Slouching Past 40

Preacher Man

2009-07-11T10:32:00.034-04:00

He has positioned himself strategically at the main campus gate, through which people must pass on their way up to the bandshell where the festival's headline acts are performing. He is rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. Agitated to the point of trembling, he directs an accusing finger at random members of his captive audience. You, he booms to the hapless fellow making valiant but ultimately futile efforts to thread his bicycle between clusters of people, may find yourself in hell tomorrow, and what will you do then? You will be the saddest person among so many sad people, because you didn't believe in hell, so why would you suspect that you might end up there?

The preacher swings his arm back and forth, tracing the perimeter of the crowd. Let me tell all of you, hell is not a bad word, it is a PLACE. And you're in very real danger of finding yourself within hell's four walls of fire and pain, each and every one of you who chooses to ignore the word of GOD! His face is mottled by rage and fervor, and shiny with sweat so profuse that it is pooling at his jowls before dripping down onto his neck and shoulders.

My children have stopped dead in their tracks to stare at this spectacle. They are fascinated as much by the preacher's anger as by his words. Seven is frowning. He nudges me and whispers, "This man is talking about everything I don't like to think about, death and fire and hell." I tousle his hair. "I know, sweetie," I murmur, "try to ignore him. He is sharing his truth with us and assuming that it's our truth, too. But why should it be ours? He's just telling stories." Somewhat mollified, Seven leans into me.

Finally we are able to move through the gate and up onto the lawn where a band has just taken the stage. Young and old alike sit on folding chairs and inhale the sweet grass-fed air, the cloudless sapphire sky, the incongruously husky voice of the young and delicately pretty blues singer. All around us children dart and run. The littlest ones are unashamedly moving their arms and legs to the music. They spin and tumble with all the agility of youth. We can't help but stare at their improvisational dancing. In us it inspires wonder and a healthy dose of envy. They are purely, innocently beautiful, these kids, and everything is spread out like a buffet before them.

I think of the preacher spewing vitriol down at the gate, and I feel sorry for him, that he can't see the children who so beguile the rest of us, children whose acrobatics embody the joy we all feel in listening to music outdoors on a quintessential summer afternoon. Surely he, too, would be moved, were he to take in these sturdy toddler legs confidently marking out the rhythms of the music, or those impossibly slender young arms slicing through the air as elegantly and precisely as a conductor's batons, the tableau leaving his mouth round and wordless with astonishment, his outsized venom and hate and sweat just evaporating in the face of all the children, who to no one's surprise except his own are poised to inherit the earth.

And in my mind's eye I see a little girl of about four skip to the preacher, his face gone white with shock and tiny shoots of remorse, and pull on his hand. "Grandpa," she'd exhort, her eyes merry and bright, "come and dance with me!" And the preacher man would, he would.

The French Lesson

2009-07-04T12:25:00.016-04:00

Madame who taught us ninth-grade French was a vaguely simian-looking woman whose name was Mary Louise and who hailed from not Paris or even Lyon but nowhere more exotic than Long Island, which we Manhattanites had been taught from a very young age to disdain. She wore her hair pulled back so severely that the skin of her forehead strained under the pressure. Her hairstyle did nothing to minimize the broadness of her forehead or the bulbous appearance of her nose. It was said that she'd been a nun. We didn't doubt it; everything about her seemed designed to disguise whatever had once been feminine about her. What capped Madame's ascetic look was a pair of glasses the likes of which none of us had ever seen: far too big for her face, red-rimmed, and, worst of all, tinted so dark that we couldn't see her eyes behind them.

That year Jenny was in Madame's class, and Madame seemed none too pleased about it. It's not that Jenny was a troublemaker. No, Jenny had a French mother and had learned spoken French very early. It was clear to everyone, even the poor students among us, that Jenny's accent was authentic, while Madame's was school-taught and barely passable. When Jenny read a passage in French, we grew unnaturally quiet, feeling that we were in the presence of something true, and beautiful for it.

Madame didn't call on Jenny very much at all.

My reputation had preceded me into this class. What Madame had heard about me was that I was quiet and well-mannered, as well as diligent. She had not counted on my best friend's influence on me. Meredith made me chatty and giggly, as I did her. We'd egg each other on until one or the other of us would laugh so hard that we'd have to wipe tears from our cheeks. Sometimes Meredith or I would be sent out of the room to collect ourselves.

Madame was timid and had a hard time quieting a class that had gone wild. It didn't happen often that we all lost control at once, but when it did, Madame would snap as resoundingly as a dry twig. Yet even her rage seemed helpless and ineffectual, marked more by the wringing of her hands and the rush of color to her face (which, for once, matched her glasses) than by anything else.

One day in December, she called my name after class. "I'd like to see you in my office," she said. Meredith, who'd stayed to wait for me, shot me a look. This request of Madame's was unprecedented. Now and then students would come to Madame's office hours for help with homework, but she never summoned one of us, particularly one who was earning straight A's, to her office.

That afternoon during a free period I opened Madame's office door. "You wanted to see me?," I asked. "Yes, Sarah, I did. Please sit down," Madame suggested, and she pulled a chair over to face her own. I sat down. I was so close to Madame that our knees were practically touching, and I started to back my chair away. Before I got anywhere Madame put her hand on mine. "Sarah," she said, and looked at me gravely. "I sense a distance between us that I'd like to bridge."

If I say I wanted to die at that moment, will you understand? I was fourteen years old. Madame's was not the language that one used when dealing with fourteen-year-olds. Hadn't she ever been fourteen?

I must have looked horrified, because she flushed and started stammering. "I mean, don't you feel that there's something not right between us?" This question, too, a misstep in conversation with a fourteen-year-old. Panicked, I wanted nothing more than to flee. "You are older than your years," she continued, "and I expect more from you than from the other girls. Why are you so taken with Meredith? She is just a child. But you, you..." Here she shrugged. Her words were not up to this task, whatever it was. I still had no idea why I'd been asked to come to Madame's office.

