the best cookie baker you’ll ever meet!” 

“Yeah, you’re good at cookies Mom. And, Dad...you’re good at vacuuming!”

This stopped us in our tracks. I let out a surprised laugh. Sam looked confused, at best. Then I started thinking: Quinn meant it as a compliment, genuinely. And Sam’s face seemed to say, “Geez, that’s all I’m good at?” Almost instantly I realized how great this was. I explained it to Sam: growing up with a dad who is good at vacuuming (as well as a number of other things), means Quinn will grow up with the expectation that dads, and therefore men, vacuum. And maybe they even do the dishes, and a few other household chores. It means she will be less likely to end up with a man who believes it’s entirely her responsibility to do those household chores. It means she’ll grow up expecting a partner, not a boss.  It may even mean that she grows up challenging preconceived gender roles. Pretty soon, Sam seemed okay being the guy who was good at vacuuming. And, ironically, soon after that conversation, I found an article online titled, “Dads who do chores raise daughters who aspire to high-paying careers.” 

The next day, I was still thinking about it all, and I started thinking about my own dad. I don’t remember him vacuuming exactly, but I’m sure he did, along with plenty of other things around the house. One of our rules was that the person who made dinner didn’t have to do the dishes. And I remember a lot of summer evenings when my parents would leave together after dinner to go play tennis while my sister and I cleaned up. Not only did they share the work, my parents were also active together. And they encouraged us to get out and do things too. When we moved to a town with no girls’ swim team, both my parents encouraged me to join the boys’ team. I knew they were proud of me when I swam against the boys, and perhaps especially so when I beat them. I never felt like there was anything I couldn’t do just because I was a girl. And I always felt like it was worth fighting for my place in the world. That’s how I was raised.

And I’ve been working to raise Quinn that way too. When a recent Atlantic magazine arrived with two women on the cover, and an article called “Closing the Confidence Gap,” it made its way to the bathroom where most of our magazines spend some time. Quinn, like her dad, enjoys a good magazine in there, and when she spotted the picture of the two women, she wanted to know all about them. We’ve been talking about what it means to be confident for weeks. I’ve been telling her that being confident means knowing that you are smart, and strong, and independent, which means you’re good at doing things by yourself. When I heard her in the bathroom the other day, I went upstairs to see if she needed any help. When I arrived, she told me, “I did it myself Mom, because I’m confident.”

I’ve been reading her books with female characters, telling her she’s strong and smart instead of always pretty, and I’ve been working on myself too to be sure she sees me leading a healthy, happy life at home, at work and in my free time. But I realize that no matter how much I try to tell her that she just needs to be confident in herself, there’s the rest of the world she has to deal with too--all the people who will try to limit her or make her feel bad for possessing those very traits I want her to have. 

The timing this week was ironic: it was the same week a young man went on a killing spree in California, targeting women, because they had never done what he wanted them to do.  No matter how confident those young women may have been, they couldn't compensate for the killer's lack of confidence. It was the same week our school's campus blew up in a hot mess over some student-written op-ed pieces in which kids tried to make sense of their feelings about sexism, and which soon descended into kids making public attacks on each other--boys attacking girls because they felt attacked. Soon they were right back where they started: he said-she said, and us against them...some kids left frustrated they didn't make any progress, but not realizing their effort was progress itself. This week was also, ironically, the week the indomitable Maya Angelou died--a beautiful and powerful voice for the beauty and power of all people.

Quinn needs such voices (we all do), and she needs to be able to see examples of how things should be. This is where Sam’s vacuuming is so important.That and her own instincts. Today we had a birthday party to go to for a four year old boy from her daycare. I asked Quinn what she thought her friend would like for a present and she said, “Well, he loves snuggle buddies!” I thought about it and realized that nearly every time I see this little boy, he’s squeezing a stuffed animal in the crook of his arm. Still, I was thinking trucks or something like that would be a better (more well-received) gift. But, when I brought Quinn to the store, I decided to just let her choose--he’s her friend after all. 

There was a huge display of perfectly sized stuffed animals. Bears, monkeys, weird looking gremlins...and there was one white kitten with pink ears. When it was present opening time, the birthday boy was inundated by kids eager to give him their presents. About halfway through, after a bunch of trucks and light sabers had already been unwrapped, Quinn worked her way to the front of the pack and handed him her gift. She stood next to him as he opened it and all the other kids looked on. I looked on nervously too. When he got the paper opened up, he immediately squeezed the kitten to his chest. Then he brought it over to his mom to show it to her; she had to remind him he had more presents to open. Quinn found me in the crowd, with a big proud smile on her face. I picked her up and squeezed her, “He liked his snuggle buddy, Mom,” she said, pleased with her gift. I was pleased to know that she hasn't yet left that happy, safe time in life when each person gets to just be who she and he wants to be.

