seven hundred fifty words

January 1, 2011 aka 1/1/11

2011-01-02T01:53:00.000-05:00

And so we begin.

What You Do

2010-05-16T21:26:00.003-04:00

I spoke to a friend at around 5:30 this evening and realized, when she asked me point blank, that I had not left the apartment in over twenty-four hours. Why? Sick baby, that's why. The routine is familiar to me now, in a dreamlike way--sharply defined behind a veil of haze--perhaps because it so often launches itself in the middle of the night. Like most people, I suppose, I loathe being wakened from a deep sleep, but when a hot face presents itself to you with a wail of utter despair, you are suddenly so awake that it's as though you never were asleep, as though night never actually happened--it is in these moments, at 3 a.m. with a sick little girl in my arms, that I can really believe the world has stopped, that only she and I exist, that only her suffering and my desire to alleviate it exist, and that I was given this child, put on this earth, for precisely this reason, to be the source of some, of any, relief.

We spent all day like this, once the long night finally turned itself over, and all day, we lay beside each other, her eyes hot with tears each time she sat up over the pot I was carting around with us from room to room. She knew the sips of liquid she was drinking were making her sick, but she is two, after all, and she couldn't quite get over the emptiness in her stomach, and we tried, again and again, my teeth clenched as I waited: a popsicle, a cracker, some Gatorade, a rice cake, some seltzer. It all came up, and I held her head each time, and then she sank back into me each time, collapsed, almost, in a rare submission, saying, over and over, "Me not better, Mama. Me not."

"You will be soon," I said, holding her, pushing her damp hair off of her forehead, my own mind flashing a surreal sideshow of my own sick memories, as they always do when they are sick: the antennae on the small TV carted into our sick rooms and the static on the screen, such an anachronism now, my father in the doorway with a coffee Fribble from Friendly's, my mother's face, a face I never imagined wearing until the first of these night wakenings, the cool cloths she always brought, just before you needed to ask her, poking those chalky orange-flavored baby aspirin into the soil of a plant in the living room, a story I have not told my girls, maybe won't.

The rise and fall of a day with a fever, the sobbing at the worst of it, the hot flushed skin, the bright eyes, and then the cooling off, the euphoria, the padding around holding hands--"I like to walk with you inside, Mama," making me mad at myself for tiring of it. "Now I better. I hungry," and then the rise again. And the fall. And the inevitable turn to the favorite game, the way I will remember my littlest girl over the course of this remarkable year of her life: Tiny Mama, in which she turns to me with no warning, no introduction, and announces, "Now you baby," and I am meant to immediately assume my role, no dress rehearsal, no allowances for timing. This time, though, when I complied, when I asked for my blanket and for her to make me some soup in her kitchen, she shook her head, forgetting, in that instant, that the whole thing had been her idea, initiated not by me. "No," she says, climbing onto the couch and nestling into me, her skin, I can sense through her shirt and through mine, hot and dry again. "You Mama."

"Why?" I say, curious about the unprecedented pivot, unexpected change-back.

"I need you take care of me," she says, matter-of-factly, aptly, so sweetly that I almost cannot bear it.

And the day continues. The rise and fall of it.

And I do.

poemish

2010-03-26T16:30:00.002-04:00

Things have been turning up: the ladybug towel, just today.

And the silver ice tongs, and the puzzle piece.

And I wonder if this is the way it is: that nothing is ever actually lost?

The Heart Cake Day

2010-03-18T23:55:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, Lily, Annika and I made a cake for a just-four-year-old we love, and today we presented it to her at her birthday party. We made the cake because the birthday girl's mother had expressed dismay at her daughter's very specific yet frustratingly vague vision and wasn't sure if she could take it on or if a bakery could be hired to create it. I liked the idea of the challenge: how do you make something look the way it looks in someone else's imagination?

This is what the birthday girl wanted: a large heart-shaped cake that was the color of raspberries and covered with glitter. We mixed the batter, which I had thought would be white but which Lily and Annika insisted be pink. We baked it, and made the frosting, which came pretty close to raspberries, perhaps a little more pink. We covered the entire cake with silvery translucent glitter sugar crystals, and Lily and I wrote the words "Happy Birthday Amelia" in "fancy" lettering with a glittery, silvery icing tube.

Annika and I walked to the party carrying this enormous cake, as Lily was meeting us at the party spot from the school bus. It is amazing how much attention you get when walking that many blocks with a giant raspberry-colored sparkly birthday cake and an Annika. The cake itself suffered only one relatively minor smushing, into my sweater button, and arrived at the party before most of the guests. It was set in a place of honor, tilted up for maximum viewing potential, and after about five minutes the birthday girl realized it had arrived. She ran across the room, hair flying, eyes enormous, skidding to a stop in front of her cake. She climbed up on a stool for a closer look. She closed her eyes, then opened them again, as though to see if the cake had remained in place. She shook her head slightly.

"It's EXACTLY what I was hoping for," she said.

Sometimes, this actually happens.

I Believe in Dog

2010-03-11T23:51:00.005-05:00

This seems like a good sign: even though it's 11:48, and I still have about 2 hours of work to do on the baby food cookbook, I have not one but TWO entries I want to write. I think I will choose one and have the other in my back pocket for tomorrow. But maybe this will spiral out of control in a good way and tomorrow I'll have seven or eight ideas, and what will I do then? As one of my wiser friends would point out: That would be a high-class problem.

So which to tackle first? Dogs. Or rather dog as conduit to a light at the end of the tunnel, by which I mean a shift in perspective, which really, when it comes right down to it, is often all I am looking for, all anybody ever needs. Today was Sadie's second dog job in two days--they don't call collies working dogs for nothing. (Although don't tell Scout--he thinks his job is licking the garbage can and occasionally moving from the couch to the bed.) This visit, for several key reasons, is mine and mine alone. For one, it takes place when Lily is in school and Annika, theoretically, is napping. For another, it is to the YAI NAtional Institute for People with Disabilities, and when they say disabilities, they're not kidding. I thought I had prepared myself, done my homework, before my first visit, but I was truly taken back by the severity of some of the disabilities: people who could not see, hear, speak, walk or move their limbs of their own accord, people missing eyes, hands, arms, legs, parts of faces, people who, on first sighting, barely resembled what we think of as people at all.

So what is a person, anyway? An assemblage of limbs and organs and brain and skin and blood? What if all that isn't there?

As it turns out, Sadie knows, knows what a person is and how to pad right up to one and lick that person's hand and then her face, turning slightly and leaning into a wheelchair so that person can rest her hand, a loose and angled contraption with three fingers and heavy bulging veins, on her back ever so lightly, burrowing those fingers into her fur, throwing back her head, sightless eyes toward the ceiling, her smile so wide you can't bear to look at it for long because you feel yourself on the verge of bursting into tears, which would be a human thing to do, would make one certainly a person, too, but wouldn't be quite right under the circumstances.

Wouldn't be quite right because this room, the lunchroom of this huge facility, with a sort of funny not-quite-hospital smell and plastic chairs around the edges and social workers and therapists who have that earnest liberal arts vibe and groovy faded t-shirts from expensive islands and a leader of the program who has a digital camera to photograph the people with the dogs and a shiny bald head and the confidence that must come with knowing you are going to heaven if there is one and six dogs, from the polar bear sized Homer down to a teeny curly ball of fluff named Mica, and about thirty people who didn't come with the dogs, people in wheelchairs and careening around unsteadily and lying on the floor and leaning into the walls and clutching at my arm and reaching into my back pocket where I keep the pictures of Sadie--this room is full of joy.

It is the most joyful place, in fact, I have been in years, maybe ever, because the people--and feeling joy, that makes a person--are so joyful that they are shrieking with it, some of them, mouths open so wide I can see their tonsils, or so overcome by it that they are trembling with it, rippling all over from head to toe with it, throwing out their arms and throwing them around the dogs, the whole dog in the cases of the smaller ones, the neck or midsection or tail end of the larger ones, like Sadie, who licks and leans and makes a sort of vibrating whistling happy sound she doesn't make anywhere else, overcome herself, perhaps, with so much showing of joy, so much directed at her.

What makes a person? Joy, and sorrow, too--the man who whispered, "Noreen died," in my ear each time I drew near until one of the earnest social workers explained, "He loved her. It was a very long time ago," and I looked closely at this man's face, his leathery black skin, his red stained sweatshirt, the mournful piece of spaghetti stuck to the top of his shoe and put my arm on his shoulder. He jerked; I realized he hadn't seen or sensed me. "Noreen," he said, shaking his head, and I could see his eyes were cloudy white all over. "I know," I said. "I'm sorry."

But most of all, I think, more than the joy or the sorrow (one thin line, remember?) is connection--that moment when a person becomes linked to you and you to them in that moment more meaningfully than anything else in the world because for the two of you, it is that moment--that is the moment of your life right then. Sadie knows this, always has, knows how easy and life-affirming it can be to simply connect. She brings me to it, takes me home remembering, valuing, wondering--wondering how many people like this there are in the world, people we just don't see.

Oh, Sadie. You are such a very good dog.

And finally, one last late note: the director always tells the people who come to visit with us in the lunchroom not to touch us, to touch the dogs but not the people. They never listen--they prefer the dogs, for the most part, but when one isn't right at hand, they reach out to me instead. And I close my hand around the hand on my arm, it is always my arm, and whisper, "Thank you."

The Thin Line

2010-03-10T20:28:00.003-05:00

That song from the Breakfast Club is running through my head as I type, in part I suppose because the one small section of the Oscars I managed to catch involved a somewhat disorienting sighting of Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald standing on stage together. I felt like I should be spraying Sun-In in my hair and zipping up the bottoms of my jeans. You know which one I mean: Don't you, forget about me...

This blog, my struggles to keep at it despite, well, everything, is exposing an insecure side to me that I'm not sure what to do with. I do know that I cannot, will not, give up on it, especially when I least know what to do with it, so here I go, again--is that a song title, too? Anyway.

A new friend, someone I liked from the instant we were introduced, wrote to me recently that, "...the line that separates happy stages from sad is always rather narrow...along with our age seems to go a sense of deep vulnerability." This struck me as astute and even somehow comforting, not to mention the fact that "deep vulnerability" is such an apt way of describing how I am finding 40 so far. These girls, my fierce, open-hearted, self-possessed Lily and my merry, sharp-eyed sponge of an Annika: they fill me with awe, make me laugh until my eyes water, cause me to lie awake consumed by their well-being until the sun rises and it's time to fill the milk cups, leave me dazzled and drunk with exhaustion, and raw. Vulnerable. Deeply, deeply so.

Tonight at dusk, the three of us set out for Sadie's "dog job," our therapy work at Gilda's Club, into a perfect early spring evening, the kind when the air feels so clean and new on your skin that you almost want to lie down and sleep on the sidewalk. A loud night--ambulances, more dogs than ever, it seemed, strollers swerving, pizza parlors open on all sides to the world, radios blasting, even a bagpipe player in front of the art house on 6th Avenue, wearing a kilt and sending piercing honking notes out over the sounds of the voices. "Mama?" Lily said, flushed with pride on our way home as passers-by commented on her leash technique and praised Sadie more extravagantly than usual. "Yes?" I said, suddenly a little bit shocked that she was old enough to be walking beside me like this. "Is it mean to say I find that music a little annoying?" I just laughed, and she laughed, and Annika, who loves nothing more than when we are laughing, laughed, too, and we kept walking, and laughing, and becoming, I saw later, when I thought about it, a part of the beautiful chaos of the evening, the street, the city, and in that moment, on the happy side of the line.

Talking Points

2010-01-28T00:02:00.004-05:00

You know that thing we all learn in a college linguistics class or from some yahoo sitting next to us on a bus to DC or because it seems to be one of those things that Americans just know by osmosis about how Eskimos have so many words for snow? I am, again, tempted to look this up on Google, exactly how many words for snow the Eskimos have, but am remembering the time I found myself looking up how old Barbra Streisand was when she made Yentl, for no reason any reasonable person could discern, and so again I will stop myself--although I won't promise not to do it tomorrow, after another glorious four hours of sleep. Did you read the Huffington Post piece about how sleep is the real feminist issue these days? If not, do. But back to my story. I know you were riveted: Eskimos. And snow.

No, not riveting, but this morning when I was helping Lily decide which coat to wear, the snow thing popped into my head, and for the first time ever I found myself thinking it didn't necessarily make very much sense. Or rather, that if we were to ascribe anew a word to every possible noun in our own language, there would have to be as many words for each noun as there are Americans (again, tempted: Damn you, Google and your infinite knowledge).

It's late, and even in a land that hands over Ted Kennedy's Senate seat to a Cosmo centerfold, it's not really a good idea to follow Obama. But do you know what I mean? When I was first explaining to Lily what a dictionary was, I told her that if you wanted to know what a word meant, you could just look it up in this book, and the book would provide you with a definition. "Does it have a picture for the word?" she asked, and I smiled, thinking of all those SAT words: loquacious, indeterminate, obdurate, scintillate. "Not usually," I said, but then--when I scoped out the children's dictionaries at the bookstore--realized that kids' ones do and became perhaps irrationally enraged. If anyone can picture what a cupcake looks like, or a kite, or a carousel, it's a kid, and whatever the kid's version is, it's bound to be better than the dictionary artist's. It's like falling intensely in love with a book and then seeing the movie and thinking: What? That character isn't supposed to look like Matt Damon.

More to the point, if you say cupcake to me, this is what appears in my mind's eye: a white, fairly fine-grained, regular not behemoth sized cupcake in a foil wrapper with a tall swirl of the kind of icing that definitely contains shortening, not butter, and when I say tall, I mean about two-inches, and when I say icing, I mean fluffy but solid enough to hold its shape, pastel-colored, and I wouldn't be adverse to a sprinkle of colored sugar crystals for a little additional crunch. If you say cupcake to a certain friend of mine, this is what appears in his mind's eye; a dense, fudgy, low-to-the-ground little mouthful with a slick glaze of dark chocolate on top. If you say cupcake to Lily, there's no cake at all: she's strictly a frosting gal, a quality I endorse in my children.

So a hundred words for snow, if that's what it is? I guess I'm not actually all that impressed, you seemingly ubiquitous (why are the SAT words coming so fast and so furiously?) linguists, you. Go beyond, deeper than, cupcake, and see what I'm getting at: love, family, mother, peace, happiness, anger, life, death, self, I could keep going forever. Does any word mean what it means to me to anybody else in the world? Not even close. Frankly, I think it's a bit of a miracle most of us find so many people to communicate with. I wonder how often we actually know what each other is saying.

Tomorrow

2010-01-26T23:12:00.002-05:00

The world seems off-kilter, and I talk, talk, talk and think, think, think, and still it rains in the morning, hard, and I send my first-born out the door in her yellow rain jacket, walk her onto the school bus, kiss her soft head, and walk off again, the little one in my arms, send her off as though she were a parcel or a soldier: out into the world, thinking, thinking as I watch the bus disappear around the corner: I would die for you.

The little one searches my face as we wait for the elevator, reaches out and touches my cheek with a delicate finger. What you name, Mama? she asks, a new game, and I answer, wiping a speck of crayon from her forehead, My name is Amy. She chortles, shakes her head in mock-dismay. No, no, she says. You not Amy. You Mama. You my Mama.

Later I emerge from the subway, from this bizarre maze of train-filled tunnels below the streets on which cars and trucks and buildings dash and perch and settle, and as my head clears the overhang and is first exposed to the air outside the subway system the sun appears, and the sky, for the first time all day, is a sort of dirty pale blue but blue nonetheless, and the rain has stopped, and I walk my boots around the puddles stretching my gloveless fingers, testing the air for premature signs of spring or at least a winter on the wane.

The girls have been listening to Annie, begging me to sing the songs they love best: "Maybe," to see me rock an imaginary baby, or a gleeful Annika, or even a lanky Lily; "I Don't Need Anyone But You," to hear me tell the story of the duet I performed as a babysitter on the beach, in Cape Cod, as a just teenager (while I wonder how at thirteen I minded seven children most of each day for a week, marvel at the energy and resourcefulness of my barely adolescent self); but most of all "Tomorrow," for the sheer belting joy of it, the way my woefully inadequate (so pretty, Mama, they say, believing it) voice cracks at every high note, the way I beam when they join me in the chorus.

And as I walk up and down the city streets, especially, only, on those rare occasions when I am alone, I find myself singing it in my head, wondering about the lyrics--is tomorrow always a day away or only a day away? I want to check it, but I keep forgetting, and then when I could, say now, I decide not to do so, not to know.

Instead I remember what I keep letting myself forget: that I have always had a way to set things straight a little, a little at least, a way to rein in the voice at the edge of an octave-and-a-half, a way to be everything I am, to center, to breathe. And so I do that, this, instead. And a little, a little, at least, it works.

I would like to remember that...

2010-01-16T10:56:00.003-05:00

this morning Annika announced, verbatim, "Hey guys! Grandpa Joel is fast asleep on the couch, dreaming."

And stay tuned for my thoughts on hardware stores. Baby steps, baby steps...

Lily is Six

2009-12-19T23:09:00.003-05:00

Fortieth birthday came and went with little fanfare; in truth, but for the constant questions as to what my "big plans" were, it seemed like a blip on the radar screen. But tonight, although I was up until nearly 4 the night before, I am not so sure I am going to be able to sleep--all I can think about is this night six years ago, nearly to the minute, when Lily was born, and everything changed irrevocably.

I now cannot help but thinking of my life as "before" and "after," meaning that an almost impenetrable ravine exists between the part of my life before I had children and every instant since. Do I think this is too dramatically stating the case? Not for me, and not, I think for many people I know. It is hard for me, sometimes, to recall the "before" parts now in any way that doesn't seem like a dream. But this night, December 19th, 2003, the dividing line, as it were, I know will remain real, concrete, alive, for as long as I live.

It is true that I don't remember it seamlessly. Certain parts are blurry--I can access faces of loved ones popping in and out, the race down the corridor, the way my mother looked at one moment as the doctor was speaking to me, the Indian accent of the anesthesiologist, and so on. But other parts, scenes, are so visceral that my eyes well up if I so much as conjure them into re-existence: the moment my eyes met Lily's for the first time, for example, the tiny, soft yellow outfit my grandmother had knit for her to come home in, and the strangeness of trying to get it on her tiny limbs in the hospital room the frigid morning we brought her home.

I was just having a conversation with a friend about how in a way, there are no right choices, or wrong choices: there are only choices, and we make them, and then we take it from there. It's the unknown, the "after the choice," if you will, that defines us, and the way we respond to what we can't or don't choose: what happens to us, as we plough ahead, perhaps thinking we actually have more choices than we do.

I am such a skeptic, such a pragmatist. I have always, since very early childhood, been one of those people who believes you make your own luck, that the notion of fate or destiny is a bit of a fool's gold--shiny and appealing but worthless in the end. But somehow, although it defies logic, and my very core, I also believe on some level that Lily and I chose each other, and I felt that way six years ago, when I lay on a narrow gurney late in the night before we almost lost each other, and looked into those eyes and in that looking, that lock of connection, for the first time in my entire life lost sight of everything else in the world.

Forty, Day One

2009-12-12T00:21:00.002-05:00

My graduate school thesis, which led to the writing of two books I wish I hadn't written, was a collection of essays written during the year I was twenty-five, which somehow seems like it happened about seventy-five years ago. I remember one line from the introduction of this thesis, or at least part of it, that described twenty-five as "the year I decided to document." This is not entirely true, however it is true that I did, actually document that year almost inadvertently, due to the requirement of writing the thesis. I can decide, purposefully, to document forty, and maybe because I have had an extra glass of wine tonight, I think that I will. So here I go. Night one. I have the venue. I have a goal. Let's see what happens from now until forty-one.

Work In Progress

2009-12-07T23:33:00.003-05:00

Ugh. Last time was so bad I think I scared myself off. Remind me never to write a bad second novel if I ever actually publish a first one; I"m not sure I can tolerate the self-loathing. But now, now--I begin again, feeling like a Democratic president trying valiantly to pass a health care bill or get Israel and Palestine to sit down to a nice brisket, or falafel, and just talk it out. Actually, I feel a lot better than that, for no good reason. Have I mentioned I'm about to turn forty? Yes. And although I'm not exactly doing back flips on mattresses like the cast of Glee (a reference only 1% of you, if you still exist, will actually get), I'm not dreading it in quite the way I expected to.