Finally she sighed. "Run along, then," she said, her voice weary and tight. I was only too happy to oblige. I found Meredith in the library and attempted to replay the bizarreness of my interchange with Madame. Meredith looked both repulsed and fascinated, and whispered to me, "I think she LIKES you!" "Shut UP!," I retorted, and glared at her. And then we both collapsed in giggles.

Whatever Madame had intended to convey to me that day continued to be utterly lost on me. It certainly backfired, because I'd felt so out of my depth in that office that I ended up despising Madame for it. If there had been distance between us, as she insisted, now there was more. I could hardly look at her.

*********************

I watch Eleven, surly and distant. I see how he responds to what his father or I tell him, and I am, if not worried, then definitely wary. Soon adults, and the things they say, will be wholly inscrutable to him. Adults will be objects of derision, contempt, and a trace of pity. That's as it should be.

Still, I can't help but hope that my son will never stare at me the way I must have stared at Madame on that December afternoon in 1981 -- with fear that quickly becomes too intolerable to bear and ends up morphing into something close to scorn. To this day I don't know what Madame wanted of me. Was she so lonely that she was looking for a friend in a teenager? Did she "like" me? But because of Madame I can easily call up the agony of the teenager faced with an adult who has unwittingly become Other. If nothing else, Madame taught me how not to behave with a child or teenager, and for that I am grateful. She's probably dead by now, and I'd like to tell you that I wish I had sought her out much later to ask her to decode her message to me, but that would be a lie. I never once wanted anything more to do with Madame, who, to my mind then and now, transgressed so thoroughly that turning back would be forever and always out of the question. Fin.

Triangulating

2009-06-23T18:54:00.009-04:00

Twice in the past month I have cried in front of the children. I have scared them. I know this, because I have watched their eyes, unblinking, wide with fear, fear that is potent enough to forge a reluctant alliance between brothers far more accustomed to being rivals. They do not know what to make of my tears. Their father comes home from work and takes them outside. I am grateful. He will talk to them. He can explain it however he likes; right now I can't afford to sweat the details. After an hour or so, they return, with treats for me: an iced coffee, a magazine. As if I am ill. Because I am ill.

Later Seven approaches me. "I get it," he says shyly. "I'd be sad if my mother died." I smile at his word choice, which suggests that I am not the mother of whom he speaks. Then again, maybe this recent incarnation of me is sufficiently different from the mother he's known that it's worth distinguishing the two.

I think, If only I could show them my bruises. If only I could translate my grief into language they'd understand. But no. Better that it be unimaginable, for now. They will know grief in their own time.

Still I am tempted to tell them a story, my story: I am on the upper deck of a ship that is pulling away from the dock, where the rest of my family stands and waves goodbye. It is understood that I will be away for a long time, but that I will return. What's less clear is who I will have become by the end of my journey. I watch my husband and boys until distance renders their faces little more than the three points of a triangle. Only then do my tears fall, tears so copious and prolonged that in time they raise the sea level. Back at the shore happy beachgoers, my three points among them, frolic in the water made unexpectedly, blissfully warm.

Boys and War

2009-06-16T11:12:00.005-04:00

I did not know what reservoirs of atavistic stoicism lay within Eleven until he donned a soldier's uniform on a class trip to Gettysburg.

I cannot look away from this portrait. For me it contains the beauty, hope, and, yes, sorrow of thousands upon thousands of boys barely older than Eleven called to do something they will not understand for years, if ever, but who rise to the strange occasion with a fragile and poignant dignity. In their knowing gazes lies their glory, whether they've stepped onto a battlefield or only just enlisted.

I study these anachronistic sepia tones with a mother's eyes, as I must, and shudder at the recognition of all the mothers whose children looked just like this and of so many, too many, mothers who clutch portraits of their sons close, knowing that it is all they have, and all they will have, for the rest of their days.

After All

2009-06-14T14:17:00.012-04:00

All weekend long I have stolen glances out the kitchen window at this group of kids who just days ago graduated from high school. They are having a party that started Friday night and is still going strong on Sunday afternoon. The weather has done their bidding, as they no doubt assumed it would. They are lithe and strong, and though they may have known small heartaches here and there, they still believe that the world is a fundamentally benign place that exists largely to support all of that promise and possibility they've long been told is theirs.

They play volleyball easily, confidently, and their frequent laughs float across the yard and through the windows into my own house, where Eleven catches them in the air and files them for later use. He hears flirtation in them, and he is curious. The sounds of flirting are indisputably intoxicating to those who recognize them; Seven, of course, remains oblivious. These newly minted high school graduates are flirting with each other, with the sun, with their drinks, with their newfound freedom from obligation -- it is as natural a state for them as surliness is for Eleven.

For a long time I saw the occasional teenager and, startled, I thought, He could be my child. Yet I was always able to console myself with the realization that only if I'd led a very different life, one that didn't include college and graduate school, could that be. But today, when I study these particular teens, some of whom are still only seventeen years old, I am chastened. They could be my children, now that I am forty-one.

But they are not, in fact, my children, and so dispassionately I mull over all that is to come for these kids, the joys and sadnesses, the disappointments and triumphs, the sobering discovery people tend to make sometime in their twenties that the world does not revolve around them and would in fact be relatively indifferent to their passing.

I think I will be relieved when this party finally peters out, when I can get back to washing a dish without being reminded that it's come down to this: a woman in a kitchen cleaning up after lunch, who has more or less ended her love affair with possibility and promise, who resides comfortably enough with now and what is, having relegated later and what might be to yet another unmarked box in the basement, where these days she's rarely inclined to venture.

Sidling Up to Too Far

2009-06-10T09:40:00.015-04:00

Seven looks up at me from the kitchen floor, on which he's sprawled out reading. He chooses to read, every time, in the most heavily trafficked areas of the house. The upstairs hallway is a favorite spot of his. Often I find myself having to step over him, especially lately, as he's been swallowing a book or two every single day.

