Category Archives: Personal

Nest

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Picture of nestThere are signs of new life in the empty nest. For one thing, Ally has blown back in for the summer from a year teaching abroad in Spain . We don’t see much of her, but we can follow the debris trail all around the house to know that she’s alive and well.

The mess is even more apparent on our back deck. Dead grass, strands of shredded bark, an overturned container of old clippings. I can’t blame Ally, since this particular untidiness preceded her arrival.  Has it really been so long since I’ve taken a broom to the redwood planks? Perhaps there’s been a localized wind storm. Or the neighbor’s cats, not content to merely pee on the plants and dig in the mulch, are upping their antisocial game.

My husband solves the mystery when he tries to spend some time in the hammock with a good book. After just a few minutes, he’s back inside, squawks of distress audible through the sliding glass door.

“I don’t want to give these poor birds a heart attack,” Jonathan says, pointing up. “Look!”

There, atop the drainpipe just under the wide eaves, inches from our kitchen door, sits a nest. It’s rather free-form and sloppy, but in a charming way–much like Ally’s bedroom. If we very quietly peek from the kitchen, we can spy the roosting bird’s beady eyes. If we’re careless, and go out this door to water the plants, cacophony ensues as the parents defend their territory. I’m not sure these birds have made the smartest choice, given the cats and their unconscientious landlords. But they do have a good view of the garden, which counts for a lot when contemplating a long confinement tending to children.

The birds may not have assessed the cat thing correctly, but I suspect they chose to squat on our deck because they are wise to our non-BBQing ways. Perhaps they scoped out the antiquated model of our charcoal grill (Weber circa 1986), the thickness of the cobwebs covering it. They probably even lined the nest with some of the gauzy strands.

I guess we won’t be barbecuing for awhile. I’m happy for the excuse in the same way that I appreciate droughts for making our failure to wash our cars look noble instead of derelict. I’m less happy about not using our deck or opening the door from the kitchen, but my mother-in-law assures me that it’s only for a few weeks. At least it saves me the trouble of putting out new yellow jacket traps.

The garden we put in last year has survived hard freezes, drought, deer, and my ineptitude as a novice gardener. Now it will have to survive neglect so the nursery can thrive.

But these things, like Ally’s unwashed dishes, are small nuisances. What a pleasure it is to welcome new occupants to the nest!

 

 

 

Trigger Alert

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(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)My daughter Ally’s been living in Spain following her graduation from UC Santa Barbara last year. Occasionally, I send her articles about her alma mater, including one about a recent UCSB student Senate resolution calling for mandatory trigger alerts–warnings about potentially upsetting lecture or reading material, such as rape, childhood abuse, or racism, that might inadvertently traumatize students.

Now it is Ally sending me urgent messages from Spain about UCSB. But it’s not words on campus that have upset her.

“Did u hear about what happened in Isla Vista????” read her text.

Of course I had heard—who hadn’t, as Isla Vista joined the long string of names where innocents were slaughtered by an angry and alienated young man with a gun. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook, street corners every day in our cities. And now again, on the streets where my daughter has spent the last several years riding her Cruiser to class, partying on Del Playa, buying snacks at the IV Deli whose plate glass windows are now riddled with bullet holes.

Skype is inadequate for the arms-around-soothing these incidents require, though I tried my best. At least Ally was safe in Spain, where the rate of firearm homicide is less than 1/10th  of this country’s. Toward the end of our conversation, Ally, who has traveled alone extensively abroad, said, “I’m afraid to come home to the United States.”

This breaks my heart. And makes me furious.

The real trigger alerts are the ones we apparently dare not issue—those having anything to do with curtailing the availability and lethality of guns. Almost twice as many gun laws have been loosened than have been tightened since 20 six-year-olds were massacred at Sandy Hook. There have been at least 74 school shootings since Newtown.

Open Carry aficionados wear their weaponry loud and proud. One such demonstration in Texas inspired a mild protest from an NRA member who wrote on an official site that such tactics, which he called “weird” and “scary,” could hurt the gun rights cause. Since his statement caused undue upset, perhaps it should have come with its own trigger alert. So outraged were the highly sensitive (though strangely insensitive) members of Texas Open Carry that the NRA apologized and distanced itself from the offending member by expunging his post.

We do not need protection from words. We need protection from guns, and from those who cherish them above all else.