I will admit that back in the day, those days when I could drink more than a glass-and-a-half of wine without falling asleep mid-conversation, those days when I occasionally went for a run, those days when I knew--and not in a purely nostalgic way--that movies were also shown in real theaters on big screens with surround sound, I used to think forty sounded impossibly old. And then everyone else around me either was forty or almost there, like me, and it suddenly seemed still kind of like the beginning of things--the beginning of the middle of things, anyway, and I didn't mind the thought so much, not the way I had hysterically met the age of ten: that fateful move to two-digit numbers.

I think it must be said, and if you are reading this it is pretty likely you have at the very least met me and more likely know me well, that thirty-nine has been, in so many ways, one of the more challenging years of my life. Although the particulars of everyone's thirty-nine are unique, I suspect that when viewed through a long lens, perhaps from the sager (oh, I hold out hope) vantage point of fifty, mine will seem part and parcel of what happens to many of us at around this age, or rather stage in life, when suddenly the opening credits are firmly behind us, the characters have for the most part been established, and the plot is in motion, for better or worse. What then? we say, or I do. What now?

But this isn't what I thought it would be like, I sometimes find myself whimpering to myself (not in a crazy out-of-body way but in a pathetic, feeling-sorry-for-myself way), and I'm not even really sure what "it" is, although I guess in a vague way it means my entire existence. And it's not that the particulars of my thirty-nine are even that distinctive or necessarily bad--in fact many of them, such as my children, are in so many ways even better than I ever could have imagined, but that is such a simplistic thing to say when of course their sheer existence is a piece of what I mean: my life, the whole, messy, disobedient, unraveling but only within the confines, hilarious, exhausting, frustrating, incomprehensible, slippery, elusive, did I say messy?, whole of it.

What did I think it would be like? I'm not sure I ever thought much about it, although in fifth grade my best friend and I had an elaborate vision of our adult lives that involved pink taffeta dresses and Mercedes sedans, which I think says vastly more about our upper middle class suburban surroundings and the very early eighties than it does about my vision for my life.

I guess I am thinking now, right now, in this instant, as I sit at my computer at almost midnight on the Monday before I turn forty, on an evening before I will get up at 6:30 with my two little girls to give them breakfast (ponytails made while seated on stools at the counter, please finish your milk, Annika turning on the same CD over and over to hear the "Mama song," where's the backpack? where's the permission slip? downstairs with my splashing cup of coffee to put Lily on the bus), that what needs to happen for me to meet forty with any sense of equanimity, is for me to tell myself, and to believe it, that the story is not yet written, that what matters is to keep writing it, that often the best writing happens when you don't know just exactly what you are going to say.

So here I go, with forty in mind. Let me keep writing. I must.

Baby Steps

2009-11-24T23:29:00.002-05:00

It's always the second act that gives one pause, a pause that all too often becomes a grinding to a full-on halt. This is my way of acknowledging that yet again I took an unexplained, probably unearned, certainly uninteresting break from this, my essential outlet and yet my bete noire too. And that yesterday, in honor of my father, my most vigilant reader, I returned, like the fog, on "little cat feet," and that tonight I find myself, as I have so many times over the last however many nights, sitting at my desk thinking: Why am I doing this again? What on earth could I possibly have to say?

I just took a long break and pretended for a while I was not going to make myself keep writing, but all along I knew that I would. I always know when I am going to do something and when I am not, which seems to be a useless gift, as so often the things I know I am going to do are wholly unimportant, and the things I know I am not going to do are the things that must get done. And besides, we all know that at heart, I do believe I have a lot to say, and will keep saying it, even if I occasionally wander off into a void for a period, a void filled with small child obligations, vaccinations against already mutated viruses and some really atrocious TV.

One reason I started this blog was to have a place where I would be able to work through pieces intended for publication, and I have been stalling quite impressively, and I am quite a staller on my worst days, on writing so much as a line. So I think I will start here, and perhaps work it through in this capacity, as the bad TV is not proving conducive to productivity.

What I am working on, in my head, anyway, is a sort of a manifesto, inspired, in part, by Orwell's brilliant "Why I Write;" it will be called: Why I Read. I am both in love with my as yet nonexistent manifesto (always a bad sign) and overwhelmed by it, even in concept. I have been asked to write a piece for which this essay would suit, so it is, therefore, one of those things I must do, but as explained above, that fact alone is a speck of dust trapped in a light shaft: nothing, or very little more.

Pondering why I read, I guess would be, in the words of the immortal Maria, "a very good place to start." Except there is no pondering, really; I have mostly thought this through. I read because there have been more moments in my life consumed by reading than by any other thing, and because so many of these moments have made me aware, either consciously or subconsciously (which I realize later), that there is a reason for my existence on this earth--to read the words I am reading in that moment, and in the other moments, too.

Although it is neither the first nor the best example that comes to mind, I remember reading these lines from Orwell's essay entitled "Reflections on Gandhi." Such an innocuous little throw-away of a title; such a knife plunged into the clueless heart of what people had thought before Orwell raised the knife. He wrote: No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. Not the most devastating or reprinted line in the essay, but the one that, when I read it, stopped my breath in my chest, made me then read almost everything else the man had ever written.

It is the last part, the part about sainthood, that makes me want to raise that knife skyward, letting the blood flow off it and around my feet. Had faint praise ever damned so much as when Orwell referred to Gandhi's "clean smell?" Gandhi, to get back to the "Why I Write" essay, wrote because of his political beliefs, but his political beliefs were his muscles and organs and bones; they were him, boiled down to who he actually was. I read because it makes me know Orwell, and I read because it makes me know almost everything I know, including how to live, and think. Reading is the only way I know to connect myself to every mind that ever wrote, every idea that has ever been written, every picture that has ever been painted, and more: to all the thoughts that haven't yet been written down in words. I read because to read is everything.

See? Working it through. Bear with me!

Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby...

2009-11-23T21:26:00.004-05:00

Tomorrow, on November 24th, my father will turn 67. A few weeks down the road, my birthday will arrive in the wake of his for the 40th time. But in honor of my dad, a man who keeps the greeting card industry in business but rarely receives any birthday recognition of his own, I would like to revisit a different birthday: his of 27 years ago.

When my father turned 40, my mother threw him a surprise party with a 1950s theme. There was a live band playing all of my father's favorite songs, and hours upon hours of dancing, and everybody got all dressed up. My dad, who had arrived in his regular clothes, was given the proverbial white sport coat and, I believe, a pink carnation by way of transformation. I remember my parents' friends in matching leather motorcycle jackets, my aunts in poodle skirts, cousins in sweater sets and rolled up jeans and my own outfit: a turquoise taffeta circle skirt and a white cotton blouse tied at the waist, a black velvet ribbon in my high ponytail. I was twelve, but thirteen was just around the bend, and I felt very glamorous to be at an adult party with dancing and live music and so many grown-ups, grown-ups who seem to me in my mind's eye like sophisticated creatures from another planet, eons older than I am now, will ever be.

How is it possible that all of those grown-ups were only forty years old? If I close my eyes I can see my father calling requests out to the band, doing the Twist in the middle of the dance floor, his hair still mostly black, the room surrounded by his friends and loved ones. The event itself was a perfect incarnation of my dad, a man who doesn't actually seem much older now than he did then, who still can twist as though American Bandstand were filming, would still cut a dashing figure in a white sport coat and who has raised two daughters with perfectly imperfect unconditional love that has given them a foundation on which all else is built and without which nothing much would stand.

The funny thing is that I felt that way at twelve. I remember leaning against a wall with a cup of soda, admiring the way my skirt glinted under the lights, and then watching my father dancing with my mother to a "slow dance," the kind I still, at nearly thirteen, avoided whenever I could. "They look so young," I really do remember thinking, swishing my skirt to make the taffeta rustle, watching the couples swaying to the mellow sounds of the music I had been taught to love by my dad.

If we are lucky, life is long and complicated. We celebrate and commemorate, we suffer and agonize, we triumph and fail, we persevere. I don't mind turning forty. In spite of all those corny greeting cards, it doesn't really seem that old; it never did. And as I always tell my grandmother, who will soon be 94, growing old seems, if not a walk in the park each day, certainly preferable to the alternative.

I think of my father's 40th birthday not just because my own is impending but because in so many ways he cannot see, my father is still that same man dancing, the last man on the dance floor for the love of the music, the man the band stays late for just because they like him, the man who again and again makes me feel like I am loved, and appreciated, and admired, and loved.

Happy birthday, Dad. This one--and all of them, really--is for you. Thank you for teaching me that every day is a possibility. I love you. And don't forget, ever, ever: This is the first day of the rest of your life.

Sisters

2009-09-18T23:45:00.003-04:00

This morning when the alarm went off I forced myself to get out of bed and made my way to the girls' room to make sure Lily was up and getting ready for school. The light was on, I noticed, and as I neared I heard giggling. When I pushed open the door, Lily and Annika were both in Annika's crib surrounded by books. "I'm reading to Annika," Lily said, when she saw me standing there, watching them. "You're both in the crib," I noted, Mistress of the Obvious. Annika laughed uproariously at this.

"Two Lilys!" she said, pointing to herself and then to the actual Lily. "Two Lilys in crib!" I wonder if Lily will always loom so large to her little sister, be the sun around which all else orbits, so much so that her name, in some contexts, seems to have become synonymous with "girl."

On Mary's Death

2009-09-18T00:13:00.005-04:00

I'm not as young as I once was--have I mentioned I'm turning 40 this year? no? if I can ever get back on my treadmill and write like I'm supposed to be doing, I will. But I'm still a good deal younger than most serious fans of Peter, Paul and Mary, a trio who recorded some of the most wistful, melancholy ballads I have come across, along with some of the most authentically earnest, persuasive protest songs of all time.

I grew up on Peter, Paul and Mary, one of the few groups my parents both loved. Peter, Paul and Mary rocked enough for my dad but were folksy and lyrical enough for my mom. And my sister and I loved every song that they sung. I think the songs you hear as a child, that you see your parents loving, are formative. My affection for Rod Stewart (thanks, Dad) and Cat Stevens (you, too, Mom) falls into this category. But my love for Peter, Paul and Mary transcends my childhood memories in that the songs I grew up loving, knew by heart, are the same songs--really the primary songs--I sing to my own girls now.

This is in part because I know all of the words, which I cannot say of so many other songs that I love. But it is also because the songs themselves have such a universal, ageless quality. I have to confess that there is no--zero--music written expressly for children that I can tolerate, with the occasional exception of the Free to Be, You and Me soundtrack, and that is definitely thanks to nostalgia. But "Puff the Magic Dragon" is another story altogether. The first time Lily really listened to the lyrics as I sang it, as I have been doing since the very night of her birth, she started to sob. "It's so sad," she said, and I felt both pride and a jolt of preemptive anxiety for this child of mine, so like another little girl whose fear of leaving childhood behind kicked in much earlier than it should have.

And the other songs I loved, love still: "Lemon Tree," also sad, "Leaving on a Jet Plane," "Blowing in the Wind," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone"--for a solid year the only song that would make tiny Lily stop crying, then Annika, too. It took me a while to realize that this one is, as a small friend of mine would say, "unappropriate." But I guess they all are, if you shy away from death, separation, loss, in your kid music.

Not all, though. Not all. Not the protest songs. My childhood friend Kate, whom I loved instantly upon first meeting but even more so when I learned that Peter, the actual Peter, was her godfather, and I used to jog around the high school track, wash our cars, drive to the movies, singing "If I Had a Hammer" at the top of our lungs. When we marched for a woman's right to choose on the mall in DC four years in a row, we sang it then, arms linked, understanding on some level that the words had prepared us for our actions.

Peter, Paul and Mary was a great introduction to popular music; I am grateful to my parents for instilling a love for it in me. And I have seen many Peter, Paul and Mary concerts since that first one, one here in New York with an especially sympatico friend (you can't just invite any twenty-something to a Peter, Paul and Mary concert) at Carnegie Hall. I made fun of us for being there, mocked myself for my uncoolness. But we both sang along to each song. Knew every word.

A few weeks ago I was stuck in traffic with the girls, a situation in which I can occasionally be prevailed on to sing. "The plane song, Mama," Annika said, and Lily concurred. "Jet plane, Mama," she said, and I sang, sang the chorus again and again at the end until they'd both drifted off into sleep. I hope Mary knew that there were those of us out there passing it on to the next generation. I think she probably did.

Time, and Time Again

2009-09-15T00:23:00.003-04:00

On Sunday Lily learned how to ride a bike--"I just kept coasting and finding my balance and suddenly I could do it!"--and today she went to her first day of kindergarten, although as it was for precisely one half of an hour I'm not sure we all felt like it was really the First Day, if you know what I mean. In short, time is racing.

Didn't I just write about this? I'm in this groove, and I guess I'm not going anywhere for a bit. Time works like this: this is something I did not know when I was younger and am only fully realizing now. Like reading, and bike riding, for Lily--suddenly days, weeks, years of anticipating, experience, practice, desire--condense unexpectedly into instant reward. And then for days, weeks, years, something else seemingly utterly unattainable, time stretching out into infinity.

Today, we swam together, Lily and I, and I knew what she was thinking; she said it once, actually. "Swimming is next," I think she said, with shining eyes, thinking it would be magic, like the bike riding must have seemed: Now I cannot, but now I can! And I, old and consumed by the passing, and stopping, and racing of time, smiled slightly, suspecting that today would not, in fact, be the day Lily swam on her own--thinking fate likes to even things out--but I held her lightly in the water, walked back farther away for her to come to me, just in case.

I don't want to blink my eyes and have her not need my hand under her back as she floats. Floating, if done correctly, freezes time.

To Read, Perchance to Sleep

2009-09-10T20:08:00.002-04:00

Have I ever told you about The Wilensky News? Or Wilensky's Words? The (very original) titles of my childhood self-published newspaper and my high school newspaper column, respectively. I find myself thinking about them today as I marvel at the infinite number of ways we humans find to make ourselves heard.

In a way, it's easier for someone like me, a person who from as early as I can remember felt an impulse to write: to put my thoughts down on paper so that others could read them. And then, as I made writing first my hobby, then the focus of my studies and then the center of my professional life, the outlets for expressing myself, for connecting my ideas with other people, readers, grew.

And many, many people, some who get paid for it, others who don't, have found a way to connect their thoughts and ideas by way of the written word, to other people. But what of the people who can't or don't? There are millions of them out there, too. I have heard it said by jaded publishing professionals that everyone wants to write a book, but in my experience this is wildly untrue. Most people I know do not have this impulse, this desire, this need, and so I find myself wondering why those of who do, do, and how those of us who don't fulfill this need or if in fact they just don't have it in quite the same way.

I can always tell when I'm rusty: I skirt around ideas, never quite honing in on the center. I am not a good stream-of-consciousness writer; I ramble, falter and remain oblique. This time, I'm not even sure why this is what I am thinking about. I do feel fortunate that I have a way to say what I want to say when I need to say it, be it here, or in another format. I guess maybe I am wondering what other people do or what happens when the thoughts hit a wall?

I don't know how many words that is, although I am going to try to be stricter with myself about the 750, partly because I want to be stricter with myself in general, partly because I do think it's good to have goals. But I am going to stop regardless and let myself indulge in what used to be my absolute favorite mode of relaxation, the activity I have missed most sorely since becoming a parent. I hope you are out there somewhere, doing the same. I am going to read. Goodnight.

Life, and Death, and Life

2009-09-08T22:19:00.003-04:00

It is three weeks since I have written here, and I could write a book, or more, on why, but I will not--and not just because I clearly am having some problems producing copy. But I will use my three week absence as a transition into the notion of passing of time, which is something I have been thinking a lot about of late.

I am one of those people for whom September will forever mean back-to-school. Not only was I in school for most of my life, but my mother's life--and therefore the cycle of our family life--revolved around the opening of school each fall, and I grew up in New England, where the demarcation from summer to fall is practically tangible.

This is a good thing. I like cycles and patterns and rhythm. I like that first morning when a leaf blows across your line of vision as you're walking down the street and you think: a fluke, an errant leaf, and then another one flies by. And that first evening when the skin on your arms is a tiny bit cold and you hug yourself and think about cardigan sweaters. And I like the beginning of things, too, and although I know some see fall as the last gasp before winter, it has never seemed that way to me.

Now I have a daughter who was born in early September, a time of year I never thought of for birthdays. It is such a period of transition, one season fading away, the next assuming its place so gradually and effortlessly that if you blink you miss it happening at all. Cool mornings, hot afternoons, and the breeze kicking up at dinnertime. Early September.

Time passes, cycles through its seasons, and how can we, if we want to, alter the path? Sometimes, with certain patterns, we cannot. Today I watched from the hallway as Scout, whose true age we do not know, made his usual run for and leap onto the bed and failed to get his hind legs up. His heavy body pulled his back end down to the ground; his front paws remained on the edge of the bed, and for a moment he just stayed like that, in limbo, between the bed and the floor, unaware that I was watching. I hurried to him, bent and heaved him up all the way, and he rolled over on his side, content, the failure already forgotten, and placed his paw on my arm, looking up at me with trust and adoration. I squinted hard to keep from crying.

What of a cycle of disappointment, of our inability to see sometimes what happens again and again? Can we change people's expectations, or our own behavior? Can we change the way we see the world? Expressions tell us no, that we become "set in our ways," that we "can't teach an old dog new tricks." Not so, I think, having taught an old dog to shake paws; not so, I hope so hard, having seen those I love unable to see the patterns, let alone escape them.

Annika is two. She is establishing the patterns; the cycles are emerging, the seasons so new as to seem unfamiliar. She greets each day with a smile and outstretched arms, is somehow both messy and fastidious, as independent as her sister, funny and so often amused, and different each day, each hour, than she was the one before. She is no longer a baby but not yet a girl; her cycle is the same as Scout's. Time passes. We change, and we do not. Summer wanes, fall rises to meet the void, and before long the days are long again. School begins, with all of the promise of the best of beginnings, we blink--we heave our shiny new backpacks onto our shoulders--and suddenly the year is over all over again.

Were you worried? Have you missed me? I don't mean to be coy. I have missed this, though. I see it now, in the middle of it--or now, I realize--at the end. Don't worry. I say this to myself. I will write. I am writing. And time, as they say, marches on.

http://www.washhumane.org/HelpTrooper.asp

2009-08-14T20:40:00.002-04:00

Some days feel like a lifetime, in a good way.

Today.

Up just past dawn with girls, cookies and lemonade made, signs painted and written, money box found, flowers readied, supplies loaded--stand a rousing success. Almost $87 earned for Trooper, the dog who is the subject of my heading. Listening to Lily explain to customers why she was raising money for Trooper some of the best moments of my life. Keeping Annika from inserting entire arm in lemonade pitcher or poking holes in cookies good reality check.

Library party for summer reading program. Girls dancing, singing, laughing--Annika in Lily's arms for half of performance. Lily and I exchanging proud and surprised looks when Annika followed dance instructions as well as the nine-year-olds who made up the bulk of the group. Ice cream sundaes.

Good phone call; book sold. Hard, joyful, life-affirming work to be done. Another one: Lily winner of mystery library prize, to be picked up tomorrow.

More lemonade/cookie stand action while Annika napping. Meet family up the street with two older girls who invite us over in the morning to meet their animals, including miniature ponies the father promises to "saddle up." Lily looks like it's Christmas times her birthday times another ice cream sundae.

Quesadillas and leftover lemonade for dinner: Lily's choice. An hour in the playroom at twilight. Lily says: "You worked really hard to make this for us, Mama. I am proud of you." I look up at the clean white ceiling imagining the birds and the butterflies. It looks just like I wanted it to, even without them.

Alone. The air is cool. Lie on the porch with an arm on each dog watching fireflies. Sadie gets up and brings me a pinecone.

Inside. More lemonade and The Wire.

Today.

http://www.sandyewilensky.com/

2009-08-13T16:31:00.002-04:00

Should I acknowledge yesterday's skip? No, I think not.

As you may know, I spend a bit of time worrying about how much I am continuing to grow as I age, and I am eternally admiring of those people in my life who remain open to growth and change in spite of all old dog/new trick cliches and stereotypes. Which is why I can't stop thinking about how it felt to see my mother behind the table of her professional tent at last weekend's enormous art show in Mystic Seaport, in which she was selected to participate out of a competitive pool.

When I think of all the times my mother was asked to watch us participate in some kind of artistic or athletic performance, from our Nutcracker stints, to piano and cello and clarinet recitals, to library craft contests, and so much more, not to mention the endless performances we put on at home--I feel as though she should be given back ten years of her life, to sit in a hammock and read, or watch mindless television, or even just sit, peacefully, in a quiet, darkened room. Sometimes I think that, "Hey! Watch this!" could be the mantra of my childhood. But although I have, over the course of my life, seen my mother in her professional comfort zone command many classrooms, and even several times--awe-inspiringly--a school community of six hundred people or so, I have never seen her in quite this position before: vulnerably, by definition, exposing what she herself has created.