For half of the party we watched a new Disney documentary about grizzly bears. I was sitting on a couch between two moms, with four little kids stretched out on our laps, watching contentedly for an impressive amount of time. Eventually they started moving around in the open space of the theater. The footage on the screen was spectacular: massive wide angle views of Alaska--mountains, rivers, forests, ocean--close-ups of bears, wolves, eagles, and fish. It was mesmerizing. The kids kept getting closer and closer to the screen. After a while, one and then the others climbed onto the little stage directly below it. They got as close as they could and looked up at what must’ve been, from that angle, massive and breathtaking. I could see Quinn in among them. At one point, she stood with her arms reaching up over her head, as if to touch all that wild nature towering above her. It was a stunning image...all those tiny people, girls and boys, still unhindered by expectations and limitations, staring up at big wilderness...all of it uncharted territory. So much possibility.

"Nothing will work unless you do." - Maya Angelou

Your Mother's House

It’s Friday morning and I’m in class. My seniors are doing their weekly forty-five minute writing exercise. Each time we do it, I give them a prompt to start from. Today, two days before Mother’s Day, I’ve given them this: Write about your mom. What do you appreciate about her? What do you miss when you’re not with her? Describe the times when you call her, or find her in the house to talk. 

As an afterthought, I’ve allowed for this possibility: Maybe you and your mother are not close...why do you think that is the case?

I sit here wondering what they are writing about their moms, and I wonder too how Quinn might respond to this question ten or twelve years from now. I hope she won’t choose the afterthought.

Inevitably, I’m sitting here thinking too about the conceptual intersection between my daughter and my mother. As I always am.

Soon after we returned from our April roadtrip, with stops at her grandparents’ house on our way to and from the beach, Quinn asked me, “What is your mom’s name?” I reminded her. “Claire. Remember? You have her name in your name.” I showed Quinn her picture again. In the past when the subject of my mother has come up, Quinn’s questions have been limited to what she can see: why is she holding that puppy? what color is her hair? This time was different. “When can we go to your mom’s house?”

It was funny, in the absurd way, to think about the possibility that I simply hadn’t chosen to bring Quinn to visit my mom--as if I had never gotten around to it, or for some reason didn’t want to go. But her question was sincere, and she waited for my answer. I didn’t really have one prepared.

“She doesn’t have a house anymore.”

“Why not?”

“She doesn’t live anywhere anymore…”

Obviously, Quinn didn’t understand. I offered up heaven, but that didn’t really work; perhaps she could tell even I didn’t know what I was talking about.

In another conversation recently, Quinn said, “Remember that time we went to the movie with your mom?” I was surprised by that question too. “Yeah! Mom! Remember? It was the movie about the planes.” Sam and I looked at each other across the counter. The movie about the planes was the first movie we took her to see. I loved the idea of my mom being there with us, looking on, smiling as she always is when I dream about her. The dreamer in me allowed for the possibility that my mother had been there with Quinn and Quinn knew it--that the two of them had found a way to meet in some sphere beyond what the skeptics could perceive. 

Wanting proof, I asked more questions. I was hopeful. But eventually I realized what Quinn was probably remembering.  “Was it the movie we saw with Mary?” I asked, “And her daughter Claire?” 

“Oh! Yeah,” she smiled, “that was it.”

This time, as I tried to explain where heaven was, things started to fall apart. My eyes watered against my will. Quinn studied my face, concerned. I said, “heaven is kind of everywhere,” but even I could hear my statement sounding like more of a question than an answer. She didn’t understand, of course, and I didn’t really expect her to. How do you explain to someone who is just starting to appreciate what it means to be alive that everyone who is alive must also die? How do you explain to your child that her mother won’t always be there? 

Maybe you don’t. 

“I don’t know how to say good bye,” I told my mom in the hospital. “You don’t,” she told me. “When you love someone this much, you don’t say goodbye.”

A Lesson In Faith

A few days after Corey and Kellam had their baby, Corey sent me an email. “I’ve never felt so whole,” he wrote, “...or alive.” Corey is kind of adorable, kind of sentimental, and very much prone to obsess over a new project. The baby, and fatherhood, were clearly the new projects.

