Slouching Past 40

Hardware

2009-11-04T10:10:00.006-05:00

Under a moon pregnant with light
The woman lay sick, poisoned by
Serpentine dreams, truth and lies
Alike, in wordless languages:

A yellowed old man, his belly strained
By the canvas apron of his trade,
Stood fast, weathering the storm of her:
A tool I need!, she cried, But which?

Clumsily he patted her with hands
Gnarled and trembling, branches
Buffeted by wind and rain and time.
For what?, he asked.

She bit her lip and tasted iron,
Leaned in, a good conspirator,
Whispered, To keep it all
At bay, a tool like that.

The man's eyes, hooded by near
Epicanthal folds of age, trained
True (if weakly blue) on his customer.
All sold out of those, he sighed.

Complicity

2009-11-01T15:52:00.008-05:00

What was it about Lenore that shouted victim as surely as if one of us had taped a note to her back? Was it her hesitant, two-footed way of disembarking the bus dropping her off at camp? Was it her rheumy eyes, her pale face, her lisp? Was it that one of her socks rode perpetually lower on her calf than the other? Or do children not need such obvious cues in order to spot a potential target? Is the language of us and them coded in their DNA as surely as their eye color?

Lenore was the niece of one of the richest women in the United States. But her father was not the favored son, and so none of of her aunt's money went to Lenore's care and keeping. I remember how her living room was decorated end to end with wobbly wooden laundry racks. There was no money for a clothes dryer. The apartment walls were painted a sickly green. What could such a paint color do but peel? So it peeled. The sweet, cloying smell of roach traps overpowered the tiny kitchen.

Lenore had little to crow about, and she knew it. Life had ground her down, had shown her what was what. She expected nothing, and that's what she got. When word came that she'd received a scholarship to camp, her mouth formed just the tiniest 'o' of surprise. I was at her house that day. My mother made me play with her, because no one else did. My mother tended to shed sentimental tears for those without. Easy to do, from her point on the privilege continuum.

I was good to Lenore until she showed up at camp one hot and dusty midsummer's day. I had worked hard all summer to hide my essential shyness. I was, for once, the center of a crowd of girls who laughed at my jokes and followed my lead in all things. It was heady stuff for a girl hardly noticed at school.

Lenore's presence threatened to expose the moody, sensitive ten-year-old I'd left behind in New York City. At first I believed I could simply avoid her. But she was doggedly persistent, if nothing else, and I found myself unable to lose her.

No one liked Lenore, of course. There wasn't anything to like. She was a shadow of a kid. My bunkmates tripped her, short-sheeted her bed, pretended they smelled something rotten whenever she walked into a room. They were cruel. I was their witness. Until the day came (I'd known that it would) when they were not content to assign me such a minor role in their misdeeds.

"Are you with us, or with her?," Beth challenged me. We were waiting in the lunch line. I pretended I hadn't heard her. I rearranged the silverware on my tray. "Well?," she asked, and this time she poked me in the ribs. In front of us was Wednesday's rubbery roasted chicken. Beth took her share and then, looking around, grabbed the least appealing piece of chicken in the tray and wrapped it in her napkin. Her eyes narrowed. "We're going to give Lenore a present. And you are going to address the package."

My handwriting was coveted by most of the girls. It was neat, and pretty, and I liked to decorate the letters I wrote with girlish drawings of flowers, horses, and the like. There was no mistaking my handwriting for anyone else's, and Beth knew it. I'd anticipated this moment for so long that I was barely surprised by its arrival.

I wish I could tell you that I refused, that I sacrificed a summer of being a popular girl in the name of the kindness that had been my longest companion. Instead I spent several sleepless nights as Beth oversaw the rotting of the chicken, which she'd stuffed in one of the vents in our bunk's bathroom. When it was well and truly rank, she put it in a box her mother had sent her, a box formerly filled with cookies, candy, and books, goodies that had long since been shared with everyone but Lenore. She slid the box over to me and handed me a pen. This time her challenge was wordless.

On the box I wrote Lenore's name, and our camp address. When that afternoon our counselor brought the mail in to the bunk during "rest time," Beth sneaked the box in under the other packages. As our counselor reached the bottom of the pile, she looked up in surprise. "Lenore, honey," she cried, "There's one for you!"

Lenore hadn't received a package all summer. Timidly she came forward and accepted the box. She clutched it to her chest. All afternoon she cradled it but made no move to open it. I felt the passing of those minutes etching themselves into my bones. When finally I heard her fumbling at the sealing tape, I put my hands over my ears and turned away, and, when that didn't seem to be enough, I pressed my face hard into my pillow and cried.

Faintly I could make out chortling and whooping. Surely the girls had witnessed shock and horror cross Lenore's face. Did that face turn even paler than usual? Could her eyes have been any rheumier?

At dinner I couldn't help but meet her gaze, a gaze so ancient and sorrowful that I nearly gasped. I had failed my first test. There would be others to fail, later.

When in high school I studied the Holocaust and read about so many Germans who defended themselves by insisting that they were merely following orders, I thought back to Lenore, and the way her nostrils must have been forever seared by the smell of rotting flesh, and betrayal.