Now he sits up. "Crab!," he exclaims. "Crab is a good word. It's fun to repeat it, like this: crab, crab, crab! Say it with me!"

If he weren't quite so busy perfecting the look of the cat who swallowed the canary, I might be tempted to call his smile sly.

"Mommy," he continues, though I haven't said a word, "Don't you like to say 'crab'? When you're in the car and someone in front of you is driving really slowly?"

Dislocation

2009-06-08T12:49:00.009-04:00

I spend much of my time playing with words: combing through them in order to find the right ones, combining and recombining them, stepping back and judging how well they flow, shuffling them around, listening to myself say them aloud, gauging their effect, all the while wondering if they match what is inside me, if I have written my truth or just an approximation of it.

And then there comes along a photo that captures my spouse and children so completely as they are and as they will be that I stop short and wonder whether I am wasting my time on words, whether one image has conveyed more to you than all those words did or ever could.

My mother's death has unmoored me. I do not trust my experience. I do not trust my environment. I am questioning everything I took for granted. I am unsettled, nauseated, itchy. It is not comfortable. When I was young, well before adolescence, I used to wake up in the middle of the night every so often with the most horrific cramps in my legs. Growing pains, my mother called them.

No. They were just leg cramps. These, what I've felt for six weeks now, these are growing pains. I am in withdrawal from complacency, and it hurts. Good thing I have the three fellas in the photo to bear witness, to nod and exclaim, all at once, She was there, see? She took the picture!, because otherwise, not sure how how to recognize myself in the body I'm supposed to anchor, I might be in danger of floating away.

Perpetual Motion Machine

2009-06-05T11:15:00.005-04:00

He is in such a hurry these days. Why sit when you can stand? Why walk when you can run? Why run when you can ride your bike, not two miles but five, or ten?

His mind, too, is racing. Why read one book a day when you can read two? Why not take out a piece of paper and attack a five-digit by five-digit multiplication problem, just because?

It is a mother's prerogative to admire the way her youngest child is hurtling towards adulthood and, in equal measure, to lament it.

The Other Kind of Freshman Year

2009-06-04T14:35:00.040-04:00

It had been the usual frat party: sweaty bodies crushed together, the smell of beer and urine, the pounding of the bass line, empty plastic cups littering the floor. Alcohol made those still dancing laughably graceless. I had been drinking, and dancing, and drinking some more. Now I was dizzy, so I climbed out an open window. Taking greedy gulps of the wonderfully cool air, I sat on the frat's lawn. Some, possibly many, minutes passed -- I wasn't judging time well -- before Tom came stumbling around the corner and nearly stepped on me. "I'm gonna be sick," he muttered. And he was. Afterward he swiped at his mouth and dropped heavily to the ground beside me. "Aww, Sarah," he said, grinning, "I love you. I love that you're here right now. With me. That I'm here right now. With you." He took my hand and squeezed it. We sat leaning into one another, silent, for some time.

Tom had been a star pitcher in high school but hadn't yet found his arm at college. A few days after our freshman year began, his grandfather had died. He took it hard. So hard that one night soon after that, drunk of course, he punched his fist through a window. He and alcohol, they weren't friends. Drinking made him restless and melancholic. Sober, he was a puppy dog: amiable and eager to please. But Tom sober was, increasingly, a rare sighting. He was spiraling out of control, and it was only September.

Now he put his face up to mine. I could smell his sour breath. The moon was full, or close to it. By its pale light I saw that he was crying, only a little, but enough to move me. He sighed before saying, "Sarah, take me home. I just wanna go home." I considered this. Our dormitory was ten minutes away from the frat, and Tom was a big guy, nearly a foot taller than I and probably one hundred pounds more. I stood up, not all that steady myself. He leaned on me, and we made our way as if partners in a three-legged race across one quad and a street to the oasis of our own quad. As I fumbled with the key to the dorm, he put his hands on either side of my face and drew me close. "Will you stay with me tonight?," he asked. "I'm scared of what might happen if I'm alone." I was young, but I'd grown up medicating someone else's sadness. He couldn't have picked a better girl for this job, though he knew nothing of my history. He may also have guessed that I wouldn't be interested in seducing him, or in having him seduce me. Not in his nearly comatose state. I valued self-control too much for that; for me, drunkenness was no turn-on.

Tom rightly interpreted my silence as assent. Up we went to his room, where he crashed on his bed. I found his wastebasket and put it within arm's reach. He threw up twice more. I was scared to leave, too worried that he'd choke on his own vomit. His roommate came home, eventually, and raised one eyebrow when he saw me at Tom's side. If he assumed anything about the two of us, he never shared it with anyone. As early as noon the next day, Tom was lost to me. He was too embarrassed by whatever he thought he might have revealed to me during the longest hours between two am and dawn. All the rest of that year he turned away whenever he saw me, as if he could erase the memory of his fragility by erasing me.

That night was not the first time I would act as a support for one of my peers. I'd been groomed from my youngest years to be a helper, and I was exceptionally good at it. It was habit as much as anything else that kept me mothering friends and acquaintances all through college and beyond. It's only lately that I rue what I missed by playing that part. I wonder what would have happened had Tom and I slept together that night, had I been able to shed the mantle of responsibility and allow myself to be an eighteen-year-old girl, an attractive eighteen-year-old girl, succumbing to the charms of an equally attractive eighteen-year-old boy. The truth is that both Tom and I were damaged long before we lay chastely side by side one night in late September, that he'd sensed my fault lines from the first day of college, as I'd sensed his, that we recognized each other, foreigners in a country where coupling (and everything else) was supposed to be easy and thoughtless.

I'd like those years back, I think, knowing what I do now, having come to terms with the ways in which I was damaged as a child. So many moons later, I believe there's lots to be said for easy and thoughtless, not as a prescription for relations with the opposite sex, but as a stance toward life more generally, at least some of the time.

My Narrative Arc

2009-05-31T11:42:00.017-04:00

Time got away from me.