I am prone to constant self-assessment, a little bit of competitiveness, and sometimes, I’m not proud to say, judging others. I’ve confessed here before that Quinn was three months old before I decided I was ready to feel glad to have her in my life. It was far from instantaneous for me, and even farther for Sam, though I should probably let him speak for himself. And, in those early days of Corey’s new fatherhood, when I was receiving pictures of the sleeping newborn hourly, I experienced some sort of weird jealousy that I didn’t have a partner who enjoyed our baby like Corey enjoyed his. Every new photo that popped into my inbox caused me to locate Sam in the crosshairs of my criticism. What’s wrong with him, I wondered. Why wasn’t he like this when Quinn was born? Why isn’t he like this even now? And how did I end up married to the Tin Man?

The reality, of course, is that if Sam had been as effusive about baby love in those first couple of months, when I felt like a sleepless alien in my own body, I probably would’ve handed him the kid, wished him luck and been on my way. Sam and I are, for better and for worse, well matched. And I realized that, fortunately, before I did too much damage comparing him to my old friend.

Winter is challenging for us, so we’re not always focused on the positive. Near constant school responsibilities, lots of tag-team parenting, the stress of our road in winter, etc...all of them conspire against clear-headedness. On top of that, Quinn seems determined never to sleep through the night without eventually ending up in our bed sometime before dawn. An almost daily discussion in the months leading up to this time, was about how to keep Quinn in her own bed so we could get a good night’s sleep. For a while, after she transitioned from her crib to her bed, she would wake up and still call out to us from her room. But this winter we entered a new phase: little feet pad across the wood floor in the dark, a quiet “Mama!” is whispered in my ear, and she lifts up the blanket to climb in and snuggle and fall back to sleep. Now we don’t even have the opportunity to try to convince her to stay in her own bed; she just comes in and helps herself to ours. For me, that’s not so bad because the truth is I love having her curl up next to me, and now I don’t even need to get up to go get her. When Quinn is snuggling with me, warm and soft and breathing in my ear, I’ll tell you what: I feel whole, and alive. 

Sam doesn’t love sharing the bed as much as I do (or at all), and when he complains, I remind him: it won’t last forever. I intend to enjoy it as long as possible, whether he intends to or not.

A couple of weeks after Corey’s baby was born, with the baby-daddy envy finally beginning to subside, Sam and I managed to get Quinn to bed one night and still have some energy to watch a movie. We had some dinner, a glass of wine, and watched James Gandolfini and Julia Louise Dreyfus in the movie Enough Said. It’s a great film, about two divorced adults, each with a daughter about to go off to college. In an early scene, Dreyfus’s character is in bed early in the morning, and her college-aged daughter comes into the room and climbs in bed with her to snuggle. I looked over at Sam guiltily, wondering if he was thinking what I was: it actually might last forever!  As you can imagine, we each responded differently to that scene. 

The movie progressed and the daughter’s departure for college, thousands of miles away, loomed closer and closer. Already I dread Quinn going off to school and I still have fifteen years to prepare. I have essentially given up on the hope of Sam understanding this, given up on the idea that we will have shared feelings that will allow us to commiserate. When the scene finally came, and Dreyfus took her daughter to the airport and had to say goodbye outside the gate, I was toast. Tears poured down my cheeks. Snot streamed from my nose. I couldn’t hold it in. I was no longer watching a movie--I was traveling through time, standing in the airport myself, and a grown Quinn, just out of reach, was smiling and waving goodbye. 

Just when I thought I would die of anticipatory sadness, I glanced over at Sam again. 
Tears streamed down his face too. My world was, and is, as it is meant to be. 

Welcome to the World

We first exist in the ether. A loosely formed inquiry about what’s possible, about joy, about responsibility. We are first a question and then an evolving answer. We become Maybe, Hopefully, suspended in the warm waters of the womb. Eventually, we emerge as Yes with the arrival of gravity, and the gravity of it all settles its weight on everyone. We adjust to the pull of the Earth, anchored in the arms of our guardians, adjusting our eyes, our lungs. Finding our way.

And the guardians are finding their way too. The world is different. The path is new. The disorientation is real. “How do you feel?” I asked my friend. “Weird,” she said, with a smile. She is a poet, she has so many choices, and yet “weird” is really the only choice. I know. 

And I know too she and he are in love with their new answer, their new path, and yet no matter how full that love is right now, unbelievably, it still has so much room to grow. In the beginning, we know it only to be new and unfamiliar. As the days unfold, we come to understand, a little more, that it is also old, as old as the Earth and the ether, and we come to sense that that love has emerged from us as if it has always been there, waiting to emerge. We come to understand that this new life is the catalyst, and we are the vessels, and the love is larger than we can ever fully comprehend or explain. 