Binge

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Haagen Dazs

My husband, Jonathan, was out of town last week, and although I knew I would miss him, I also looked forward to getting lots of things done with more time to myself: Write, read novels, get going on turning my 26-year-old daughter’s long-vacated bedroom into a guestroom from its former incarnations as shrine and dumping ground. I also planned to eat salad for dinner every night and lose a little weight as a buffer against upcoming indulgent occasions. Instead I gained two pounds. I did eat a lot of salad, but I might have been ambushed by some late-night Haagen Dazs.

The real binge, however, was throwing myself headlong not into a pint of chocolate-chocolate chip, but into Season 4 of Parenthood.

Jonathan and I had tried a couple of episodes when the show first aired, but he didn’t like it, and I kept forgetting to watch it by myself in the rare free moments of a busy life. Then, in the fall of 2012, I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands while recovering from surgery and six rounds of chemo for uterine cancer. I needed something that would absorb me without requiring concentration, or risk pushing me over the brink of existential despair.

I devoured Parks and Recreation and Modern Family, but Parenthood was my favorite. What’s not to like about a cast partially drawn from Six Feet Under and Friday Night Lights, set in Berkeley, no less? I was hooked.

By the time my cancer rolled around, we no longer had TV, so I could not watch Parenthood in real time once I’d made it through the first three seasons. I knew about Kristina’s cancer, though, from the way friends would say, “Do you know what’s happening now? Kristina has–” Then they’d stop themselves, either wanting to protect me from revealing the plot or from mentioning cancer in case they labored under the illusion that it wasn’t constantly on my mind.

Before long, treatment was over, I got better, and my busy life resumed. Plus, Season 4 was not yet available on DVD.

Finally, though, it was. Just before Jonathan went on his trip, I got the notice from the library that I had made it off the long waiting list. I had three nights of Jonathan’s absence to watch 15 episodes if I wanted to avoid late fees.

I decided to forget about converting my daughter’s room, and pretty much everything else besides work. Season 4, after all, centered on Kristina’s cancer. Calling it “research,” since I write about cancer now and then, I put Disc 1 in the DVD and sat back–taken back to long days watching episode after episode to distract myself from feeling scared and unsteady.

Here’s what other memories Season 4 brought back:

  • Telling our daughters I had cancer, particularly Emma via Skype, since she was working in Russia at the time. I remember watching the grainy screen as all the oxygen got sucked out of her. “I feel like I’m on another planet,” Emma said. Like Haddie in Parenthood, she couldn’t bear to be away either, and came back for an unexpected visit.
  • Wanting our daughters to carry on with their lives as before; downplaying our fears and bad days to reassure them as much as possible.
  • Being mad at my husband for saying I looked fine without my hair.
  • The relentless and unhelpful demand for positive thinking from people who don’t know shit.
  • Eating ice cream in defiance of the food police. (Do you sense an organizing principle in my life?)
  • Getting a fever and going to the ER on a holiday weekend. In my case it was the day before President’s Day, not Christmas Eve. I went right away, unlike Kristina, who ignores her deteriorating condition and almost dies of sepsis. There were no family reunions and presents around my ER gurney. All my scare did was cancel a dinner party and delay chemo by a week so I could finish a short course of just-in-case high-powered antibiotics.
  • Having a lot of helpful and caring people around, although with better coordinated food delivery so we never had a surplus of roast chickens left to rot in the fridge.

What didn’t ring true was looking like a deliberately bald haute couture runway model, or being perfectly made up all the time. In fact, my daughters dubbed me Gollem in my baldness. Oh, well, I’m in real life,not a TV series. Though I guess I could have had a shot at Lord of the Rings!

I’m looking forward to binging on Season 5 when it becomes available on DVD.

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What’s your favorite comfort food or DVD series to binge on?

 

Recovery Garden

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The Jewel Box, One Year Later

The Jewel Box, One Year Later

This week I’m celebrating the one-year anniversary of our garden with a post-chemo post I wrote last year:

I’ve long dreamed of an English country garden–roses spilling over trellises, beds layered with delphinium and hollyhocks, velvety lawns sweeping down to the pond. But we live in California, not in a BBC period drama, and our budget is not as outsized as my fantasy. Even if it were, there is no way our deer-infested slope of chert that gets 34 inches of rain in a good year could ever resemble the Emerald Isle.