Her work, which focuses on her beloved oceans and beaches and seaside vistas, is beautiful: restful, soothing, occasionally moodily complicated, deceptively simple sometimes, and pure. To see it en masse, an oeuvre, if you will, was impressive, indicative of the amount of work and time and care she has invested in this new endeavor. But I was even more struck by my mother herself, answering questions about a painting with a customer, arranging the paintings to reflect her vision, making arrangements with a decorator who was shopping for a client, sitting, alone, behind the table at the back of the tent, watching the thousands of people walk by surrounded by what she had made.

In some ways my mother remains an enigma to me. Like her father, and her brother, too, she keeps her cards close to her vest; it is often hard to know just what she is thinking. But always, in so many ways, she knocks me to my knees. There is no complacency, no slow slide into acceptance, still, when I am least expecting it, a surprise. And this: this inspires me. To create, to be unafraid, to slow down when I need to, to push myself when I need to, and no matter what, to keep my eyes on the horizon, taking in both the long, smooth stretches of cool sand and the tumult of the waves at the line of the shore.

A Bientot

2009-08-12T01:01:00.000-04:00

Just finished daunting work project; conciliatory post tomorrow.

To See

2009-08-11T00:01:00.003-04:00

Spent the weekend with my parents and the girls in Mystic Seaport, where my mother was participating in an enormous art show--to be the subject of another entry. What I want to write about tonight is the La Quinta chain hotel we stayed in, and Lily.

I had taken on the task of finding us all a place to stay, and I began with the inns and bed-and-breakfasts. Booked, booked, booked. I moved on to the nicer chain hotels, also booked. A woman at a Marriott informed me, when I wondered aloud why it was so impossible to find a place to stay in Mystic, that because of the art festival and a large number of local weddings, I was going to keep hitting dead ends with my calls. She suggested I try a La Quinta, a chain I didn't know, one town over, as it had only been open for a few weeks and was therefore apt to be under the radar. She was right.

My parents arrived the night before we did, and en route I called my dad to ask how the place was. Like me, my father enjoys a nice hotel, and I knew from his curt, "You know. It's fine," that La Quinta was substantially sub par. It turned out to be very generic, on a highway near nothing save a Dunkin' Donuts, overpriced for what it was and in serious lack of managerial talent. The cleaning staff was erratic, the so-called heated pool was icy, and the complimentary breakfast--save for yogurt, dry cereal and coffee--inedible.

But from the moment we pulled into the parking lot, Lily was in heaven. "It's just so beautiful, Mama," she breathed as she climbed down from her car seat. And then. The room (with slick, polyester bedspreads and ochre curtains) was so "spacious and glamorous." The bathroom (chain motel standard, missing shampoo and soap) was "gigantic." The aforementioned pool, which I forced myself into out of profound love for my firstborn, Arctic to me and my mother, who somehow escaped going in, "the funnest fun I've had in 22 years." Even the breakfast--with its bevy of (unappetizing) choices--"delicious."

I found myself enchanted by Lily's perspective, not in a way that made me (or my father) ever want to set foot in a La Quinta again, but in a way that made me realize how new and full of possibility the world is to a five-year-old, even one who's stayed at a four star hotel before but not one that she remembers or that gave away tiny boxes of cereal to anyone who wanted one, just because that's what they do. It is a real part of my job, I decided, to help her stay this way--not as a five-year-old, of course, but as a child, an adolescent, and an adult who continues to know that, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

And finally, on our drive back Sunday evening, we stopped in at IKEA on the highway to pick up a few things. As we pulled into the lot, Lily practically jumped out of her car seat. "Look! Look what's right next door to IKEA!" I looked. Although I've been to this IKEA a dozen times, I'd never noticed the La Quinta beside it right there on 95. "We've got to tell Sands and Grandpa Joel," she added.

"That we saw it?" I asked, confused.

"No," she said. "That we saw it, and that it wasn't nearly as beautiful as ours."

Creation

2009-08-07T22:12:00.003-04:00

You know how sometimes you get so immersed in something that you have no perspective on it whatsoever and even when someone else comments on what you are doing you can't really understand what they are talking about?

Wow, that makes no sense. What I am getting at is that today, this evening, I had a sort of a revelation--a flash of insight into my own behavior. I have been spending hours and hours of hard manual labor and challenging problem-solving and actual lifting of heavy objects--which for me is a rare occurrence--on this ridiculous project I took on of turning an unfinished attic wreck of a "room" into a viable play space for the girls.

It didn't occur to me to ask myself why. They play outside much of the time when we're here, and there was enough room for their toys downstairs and in their bedrooms, and although I am a big believer of not having all the adult space in a house taken over by children's stuff, that wasn't enough of a reason. Not to take on a project so out of my comfort zone, so physically taxing, so detail-oriented, and so dependent on an aesthetic vision for success.

I'm not quite finished yet, but today, I hauled up some heavy shelves for books and toys, some chairs, and the wooden dollhouse my mother gave Lily for Christmas. I started the most artistic part of the project, some lettering on the stairs that is hard to explain, and I brought up dozens of piles of books and puzzles, which the girls helped me begin organizing.

At one point, they were downstairs, and I surveyed the now all white space, a blank canvas just waiting for the bird and butterfly mobiles Lily and I are going to make, the artwork both Lily and Annika will make for the walls. It looks beautiful, I thought to myself, and that's when I realized it.

Sometimes, when you are preoccupied with knotty challenges, you just need to make--not buy but make, with the full involved labor of your own two hands--something pretty. Something that looks just the way you imagined it would.

Car Interior Dialogue, Take 326

2009-08-07T00:27:00.003-04:00

Lily has always been one of those kids whose age you forget sometimes. She prides herself on competency, sometimes to a fault. Then, there are times when it is blessedly clear she is five. A dialogue:

Scene: car interior

Lily, from backseat: Mama? Have you ever built a grassman?

Me, driving and trying desperately to listen to John Hughes story on NPR: What? What did you say?

Lily: Mama! I said, have you ever built a grassman?

Me, giving up on Brat Pack analysis: No, I don't think so. What's a grassman?

Lily: You know. Like a snowman but made out of grass. You know, lots and lots of grass. Like from a big field.

Me, pausing to absorb strangeness: Hmmm. That seems like it would be hard to make. Have you ever made one?

Lily: Not exactly. I mean, I tried. It didn't get very big.

Me, choosing words carefully: I feel like it would be really hard to get the pieces of grass to stick together. Snow sticks to itself when it's wet so it's easy to make the snowballs. But grass--I can't really imagine it.

Lily, excited: Exactly! That's just what the problem is. You understand exactly. Maybe someday, we'll figure it out. Make a real grassman.

Me: speechless.

Fade out...

Distracted

2009-08-05T22:47:00.003-04:00

Got into a painting groove and am about to fall over. Back tomorrow...just the trim left!

Apple Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree, etc., etc.

2009-08-04T23:32:00.003-04:00

Two nights ago, as I lay on the couch downstairs reading at 12:30 at night, I started when I suddenly saw Lily standing at the foot of the couch, Mr. Popper's Penguins in one hand, her new Itty Bitty Booklight--a colossal mistake, as you will see--in the other.

"What in the world are you doing awake?" I asked her, jumping up to take her straight back to bed. "What woke you up?"

"I haven't been to sleep yet," she said, on the verge of tears. "I'm so tired, but Mama, I just love reading so much. I just can't stop."

Last night 10, tonight 9:30 or so after the light was confiscated, to the sound of wailing protest: I know it's too late, and I want to go to sleep, but you have no idea how good this book is.

I told my mother about the 12:30 night on the phone and heard a sigh. "I can't say I'm very surprised," she said. Ah. Yes.

It's 11:30 now, and I think I will bring my book up to bed. But only for a half an hour. Famous last words.

Would-Be Baby Book Entry

2009-08-04T00:32:00.005-04:00

Last night after dinner I told Lily that it was later than I had thought, and that we would soon need to organize ourselves for bed. I started putting some of the dishes in the dishwasher, not noticing that Annika had headed upstairs. A few minutes later, she appeared beside me, proudly bearing a short stack of clothing she had found in her bedroom. "I got my 'jamas for you, Mama," she said. And she had. The child is still only one.

And then this morning, I was reading to her from a pile of books she had assembled for the purpose. (Like Lily, whose first sentence, uttered incessantly, was, "Mama! Read this book to me," Annika is a voracious and demanding listener. Which is, don't get me wrong, a good thing.) One of the books was a counting board book, with pictures of objects numbering from one to ten. The last page was of a baby's feet, with the toes representing the number ten. The photograph had been taken from above, but I never would have noticed that--had never, in fact, having read the book before--if Annika had not said before I was able to read the line of text, "Uh oh! Poor baby." I looked at her, confused. "No, it's ten toes," I said, starting to count them for her. "No, Mama," she said, more insistently, holding her own feet up in the air like the feet in the picture. I realized the baby had to have been on its back for the picture to look like that. "The baby fell," she said.

And in a final trivial yet delicious detail, this afternoon Lily and I were doing a hard-to-explain craft/organizing project that involved construction paper and magic markers. Annika held a marker out for Lily as I walked into the room to get something. "This one, Lily," she said. "It's purple." Turns out she knows all her colors. Who knew?

Work, Oh, Work--Why Are You Always So Hard?

2009-08-01T23:47:00.003-04:00

Oh, such frustration. And it's lingering. Usually my mistakes aren't quite so glaringly concrete.

Over the past few weeks I have spent hours of hard manual labor, alternately complicated and tedious, trying to transform the ramshackle attic room of our house into a special playroom for Lily and Annika. Home improvement projects are way out of my comfort zone; I can hammer nails into a wall, and that's about the extent of my regular experience. And this room was in terrible shape. Somebody had shoddily put up a layer of thick, hideous wallpaper, slapped unmatching, uneven layers of paint on wall, stairs and ceiling, and nailed down patches of a filthy, dead-bug-covered carpeting. It was not a beginner's job, but then again, if I'd known that, I never would have started it. And although I'm not finished yet--and today's debacle set me back some, for sure--I have a feeling I'll be glad that I stuck it out, even considering I am typing with my index fingers only right now, due to the open wound on my thumb. Injured in the line of carpet-removal. As you will see.

So in short, this is what I did today. I had rented a heavy-duty carpet cleaner from the grocery store, hoping I might be able to make the carpet, which although white and patched in places, was a sort of wintery white wool and in theory, not totally impossible, if only I could get the stains out. To my surprise, once I'd figured out how to operate the thing, the carpet cleaning machine worked wonders. When I'd finished about half of the space, I stood back at the top of the stairs to assess: not bad at all. I was excited--it seemed that I might actually be able to finish the carpet and paint the stairs before the girls came home from my parents' house, which would be quite a surprise, more than I'd hoped for. Suddenly, I spotted the spray can of blackboard paint I'd bought. Without stopping to think, I decided to use it to paint the inside of the closet I am planning on turning into a secret little reading/clubhouse nook and just started to spray, standing there. When the can was emptied, I told myself I'd pick up another at the hardware store when I went back out later in the day, but then I looked down.

All around me, for four or five feet beyond the floor of the closet, green spray paint had scattered fine droplets on the white rug, heavy nearest the closet, lighter as you headed away. I confess: I cried. I sat at the top of the stairs, and I cried. So much work--and time and money, too--but mostly work, had gone into my project so far, and now this. I was too mad at myself to walk away. Instead, I gathered turpentine, and nail polish remover, and WD 40--anything I could think of to try to get the green paint out. I put some of it in the carpet cleaning machine (sorry, grocery store rental facility) and tried that. I saw that in my efforts I had spread the paint wider and added a couple of green footprints to the now unsalvagable situation. Although I could get quarter-sized spots out by dumping turpentine on the rug, I was beginning to worry that the room was on the verge of spontaneously combusting, which would have suited the mood I was in at the time. I also felt light-headed from the chemicals I had inhaled, which might have affected my judgment as I made my next move.

In one swift motion, I ripped up a corner of the carpet. When I had done this originally, it had looked to me like there was just unfinished plywood underneath. Now I could see there were painted floorboards. I ripped up the rest of it. The floor was in bad shape but I could patch some of the holes, sand some of the damage. First, of course, I would have to rip up the thin strip of wood that had been nailed all around the edge of the room and pull out the hundreds of staples all over the floor. Then, I would have to take on another painting job out of my comfort zone--paint buying, sanding, priming, painting, fixing.

But this was, although I had not thought so in the heat of the moment, a surmountable problem. I had done something rash and thoughtless, yes. But now I could, would, make it better.

Annika, Love

2009-08-01T01:12:00.003-04:00

Apparently this morning, Annika--who is at my parents' house with Lily--came to Lily and told her that she needed to wash her shoes. Lily told her no, that her shoes did not actually need to be washed. Frustrated, Annika went and found my mother. She told her, "My shoes are thirsty." My mother got her some water. Presumably, the shoes "drank."

A reminder, as I seek to find the right words in my own work, that there are so many ways to say just about everything. And a reminder to pay attention, as close as I can. The way these children of mine are growing and learning is astonishing.

Creaking Back Still

2009-07-31T00:36:00.003-04:00

Ugh, I'm so rusty, rusty, rusty, and I even fell off the wagon yesterday after only two days, and it's 12:34 right now, which means it's technically tomorrow already, and the truth is I really don't know what to write about. It's not because I can't write--it's because I have been writing, but not about me, and I'm just not in that zone right now, and I feel like my brain can only do so much writing in one day, and I'm not sure what to do about it. I do think that part of the way I am feeling is because I let myself slide so far off the path, and I am hoping that if I claw my way back on, tooth and nail, I'll find my way again.

So what to say? For one, tomorrow I will write my sevenhundredfiftywords during daylight hours, that is for sure. I guess I have been thinking all day long about the concept of balance. The last few days have been such a mix for me of real, down-in-the-trenches physical work and real, down-in-the-trenches intellectual work, and I feel like a heightened version of myself, if that makes any sense, sort of like I am operating--at least for this short spell--at a greater capacity than I usually do.

Although I am explaining this in such an awkward, knuckleheaded way, this is a good thing. As you may know, I have a bit of a hang-up about how lazy people are--of course I mostly mean me, but I also mean people in general. We use such a small part of ourselves, I fear, and I worry that it is not just a myth that we shut down even more parts of ourselves as we age, narrowing our interests and activities to a safe and shopworn few. Or at least it seems to me that lots of us do.

So when I have a long two days that involve painting a room and weeding a garden and hauling furniture, as well as an intense conversation with a mentor about early childhood education and research into a corner of history I'm realizing I've always neglected and writing for hours in that rare way that makes me forget about time, I defy these fears, show myself that I don't have to be complacent and predictable. There is also something, I think, to the notion that humans need a balance of the body and mind--that is where I started, and I see now I went off on a tangent about laziness, but both points are valid, and not unrelated.

See? I'm out of practice. But with a little luck, tomorrow will be just a smidgen easier.

Just Saying

2009-07-28T19:19:00.002-04:00

So yesterday I drove to the library in our little town, as I've been doing pretty much every day for the last four or five weeks, and was surprised to find the parking lot pretty full, considering it was about 4:30 in the afternoon on a day when the library closes at 5. Before I had kids I used to sometimes, when I was in the right frame of mind, park deliberately far from the entrance of my eventual destination, just like my grandfather used to do. He did this, I am told, because he figured the extra walk, short as it may be, was a good thing. Averse to suburban car culture as I am, I like this mentality--and the concept of these secret little personal refusals to play into a system you do not admire. But that being said, with an independent five-year-old and a squirmy, would-be runaway of a one-year-old, these days I mostly get as close as I can. Which--although I was alone--was the mindset I was still in when I pulled into the library parking lot.

I looped a circle, then returned to a spot I'd seen pretty near the front doors. It looked tight, but although I am a mediocre driver at best, parking is my forte; I take pride in my ability to slide into spots and parallel into impossible ones. I can do this, I thought. I turned in, put my foot on the brakes at just the right moment, and turned off the car, pleased with myself. It appeared I was centered perfectly between the cars on either side of mine. And then, I opened my door, slowly, so as to avoid hitting the car on my left with it, and realized there was not enough space for me to actually get out of the car. I tried to squeeze through but to no avail. Now angry with myself, I maneuvered my way back into the driver's seat, turned on the engine, and found another spot on the other side of the lot.

Why I am I telling you this? Because as I was stomping out of the car once I was finally able to open the door it occurred to me that I need to be more watchful of my tendency to do this, to focus single-mindedly on some goal or another, ignoring the context, the consequences--all of the possible ones. The best spot in the lot is meaningless, in other words, if you can't get outside to go where you're going.

That's all.

Back in Black? On Track? Whatever.

2009-07-27T23:17:00.005-04:00

You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and it's as though the previous month, or even, say, five weeks, just sort of disappeared on you? No? Well, it might happen to you someday, and if it does, I will be a sympathetic ear. What is that famous quote, it's by some guy whose name sounds like Elvis but isn't? Never explain. Your friends don't care, and your enemies won't believe you anyway. Or something like that. I'm going with the guy whose name sounds like Elvis on this one. All I will say is: I'm back.

Having said that, I feel as though expectations may be high. If you've wondered where I've been, why I haven't been writing this blog (and let me just say, as a person who loathes a red herring, hates a teaser: there is no big secret here, just a mad confluence of full time summer vacation children, disorienting country living, cleaning, exhausting and exhilarating work writing, knuckle-scraping gardening, house-bound dogs and exhaustion), you might be hoping for a splash of a re-entry, a dramatic appearance from a hidden perch offstage. The written version, if you will, of the scene you have surely seen me do from my Nutcracker days (especially if you have been in my presence after I've consumed more than two glasses of wine) when I emerge, arms outstretched, into indoor falling snow and connect with the audience in wonder and sheer delight. But my re-entry, like my life, is late and scattered and all over the place. It doesn't arc nicely like a novel, have perfect edges like a professional paint job, swoosh free throws without so much as hitting the rim. But it is here, and it will move forward, and, like me, it will try even harder tomorrow.

Good night. I'm glad to be back.

Reason 357 Why I Like Children More Than I Like Adults

2009-06-17T18:23:00.005-04:00

Today I worked with an eleven-year-old boy for the first time and was reminded, thank god, why I need to keep working with kids. Returning to a recurring theme, there is something just perfect about eleven-year-olds. Too young to be jaded or fresh, old enough to hold a real conversation and have fascinating thoughts and ideas, they are, in my mind, perfection in age.

This one was a particularly charming specimen of the genre. I had been told that he "hated reading" and "lacked focus." (This is code for: he's not doing as well in school as we'd like and balks when assigned Virginia Woolf in fifth grade.) As soon as we sat down at his desk, I noticed that he had all four "Twilight" books in a stack on the floor. "Did you read those?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," he said. The first one I read in one day. I started it, and then I couldn't stop."

"I read it too," I said. He looked at me as though I had sprouted antlers.

"Really?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. We sat in silence for a moment, my student contemplating his mother's sanity in hiring me, me contemplating the wisdom of full disclosure. And then. In a quiet voice, hesitant but buoyed by conviction, he spoke.

"I loved them. All four of them. And I can't wait for the next one to come out." I smiled. He smiled too. And then, as if scripted, he spoke again, in a whisper, so as not to alert any other members of his family who might be within earshot. "And I don't really hate to read."

"I can see that," I said, resisting to the urge to hug him or grasp his shoulders and shake him, shouting, Holden Caulfield-style, "Don't let the phonies get you!" Or, like Johnny: "Stay gold, Ponyboy! Stay gold!"

Because that, of course, is the problem with eleven-year-olds, so true, so clean, so honest, so open, so unabashedly, unselfconsciously, deliciously themselves. They turn twelve, and thirteen, and fourteen, and the world, and their parents, and their peers, and their schools, do their damnedest to shake that purity out of them, and they become not teenage zombie drug dealers or drunk drivers or sex addicted derelicts but grown-ups, who care too much what other people think and don't worry about hurting their parents' feelings when they confess their passion for vampire lit and never stay up all night reading under the covers with a flashlight and can't remember what it feels like to know that about some things, all of the rest of the grown-ups are actually wrong.

Stay gold, my young friend. When it comes to reading, I will do what I can to help.

