Month: May 2016

I’ve stood in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington. And I’ve read In Flanders Field and seen Saving Private Ryan. I’ve felt tears when watching soldier homecoming videos.

Let me be the first to say, I have no idea what Memorial Day truly means to many, many people in this country.

Now that I have children of my own, a husband, a family, all of whom count on me in ways large and small, and whom I count on in the same ways, maybe I understand a little more. Maybe I can imagine what it might be like to lose one of them. But in this moment, it’s only an abstract impression. It is one of those things that I sometimes feel with fearful clarity in odd moments. What if. What if, my heart beats on a random commute into work, or just before I fall asleep. But then I move on to other thoughts and other things, and I stop thinking about it. Because I can.

I realize that Memorial Day is about what happens if that abstract what if changes into a painfully crystalized reality.  And I realize again, that still, even with my family and my children, I have no idea what it would mean to live with that possibility in such a way that it became subconsciously habitual, or god forbid, real.

Yesterday, at a work bbq celebrating the long weekend, it was sort of miserable outside. Dark, cold, rainy. We were in a hangar, except for the poor grill master, but it was still cold and one of my coworkers offered his fighter jacket, leaving him in shortsleeves. If there’s one thing about the military I’ve learned, it’s that chivalry is not dead.

“That jacket’s been places,” he said as he handed it over.  I asked where. The list was astounding. Jordan and Germany and Africa and Crete. There were a dozen others. And sewn inside of it is a silk blood chit, written in a dozen languages, identifying the wearer as friendly and asking for assistance. An interesting bbq conversation, until you consider why a fighter jacket needs a blood chit to begin with.

Before my current job, I didn’t have a lot of experience with the military. Now I have more, in, granted, an informal way. My coworkers have told casual stories about months aboard a submarine, about POW training, about air raids and about the bonds that they made during service. Sometimes when someone has been brought into the corporate fold, the explanation is just, “They flew together.” Initially, I thought it was straight up nepotism. But after hearing the stories I understand that it probably is nepotism, but that more, it’s brotherhood. Hearing the stories, I get it. And respect that.

I’ve met more military and ex-military in the last few years than I have the lifetime before that. I’ve heard stories I’ve never heard. And as with anything in life, the more you learn, the more you know. I’m grateful for that.

This Memorial Day, I admit I still don’t truly understand what the holiday really means to those who have lost someone in service to this country. I can’t know. I haven’t lived it. I don’t understand what it means to live with that possibility. And I can’t truly understand what it means to move post to post every few years, and wait at home and go about all the functions of daily life while counting down days until a deployment ends. I definitely can’t understand what it means to go into work every day knowing that work means, possibly, the very biggest sacrifice of all.

But I know I appreciate it.

 

 

You know how you’re going about your life, and days turn into weeks, and suddenly you’re smack up against some milestone. Maybe it’s suddenly Christmas again, or an anniversary, or in this case, the last day of school. Another year has zoomed by. Again.

I was already feeling a little sentimental this week. Even as I celebrate all the new independent-child accomplishments of my children, who can now get breakfast, pack lunches, clean bathrooms, walk home from school — each of these accomplishments also take a little bittersweet piece of my heart. I’m excited that they’re able to navigate pockets of time without me, and wistfully despondent about it. Mostly the former. But definitely a little the latter.

This year on the last day of school, I dropped my children off at the same southeast corner of the school that we’ve been pulling up to all year. And it struck me all over again that at the beginning of the year, my youngest still wanted me to walk her to her classroom. By a few weeks into second grade, she didn’t need me next to her anymore. I didn’t know she’d feel so comfortable so quickly. While I felt a warm, reflective glow in her new independence — the work of any parent is to foster wings strong enough to leave the nest — and while I could get to work a few minutes earlier, I also grieved just a little. These “I’m good, Mom” moments should come with a countdown clock. Otherwise you stand beside your car thinking, Did I appreciate her still-small hand in mine yesterday? Did I notice how it felt to meet her teacher’s eyes, smile, and silently transfer over her welfare, or was I too busy thinking about email I had to answer once I got to work, and whether I’d checked to make sure the garage door was closed.