And yet some of us will spend the rest of our lives trying to comprehend and document and explain. And we will probably not succeed, but we’ll try anyway because first there is the moment, and then there is the attempt to capture the moment, and in that recreation is the re-experiencing, the revisitation of joy, and laughter, the struggle, the lessons, and the profound inexplicable wonder of it all. 

And life proceeds from here in this circular advance through time, moving forward, looping back, swirling as samaras from the maple tree, falling to the Earth, taking root again as fieldings, keeping the ancient, magical love alive.

 Welcome to the world, baby girl. You've landed in a wonderful place. xo


For Corey and Kellam, and for Fielding. 
Wishing all of them joy and love they can feel in their bones.

The Christmas Conundrum

Last December I started worrying about whether or not I would tell Quinn the Santa lie. I was able to put off the decision, temporarily, because at just over two years old, she wasn’t really ready anyway. This year she was more cognitively prepared and I was still ethically unprepared. 

With Thanksgiving just past, and Quinn reminding me daily that we had to do something to make the world more beautiful, we entered into the Christmas season. One weekend, earlier this month, we made our world more beautiful by hanging colored lights on a small spruce tree in our front yard. Quinn loved the process and many nights this month she’s gone out on the front porch in her slippers to admire our “beautiful” tree, lighting up our dark little corner of woods. Soon after hanging the outdoor lights, we put some decorations up inside the house, and started a countdown calendar so Quinn could count the days until Christmas. We hung a green ribbon from the railing next to the stairs in the hopes of receiving holiday cards in the mail, and had a great time each day when they did. Eventually, the weekend before Christmas, we hiked out into our woods to find and cut down a tree.

Through it all, I was testing out the Santa Claus idea with her. “Hey Quinn...have you heard anything about this Santa Claus guy?” I was awkward about it, I knew, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t make it feel natural. I’ve always been terrible at lying--I’m incapable of it really. Quinn had heard of Santa from school, but I could tell she didn’t really get the myth, so I thought if I danced around it, I might have still another year to postpone this difficult decision. And yet even in my talk of “postponing” the decision, I felt more and more sure that I would not actually try to convince her that a man in a red suit would come into her house and leave her presents on Christmas Eve. It’s actually kind of creepy, when you think about it in a certain way.

I started preparing Sam for my decision not to lie to Quinn. I think he understood my desire to be truthful with our daughter but, unlike me, he was very concerned about other people’s kids--worried that Quinn would be the kid who would ruin it all for everyone else. I suggested we find a way to talk about “the magic of Christmas” without Santa being expected to actually arrive. But, before I could fully frame the story, I stumbled on a game changer: an article on the New York Times homepage titled, “Santa on the Brain.” I clicked the link, eagerly looking for something to justify my refusal to participate in the Santa lie, but found instead a thought-provoking argument for making the lie as big and fanciful as possible. 

The author, a neuroscientist and mom named Kelly Lambert, explained some brain-development basics:

Although children are born with a full set of 86 billion brain cells, or neurons, the connections between these neurons are relatively sparse during these early years. As their brains develop — as more and more micro-thread extensions form between neurons, and neurochemicals zap across the tiny gaps — children slowly learn about the rules of the physical world, and the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. Eventually, they learn that reindeer can’t fly, that Santa can’t visit every child’s home in one single night and, even if he could make such a trip, there’s no way he could eat all those cookies. Magical beliefs are pruned away as mature neural circuits reflecting real-world contingencies become solidified.

Lambert goes on to explain that even though children outgrow their early fictional beliefs, the presence of those early fictions might provide benefits to them in adulthood:

...The brain appears to retain a mechanism for neural time travel. By this, I don’t simply mean that adults have warm memories of having believed in Santa Claus. [They may also have developed] mental time travel memories, or M.T.T. These [memories] come closer to re-experiencing a remembered event...Neuroimaging evidence indicates that, when certain events are recalled — presumably after being triggered by familiar sights, smells or sounds — emotional brain areas are activated as well as visceral responses. You relive the feelings you experienced in the past.