Fire Island, 1977

2009-10-30T16:14:00.004-04:00

Imagine if you will two little girls, one nine years old, the other seven and a few days. They are long-time friends who reunite each summer in Fire Island, NY, where one girl’s grandfather owns a beach house. The beach house is on stilts, as many on the island are, for protection against high tides and hurricanes. It has a glorious wrap-around deck, the only downside being the super-size splinters that pierce each girl’s feet at least once a day. But it is the underbelly of the house that most interests the girls and that is the setting for much of their playtime, because it is shaded and cool, but dusty shafts of sunlight do make their way in, squeezed through the crosshatches of the latticework so that the girls are provided with ready-made diamond spotlights. There are sometimes more interesting sea creatures in the almost primeval sand under the house than the garden-variety horseshoe crabs the girls can find by the dozens at the shoreline. In their secret place, they play endless games, the kind of pretend games girls play so well. They make up their own plays, and over and over again they reenact “Annie,” which has just premiered on Broadway. They take turns singing “Tomorrow” and “It’s the Hard-Knock Life,” because those are indisputably the best songs in the show, and because each girl has already learned how to share.

Upstairs the younger girl’s parents and grandfather do whatever it is 1970’s adults do. There are sometimes mysterious, pungent odors from above, and there is much too much nakedness for the girls’ taste. They laugh and laugh about the “eww” factor of nakedness. The adults, being of the “me” generation, leave the girls to their own devices while they indulge in amusements of their own. This is not by a long shot the era of the professional mother.

On one of the dog days, the girls grow tired of their basement lair and decide to go for a swim. Already there have been many days when swimming in the ocean has been forbidden by the authorities. The Atlantic is not for sissies, and there have been ferocious riptides that test the strength of even the adult swimmers. There have also been abundant jellyfish. But today no signs are posted that would prevent the girls’ outing. The older girl is a fish in water, and she quickly swims out where the better waves are. The younger girl is still hesitantly testing the water with her toes. The water is frigid, even in August.

In an instant the swimming girl vanishes from sight. The seven-year-old thinks her friend is teasing her (she is always teasing her) and looks away irritatedly. In fact the older girl has been caught in a riptide and is tumbling over and over again in a tight tuck position her gymnastics teammates would find enviable. She cannot stop these gyrations and begins to crave air, crave the power to break free of these endless circles, which are making her dizzy, and tired. Somehow, after a minute that's spanned a lifetime, she breaks through to the surface. She is coughing and sputtering and taking huge gulps of the salty beach air. In her struggles, she has lost her one-piece bathing suit; now she crouches, naked, shivering, humiliated.

To the girls, the loss of the bathing suit (never retrieved) is one of the funniest things that happens that summer. Neither girl has any idea how close their relationship has come to being suddenly, irrevocably severed. Never do the grown-ups find out about this day’s drama, and never do the girls discuss it again, not the next summer, not as adults.

Now the girls are grown-ups themselves, and one has children. The girl-become-mom finds that she doesn’t recoil as much as she really ought at the growing number of “helicopter parents,” parents who with the help of cell phones continue to monitor their children’s every move, even when those children have left for college. Helicopter parents deliver wake-up calls to their kids' dorm rooms and check their grades online. Yes, it is too much. Yes, it is a little gross. But the girl who now has children of her own, who in the 70's lost a turquoise swimsuit to the jaws of the Atlantic, thinks that in everyone's life there are moments of reckoning, moments that beg for a helicopter parent, or two.

originally published on 2/1/07

Va Pensiero

2009-10-27T07:02:00.022-04:00

I don't trust in the beauty of the butterfly. Too showy. Too easily acquired. If I wrap myself up in a cocoon for weeks on end and then emerge stunned and blinking, as is my wont, will you stand, rooted to the floor, bewitched by the sight of me?

I am not a siren, and I have no call.

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

When we used to lie together, long before there were children, I stared at the ceiling and thought I could see the stars. As if your apartment were our very own planetarium. We shared our quiet dreams. You wanted to be known for something. It seemed to matter less what the thing was than that it be yours. I did not understand, but I loved you for your earnestness as you set about planning to achieve it. That was our way then, to love generously, to spill powdered sugar all over the bed as we greedily gobbled up each other's sweetness.

The ceiling was cracked, the people in the next apartment over fought low and mean. There was a coin laundry in the basement. You gathered up our clothes into a cheap nylon sack and took them down. When it was time, you changed them over. Later, you brought them up, and I folded them, put them to rights again. And again.

Remember Mr. Lee? Mr. Lee across the hall? He was up to something. All those night visitors. And then our suspicions confirmed when one night he up and left, taking his motley belongings and motley companions with him to parts unknown and ominous for it. The next day, the police came, and inquired of us. What was there to say? He'd been jovial whenever we'd run into him in the lobby. Persistently, awkwardly, jovial. We were suspicious long before we had any reason to be.

And next to our slightly seedy building the Italian restaurant we could ill afford. Months of watching the well-to-do enter and exit Va Pensiero with unstudied casualness convinced us that we, too, could dine there, if only once, on Valentine's Day or on some other equally formal occasion. But when we did finally step across its threshold, we felt out of place. Not for the likes of us. Perhaps in ten or fifteen years, we thought.

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

So this is what it is. We watched the real estate shows on Sunday morning, and we coveted, though we had little idea of all the headaches that would end up accompanying such a peculiarly American dream. I pictured myself, cappuccino in hand, leaning up against the cool, clean Corian countertops of those sleek and fully functional kitchens. (Our own kitchen quite literally a closet.) Betty Draper to your Don. So stereotyped, my small and yes, earnest, fantasies.

The lion's share of the fun was in the not knowing, wasn't it?

Tonight I gaze up at a different ceiling, a ceiling without the cracks that might define it, and I find myself unable to spot any stars. Even Venus eludes me.

Yet our children sleep soundly, untroubled, a few rooms over. Surely there is something to be said for a life that fails to crease their foreheads, or to turn down the corners of their blossoming mouths.

One day we will return to the town where we spent time as poor students, and we will enter Va Pensiero with comfortable nonchalance. We will order appetizers, and dessert too. Wine, in abundance. While above us, late into the night, young lovers will sketch out their idiosyncratic dreams in their private planetaria.

