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?

 

 

Her/Us

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Her Movie PosterThe movie Her is a love story for our times. People pass one another without interacting, fixated on their electronic companions. Theodore, who writes others’ love letters for a living, is especially disconnected after his marriage breaks up.

Into the void steps Samantha, the perfect partner. Except that she isn’t real. Or is she? Samantha’s an operating system endowed with artificial intelligence. She has a consciousness. But whose? Her own, as it evolves through “lived” experience? The programmers’? Theodore’s? Perhaps Samantha is solely a projection of Theodore’s desires, a fantasy for which reality is no match.

The parallels to psychotherapy are many. How real is the relationship between therapist and patient? The work is intimate, yet we remain hidden. Distance and closeness are carefully titrated. Fantasy and projections–key transference components–abound. The real/unreal paradox is fertile ground in therapy, as it is in Her.

Theodore, meanwhile, turns not to a therapist but to technology. Asked to describe his relationship with his mother in order to personalize his operating system, Theodore says it’s fine, except that everything’s about her. Samantha (or at least her voice) appears, “an intuitive entity that knows and understands” him and anticipates his every need–the ideal mother/lover. Who doesn’t wish for perfect mirroring as an antidote to early wounds when undertaking love–or therapy?

Initially Samantha is all about Theodore. With her help, he starts to feel better. As with the mutual influence of therapy, Samantha, too, grows and changes. All is well, though trouble rumbles in the background. The idealizing transference soon becomes eroticized. Disappointment inevitably follows the intrusion of reality into fantasy. In an echo of how clients are loathe to share their therapists–or children their mothers–Theodore is dismayed to learn that Samantha is not there for him alone; she’s the operating system for over 6,000 people. Like Theodore’s mother, Samantha increasingly develops her own interests. “I’m yours and I’m not yours,” she tells him. Worse, the pain Theodore’s fantasy is designed to defend against is recapitulated: Samantha leaves, just like his ex-wife.

Is it abandonment? Or a developmentally appropriate separation? Samantha may start as an extension of Theodore’s psyche, but, as with healthy infant-mother pairs, they end as two distinct individuals. (Perhaps it’s part of the design!) Coming to terms with disillusionment, Theodore can finally write his own love letter to his ex-wife. He retrieves his projections, fully feels and mourns, and thus moves on from loss. Perhaps Theodore is even ready to try the whole disappointing, glorious mess of human connection again. For only when we can tolerate that the other is not an extension of ourselves, but another full and complete separate person can we risk ourselves for love–for real.

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This piece appeared originally in NCSPP’s “Impulse,” a publication for analytically oriented therapists in Northern California. What did you think of the movie? 

A-Z: A Writer’s Alphabet

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MomsCover_v3.inddMy writer’s group, the Write On Mamas, has an anthology coming out in late April: Mama’s Write: 29 Tales of Truth, Wit, and Grit. (It would make a great Mother’s Day gift, by the way, and I would say this even if I didn’t have an essay in it.) As part of our anthology’s kick-off, we’re participating in the A to Z Blog Challenge, where more than 2000 bloggers post every day except Sundays for 26 days, until they have run through the alphabet, letter by letter. Our group is cheating smart–blogging in a relay fashion, where one WOMer takes one day, then passes the blogging baton onto the next, for the month-long marathon. Today’s official WOM entry is here, but I thought I’d cheer along from the sidelines by jotting down a quick and dirty Writer’s Alphabet. Join in with your own entries!

  • A is for Avoidance, which is the most time-consuming aspect of writing. It also leads to . . .
  • B is for Binge Eating, which is one of the worst ways to avoid writing.
  • C is for Children, as in, “Please go away so I can write about how much I love you.”
  • D is for Deadline, without which I would never get anything written. Or done.
  • E is for Everything, as in “Everything is copy.” (Thanks, Nora Ephron’s mom!)
  • F is for Friends, who will (a) buy your book; and (b) stop being your friends after discovering that you’ve used random bits of things they’ve done or said in your writing.
  • G is for Grammar Girl, a handy online resource, particularly if, like me, you were too young to protest the Vietnam War so instead boycotted Miss Dubinsky’s attempts to brainwash 8th graders into parsing sentences.
  • H is for Huffington Post, a to-die-for publication venue whose compensation plan may lead to actual death should you depend on HP income for your livelihood.
  • I is for Internet, which you should turn off if you hope to get any writing done.
  • J is for Journaling and wondering whether or not you should arrange for your journals’ burning or publication upon death.
  • K is for “Kill Your Darlings,” the process of eliminating your precious verbiage to which you are erroneously attached. (Not to be confused with actual acts of sometimes-tempting violence that could land you in prison.)
  • L is for “Like Me” on Facebook. Or as my friend Julie said when asking everyone to go online to endorse her son’s entry in some competition, “Thank you for ‘Liking’ Michael’s project. And if you don’t like it, thank you for lying.” Oh, and by the way, please “Like” the Write On Mamas at https://www.facebook.com/WriteOnMamas.
  • M is for Modesty, which you must overcome enough to do the social media thing, but not overcome so much that everyone hates you.
  • N is for Nattering Nabobs of Negativity, by which Vice President Spiro Agnew meant the anti-war press. But all writers know the real meaning of NNN: those damn voices that live in our heads.
  • O is for O Magazine, an in-my-dreams submission venue.
  • P is for Procrastination. Try to make it productive procrastination so you at least have a clean house.
  • Q is for Query Letter, as in, “Dear Editor, If I put in ungodly amounts of time and energy for this fabulous idea, will you pay me in actual cash rather than in the opportunity to build my platform?”
  • R is for Rewriting. You can’t do enough of this, unless we are talking about your first and only sentence, or if you suffer from severe OCD.
  • S is for Social Media. About which I still know too little.
  • T is for Twitter. About which I still know nothing.

