Unwell

Feverish and feverish children so not tonight...

In the Moment, Not Always What You Feel Like

I have a very hard time taking the long view. Everything always seems so intense and irrevocable to me in the minute, and I so often find myself desperately wishing I were the kind of person who would ever be described as happy-go-lucky or go-with-the-flow. I also have a very bad habit of living in my head during times of crisis, of feeling unable to reach out to people who might be able to help me or counsel me. I'm not sure why this is so. 

I don't mean to be cryptic, or alarmist. In fact, 2009 is, as I hoped, taking a different path thus far than 2008, and much is good here on 16th Street. But this has been a very difficult week, and all I can say is that when I returned home this evening after two long-scheduled events at which my presence was required, I was very glad to be able to smile when I noticed that both dogs were spotted all over with stickers. Scout had one right in the middle of his nose.

Breathe. This is my message for the day. Just breathe.

Dinnertime

Because clearly I have a strong sadomasochistic streak, when it seems even remotely feasible, I try to have dinner together as a family. Sometimes, when I have been working all afternoon, and come back home right at six, and the girls have not seen Ben all day, and the dogs have not been fed or walked, and the girls are overtired, and I haven't prepared any food in advance, it is almost as though a neon sign is hanging in the kitchen doorway, a sign that reads: This. Is. A. Very. Bad. Idea.  But often I do it anyway.

Tonight, for example, the apartment was a mess, I was exhausted and had a lot on my mind, Lily was yawning already at 5, and I insisted--to myself--on making the shrimp scampi and snow peas I had planned at a rare mellow moment over the weekend. By the time we sat down at 6:45, 15 minutes before I like to start bedtime, the dogs had managed to steal a number of shrimp tails, Annika had managed to eat a piece of the travel Connect Four game, and Lily had managed to bring half of her bedroom into the living room as part of her new "I am going to Mexico" game, which I like to call "How to Make as Giant a Mess as Possible Involving Everything We Own."

We sat down. Lily requested water and milk and proceeded to balance both cups on the very edge of the table, looking at me sideways as she did so. Annika downed her pasta and shrimp in three seconds and then started shrieking. There was a comment by the aforementioned patience-tester about "this shape of pasta, which is not my exact favorite shape," which was met by a stare so frosty it should have left icicles on the speaker's eyelashes, but instead set off a monologue on how "little bits of green stuff" so often ruin otherwise delicious food. Annika stuffed all her snowpeas into her cup and then tried to drink them. This made even me laugh, irritable as I was, causing her to repeat the sequence over and over again, allowing Lily to distract us from the fact that she had eaten precisely nothing. 

I looked around. The floor was coated with a light layer of dog hair and chewed-up snowpea bits, rejected by the canine cleanup squad. Lily and Annika were dressed in half-costume/half-pajama ensembles with bunches of their hair pulled back in elastics, thanks to Lily's newfound interest in hair accessories. The lights were off in the small living room because the wiring had blown, and the floor in there was covered with pieces of toys. Annika was shrieking again. Lily still hadn't eaten a bite of her dinner, which Ben was hungrily eyeing. I had a big glass of wine in front of me, bags under my eyes and part of Annika's earlier banana rubbed into my sweater and pants. The dogs lay on either side of the high chair. As I watched, Annika threw down a shrimp. They both lunged.

I suspect I am meant to think that someday, when I am very old and sitting alone in front of a television set with a tray on my lap, I will look back on these meals and long for the days of chaos and mess. I might; some part of me probably will. But another part of me might sink deep into my cushy recliner chair, in my clean, unsnotted on robe, and breathe a satisfying sigh of relief. I'm just saying.

Eye of the Storm

I forgot! I am not writing on weekends anymore! Now I can take tomorrow off to make up for extra Saturday post. Just kidding. I actually feel like writing (this is a good thing, right?), so I will, a little.

When I was a kid, I developed a theory that there were two kinds of families. There were families like mine, where most of the time it was just us, and sometimes we had friends over, or a party, but there were not people dropping by at all times of day or night, running through the doors to the backyard and back in again, making themselves at home and feeling as comfortable as we did in our house. And then. Then there were the kind of families that mostly existed in some of the books I read or television shows I watched and occasionally encountered in my actual life. These families were part of large and lively, fluid households, households in which when whoever had cooked called everyone to come to the table it was a mystery who would actually appear in the dining room. 