Drink on This

2009-06-16T23:55:00.003-04:00

I have always been a little skeptical of those who say that the sense of smell is the most evocative. Yes, certain smells remind me of, say, my Mormor's kitchen, in a good way, or a hospital room, in a bad one. But as a trigger for memory, smell has never come to close to the other senses for me. What do we call the sensation of swallowing? Touch, I suppose, but that doesn't seem right.

This afternoon, in an apartment on the Upper West Side, I was asked if I'd like a glass of water. I said yes. When I took a sip, I was momentarily surprised to find the water so cold it was almost hard to swallow the first gulp--as close to ice as water can get without being actually frozen.

And then, I was no longer in this kitchen nook but in a tiny kitchen in a tiny apartment in the woods about thirty years ago, an apartment I could suddenly see as clear as day in my mind's eye. I saw the blue couch in its plastic cover, the lamps with bases like china dolls, the sheen of the coffee table, the blue jar filled with hard candies, the half walnut shell with a picture of me taped inside hanging from the wall on a piece of gold cord, a handmade gift from a ten-year-old girl to her grandmother. How did I get there? It was the water.

A quirk of my grandmother, my father's mother, who died when I was fifteen, is that she only drank water that was extremely cold. She kept it in the refrigerator, which she kept at the coldest setting, and when you asked for a glass of water you got this: that almost numbing sensation followed by the ultimately satisfying quench of thirst, a pleasurable experience, ultimately, so much so that I have always considered frigid water a genuine luxury, on the few occasions I have been served it as cold as hers.

And I could see my grandmother: her red hair, thick and wavy like my father's and my aunt's, cut in short layers and set professionally, the fine lines around her eyes, her "house dress," flowered and to the knee, the veins in her legs, which I have, too.

It is true that we do not forget those we love. But sometimes it is surprising how and why we remember them.

Scooby Dooby Doo

2009-06-15T23:57:00.003-04:00

Generally I pride myself on being very pragmatic and immune to anything that could be remotely described as woo-woo or unscientific, but the secret truth is that I believe a little, little bit in karma: in the idea that what you throw out to the universe comes back in some unspoken, sometimes incomprehensible way. Of course, the pessimist's definition of karma is: you get what you deserve, but I don't even mind this, as I like the idea, however far-fetched, that goodness breeds goodness, even if the theory offers no explanation for all of the badness that goodness breeds too.

Anyway, that was a rambling and not entirely well-suited introduction for my little story, although maybe it will make more sense when I read it over tomorrow. Today, on our way home from her first day of a week-long camp at her new school, Lily and I rode the subway downtown in the middle of the day, when traffic is light and you can almost always get a seat on one of the benches. We got one, and just a few minutes into the ride a man stepped onto our car with an electric guitar hooked up to some kind of a portable battery, which Lily immediately noticed and was intrigued by. And then, he started to sing. He had a pretty voice, and he didn't sing too loudly, in spite of the electric guitar, which I appreciated. As frequent subway companions, Lily and I have come to an agreement regarding those asking for money below ground, or above. Although the socialist in me wants to give a dollar to every soul who asks me for money, the capitalist--or perhaps the pragmatist--in me, has decided that if somebody is performing, working in some way to earn the money they are asking for, I will give it to them.

This situation qualified, but for some reason, probably because I was so tired, and so distracted by other things--Lily's experience with all of her future classmates, the afternoon meetings I had stacked one right after the other--I sat tight, even as Lily smiled at the performer, and I too admired his voice. And then, as he walked past us toward the end of the car, Lily looked at me with a question in her eyes, although she didn't ask why I wasn't giving her a dollar, as I usually do, to give to the singer. Quickly, now not sure I even had any cash on me, I rummaged in my wallet and found some, stuffing it in Lily's hand. She jumped up and handed it to the man, who took it with a smile, bowing to her in thanks. By this point he was standing at the door, ready to push through and sing for the next car on the line.

Instead, he turned on his guitar again, strummed an opening chord. "This one is for the little lady," he said, and Lily looked at me, eyes huge, as though she'd just been announced as the winner of an Academy Award. And he played and sang the entire original theme song from Scooby Doo.

After the first bar of music, I recognized it; how could I not after so many early Saturday mornings sunk into the rust-colored couch in my parents' den, eating cereal from the box with my sister, as the gang rode around in the mystery van? And as Lily laughed, I watched pretty much everyone on our subway car realize what he was playing with such reverence and start to smile too, perhaps remembering their own Saturday morning cartoon experiences, or just enjoying the incongruous act, the spontaneous expression of fun.

Karma? Who knows. But a good moment just the same.

Exhaustion

2009-06-15T01:06:00.001-04:00

Back from weekend away--which somehow seems like a month. Back on track tomorrow, I promise.

Alone but Not Alone

2009-06-12T00:27:00.004-04:00

It's really, really late, and I have had a few glasses of wine, so I am going to keep this brief. The options, in this condition, are either brief, or endless; trust me: I think you will prefer brief. The reason I was able to go out this evening and have a lingering dinner with friends, is because today--for the first day in years--I was without child and without dog, a state I will maintain through Sunday. I am in a wedding this weekend, and because we are going to a very remote part of Connecticut for the wedding, and because the girls are not going to the wedding, my parents took them, and the dogs, to Massachusetts for the next few days. I had big plans for this day--the only day I did not have wedding obligations--and of course I mostly frittered them away. But I will not lie to you: To not have to think about where I was going and when I was coming back and knowing that I was not paying somebody else for the luxury of my solitude was pleasant, maybe even more than that. That being said, I now feel as though I understand the concept of the "phantom limb." Sleep well, girls. I will, I think, but I will dream of you.

Still Swirled

2009-06-11T00:13:00.003-04:00

Still circling my subject matter--the end of Lily's preschool years--although I know I am going to hone in eventually. The Watermelon Party was today--this is her preschool's end-of-year celebration. I was reminded, as we sat waiting for the children to come down the stairs and sing for us, that just a few weeks ago in our ongoing series of "Tell Me a Story from When You Were a Little Girl, Mama," I had told Lily, almost offhandedly, about something I hadn't thought about in decades: my own preschool's end-of-the-year celebration.

It's funny that Lily's school celebration is both named after and focused on the consumption of a particular food. Because the only thing I remember about my last day of preschool is the little sundae cups. Do you remember these? I think they're still around, but I haven't seen one since I was five. They come 10 or 12 to a package, I think, in little plastic containers with paper lids. The containers are plastic, I am assuming, because you can see that way whether you are getting the chocolate swirl or the strawberry swirl; I always wanted the strawberry. (My love for chocolate has always been narrow and specific as opposed to all-encompassing.) The cups were eaten with those little flat wooden "spoons."

My preschool, in the suburb in which I grew up, had a big outdoor space surrounded by a fence, and it was in this yard that we ate the sundae cups. When I had finished describing the cups to Lily, I stopped and looked at her intently, waiting for her to say, "And then?" or maybe, "So?" But she did not. "I can imagine you eating one of those," she said instead. "I would like to try one." And it became clear to me, for the hundredth time, that these stories for her are not about plot or character development or larger meaning but instead about feeling connected to me, to the child I was, like she is now, and about knowing where--in even the most minute and seemingly inconsequential ways--she comes from.

So even if all Lily remembers is the watermelon, I, now, will remember so much more: the smile she exchanged with the classmate standing next to her on the steps, the way she threw herself into her teacher's arms, the book she pulled out of the red canvas bag, the swirling chaos of the parents in the classroom, the overwhelmed little boy retreating to his cubby, the laughter, the sound of the singing, the moment when, walking down the stairs, she spotted me in my folding chair and very lightly touched her finger to her nose, the symbol we had agreed upon so she could know I was watching. I wonder if my parents remember the sundae cups.

Oh, To Be Royal

2009-06-10T00:03:00.002-04:00

Lily is "graduating" from preschool tomorrow, and I am so overwhelmed by my emotions concerning this fact that I can't yet write about it, if that makes any sense. Instead, I turn to the default device of the emotionally overwhelmed and relay an amusing anecdote. And apparently adopt a vaguely British, stilted style that I hope is on its way out with the ending of this sentence.

Tonight at dinner, Lily, who has been doing her darndest to convince me that she is in no way, shape or form ready to go to kindergarten and instead should be shipped off to military school, appeared at the table swathed in a blanket, cradling her stuffed frog, which was wearing a diaper and some kind of a hat. "I am not Lily," she announced. "I am a queen." My parents and grandmother, who had just arrived from Massachusetts, were amused, and Annika looked solemn, as though thinking, "Well, duh. Tell me something I don't know." I rolled my eyes.

"And who's the frog?"

"It's not a frog. It just looks like one. It is my daughter. The princess." She suddenly started laughing so hard she couldn't speak for a few seconds. "And did you see? She's wearing a diaper!" Ha, ha, I thought. Good one.

"Your child doesn't look like you at all," I said, knowing on some level that this was the wrong thing to say, and Lily's face immediately darkened.

"That is not funny, Mama," she said, "and if you--" The look on my face, for once, stopped the sentence in its tracks. "Not funny," she whispered instead to the frog, who, I must say, looked like an ass in his diaper. I carried some dishes into the kitchen. When I returned and sat down, Lily waved her hand in the air, chin held high. "Silence!" she said. "The queen must speak." My mother gave me her version of my previous look, a much more effective version--it seems to lose effectiveness as it is passed down through the generations--and I held my tongue.

"I told you I am the queen. Well, you," and then she pointed squarely at me, "are my servants. Servant?" Again, the finger across the table, directly in line with my forehead. I rolled my eyes again. "You must agree. You are my servant. And that baby over there?" With this she pointed at Annika. "She is my other baby. And that means you are her servant, too."

Suddenly, I felt exhausted. And I wasn't entirely sure she was wrong.

Excuses, Excuses

2009-06-09T00:33:00.002-04:00

Ugh. Blog called on account of children who woke up at 5:00 a.m. this morning and work day that just never ended and a few cooking projects interspersed throughout and a general sense of ineptitude.

And Another Thing About Annika...

2009-06-05T22:10:00.002-04:00

Walking up the stairs behind Annika tonight on our way up to put her to bed, I said to Lily and Ben, "Can you believe she's going to be two in September?" What I was thinking about was the night before she was born. When you have to schedule your baby's delivery, the twenty-four hours beforehand becomes increasingly, almost intolerably, weighty. That night, I could not fall asleep. Hours after my parents, Ben and Lily had retired for the evening, I sat on the reclining chair trying not to think. I "watched" a Law and Order, then about four more. Five minutes later I couldn't remember the plots of any of them. At some point somebody walked down the hall on the way to the bathroom and said to me, "You really ought to go to sleep. Big day tomorrow!" Can you conceive of more of an understatement? And so I sat, in my favorite lavender maternity shirt and my black leggings, my hands on my belly, feeling the baby kick. I kept thinking I wished I could just slow down the passing of time, although each time I looked at the clock it still seemed like forever until the morning would come. I am not ready, I kept thinking, feeling. Seven more hours. Six. Five. Four-and-three-quarters.

And then it was the morning of September 4th, and we said good-bye to everyone, discussed which route to take--Will there be traffic on 10th this early?--and drove ten minutes up the street to experience the second biggest change of my life, which I knew, thanks to modern medicine, would happen at 8 a.m., shortly thereafter, if the doctor had been forced to wait for her coffee. It seemed so strange: so mundane: so earth-shatteringly insane. And then time flew, of course, and at about the time most people were arriving at work, EST, I was holding this baby, this Annika.

I wasn't intending that preamble. What I had in my head when I started was a quirk of Annika's that seems so her own; it was not something Lily ever did, or does, and Annika has been doing it since she could speak. At many points throughout the day, but especially when she is sleepy or in the car or just with me, Annika will become preoccupied with where each member of her family happens to be. "Lily is?" she will ask. "Dada is?" This means, as clear as day and she's been saying it for six months now: Where is Lily? Where is Dada? "Sadie is? Scout is?" she will ask, and even, when I am holding her, or standing at the counter with her at my feet, "Mama is?"

"Mama is right here," I say. "Right here with Annika." She nods solemnly. She knew this all along, but clearly it comforts her. "Annika is?" I say sometimes, just to revel in her response.

"Annika is," she says each time. Annika is." Not a question, but a statement of fact. Yes. She is.

Tooooo Late

2009-06-05T01:05:00.002-04:00

Just finished a big work project. I started to write an entry afterward but it was baaaad, and not in the Michael Jackson sense of the word. So although very early on in this experiment I explained that I would not be filtering myself, deleting entries that I had not sufficiently worked over, I apparently lied. I erased. And we are all the better for it. But I will now sleep the righteous if unfairly short sleep of the worthy, and tomorrow, I will, exhausted, begin anew. It's a good thing I'm down with this whole "beginning anew" thing, wouldn't you agree?

Contagious

2009-06-04T00:23:00.003-04:00

For a couple of weeks now, Annika has been spontaneously breaking into what Lily and I now call the "Happy Song." This consists of her shaking her shoulders, waving her head from side to side, and singing the words, "Happy, happy, happy!" repeatedly, all while smiling winsomely at her audience. This is one of those "baby book" items (that isn't yet in the still-blank baby book) because it so epitomizes to me who this child is. It also seems relevant to me in a time when happiness is a focus of study for writers, psychologists and sociologists, as well as a key player in the zeitgeist. Americans seem mildly obsessed with happiness these days: What is it, how do we get it, why do we need it, and more. The thing is about Annika, that she just is. And she has been that way from the very beginning: happy. I don't mean to imply that all this fuss about happiness is really pointless because so much of it seems to be a person's birthright, or maybe I do, a little bit. Don't get me wrong. I certainly believe that a person can make themselves more or less happy than they might be by nature, and that circumstance and discipline and sheer awareness can have a major impact on how happy we are. But the fact is, some of us are born singing the "Happy Song." I feel fortunate to have one in my house.

The End of Something

2009-06-03T00:28:00.002-04:00

Lily is always begging me to tell her stories "about when you were a little girl," and I search my reserves of memory for them, telling some again and again--the summer my mother banned Popsicles, the popcorn-induced babysitting fire--and occasionally remembering a new one. When she says "story" she means a juicy memory, not necessarily one with a plot but with a flash of lightning, burst of flame, satisfying denouement. And if truth be told, these are, in fact, the memories that exist closest to the surface, the easiest ones to recall. But they are not my only memories. They are not even the memories I cherish or hope to hold onto.

No, those are the fleeting, seemingly ordinary scenes, the moments that appear or occur to me unpredictably, with no context or framework, the thoughts or actions that would never be captured in a photograph, or, typically, in words.

Lily's preschool experience ends next week, and I am thinking all of the time about transitions, about endings. And beginnings, too, of course, but more about the finite nature of experience, and the duration of experience, and endings most of all. And I found myself one day sitting on a chair in my dining room remembering an afternoon twenty-one years ago, just around this time of year, when I was days away from graduating from high school. I remembered walking through the dining room in my parents' house, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror that still hangs on the wall, and hardly recognizing myself: a wash of dark hair, a pale profile, a faded navy blue T-shirt that was partly disintegrating even then and is still kicking around today. I remember, quite specifically, thinking the words: This is the metaphorical end of my childhood. And then, sitting in my father's den, on a velvet sofa that is no longer there, thinking: What will happen to me? This is the beginning of my very own life.

I wonder what Lily is thinking.

Dear

2009-06-01T23:49:00.002-04:00

Oh, it is just so, so easy NOT to write. I almost talked myself out of writing right now--was so close I could taste it, or rather feel the pillow under my head. But it is too easy not to write, and that is the problem. The older I get, the more I see how much of writing is discipline, and how much of discipline is learned. I am still learning. I am determined to learn. And so I write. Badly, sometimes. In brief, much of the time. And when I stop, as happened last week, I start again. As Emerson wrote, in a quote I keep by my desk, "Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." Begone nonsense. Tonight, I write. Tomorrow, I write again. Serene? Not so much. Maybe in a dozen years or so. But begin, yes. That I will do. As many times as it takes to continue from there.

Today I have babies on my mind. No, don't worry mother of mine. Not more for me, but other people's. Or rather, other creatures'. Yesterday two fawns were born in our yard in Connecticut. I will give you the short version of a story I have been telling ad infinitum, to the point that the thought of it exhausts me. One of the babies was left behind when the mother ran off to protect herself and the baby who could already walk, and after a long day of agonizing on the parts of me, the weak and hungry and terrified newborn, and presumably the heartbroken, brave and desperate mother, the fawn was rescued by wildlife rehabilitators: a couple who spend their days answering calls about orphaned infant raccoons and rebuilding turtle shells with fiberglass and treating the broken beaks of vultures. In other words, people who will go to heaven if there is one, people who make me proud to be a human being.

And in the middle of this day, I lay with my own baby, indulgent at her nap time, unable to turn my thoughts from the stricken mother deer, who had no choice but to leave this tiny helpless creature behind, who saved herself and the stronger of her children but instinctively could not risk dying for the other, singing--stroking my own child's hair, and singing in a low, sad voice, praying, in my own way, for the mother to somehow return.

By the end of the day, she had not. I had doubted she would be able to. So many screaming children, barking dogs, running lawnmowers, ringing phones, starting cars--it was too bright, too loud, too chaotic. I know she was watching from somewhere unseen. Waiting. Or at least biding her time, if I am humanizing the mother too much. But she did not, could not, and we had to leave, could no longer keep the dogs shut up, prevent the rain from falling, keep the infant warm, or fed. And when the rehabilitators came, showed up in a car full of rescued baby raccoons and blankets and carriers and gloves and medication and bandages and food, I had no real choice but to agree with them when they decided to take the baby to a fawn rescue facility, where he would never again see his mother--whom he knew for mere minutes on earth--but would likely, with luck and specialized formula and another one of these human/saints to care for him in his infancy, survive.

And it was not until much later, after a sleepless night spent dreaming of this mother deer, this powerful, daunting creature who had rushed a dog in defense of her own, dreaming of her return to a fawnless site, her agony at the loss, that I connected my actions with hers, that I realized in allowing the fawn to be taken, to be saved, I was obeying my own maternal instincts, that voice that says, no matter what, against all odds, in the face of all adversity: The baby must survive.

Doctor Laborde

2009-05-27T00:20:00.002-04:00

Blog called on account of Nicole's arrival in NYC. Back tomorrow.

NYC

2009-05-21T22:15:00.002-04:00

Early this evening I was walking through one of the subway stations near my apartment on my way home when I walked past a dad with two kids: a boy who looked to be about ten and his sister, younger by a year or two. The boy was holding a Metrocard; the dad was waiting for them a few paces ahead. There was nothing remarkable about the scene, nothing even vaguely out of the ordinary. A dad, two kids, on their way somewhere, or going home like me; I didn't know, it didn't matter, but as I kept on walking, I suddenly stopped, right at the base of the stairs to the street.

Everything was out of the ordinary about that scene, at least in terms of what had been ordinary for me for so many years. I found myself thinking, pounding the obvious over the head with a hammer: Oh my god. Children actually live--LIVE--in this city!" Mine do.

When I was growing up in a borderline rural town that has since become more classically suburban, trips to the city, and Boston, mind you, not New York, were special. We went quite a bit: my father went to every Boston Celtics home game, and we went with him sometimes, my mother liked to take us to see plays and go to the ballet,we went shopping, or out to dinner, or to visit our urban pioneer friends, who lived in the then still slightly edgy South End, where my father felt nervous parking his car. But every time I walked down Newbury Street, or looked for books in the Boston Public Library, or later, even when I lived in Cambridge and took the T downtown every single day, it still felt like a mini event: Here I am in the city!

Which I think is why I occasionally have these moments, these instances of feeling shell shocked that my children will have Metrocards, that their "ordinary" will be hot dog stands and 24 hour delis, taxis to Chinatown, picnics in the park. Their "ordinary" won't be waiting for a ride, being driven to a friend's house, walking around to the side yard to get the mail. I don't think my oldest, at five, knows what a mall is, or a car pool. When we are not in the city she doesn't understand that you can't get things delivered.

And she has an urban confidence that I remember even as a small child noticing in my South End friends: an assumption that the streets they walked were theirs, a total absence of that "Look, I'm in the city!" vibe that I possibly still exude to some extent, in the best possible way, because I think it with such pleasure.

I didn't plan this, living here. If you'd told me twenty years ago I would be, I would have laughed in your face, called you insane. But here I am, heading home each day on the express train, my unlimited ride card in my wallet, with this child who owns the streets of New York, and another one, who can walk all around the block, if you give her an hour or so, who's got a little swagger, too.

Yes, kids live here. Mine do.