They say time is linear. To them I direct a question: How to explain the cunning way it seems to speed up, or slow down? During my children's infancies the days were as long as a week feels to me now, at the midpoint of my life. Then I measured them by whether my baby was asleep or awake: the altogether too long morning before nap, the nap itself, always too short, whether it lasted one or three hours, and then the rush -- late afternoon, dinner, bath, and bedtime, all compressed into just a few hours of dislocated fretfulness, the baby's and mine both.

There was nothing linear about those days.

*********************

Last Monday marked twenty years since I graduated from college. Twenty years. The first twenty years of my life passed in the way that a long, hot unscheduled summer afternoon passes for an eight-year-old: relentlessly, painfully slowly.

The second twenty years? I blinked, that is all. I blinked, and I am here, in a small town I'd never even heard of back then. I blinked, and I am a mother to boys, two of them, when I'd only ever imagined girls.

And still, my potential remains just that: potential.

I didn't go to my college reunion. I haven't gone to my high school reunions. I wouldn't know what to say.

I was the one with promise. While I've earned a PhD, I don't use it and don't intend to use it, so it hardly counts. I'm good at school. So what?

*********************

I look to these next twenty years with hope and fear both. If my first twenty years went too slowly, and the second twenty went too fast, perhaps the third time's the charm. Like Goldilocks I am, anticipating that from this point forward time will flow as it ought, neither too fast nor too slow: just right.

Time to realize whatever's left of that potential, I think. No better time, because this is the only time.

*********************

I have written enough first lines, first scenes, first chapters of novels in my lifetime to fill, well, a novel. Why no second lines, scenes, chapters? I was loathe to settle on one narrative arc, because there might be another more promising one that I would have to forsake. But there's no time for that now, there's no time to waste. On that point, my mother's death in April was instructive.

I've started to scribble the "what comes after" text, the words that will force me to commit. They do not come easily. Sometimes they require wine, or sleeplessness, or both. Often they're not very good, and I am miserable -- wretched, even. This writing life, it's not for sissies. Still, here I am, and away I go. With eyes wide open, I jump.

Hole (or: One Month Out)

2009-05-28T11:43:00.011-04:00

oh yes i miss my mother

the missing, it isn't constant. instead it comes up behind me and shouts "boo!" when i am most unprepared for it. and the surprise, it's shocking, of course, but it's what comes after the shock that's so hard, an ache of remembrance, a sinking feeling, a hole.

as when seven came home with letters from his classmates and teachers, letters written in his honor. he was the class "superstar" for a day. and his head teacher wrote to him that had she ever had a son, she would have wanted him to be just like seven.

absent-mindedly i picked up the phone to call my mother, because she would want to hear this, it would make her sigh with the sweetness of it, just as it had made me sigh.

but no, cried memory sharp and bitter.

i hung up the phone.

the unspoken words rose up, evanescent as vapor, no one to substantiate them. oh, sure, there's my husband, but that's different, you know it is. in this latest incarnation, the buck stops with me. i will simply swallow certain stories.

i am a grown-up now, and we grown-ups do that, we swallow our stories, which frees us to listen to the stories our children tell. i get it. i wasn't ready for it -- don't tell me that you were, because you weren't -- but i get it.

just: when will i stop picking up the telephone?

and: will anything come along to fill this hole? or will the absence of a mother remain as tangible a thing as the presence of one was?

Children as Shape-Shifters

2009-05-26T11:03:00.025-04:00

I am repotting a plant when I look up to see our next-door neighbors' child, a curly-haired impish girl of three, hugging my younger son. And Seven, he's hugging back. They hug so hard that they fall over, and now they are giggling in the grass. She's got him pinned, though she's nowhere near his height and weight. He doesn't seem to mind at all. They lie like that for a minute before she hops up and cries, "Now let's draw with chalk!"

I marvel at their connection, this seven-year-old boy and three-year-old girl. Seven has only to trot next door if he wants to be an older brother. And it seems that he does. For her part, she's been trying to adjust to life with a baby brother. Having an ally on that long, strange trip from only child to sibling must be a comfort: Seven as a shock absorber. But then she's a shock absorber for Seven, too, as he finds himself buffeted about by his older brother's bursts of unprovoked anger, the expression of a tween's need to be left alone for longer and longer stretches of time.

*********************

If you tell me that birth order doesn't help to shape personality, I will laugh. Any parent of more than one child can see it plainly.

Yesterday Seven was playing next door when his little friend took the hose, which was set to spray at high pressure, pointed it at him, and pulled the trigger not two feet from where he stood. The force of the water was enough to knock his glasses off and leave a red mark on his cheek. Apparently he sat down and rubbed his face a few times. He looked stunned. But he didn't cry.

Had this same scene played out at our house, Seven would have cried long and hard. I would have fetched an ice pack, and, docile in the aftermath of fear, he would have curled into my lap as I applied it to his face. Yet not eighty feet away from home, he knew to be an older brother figure, to model maturity and restraint when confronted with pain.

*********************

And then there's school, where by all accounts Seven is comfortable: sociable, confident, and assertive. It's taken him the better part of a year there to become so, according to his teacher. She, and we, are thrilled to see a child finally free of the twin burdens of acute shyness and sensitivity.

Except when I show up at school, as I did last week for an all-school picnic. With me Seven was stiff and formal. We sat on a blanket eating our respective school lunches and exchanged hardly a word. I tried three or four times to initiate conversation with my own child -- who at home does not stop talking -- but got nowhere. So side by side we ate our hamburgers and munched first on carrots, then on cookies. At least we were companionably silent.

That evening I asked him why he hadn't wanted to talk with me at the picnic. Instantly he looked as uncomfortable as he had earlier in the day. His answer came haltingly: "Well," he said, "I guess I didn't know how to be with you at school. I am one way at school and one way at home, and it was just really confusing to have those two places mixed up."

I nodded. I understood. And now I'm even gladder that Seven has a third place, where he can try out being an older brother and see how well it fits him. If parenting has taught me anything, it is that our personalities are much more malleable than people tend to think, especially when we are still young. The more opportunities we have early on to enact different roles, the better.