I had a friend in middle school who had three brothers and lived in a large, rambling house on a very populated street with a barn set up for the kids, a pond for swimming, and an expansive lawn with a trampoline. I loved being at her house for the night or the weekend: children running in and out, dozens of them sometimes. People were always spilling out of the guest bedrooms, curled up in sleeping bags in the den or the barn. There were tents and coolers, outdoor radios, even an old-fashioned player piano. It felt like being in a novel or a movie, in fact, and every time I drove away from her house, leaving behind as much commotion and activity as I had found upon my arrival, I felt wistful, knowing that I was headed back to the relative quiet of my own home, in the woods, five acres from the closest house, where the loudest anyone ever got was to yell down the stairs to the basement to ask the person doing laundry to remember to turn off the light.

It's funny; I can barely remember my friend's mother in all of that chaos. I do remember one scene: pre-dawn on a morning we were all going skiing. Eight or nine kids sat around her enormous kitchen table, as she doled out bowls of food, smiling at one child, patting another on the head. I don't remember if she had any help with those four children, although I don't think so, and I do remember that she was very young. Even then, I thought she seemed young.

As a child I wanted that kind of chaos. I wanted a home where if somebody dropped by, music would be playing and something would be cooking on the stovetop, children would be running in and out and all over the furniture, dogs barking, bells ringing, voices calling, everything and everyone in motion. I didn't know enough to want stillness and solitude. I had it when I needed it, and that was plenty. The funny thing is that even in these days when I am so rarely alone, so rarely peaceful and still, I still crave that chaos, and I still love it when I stop moving--just for an instant--and realize I am standing in the middle of what I hath wrought. In these moments, I suspect my ten-year-old self would be particularly pleased.

The Remaining Fifteen (Or Ten, If I Get Too Tired or Lose My Nerve)

11) As I write right now I am seated on a cushion my sister made from cloth she found with collies printed on it and stuffed with fur she had secretly gathered from our first dog's brushings, which will not sound as bizarre if you know my sister. It is okay to think this is a little disgusting. It is. 

12) I spent almost every August until I was well into my twenties on Martha's Vineyard, and the path to Lambert's Cove Beach will always be my favorite walk in the world.

13) I once had a Diet Coke problem and could drink a two-liter bottle or more every day. I stopped altogether one day years ago for no real reason and switched to coffee, and it is only this year that I have started to enjoy an occasional soda, although I now prefer the fountain version to bottles or cans. I realize this, more so than most of these also picayune items, is of zero interest to anyone, including myself.

14) At one point when I was a teenager and training six days a week I had to decide if I wanted to pursue ballet as a career, to try to become a professional dancer, and I decided against it. I have never regretted this decision, but I often miss ballet and sometimes realize I am standing in first or fifth position when waiting for the subway or standing in line.

15) I am still in touch with my eighth grade French exchange student, who lives in Paris and seems just as glamourous and exciting as she did when we were both fourteen.  She took me to my first nightclub in 1984, and I remember that Kool and the Gang was playing on what seemed like an endless loop and her boyfriend, to my shock, was 21.

16) I am defensive about being considered domestic but am expert at the hardcore, old-fashioned domestic arts. I can make jam, can tomatoes, pickle cucmbers, sew by hand and machine, embroider and quilt. I have a sewing basket. I have made many samplers. This item was the hardest to write, and I will regret it later; it gets to the supressed but real part of me that wishes I were a glass-ceiling-breaking CEO.

17) I find organizing, as in linen closets, bookshelves, cabinets, very satisfying, but am a legitimate slob and only mind piles of dust and dog hair because I know they are considered socially unacceptable. 

18) Until my 30s I thought my head looked really weird when my hair was in a ponytail, so I never wore one. Since giving birth to my first child, my hair has been pulled back in a loop approximately 95% of the time.

19) I hate buying things in restaurants, bakeries or food stores that I can make better myself. I will spend a lot of money on and time seeking out the best versions of food that I can't or won't ever make, such as croissants, sourdough bread, cheese, toffee, chocolate and crackers.

20) I vividly remember my mother standing at the counter eating crackers and cheese in the evenings with a glass of white wine, and this always did, and still does, seem somehow elegant to me.

21) I hate exercise for the sake of exercise and only do it when I feel I absolutely have to, although I used to love playing team sports and can walk for hours in the city. I only added the last part of that sentence so I wouldn't seem lazy. I hate exercise.