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

The beauty that makes me gasp as I approach forty-two years of age isn't in the butterfly but in the chrysalis.

And then I found joy hiding in the laundry basket.

2009-10-25T11:46:00.002-04:00

Branch Road

2009-10-22T11:47:00.016-04:00

There's a winding road in my town. It is the road everyone loves to drive. It threads around the base of a little mountain and through an even littler village beside it. The village, by definition, is quaint, and with the leaves changing and falling the whole of it is what great-grandparents might refer to (quaintly) as a worthy Sunday drive.

Driving down the main street of the village, I feel content. My car grips the road and turns obligingly into curves. Four, five, six curves, and I realize that I am holding my breath. (Contentment back on curve three, the one bisecting the community golf course.) Ahead, rising up on a hill, is a cluster of red brick buildings set in an unnaturally manicured landscape.

Within those buildings resides my shame, tucked up into a corner of Room 204.

Last year my mother lived in Room 204 of the flagship building. She arrived, in October, by ambulance, arrived weighing only 70 pounds, arrived with a broken brain. Even as I walked through the doors of the nursing home, I could hear her calling my name. "Sarah, Sarah, Sarah!," she was shouting. "Where is my daughter Sarah?"

I found her in bed. She was sharing a room with a lump of a woman, a woman who ceaselessly ground her teeth and kneaded her hands, a woman absent but for her shell. I knelt by my mother's bed and touched the hollow of her cheek. She beamed, the most disconcerting effect of her stroke a beatific smile where once there had been only a tight sort of wryness. "You're here," she sighed. "Now you can take me to your house. The children are waiting for me. I have presents for them."

She did not have presents for them, except in that broken brain of hers, and I did not take her to my house. Not even once before she died. For that I might recite a litany of excuses: She couldn't walk she was incontinent she was impulsive stormy explosive unpredictable unsteady cruel unthinking. And there is the one I used most often and even believed, for a while: She will scare the children.

For years and years, when my mother failed to beam, I was a good daughter. The best kind of daughter. She was so ill, long before she was actually ill. I took care of her. I got her through the years. Would she have reached sixty years old without me? Doubtful. So maybe, by the time she showed up in my town, the town she had never before visited without scrunching her nose up in distaste, I was... done.

There is no other way to explain why I never carried my mother -- whose anorexia made her lighter than my older son -- into my house, my home, and set her down, ever so gently, on the couch. Offered to make her tea with lots of lemon. Handed her the remote so she could watch her conservative talk shows at achingly loud volumes and rail against so much perceived injustice.

I did not do any of those things, so now I carry the weight of my decisions with me. The load is precisely as heavy as it was on the day my mother died. (I could avoid Branch Road, but I don't.) It is a part of me now. My favorite drive inspires a quiet joy and then the sharpest prick. This is, I think, as it should be. Two sides of a coin.

I was a good daughter up to and until the time when I was just a good enough daughter, and that's really all there is to say.

Firsts

2009-10-18T13:51:00.016-04:00

I. Then

There was the first night
For jazz, in a bar of acolytes,
Smoke and heat, sweat and drink
Counterpoints to the dismaying
Array of notes, notes struggling
To rest on the head of one pin.
She inclined her head, prepared to
Nod, rapt, like the rest of them.
But eschewing the expected
She did the one natural thing
And threw up the drink, the sweat,
The heat, the smoke, the notes.
She remembered to flush.

II. Earlier

The night she turned twelve
She attended her own party
At the restaurant called
Windows on the World. It'd be
Just another casualty
Of the eleventh of September.
But then, who could know? So.
She stole away from her "friends"
(They wanted a meal, and why not?),
Looked down all those stories
And wondered why the elevation
Failed, so thoroughly, to elevate.
Chicken marsala, it was.
The mushrooms supposedly wild.
But she tasted only wine.

III. Earliest

The day her Grandpa Joe died
Her mother sat stiff-backed
In, yes, the telephone closet, and
She sounded grave, it's true,
But the child had known before
The phone announced the call --
Grandpa Joe would no more fill
The makeshift chamber pot
Off the first floor study
When he couldn't make it
To the usual receptacle.
It was cancer that took him.
Promptly the pot was reconfigured,
A repository of flowers, it would be.
Grown-ups deemed her too young
To visit Grandpa in his casket.
But I've seen his pee!, she cried.
What more could there be?

IV. Now

The day, just the other day,
When she wished to scrabble out
Of her own skin, tired skin,
And be anywhere but here, be
Anything but forty-one and
Safe. She imagined flying
From the windows on the world,
Landing intact on the velvety lawn
Of someone else's house.
Does it matter whose? Not if
She might nod, rapt,
Like the rest of them.

The Color of My Parachute

2009-10-14T11:59:00.003-04:00

I am looking out the window at the leaves falling -- dancing, really, because it's windy --

but I have done this before.

I worry about the children. Is Twelve navigating the social minefields of sixth grade? Because he doesn't talk to me anymore, not about those kinds of things, anyway.

but I have done this before.

I signed up to be the Secretary of the middle school's PTO.

What are you afraid of, Sarah? Why do you keep filling your time with niggling little chores? Because it's time. You know that.

It's time to change to winter bedding. It's time to get the winter coats out from storage. It's time to think up Halloween costumes and carve pumpkins. And there's planning to do for Seven's upcoming birthday --

NO. It's TIME. The children are fine. They will be fine.

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

I need to look for something to do outside of the house. I need to earn a wage. My kids are well on their way. I do not want to wake up on the morning after Seven (Eighteen!) leaves for college and think, "What now?"