*********************

Had I been able to give Seven the gift of a younger sibling, I would have. Instead he was granted one serendipitously. He is lucky, and so is his friend next door. I know it, and having watched them hug each other so lovingly, I believe that they know it, too.

All Tweeted Out

2009-05-22T11:02:00.007-04:00

The paragraph hit me so hard that I sat up in bed, my senses all on alert though it was well past midnight. I had been reading an article on attention in the twenty-first century, an article written by Sam Anderson and published in the current issue of New York Magazine. Here's the part that struck me so viscerally:

...Some of it is pure impersonal behaviorism. The Internet is basically a Skinner box engineered to tap right into our deepest mechanisms of addiction. As B.F. Skinner's army of lever-pressing rats and pigeons taught us, the most irresistible reward schedule is not, counterintuitively, the one in which we're rewarded constantly but something called "variable ratio schedule," in which the rewards arrive at random. And that randomness is practically the Internet's defining feature: It dispenses its never-ending little shots of positivity -- a life-changing e-mail here, a funny YouTube video there* -- in gloriously unpredictable cycles. It seems unrealistic to expect people to spend all day clicking reward bars -- searching the web, scanning the relevant blogs, checking e-mail to see if a coworker has updated a project -- and then just leave those distractions behind, as soon as they're not strictly required, to engage in "healthy" things like books and ab crunches and undistracted deep conversations with neighbors. It would be like requiring employees to take a few hits of opium throughout the day, then being surprised when it becomes a problem. (from "In Defense of Distraction," by Sam Anderson, published in New York Magazine's May 25, 2009 issue)

*and for the bloggers among us, comments on our posts! -- S.M.

Perhaps none of this is news to you. And it's not precisely news to me. But I've never seen it put together quite so forcefully and succinctly. After I read it I felt as if I'd been punched. Certainly I recognized my own behavior, but that wouldn't begin to cover what I was feeling. Add to that the impact of another article (this one about Twitter) in the same issue of the magazine, and I found myself with plenty to mull over.

This is what I read about Twitter:

Recently, Nielsen reported that 60 percent of people who use Twitter once fail to return the following month. (At a similar stage of its growth, Facebook only lost about 20 percent.) In response to this report, one online commenter argued that new users simply don't get that Twitter is perfect for "involving your brand in relevant conversations." Eureka! Maybe this explains why so many writers, pundits, politicians, and celebs tweet, even as the rest of America shrugs. After all, those are exactly the types to think that (a) their every stray thought is publishable poetry and (b) it's crucial to constantly insert their name -- their brand -- into the conversation. (from "Spam Haiku," by Adam Sternbergh, published in New York Magazine's May 25, 2009 issue)

Ouch. For the record, I believe Twitter to be more than a vehicle for shameless self-promotion. If one chooses one's "tweeps" wisely, Twitter allows spontaneous and often surprisingly intellectual conversation among users who have gravitated to Twitter in search of community. However, I would doubt that most twitterers use Twitter as a watering hole.

*********************

Reading all of this prompted me to add up my own Internet numbers, and I was flabbergasted by the result. Let me ask you what I asked myself:

1. How many times per day do you check your e-mail?

2. How many discrete visits per day do you make to Twitter? How long do these visits last, on average?

3. How many discrete visits per day do you make to Facebook (or MySpace, or the like)? How long do these visits last, on average?

Ouch.

I was so dismayed by my own statistics that I am closing up Twitter shop. Although it's fun, it's expendable.

For me, the bottom line is this:

I call myself a writer, but I am too busy fielding e-mails and engaging in social networking to write, to write the way a real writer writes.

Instead I've just been playing at writing.

Actually, I've just been playing.

What a wake-up call.

The Only Secret

2009-05-21T08:42:00.008-04:00

the truck driver
who calls his wife
every night
just before seven.

he knows.

the girl who waited
solemnly by the swings
for just one turn
that never came,
who buries her face
in her mother’s lap
and thinks she'd like
to stay that way
forever.

she knows.

and the gentleman
(out on a walk
with his collie)
who gasps as the dog
darts away from him,
who hears the thud
and rushes headlong
into the street,
who strokes his pet
and sheds copious tears
that consecrate her
as she leaves him.

he knows, too.

do you?

written as a response to this week's PROMPTuesday

A Mean Mom, and Proud of It

2009-05-18T10:44:00.012-04:00

Eleven's best friend poked his head into the kitchen.

"Mrs. P., I was just upstairs thinking that it must be getting very close to that time."

I smiled. "What time would that be, M.? Time to go home?"

"Snack time, of course!," he parried. (He's witty, that one. Both he and my son possess impeccable comedic timing.)

"Snack time!," I repeated. "We stopped having snack a few years ago in this house. But I can offer you a banana, a yogurt, carrots with ranch dressing..."

He frowned.

"Oh, I see," I continued. "You were hoping that unlike your Mom I might just offer you Oreos or potato chips. Am I right?"

He grinned and nodded.

I laughed, said, "Ahh, but M., I am a MEAN MOM. You may not have known that about me. Ask Eleven; he'll confirm. Do you still want a snack?"

He considered, replied, "No. But I am a bit parched*. How about a glass of water?"

*Yes, he really did say this.

*********************

I wasn't exaggerating. I am a mean mother. I am also a good mother, at least some of the time. Is it strange that I view the two categories ('mean' and 'good') to be more or less synonymous?

I don't think so. Because mean parents aren't mean as much as they are strict, are they?

And yes, I am strict. Can you parent effectively without being strict? Are you parenting at all if you're not (at least sometimes) strict?

I am stricter than some parents, but not as strict as others. I allow video games, for example, but I set limits on their use: One hour on Fridays, two each on Saturdays and Sundays. Eleven is greatly dismayed by these restrictions and tends to argue, "But so-and-so gets DS time every day!"

At which point I think one thing (If he's going to fall into that trap...) and voice another: "I am not so-and-so's mother, lucky for so-and-so."