Reading this forced me to think about my own Christmas memories. When I was little, Christmas was, truly, the most wonderful time of the year. When the Christmas decorations came out, my parents let me hang a string of colored lights around my bedroom doorframe and I would fall asleep happily every night in that soft glow. We left notes for Santa every year, and cookies we’d find mostly gone, save for a few evidential crumbs, by Christmas morning. My sister and I were literally giddy with excitement for days, if not weeks. And, when the day finally arrived, my father would torture us with further ploys to prolong the anticipation. He would have to go to the living room first to confirm that Santa had actually come, while we waited impatiently at the end of the hall, or upstairs. He would have to make the coffee, put Elvis’s Blue Christmas album on the stereo, and light up the tree before we came down. And for the whole long journey, we’d have a camera pointed in our faces, recording the hope and excitement and finally the confirmation, by virtue of the pile of presents wrapped in paper unlike all the others, that Santa had in fact remembered to include us in the Christmas joy.

To this day, in spite of my desire to avoid the excessive consumerism of the holiday, I love listening to Christmas songs, I love signing, addressing and sending Christmas cards, and I love baking Christmas treats and decorating the house or the tree with our small but growing collection of Christmas ornaments with stories. I still get excited. And I still remember, every year, the time I woke up in the middle of the night and was certain I saw a reindeer leg pumping air outside my second story bedroom window.

My reluctance to tell Quinn the lie, I realized, was not a desire to deny her these Christmas joys, but rather a desire to help her avoid the disappointment of finding out that Santa isn’t actually real. That’s why I’ve been trying to imagine a way to preserve the Christmas spirit, without the lie. But when I reached the conclusion of the neuroscience article, I started to realize the necessity of the fiction. The author herself realized, “For every year I layered another set of Christmas memories into [my girls’] brains, the easier it would be for them to relive those feelings.”  And so, if Quinn is to be able to call up that magic in the future, if she is to have an opportunity to relive the joy in her adulthood around the holidays, it seems I have to lie to her right now. I want Quinn’s experiences of magic to be real, and tangible, rather than just conceptual...rather than just lore.

And so, when Quinn told me one night recently, “I hope Santa will bring me a new baby doll for Christmas,” even though I had already bought her presents, and even though I hate baby dolls, I went out and got her a new one. And when I absentmindedly let her play with the roll of wrapping paper that was going to be just for the Santa presents, I went out and spent another $7 dollars on a different roll, so the Santa presents would stand out as unique and exotic under the tree. On Christmas Eve, I asked Quinn if she wanted to leave Santa some of the peppermint brownies we’d made for friends and family, so he could have a snack if he stopped at our house, and I even wrote a note for her, based on what she wanted to write: “Dear Santa, Cookies are for you.” After that, she signed her own Q.

She went to bed without complaint, understanding that Santa doesn’t stop if you’re still awake. Sam and I stayed up late prepping appetizers and dinner for Christmas day, and wrapping presents, and we were woken up early the next morning by our three year old who was eager to see if Santa had come. She was hard to contain upstairs while I went downstairs to get things ready, and she graciously arrived with a look of surprise when she saw the small pile of Santa presents set aside from the rest. 

It didn’t all go exactly as planned. When I showed Quinn the crumbs left on the plate, certain she would be excited that Santa had eaten and enjoyed the treat she left for him, she burst into tears and stormed away. I followed her to ask what was the matter. “I wanted those!” she screamed, and she continued crying for at least five minutes. Seems we still have some work to do on just how this whole Santa thing works. In the meantime, it was a good start, and it felt okay, for now, to tell this white Christmas lie.

As for me, I worked hard to do my Christmas part. I got the granddaughter to Massachusetts to see her Nonna and Poppa, Aunt Amy, Uncle Scott and her boy cousins, and I got her home in time to host her Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Josh and Aunt Geraldine and cousin Olivier, as well as her Aunt Becs and cousins Tyrus and Cameron just back from California. Everyone had presents under the tree and was hopefully well fed through the holiday. I made cranberry orange scones for breakfast (reminiscent of my grandmother’s cranberry bread she used to make for me), and Louise's egg and sausage casserole. We had bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with blue cheese in the afternoon with shrimp cocktail and champagne, and a smoked ham for dinner with sautéed green beans and a rosemary potato galette. Everyone seemed content: reading books, playing with toys, video-chatting with the one missing Jackson sibling and her family in Spain.

By Christmas evening, as the last of the presents were opened, I was exhausted and felt a cold coming on, as well as a bit of anti-climax. That’s when I was forced to assess what Christmas means to me now. It’s not the presents that matter, but the anticipation of it all and the rituals. I love receiving Christmas cards in the mail from friends and family all around. 

And I love that students come back home to Vermont and want to see us. Since we said goodbye to the family on the 27th, we’ve been welcoming a rotating series of former students - now friends, to hear their latest stories. I love the surprise phone call from an old friend far away. That’s what’s wonderful to me now about Christmastime: people remembering other people, making time to say hello. That and my memories of childhood Christmases with my family. Not remembered magic, but magic re-experienced.