So I’ve had to adjust my sights some. For years I’ve looked out on a weedy, parched patch of dirt off our back deck, adjacent to a slope of scraggly rosemary and oleander that the neighbors’ dogs use as a toilet. I’ve been meaning to call in the professionals for years to prepare the soil and install proper irrigation. But somehow the time is never right, and I’ve kept putting it off.

One good thing about cancer is finally absorbing that there really is no time like the present. And speaking of presents, my friend Mary, knowing of the garden dreams I’ve long harbored, gave me a wonderful one soon after I began treatment: Plants and Landscapes for Summer-Dry Climates of the San Francisco Bay Region.

These authors know about deer and chert, and that we have neither the climate nor the staff of Downton Abbey. I drooled over every garden-porn page, and, in between chemo sessions, set about turning my fantasy into reality by visiting my favorite nurseries for landscaper recommendations.

Most of the people I called seemed like they’d rather be waterboarded than bother with our site and budget. But not the lovely Ashley, who said she enjoys a challenge. I was sold when she remarked about our patch of weeds off the deck, “This will be the jewel box of the garden.”

After years of waiting, we were ready to go. Fortunately, the list of plants compatible with deer, drought, poor soil, hot sun, and neglectful homeowners is not that long, so the design phase was quick. Every morning on my way home from my walk and latte, I hauled rocks from a nearby field for mini retaining walls in the jewel box. Ashley and her crew arrived and transformed the entire site in less than a day just by cleaning up 20 years of scraggle. They finished the entire installation, from irrigation to microbark, in another two. Ashley left me equipped with deer repellent and instructions for running the irrigation system.

She also left me with a beautiful garden and that deep happiness you get when you finally let yourself go for what you want. True, the garden doesn’t look as good as Downton Abbey or the photos in my book. The adjacent trees rain down eucalyptus litter constantly. The deer have messed up the shredded bark and sampled the verbena. Still, what a pleasure it is to switch my focus from scary things growing inside of me to the vibrant life springing forth in my recovery garden.

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What dreams do you keep putting off? Which have you finally made a reality?

 

Risk Management

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LupineThe bodies of two women hikers were found on Mt. Tam recently. Although officials say there is no sign of foul play, my Facebook feed crackles with alarm. “Creepy!” the posts warn. “Women: Please don’t hike alone!!!”

I hike alone almost every day in our local watershed. It’s miles from Mt. Tam, but the forested flanks of that rugged peak dominate my view. How far away does danger lurk? It‘s hard not to succumb to fear’s contagion.

My hike starts downtown, at the cafe where I get my daily dose of caffeine and news from the local paper. There’s more coverage of the unfortunate hikers; a story about a stowaway who survived a flight to Hawaii in the jet’s wheel well; a report that 75 percent of homes in the area are vulnerable to land slides. Two women dead, one boy improbably alive, our house at the base of a steep hill. What are the chances?

I begin the long slog through residential streets as I always do, listening to podcasts of Fresh Air or This American Life. This American’s life is lucky indeed, with enough time and stamina to hike each day, drinking in lattes, the spring gardens of well-tended homes, the natural beauty of the landscape. The uphill seems less steep with Terry Gross and Ira Glass to keep me company. My public radio hosts also keep me safe, in the same illusory way our daughters felt safe, attached through the umbilical cords of their cellphones as they called us on their way across campus at night.

Where the pavement turns into fire road is a sign noting the presence of mountain lions in the watershed. I think of the episode of Six Feet Under that begins with an overweight man jogging in the hills above LA. He stops to catch his breath, panting and sweating. You think he’s going to drop dead of a heart attack. Instead, a mountain lion drops out of the trees above. I glance up at the treetops, quicken my pace.

Today I have extra time, so I decide to vary my route. If I continue straight ahead deeper into the wilderness instead of turning left, I’ll avoid the grizzled mountain bikers who whiz by me every day as I scramble to safety on the edge of the fire road. Besides, I want to defy Facebook’s panic.

The smooth foot-wide path beckons. I pause a moment, thinking of mountain lions and trailside killers. The likelier dangers are ticks and poison oak. I can handle those, so I stride on through the dense stands of oak and laurel.

Just as Fresh Air ends, the path opens out to a meadow purple with lupine, framed by the rugged ridge across the valley. Clumps of white and amethyst iris dot the nearby banks; monkey flower and Scotch Broom run riot down the slopes. The air is clear. So is my head.

Some may seek peace of mind by staying off the trails. But I’ll continue to find mine on my daily treks.

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How do you find prudence and pleasure on the spectrum from denial to paranoia?