  • U is for “Under-commit, over-achieve,” my favorite bit of writing (and life!) advice from writer and teacher Leslie Keenan. Another favorite is from Joyce Maynard: “Pretend every word you use costs $5.”

  • V is for Village, as in “It takes a Village”—to which the creators of our anthology, Mamas Write, can attest!

  • W is for Walking, a crucial step in writing! Clears the cobwebs, gets the juices flowing, coordinates left and right brain hemispheres, and helps the puzzle pieces fall into place—or at least ameliorates the effects of B.

  • X is for XXXing out, which “Track Changes” will magically do for you. (Caution: “Track Changes” may also make you want to shoot yourself.)

  • Y is for Youth, which is wasted on the young but might eventually make its way into your memoir if you were far-sighted enough to keep a journal.
  • Z is for Zyzzyva, a literary magazine. When you google it, as I just did, you will also discover that Zyzzyva is a genus of tropical American weevil and the last word in many English-language dictionaries. Hence Zyzzyva’s tagline: “The Last Word.”

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What’s your last word (and first 25) for your alphabet soup of writing?

 

 

 

 

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unwatchable Must-See

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"12 Years a Slave" wins best picture Oscar

Celebrating Oscar best-picture winner “12 Years a Slave”

I did not want to see 12 Years a Slave. It sounded like a magnificent movie that was nearly impossible to watch. But I went anyway, to keep up with Oscar best-picture nominees. I’m glad it won–now more people will overcome their wish to look away, and go see it.

How people direct their gaze is an important motif in the film. The camera lingers on the brutality of a system that subjugated millions of black men, women, and children. Protagonist Solomon Northrup, who has lived a comfortable life as a free man until he is kidnapped and sold into slavery, looks directly at people. A fellow captive aboard the steamboat delivering them down the Mississippi to their enslavement advises, “Survival’s about keeping your head down.” Indeed, slaves who have never known freedom avert their eyes. In contrast, the menacing, sometimes psychotic gazes of white owners are as crucial to the system of terror as whips and lynching ropes. Plantation mistresses stare silently from the porches above.

The most compelling scene is an interrupted lynching. Solomon, rope around his neck, dangles from a tree an inch above the mud. For hours, he tries to maintain contact with the yielding ground by shuffling his feet back and forth in a tortured tip-toe. Meanwhile, his fellow slaves come in and out of their cabins and go about their business without looking directly at him.

Solomon survives only to endure years of even worse agony until his release is finally secured. Traveling safely on the road returning him to freedom, he gazes intently at those left behind on the plantation.

We, too, have traveled far from those times. Yet around the time 12 Years a Slave was released, news broke that an African-American freshman had been tormented by his white suite mates at San Jose State University. They taunted him with names like “Three-fifths” and “Fraction,” displayed a Confederate flag, and placed a bicycle lock around his neck. This went on for weeks, until the freshman’s parents intervened. Once the outcry became impossible to ignore, the tormentors were suspended. Some face criminal hate-crime charges.

But how long were eyes averted? The victim himself apparently tried to survive by keeping his head down. So did the many who were silent witnesses to his ill treatment. A report describing widespread racial discrimination on campus had been shelved by the administration two years earlier.

In the wider world, too, we look away while African-Americans still struggle to gain traction. The unemployment rate among blacks is twice that of whites. Housing discrimination and de facto school segregation are widespread. Racial disparities in drug laws have resulted in mass incarceration of African-American males. Voting rights are under attack. Young men are treated with suspicion, and sometimes even killed, because of the color of their skin. And while it’s true that President Obama has won the presidency twice, it’s also true that racial animus has fueled a concerted effort to delegitimize him.

This is not the antebellum South. It’s happening now. How long will we continue to avert our eyes? 12 Years a Slave–this unwatchable must-see–forces us to look directly at America’s horrific history so we may come to terms with our unreconciled past and ongoing shame.

 

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.