Next year my children will be in 3rd grade and 5th grade. 5th grade rocks me a little, maybe because for me it was the end of elementary school. Or maybe because it somehow sounds so much older than 4th. Because of my older daughter’s extraordinary Girl Scout troop, she’s already spent several multiple-night trips away from home. She’s always been a more collected, unruffled child. Flexible and mature. Somehow because she sometimes makes me feel frivolous and young, I haven’t felt as rattled to watch her grow up. It seems only natural that she’d grow into her old soul.

Today, the very first day of summer vacation, my youngest came back from our neighbor’s house, where she spends quite a bit of time playing with our neighbor’s granddaughter, nearly bouncing out of her flip-flops. Could she please, please, please go overnight in our neighbor’s camper to Cheyenne, Wyoming? Our neighbor came over and assured me that they’d love to have her come, that it would be fun for their granddaughter to have a friend along. And they were leaving in about 30 minutes. She just needed a change of clothes and a toothbrush.

I looked at the camper, the one that routinely blocks our otherwise unencumbered view of the mountains. And I thought about Wyoming, which is a couple hours away, and I looked at the terribly excited child in front of me, and I thought, No, no, no. No, you can’t go out of the state without me beside you. No, you can’t spend a night where I can’t get to you within five minutes. No, no, no.

And then I looked at Eva’s excited face again. And at our kindly neighbor and his very sweet granddaughter who will be Eva’s secret keeper in another few years. And I said, Let me just call her father to make sure we don’t have plans. …which was of course ridiculous and we all knew it. If there were plans for the evening, it would be my household role to both make them and know about them. But our neighbor smiled in understanding, and I called my husband to make sure that he couldn’t think of a reasonable explanation for why she couldn’t go. “I can’t think of any reason she shouldn’t,” he said.

No. Me either. Except that it will break my heart, just a little bit. Again. Except what if she needs me at midnight, and I can’t get there. Except what if the literal registered nurse who will be along, our neighbor’s wife, doesn’t know what to do if…. if…

And so I took a deep breath, and made her ridiculously happy by saying, Yes. Yes, you can go. Yes, you can test your wings. I’m just going to be over here doing some deep breathing. And panicked texting.

I hope she has fun. I hope that it starts her summer off in a way she’ll always remember — “that time, at the very last minute, when we went to Wyoming in a camper.”

And maybe I hope she misses me just a little bit. Not so much to dampen her excitement, but enough to sweeten her return home.

 

 

“Mountains of mud set to fly in White House race” ran the headline.

I consider myself fairly political. I have a lot of opinions. However, working for a conservative company, I am also aware that not everyone shares my opinions, as weird as that is. I know that I am several of my coworkers’ token liberal friend. I’m an anomaly in their lives, as they are in mine. We view each other with affectionate amusement, for the most part, and sometimes with some frustration. But we keep sharing weekend plans and going to happy hour, because we’re a lot more than our political leanings.

One thing we can agree on, though, is that no one wants to trudge through the next six months of general election campaign. The circus of the primaries has long since stopped being amusing. It already feels like it has drug on interminably. The very idea of “mountains of mud” for the next six months makes me want to go off the grid. Could I do it? Could I give up internet and the nightly news and social media? Would I be less angry, less hair-triggered about daily life? What would I do with my time? Would I exercise, watch every sunset? Write letters like I always mean to on the greeting cards I can’t stop buying? Write that novel?

So, if we can all agree that no one wants to go through the next six months dealing with the playground antics of the would-be leaders of our country, and that’s really a whole other issue right there, then why do we cultivate a society that not only tolerates mudslinging but watches with rapt attention? And actually, playground antics seems needlessly harsh toward our children. Because in actuality, the majority of children are pretty good eggs. I’m not always so sure about that percentage with adults.

We thrive on negativity. When we first heard the German word ‘Schadenfreude’ – the pleasure we get from the misfortune of others – we didn’t wonder at the oddities of culture and language that such a word would exist. No. We said, Yes, that exactly! Those genius Germans with their spot-on words!