22) My earliest memory is of sitting around a little table in preschool at snack time and feeling mortified that the sound of my chewing--graham crackers--was so loud. Years later I realized that chewing sounds much louder to the chewer than it does to anybody else and felt only somewhat mollified that nobody else could have noticed the sound.

23) When I got married I had to give up down due to my husband's allergies, and when I am at a hotel or a friend's house where the bed is layered in puffy, feather-filled comforters and pillows it now seems a tremendous, blissful luxury. I actively miss my down comforter and pillows.

24) I really wish I could sing and worship those I love who can do so.

25) I adore lists like this, reading them more than writing them, and would be happy if every single person I knew were required to fill one out and send it to me. I would pore over them and remember every line. 

Ten in Ten. Not as Hard as I'd Thought.

1) I love fried food of all kinds. My friend Nicole's mother once said that what I really liked was the "fried," by which she meant the coating. She was right. 

2) I do not have that thing that so many people I know do where I cannot watch movies or television shows in which harm comes to a child. However, I cannot watch an animal in peril on screen and must avert my eyes.

3) That being said, I often feel I enjoy the companionship of children at least as much if not more than that of most adults and love my own children far more than I ever imagined possible. 

4) I studied Swedish for four years in college and at one point, ill-advisedly--or perhaps irrelevantly--had this on my resume: Conversational Swedish. This was, even then, pretty much a lie, although I can still say these sentences: "I can speak a little Swedish. I can buy reindeer meat. I have a little elf. His name is Sven." Seriously.

5) For a brief period in seventh grade, frustrated by the ordinariness of my name, I spelled it as follows, alternating versions as it suited me: Aimee, Ame with an accent over the "e" and Ami, with a heart instead of an "i." Oy.

6) I will remain loyal to the Boston sports teams even if I stay in New York for the rest of my life, and do not mind being the only Celtics fan in Madison Square Garden or Red Sox fan in Yankee Stadium. It is very important to me that my children understand the importance of this and follow in my footsteps, created in the footsteps of my father before me.

7) I love, in no predetermined order, hot baths, reading in bed, the beach, and beaches on islands in particular, red tulips, red toenails, mechanical pencils, convertibles, eating tomatoes off the vine in my own garden, hammocks, potato chips, the Rolling Stones and Buddy Holly, frosting--straight up, no cake, big dogs, sledding, strong and/or triple-creme cheese, tart lemonade, basketball, baseball caps, mittens not gloves, boots not shoes, and unselfconscious people.

8) Emerson's essays "Self-Reliance" and "Experience" have been very important to me since I was a teenager and I read them both regularly.

9) I subscribe to, and read, both the New Yorker and US Weekly and believe this makes me well-rounded.

10) I know, with 100% certainty, that if I called my parents at any time, day or night, and told them I needed them, they would be in the car in 30 seconds, and I want nothing more than for my children to feel the exact same way.

No Title, Just Some Thoughts on Parent Friends

Missed yesterday because I was out in the country with the girls and two newish and delightfully appealing friends, who both have kids of their own.

Which transitions nicely into a conversation I had just this week with a close friend--male, single, no kids--about the phenomenon of "parent friends." He was asking if most of my friends now were moms and dads of kids that were peers of mine, and I was scoffing at the notion, at the idea that I had entered parenthood as a way of building a social circle. As if I didn't have friends already--like you, buddy, the one asking the question--and had abandoned the idea altogether that friendship was based on compatibility, shared likes and values, and that intangible factor called, for lack of a more specific term, chemistry.

But then, as I drove back into the city from our country retreat, I found myself feeling so grateful for the friends I have made as a parent, because of our kids, initially, and how there is actually something very real and profoundly helpful and even soul-saving about having friends whose parenting makes me feel safe and validated and sometimes even inspired. I learn from my friends who are parents, and I don't think it's a coincidence that I so often love their children, too: fierce and unquenchable, watchful and so often delighted, complicated and wise--so many people--adults and children--have come into  my life since becoming a mother, and some of them have become true and valued friends. 

My thoughts are scattered: I want to write about the fact that the way you parent can make for the foundation, at least, of friendship, about the joyful rolling of enormous, straw-filled snowballs in a white, white field under a gray sky with a charming, witty man who will do a headstand to make children smile and has honed fatherhood into an art and a gracious, lovely woman who appears to serve as an example of how to live for many, about how in the end, friendship is still about the same things it always has been if reached by different routes, and more, but I think I will go to sleep instead, for now, and sleep the satisfying sleep of a person who is rich in her friends, old and new, and striving for gratitude, more and more every day.