 

The Habit(breaking) of Lent

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It's 8:01--do you know where your chocolate chips are?

It’s 8:01–do you know where your chocolate chips are?

My friend Jessica’s terrific piece on giving up sugar for Lent just aired on KQED’s Perspectives. It’s a humorous contemplation of what sacrifices Catholics like Jessica are willing to make in this season of resurrection.

The daughter of a lapsed Catholic and never-practicing Jew, I was raised as a Unitarian. This was on the more traditional East Coast, where we at least had churches with steeples and pews instead of fellowship rooms with folding chairs. Unlike the twice-a-year attendees our minister derided as the “Christmas and Easter crowd,” we were devout Unitarians by virtue of going to church more often than not. My religious education focused on science, sex education, and the belief that if Jesus were around in our day, he would be a hippie. Instead of sacraments, we had an interpretive dance choir of nubile teenage girls draped in scanty pastel crepe. Easter meant not sacrifice, but showing off a new spring outfit and downing drugstore chocolate.

Despite these perks, I envied my Catholic friends, particularly when they got to miss school at the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, returning the next day with huge black smudges on their foreheads. Were these related to the black marks on the sole I was always checking the bottom of my feet for? I knew how long it took for a beam of light to travel from the sun to the earth, but I was confused about spiritual matters.

As it turns out, the soft-core dogma of Unitarianism provides a soft landing for those who stray from the faith. Lapsed Catholics like my mother lose all of the faith but none of the beliefs. Stripped of comfort, my mother was beset by guilt, shame, and the threat of eternal damnation her entire life. But what does a lapsed Unitarian suffer—the renunciation of potlucks?

In my case, renouncing potlucks might be a good idea. They may not be the Devil’s spawn, but they are surely the curse of the Lifetime Weight Watcher, my new Sabbath calling of the last 13 years. Which brings me back to Lent, in case you were wondering.

My Weight Watchers leader Linda is, like my friend Jessica, an old-school Catholic with a serious sweet tooth. Linda regales us with hilarious stories of her 40+ days in the wilderness bereft of whatever she’s given up for Lent. Usually it’s chocolate. This year it’s sugar. Two years ago she told us that her 10-year-old daughter was giving up rolling her eyes for Lent. That one caused me to fall out of my chair laughing, but it also inspired me. First off, could I somehow introduce the concept of Lent to my then-teenaged daughters before their eyes rolled right out of their sockets? Second, what could I give up for the 40+ days of Lent to tame the food demons that still threatened to take me down a decade after more or less following the program?

That first time, I decided to give up dark-chocolate-covered almonds, which I loved to pilfer from the Trader Joe’s container in my husband Jonathan’s nightstand. I put them there to avoid seeing them in the kitchen every 10 minutes, but the chocolate almonds still called to me. Possibly their siren song was louder from upstairs—I used to love to pilfer Junior Mints from my mother’s bedside stand, the minty bite enhanced by the frisson of transgression. The ritual of the stolen candies commands quite a place in my psyche as well as my waistline. Perhaps it was time for the ultimate sacrifice, or at least the experiment in habit-breaking that Lent affords.

So for 40+ days I resisted temptation. When Lent was over, I went back to my old ways, though at a slower pace, sometimes even able to stick to the bargain I’d struck with myself, sucking on just one chocolate-covered almond. I noticed that they didn’t taste all that good—we’re talking Trader Joe’s, not Godiva—but I’m kind of a chocolate whore, no doubt hearkening back to waxy chocolate rabbits from Easter baskets past. So I gave up chocolate-covered almonds again for my second year of Weight Watchers Lent.

It worked. I had found the sacred secret to secular habit-breaking. No longer was I tempted to raid my husband’s supply, even for the cheap thrill of transgression. Not that Jonathan noticed—as a person with no food issues except for the pathological behavior of eating when he is hungry and stopping when he is satisfied, Jonathan forgot about the chocolate-covered almonds until rummaging around for his misplaced library card.

“You don’t need to buy these anymore,” Jonathan said. “They’re not very good.” Now he tells me!

Having mastered Level One of the Lenten challenge, I stepped up my game this year. I would never be so foolhardy as Jessica or Linda to give up sugar altogether—we lapsed Unitarians are not made of such strong stuff. But I did try to break two habits this year: eating chocolate chips out of an open bag (I’m perfectly safe from the approximately 30 unopened bags of Ghirardelli semi-sweet in the cupboard), and snacking after 8:00 p.m. I have lapsed a little, but it was mostly on Sundays, which I understand is now exempt from the strictures of Lent. Religious purists sniff at this sanctioned laxity the way baseball purists sniffed when designated hitters were introduced to major league baseball.