I believe in parenting with strictness, but only if the strictness is motivated by a compelling rationale. Being strict without a rationale is, as far as I'm concerned, being arbitrary and perhaps even the slightest bit power-hungry. My strictness about video games is a consequence of hard-won experience. When in the past we had looser rules about video games, Eleven was rushing through his homework in order to get to play them sooner. Because I think kids' primary responsibility is managing school and homework, I was not pleased with what I was seeing. And so I instituted a change, to stricter rules.

As far as snack goes, well, snack in our house invariably resulted in poorer appetite for the hard-to-sell items (e.g., vegetables) at dinner. When I ditched snack, I noticed that the boys were more willing to try a variety of foods at dinner.

*********************

That is why you may detect a note of pride in my voice when I call myself a mean mom. It's harder on a parent to set and enforce rules, believe me. How much easier must it be to abdicate responsibility and simply coexist with one's children? I see it all the time. On this point, I dare to be judgmental: If you're finding parenting that easy, then you're probably not actually parenting.

And that, friends, is my two cents on this Monday morning in May. Have at me, if you wish. I can take it. I'm a meanie, after all.

Snippet from Sibling Hell

2009-05-15T11:55:00.005-04:00

Eleven: Did you have a good time today at the cultural fair, Seven? What foods did you try? I really liked the maple candy from Canada.

Seven: Ooh, me, too! I loved the maple candy.

Eleven: I also liked the food from Russia.

Seven: Me, too!

Eleven: Oh, and the pizza from Chicago! Wasn't that great?

Seven: Definitely! It was SOOOO good.

Eleven: Seven? There was no pizza.

Seven: But there was! I had some!

Eleven: I made that up, Seven. Because you say, "Me, too" way too much, and it drives me crazy.

Seven (near tears): But I DID eat pizza! I promise!

Eleven (shaking his head): Right, Seven. Sure you did. Because that would make sense, that there was food at the fair from Japan, Russia, Canada, and Chicago.

On Clogs and Paper Towels

2009-05-13T10:07:00.018-04:00

I keep thinking about clogs.

For a couple of years when I was in elementary school, I coveted the clogs the popular girls wore. It wasn't just how they looked, though their sueded uppers were such a rich marine blue. It wasn't just that they would add an inch or two to my frame and, I thought, stop my peers from patting me on the head so often. I was tiny then. It was, most of all, how they sounded, the clop clop clop as they made contact with the linoleum floor of the classroom. They conferred authority on the wearer, and God, was I after a little authority then.

Would they have magically transformed a shy, sensitive slip of a thing? Not likely. But that slip of thing thought they might, and maybe that was enough all on its own.

However: No, said her mother, flatly, her tone brooking no dissent. Too dangerous.

My mother was always all about danger. Shows like Dateline, exposing the seamy, bacteria-ridden underbelly of ordinary life, were made for people like her. Well into my thirties I was listening to phone messages that went like this: Sarah! It's your mother! You MUST stop using this product (or that, or that). It's been shown to cause kidney tumors in mice. Do you HEAR me? Go, right now, to your medicine cabinet and toss it all out! Don't wait!

Before Dateline, there were the paper towels. When, as a kid, I invited friends over to my house, they couldn't fail to notice the paper towels. In fact, all I have to do to get a number of my oldest friends laughing uncontrollably is to intone, "PAPER TOWELS." You see, my mom kept rolls of paper towels above the fridge. Rolls and rolls. Perhaps thirty rolls. And when there were twenty-nine, she NOTICED. And fretted. "We have to go to the store," she'd say. "We're low on paper towels." I'd look up and roll my eyes. If I were feeling particularly brave, I'd retort, "Low is one or two rolls. Not twenty-nine." And then she'd snap her eyes dangerously at me, and I'd shut up.

*********************

At present I own two pairs of clogs. I still like the fact that they add one or two inches to my frame. I still love the sound they make. In fact, sometimes I stomp around in them, just because. I am no longer a slip of a girl. In this case, that's all to the good: the sound of me and my clogs is deafening.

And I never, ever keep more than three rolls of paper towels in the house.

I am learning to tolerate more and more risk, to undo years and years of training in risk avoidance, and it feels great.

Clogs and paper towels. Whatever will I dream up next? Downing expired pain reliever? Just imagining the possibilities makes me giddy with delight. So many people become fearful and rigid as they age. Someday I hope my grandchildren speak of me to their own children as an exception to that rule.

Muckity Muck

2009-05-11T12:30:00.007-04:00

I am searching for my words, but unaccountably they are keeping me at arm's length. I am bereft but cannot, apparently, say more. There's been so much sadness on this blog. I am frightened that when the sadness finally recedes (it will, won't it? please tell me that it will), there will be nothing left that's of any use at all, to you or to me.

I am alone with my children (no! not forever, sillies, for two days, two little days). The responsible party. I will rise to the occasion. Necessity has a way of forcing one's hand.

But here, now, in this space, I confess that I am frightened. I don't know how to do this. To be the one to whom all the others turn. (And there are still others. This surprises me. They should have left by now.)

She always thought of me as needy. She went so far as to appoint a friend of hers to take care of me, after. I do not wish to be followed by this particular friend. Not only is she no friend to me, but I would like to set the terms, the boundaries of my inner circle. We ought to be able to set our own terms by the time we are forty, no?

I tell you now, I was not needy. I was a child, nothing less, nothing more. A child in need of care. A child forced to care for others too soon, and at great cost.

Bah. It's all a muck. Should I publish this, you will likely stare, befuddled, and either turn away or wish to. As you should, as you should.

I am somewhere between not fine and closer to fine. Thank you for asking. What's that? You didn't ask? Well, then, do me a favor and pretend you did. Just for today.

And promise me that we will not speak of this again, this grief, this unwieldy, messy, embarrassing affliction.

It is unseemly, and we can't have that.

Now I will turn from this page, make myself presentable, pick up my children from school, help them with their homework, feed them, take them to their lessons and their practices.