We read our children books about the hatefulness of bullying. We tell them that we all carry around invisible buckets to fill with kindness. Have you filled a bucket today? And yet as adults, our jokes are often at the expense of others. Even our inexhaustible supply of reality singing and talent shows always start with the painful process of shaming the misguided dreamers first. We’ve created a whole celebrity culture of people we elevate only to hate. The Kardashians and the Real Housewives and pageant mothers and bachelorettes. New mother Chrissy Teigen was savaged on social media for first, daring to go out with her husband 9 days after having a baby, and second, and perhaps even worse, looking good doing it. Comments were brutal and extraordinarily nasty. What drives us to that? And why on earth would we care when new parents we’ve never met, will never meet, decide to go to dinner? I’m 99% sure they didn’t leave their baby alone to be babysat by the dog, so why all the vitriol?

Why? Because we’ve apparently forgotten how to speak nicely and use our words, like they taught us in kindergarten. We’ve gotten incredibly lazy-minded. I don’t think we have to take Thumper’s age-old advice, and say nothing unless we have something nice to say. By all means, we should have opinions and we should be able to voice dissent and frustration and fear. But there is a basic difference between a reasoned critique and lazy name calling. There is a difference between passionately disagreeing on an issue and debating it, as opposed to smoke and mirrors and pouring over decades of video and news clips to find what can best be taken out of context, warped, manipulated and then fed to the most gullible.

I realize that in an election year, no one should ever talk about being out of work, but I’d be just fine putting back into the job market those people on both sides whose sole job it is to find the mud, to mold it into the most splattery, distracting shape, and then launch it like a faux PSA. Aren’t we better than that? Our children are, so I have to think we were once, too.

What if we turned off the tv every time we saw something needlessly negative and let the ratings do the talking for us? What if we refused to visit internet sites whose sole function was to create partisan acrimony? What if we actively dismissed every headline that was deliberately misleading? We just said no to click bait, even when it was packaged in the exact shiny snark we so wanted to hear to feel validated in our own small meanness, our most Schadenfreud-tastic selves.

Gandhi said, “Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

Is our destiny to sit in our self-perpetuated darkness, slaves to our glowing screens, alternately spewing and internalizing negativity? Because that seems like a really poor decision. I don’t know if I could go off the grid. Probably all those greeting cards that are sitting in my card organizer (for real) and waiting for words and stamps are still safe. But I think I am going to make a conscious effort not to get lost in the babble. I already know my own mind. I don’t need anyone’s contextless 45-second video clip from 1991 to lead me toward an epiphany. Any time spent reading comment sections is only time I will never get back. Six more months of negativity will not change my vote, but it will likely change my outlook.

Words are choices. Speaking them. Reading them. Flinging them around like barbs and poisoned arrows. If my words are destined to become actions, then may my actions become a long twilight run, a hot bath, and snuggling in with a moralistic children’s tale for bedtime stories (and hoping it rubs off on me). No mud in sight.

I stood in the middle of an urban forest in the midst of Seattle, and I could hear woodpeckers and humming birds and probably a dozen others. There was a distant siren, as well, moving farther away, but so out of place in the dense green of the forest, it almost seemed as though this lush kingdom we’d stepped inside was the real world, its amazon vividness in stark relief against the monotonous humdrum of far away traffic.

Most of the time, we make friends and maintain friendships based on what we have in common, whether that was our middle school crushes, or our college term papers, or our children’s elementary school. These are important friendships. But some of the time, we make friends despite what we don’t have in common. With one of my best friends, we’ve always been at different crossroads. As I was struggling through the first years of parenthood, she was figuring out her early twenties. As I sent a child to kindergarten, she spent 6 weeks exploring Europe. We are, in many ways, in very different places. What we have in common is a love of literature and grammar, faith in a good proverb and a good rosé, an appreciation of a well executed high tea, and each other.

On that foundation, we’ve seen each other through some dismal lows and some extraordinary highs. We’ve gotten drunk on champagne and whiled away an afternoon over mugs of hot, strong brewed tea. Words and no words.

When I’m at home, quiet is nearly impossible. “Look, I’m dancing like popcorn,” my daughter says as she waits by the microwave, Once Upon A Time on in the living room, while my other daughter bounces on an exercise ball while watching Curious George videos on her computer. “Mama, is my shirt in the dryer?” “Mama, come see! I organized your jewelry!” “Mama, have you seen Buddy?” “Hon, did you schedule afterschool care yet? We need Thursday, too.”