But hey, I’m a lapsed Unitarian—what’s a little failed renunciation to me?

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What have you given up for Lent? How do you go about breaking a habit?

 

 

Steady Hands

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Stomach injectionFor the past week and a half, since my husband Jonathan had eye surgery to correct strabismus, I’ve been applying a thin line of ointment to his inner eyelids each night. It’s been something of a slapdash operation–the ointment sometimes sticks to his eyelashes, sometimes runs down his cheeks. It makes me wonder how on earth I ever got drops into our daughters for pink eye when they were little—Jonathan, unlike them, has not even screamed or squirmed. Eventually we figured out that if he rolled his eyeballs back into his head, the ointment got within spitting distance of the target area. Still, it’s a lucky thing I never aspired to become a brain surgeon.

All of which sparked my memories of a year ago, in the days following my last chemotherapy infusion, when Jonathan gave me my final Neupogen shot. (Neupogen stimulates white blood cell production.) For five nights of each chemo cycle, I’d lain on the couch while Jonathan swabbed my exposed belly with alcohol before carefully plunging a syringe into the fatty tissue. The first cycle we’d nervously joked about the movie Memento, in which an injection gone awry leads to amnesia and an excellent film. But nary a drop of blood did he draw the whole time. I can’t imagine entrusting myself to anyone else.

There were many steady hands holding me throughout six months of treatment–my doctors and the always cheerful Kaiser staff, my therapist, my yoga class, Michael at Pine Street Clinic, my daughters (who in honor of my remaining wisps of hair dubbed me Gollem), and, of course my many wonderful friends and family members who cheered me with delicious food, walks, emails, flowers, CDs, presents, visits, and funny YouTube links. I wouldn’t have made it through without everyone.

Yet the steadiest was Jonathan, who was there from the first terrifying news of diagnosis through it all: hours of surgery not knowing how far the cancer had spread; uncooperative catheters; private sadnesses and fears; doctors’ visits; a wife with no appetite who didn’t put dinner on the table but who still obsessed about her weight; hair loss; and all the usual demands like taxes and college tuition. On top of it all Jonathan worked 10-hour days to keep the paychecks and medical insurance in place, and he did it all without complaint. He even endured my most incessant question: “How do you really feel?”

I’m not sure how he really felt. But I feel incredibly lucky to have him: steady hands, steady heart, mind, and soul.

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Who’s your steady?

 

Anniversary Purge

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Recycling chemo papers

Today is recycling day. I toss into the bin a large cache, more than the usual fundraising appeals and advertising circulars. Chemotherapy and You lands on top of the pile, along with notes from consultations with surgeons and my oncologist, diaries tracking food intake, medications, and neuropathy ratings on a scale of 1-5, Look Good, Feel Better brochures, Radiation and You. It’s a good day for a purge—the one-year anniversary of my last round of chemo for a rare and aggressive form of uterine cancer.

I’d let go of a lot of things already: the sense of having an uninterrupted life; the veil separating me from mortality; my “lady parts,” as my friend Deb calls the uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, and cervix removed by the surgeon. Then my hair. Sometimes, though less than you might think, my energy, appetite, and spirits.

It was a long winter. But then it was the first day of spring, as it is today.

A year ago, at the end of my last chemotherapy session, the staff presented me with a Certificate of Achievement,  Certificate of Achievementwith accolades about my courage and perseverance. Such praise felt unwarranted, as it wasn’t so much a matter of bravery as complying with the recommended treatment in order to regain my health. But I did leave feeling grateful. And so relieved to be done.

Today I hesitate to add my certificate to the recycling bin. It’s strange moving away from active treatment. Along with the sense of relief comes the fear of moving beyond chemo’s protective bubble. Anxiety about cancer recurring simultaneously recedes and grows as time passes. Will throwing out my Certificate of Achievement jinx me? But I toss it anyway, along with magical thinking. I’m happy to be done with cancer’s clutter.

My cancer treatment included some Chinese medicine, and my practitioner, Michael, prescribed for Days 5 through 10 of each chemo cycle anything that would help my body cleanse itself of dead cells. “Cleansing can also be figurative as well; anything that you do during this part that helps you get rid of things is useful—cleaning out closets and the garage, completing projects, and resolving personal and business issues and relationships.” My garage is still a mess. But today’s purge feels very cleansing.