On Their Terms

2009-05-20T22:46:00.002-04:00

Today was my gardening class, and we had two special guests: a pair of garden snails transported into the city by a family I love with the plan of moving them permanently into one of the new planters we have set up on the roof. The children were unanimously excited by the snails. They wanted to touch them, but only the shells. They wanted to peer at them very close up and speculate as to how they "slimed around." They completely didn't get my escargot joke at snack time, but that's okay; it wasn't very funny anyway.

For most of our class, the snails waited patiently in their cozy Tupperware container, certainly more patiently than most New Yorkers wait to move into their new digs. Approved wholeheartedly by the co-op board and just in time for the still low financing rates, at about 4:15 they were carried over to the chosen planter, at which the point the carrier, who was supposed to put the snails on an appealing patch of dirt, stomped her foot. "They won't come off," she said. "They don't want to leave the container."

"Let me try," another gardener requested. He, too, could not dislodge the stubborn snails, who were possibly thinking that they should rent instead, in the hope that another six months would provide even more advantageous circumstances. I took the box from the child and tried myself. They were right: The snails, having had their snail universe rocked over and over in the course of a week or so, were not going to give up the ghost. This was their Tupperware now, and they weren't giving it up just because we had planted a few herbs and hydrangeas for them.

The gardeners were becoming restless, worried, even. Without thinking about what I was saying, I set the lid of the container, which was the part the snails were clinging so desperately to, down on a nice patch of dirt near a healthy-looking clump of cilantro. I hoped it wouldn't taste like soap to the snails. "What are you doing?" one little girl said. They all waited for my response.

"I think they just need to do this on their own time," I said. "I think they will slime off when they're ready." The children, seasoned gardeners now who know all too well how to resist when they're pushed, nodded, all seven of them. This made perfect sense to them. And later, when I thought about it, it did to me too.

Meditations on Basil

2009-05-19T12:52:00.002-04:00

I have been doing a lot of planting lately: my garden in Connecticut, the garden on our building's roof deck, the roof deck at Lily's school, where I teach my gardening class. And some of the time, much of the time, Annika has been gardening with me. It might surprise you, how much a twenty-month-old can garden. As it turns out, babies this age like pots and trowels, soil and digging, and--at least in the case of mine--the taste of herbs.

Lily is also a bit of an herb fiend, in the straight-up and not Jerry Garcia sense of the word. That is to say that she enjoys chives snipped in her scrambled eggs, cilantro in her guacamole, rosemary in her hash browns. What she really likes to do, however, is stand in our herb garden plucking things and chomping on them with gusto, asking me, even when she knows the answer, "Are you sure I can eat this, Mama? Are you SURE?"

I think it is because for five years I have been telling her that nothing can go into her mouth but actual food, and the herb thing seems a bit like cheating the system. Regardless, she has taught Annika how to wander around the beds, picking and chomping, and I was quite proud to hear Annika utter her first herb just last weekend: "Basil," she said quite clearly, pointing to an enormous patch of sage. "Basil!"

So this morning, as the two of us sat at the kitchen counter eating apple slices, I pulled the little pot of basil that was a gift from my in-laws close to us and told Annika what it was. Imitating Lily, she asked, "Eat it?"

"Yes," I said. "You can eat the basil. Would you like to try a leaf?" I plucked her one, and she chewed thoughtfully, smiled. Then, as I sat beside her, wondering if I should intervene, she proceeded to eat every leaf off the plant, one by one, Every Single Leaf.

I'm not even sure what to say.

Triple Word Score

2009-05-18T23:52:00.002-04:00

So at some point on Saturday evening I found myself standing at the counter at our house in Connecticut sorting tiny Travel Scrabble tiles into rows by letter. I actually had this thought: It is Saturday night, and I am standing at the kitchen counter sorting Scrabble tiles. I could never have predicted this moment in time.

The reason for the sorting, or at least the outward purpose, was that for some idiotic reason we apparently own (or owned, thanks to the missing "K") two Travel Scrabble games, both of which were out at kid level, leading Lily to come up with the clever notion of taking all of the letter tiles and combining them in one of the little pouches included in each game. This, of course, rendered both games unplayable, not that I have ever in my life been in a situation where I was one of a group of people in which this conversation suddenly broke out:

Hey! I feel like a game of Scrabble. Anyone in?

Me! I do! I want in! Can I play too?

And so on, until there were too many people for ONE game alone, and I was able (or not able, as this exhilarating dialogue is hypothetical, remember?) to say:

Well, it's a damn good thing I have TWO sets right here then, isn't it?

But still. Even two people couldn't play Scrabble using the letters from two games combined, so I decided to do the onerous sorting, figuring I would learn in the process if--after five-plus years of children--the majority of the tiles had survived or been digested.

I use the word "onerous" (and, inexplicably, many sets of quotation marks), but the truth is, the work was actually square on the side of enjoyable. Much like folding laundry, cleaning the linen closet, sorting Scrabble tiles turns out to be one of those mindless repetitive tasks that provides enormous satisfaction in being absorbing and more importantly, finite.

I think I have written here before about my love for finite tasks. I love finite tasks. Almost everything I do, personally, professional, parentally (?), is open-ended, never-ending, subject to interpretation. Not finite tasks. Finite: I even like the word. Onomatopoeia: Short, crisp long vowels, done.

As I stood there sorting, my husband came into the room. I waited, knowing he would say one of two things when he saw what I was doing. He said the first: Why are you doing that?

I was ready.

Well, we don't have a movie, and I thought it looked like fun.

No, seriously. Why don't you just throw those all away and get a new game?

That was the second--I had the satisfaction of predicting both.

I know there are many people who would never take the half hour or so it took to sort the Scrabble tiles. I am married to one of them, related by blood to another. But I am not a member of that tribe, and not just because I loathe throwing anything away, have difficulty, sometimes, buying new things.

In this world, in this family, somebody needs to be the person who sorts the tiles, who notices the bag of useless mingled letter squares, who dumps them out together, who steadies her jaw, and sorts. Who has the satisfaction, a better kind, of filling one bag with a complete set, putting away the game, out of child reach, this time, and storing the set with the missing "K" in the hopes that it might be found and the set moved on to the donation bag, so some other family somewhere can have the satisfaction of never playing Travel Scrabble either, at least while their kids are still too small.

Yes, somebody needs to sort the Scrabble tiles. Today, anyway, I am glad that this person is me.

2009-05-14T22:15:00.003-04:00

Oof. Those easing-back-in entries are always so rough. Will, once again, resist coward's impulse to delete. As promised, onto The Once and Future King.

So I just reread this, for the first time since seventh grade, and I found it so much more enjoyable this time around. It is so important, I think, not to read books too early. This, I think, is an art: to know when to read what, to know it well enough to guide others, such as one's offspring. I hope I do right by mine in this regard. Anyway, my seventh grade memories of the book involve an agonizing extra credit assignment and a real sense of trudging through whole chunks, although even then I found substantial sections charming and funny and clever. This time, however, I got the epic-ness of it, if you will, the mythic part of the myth. I am thinking now that seventh grade is a little young in general for "epic" and even, in some regards "myth." In seventh grade, what seems epic or possessing of a mythical quality is almost always later determined to be almost inconceivably irrelevant, such as hair crimping, or one's mother's policy on eye shadow. But I digress.

At the end of the third chapter of the first book in the book, I came across this line, uttered when Wart, the future King Arthur, learns that Merlyn is to come home with him and be his tutor: "My!" exclaimed the Wart, while his eyes sparkled with excitement at the discovery. "I must have been on a Quest!" I most certainly do not remember this line from my childhood reading, and I do not think the word "quest," or rather "Quest," for it is in the text and intentionally so a big Q Quest, would have resonated had it been brought to my attention. What struck me this time was how lovely, how inspiring, how redemptive is the notion that one might be on a quest--even a Quest--at any given point in time and not even know it. What magic it would be--is sometimes--to learn it.

To nobody's surprise, I am sure, this made me think of parenthood, which believe me, I try not to think about as hard as I can, but the mind does what it will, especially when the objects of one's thoughts simply refuse to go away, twenty-four hours a day and are, for the most part, very loud. The last two days, for example, have been arduous, exhausting. As briefly if cryptically noted yesterday, Annika and I were stuck in a subway turnstile for a full ten minutes. There was a distressing dog incident I can't quite bring myself to write about yet. Lily and Annika have both been having a hard time (this language, which most of me loves--having a "hard time"--occasionally makes a regressive little tiny part of me want to yell at my progressive, open-minded, modern parenting self: It's called "acting like a massive brat and driving your mother to drink," but anyway.). Annika's is more of a physical nature: in short, an infected toe that is healing slowly and needs to be bandaged constantly and twice-daily antibiotics that have almost left my index finger decapitated a dozen times. Lily is, well, I'm not sure what Lily's going through right now, but I know it has to do with leaving the school she's been at for most of her life, since before her long term memory kicked in, and also probably something to do with being five, which from where I'm sitting looks like a lot on the plate, emotionally speaking.

And then this line. I read it yesterday, before my book group met, because I had folded over the page corner, and then I read it again today, because I wanted to see if it read the way I remembered it. It did. And I felt a wave of relief wash over me in a sea of discontent at the idea that all of the trying moments of parenthood, and let's be honest, even the hours, and the cups of water hurled out of the crib, and the dismantled remotes and cell phones, and the public and private temper tantrums, each harrowing in their own special way, and those worst of all moments when your child cannot communicate what she wishes to you, and you cannot will yourself into understanding anyway: they are all part of a quest, my Quest, or one of them, and someday, in a more obvious way, or maybe just in an increasing series of realizations like this one, I too will be lying on an isolated beach somewhere (because why not a beach? it's my fantasy), looking back, and I will be able to say to myself, with profound relief and satisfaction: Ah. Ah. I must have been on a Quest."

Baby Got, No Is, Back

2009-05-13T23:33:00.003-04:00

As it turns out, I am not very good at writing every day when I actually have a lot of other (read: paying) work to do, which was the case over the last week when, as was noticed by my aunt if nobody else, I have not posted at all. This is a problem, as the writing is meant to be the other (read: primary) work. But for now, it is unavoidable. To be fair, the work I do when I am not writing here is writing, in a sense, and editing and revising and teaching writing to other people, but you know what I mean. It's not the same thing at all. Let's see if I can get myself back on the rails, one day at a time. Have I lost you? I hope not. How can I woo you back?

Tonight, I don't have much. All week I've been thinking of entries I would post when I had the time, but for some reason, right now, in the moment, I can't remember a one of them. Although perhaps someday in the future I will want to write about getting stuck in the subway turnstile with Annika in her stroller or how Annika responded when Lily made a guest appearance in her toddler group today, or the acapella group I heard this morning singing, beautifully, a song I love: This Magic Moment, or the planting I did on the roof with my class of five-year-olds today, but for now, I'm just not feeling it; remember: I'm easing back in.

So instead I will leave you with this: what I saw at the subway station at Union Square as I exited my train to head up to the street and back home after my children's literature book group. A man, standing at the base of the stairs to the street, with a stack of fliers in his hand. His sweatshirt was white, with an image of Jesus nailed to the cross silk screened on the front in black, surrounded by red and orange flames. The words: Jesus will save you from hell. All the way back home I kept thinking about this message: what it says about this man's interpretation of Jesus, what it says about this man's vision of hell, but most of all, what a very odd, very unfriendly, aggressive, presumptuous and hideously ugly design to be wearing around on your sweatshirt.

Remind me tomorrow that I can write about a passage from my book group book: The Once and Future King. A quest!

Humor Me

2009-05-05T11:29:00.009-04:00

Periodically, I am overwhelmed by a wave of guilt over Annika's baby book, which is largely blank thus far. I know this is a cliche--the fate of second children everywhere--and much of the time I can suppress my guilt, so overwhelmed am I by virtually everything else. But then. The wave comes (why does guilt feel like drowning?), and I succumb.

So as an impetus to write in the book itself, I will practice here, by relaying the most extensive conversation I have had with Annika thus far, and--I suspect--the most extensive conversation Annika has yet had with anyone.

Scene: I am lying in bed, the covers over my head, trying to pretend I am still asleep. It is approximately, no exactly, 6:15 a.m. Lily is awake. Loud. (Why is Lily seemingly always awake? Why so loud?) I hear tiny padding footsteps.

Annika: Mama? Mama? Mama up!

I open my eyes, and Annika is standing by my side of the bed, holding a little pair of shoes. I pick her up and place her next to me on the bed. She hands me the shoes.

Annika: Mama. Shoes on. Shoes on.

I put a shoe on her left foot.

Annika: Mama. Other one. Other shoe on.

I put the other shoe on her right foot. She surveys my handiwork.

Annika (very pleased): Shoes on! Pretty! Pretty!

Me: Yes. The shoes are on, and they look very pretty.

Annika: Down. Down. Show Dada. Show Lily. Pretty!

I put her back down on the floor.

Annika: Bye-bye, Mama!

So Annika, this one's for you. You are 20 months old, and you talk! And before you are two, I am going to flesh out your baby book. But only if you start sleeping until 7.

When is a Job Not Just a Job?

2009-05-04T16:48:00.005-04:00

Let's pretend I didn't just take an unearned three-day weekend there. I don't know why I am risking losing the few loyal readers I have by slacking off. Sigh.

Anyway. I have had a study-in-contrasts kind of a day, which many of my days seem to be these days: days in which I try largely unsuccessfully and with unintended comic effects to balance the many unflattering, ill-fitting hats I am trying to wear simultaneously, much like the man in Caps for Sale, a book without one-tenth of the clunky adverbs and adjectives in this sentence alone. And cute monkeys to boot. Wearing caps.

In an amusing twist of fate, I am currently editing a book called Raising Your Toddler. This is amusing to me, anyway, because due to a very scattered childcare schedule, I am often attempting to edit Raising Your Toddler while, well, raising my toddler. Or at least while keeping her semi-occupied and with a mouth full of applesauce while I conduct business calls and check word counts.

Today, for example, although I had a babysitter, Annika was not particularly interested in the Battleship game said babysitter was playing with Lily when the author of the book I am editing called. As I answered the phone in my professional (i.e. polite) voice, Annika fell into my office on top of the child's camera she was wearing around her neck, a camera I keep meaning to throw out, as it has never worked, but somehow can't bear to, as I liked the idea of it so much before purchasing it.

Annika wailed, the author asked, "Are you still there," the babysitter rushed in, Lily called, "It's my turn," and I froze with the phone to my ear. I find these moments are so concrete, so obvious, so in your face, so much more of the time than one would expect, at least for me. I suspect this is not the case for those parents with proper office jobs, those who do not work at home, those who have actual doors on their home offices, which I, at present, do not.

I feel like I have set up this anecdote with an element of suspense. What did she do? Did she drop the phone, scoop up the toddler, cradle her to her chest? Soother her, throw away the useless children's camera, join in the Battleship game? Reprimand the sitter, run out of the office with the phone leaving all the chaos behind, explain away the crying in the background by telling the eminent child psychologist/author of toddler book that sometimes kids "just need to cry?"

I think I will leave you hanging. Just know this: The author of the toddler book, a very wise woman I feel privileged to be working with, is a very big advocate of the good-enough school of parenting. I am trying to squeeze the last drop out of this editing project, in more ways than one.

Bringing It Back to Boston

2009-04-30T23:08:00.000-04:00

Well, I had today's entry all planned out, but after a triple--yes, I said triple--overtime game, even a viewer needs a rest.

Banner Day

2009-04-30T00:05:00.002-04:00

It's nearly May, and so--nearly six months after the election--I have made an important executive decision in my own household: It's time to take the Obama/Biden banner out of our living room window and retire it to the basement, where all good banners go to be disappeared by non-voting, yet Democratic in spirit, building superintendents.

Now the jaded among you, or those of you who have known me for longer than about ten minutes, might think that the banner has been in the living room this long because of what I shall call, generously, a lack of interest in the cleaning arts. This is not the case, although we will leave the discussion of the clumps of dog hair I hid behind the couch tonight instead of taking them to the trash can one room over while watching Gabriel Byrne's show (how I like to think of it) on HBO tonight for another "session."

No, the banner has been in the window because I like to look at it, still, because although I have succumbed to human nature by not walking around every waking moment of every single day with the words: We won! We won! ringing in my ears, I don't want to forget about what happened on that already distant-seeming election day, and I don't want the election itself to be the most significant victory.

But even the most triumphant banner, when clumps of dog hair adhere to its sides, and bits of smushed banana dot its surface, is ephemeral by definition. I do not need a banner to remind me of what has been done, what must be done, what we will do.

(But I am secretly hoping that my lovely superintendent can't bear to throw it away and tucks it in a back corner with the cleaning supplies, where I can peek at it every once in a while when I need a fix.)

What a Piece of Work is Man

2009-04-28T23:40:00.004-04:00

A friend invited me to see "Hair" tonight, on Broadway, which I realized with a start once it began I had never before seen performed live. Some of the songs seemed wholly unfamiliar, including one, whose lyrics struck me, both because I liked them, and because they echoed a phrase that so reminds me of my mother, and my grandfather, a phrase I myself use all the time. I know it is only a matter of time before Lily utters it; I hope she will be grateful that although I have continued in the longstanding tradition of "piece of work," I have fully exorcised "gauchos" and "slacks." But mostly I like the concept. I usually refer to individuals as a piece of work, but Shakespeare, as per usual, had it right (even though he was actually using the phrase reverentially, not with exasperation, as per the excerpt that follows). But man is a piece of work. The whole damn lot of us.

From Shakespeare's Hamlet:

I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation
prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the king
and queen moult no feather. I have of late--but
wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so.

Life Imitates...Life

2009-04-27T23:46:00.003-04:00

Today I found myself walking down 5th Avenue after picking up Lily at school with a babysitter and two of Lily's classmates, a girl and a boy. I tried to gain entry into the children's conversation a few times, although I should have known better. When three five-year-olds are walking down the street together, the last thing they want is a grown-up asking them how their day had been. When three children are walking down the street together, grown-ups are so much background noise.

So I did what any grown-up worth her salt would do in such a situation. I kept walking alongside the group, feigning disinterest, and I eavesdropped as hard as I could. The most interesting conversation, after it had been determined that the babysitter would bring all three children to the park, was about what they would play at the park. The two girls wanted to play "family," a game Lily is a big fan of that has many variations but is basically role-playing. At any given moment about half of the children are animals, pointing to a latent desire for a 50/50 ratio between humans and pets in a household.

The boy, however, wanted to play a different game: "fight." I have seen versions of this, as well. It's not as bad as it sounds. If the "family" crew wants to pretend they are making dinner and walking the dog, the "fight" crew really just wants to chase each other around while yelling. The girls negotiated. "We can play "family," and just do the "fight" part too," Lily explained. The boy looked skeptical.

I don't know what actually happened at the park. Liberated by the other children's babysitter, I ran home to play a game I like to call "work." If I'd asked, I would not have been given an accurate answer. So I didn't ask. But I did find myself thinking how funny it is--odd funny, not humorous funny--that children this age like to form little mock-family units and play out mundane situations taken from their actual lives or run around pretending to capture or blast each other's heads off.

Or maybe it's not actually that odd funny at all.

Belief

2009-04-23T22:31:00.002-04:00

I got a couple of very thoughtful responses to the entry I wrote about my father's relationship to his religious background, but only to my private email account. People are funny about religion. One in particular has had me thinking all day; it was sent by someone I love very much, who also knows and loves my dad.

This person is religious herself, practices her religion, and--I think, believes. She is faithful in the best sense of the word; that is to say, she has actual faith that guides her to be a kind and decent person and helps comfort her in times in need. I wish I could have faith like this, too, but unfortunately, like long legs or a good singing voice, you either have it or you don't. You can get it, I guess, according to all of the "saving" reports, but I am never wholly convinced by those. They so often seem to come from the vaguely unhinged.

I have always felt, intuitively, that this person believed in her religious practice, but we have never discussed it. I have never heard her proselytize or try to convert anyone; in fact, her belief seems very private, which to me makes it seem all the more convincing and affecting. I have never understood why part of believing must entail harassing others into sharing your belief.

But what really struck me about the lovely message I received from this person was that she brought up the fact that her own children don't actively practice the faith they were raised in, don't--as far as she can tell--believe the same way she does. At least I think this is what she was saying; I hope I am not presuming. And this is something I think about all of the time as the mother of two very young children: How can I teach them what to believe? How can I show them what is good? And sometimes, although I am loathe to admit it, because it sounds so, well, mundane in its petty self-centeredness, I wonder how I can live so they will want to believe what I believe, because even though we humans can be insecure and full of doubt, essentially--come on, admit it--we believe what we believe because we think it is right.