The day after Christmas I put the leftover hambone in a stock pot on the stove. I’d never bought a ham before, and hadn’t had a spiral sliced ham in many years--since we used to celebrate Easter at my grandmother’s. Every year, after Easter, my grandmother made split pea soup and it was one of the things I most loved. I’d never made split pea soup with ham before. It simmered on the stove for hours, and when I finally tasted a spoonful, the sweet smokiness transported me back to her dining room, on a day when we would have tea, just the two of us. I’m convinced the time travel is real. Magic, done right, can be relived. 

For me, 2013 has been a magical year and I'm grateful for every minute of it.

Here’s hoping 2014 is a magical year for everyone. 

Happy Holidays.

Weathering It

On a recent Saturday evening, we had come home a bit late from a splurge dinner out with friends to celebrate our sixth anniversary. My November funk had persisted and, after weeks of going through these work and family motions feeling disconnected from Sam, I had a hard time shaking my literal and psychological fatigue. “Are we even in love any more?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied, “We are. That’s what gets us through the times when we feel like we’re not in love.” Sam will go long periods of time without saying anything at all, but when he's down to the wire to avoid disaster, he usually says just the right thing. I went to bed willing to put a seemingly "inevitable" divorce off for at least a bit longer.

When I woke up the next morning, on our actual anniversary, the world and the house were still dark. My thoughts were too, but less so. I tried to clear the sleep from my head as I approached the stairs to take Quinn down to the kitchen for her glass of warm syrupy milk and my coffee. We were feeling our way from step to step, and long before I reached the island light switch, the smell of the storm ahead reached my nose. I put Quinn next to the tree post and told her to stay there while I tread carefully around the first floor, turning on lights as I followed my nose to the smell: a literal shit storm was about to begin and it started with a cold pile in the middle of the living room rug.

This is the third November in a row that’s found me feeling depressed; by now I recognize it as a pattern, and patterns are meant to be analyzed. So why, in this month that marks my birthday and my wedding anniversary and my favorite of all holidays, Thanksgiving, why now would I feel so persistently sad? Add to this the fact that in November I am largely relieved of my teaching duties as kids ship off to points west for ski training, and it all seems so illogical. As I scrambled around in my pre-coffee haze, trying to clean up the mound of fecal matter, a few answers started to come to mind.

First is that without the structure of school, Sam and I often flounder. I especially need the sense of purpose that my job provides, and without it unproductive days and hours pass and I feel dissatisfied, at best, if not completely unhappy. I love my job and I love to work. So, while I expect to enjoy the bit of extra time “off,” I haven’t yet managed to find a rhythm for myself in that undefined time. But, this is a fixable problem…

What I do end up doing in that available time is scheduling all the things that are hard to otherwise fit in: doctor’s appointments, tire changes, etc. And this brings me to the second challenge of November. In recent years, my doctor’s appointments haven’t been as uneventful as they used to be, nor nearly as uneventful as I’d like them to be. This month, still trying to solve some early skin cancer spots on my face, I had to do a 14 day topical chemo-therapy treatment. My face looked like a pepperoni pizza and my vanity was equally inflamed. What my still-not-annual physical turned up, ironically, is that my vitamin D level is insufficient, explaining my low energy and moodiness. (And here I was thinking it was just the result of being a Scorpio!?) My skin is telling me too much sun, and my blood is telling me not enough! Fortunately, this is fixable too…

Finally, November brings Vermont fully into the throes of hunting season. While I appreciate the notion of truly fresh meat, and the New England self-sufficiency that informs the hunting tradition, I hate knowing that each day there are beautiful wild animals being hauled from these acres of woods in the backs of pickup trucks. On our little horseshoe road, we rarely see anyone pass by most of the year; in hunting season there is a steady stream of slow driving, broad scanning hunters. I hear gunshots from inside the house. And, worst of all, our dogs manage to find gut piles and bones left behind in the woods. And when they find them, they eat them. And when they eat them, they regurgitate them and then eat them again.