I won't breathe a word of this. See, it's been decided: we will not speak of this again.

Friday: Grace in Small Things

2009-05-08T11:35:00.010-04:00

The heady scent of lilac carried into the house by a warm breeze.

Seven and I on the couch under a blanket, snuggling, legs tangled up, reading books for a solid hour.

Eleven jumping up after dinner and announcing that he was going to take another look at his homework assignment and "make it better."

Seven as goalie stopping the ball that came at him hard and fast. His mature little nod of acknowledgment after receiving the coach's praise. His newfound ability to jump into the fray, to ferret out the ball with his feet, to play with confidence.

My husband's commitment to improving the math curriculum in our district even though change, if it comes at all, will come far too late to benefit our own children.

The sweetness of our new neighbors, who brought us blondies last night because my husband mows a section of what is technically their property.

A certain blogger who just sent me blue hair dye (we motherless bloggers have to stick together somehow) and who supported me unwaveringly during the awful months after my mother's stroke, even though she was enduring her own mother's terminal illness.

My readers, who helped me through the toughest days with their words of love and support.

My brother, who waved his magic wand and procured tickets for me and my husband to attend tonight's Springsteen concert, which has been sold out for months. I don't know how he does it. I think it's best not to ask.

My sister-in-law, who treats me like a sister, not an in-law. I don't deserve it, but thank you, Lori. No less for the incredible orchid:

My brother, who knows better than anyone else how my life has gone over the past year and a half, who has been looking after me in all sorts of ways, who in adulthood has shown me just what an older brother can be. Thank you, Dan. I love you.

Click here if you'd like to read more Grace in Small Things.

Ode to Eleven

2009-05-07T10:27:00.017-04:00

I take him aside to let him know how proud he's made me, how beautifully he played his clarinet at the concert the other night, how I noticed that he always knew exactly when to come in, when to play softly, when to hold a note, and when to let it go.

And under the bright hot light of my scrutiny, he writhes. He is that uncomfortable in his own skin these days. But when I look closer, he is pleased, so pleased, to hear my words, even though they are causing him such obvious physical discomfort. He rides high on my praise for at least an hour.

These tweens are disguised to us. They are too tall for their own good. They've sprouted pimples overnight. They are rough and coarse, reflexively rude, chronically out of sorts. They are hard to like. But really very easy to love.

I will not stop complimenting my eleven-year-old son, even if he makes it harder and harder for me to want to do so. I will not stop, because he is no different from you or me in his need for, or desire for, validation. Or it may be that he requires more of it as he hurtles towards the undeniably fraught adolescent years. I will not be fooled by my child's adolescent shell. It is just armor, nothing more. I will not forget that within lies a stunning vulnerability and softness.

He is nearly taller than me now. His feet are larger than mine. But never have I been surer that he is my baby, that he will always be my baby, even when I am eighty and he is fifty. Then I will see through his thinning hair and bulging middle to the infant I cradled and fed and loved fifty years earlier, the memory no less potent for its age.

*********************

I know.

I am a baby who has just lost her mother.

I am all aching, raw need.

I am forty-one years old. I am well able to feed myself and put myself to bed. That does not mean that I don't crave, now and then (especially now), my mother, a mother, to do those things for me.

We don't outgrow being someone's child. And if the someone who parented us went beyond being an imperfect parent, either by declining parental responsibility or by spectacularly botching the role, then we don't outgrow the wish to be some other person's child. To be mothered by whomever is up for the job.

*********************

I see you, Eleven. I may need special glasses for the task, but I see you. I am not going to look away. I will tell you that you are special tomorrow, in a week...

And when you're fifty. Yes, then, too.

P.S. One of my friends has started a wonderful blog called cuizoo, which is all about "feeding your wild animals." Hahahahahah! I need help feeding my wild animals -- that is for sure; and Kristin is a fantastic cook. I love the site and encourage you to stop by. You won't be sorry.

Scattering

2009-05-04T09:33:00.020-04:00

It was a damp spring morning, fitting for the job we had come to do. My mother's ashes in the back seat called to mind Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which I'd read as a teenager, tittering nervously throughout, eager to be done with it.

My mother wanted to be with my grandmother where they (and later we) spent so many summers, dating as far back as the 1940's. We could do that for her. After we'd parked well off the side of a country road, we made our way gingerly down a steep incline. The air carried the overpowering scent of spring. The terrain was muddy and overgrown, and we were forced to push brambles aside or risk getting scratched by thorns. Our feet kept sinking into the soft, saturated earth. In spite of it all, we managed to reach the rushing brook. Our ears filled with its insistent, vital, near raucous voice.

With customary agility my older brother skipped over rocks to stand in the center of the stream. And like a preacher, he offered up words, words of valediction. He asked me if I had anything to say. I shook my head. (There were half-formed words. The task of organizing them and prettying them up for publication seemed dauntingly formidable.) So he went ahead and did the thing we'd come to do. He joined my grandmother and my mother, as my mother had requested so often and for so many years, the repetition serving to intensify the request until it took on the force of an inviolable command.

When it was done, we stood, silent, watching the current take my mother downstream, watching as she became one with rock and water, silt and moss.

On the way home we stopped at the lake where arguably my mother had spent her happiest times. Still grey and rainy and just right for a farewell, or so it seemed to me:

Late that evening I discovered a tick on my thigh. At first I was disgusted, and then angered to have the day spoiled by something as prosaic as squeamishness.

But you know? The tick was being a tick, doing what ticks do. Life will out, does out, even on days when we acknowledge the passing of life.

And so it goes.

After

2009-04-30T07:48:00.007-04:00

I did everything I could think to do before opening that door. Went to the bathroom, washed my face, patted it dry, checked for stray hairs. When I ran out of trivial and time-wasting tasks I stood in the hallway and gulped air before finally turning the knob.