Sometimes a List is Just a List

So I didn't think about my twenty-five things list all day long, and then tonight, when I sat down to write, all I could come up with was single item. Seriously, I sat and sat, and thought and thought, and this is what I came up with. For the sake of optimisim, implying that the rest will eventually follow, I will call it item #12. 

I almost always buy and keep limes and lemons in my kitchen, but I rarely use them and am often forced to throw them away when they are shriveled and hard.

Why? Why in a day when so many things happened to and around me, a day in which I made cheese omelets, played giant dominos, had a conference about a 14-year-old boy who was the only student in his class to actually wear his pajamas to Pajama Day, poured bleach, polished glasses, mixed tuna salad, trimmed lily stems, discussed the book Twilight with a group of heavy hitters, brushed dogs, braided hair, visited Brooklyn, sent text messages, hid malted milk balls, and so many other equally irrelevant or mundane undertakings, is the lemon/lime item what came to my mind? 

I'm not sure. And my point is only this: I need to make this stupid list so I can check it off one of my other unfinished lists and move on. For all our sake.

I will add one more item off the cuff, off the top of my head, right damn now, to move things along a little more. Okay. Here goes:

I love karaoke, but only the kind in a private room not at a restaurant, and one of my favorite songs to perform is "The Tide is High" by Blondie. I sing it loudly and with much enthusiasm, but poorly. Once about ten years ago I sang a duet of "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" with my friend Jenny at an outdoor restaurant in Florida. This was the last time I have done public karaoke.

Twenty-five Reasons to Find Me Annoying, TK

If you are on Facebook, or maybe even if you're not, you have caught wind of these "Twenty-Five Things" lists that have been making the rounds over the past couple of weeks. The premise is simple: basically, somebody makes a list of twenty-five "random" facts about him or herself, then sends it on to 25 people, who are meant to do the same thing, making sure to send their own list back to the person who originated the chain for them. 

By this point, I have been "tagged" by a number of people to make my own list, and after having read dozens--those compiled by friends as well as strangers, people whose lists are available to me by virtue of a common friend--it is time to bite the bullet and do my own.

Except I can't quite do it. Yet. Let me try to explain. I love these sorts of things. Many if not most of my closest friends find them excruciatingly annoying and juvenile, and yet every time something of this ilk crosses my path, I beg them to do it, motivated by my own curiosity as to what they will say. I love finding out things I didn't know about my friends, but more, I love seeing how they approach the questions, in such different ways from each other and from me. I love both being surprised and having my assumptions affirmed, when I see someone answering questions the way I would have predicted they would answer them. And I love that I read them so openly. Although I can be very judgmental in real life, in this type of scenario, I always cut people maximum slack. 

So why have I not been able to come up with twenty-five random things about me? I have, many times over, in my head, usually as I am taking a shower or walking to the subway, but in the cold light of day--or rather in the presence of my computer--the facts seem too random, oversharing of the worst kind, and I fear being judged--not just judged in general but being deemed some kind of person based on the compilation of items that I don't necessarily want to be seen as.

This is, I know, childish, and what's more, it defeats the purpose, which is to lightheartedly and in the moment come up with a quick list of things that come to mind. But I am an overthinker, an anxiety-prone, self-conscious, navel-gazer who knows that if anyone even reads my list, they will give it less thought afterward than it took me to write item 1. Still, I overthink and analyze. If I write that I love fried food, do I need to then come up with another item that reveals my gourmet side? If I write that I am double-jointed in my fingers do I run the risk of just seeming like a person who needs to get an actual hobby, or, dare I say it, a life?

Even in writing about my inability to write my twenty-five list I am overthinking, ruining the spontaneity of a fun little exercise with my neurotic streak and self-regard. But it does give me some more ideas for my list. Which might, just so I can finish it and shut up about it, be posted here tomorrow. I bet you can hardly wait. 

New Moon

I think I was in third grade the first time I heard the expression, "In like a lion, out like a lamb." Do you know it? It refers to the month of March, and it works both ways. In other words, if March begins with snowstorms and weather drama, then it will end with a soft and seamless entry into spring, and if it begins with mild, calm weather, winter will rage on into April.

I found myself thinking of this expression in another context today when I realized that yesterday I had written my 364th entry here, which means that I went over my initially daunting one year goal without even realizing it! I knew it was coming, sure. I've even written about it here. But when it actually happened, it was without commemoration on my part. 