I put the dogs’ orange vests on that morning and sent them outdoors into the predawn dark while I resentfully cleaned the rug. Some time later, when I had forgiven Moses for his dastardly deposit in our living room (Boone would have barked to go out), I heard them return to the front porch and went to let them back in. Boone almost made it past me into the house when I spotted the green-brown sludge on his shoulder. While I don’t know what he rolled in, I know I didn’t want it inside so I sent them back out. When Sam eventually woke up, I told him about the shit storm that was well underway. He was determined to have his coffee before going out to scrub Boone in the cold. That was until I spotted Boone eating something over by my vegetable garden. Sam must have seen Moses throw up there because when I drew his attention to it, he panicked. “No! Boone! No!” He grabbed his jacket and ran out the door. Quinn and I opened the upstairs window to peer out just in time to watch Boone throw up some sort of fully intact organ. By the time Sam finally cleaned Boone and came back inside, it was Moses’ turn. Without even getting up from his bed, he threw up a green slime that was so pungent, I ran to the window to gag.

Some hours later, when rugs and floors and orange vests and dogs and their beds were all cleaned, I felt my November funk fully dissolve as Sam and I gave in to laughter and hugged in the kitchen, commenting on the very unromantic nature of our sixth anniversary. I never tire of these metaphors: life is a shit storm sometimes, and you’re lucky if you have someone to weather it with. I felt a new appreciation for my partner that morning, thanks to those ridiculous dogs. 

And in the nearly two weeks since, as I’ve studied this recent November pattern, I’ve been reminded of some important facts, about my life and my relationship with Sam. 

Sam’s mom and dad sent us a card for our anniversary, one that in a supreme irony pictured a dog sleeping between two people in a bed. What they wrote inside brought me back to one thing that’s especially good in our relationship:

In these recent three years, we’ve been forced to be constantly connected to each other in a way that isn’t quite natural for us. We haven’t been able to truly function independently in a long time, save for a couple of brief outings each of us has had in the past year or so. And that’s the thing: we need more of those, in order to more fully appreciate our time together, and continue "forging forth in all of the essentials." Acknowledging this might help us feel a renewed commitment to the vows we each wrote six years ago. Looking back on them now, I’m as surprised as I was on our wedding day, by how they are almost exactly the same, even though we wrote them separately and unveiled them to each other only just before our ceremony:

For me, Sam wrote this: “I promise to keep alive our desire to explore the world--from what is in our backyard to what is overseas--and to keep seeking out adventure and experience, whether it is traveling to new places or building a house or starting a family...I promise to give you the space to walk away when you need to be alone, to be your own person for a moment...I promise to love you and support you unconditionally, in good times and bad…”

And for Sam, I wrote this: “I promise to honor you each day as best as I can, by being near you when you need me, and by letting you go when you need that of me. I promise to be a partner who encourages your dreams, one who supports your personal adventures and who gladly participates in those you want to share. I promise to love you unconditionally, in good times and bad…”

In spite of my tendency to see life in absolutes--as in: because we are not, in this specific moment, enjoying one another’s company, we must, absolutely, be destined for divorce--Sam and I have not really had any truly bad times. I forget, sometimes, that there can be a third or fourth or fifth category, other than good or bad. The weeks spanning October and early November, for example, seem to fall somewhere outside of both good and bad. And, as Quinn would say, "that's just the way it is!"

Fortunately there is Thanksgiving to help me put things back into perspective and take stock of all the things I’m truly thankful for. This year, among many things, I’m especially grateful for this guy:

And the warm house he built me, and the beautiful sunrises he made sure I could see each morning.

And I’m grateful for this kid, my hero, who woke up on the day before my birthday and, before saying anything else, told me: “Mom! You need to show up for your family. You need to show up for your life. And you need to ‘make the world more beautiful.’” *

I’m not kidding, or exaggerating, or writing fiction...she actually said that. And she’s right. So that’s what I’m trying to do right now...trying to show up and appreciate all there is to appreciate: my family, all of them, on both sides, and those dear friends who are family too, my "voluntary kin," and the adventures that have made me who I am, and those I have yet to experience, and this beautiful chunk of Vermont woods that is my church. 

I’m thankful for all of it, and you: thank you for reading my stories. Happy Thanksgiving.






*If you haven't already, you should read Miss Rumphius too, a wonderful book given to us by wonderful people: Roni & Matt & Megan and Ben Luck. It's made an important impression on Quinn, and us. 

The In-Between

We’re just coming off a nearly seven week stretch of continuous work days. Some of my “work” is just participation in school-related events, and some of those events are really wonderful occasions: the engagement of two former students (one a young woman who backpacked on the Long Trail with me for almost three weeks, and the other a young man who lived with us when we were dorm parents for a group of kids), the celebration for another former student who is beginning medical school, the annual fall musical, the boys’ soccer team playing in the state championship game. It’s all good stuff, and I love what I do, but when I add to this the actual work, whole months can go by without me stopping to notice, without getting any exercise, without any dinners with Sam that aren’t pressured by reading or grading that needs to get done. A whole seven weeks of Quinn have passed in a relative blur.