The room was unchanged from the day before. A picture window with a showily pretty blossoming tree filling its frame. A clock on the wall. A hospital bed. Four framed pictures on the nightstand: her three grandchildren, and one of me at thirteen with my grandmother. A TV sat on the bureau that contained no clothes. The TV had never been turned on.

She wasn't cold, but neither was she warm. And she was beautiful. I hadn't expected that, and it was a comfort. Her face, free of anger, sadness, reproach, and pain, for the first time in so long, looked not much older than my own. I took her hand in mine. Her fingers had already curled under.

And then I was crying loud and ugly bursts of tears. I sobbed for the awfulness of the last year and a half. I sobbed because I had never found a way to make it better for her, for me, for my brother. I sobbed because of all the people I have ever known, my mother was the brightest, and could have been the best.

She was all potential, unrealized potential.

I sobbed for who she might have been. For the person I found once in a long while, but only in my dreams.

My mother was the smartest, most talented person I have ever known. Had she been psychologically healthier, she might have moved mountains.

As I cried I found myself repeating, "I'm sorry." Not for anything I did or didn't do, but because there were so many obstacles in her way, because she was miserable so much of the time, because we only have the one life, I believe, and my mother, though she was seventy-two when she died yesterday, never really learned how to live hers.

And that makes me sadder than any of the rest of it.

*********************

When the tears relented, I tried to uncurl her fingers, but they wouldn't budge. I pulled the sheet up over her shoulders as I do for my children each night when I check on them just before I go to bed.

People I love? I don't want them to be cold.

I shut the door in order to grant her privacy that she is past needing. Habits that preserve and defend life are curiously strong.

And, eyes dry and aching, I drove away from her and to my brother's house, where my own life was waiting for me to grab it by the reins and show it the way.

In Memoriam

2009-04-29T10:28:00.004-04:00

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W.H. Auden (1938)

for my mother, Dorothy: August 18, 1936 - April 29, 2009

This Dying Business

2009-04-26T12:15:00.011-04:00

If there is a story to be told about the events of the past few weeks, it has not revealed itself to me. Instead I am blank. At once I feel everything and nothing. I am calm, I am ferociously angry, I am sad, I am relieved, I am strong, I am weak.

My mother has been moved to a hospice inn, and that at least is uncomplicated. Her pain, finally, is appropriately managed, at the cost of her consciousness, which is really no cost at all.

I will visit her this week. From all accounts, she will not be able to respond to me, nor even recognize me. That's OK. I don't expect to say good-bye to her, or more precisely I don't expect reciprocation. I don't think she even understands that she's dying. I will hold her hand, because surely it must be better to have a hand to hold when you are dying, even if you don't know whose hand it is or what has motivated the gesture.

I will reassure myself by remembering that she wanted this. Truly, she should have died back in September when she suffered such a massive stroke. All of the doctors were sure that she was going to die. She didn't, but more than once since then she's confided to me that she wishes she had.

This has been a messy leave-taking. It's eradicated any romantic notions I once harbored about death. It's rare indeed that the will and the body are on the same page. Either the body is too strong or too weak; whichever the case, there's a mismatch.

*********************

Ten years ago my 91-year-old grandmother, who had been ready to die for some time, developed appendicitis. What a cruel joke, to have appendicitis so late in life. She did not tell anyone that she was in incredible pain. She sat alone in her apartment until she couldn't stand it anymore and dialed 911. When the surgeon showed up in the emergency room to examine her, my grandmother pulled on the sleeve of her jacket and, through her pain, managed somehow to plead her case, "I don't want this surgery. I would like to die." The doctor shook her head. "I can't do that," she said. "I have to take your appendix out. I am a surgeon. It's what I do."

My grandmother survived the surgery. Yet when visitors came to see her, she refused to be deterred from saying her good-byes. We protested. "But you're fine! You're getting better!" To me, she said, "I'm sorry I'll never get the chance to know Kate." I was so sad as to be stupid. "Kate? Who's Kate?," I asked her. I got no response. Later I understood. Kate would be the girl I'd birth sometime in the future. She knew I'd always loved the name. (And she would have loved Seven, though as it turned out we couldn't very well call him Kate, or Julia, my favorite girl's name at the time of Seven's birth.)

Forty-eight hours later she had a stroke. The doctors couldn't understand it. She had been doing so well. I'll forever believe that she chose that stroke.

*********************

But few are as strong as my grandmother. This has been an awful time for my mother, wishing to be done, but not capable of fulfilling the wish.

These six months have made me sadder but -- you guessed it -- wiser. I will do everything I can to die with dignity. My mother made choices, some in the past, some in the distant past, that made it less likely that she would die the way she wanted, the way we all want, I suppose. I will try not to make those mistakes. At the same time, I know now that there is so little that lies within our control, especially where our physical selves are concerned.

Now off I go, to bear witness. So late in the game, it's all I can do.

Not With a Bang

2009-04-23T08:11:00.008-04:00

My mother broke her shoulder a couple of weeks ago. She likely suffered a mini-stroke in the shower and fell. The break was bad enough to require surgery, which went reasonably well. Her social worker started making plans to place her in a rehab facility for a month or two.

On that same day my mother spiked a fever. Doctors presumed that she had an infection from surgery and started giving her IV antibiotics. A few days later, when the infection seemed to be under control, her blood work showed some worrisome abnormalities in potassium level and kidney function. More days in the hospital. After that her foot started hurting; within 48 hours, it had grown cold. Doctors detected a blood clot in her leg. Emergency surgery followed. This time, surgery was only partially successful. There were too many clots, and a good number of them were too small to remove in any event. Right now she is a very sick woman. She has been in the ICU for two days. She is sedated; otherwise she would be in incredible pain.

My mother's powers of recuperation are awesome. We are still stunned that she managed to recover (albeit incompletely) from September's massive stroke. But this time I'm doubtful. I don't think that there are any more tricks in her bag.

With each new day I edge closer to certainty: She will not be leaving the hospital. She is dying.

We ask any extended family who might be reading this to respect our privacy at what is a most difficult time. We have not forgotten you and will be in touch when we can. Thank you.