This is coming out all wrong, as though I want to brainwash my children into being little clones of me, which is not the case at all. In fact, I hope they are different from me in so many ways, and I want nothing more than for them to be open-minded, independent thinkers who decide what to believe on their own terms, in their own time, in their own way. But then that voice, again: the one that says believe this because I do, because you are a part of me, and because I love you.

The person who sent me the message expressed none of this, by the way, just noted the fact that her own children have not followed the tradition in which they were raised, in they way they were raised, and that she had been thinking about this herself. And I guess, ignoring my little scared voice that wants my beliefs to be so powerful that they are, indeed, inescapable, I say this to this person, believing it myself: You have done this right, this believing, and this influencing of belief.

When I first took Lily to a toddler group, when she would walk away from me and explore the classroom while many of the other children sat glued to their parent's lap, I grew nervous that she was secretly not as attached to me as these other toddlers were to their parents, that I was not as connected to her, that she did not need me as much as she was supposed to. I called my mother, who has spent nearly fifty years working with children, and shared my concerns. She laughed, gently, and told me that Lily was exploring the classroom because she felt safe with me; she was independent because she felt so secure.

Live as you believe, and those you love will see who you are. It may not be reflected back at you in a way you can easily understand, but I think it will be there. I am hoping so.

Animal Kingdom

2009-04-22T23:28:00.003-04:00

Today, in a virtually unprecedented turn of events, at least in my adult life, I saw two movies in actual theaters. Coincidentally, both movies were about animal behavior. The first movie, Earth, I saw with a friend and her children, and Lily. It was beautiful: beautifully filmed, awe-inspiring in all of the intended ways, and respectful of those of us who want to be down with the cycle of life but can't stop eating bacon and get angry when other people step on ants. In other words, the obligatory animal deaths were handled delicately but honestly, and so thoughtfully in a few cases that I heard Lily say as a scene featuring a wolf pouncing on a caribou faded into black, "Oh, good. He only got his tail." Sorry, Lily. But you can wait until you have your own email account to learn the truth.

I was worried about the polar bears; it's impossible to discuss global warming without picturing a starving polar bear, at least for me. Sure enough, the dignified father polar bear does not survive; I will see him again when I fall asleep tonight. And as soon as I saw the polar bear family, and realized that animal deaths would be filmed in a real and honest way, I was a little worried about the children, all three perceptive, sensitive and inquisitive, in different ways. I love how children surprise us, again and again, over and over, defy our expectations, refuse to play into our preconceptions, insist on continuing to grow, in spite of how many times we insist on strapping them to the couch and forcing them to watch cartoons.

Kidding. About the strapping part, anyway. But as I tried not to think about the certain fate of Mr. Bear, all three children kept whispering wise, insightful comments about the unprecedented images they were seeing on the screen. There were no tears or shrieking when an elephant was attacked by a pride of lions in the middle of the night because they understood--were able to process in spite of their empathy for the elephant--that the lions were starving. How can four and five-year-olds make sense of this, allow this empathy to exist for predator and prey? They did.

The second movie, which I saw at night, after the children were asleep, was about the preschool application process in New York. Its portrayal of animal nature was far less appealing, although awe-inspiring in its own way. The less said about it, the better. But as we walked home, my friend and I remembered what Lily had noted, after the umpteenth scene in the movie Earth in which a mother animal sacrificed food, water, shelter, safety and life itself for her child. I think it was after the narrator, which the junior Star Wars fans among us may not have known was Darth Vader himself, explained that the polar bear cubs had survived the winter by nursing (exclusively, for all those wondering if polar bears have access to formula or the statistics on IQ points or allergy rates), while the mother polar bear had lost half her body weight and was emaciated. "It seems like there's always enough for the babies," she said, "But the mothers never get enough of anything." Hmmm.

I feel proud to be a member of a subset of the animal kingdom that bands together to protect its young against a threat of death, whose individual members know instinctively that what matters most is to love our children more than life itself, no matter what. With this in mind I will try to be less judgmental of the mammals in the other movie, generously hoping that what motivates them is the same.

The Take-Away

2009-04-21T22:40:00.003-04:00

What happened this evening after dinner: I suggested that we take a walk, all six of us (including the dogs) to the corner of 18th Street and 6th Avenue, where I happened to know a Mr. Softee ice cream truck was parked. Lily wanted to take her scooter, and because I knew Annika would be upset to be scooterless, in spite of her total lack of ability to scooter, I got the doll stroller for her to push, and everybody put their shoes back on, and we clicked the leashes onto the dogs' collars, and we set out into the lovely spring evening. And then the fun really began. Lily, totally oblivious to pedestrians, almost careened into half a dozen of them; Annika, who is, to be fair, only 19 months old, set the pace at about a block per fifteen minutes. If you don't know New York City blocks, this is not fast. The dogs, confused by the cluster of us and the squeals of excitement and the near-constant near-collisions, peed randomly and frequently on every object on the sidewalk, and Scout--poor, neurotic, rescued Scout--barked crazily and nonsensically at a fuzzy, foolish-looking, pincushion of a dog who was actually wearing a windbreaker. By the time we arrived at the ice cream truck, it was midnight, and the truck had gone home for the night. No, it was still there, and it wasn't too late, and the girls were so happy with their small cones of soft-serve that I almost forgot the dozen near-lawsuits that had occurred en route, and stood on the corner watching them lick joyfully, not think, I swear it, of all of the laundry each lick would entail, just of their joy. And then, the walk back, on which Ben and I had to control both dogs while holding a scooter and a stroller, while ensuring that our two slow, now chocolate-covered walkers did not get hit by cars, knocked to the ground by larger people or have their ice cream stolen by the previously mentioned canine members of the group. Annika stopped, only to wipe her runny nose on my freshly dry-cleaned suede jacket. Lily walked into a mailbox while trying to isolate a piece of chocolate coating from her cone. Annika walked even more slowly than before, with the newfound focus of the ice cream, and both wanted to push the stroller while eating it, and realized she could not, causing occasional tears of frustration, stopped only by another joyful lick. Lily drew unnecessary attention to us when the dogs finally did their real business. The word "stinky" was shouted several times before the threat of a Mr. Softee veto was invoked. And when we reached the door, loud and sticky and stinky and snotty and tired, our gay neighbor who was waiting for the elevator took one look at us and said, "Oh, you straights. I am so, so sorry for you sometimes." I won't even go into the effort it took to finish the ice creams, deposit the ends of the cones in the trash cans, fend off a temper tantrum and a pajama rejection, with the dogs barking behind the locked bedroom door, because it doesn't seem necessary. But this does.

What I, what we, will remember of this night (without pre-reading this, of course) in twenty years, or more: a rare family walk to the ice cream truck on one of the first lovely spring evenings of the year. The joy.

Background Noise

2009-04-20T22:26:00.003-04:00

Late at night, while trying to fall asleep, or early in the morning, before I get out of bed, and occasionally just while lying on the couch in the living room when I have a lot on my mind, I idly listen to the street sounds: cars driving by, mostly, rain, sometimes, or thunder, a barking dog, shrieking woman, booming car stereo, a jackhammer, garbage trucks. Most of the time, however, I don't even notice it, and I always find myself surprised when people--staying in our apartment or just musing from another city--ask me how I can stand the street noise in New York.

Tonight, one of those occasional nights on the couch where I was just thinking and listening, I found myself realizing that as a child, at least for the summer months, I fell asleep each night to louder sounds: the crickets in the swamp by the pond in my parents' yard. The first time my best friend from college came to stay with us in the summertime she sat straight up in bed. "Are you kidding me?" she asked. "What the hell is that?"

"What do you mean?" I asked, truly not knowing. I am thinking that maybe I filter out a lot of background noise, focus too much sometimes on the internal chords, a useful skill, perhaps, for sleeping, but a potentially problematic one in life. I have always taken pride in the fact that I can sleep anywhere, in any setting, find myself annoyed when others are fussy about their mattress or white noise machine or pillow or curtains or shades but especially sound. I think I am going to try listening harder.

Why I've Always Hated the Word Assimilate

2009-04-19T20:27:00.006-04:00

In spite of what he may like to think, my father's relationship to religion is not casual; it is extreme. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, attended yeshiva until he was in high school, and was surrounded by adults who spoke in Hebrew or Yiddish until he left home for college where, not coincidentally, he immediately pledged a Jewish fraternity. And then, he graduated from college, moved to Boston, and became suddenly, miraculously, not Jewish.

Except he didn't. That was a simplistic way of saying what I want to say; I wrote it for dramatic effect. What he really did was somehow neutralize himself in a superficial sense. He always identified himself as having been raised Jewish but conveniently left out how just to what extent, and from as early as I can remember would claim to have no interest whatsoever in organized religion, which he found more deleterious than good. Except for family ceremonies, he never set foot in a synagogue.

As I got older, this explanation became less and less satisfying to me. For one thing, I had a Jewish grandmother, who lived in my hometown, no less: a Bubby. I had second cousins who all had bar or bat mitzvahs, which we attended, and although he didn't know I was watching him, it didn't escape me that my dad seemed to know all of the rituals and the prayers. And there was more. Almost all of his close friends were Jewish. On certain occasions, such as at any overt display of Christianity, he became visibly uncomfortable. He didn't like entering churches. Culturally, from the food he liked to his taste in books and movies to his sense of humor, he identified--voluntarily or not--as Jewish. And then there was the fact that people almost always assumed I was, because of my name.

From a very early age, when people asked me what religion I was, I would say I was half Jewish, half Unitarian, Unitarianism being the compromise my parents had made when they married, when--again in a revelatory fashion--my father had said to my mother something along the lines of, "I'm fine with whatever you want to do, but I just don't want them raised Christian." Hmmm. Not Jewish, but not Christian, which Unitarianism is, technically, although there were so many mixed marriage families at The First Parish in Sudbury that we honored all of the Jewish holidays along with the Christian ones, built a sukkah each year in Sunday school and were never taught about any religious beliefs or traditions without also being taught about their context in world religions at large.

This was a tolerant, open-minded, expansive, and informative way to grow up, religiously speaking, but it wasn't very satisfying in a gut way. I have friends who were raised Catholic and haven't been to church in years but will cross themselves involuntarily when the car stops short; I have friends who were raised Baptist who loathe the hypocrisies of their church but can tear up at the sound of gospel music. Their religion is visceral; it may not be something in which they believe, or believe wholeheartedly, but they feel it when they see it. When I hear hymns, I automatically make them gender-neutral in my head. When I learn about molesting priests or sexist rabbis, I think: Well, yes.

And then there is my father, whose mysterious connection to his very deepest roots, is a puzzle I will be puzzling all my life. There was a rabbi who favored the more socially prominent families in town, including the boy whose bar mitzvah fell on the same day as my father's. There was the fact that he felt his own parents were adhering to convention more than heartfelt belief in their own practice. There were the hours of religious study in lieu of baseball, the obvious discrepancies in the ways men and women were treated in the Orthodox faith, the fact that although he loved them, in a way, his own parents were not people he truly admired.

Last week I got a message on the answering machine from my father, passing on some chatty news, a message that ended with the words, "Oh, remind me to tell you a funny story about the minyan." I played it twice. Funny story about the minyan? I called him back. It turned out the Orthodox congregation that meets in his office building, down the hall from his office, had asked him in the past if he was interested in joining them for any events. He had said no, that he was not interested. But this day, he had been asked to please consider giving just a little bit of his time for a minyan, the quorum required of ten men in Orthodox Judaism for certain ceremonial functions; they had nine, needed a tenth, and there was nobody else to be asked.

Begrudgingly, my father said yes. I could imagine this interaction: the asking, and my father's response, and I found myself very glad he had said yes, even before hearing the rest of the story. We cannot choose the groups we are born into, regardless of how far we stray. Sometimes, I think, we find that the journey is a circle, and not the line with an arrow we'd once imagined, or hoped. And, as he told me on the phone, trying to sound bemused, I think, but actually with a measure of awe in his voice, it "all came back." I remembered the Hebrew, he told me. Fluently, he said. I was always good at reading it. I understood everything. I didn't stay for very long, he added, and I was silent, still. Frankly, stunned.

Of course it came back, I wanted to shout, then. Of course it did! This was your life, the language you heard spoken, sung, since infancy, the sounds of your childhood, the prayers of your adolescence, men who looked like your father and uncles, dressed like them, speaking like them, assuming you into the fold not for what you believe, necessarily, but for who you were born to. This, I wanted to say, not even understanding the feeling, was your heritage.

The thing is about your past is that you can't ever get away from it, and you shouldn't really want to. We can choose so much about who we become, but in a way, we become who we already are.

Kindred, Again

2009-04-15T23:26:00.003-04:00

I have written before about the concept of kindred spirits, which I learned about from the Anne of Green Gables books, although I don't know if L.M. Montgomery should get credit for coining the phrase. I love the idea of kindred spirits, but even more, I love when I encounter them, and when they become a part of my life. One of the best aspects of kindred spirithood is its unpredictability, the fact that a kindred spirit may be older or younger than you, from a different background, of a different race, religion or gender--kindred spirits can be found anywhere at all if you remain open to the possibility that you might actually find one.

I have a friend I've known since we were eleven. I love my friend, and there is much I could write about her, but my focus here is on her dad. I don't remember the first time I met my friend's dad, but I do know, that even as an eleven-year-old, I found him to be excellent company. He is, was, older than all of my other friends' dads. He was married before he married my friend's mother, and he is only a few years younger than my grandmother, but until I was an adult, I never thought about this. I'm not sure I even realized it back then. I did know that he was funny, and that frequently, the same things made us laugh.

I never spent that much time with my friend's father; like all parents, he existed in the backdrop of our lives. But once, when I was in my twenties, I was in a home goods store and found myself waiting in a line by a display of cocktail napkins with cartoons and jokes printed on them, the kind of thing I would never in a million years buy. But the line wasn't moving, and I started scanning the rows of napkins, and I stopped on one package featuring napkins imprinted with the line: Who invited you?

Without thinking, I took the packet off the shelf and bought it. Not for me, but for my friend's father, whom I knew would find it funny in precisely the way I did. I mailed it to him. I can't think of another time I have purchased a novelty gift for anyone, let alone a friend's father, and sent it to them for the pleasure in knowing it would elicit a smile.

My friend's father is even older now, as, I suppose, am I. Over the years we have occasionally sent each other trivial little gifts of this sort, always targeted toward the other's sense of humor. This is never planned, and never discussed. It just is. I will miss it when it ends.

I see my friend's father every once in a while, and I always feel a sense of relief when I walk into a room and he is in it. There he is, I think, and smile.

Feverish

2009-04-15T01:31:00.001-04:00

Annika: 102. Me: 102. Coincidence? You decide.

Can't sleep, as feel terrible, but think I won't write in this state. The screen is blurry.

Dog Day

2009-04-13T23:24:00.002-04:00

Lost a day to travel there; back in NYC and ready to write. And write and write and write, I hope.

This evening, after hours spent in cars and on planes, the girls and I went on an outing to get some fresh air and exercise and, it must be said, cupcakes. Annika was traveling by stroller, and Lily by scooter, meaning we were not anybody's favorite sidewalk sight right off the bat. Factoring in Lily's propensity for wild twists and turns and occasional crashes, and my absent-minded tendencies behind the wheels, we were a disaster waiting to happen. Except we weren't. We made it all the way to the market that was our ultimate destination, did some necessary shopping, ate a pleasing number of free samples (a learned behavior I cannot spare my children), purchased our cupcakes, and headed back out onto the not-so-mean but potentially irritable streets.

About halfway back, with Lily yelling from about twenty feet behind me, "Mama! I'm going to up catch you!" over and over, and Annika shouting random syllables in sympathetic joy, we saw a woman with three dogs, purebred pitbulls, up ahead; I could tell Lily saw her just as I did because she actually picked up her pace for a change. "Can I? Can I ask her?" she asked me, and I gave my customary answer. Our rule is she can ask anybody with a dog if she can pet it, and if the person says no, she is to say thank you just the same and back away.

I kept pushing Annika as Lily scooted ahead and approached the woman, a somewhat surly-faced twentysomething who did not reek of child-friendliness. The dogs seemed nice enough, but my hackles went up as we got close enough to see the choke collars, the fact that the two females had very recently given birth, were still nursing, and that the male wasn't neutered. I heard Lily, polite and eager, hair wild from the windy ride, ask if she could pet the dogs, and I heard the woman, not rude, definitely surprised, say no, she could not.

This happens so rarely that Lily always seems both disappointed and dismayed--she has expressed her opinion before that these dog owners are really depriving their dogs of her, as well as her conviction that people don't know that she is a dog owner herself, and not just an ordinary dog novice kid. This time, for whatever reason, she didn't just walk away, shrug her shoulders at me. "Are they boys or girls?" she asked, and the woman, backing away from her a bit, jerking the dogs on their leads, looked at me, then away just as quickly. "Two girls and a boy," she mumbled, trying to turn her back on us, keep walking, but the dogs--sensing interest, pulled toward us, panting and jostling for attention.

I realized I was gripping the stroller handles quite tightly; my hands hurt. I relaxed them, stretched my fingers, looked at the dogs. I had a very bad feeling about these dogs, about what they were being used for, about the way the woman holding them was behaving. She was staring at Lily, who kept openly, curiously, firing questions at her, and she wouldn't make eye contact with me. I waited for Lily to say what she always says when she sees choke collars, which is: "My mother says those collars are not nice for dogs," but she didn't. I thought about asking the woman a question or two myself, about these pretty, tired-seeming, untrained, straining at the bit, apparently untouchable dogs, but I didn't.

Instead, I spoke sharply to Lily, more sharply than I had planned to, told her to come right now, that we needed to get back home. She said good-bye to the dogs and shot me a mad look, and I started pushing again, and Lily started scooting again, and Annika started calling out words again, and we all headed back up the street toward home.

About halfway up the block, I turned, in spite of myself, and the woman was still standing where she had been, frozen in place, watching us go. I wonder if Lily made her think about those dogs. I wish I could stop thinking about them myself. I hope I am wrong.

Old

2009-04-11T18:06:00.005-04:00

I have spent the past few days in the company of a woman born over ninety years ago, and the few days before that in the presence of another. And so I have been thinking quite a bit, in spite of myself, on some level, about what it means to be old.

One of the most useful things I have learned about being a parent is that you are the kind of parent you are a person. Terribly put; what I mean to say is that becoming a mother, say, does not actually change who you are, even as regards your relationship with the previously nonexistent child in your life (although it changes essentially everything about your circumstances). I am exactly the kind of mother I sort of knew, subconsciously, I would be. My friends, too, parent as they are.

Becoming old is like this, too. It is done in the fashion one does everything else, as one is. Quirks, after years--decades--of wearing in grooves, become amplified, extreme. Traits shriek, habits--fearing extinction--fight hard for survival. In some ways, an old person is an exaggeration.

There is something exhausting about the elderly, who induce in those of us lucky enough to still be young, an intense feeling of, "There but for the grace of god." Funny: What we should be thinking is, "When?" There is also something beautiful and fierce (in the extroverted and timid alike) in the character's refusal to be subdued, the self's insistence on itself.

The self's insistence on itself: sad, tragic, even, but beautiful, too.

Safe

2009-04-10T23:11:00.006-04:00

Touche (with an accent, please), oh you who commented that the quitting seemed to have taken. Have not had access to a computer for the last few days, so I have decided that I will make up for the last two missed posts by NOT taking off the weekend. Sound fair? Good thing this isn't an actual dialogue.

I am writing from my aunt-in-law's office in Illinois. We are here for the weekend, visiting, and the girls were both wound up and exhausted after nearly a day of travel. Annika, generally the easiest baby in the world to put to sleep, was not quite buying it in a wholly unfamilar room, new crib, no sister, familiar music or Flat Dog (my fault), and a few minutes after I'd put her to sleep she was still whimpering, and so I went back in.

She was standing in the crib, one of the portable, fold-up versions, hands on the side, shaking her head and saying, "No, no, no, Mama. Where? Where?" I scooped her up and lay down on the couch in the room with her, and she immediately snuggled into me with a contented, audible sigh. I'm generally pretty good about not comparing my girls, so I will allow myself this one flagrant comparison: at this same age, Lily was not very much of a snuggler. In fact, unless she had a high fever or was being read to, she rarely lay still in my arms; Annika--like Sadie, it must be said--is of the maximum skin-to-skin school of snuggling, and as a person not known for overt displays of affection, I must say, I love it.