When so much time passes like that, I start to get run down, worried that I’m missing important things or wasting precious days. And then, when I’m out of practice being mindful, or I’m out of any potential routine of eating well and exercising, I worry that I’ll be so far gone from healthy that I won’t be able to ever get it back. I sit down to write and don’t have anything to say. I look in the mirror and don’t have anything to say. I stop sleeping.

But in the nearly two months since I last sat down to write, some wonderful things have happened. I went to my twentieth college reunion with my three best friends. We had a tiny little hotel room for two nights, with two tiny beds for the four of us, and we were happy and without complaint. When everyone arrived, we fell immediately into old patterns. Each set of former roommates gravitated automatically to sharing a bed. We laughed for hours, told and listened to stories, retraced some of our old steps: running a morning 5k together, climbing to the top of the fire escape that looks out over the lake, sitting at the bar, four in a row, at the brewery where we used to always go. I still live near our old stomping grounds, but for some reason I never go to the old places we went. College was a pretty magical time; it’s just not the same without them. 

Still, none of us would go back if we could. Life is too sweet right now, with all of us still living in the happy here and now--no divorces so far, no cancers yet, no teenage crises or traumas to endure. It’s all just stories of trying to keep it all afloat, stories of funny moments and the shared insanities of the little people in our lives. For now, it’s all just a looking forward to more brightness still to come.

Quinn has been wearing her coon skin cap a lot these days; often with Mardi Gras beads.

And there was a lot of brightness with Quinn in this past month and a half too. We've made continued progress treating each other kindly and dealing with the meltdowns--hers and our own. One tired morning, after barely getting out the door, Quinn called to us from her car seat. When she points, she uses her middle finger. She wagged that middle finger at us from the back seat and lectured us all the way to school: "Mom! Dad! I do not like those angry faces. I want you to work on making happy choices today, okay? I am so serious about this. Happy choices! OKAY?" By the time we arrived at her school, she insisted we needed to hug each other and make up, even though we had never been fighting. We're just spreading the love around it seems, around and around and..."Mom! That will make Dad so happy right now, okay? Go ahead...give him a hug." 

Quinn is also starting to take ownership of some "chores" around the house these days, like plugging in all the white lights when we come home to a dark house, setting the placemats and napkins on the table for dinner, crumpling paper to start a fire in the wood stove. She's in a "big girl" bed, with the front finally off of her crib, and she's quite proud of that. She went to see Shrek the musical with me at school, which she loved and still talks about, and she went trick-or-treating for the first time on Halloween (just to one house, my friend Meg's across from Quinn's school). Quinn chose her own Halloween costume of course--she wanted to be a butterfly--and she made suggestions for ours too: she thought I should be a "scary tiger mom," which I thought was ironic, and she wanted Sam to be "a scary princess," which I thought was, well, hilarious.

Quinn and Ansley were Meg's first trick or treaters in her new house.

This is the slightly more put together outfit Quinn wore for her school Halloween Party.

These are the things I need to remember when the malaise of early November starts to set in. After the leaves have fallen, and the cold has settled, and the clocks have been turned back to add more darkness, I have to carry the bright spots with me as I enter the nebulous transition to winter. It is undefined time, a place I’m not good at being, and if I'm not careful I can lose track of myself in these grey days.

Driving home from a friend’s the other night, after a much needed break, a gigantic owl dipped down in front of my windshield and glided in front of me over the dark dirt road. I hadn’t seen one in a long time. At four o’clock this morning, I woke suddenly to the yip and howl of a coyote in my back woods. I haven’t been able to write anything in weeks, but peering out into darkness, the coyote in one ear, Quinn’s sleeping breath nearby in the other, I wanted to open my computer right then. Finally, I thought, I feel awake.

At six o’clock I came downstairs to let the dogs out and was happily surprised to be greeted by winter--three fresh inches of beautiful white snow. I watched the first spot of light begin to grow on the clouds over the ridge. Quinn padded quietly down the stairs. 

“Hi, Mama.” 
“Good morning, sweet pea.”
“Wanna know how many times I love you?”
“I do.”
“I love you like crazy…”

The syntax is whacky, but that’s the beauty of it, of course. 

“Mom? Wanna look at the mountain with me?”
“I do.”
“What colors do you like best?”

All of them, thanks to you Quinn; I like all of them.