And I have come to a decision, based only in part on that: on the fact that writing here has become, as hoped, a part of my routine as ingrained as my morning cup of coffee. It's just something that I do. Will keep doing. As I continue, however, I will be taking weekends off. Sevenhundredfiftywordsfivedaysaweek? No need to mess with the title. Just know, if you're reading, I'm skipping Saturdays and Sundays on purpose, not hiding from you in the shadows of cyberspace or in the bathtub with a magazine.

And I am going to devote less time to analyzing what I'm writing, and why, and to explaining either here. The original point of the blog, to make writing a part of my everyday life, is enough, I have decided, without apologies or backpedaling. 

Besides, more and more, I am seeing the beauty in the everyday, those entries I initially worry are so slight and trivial they will drift off the screen into the air of your offices and living rooms, into mine. The older I get, the less appeal I find in the big punch, the fireworks accompanied by the symphony capped off by the popping of the cork in the bottle of champagne. 

It may be, for now, that I am meant to be writing about the moon-shaped night-light Lily got for her birthday that is mounted on the wall and cycles through the phases of the real moon for thirty minutes after I put the girls to bed. Now, since I hung it across from their beds, Lily puts her hands behind her head on the pillow and gazes happily at it as it waxes and wanes, as though she were lying on a blanket in a field under an actual starry sky. And Annika, eyes shining, stands in her crib, leaning on the bar as far out as she can to get closer to it, saying, pointing, "Moon! Moon. Moon."

Thank you for listening, for helping me continue, for making it worth it, for reminding me why I write and who I am. Good-night. Another year begins.

What I Might Have Missed

Tonight was our third visit to Gilda's Club with Sadie, our collie who became a certified therapy dog this winter. It had been a long day, and I was tired. Lily was tired, too, although she would never admit it, and we had family over for dinner. It would have been so easy not to go, to stay home and finish more of the take-out food we'd ordered, have another glass of wine, put the girls to bed, early, lie on the couch for the rest of the night.

It's always so easy to do the easier thing. Although there are exceptions to these rules, in general it's easier to stay in than go out, lie down than get up, hang back than plunge in, judge than do, and on and on ad infinitum. But these days I am trying to pass over the easier, lazier choice whenever I can, even when it takes a Herculean effort just to say no the devil on my shoulder, who is sedentary, slothful and mean.

So I got Lily out of there, out of a home filled with food and people, into an unseasonably warm evening with a willing, vest-wearing, oblivious dog. We walked as fast as we could up the street to the brick building that houses Gilda's Club, down to the basement where the group sessions for grieving children are held.

Many of the usual suspects were there, both dogs and children, and Lily--whose devil seems prone mostly to whining, thus far--plunged right in. I hung back to take off my coat and was immediately approached by a small girl, who told me her name was Victoria and that she was almost nine years old. "Do you like to be called Vicki?" I asked. 

"No," she said. "My math teacher calls me that." 

"Okay," I said. "Victoria." I sat, Sadie lay down, and Victoria sat next to us, putting her arms around Sadie and petting her head. 

"Do you know why I'm here?" she asked, finally.

"Why?" I said. I knew we weren't supposed to initiate conversations with the kids about their experience, but this was the first time it had ever come up.

"My mother died," she said, continuing to pet Sadie, whose tail was thwacking against the rug in a pleased sort of way. I didn't say anything, just waited. "We have a black lab, but my mother's favorite dog was a collie. She had the movie Lassie, and it was the first movie we ever saw with her." She gestured across the room, where an even younger boy, who looked just like her, was playing with one of the other dogs. I suddenly knew I needed to speak or I would start to cry instead.

"Well, I'm really glad Sadie got to meet you," I said. "She knows when somebody really appreciates collies." Victoria nodded, and I closed my eyes tight, opened them, and watched her pet Sadie, just sit there and pet her, for the rest of the visit, as the other children and dogs mingled and played all around us. Motherless, fatherless children, with the exception of mine.

When it was time to go, I called Lily over and asked Victoria to hold Sadie's leash while I put on our coats.

"Will you be back next time?" she asked. 

You can count on it, Victoria. And from this point on, it will be the easiest decision I ever make.

A Little Dylan Thomas for the 94th Year

Because I was the kind of kid who seethed when I was told I was overtired, I know I will be the kind of old lady who rages when (and I guess one can only hope, here) my children treat me like a child. 