And I have to stop waiting for the perfect job to find me. In that I am playing a child's game. Work is work. There's joy to be had there, but it's incidental. Work and play are not synonymous and never were.

What am I afraid of? What does it matter what color the parachute is, as long as it opens when it should?

I wanted to make a living as a writer, an unrealistic and perhaps even a self-aggrandizing goal.

I must move on, from my mother's death, from the belief that my kids need me (they do, but not like that, not anymore), from being stubbornly stuck here, watching the leaves fall -- excuse me, dance -- as they do every year, as they will do long after I'm gone, as indifferent to my absence as they were to my presence.

I must move on.

there will be joy -- still, again -- there will be joy

The Way of Things

2009-10-06T11:52:00.009-04:00

The other night I walked
A girl home, a girl
Old enough to watch my babies,
Young enough to seem
Defenseless, in the dark.

I was that girl, once.
Ersatz mama to city kids.
Apartment, elevator, playground.
Sometimes the museum
Of dinosaur bones and
Other antiquities.

In Manhattan
The daddies walked me home.
The dizzying scent of liquor
Rising up and off their suits,
Italian shoes that slap, slap,
Slapped the dirty pavement,
Irritation at the task, at their wives,
Turning their mouths hard, cruel,
Even as their eyes betrayed them,
Settling always on my breasts,
Youthful breasts, perky and proud,
Despite my desperation
To rein them in, to hold them back.

When did I become
A version of these men?
The other night I walked
A girl home, a girl who saw
My mouth set in anger
At the husband whose job
I thought this was --
Though times are different now,
Certain things unseemly
That once were not.

I suppose it happened
When that first infant
Was pulled squalling from
My unforgiving womb,
His shock of black hair
Surprising us all,
His objections to the air
Substantiating him.
(The what-to-expect words
Hadn't stood a chance.)

Yes, it must have been then.
I was too tired to see it
For the divide it was and
Continues to be. Now
The buck stops with me.
I must remember that.

I will walk all the girls home.
(There will be many.)
I will ask about their schools,
Their friends, their lives,
And when they answer
In muttered monotones,
I will smile, a smile
Lopsided but kind.
Because this? It's just,
Only, and forever after
The way of things.
What is there to do
But shrug? So I shrug.

More on Melancholy

2009-09-25T10:36:00.003-04:00

What is there to say
About sadness?

Damn leaves keep falling.
Sadness shrieks, runs about,
Frantic to pick them up --
Fighting useless battles,
As usual.

Through the lens of sadness
Soft and supple skin turns
Scaly, and rough.
It's some magic trick, one
We'd best not teach our
Up-and-coming magicians.
(We wouldn't want
To scare the children.)

In the hands of sadness
Lettuce wilts and
Bananas go brown --
Just like that.
Soon enough,
The sweet pungence of rot.

And the sun's not warm, no.
It's searing, piercing,
Relentless, and -- God,
Could there be more? --
Insidiously carcinogenic.

But really.

What is there to say
About sadness?

You know it,
Or you don't.

Tilt

2009-09-15T14:23:00.005-04:00

My summer camp was long past its prime: scrubby woods, bat-infested bunks, rusty toilets and sinks. The infirmary smelled so strongly of iodine that whatever had caused you to venture in to face the stern white-capped, white-stockinged nurse with arms folded just so over her enormous bosom seemed relatively minor next to the antiseptic-induced dizziness and nausea that nearly brought you to your knees, right there in front of the woman who, just like the camp, had seen better days.

I was ten in 1978, the first year I spent significant time at camp. More than anything else I remember that summer in songs: Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street," with its eight-bar alto sax solo, Donna Summer's "Last Dance," and the soundtrack to Grease, over and over and over again. I remember my jeans, because there was a sneaker, with real laces, embroidered on one of the back pockets. I remember learning how to square dance, how to make lanyards, how to tie-dye.

I remember my first kiss, with a boy named Brian, on a dare. Campers lounging around a picnic table outside our cabin urged us on, into the deepest woods we could find, and insisted that we French kiss. Who were we not to comply? The trouble was, neither one of us had the foggiest idea how to French kiss.

So, out of view of the others, we improvised. We opened our mouths wide, in yawns, and then carefully pressed our lips together. We didn't realize that our tongues were supposed to come into play, so we just stood there, lips locked, eyes wide with puzzlement, until we thought the time was right to be finished.

On the way out of the woods, Brian took my hand. He looked at me meaningfully, and the look said, "For show. This is for SHOW. Just that." I was relieved.

The campers gathered in front of the bunk hooted and whistled. We'd been successful, from their perspective.

That kiss has remained the most awkward physical encounter I've ever had with another human being. Intimacy without desire is theatre, nothing more.

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

On Sunday I took four boys to the amusement park. Four boys, all of whose limbs are fun-house long. Four boys, going 'round and 'round on the carousel -- entirely without irony. Four boys, just, or midway through, or nearly no longer, eleven years old. Four boys, who don't know what to make of their bodies, bodies changing too fast and too soon. Four boys, failing utterly to notice all the girls vying for their attention.

Four boys, whose physical selves are tilting towards the future. Four boys, whose fervent wish is that they could just whirl away to a place called Neverland, where it isn't so, where it won't have to be.

The Formative Days

2009-09-11T04:13:00.002-04:00

a repost, for obvious reasons

"Darling, I don't want to worry you," she said. Could one inspire any more worry than by uttering a sentence like that?

Idly, I let my fingers drift reassuringly over my belly, my cantaloupe belly, firm and round with Eleven. I was seven months pregnant.