Coming home from a quick 48 hours away, even having Skyped with my family mid-way through, remembering I had parked in far-away row Y3, Economy West was an added insult to the 20 minute runway delay in Seattle. It had been time to get away, and now it was time to get home. I chose the toll road to expedite the process and ended up behind a state trooper, all of us going exactly 75 mph for 30 miles. As soon as I got home, hugs distributed, we all talked at once. Eva had had soccer and written a short story. Samantha had a history project to discuss and dinner was ready.

This is home. It’s loud. There’s always something we’ve forgotten to do, and there’s always something that didn’t make it on the grocery list. There is never a hairbrush to be found, and socks never match. It’s controlled chaos when we’re lucky. Bedlam in a bottle. It’s what I hurry back to, even while I’ve counted down the hours to slip away.

But 1000 miles away from home, it’s nice to know that there is a forest in the middle of the city, where I’ve stood with one of my best friends, amid the moss and the ferns and the towering cedars, and just listened to the woodpeckers and hummingbirds.

I don’t remember the condition of my friends’ houses when I was young. Whether or not there were ever dishes on their kitchen counters, or toothpaste on their bathroom sinks. I do remember long talks and complicated games and secrets kept. I remember feeling at home, but in that sort of “other” way that was a little different than your own house. The house rules were a little different. There was Schwann food in the freezer. Entenmann’s on the counter. Exotic hallmarks of my trips abroad into other neighborhoods.

Tonight, two of the three children of one of my good friends are adding their voices and their laughter to the evening’s soundtrack. Two sets of siblings who would likely be fighting if left to their own households (I’m really only speaking for mine, but quite definitively for mine), but instead they’re playing “Truth or Dare.” My oldest daughter has already been forced to bark at me from her haunches. They’re planning a Netflix marathon. They are hysterically laughing, and I can hear their voices drifting up from the basement stairs and through the vents. It reminds me that they’re growing pretty independent. Sleepovers used to be more work for us as parents. Now they’re less work, the occasional snack or redirection. Time to read. Time to write. These two frequent young visitors to our house are among the few people who see on a regular basis how we really live. There are dishes on our kitchen counter. Somehow, there are 7 water bottles and 2 travel mugs amongst them. I don’t even know how that happens. There is still pizza (the only official food of slumber parties) sitting out on the kitchen table.  Someone might want a final piece (nothing to do with my Saturday night laziness).

A few weeks ago, I was rushing around one morning when these same friends were coming home from school with my daughters.  There was no way that we were going to get to the cursory clean that I usually (try to) attempt when visitors are due (even visitors of single digit age). And while they’d seen our house just as — we’ll say lived in — before, it was then that I realized that they were a certain tier of friends. Top tier, specifically.

I texted their mother, one of my own top tier people, “It occurs to me that your kids are the only people who see how we really live.”

The text reply came back, “I was thinking the same thing one day when your kids were at our house. There is something liberating once your friends know how you live.”

Here’s to prioritizing laughter over laundry, and kid crafting over clean floors, books over dusting. And to the friends who know us all too well and still allow their children to visit.

On this Mother’s Day, I’d like to raise a glass (if we have one clean), to the other mothers from my childhood who let me run as wild in their homes as I did my own. To my surrogate college mom — my roomie’s mom — who took me in for a whole summer one year while I was working in the city, and countless weekends in between. To my friends now who I hesitate to allow inside my house on a random Wednesday evening, but who assure me that they get it and politely mention my houseplants instead of my messy floors. And to my own amazing mother, who made parenting look so easy that I thought it would be a breeze… I know better now, and love you the more for it.

“Don’t worry. We can fix it.”

How many times have we said this, in how many contexts. We’ve said it as relationships founder. We’ve said it at work when a presentation goes off the rails, when we forward the email straight to the customer, with the full thread intact. Recall, recall, recall. This message has been read. It’s okay. We can fix it.

And we say it to our children. We say it a lot to our children. It’s the pact we make with them when they’re born, tiny and red and already everything. Tiny debutants into the world. No matter what, we’ll always be there. We’ll be there, and we’ll fix it.