My grandmother is not one for rage. I have seen her express real irritation a few times, but that is the extent of it. It's just not who she is. If there ever was any rage, or is still, it is so effectively suppressed that it does not even simmer below the surface, alerting those who watch carefully to its existence. It's simply not there.

This has always been a bit of a wall between me and my grandmother. Or, as she is not aware of the wall's existence, I should say that it has caused me some distress in terms of my inability to better understand her. Anger and I are fairly well-acquainted, mostly in a healthy way, I like to think.

Although I know it sounds strange, I have always found it secretly refreshing, or rather reassuring, when my grandmother's irritation shows, peeking out at the edges, like a slip at a hemline. The fact that the irritation is usually targeted at my mother, who is my grandmother's oldest child and primary caretaker, complicates all this. 

Basically, my grandmother knows that she needs help but resents it, likes being taken care of and wishes she didn't need to be. When she takes my mother's arm to walk across an icy driveway, it is with both relief and something less innocuous. If you look closely, you can see it: a tinge of yellow resentment.

This past weekend, I drove to my grandmother's house, where my mother makes it possible for her to live alone. I was going to pick her up and bring her back to my parents' house, to spend the rest of the day with us before we had to drive back home. As I walked out the door, my mother instructed me to help her get the right Valentine gifts, as she'd wrapped them for all of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and to take her arm to walk to the car.

When I pulled up in my grandmother's driveway, I was on the phone, finishing up a call, and in the 20 seconds it took to say good-bye and hang up, my grandmother not only--to my surprise--heard the car pull in, but selected the right gifts out of her enormous pile of them and walked all the way out the front door by herself. I jumped out and grabbed her arm before she could take a step on the driveway. "What are you doing?" I asked. "You're going to get me in trouble." She grimaced and tried to shake off my arm.

"I'm fine," she said. "Don't you walk over here. You'll slip on the ice." I walked around with her anyway, holding lightly but walking close so I could break a fall if it happened. I let her get into the seat by herself, but I stood there, just in case. And then, I walked back around and got in the driver's seat.

On the way back home we saw the biggest snowman I have ever seen. I pulled over by the side of the road, and we both stared out her window. The family who lived in the house was standing around the snowman, and the father of the family was less than half as tall as the snowman. It must have been fifteen feet tall. I asked if I could take a picture to show my five-year-old and they said sure, so I did, and after a little more staring, we started to drive again, heading up the road that connects my parents' house to my grandmother's. 

"I'm almost forty," I said, "and I've never seen anything quite like that." I could see my grandmother out of the corner of my eye without turning to look at her.

"Neither have I," she said. "Neither have I."

She wasn't irritated at all when we got there, and we walked arm and arm up the steps to the house. She was tired, I could tell, and sank immediately into the couch. A trip up the street with a walk at both ends can drain her some days, and it had been a long weekend, with lots of unaccustomed activity.

I sat down, too. I watched her play Pattycake with Annika, thought about how I felt when I saw her get mad. I remembered a verse from a poem that has always struck a chord with me. This is it:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And then, for the very first time, I understood something I have inherited from my grandmother.

Home Again

Too late, too many states--literal and figurative. Back tomorrow. Full force. I promise.

Passing of Time

It's hard to write here. It's hard to think clearly, even. In spite of the pervasiveness of the figures of my present--husband, children, dogs--when I am up late at night by myself in this house, the only one awake in the household, the years run together, are fluid, and I might as well be eighteen, twenty, twelve.

A little while ago I took the dogs outside. It is much warmer than it has been, but it was still cold--the best kind of cold, in which an inhaled breath feels clean and your hands don't freeze without gloves. I walked across the patio, down the stone steps and onto the driveway, covered with sand over ice.  I found myself thinking about how when you grow up walking on ice, you know how to walk on ice, don't fall. And then, as the dogs romped in the snow, I looked up.

The sky was black and lit up with stars, framed by the trees, the same trees that have framed the same stars for as long as my parents have lived in this house. That patch of sky, the same patch gazed up at all those summer afternoons I lay on the lawn, the same patch taken in on so many other winter nights.

And I just stood there, letting the dogs prance in the cold, clean air, looking up, looking at the stars, thinking about my grandmother, who is now just 93, and about this house, and how it never changes, and about how I do and don't, and about the way it feels to be the right kind of cold alone, outdoors, on a clear winter night.