The woman who'd be a first-time grandmother in just a few months pressed on. "I had a biopsy. And it's cancer, but there's no need for you to lift a finger. Your brother has found me the best doctor, and this will be taken care of. So don't worry about a thing. Your job is to grow that wonderful child."

Suddenly unsteady, I sat down in the chair that had imprisoned me for months as I'd worked feverishly to finish my dissertation before Eleven's birth. It wasn't a comforting chair. There isn't a chair comforting enough to tamp down the cold fear running through your veins when you understand, really understand, that the tables have turned, that you can no longer act the child with her, even if you were her child once.

And I wept.

By the time Eleven was born, my mother had undergone two surgeries and was well into a course of radiation therapy.

She survived her cancer. But barely. And life for her, for me, too? It would never be the same.

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

Seven months pregnant with Seven, I was making coffee when the telephone rang. It was my mother, calling from Manhattan, calling from the very apartment in which I'd been raised.

"A plane flew into the World Trade Center a few minutes ago!," she exclaimed.

"Mmm," I replied absently. Yes, I minimized. But understand this: I didn't have room in my head to imagine that a plane crashing into a building could be anything but an accident. I suppose that I was too busy gestating a baby, by definition the most optimistic of undertakings. Or maybe this was, simply, an unimaginable event for anyone -- for everyone.

Ten minutes later my preternaturally calm and collected husband called me, and he was practically shrieking. "Turn on the TV, Sarah," he urged. So I did. On the edge of the bed in front of our small television, I sat holding onto Seven (who on a dime felt unbearably heavy), tracing the contours of my expansive belly, just as I had done with Eleven.

How else can one protect fetuses from terrible news? I would have covered their eyes and ears if I could have tunneled my way in, you know?

I stayed seated, my eyes glued to the scene unfolding at the World Trade Center just as yours were, for minutes that slipped too easily into hours. That brilliant blue sky, I remember thinking, was it just too beautiful, too unearthly, for its own good?

And I wept.

To bring a child into the world without his grandmother, oh, that is heartrendingly sad -- but had it come to pass, it would have been manageable. To bring a baby into a world that contained September 11th? Felt at that moment like the worst kind of child abuse. It is a piteous child who's down for the count while he's still in utero.

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

If the seventh month of pregnancy was to be a test of my strength, I suppose I passed. My mother is alive, the world persists, crueller by the day but no less vital for it.

Life will out.

I parent my boys well enough. I am both a mother and a daughter now; I can carry both those loads at once because of the hard lessons I learned (twice! -- not, I think, coincidentally) in my seventh month of pregnancy -- when I gained the hard-won wisdom that comes of knowing the worst that can happen, and persevering in spite of it.

But I won't lie, there's no being a mother AND a daughter. Not really. The seesaw is never perfectly balanced. Like taffy I am pulled in one direction or the other. At this moment I need to be a daughter more than a mother.

No doubt tomorrow the winds will shift.*

If I fall into believing that I cannot be the kind of adult I know I ought to be, I have only to return to those two moments -- hearing the news of my mother's cancer and watching the twin towers implode -- and as easily as that I shake off my doubts.

Some speak of formative years. I speak of formative days, days when the contrast between life and death, health and illness, good and evil, construction and destruction, is as sharp as the shards of glass and metal, as glaring as the blindingly white financial confetti that on a September morning heralded the reconfiguration of a city's skyline, and the reconfiguration of our preconceptions and conceptions both.

*No doubt. On April 29th of this year, the winds shifted quite dramatically when my mother died.

The fog comes on little cat feet.

2009-09-09T10:54:00.007-04:00

I will not be a cat blogger.

But yes, on Sunday we brought home a cat. He's all black with green eyes. He's fourteen months old; any illusions I harbored about him being out of his kittenhood have been scratched, bitten, and licked.

He's awake all night and sleeps all day. This wouldn't be a problem, but for the fact that my husband and I let him into our bedroom on his first night with us. He was terrified, and we wanted to be of comfort, if we could.

Three sleepless nights later, we are deeply regretting that decision.

He's a love, though, and he's got the loudest and easiest purr I've yet come across. He is still petrified of the children -- they move too fast and too jerkily -- but he's clearly and adamantly imprinted on the adults.

We named him Oscar. As to why I haven't been blogging, I place the blame squarely on the cat -- his sleek coat, which was made for stroking, and his enchanting eyes. He's bewitched me.

But there is news on the blog front! Late in the week this blog is going to look very different.* It seemed past time for a little redecorating around here. I'm excited!

And now that the boys are in school (yes, Eleven survived his first day of middle school, and, more than that, appears to love it, though he's way overtired from having to get up an hour earlier than he's used to; and Seven likes his second-grade teacher and will be going down the hall for third-grade math, which thrills him), Oscar is settling down (sort of), and my blog will be all pretty and sh*t, I'll have absolutely no excuse for not blogging.

Right?

How are you all?

*Uh, as you can see, my blog has already been redesigned. A shout out to Wanderlust Jones, whose blog design skillz are all kinds of awesome!

Tails

2009-09-04T11:41:00.015-04:00

For a few years now, I have been able to measure the distance Seven has traveled from the land of debilitating shyness by how he greets the crossing guards each morning. There are three, all at least seventy years old, lined and weathered, but oh so soft and kind. One is a Santa double.

Seven used to walk with his head to his chest and startle when anyone tried to talk to him. But that was long ago. Last year he said, "Hello," or "Thank you," to each crossing guard, but his words were surely inaudible to anyone but me, because he spoke them into his shirt.

Yesterday he raised his head and eyed the crossing guards, said a very quiet and uninflected "Hi."

Progress.

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

He is in the bath, and I am washing him. He has been talking for minutes now. I haven't had to say a word.