I’m hanging onto my wig, though. Maybe it’s like Fat Clothes, the oversized garments in the back of the closet you can’t get rid of after you lose weight just in case it comes back. You never know.

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Read more Cancer Detour posts

 

Mom Rules

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My mother gave me some impossible advice: “Don’t be like me.” (My essay of the same title was just published in skirt! Click here for a funky link to the issue’s pdf and find page 31). I don’t know many women who don’t fear discovering—and then finding–aspects of their mothers in themselves, do you?

Another of Mom’s gems was, “Don’t grow old.” This puzzled me as a child. Was I supposed to look forward to an early death? As a person who was diagnosed with cancer a year and a half ago, I can tell you that there is nothing I look forward to more than growing old.

I have tried to take a more pragmatic approach with my daughters. Here are my top tips to them:

  1. Pay off your credit cards in full on time, every time.
  2. Try to have a job where you don’t have to wear pantyhose everyday (I dispensed this tidbit before it was acceptable for people to leave the house in their pajamas).
  3. If you want to have children, try to have a career that allows you to work part-time.
  4. If you want to save money, don’t buy alcohol at a restaurant or bar.

When my eldest daughter, Emma, was experiencing a difficult time in college, I recommended that she figure out one small thing she could do each day NO MATTER WHAT—brush her teeth, put on lipstick, do the dishes, get dressed. “For me, it’s making the bed,” I added. Emma now makes her bed religiously, and says this is the most helpful thing I’ve ever said. I only wish I had thought to say it before she left home for college, leaving behind her a bedroom that looked like it had crossed paths with Hurricane Katrina.

Who knows what bits of mother wisdom and folly will lodge in kids’ brains?

Actually, my mother gave me some very valuable advice on top of the impossible:

  1. If you want to read good writing, read The New Yorker.
  2. If a man hits you, even once, walk away and never look back (I passed this one on to my girls).

Here’s what I really hope I’ve passed on to my girls from my mother. She didn’t write it–I came across the well-worn clipping in her drawer. It wasn’t even published until 1972, when I was almost out of the house. But my mother could have been the author–it was the air I breathed growing up. Take it and pass it on; you could do a lot worse:

Children Learn What They Live

By Dorothy Law Nolte, Ph.D.

If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.

If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.

If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive.

If children live with pity, they learn to feel sorry for themselves.

If children live with ridicule, they learn to feel shy.

If children live with jealousy, they learn to feel envy.

If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty.

If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence.

If children live with tolerance, they learn patience.

If children live with praise, they learn appreciation.

If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.

If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves.

If children live with recognition, they learn it is good to have a goal.

If children live with sharing, they learn generosity.

If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness.

If children live with fairness, they learn justice.

If children live with kindness and consideration, they learn respect.

If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and in those about them.

If children live with friendliness, they learn the world is a nice place in which to live.

Copyright © 1972 by Dorothy Law Nolte

Thanks, Mom. You rule.

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What was the best and worst advice you got from your mother? How about the best and worst advice you’ve given your kids?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Travels in Siberia

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Source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/424158

Missing my daughters a lot today, so here’s one of my old favorites:

Emma, my 22-year-old daughter, has long dreamed of Russia. Its exotic onion domes promise delivery from the dull safety of her suburban upbringing. At last she is there, studying for a semester in St. Petersburg. It’s not Siberia, but the vastness that separates us feels like a kind of exile.

Thousands of miles and eleven time zones are not all that keep us apart; Emma has always required her space. Her penchant for privacy was coupled as she grew with a vigilance against usurpation. Once I made the mistake of lavishly praising a picture she had drawn. Emma savagely scribbled all over the paper, destroying her creation but also any attempt to appropriate what was hers. I often made such inadvertent incursions.

Eventually, I learned to heed the “No Trespassing” signs Emma posted from an early age. When she withdrew further into the interior, as every adolescent must, her natural reserve had already prepared me for the unrequited longing all parents must bear. Growing up is always an act of exile, a necessary escape from the soft smother of love.

My friend Leslie recalls when her teenaged son skulked away from their once-close bond. She said to him, “I know you need to do this, but I’ll miss you, and I’ll be glad when you’re back.” A decade later, he put his arms around her when she was doing the dishes, and said, “I’m back.”