Asleep

I am at my parents' house, my childhood home, for the weekend, as yesterday--February 6th--my grandmother turned 93.  Whenever I stay here, certain situations, or even objects, trigger memories that I am certain would otherwise remain submerged.  The ones that really interest me are the most mundane, as collectively they give me a shadowy version of my former self, a version of family life from decades past with a little more meat on its bones.

This evening, as I was preparing a dish for the brunch we are hosting for my grandmother tomorrow morning, I couldn't open a large jar of artichokes. I tried my parents, but they couldn't open it either. I went upstairs to see if Ben or Alison, who had both gone up to bed, were still awake. The light was off in my old room, so I didn't try Ben. Alison's light was on, so I cracked the door and peeked in. Suddenly I remembered so many nights like this: Alison under her covers surrounded by stuff, eyes closed, mouth slightly open, television on, lights blazing all over the room. 

This, I maybe would have remembered regardless, without seeing the scene again live, but somehow I feel like the next part, my part, would not have come back to me so distinctly. I would walk as quietly and lightly on my feet as was possible to the standing lamp, knowing I had one shot and one shot only to turn it off and exit more softly than I had come. If I stumbled, or breathed too loudly, or made the mistake of turning off the television in one fell swoop instead of a slow diminishing of volume and slower click of the dial, Alison would wake up, eyes flashing, then narrowed, furious. 

And the feeling. That, too, would have been harder to access. I felt it tonight: a vulnerability on her part, an unconscious need to sleep in the light, a protectiveness on my part, a desire for her to sleep in silence and peaceful darkness, a fear of her waking and startling in all that light, all that noise.  Somehow, a sense of connection.

At Play

Last night I attended a conference on "play" at my daughter's nursery school. Although I was really looking forward to hearing the featured author's talk, and the subsequent group discussion, I was not expecting to be surprised by much that I heard. Since I was in preschool myself, I have been indoctrinated in the ideas I knew were going to be discussed; the importance--centrality--of play in the lives of children was the foundation of both my childhood home and my mother's schools. 

And, in fact, the author's talk contained no new information for me. Rather, it reinforced what I have been taught and know. The discussion, however, led by the preschool director and supplemented by some of her excellent teachers, sent me home with a little something unexpected to chew on. 

When I think of play, I will admit that I do think of children, of childhood and childhood things. I play with my children all the time but almost always in their world, on their level, on their terms. When I am lying on the floor making puzzle pieces "say" animal sounds, or deep in the throes of a passionate game of Candy Land (cue sarcasm), I am playing their games, playing their play. 

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I think that's probably how most of us think of play: as the provence of children. But then the preschool director, almost as an aside, said something near the end of the talk that I must have absorbed and set aside for later, as it wasn't until hours later, as I sat in my desk chair way too late, that I really thought about what she had meant.

I can't remember the wording, but she told us that over her many years of working with children she had come to think of play as more of an attitude, or an approach, than as something children do with toys or their imaginations. Play, she said, was just as relevant--and necessary--a term and a way of being--for adults. 

It is very clear to me that in these past few years I have rarely let myself play in the way I used to, certainly as a child, but not for a very long time since. Adulthood can be so serious, so full of itself. There is no reason that I can't take off on the sidewalk as Lily and I walk to the subway in the mornings announcing a race to the curb, just as I would have done 30 years ago had I been walking to school with my sister. More, there is no reason I can't approach my relationships with adults, my sacred loved ones, my friends, with a lighter, looser, improvisational take, as opposed to what has become my grown-up self's less playful, frankly less appealing version. Play, I suspect the preschool director might agree, has much to do with freedom, much to do with joy.

One of my favorite memories of my parents is from when I was nine or ten. It was a moment on an ordinary afternoon. I suspect they won't remember it at all. They were in what used to be the kitchen in their house, and my father had a glass of water, and for some reason he was trying to pour the water on my mother's head, and she was ducking away from him, and he was chasing her, and they were both laughing, and I remember so clearly as a child thinking to myself, in a way that made me deeply happy, that they were, well, acting like children, outside of their regular selves. 

I would like my children to have lots of memories of me like this: at play, in the spirit of play, not just with or for them but because it is who I am, the person I would like to be.

Insurance

I fully intended to post last night, had started to write, in fact, when I blew a fuse in my new writing space and couldn't get the computer back on. I was so determined to follow through that I logged onto the blog on my iphone, but once there, could not figure out how to get to the "New Post" space, which is probably a good thing, considering how long it takes me to pound out a one-line text message.