Do people see colors the same way? I mean, if I see red, do you see red? And does everyone think that black and red are the scary, devil colors? If a devil was blue and white, he wouldn't be as frightening, would he? Oh, Mommy! I forgot to tell you that our teacher gave us a coupon for a free milkshake! Some of the kids were acting like they'd never had a milkshake, they were so excited. But I just said thank you. I mean, c'mon, it's a MILKSHAKE, people. Mommy! Second-grade lunch is yummier than first-grade lunch. There was PUDDING!

Tired and preoccupied, I let the stream of words wash over me as the rinse water washes over Seven. But then I get to his back. Seven's lower spine is very prominent, a consequence not of his being skinny (though he is thin) but of a condition called spina occulta, which is found in ten percent of the population.

Two weeks ago at Seven's checkup his pediatrician fingered that part of my son's back and, in musing tones, pointed out the bruising and scarring limning his spine. He will always have to watch that area, the doctor warned me. It will be easy for him to hurt himself there, as indeed he has already done.

Now I am gingerly soaping up that vulnerable lower back of Seven's when a shudder runs the length of me. I wonder if I am going to have to throw up. As Seven continues babbling, I sit back on my heels. I am envisioning all that could have gone wrong in utero but didn't. Why not spina bifida for this child? It could have been. It could have been.

The sight of these fragile vertebrae, what will be, I suppose, his Achilles' heels, suffuses me with a helpless tenderness, the kind of tenderness that knows that tragedy, and pain, and grief, are right there, just on the other side of the shower curtain.

I nearly weep. It is not, and never was, but for the grace of God we go. It is a coin toss. With my child out of the tub, a papoose in a blue towel, his vulnerable back hidden to me, I am finally able to cast the image of a coin landing not this way but that down the drain, along with the dirty bath water.

And still my son chatters on.

Brothers

2009-08-31T10:29:00.011-04:00

Because at the end of a long summer it seems we all need a reminder that sometimes they really do get along.

Boy Man

2009-08-23T14:25:00.018-04:00

He is slipping away from me.

This boy, my boy, whom I know less well each morning. How long before there's an utter stranger sitting at the table and requesting breakfast, as if it's the most natural thing in the world?

He has fine blond hair on his legs now. It catches the light, and I gasp. He turns, questioning. I see blemished skin on his face. His hair needs to be washed.

But the physical care of him is no longer my province. I clamp my mouth shut.

Our eyes meet, level. His lashes will be the stuff of girls' dreams. Maybe they already are. I'm not sure I'd know.

"Did you want something, Mommy?," he presses.

and yet he still calls me "Mommy"

"No, nothing at all," I say. He unfolds himself from his seat. His arms and legs needs special attention, so disproportionate are they. And so very slender that I fear they might buckle underneath him, a thoroughbred's sinewy legs, no padding to slow them down.

In a week or so he is to start middle school. It is all before him. We have received word from administrators that our children will be able to make it on their own. That we will not be asked to come in to volunteer in the classrooms, or bring birthday cake, or accompany them on field trips.

My son is on the cusp. No longer a boy, not yet a man. A lot can happen in the liminal space he occupies. I am trying to trust that we have prepared him well for the contingencies, whatever they may be.

His voice has not yet betrayed him, and in its high, sweet register I take refuge. I remember him at three, standing in his seat on an airplane stuck far too long on the tarmac. I remember him singing "Old MacDonald Had a Farm," and I remember first strangers in the rear of the plane shouting out the names of animals, and soon enough the entire planeload of people singing along with my son, whose enthusiasm has always been infectious. I remember tears, my own, tears of wonder at this boy who'd single-handedly moved a hundred cranky passengers to sing out.

I suppose this is the way it will be, then. I will carry my firstborn's selves with me, and superimpose them on the man he is at twenty, at forty, at sixty.

My son is at the gate. Any minute now he'll be off. I sit a little forward in my seat and scan the track. I am preparing myself to watch him go.

Gifts

2009-08-20T10:03:00.025-04:00

To him I offered my youth, its careless unadorned beauty. Greedily he gulped it whole. Until one day, when he cast his eyes down and, soon enough, away.

At her doorstep I spilled all of my words, the ones that came to me even as I slept. They were so lovely, and right. They moved gracefully and always knew to carry their own ribbons and bows with them. They shocked, startled, moved, and angered. They did it all. She took them in and loved them as she had once loved her babies. Until one day, when words didn't interest her anymore.

In his rough, worn hands I lay my kindness, a balm for the damage done by all those years of living. He treated it with the care it deserved, until it became so familiar he forgot that it had been my special gift – until one day, when it was no more to him than the milk he took in his morning tea. On that day I stole away, but not before picking up the tattered bits and pieces of my kindness and placing them in my pockets, for later.

Today I am bare before you. I come as is. I haven't arrived here with any particular gifts. Oh, you may cry on me, should it come to that, or caress the baby-soft skin at the top of my foot, the only part of my body that time has seen fit to spare. I may even utter transcendent words now and again, when you (and I) least expect them.

But mostly I will be. I will live out the rest of my days with the kind of emotional containment born of long experience. I will sip at my coffee, and smile at your jokes (though I've heard them all before), and gaze upon the garden that together we planned.

Nicked and scratched as I may be, still I dare to ask: Is this, the gift of me as is, enough of a gift for you?

The Beauty That Makes You Weep

2009-08-19T09:20:00.020-04:00

I've long wanted to visit the Library of Congress. For the books. I finally got there this weekend. And much to my surprise, it wasn't the notion of so many books housed in one place that captivated me. No, it was the place itself, which I have tried to honor in these photographs:

"BOOKS WILL SPEAK PLAIN
WHEN COUNSELLORS BLANCH"

*********************
If my religion is books, then I believe I have found its church.

A Nine-Year-Old Boy's Fourth of July

2009-08-16T19:39:00.001-04:00

I first published this piece on July 10th, 2007. Why am I running it again? Because I like it, and because it's my blog, that's why. I've been forgetting that. It's my blog.