I had found an old radio in the room we are staying in, and on my first try at sleep had set it to what I thought was an innocuous, generic, FM lite station with little DJ commentary. As lay on the couch with Annika in my arms, this at first seemed to be the case. And then, the tempo picked up, and I realized that it was 7:30 Central Time and that I was lying on a couch in Champagne, Illinois, with my 18-month-old baby in my arms, listening to Men Without Hats bust out "Safety Dance." To continue the theme of time travel, I was suddenly half there, half in my eighth grade gymnasium at a school dance. I could practically see the robot moves, the worst offenders, who shall remain nameless; a few of them might even be reading this now.

What I am steering toward here, although I know it doesn't seem remotely like it, is that the music was far from relaxing, evocative for me, at least, of an intensely unrelaxing time and place, but that lying there with Annika melting into me was the most relaxed, content, I've felt in months. These moments of stillness with her and her alone are so rare; I am glad I have held onto the ability to cherish them, even when the world around me is all Men at Work-style chaos and discord.

And then. As if her ability to transcend Safety Dance weren't enough, I felt a tiny hand on my cheek, along my jawline. A tiny voice say, "Amy. Mama. Amy." Just perfect. Exactly what I needed to hear.

Can't Quit

2009-04-07T20:14:00.005-04:00

Writing: I wish I knew how to quit you.

Not really, although pretty much yes, most of the time, I hate to be writing this, let alone thinking it, and it is true that I don't mean it in that if given the choice to never have to write again, or feel the impulse to do so, I would take that choice, I do mean it in that these days I wish so much of the time that I had gone to medical school and become a world-famous brain surgeon, or even just a well-paid dermatologist who could leave work in time to have dinner with her kids.

My relationship to--with?--writing these days has some very Brokeback Mountain elements. I am full of yearning and dreams, self-loathing and shame. (No, Dad, this does not mean I am secretly a gay cowboy.) The other day, a new friend who is a successful novelist posted a Facebook Status Update that said something like: I hate writing, and although I had just met this woman I felt an overwhelming kinship with her and immediately posted back to her with such enthusiasm she's probably still thinking: Yikes. What's her problem? I was just kind of kidding.

It's the "kind of" that's important there, because I suspect, actually, she does hate writing, sometimes, just like I do, and maybe she even wishes she could run from it, "quit it," choose something else, something safer, saner, more socially acceptable and consistently productive, either to do for a living or simply to love.

I think that's one of the reasons I am writing this blog right now: to try to make myself fall back in love with writing, or in the hope that if I don't let myself run away from it, keep my relationship to--with?--it out in the open, that it won't just quietly disappear. It's always better to be honest, right? Out in the open and true? Writing, I don't really wish I could quit you. Except when I really, really do.

On and On

2009-04-06T20:46:00.002-04:00

Still in Sudbury, still staying with my parents, still existing in alterna-universe where most of the people I encounter have known me since birth but not so much over the past twenty years, causing me to feel like a not quite amalgamated hybrid of a number of my former selves.

Not to mention that being here, as is true to a lesser extent of being anywhere outside one's regular stomping grounds, makes me think differently, think about different things. Tonight, I took the girls over to my grandmother's house up the street to make a guest appearance at the weekly "Knitting Group" held in my grandmother's kitchen. Although this started out as an actual knitting group, it eventually became yet another version of my mother's lifelong women's-only wine and cheese and talking get-togethers, as apparently nobody even bothers to bring their knitting anymore.

Annika had not napped and was a mess in my arms, and although all of the women oohed and ahhed over her and Lily, as propriety required, I was so tense and exhausted that our stay could not have been very enjoyable for any of us. Except, my grandmother. As I sat at the table for a few brief minutes while Annika distracted herself with a plate of spaghetti, I drank a glass of wine as though it were a shot of tequila and contemplated my grandmother. She sat at the head of the table, and it was readily apparent to me, at least, that she could not hear a word being said. At one point I asked her a question, and she beamed and shook her head as though to say, "Oh, Amy," but this was just to acknowledge that she'd seen my lips move, to let me know she was glad I was there.

Two of the attendees were two of my mother's oldest friends, women who have known me since infancy. One was my parents' neighbor at their first apartment complex, where they lived when I was born; later, she was my fourth grade teacher, my sister's, too. I overheard her telling Lily at one point that I had been "a wonderful student, the kind of student who did 'extra,'" which I let slide under the circumstances, and that my sister had "brought all kinds of of household treasures into school every day," which I also let slide. At one point these two women had a rather intense discussion about how I was suddenly "much more like [my] father" than ever before. "Do that smile again," one said, "so I can show her," and I obliged, forcing a fake-feeling grin as Annika screamed in my arms, wiped tomato sauce on the arms of my sweater, Lily beside me poked holes in a strawberry, I searched the room for what must have been left of the bottle of wine.

And just before we left, I looked at my grandmother again, still smiling, still essentially deaf, holding a fork but not eating, feeling--I knew somehow--a partly subconscious sense of relief that life--continuous and choppy, wailing and wistful, messy and dishonest and heartfelt and true--was happening still in her kitchen. And that she was a part of it too.

CVS

2009-04-05T21:35:00.002-04:00

I'm at my parents' house, the house I grew up in, for the most part, and earlier today I had to make a run to the drug store, for diaper cream and wipes, which I'd forgotten in the rush of packing. This drug store--like most of the places of business in my hometown--has been here for decades, and as I pulled up to it and parked, right in front of the store, I had that feeling I get every time I come "home" that time is slipping all over the place.

As I walked up to the entrance, to buy my diaper cream, mind you (diaper cream! I am a mother!), I was no longer thirty-nine but eighteen, and it was the night before my parents drove me to college in a packed Country Squire station wagon, and I was meeting my friend Kate, who lived up the road in the next town over, so we could buy school supplies to bring along to school. School supplies! How ridiculous, I think now, although I guess we were more in the market for dorm room supplies, shampoo and such, although to think now that I must have wondered if these items would be hard to find on campus seems unfathomably naive.

But this is not what I was thinking as I walked up and down the aisles, not looking for what I needed, yet, just walking. I was thinking: That was yesterday, not twenty years ago. I remember what I was wearing, the shorts and T-shirt, the sneakers with the stepped-on heels, how my skin looked: tan, what I was feeling: unbearably nostalgic in that self-glamorizing eighteen-year-old fashion, what I heard: my friend's unmistakable laugh in the make-up section, where I used to buy cover-up and green clay masks--do teenagers do this still, or are the green clay masks another relic in the teenage girl graveyard of self-improvement tools?

What has happened in these twenty years? I found myself thinking. Everything--most of my life--and yet nothing at all. I have two children, and sometimes I need to buy diaper cream, but I am still that same freckled girl who thought she was so old and wise and ironic, buying pencils to take off to college, quite easily made to laugh so hard in a drug store over something moronic that a clerk is summoned to check on the girls in the make-up aisle, girls whose idea of make-up is chapstick, girls who look like they're playing dress-up when they experiment with mascara, girls who will someday, two decades later--or at least one of them will--walk back out of this very same drug store wondering how the last twenty years disappeared in the blink of an eye, the firm slam of a car door, the turn of a key.

Beat This

2009-04-02T23:54:00.003-04:00

So when is the last time you were at a children's birthday party? Get this: the pinatas are no longer hit with a stick.

I've been to so many children's birthday parties in the last few years that a weekend without one is beginning to seem like a week in the Caribbean. And many of these parties feature--among numerous other activities and performances--a pinata. The first few times, I didn't notice what was up; I was too busy making sure that if there was so much as a half-slice of pizza left over for "the parents" that I was the parent who grabbed it. For some reason I always arrive at these things hungry. But at the last party, I'd eaten my fill of mini hot dogs and swallowed down a couple plastic cups of juice, and when the pinata came out, I was ready. Maybe I could catch a few pieces of candy on the outskirts of the crowd if I was quick.

The children lined up behind the birthday child. They seemed oddly somber. Joyless, even. I looked at another parent to see if she had noticed the grim mood, but she was watching, patiently, as though she'd seen this show before.

And the birthday child stepped up to the hanging pinata, a superhero of some kind, I think, and...pulled a piece of ribbon dangling at the bottom. Nothing happened.

And then the next child came up and did the same thing, and then the next child, and the next child, and finally one pained-looking child pulled her ribbon, and some candy fell out--did not dramatically spray around the room causing shrieking, happy children to scatter with it--and the children fell on it, and then quickly got up, clutching their bags (I don't remember the bags, either; we got what we could hold), and moved on to another activity. The anti-climatism was deafening.

I know much has been made of today's "safe" parenting, so-called helicopter parents and the uber-involved, ultra PC moms and dads who think a water balloon is the childhood equivalent of a battlefield grenade, and I have nothing much new to add to the debate. Except this: I'm kind of sad about the pinatas.

Just a Thought for Today

2009-04-01T23:17:00.001-04:00

"We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Experience"

Nonsequitor Snake Poem

2009-03-31T21:52:00.004-04:00

Late this afternoon I stood in another woman's kitchen uptown, in my exercise clothes, which I hadn't actually exercised in, and listened as she told me about the news she'd heard from Miami.

The Daily Show, actually: That's where she'd heard it, and I thought: Of course; that's where the news is now.

Not really news, I guess, although she was quite serious in the telling. Anacondas--escaped from a pet store during a hurricane--were breeding and migrating west and north, out of Florida, where enormous reptiles and amphibians can live in the rest of America's collective fear space, coming north, perhaps as far north as New York, and could grow so large as to eat a dog, which is what she said, although I suspected "small child" was what she wanted to say. More shock value. Better audience pleaser.

And I stood there, surrounded by oak paneling and white subway tile, and an eight-burner Viking range, and the sounds of the household as backdrop, and listened to her talking, gesticulating, raised my eyebrows to please her, shook my head in dismay, and tried to picture one, an anaconda, but all I could see were the tiny slithering garter snakes of my childhood, which could make me jump but never truly afraid. nonsequitor

And as she talked, and I tried harder--a swamp from a movie scene, my imaginary snakes increasingly cartoonish, buffoonish, fangless, really, in every possible way--my eye lit upon something I'd never noticed in years of standing in this woman's kitchen: a snake, a thin wooden carving of a snake, hanging vertically by the old butler's pantry, by the window, the open window, spring on the other side of the glass, filtering in through the inch of open space at the bottom, and the park, green at last, or intimations of it anyway, just across the street.

I Am Who I Am

2009-03-29T20:58:00.003-04:00

This afternoon I was in a suburban grocery store, pushing my cart up and down the aisles, when I was stopped by a little traffic jam in the middle of the aisle featuring baking supplies. I would have turned around and skipped the rest of the aisle, but I actually had to buy flour, and because I was alone, blessedly alone, I felt no need to be in a rush.

I had been lost in my thoughts, but because I was waiting, I decided to focus in on the scene, see why we were waiting, and at first all I could take in were the other people in my position: a middle-aged woman with a full cart, a man about my age with a toddler in the front of the cart, two teenage girls buying soda and chips. And then I heard a voice instantly identifiable as that of a Very Old Person and saw the woman whose voice it was, and knew she was as old as my own grandmother: ninety at least.

She was with her daughter. They didn't especially look alike, but I knew it was her daughter as soon as I focused in on their conversation and heard the mother, the elderly woman, say in as loud a voice as she could muster, "Linda, I'm sorry, but I am who I am." She didn't sound very sorry, though, more tired and annoyed, and when I looked at her daughter's face, she too looked tired and annoyed, and suddenly I realized that I wasn't the only person who had heard the old woman speak because the mood--the atmosphere--of our little five cart pile-up had subtly shifted.

I caught the eye of the dad with the toddler, and he smiled, and the middle-aged woman backed up, making more space for the mother and daughter to walk by, which they were doing, slowly but surely, after whatever had transpired between them in that brief but telling exchange. And I knew somehow that I was not the only one thinking how familiar, how significant, this comment had been, this passing of the ultimate frustration from parent to child, and how many millions of times it--the precise sentiment--had been uttered or felt by us, by other parents and children, all over the world, from the beginning of time.

And I found myself wondering just why it is that we can never quite accept our parents as they are, why we can never quite stop wanting them to be, to do, to say just what we need them to be, to do, or to say every single time, even if they exceed our expectations most of the time; I found myself wondering how--in what ways, and when--I will not be completely understood or accepted myself.

Kid Lit

2009-03-26T18:18:00.005-04:00

Whenever the subject comes up of how my life has changed most since becoming a parent, or I am asked what I miss most about my pre-children life, the answer is simple: reading.

I still read, probably more than most people, but I used to read pretty much all of the time. I read on the subway, while eating meals, in the bathtub, while stalled in traffic, in line at the bank, in bed at night--there was never a time when I didn't have several books going simultaneously, and I both kept up with new authors and books and tried actively to fill in holes when it came to the classics. Now, I read for work, I read to and with my children, I read for pleasure when I can, in snatches, but I almost never have the luxury of long stretches of time when I can just lay around and lose myself in a book, or two, or four. I miss it sorely.

Which is one of the reasons why, when a friend asked me if I would be willing to co-found a children's literature book group with her inspired by a group she was already in that had become too large, I jumped at the invitation. I have always loved reading children's literature--which really means books targeted to older children and adolescents, not picture or new-reader books--and the thought of having a legitimate reason to devote more time to reading seemed immensely appealing.

It is hard to describe the pleasure I have found in this group, in my rediscovery of books I have loved for thirty years or more, and the license I have given myself, finally, to consider this genre worth serious consideration as a part of my work, something I truly love and a serious intellectual undertaking. Because I have been so thoroughly immersed in the books we have decided to read for our discussions--The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and The Westing Game, for the next gathering--I have been reading other "kid lit" books that would not otherwise have been on my radar, such as The Willoughbys and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and filling in holes again for the first time in a long time, with books such as the Meet the Austins series, which I somehow managed to miss the first time around, when I was actually a child.

It's funny; people tend to assume that this group, when I mention or describe it, has something to do with my current status as parent, that I am reading as research, or vetting books for my girls, or trying to find books I can read to them as they grow, but one of the many wonderful aspects of this group is that it actually has nothing to do with parenting or children at all, and although some of the members have kids, others do not, and none of us are reading the books we love to read from this genre because of our roles as parents.

It is refreshing, and more than that, actually, to be a part of something that exists purely due to shared passion and rigorous debate with admirable peers, something that speaks to a part of me I feel connected to sometimes these days by merely a thread--which is partly my own fault, I fully acknowledge--but still. It exists, and I am grateful for it.

How?

2009-03-25T23:55:00.003-04:00

I don't know what happened to sevenhundredfiftywordsbeforenoon--suddenly it's all sevenhundredfiftywordsaftermidnightafteri'vewatchedalotofcrapontv. Working on possible solutions. Not sustainable.

That being said, it's 11:56--I'll make it brief. For a number of reasons, which I will not elucidate here, at least not now, I have been thinking about the finite nature of the period of parenting young children. A conversation I had this morning with a friend who is a mother of three summed up the essence of my thoughts: she mentioned how her parents will often say they don't remember when she asks them something about her own early childhood, a sentiment--although I've never really processed this as it relates to my life now--my own parents have echoed many times.

YOU DON'T REMEMBER?

How is this humanly possible? When you have a small child, regardless of whatever else it is you are doing--brain surgery, teaching fourth grade, cleaning toilets--that small child's existence is so all-consuming, even when it isn't, or you try to pretend that it isn't, that the rest of the world seems actually colored differently--a little tepid, perhaps. With my recent posts in mind, I must point out that I am not making a case here for children as the center of the universe or the sun around which your planet must revolve; I merely mean to say that it is virtually impossible not to be thinking about them on some level pretty much all of the time, for better and for worse. It's just the way it is.

And then tonight, I was reading a book to Lily in which the phrase "just plain" appeared, and I suddenly realized I had totally forgotten about the period of at least a year when Lily liked to strip off all of her clothing and appear in front of me announcing that she felt like being "just plain Lily." How could I forget this? Now, forcing myself, I think I can even remember the first time she did it, my pleasure at the perfection of the description, but how could I have let myself forget it at all? And knowing this, how many other moments have I already forgotten, will I never remember again?

When I ask my parents questions about myself at 3, 4, 5, they are often of a practical or technical nature. Did I have ear infections? How tall was I? What were my favorite toys or friends? They usually squint, look puzzled, then blank. These were loving, present, available parents. My mother cared for us full time during those years. My father kept baby books recording our every word and bite of food. Did I like kindergarten? I ask. Was I ever shy? The look. A moment of recognition, insight. A Yes, I think so, and the squint again. Or maybe that was your sister?

My point is this: How, how can I , will I forget? Must I? Must one? Some of it, I think, with a certain sadness and a sense of relief, which somehow don't seem contradictory.

Time Capsule

2009-03-24T23:48:00.003-04:00

Oof. Yesterday's post was so lazy, so vague, so unnecessary, although it elicited a few lovely and helpful emails that render it not totally useless. And it's really late now, loooong day, so in lieu of another filler entry, I give you my first ever and probably only ever time capsule. I'm about to go back to some more practical work here for the next few days so consider this a palate cleanser.

The Contents of Lily's Purse De Jour, for Posterity, Because I Find Them Significant

• one red pen

• two Barack Obama pins from the campaign: one big one reading "Elect Obama 2008" and one tiny one reading "Obama" with a peace sign for the "O;" these are often worn on unexpected parts of her clothing, such as a pants leg

• the ticket I hadn't known she'd saved from the Nutcracker performance the two of us attended on December 16, 2008

• a small Hello Kitty wallet containing a pot of lavender lipgloss she got at a birthday party and I tried to confiscate and dispose of, unsuccessfully, and the key to her desk, a gift from a dear friend that she cherishes

• a little pad of paper, one of many diaries in circulation, that she has decorated with Chiquita banana stickers taken from Annika's countless bananas

• 2 cents

That's all. But really, isn't it enough?

Just Wondering

2009-03-23T23:17:00.005-04:00

Every once in a while I get a comment, either posted or to my private email account, that makes me a little uneasy about some of the writing I am doing here. Often, these comments are from my father, who so enjoys reading about his grandchildren that I could post what they said verbatim over the course of an hour, which would would entail a lot of lines like, "Mama, can I have a glass of milk?" and "Rai-sins, rai-, rai-, raisins," and my father would almost immediately email me to tell me how moved he was by the "work."

But it's not just my dad. Others have emailed me to tell me that I am making parenthood seem "idyllic" or that I seem so good at "being in the moment" with my children. Although this is certainly occasionally--maybe even sometimes true--the thought that I am giving this impression in any overarching way smacks of dishonesty and makes me worry I am failing in creating any kind of realistic portrayal of my experience of being a mother.

There are complicating factors. First of all, this blog is not meant to be an overview of my life. I have made it clear, here and to myself, that I can write about whatever I want to write about as long I'm writing regularly and in some way am moving forward as I write. It's the moving forward part I'm worried about when it comes to my parenting vignettes. I fear I'm being lazy in presenting neatly tied-up anecdotes or charming scenes with a moralistic or saccharine concluding statement when what I should be doing--in spite of the fact--or because of the fact that my girls will read this some day themselves is striving for accuracy. Or rather realism.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I worry I'm too often leaving out the wrenching, agonizing, messy, soul-crushing parts of my life as a parent in favor of the package with the red shiny bow. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle, is a roiling mixture of both: the joy and the frustration. Just giving myself something to think about as I keep on trucking. Maybe I should make myself write the next time I'm seething with anger or fighting back tears. Fear not: I will be able to find some of these times. Tomorrow, even. We shall see.

The Walk

2009-03-20T21:03:00.003-04:00

I love the concept of "prophecy fulfillment" raised-and coined?--by Liza and will write on it more. I think it is wise to think of ways to counteract it, or to prophecy only for the good, although that, too, I think, can be limiting. Controlling, anyway, on the part of the parents or whomever is sending the messages.

But for tonight, to ease into the weekend, a tidbit, a scene--for me, because I will want to remember it years from now, when Annika asks why her baby book is empty, when Lily asks why I never managed to learn how to use the video camera.

This afternoon, after hours indoors, I asked Lily what she thought we should do for an excursion. Annika was up from her nap, and it was clear all three of us needed a little airing or somebody was going to start yelling; it could have been any of the three. She decided we should go to the toy store, which in New York, in our neighborhood, can just be for a visit; for years we have been making this little trip to play with the trains, to decide what we might like for Christmas, even in March. Lily was just about Annika's age the first time she walked there by herself, but I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to have Annika walk today, had Lily not started preparing her doll carriage.