Moving on. 

A few nights ago, Lily was two floors down playing with our old neighbors after school. When I went to get her at dinnertime, with Annika in my arms, she insisted on taking the stairs with her friends instead of coming up in the elevator with me and Annika. When we reached our floor, the three children were not there. 

I figured they had run up and were in the apartment, but there was no sign of them, and when I walked around calling them, nobody answered me. I left Annika with the babysitter and ran back down to our old floor, but they weren't there, either. I ran up to the sixth floor and down the stairs to the lobby, stopping on every floor to call for her, alarming some neighbors in the process, a few of whom offered to help me look. 

By this point, I was in a legitimate panic. I had received a few emails earlier in the week about an assault on a child in our neighborhood, and although I couldn't imagine she would run out of the building without me, it was beginning to seem like she wasn't inside. I ran back up to our apartment and made another round, calling her name. In the playroom I heard a tiny voice, responding to the fear in mine, I imagine, say, "We're here. We're hiding behind the chairs." 

Needless to say I sent the neighbor children home in no uncertain terms, and sank into one of the offending chairs to catch my racing breath. "I'm sorry, Mama," Lily kept saying, but now that I'd found her, I could barely look at her, I was so overwhelmed by relief and anger in equal, dueling measures.

The rest went as you'd expect: I yelled, she seemed appropriately frightened by both my yelling and the ensuing, calmer discussion about what could befall a young child separated from her parents. I started breathing normally again, then had a flashback later in the evening of how it felt to think--even for an instant--that she was gone, and found myself checking my pulse, sinking to the floor to gain composure.

And then, as I was trying to fall asleep that night, remembering this: Two girls, small girls, with long brown braids and hand-knit cardigan sweaters, standing on the deck of a ferry boat. Faces lifted to the sky, to watch the seagulls swoop for the pieces of bread held out by other passengers, bodies close to the rail, heads barely above it. A breeze, a mild breeze on a sunny  summer afternoon, and a man, my father, gripping our arms, pulling us away from the railing, fearful, as he explained while pulling, that the wind would somehow whisk us over the rail and into the frothy green sea. 

As a child, I thought this was insane. As young adults, we mocked my father for his foolish "physics." How, indeed, could a mild breeze cause a 40-pound child, two of them, to be lifted into the air and over a four-foot iron railing? As a parent, with a mere few minutes of uncertainty, I understood the utter lack of logic, the desperate desire to hold onto an illusion, at least, of control. 

We will be on that ferry soon. My girls will want to watch the seagulls swoop while pressed against the railing. I will let them. But I will be standing there, too. 

Good Medicine

Wow. Talk about slippery slopes. I can't believe I missed five days. To be fair to myself, I did have bronchitis, but that accounts for two of the five, if I am honest with myself. And then I unexpectedly had no computer access for one night, Saturday, but none of this offers any real explanation for the extended vacation so close to my one-year, 365-day landmark. Performance anxiety? Maybe.

The truth is that I have actually been thinking about seven hundred fifty words quite a bit these days. I am still not sure what I am going to do once that one year mark has been reached. I think I set this up as a lifelong enterprise, but--as is so often the case--adjusted my expectations once reality set in and had in the back of my mind a one year goal. Which almost a year ago, based on decades of inability to do almost anything with any consistency, seemed unlikely if not insurmountable.

The problem is that I both love having a blog, and exercising the discipline of writing every single day, and feel oppressed by it, not every day, but some days, days on which I wish so desperately I could simply go to sleep. Am I the better for making myself, as best I can, adhere to my stated mission? Or more relevantly, am I a better writer? Is this endeavor doing what it was meant to do, something else instead, or nothing at all? 

These are the things I am thinking about. It is possible that during my five day hiatus the few readers I had who are not related to me by blood have drifted away quite happily; this is, after all, a crowded field, and I have done nothing to attract or woo readers, as having them was not my original intent. But they have turned out to be quite a bonus, in making me feel accountable and in their often insightful comments and kind support. 

But if I decide to keep going once the year is up, it cannot be about or for anybody else; it will have to be because I have decided that in fact the enterprise is productive, is helpful, is setting wheels in motion, is a net positive for me as a writer. I feel tired writing this, these last few lines, because in writing them I am already starting to see what the answer must be, in some capacity anyway. 

Enough vague soul-searching. Tomorrow, I will write for real. Just wanted to try to explain the siesta.