There's B., in the grass. You can't see his face, because it's dusk. What you can see is the form of a boy against a backdrop of open sky. He's the tall skinny boy who wears airplane pajamas with his dad's t-shirt pulled over his pajama shirt for extra warmth. The t-shirt hangs down to his knees. He's wearing new white sneakers, so white they dazzle brilliantly and uniquely among the muted colors around them. They look comically large, these white boats, but no, my boy has feet two years ahead of the rest of his body, and the shoes fit.

He's humming to himself as he scans the brush for fireflies he might put in the jar he's carrying. Every now and then he breaks into a dance or a karate step. He's in a groove. Flitting about, just like the fireflies. He could be one of them.

Finally he climbs up the hill toward us. We are sitting on the patio adjacent to our hotel room. We're breathing in the unusually cool, crisp air. By now, the sky has mutated into an otherworldly shade of blue. The lights from dozens of boats skip merrily across the lake just down the hill from us.

B. has trapped a firefly in his jar, and he's over the moon. But this firefly is too frightened or too stunned to wink its orange light at us. Finally I say, slowly and regretfully, "He doesn't look too happy to be in that jar, B. Maybe you should let him go?"

And B. looks disappointed, but he understands. We unscrew the lid of B.'s bottle, a Starbucks bottle, and we giggle when we see the firefly apparently intentionally making his way around the lip of it, seeming for all the world as if he's enjoying the bit of sweet, sticky liquid he's found there. Finally, sated, he moves away from the bottle, and with a weak but visible flicker of his light seems to bid us farewell. I feel vindicated, and B. is happy to see that all systems are go on a creature he thought might be damaged. But then we watch as he stutters and jerks a little. Perhaps the vanilla frappuccino weighs uncomfortably on his wings. Finally, he regains his balance and disappears. We're relieved.

My husband turns to B. and says, gravely but with a twinkle around the eyes, "B., I think you're old enough to use the video camera to record the fireworks so that J. can see them tomorrow. Would you like to?"

B.'s eyes grow huge. He nods in agreement. And in homage to the most serious and dedicated of cinematographers, he takes the camera and begins to shoot footage. "J. will like this," he whispers reverently. "Yes, he will," I say.

The fireworks begin not with a bang, but a whimper. No one around us is even certain where in the sky they are meant to appear. People keep scraping and shifting their lawn chairs, angling themselves anew at each loud noise. It's comical, really. B. eagerly tapes everyone's idiosyncratic preparations. The older man and woman behind us are dissatisfied with their view. They stand up, chairs stuck to their backsides, and, like turtles, make their way stolidly past us as they seek those coveted first-row center seats, wherever they may be.

Eventually the show starts in earnest, and it lasts far longer than I would have expected. Throughout, B. maintains a careful and tight grip on the camera. It is only in the last few minutes of the display that he grows tired and reluctantly hands the camera back to his father.

It's been a magical night. The surprising and welcome coolness, the periwinkle dusk, my firstborn dancing with the fireflies, and some impressively beautiful fireworks lighting up the sky, so close to us I'd be tempted to grab hold and go for a ride, if I believed I wouldn't get burned.

I've had to abandon so many beliefs. We all do. It's part of growing up. When I was little I imagined clouds to be the coziest of beds. I thought that lying down on a cloud would be like settling into the most comfortable mattress money might buy, with the softest and warmest goose down enveloping me as reassuringly as my mother's arm wrapped tightly and protectively around me. It was only later, when on an airplane bumping about through clouds, that I was disappointed to realize that a cloud was yet one more in an ever-lengthening line of illusions, sleights of hand.

But B. at nine must still believe that he might sink into the fullness of a cloud or slide down a shower of fireworks. The whisper of his voice, usually too loud, the shine in his eyes, they tell me that yes, he believes. And the careful and serious way he captures the fireworks on this night, preserves them for his sad little brother, who's too frightened to see them live?

That's another kind of magic entirely, the magic that gently pulls the hair back behind my ear so that I can hear its message. It's saying, Yes, Sarah, you see it, through all the bickering and squabbling and fighting and crying, this transcendental love of a boy for his brother. You can see it. You just have to look a little harder, a little longer than you've been doing. It is there in the clouds and the fireworks and in the open sky, it is there in that boy so busy catching fireflies and making memories. It is there.

Would YOU be able to say no to this face?

2009-08-15T10:43:00.000-04:00

The Birthday That Wasn't

2009-08-11T14:44:00.007-04:00

One of the chores I can cross off my list this year is buying my mother a birthday present. She was notoriously difficult to buy for. I used to think the problem lay in her already having everything she needed and wanted. But that's not true. The reality is that nothing gave her pleasure for longer than the time it took to unwrap it.

On Tuesday she would have been 73 years old. Last week I caught myself brainstorming ideas for her present. And then I remembered. Grief takes me by surprise, still. It's coy, and somewhat slippery. I am wary of grief, the charismatic fellow you met once, at a dinner party, only to find out much later that he'd murdered his first wife.

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

One year I bought her a silk paisley throw for Christmas. When it caught the light, it shimmered, vibrant and alive, the rich browns and reds and yellows gifting its owner with an autumnal sunset. A few years earlier my mother had purchased a drab brown sofa bed, and I imagined the throw as a centerpiece for an otherwise uninspired guest room. I couldn't wait for her to open it. When she did, she stared at it for a beat too long. She equivocated: "It's pretty..." I started to explain its purpose.