Annika watched for a few minutes, and then got the little doll stroller for herself, emulating Lily by strapping in the tiniest doll, packing a bottle and a few random things from the floor of the playroom underneath. "You want to take that?" I said to Lily, knowing she did, hoping for a miracle--it's amazing how unfettered I feel now when I walk down the street without, say, a bag of stuffed animals or a ten-pound scooter.

"Of course," she said, giving me that "Are you losing it?" look and pointing to Annika, who stood ready by the door, mini stroller in front of her. "And she wants to bring that."

I looked at Annika hard. She had never seemed such a little girl, less of a baby. She beamed at me, so proud of her stroller, of her packing job. "Baby," she said, pointing at the doll, and I took a deep breath, checked the time on my phone. We set out.

Two hours later, we returned home. No, we did not take a detour to midtown at rush hour, a Circle Line Tour of the city. We walked, Lily pushing her carriage, Annika pushing her stroller, to the toy store, a BLOCK AND A HALF away from our apartment. It is true that we stayed at the toy store for a half hour or so, meeting some kids, checking out the new trains, the Playmobil display, the Easter goods, the bucket of sparkly rubber balls. We purchased one small bottle of "invisible ink," from that company that manufactures old-school gag toys like whoopie cushions and vibrating handshake devices, which Lily refused to use as a joke, per its intent, preferring to explain it to everyone we met, then asking permission to squeeze a small sampling onto their clothing "as an experiment." We stopped so I could show her how you were supposed to do it: Ostentatious fake trip, the dramatic splash of ink across the clean shirt, the horrified expression, the over-the-top apology, and then, the pay-off, the big finish--the disappearing of the ink right in front of our eyes! I was impressed by my performance, a little deflated when she cocked her head, considering, and said, "That's interesting, I guess, but I think I'll use it my way."

But I digress. That's not really what I want to remember at all. I do want to be able to close my eyes and see the two girls, both smiling, walking behind their strollers in their little coats, their cheeks pink, their stride serious. I want to remember that Lily stopped on the sidewalk to get her baby a bottle, and that Annika stopped too, eyes enormous when Lily told her to shush because the babies were sleeping, and that Annika then bent down and found her own little pink bottle, placed it gently on her own tiny baby's body, and looked at Lily for approval, grateful for the "Good job," Annika," she received.

When we were close to home, I walked behind them, tired from the excursion, from carrying Annika and her stroller across the intersections, from picking up the toys she took off the shelves in the store, from explaining to Lily for the zillionth time why she could not also have the stapler shaped like a cat, from the slow, slow pace, the apologies to the people we all walked into, the fallen strollers, the dropped bottles, the day. But although I was tired, am tired now, all I felt as I watched their little backs ahead of me, Lily's increasingly long-legged, big-kid swagger, Annika's teetering yet confident gait, all that I felt was joy.

More Musing

2009-03-19T19:44:00.005-04:00

I usually don't do this--respond to comments in an entry--but I feel like I have more to say on the subject of my most recent entry (could not get online again yesterday--so incredibly annoying) that I thought I'd just plunge in.

For one thing, I'm not talking about assessing kids based on real things they do or are. Words such as "tall" or "brunette" or "right-handed" do not apply. And I guess in a way I'm not talking as much about labeling as I thought I was. Labels are tricky. As one commenter pointed out, "tomboy" or "daddy's girl" aren't often intended as negative labels, although I am often bothered by the way they are used: to pigeonhole. That's what I'm getting at, I think, is the need--the very real and natural need--we have to make sense of the world around us, and especially of the people who inhabit this world--by attempting to suss out who they are and apply labels that we hope make sense to other people as we communicate with them, and to ourselves, as we process information.

I don't mean to suggest that we can even stop doing this; I just wish we could rein it in when it comes to small children. I don't think the people who look for signs of Lily in Annika are doing it in anything but a loving, human way, but as an older sister whose younger sister would probably cop to a certain amount of resentment at the constant comparisons, I'd love for Annika to be judged on her own terms--yes, even at the age of one.

Do I sound like I'm being extremist or overly sensitive? That example, of the older/younger siblings, is not the best one for what I am trying to talk about. I guess I just worry that the little boy I know who's always being described as "wild" or the little girl I know who is often referred to as a "little princess" won't have much of a chance of discovering that they're actually somebody else altogether when grown-ups keep pushing them into those boxes.

Clearly, I have more thinking to do on this subject. No fears: My internet connection is back, and I will be too. Any more thoughts from you? I want to write more about this, I think, in a more fruitful way.

2009-03-17T16:42:00.002-04:00

I have recently been having some fascinating conversations with other parents of small children about the ways in which people so desperately want to pigeonhole small children--to label them as this or that--in ways that to me often have very little to do with the child in question.

I understand the instinct, the need sometimes, to pigeonhole; I do it myself, all of the time. I do think in my case this instinct has lessened with age, in large part because I have realized how useless a tool it is in terms of actually learning anything about a person, but I am not going to lie to you: I do it, still. Don't we all? She's so superficial, I will find myself thinking about a woman I work with who mentions the labels of her designer clothing. And then I will spend a half hour surfing a site on the Internet that rents villas in Italy, not that I'm renting one in the immediate future, but still: It's not rocket science. It's not even work. And I can talk about clothes with the best of them. Just because it's not how I like to think of myself--a clotheshorse, a fashion person--doesn't make me any less superficial than the person who's less concerned with how she's perceived.

We judge because it helps us feel better about who we are, it helps us make sense of our own insecurities, and it helps us maintain the illusion that we are making the sense of the world around us and the people who inhabit that world, although the truth is that we can't really do that, and ultimately the judging doesn't really assuage our deepest fears. But why, oh why, do we do it to children? Why can't we just let them be?

Let me be more specific, using some recent examples from the world of children I inhabit, including my own. I know a little girl whose father brings her to school each day; not a week goes by that I don't hear someone say, as the two of them pass, "Oh, look! She's such a Daddy's girl." I know a little girl who dresses in pants and shirts in navy and olive green and whose hair is cropped very short: "So boyish, such a tomboy," people murmur as she passes. There is a little boy in our building who plays dress-up and doesn't like cars; "Are you worried? He's so sensitive," a neighbor asks his parents in the lobby one afternoon. There is Lily, who often gravitates to boys on the playground, just last weekend building sand forts with a group of five or six of them when a mother asked me, "Do you want me to try to get some of the little girls over here for her?" There is Annika, whose ears I already want to cover each time someone says to me, over her head, "I am looking and looking for signs of Lily in her."

Stop looking. No, don't call over the girls for a child who's so profoundly engaged she hasn't looked up from her play in 45 minutes, don't assume anything about a child based on her transportation arrangements (not to mention the vaguely offensive datedness of the "Daddy's girl" term), don't make a kid wear skirts if she doesn't want to or really have an opinion on it at all (don't you have anything better to do?), don't undo decades worth of work on the part of some very determined feminists by making little boys feel self-conscious if they don't feel like smashing each other over the head with blocks, don't use the word sensitive as though it means non-masculine--sensitivity is a rare and commendable commodity usually found in conjunction with wisdom and empathy and we need lots more of it in men and women--and most of all, give children the freedom to figure out who they are on their own terms, without labels they don't know and can't understand, without a lifetime of often misguided judgments on our own parts, without our own secret or overt biases and desires and fears.

If you want for them, your children, children in general, want this. This freedom. It is perhaps more important than anything else.

Sunday Morning in the City

2009-03-16T16:21:00.003-04:00

Massive technological breakdowns here on many fronts, but all is resolved, and so am I: to begin anew, as spring sets in for real.

Yesterday, as is always true these days, our household was awake and active by very early morning, and because my father was here from Massachusetts, and because it is true that most bagels outside of New York (and even many of them inside New York) are inedible, I headed out into the post-dawn of an urban Sunday morning to acquire some good ones and bring them back for us all.

I love city Sunday mornings, early, early. There is something post-Apocalyptic about the empty streets, the gray silence, the pigeons pecking abandoned fast-food wrappers in the gutters. I remember thinking years and years ago, on an early Sunday morning in another lifetime in another part of town: I can see how someone would think this was depressing--this gritty street scene--but I, I who grew up surrounded by manicured lawn and freshly-mown pastures, a pond with actual swans and flowering dogwood trees, I find it beautiful somehow, alive and real and, well, alive, in a way that my suburban landscapes never are.

I still remain amazed by how I love the city, how completely I took to it after years of fear and skepticism, how fully I melted into my neighborhood, each neighborhood after the other, once I found my pace on the sidewalks, exchanged nods with the men selling papers at the corner newsstands, walked the dog, or dogs, around the trees in the patches of earth that persist in growing things in spite of their beds of concrete. But even more, I surprise myself with the beauty I see in my city, and I can call it that now, and how when somebody else says to me, I can't imagine how you ever get used to the loudness, or the commotion or the press of bodies in the subway cars at rush hour, I always feel a little bit confused, as though my brain can't quite process what they are saying enough to send the message to my state-of-consciousness, and it's not that I don't see it or hear it, the dirty, the hot, the loud, the crazy, the sad, the angry, the grayness, the rumble, the siren, the too, too much, it's that I just don't see or hear it that way, that raised eyebrow, vaguely disapproving, faintly superior outsider kind of a way; I never have.

To me, child of a beautiful home in a beautiful yard on a beautiful street in a beautiful town there is so much alive here on every patch of dirty sidewalk, so much beauty in the faces on the stoops at sundown, the transactions at the newsstands, the friction of the shoulders bumped on subway platforms, the arms raised on city corners, the water flowing in the gutters from one street to the next, ad infinitum, as the people walk and climb, run and pass each other, smile and gaze ahead, headed for any of an infinite number of destinations, headed home.

Hope, and Springtime

2009-03-09T17:24:00.003-04:00

Yes, I took a three-day weekend. Everyone needs one every now and again.

I spent this weekend in a very pleasing mix of urban and country environments, attending a children's party in the neighborhood, which reminded me how much I love my pedestrian lifestyle here, and then out at the house in Connecticut, where I walked the yard looking for signs of spring. I love finding them, year after year: the heads of crocuses (croci? probably not.) poking through patches of half-hearted snow, buds on branches, the return of some of the hardier birds.

This year, this spring, in particular, it felt important to have proof: to see tangible evidence of the passing of time, the changing of seasons, the renewal after the cold. As the dogs romped around me, barking at nothing and everything, I squished through the mud, breaking off a few dead canes on the rose bushes, assessing the blueberry and cherry trees, thinking about how--in a few more weeks--I will be able to clear my herb and vegetable gardens for yet another season of growth.

It is everything to me, this growing of things I have undertaken in my adult life, and I am surprised, in a way, by the importance it has taken on. I didn't anticipate it, the need to get my hands dirty, to create something from nothing, to reap what I sow in such a literal way. I am still puzzling it out, in fact, and I will let you know when I know, or have more insight. For now, I just know that I need it, that it makes me feel purposeful and whole.

As I walked back to the house, after my slow circle, by the messy patch where the peonies will bloom come June, I noticed the persistent stubs of rhubarb pushing through the soil, a sign of spring for cooks and gardeners alike. I started thinking about rhubarb tarts and jam, a picnic table, steak on the grill, and snipping chives for scrambled eggs. I could almost feel my knees damp from the still wet leaves and dirt of the garden. How important it is to believe it will happen.

New York Story

2009-03-05T14:50:00.003-05:00

The building we live in is a wonderful mix of young families, older single people, middle-aged couples and almost every other configuration you could imagine. I love this about our building, that it is impossible to stereotype who lives here, that the people we encounter each day range from newborn to 90s and all ages in between. But it is true that I have occasionally worried about a few of the single older people, really only two of them, I guess, the true loners, and it turns out my worries were not unfounded.

Last night I received an email from the president of our coop board asking if I had seen one of these single older men around in recent days. I responded no, that in fact I had not seen him in weeks, come to think of it, and the reason I was able to say this with some assurance was that this man in particular was so clearly alone--wore his isolation like a heavy, impermeable cloak--that he was quite frightening, especially to small children, whom he ignored completely, although he didn't really acknowledge other adults, it must be said. Later, I learned why she had been asking: the police had been called when the neighbor noticed an increasingly foul odor, and the man had been found dead inside his unkempt, dirty apartment. No contact information for anybody could be found in the apartment, not a letter, an address, a phone number, a name. I was told by another neighbor this morning they think he may have been dead in there for a couple of weeks.

I can't quite get my head around this, how a person manages to reach this level of pathological aloneness. A friend of mine has been researching legacy, and the sociological ramifications of a death when there is nobody to leave things--memories, stories, possessions--to, and I have marveled that he has been able to find such people. But now I know. Sometimes they live just up the stairs.

I often find myself feeling oppressed by people, closed in on, desperate for just a moment alone. What a luxury it is to feel that way.

Catcher on the Roof

2009-03-04T17:47:00.002-05:00

I taught my gardening class today at Lily's school, and about halfway through, as per usual, we went up on the roof so the kids could run around. It was cold, and they quickly invented some kind of a faux ice-skating game that involved plunging headfirst down one of the slides and then sprinting over to a "skate shop" over by a chair, so I stood with my back against a wall and watched them. To my horror, I realized after a few minutes that a few of the kids were deliberately excluding another one, pretending not to hear this child, dismissing this child's ideas and otherwise ensuring that this child remained clearly on the outskirts of the goings-on.

I'm not sure why I was so horrified. I was a child. I went to school. I remember how mean children can be to each other; I remember the times somebody was mean to me, and the (blessedly few) times I was mean to somebody else, and how it felt afterward, how it still feels now to remember. But seeing it from this perspective, as the parent of a child existing in a little closed circle in which this was happening, although she was neither the perpetrator nor the victim, felt different. To be honest, it made me feel a little bit sick.

I stopped it. I took one of the offenders by the hand and told the child in no uncertain terms that if everyone was not able to, encouraged to participate, then the game would end, that we would immediately descend from the roof. I am not my mother's daughter for nothing; I saw recognition in this child's eyes. I was not messing around. But the truth is that the child who was being shut out will be shut out again, probably tomorrow, and the children shutting out this child will shut out somebody else, probably tomorrow, and what I really wanted to do up there on the roof as I stood with my back against the brick wall watching, remembering, was take the offending children by the shoulders and crouch down to their level and look them straight in the eyes. I wanted to say, to shout, STOP! I wanted to tell them that making somebody else feel small never makes you feel bigger, that every time you are cruel to someone else it chips away a little piece of who you are, that mean people are loved less, love less, and hurt more, that being kind, truly kind and generous to others, especially those you don't love or don't need or don't understand is the best way to give your life purpose and meaning, to mean something more than what you actually are.

But I didn't, of course. I just stopped it, in the moment, and went back to watching, but a little less cheerfully, a little more warily. I cannot protect my children from this. But I can do all I can to make sure they know which side they want to be on when the meanness starts. From this point on, it will be a central part of my parenting. I wish it didn't have to happen so soon.

Just Another Tuesday

2009-03-03T23:33:00.002-05:00

This morning the girls were up early, and I got up, reluctantly, to make breakfast. Lily wanted Cream of Wheat, so I made Annika cereal, too, as she generally goes along with what Lily is having, and set them up at the table so I could go back into the kitchen and make myself some much-needed coffee. When I heard Lily cackling with laughter I popped my head back out to find Annika, chortling herself, rubbing warm cereal into her hair with both of her hands.

On some mornings, in some moods, this would make me--like Lily--burst into laughter. On other mornings, mornings like this morning, the morning after the Snow Day, a.k.a. the day I decided I wasn't actually paying too much for nursery school, this is enough to bring to tears to my eyes, or at least to make me feel as though the entire day has nowhere to go but straight downhill. I plucked Annika out of the highchair and took the half-finished cereal bowl into the kitchen while she wailed and stomped her little feet. Lily was still sitting at the table, dreamily poking at her cereal, stirring it idly, bringing a spoonful to her mouth and then putting it back in the bowl, untouched, as though to torture me.

Annika held out her arms to me, and I picked her up, gritting my teeth as she wiped her sticky cereal hands on my sweater, snot and drool dripping onto my shoulders and shoes. I decided to remove all of our clothes--the only realistic solution to the situation--and when I went to put the clothes in the hamper, Annika disappeared into the kitchen in her diaper. I found her licking a finger and touching it to a can of Ajax that was for some reason within reach. Before I could reach her, she touched her finger to her tongue and made not the horrified look of disgust one would hope for but a considering look, as though to say: maybe just a sprinkle on a piece of buttered toast!

Lily finally managed to swallow down three or four tiny bites of her chosen breakfast and emerged from the bedroom wearing a predictably bizarre outfit of mostly navy blue fuzzy clothes, all of which were so coated in layers of dog fur that even I was embarrassed. I couldn't find a lint roller, and I couldn't find a roll of tape, so I told Lily that I would brush her off at school, where there was lots of tape, but that we had to leave, at which point she said, "Mama, I'm so, so hungry," and I noticed Annika feeding Scout segments of clementine she'd found somewhere in the apartment. They looked partially fossilized.

I'm not sure what my point is. I believe there actually isn't one, or a moral, or anything more to add except that at the bookend of this day, when I arranged the little hamburgers that had been handsomely rejected the night before by a number of discriminating children on a plate on the counter and bent to tie my shoe, Scout managed in one surprisingly graceful motion to swoop up behind me, consume three in one miraculous bite, and slink out as fast as it is possible to slink to a protected spot under the dining room table where he alternately licked his paws and rolled around on his back, leaving more tufts of white fur on the floor, awaiting tomorrow morning's preparations.

Growing Down

2009-03-02T23:20:00.004-05:00

Took a three day weekend there, but I'm back. The no weekend thing is proving difficult. It's hard to start up again after even two days off. Although it's really nice having the days off when I'm in it. I reserve the right to change my mind if the transition back in proves too difficult. I'm also, it must be said, in a funny place right now: so much on my mind, so hard to sift through it all and know what to write about.

I do keep thinking about something Lily said as we were walking up the street a few days ago. She was asking me about people's birthdays, when was so-and-so's birthday, how did I remember everybody's birthdays, and on and on. Finally, she couldn't think of any more names to ask, and we just walked in silence for a few moments, hugging ourselves in the cold. Then, she said, a bit dejected, "Grownups know so much. I'll never know as much as a grownup."

I'll admit; I was taken aback. Lately I've been feeling as though what I know would fit on the head of a pin. "Like what?" I asked, without stopping to think. I was genuinely curious.

"Like when everybody's birthday is," she answered.

I started thinking about how daunting it must seem to her that so often when she asks me a question, I do know the answer, or can fudge one on the spot. I know when all of my family member's birthdays are, and I know how to crack eggs without getting the shell in the bowl, and I know how to make music play from my computer, and I know how to write in cursive. I know how to give a pill to a dog, and how to drive stick shift, and how to sew a button back on her shirt. When I have to tell Lily, in fact, that I DON'T know something, she always seems surprised, come to think of it, a reaction that is not shared by certain others in my life, who have, on occasion, accused me of being a know-it-all.

But from where I'm sitting, it so often seems as though I know less and less. Working with teenagers underscores this; although they don't know how to talk to each other, or when somebody likes them, or how to choose the most flattering shirt, they know so much. Have any of you looked at an SAT in the last couple of decades? If you want to feel like an idiot, check out a practice book in a bookstore someday and see how much you once knew that you will never know again. Think about how many entire fields of knowledge--algebra, that Robert Frost poem you had to memorize, chemistry, Latin, playing the cello--have gone by the wayside, left so far behind you can't even remember the very first line of "Fire and Ice." Which, if I remember correctly, is about five lines long altogether.

Now of course this is not the kind of knowing I am saying I feel so bad at lately. I actually have no problem telling a fifteen-year-old who asks me if he will ever need to know sine, cosine and tangent again in his life that the answer is unequivocally no. Unless it kicks in past forty, I suppose. But somehow, I don't think so. No, the kind of knowing I feel so inept at these days is more the art of living kind of knowing, the kind of knowing, come to think of it, at which Lily excels.

So what I should have said, when she worried out loud that she would never know as much as a grownup, is this: No, sweetheart, You know oh so much more. Just don't forget it as you grow up, and you'll be fine. Now, tell me how I can remember?

Unwell

2009-02-26T23:16:00.001-05:00

Feverish and feverish children so not tonight...

In the Moment, Not Always What You Feel Like

2009-02-25T00:28:00.004-05:00

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

2009-02-23T20:33:00.007-05:00

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

2009-02-22T23:43:00.003-05:00

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)

2009-02-21T21:42:00.006-05:00

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.

2009-02-20T23:16:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-19T22:45:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-18T00:03:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-16T23:37:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-12T20:20:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-11T20:47:00.006-05:00

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.