Emma is far from being back, and I miss her. When I take the dog out at night, I look up at the sky and travel light-years to her through the star-strewn blackness. It helps to know we are under the same canopy.

Still, it is not enough.

I read in the newspaper that the writer Ian Frazier will appear at our local bookstore to read from Travels in Siberia. If I venture through the portal of his book, maybe I can sneak into Emma’s territory without tripping the alarm. My friend Roberta tried something similar. She hates baseball, but learned all about RBIs and earned-run averages so she could talk with her son throughout his adolescence. Their bond is deep, as is her grasp of baseball statistics.

Hoping to emulate Roberta’s success, I drive to the bookstore, buy Travels in Siberia, and take my seat. Maybe I will find Emma along the way, or at least understand her case of what Frazier calls “the dread Russia-love.”

Ian Frazier sports a middle-aged paunch, but he and Emma have a lot in common. For one thing, they are both lousy photographers. I am charmed by Frazier’s out-of-focus slides of dreary horizons, his low-key intelligence, and boundless curiosity. Frazier is infected with a fever for “the incomplete grandiosity of Russia,” relishing, as does Emma, its simultaneous greatness and brokenness.  I go home eager to travel the miles through his prose to my faraway daughter.

I feel like a trespasser, though. This is Emma’s journey, not mine, much as I want to accompany her. What if she needs the vastness between us now more than ever, and regards me as another marauding Mongol sweeping across the steppes? I do not want to force her again into scribbling out what she has created to protect against invasion.

But Frazier reassures me; setting out on his epic road trip across Siberia, he marvels at the absence of fences and “No Trespassing” signs. Encouraged that the unbounded landscape is spacious enough to absorb both Emma and me without crowding, I press on.

Commenting on the loneliness of exile in Siberia, Frazier writes, “Longing and melancholy worked their way into the very soil.” So it is with parents and children of a certain age. Standing now on the opposite end of a lengthening road that takes Emma farther and farther away from childhood, I feel the sorrow of exile as she goes down the road without me.

It has not been easy for Emma either. Her once-sure trajectory unspooled erratically as she zigzagged in and out of different colleges and half-baked plans. “All who wander are not lost,” I tried to reassure myself. But what if she could not find her way back? It looked like breakdown to me.

Frazier, too, encountered breakdowns on his journey across Siberia in a rickety van. Initially he fretted that it kept sputtering to a halt, just as I fretted about Emma. Over time, though, Frazier came to see the fits and starts as essential to the pleasure and genius of discovering what to do when things go wrong.

I have come to see the same about Emma.  Eventually I learned to trust that her breakdowns and detours were not so much obstacles, but the road itself that would take her where she needed to go.

Right now Emma needs Russia, with its convulsive revolutions. How could she not? It is every adolescent’s job to overthrow the tsar, and every parent’s job to surrender the throne. The old order gives birth to the new in benign or violent spasms, but there is no stopping the transformation.

Emma on the cusp is drawn to places in transition. Like Frazier, she savors crumbling Soviet-era housing blocs, babushkas hunting for mushrooms along busy highways, the ubiquitous trash. Russia, stubbornly insistent on remaining itself despite the homogenizing onslaught of progress, offers a bulwark as childhood edifices give way to Emma’s relentless induction into adulthood.

Siberia is no longer synonymous with the disappearance of exile. Frazier freely comes and goes after the Iron Curtain is lifted, and Emma, too, is less shuttered. In fact, she’s back. Not in the arms-around sense of Leslie’s grown-up son, but back from St. Petersburg and the need to keep us at arm’s length. Our mouths water as Emma describes fat dumplings stuffed with minced beef and onions. She is thrilled that Russians mistook her for a native. No wonder; her face, bright-eyed again, reflects her great-great grandfathers’, who fled the mother country in their own passage to adulthood.

We ask Emma to show us her photos, and she reluctantly obliges. My husband and I sit next to each other at the dining room table as she positions herself on the side. Emma removes certain photos before carefully placing each of the others at an angle where we must twist our heads to see them properly. We politely ask her to set them straight before us. She politely ignores us, allowing only an oblique glimpse into her edited world.

Emma’s pictures are terrible: A shot of sky with an onion dome in the corner, a kitten that’s only a speck in the foreground. They are as blurry and without context as Frazier’s shots of the endless horizon.

But they are hers. And she is ours again, if we let her set the frame.

*

Originally published In Underwired, July 2012