She shook her head, effectively interrupting me. "But what is it FOR?," she pleaded.

"Well," I stammered, "it's not for anything, really. It's just for decoration. Unless you're cold, and then you can wrap it around your legs."

"Oh," she returned, her voice unnaturally bright and cheery. "Well, thank you, darling."

She never used it.

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

It should be a blessing, then, that this year I don't have to search high and low for a gift for my mother. Instead I find myself gazing at this or that, in this store or that, and thinking, Would THIS have been the present that made her rapt with wonder and delight? (No.)

My mother is dead; yet I continue to try to please her.

It seems that I still have some grieving to do.

Eleven's Poll

2009-08-10T18:56:00.007-04:00

Eleven would like you all to vote in a poll he and I have put together. Will you indulge him? Please vote here. If you'd like to see the results after you've voted, go here instead.

Eleven and I thank you!

If this boy were to shout "Crap!," would it bother you?

Hunger

2009-08-05T09:10:00.009-04:00

I wake up with a dry mouth and stomach ache. Yesterday I battled stomach flu and lost. But today's stomach ache is not as angry. Insistent, yes, but gentler. This, I realize, is hunger. Just hunger, a sensation I don't experience often enough, a sensation most of us don't experience often enough.

And there she is before me, as she appears every morning. My mother. My gaunt mother.

Will she know if I spill her longest secret? And do I care?

Come here, a little closer. Let me whisper it in your ear:

My mother was anorexic. And bulimic. What they now call bulimarexic.

In her later years we were gladdened to see her weigh eighty pounds. Eighty pounds was a victory. In what kind of world is eighty pounds a victory?

She denied her diagnosis vigorously. She died before owning her condition. She'd wave her hand, a clear enough dismissal of our inquiries. Breezily, she'd offer, Oh, you know, the cancer left me with radiation damage in my throat. It's hard for me to eat anything but the softest foods.

And then we'd watch, incredulous, as she lit into a steak, her studied obliviousness enough to take our breath away.

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

I won't talk about being a girl growing up with a mother obsessed with her weight. You can guess at what it was like. Only this:

I am out for dinner with my family on the night of my graduation from high school. I am wearing a sleeveless white dress, and I am as thin as I will ever be. Not too thin, but just right. My mother is sniping at me about how ill-fitting the dress is. She is disgruntled because it was my grandmother whom I chose to accompany me to the store to choose the dress. In the taxicab on the way home from dinner I am sitting with my aunt and uncle. My uncle, generally a genial fellow, takes my arm with unprecedented force and hisses, Don't let my sister tell you otherwise. You looked beautiful tonight. Perfect. I am stunned. These words are more (louder, clearer, straighter) than I've heard from my potbellied uncle in years.

I do not forget them.

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

My mother's every waking hour was spent thinking about food. She had scarcely finished one meal before she was planning for the next. When she came to visit me and the boys, her requests for food arrived on the hour and required thrice-daily trips to the gourmet supermarket (the "only" supermarket, as far as she was concerned).

I am pulling in to the diner where we are to eat brunch, even though the boys and I ate breakfast at home and aren't even faintly hungry. It is pouring. My mother lets herself out of the car and races into the restaurant ahead of us. She takes the only umbrella. I am left trying to manage the boys, their jackets, and a few toys. In the rain. I am dumbfounded. By the time the boys and I sit down at the booth my mother has chosen, she is already sipping her coffee -- and has already ordered her meal.

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

This weekend my sister-in-law asked my children if they'd like to eat grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. They nodded. She pulled out the ingredients and left them on the counter for me. She grabbed a frying pan and put it on the burner. And then she turned to face me. I must have looked recalcitrant, or mystified, or some combination. She laughed and called out to my brother, "Your sister is the only person I know who makes me look like a gourmet cook." And then she took over at the stove.

It is, I think, my mother's peculiar legacy. I am so frightened of turning into her that I don't like thinking about food. I don't like preparing food. I spend the least amount of time I can in feeding my kids, while also ensuring that they don't eat crap. It's a fine line, but we manage. It isn't ideal. Luckily my husband likes to cook.

I am not anorexic. Or bulimic. Nor have I ever been so. But I know, first-hand, what it is to be obsessed with food. What that obsession looks like, smells like, tastes like.

It is quite possibly what I know best of all.

My Brother, My Keeper

2009-08-02T15:28:00.006-04:00

This Is My Family

2009-07-28T11:47:00.008-04:00

Roots so gnarled and arthritic
You'd barely recognize them,
As roots, that is. They
Turn on each other, hard,
Squeeze each other out,
And if anything grows,
It's hideous. You'd call it
A weed, I guess, and dig it up,
Expecting something better
Next time. Truth is, I'd
Like to have been rootless
With no one to teach me
The wrong lessons, day, month,
And year. Instead I spend
What time there is
Pulling up ugliness, and
Planting hope in its place.
But hope is fragile, it
Withers if cramped by
Rough, cruel things. Would that
I were the virgin child.
Later on, I pray, my kids
(And theirs and theirs and theirs)
Might like the roots they find,
Might steep in tales they tell,
Might even be proud. (Dare I
Wish it? Yes, that I can do.)
Would they tell one another,
It started with her? In voices
Laced not with blame but wonder?
And that same delicate hope, now
Grown tall and strong without the rot
That knew just this: to choke growth,
To tamp it down, to shut it out?

I published this first on my private blog, which I had intended as a space for my creative writing. Turns out I don't post there. At all. So I'm moving the poem over here. There are a few folks who've already seen it; I apologize to them for the repost.