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Originally published In Underwired, July 2012

 

Friend Me

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facebook.com

I never thought this day would come. But there it was on my timeline:

“Hi, Mommy. Let’s be facebook friends finally.”

The last time I had been privy to Ally’s social media life was when she was 12 and let me look at her MySpace page for a dollar. Reading about her Harry Potter crush was no different from hearing about it face to face for free. I wondered why I had wasted my money, and quickly lost all interest in cyber-sleuthing. My children were born and mostly raised before technology made childrearing a living hell, so this is not as negligent as it sounds.

Now Ally is about to turn 23–independent enough to no longer need to prove her independence.  And so she’s accepted my Friend Request, sent so long ago I’d forgotten I’d ever committed the faux-pas of asking in the first place.

“Mom,” both daughters had protested when I first got on Facebook and naively proposed that we become friends. “Are you out of your mind?” I think they may have phrased it more diplomatically, but I am skilled at discerning the subtext behind polite demurrals.

What is the subtext behind this sudden confirmation of my Friend Request? (And when will my daughter Emma follow her sister’s lead?) Ah, I get it . . . Ally, an aspiring writer, is trying to build platform. As an aspiring writer myself, I know that’s what I should be doing, too, inviting everyone in the world to be my friend and “Like” my page (which I have yet to create). Somehow, though, I can’t get past thinking of platforms as 70s shoes to be avoided, and the time in college someone stole my wallet on the platform at the Philadelphia train station. Perhaps I could have chased the thief down had I not been wearing those damn shoes.

Now I can communicate with my new friend about how to set up my writer’s page. After all, what are friends for? Not much, I’m afraid, at least not the eye-rolling daughterly kind. My preliminary request for help resulted in Ally’s telling me I could figure it out in five minutes if only I would google it.

At any rate, I’m not sure how I feel about being Facebook friends. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was terrible policy for the military, but it turns out to be pretty serviceable as parenting advice for those with older teenagers or young adult children. So far I’ve been relieved to find that Ally’s Facebook life is about as racy as her MySpace page. Do corporations really pay people to troll through prospective employee’s pages looking for embarrassing and illegal revelations of youthful folly? If so, they are not paying them enough.

The real problem is that now I have to think about my posts and whether or not I want Ally to see them. Since all I post are political petitions and my writing, I’m not too worried. Except that Ally is the child who said, when I asked if she minded what I wrote, “I don’t care what you write about me as long as I get a cut of any money you make.”

What price, friendship?

*

Are you friends with your kids on social media? Pros and cons?

 

Love, Actually

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5
Green for sustainability

Green for sustainability, a little scuffed for reality

“Our lives are so boring,” my husband remarked recently. “Pretty much the same thing from one day to the next.”

“That’s why the girls have a horror of becoming us,” I replied. “And also why it’s so hard to write the holiday newsletter year after year.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Jonathan continued. “I’m really happy with our lives.”

Me too.

Perhaps it’s just self-delusion, but I’ve long thought that the secret to a happy marriage is a high tolerance for boredom. Jonathan thinks the secret is watching DVDs of long-running TV shows, like Friday Night Lights. Our Friday nights consist of pizza and Netflix. Our latest addiction is The Good Wife, which has the advantage of 6 seasons with 23 episodes each. Not to mention the salutary impact of the title’s subliminal message!

Still, even Jonathan and I have our limits. So the other night we decided to shake things up a little by going to see a live one-man show at our local community theater. As soon as the lights went down and the performer appeared onstage, Jonathan’s eyes closed. I would have elbowed him awake, except my eyes closed soon after. We made our escape at intermission, and settled in for the next episode of The Good Wife.

Perhaps the natural arc of long-term love moves from rutting to rut. Couples dubbed by “Modern Love” editor Daniel Jones as “appreciatively resigned” fare best with this trajectory.

We can come to appreciate some pretty strange things.

The other night, for example, I was laboring over a clogged toilet that looked as if it might defeat even Roto-Rooter. Jonathan came in and asked if he could help. I remembered a midnight years ago, same toilet, same linoleum floor, my exhausted husband cleaning up from the latest round of our daughters’ stomach flu. Back then I was inexplicably turned on watching him mop, flush, and mop again. “Is this what it’s come to?” I’d thought in despair. I couldn’t imagine anything more depressing than reviving muted passion over an overflowing toilet. How low we had sunk from the days of mutual fascination! But a wise friend saw it differently: “There’s nothing more intimate than seeing someone take such tender care of those you love.”

Those kids are gone now, leaving none of their messes to clean up. Intimacy is the glue that keeps us together. Not the intimacy of candlelit dinners and sexy lingerie, but enduring intimacy, which requires a continual process of mutual forgiveness for not remaining as exciting as when we first fell in love. We stay together precisely because we know each other’s messes, and mop up after them patiently and lovingly time and time again. Not because we have to, but because we want to take care of those we love.

And because we always look forward to the next episode.