When they bring us a construction paper masterpiece torn down the middle, we carefully tape it back together. We are masters of super glue and have even hand stitched the seams of that silly purple Dollar Spot stuffed …hippo? (Horse? For $3, it’s anyone’s guess.) We have half a dozen types of character band-aids. Snoopy. Tinkerbell. Turtles. We try to give them the right words for when they’re frightened, angry, lost. For when friends are cruel, or siblings dismissive. Bring me what’s broken. Bring me what hurts. We can fix it.

Except sometimes we can’t. The relationship ends. The job is lost. Some hurts a band-aid can’t bind. We have to say instead, “I wish I could fix this. I wish I could make this better.”

My youngest daughter has had stomach aches for ages. We’ve taken her to doctors. To allergists. We’ve tried holistic biofeedback and heartburn medication and IBS medication. I’ve emailed her teacher to please look out for medication side effects, and wondered if this is the right path. We’ve tried eliminating fried foods and dairy. She prefers not to actually eat at restaurants, where she’s forever running back and forth from the bathroom – “just to try” – and so we often pack up her whole meal and bring it home while she colors and does the word scramble and circles the hidden objects on her placemat. Her food diary is a puzzle. Sometimes she’ll eat strawberries for breakfast with no issue, but after dinner they’ll make her sick. Cheese is definitely a trigger but yogurt seems to be fine. 50% of the time, she’ll feel better after 30 minutes. 50% of the time, she doesn’t and it can go on for what seems an eternity. She’ll spend the 30 minutes after lunch resting in the school clinic, except for “when it takes two 30-minutes.”

“Tonight went pretty well,” my husband will say, encouragingly. “But she didn’t eat anything,” I’ll say. “Well, that still tells us things,” he’ll reply. What?, I wonder. What does that tell us? That… food … is the issue? And I text my mama friend who knows what it feels like, and doesn’t try to fix it, but says, “I’m so sorry you’re going through this.” And even though I know it’s actually my daughter who’s going through it, I lean into the empathy and let my shoulders sag a little while my fingers fly to pour out the guilt and frustration and exhaustion.

Every time we schedule a new appointment, she’s thrilled because she believes that with this new approach we’re going to fix it. And baby girl, I swear I’m trying. When I held her crying on my lap for bloodwork, her arms and legs windmilling in fear, screaming, “I don’t want to do this!,” me crying, too, and my voice breaking as I tried to sing Hush Little Baby, I told her, “They can look at your blood and see what makes you feel sick. This will be over in a few minutes, and it will be worth it.”

For the blood panel review a few weeks later, she felt nauseous that morning. She held my hand tight in the hospital elevator, in the way that reminds me how little she still is, even as big as she’s getting. She was a little nervous, scared because we’d been there before and it had hurt, but excited. This time. This time we could walk out knowing. But of course we didn’t. Everything was within normal ranges. Just like allergy skin testing had said, too. The doctor called it good news. And I suppose it is. But it’s also frustrating. “Are they going to have to do it again, momma?” she asks, one more little hope extinguished. “No,” I said. “The next doctor can look at these results.” But, quietly, in the back of my heart, I thought, Maybe. Maybe.

And I remind myself it could be so much worse. I remind myself that some parents have spent not just hours but days and weeks and months in hospitals. That some days she feels just fine, and that she’s a sweet, happy child much of the time. But when that red flushed face looks up at me, with splotchy chest and wet eyes, I know I can’t fix it. “You need sleep,” I say, tired myself. “I can’t even do the easiest thing in the world. I can’t even sleep,” she says despairingly. She carries a yellow plastic mixing bowl to bed with her – just in case – though she never actually uses it. But it’s security, along with her worn-to-real, loyal, trusted Sam-I-Am. She gets up, again, and goes to sit outside in the cold night air. “I just feel like I’m allergic to everything inside,” she says. So we open her window, even though it’s snowing. And I lean my forehead against hers. “I wish I could fix this,” I say. And then she’ll turn on her music, pat my cheek and say, “Mama, go get some sleep.”

It breaks my heart to know that she’s already learned what I wanted to protect her against, at least a little while longer: some things you can’t just fix. There is no super glue. No Tinkerbell band-aid. There is simply, I’m so sorry you’re going through this. And if I can’t fix this, I’ll just be here.