Light and Momentary

Waiting my whole life

"Your children are not your children," I said to myself very firmly a week ago. Stella and I were talking about whether she wanted to continue piano, and she was not sure that she did. I have tried a bunch of different approaches across the years that Stella has taken piano: I have encouraged and offered space and coaxed and helped with technical details and stepped back to let her figure stuff out. I have done what I could do to support her in learning piano, but this is a true fact: in the end she has to decide if she wants to do the learning.

"I don't understand why Stella doesn't play the piano for fun," I said to Elwood. "You mean like everyone else in this house except for you?" he replied, to which I said "...oh." I have furnished a music room full of instruments and books, a room I would have loved to have access to when I was a kid, but that doesn't mean any of my own kids will want to linger there.

One night I said, "Hey, Stella, you know there are only like 4 chords in most Taylor Swift songs, right? Want to try to figure out some Taylor Swift?" She sat down and sang All Too Well with me, but her heart wasn't really in it.

This was the point at which I got stern with myself: she is under no obligation to play the piano for fun. She is not responsible for my lingering issues about what teenagers should or shouldn't do with their musical abilities. She can quit piano lessons if she chooses to do so.

But maybe she won't quit quite yet. Because yesterday I said, "You know, I was thinking that All Too Well would work better for us if we played it in E instead of C -- want to try it?" And vocally E is probably a better key, but I was fumbling around trying to hit all four sharps. "Maybe D," I said, and moved it down a step.

"Mom," said Stella, watching my hands, "can you show me how to do chords?" 

This baffled me, because her piano teacher pushes her students to learn a ton of technique. Stella has learned the I-IV-V chord sequences for every single key. But here's what I didn't understand until yesterday: she never really knew why she was learning them.

Yesterday her inner lightbulb blinked on with spotlight brilliance. If you want to play All Too Well, all you need is four chords: I - V - VI - IV. The original version is C-G-Am-F, but we like it better as D-A-Bm-G. If you want to play it in G-flat, more power to you. But the sequence is the same the whole way through, so once you've got it in your head you can sail through the whole 10-minute version if you're so inclined. 

We sat together on the piano bench for a little while, but it wasn't long before she was playing it all on her own. "Wait," she said, "Clean uses the same chords in the same sequence?" 

We sang in unison; we sang in harmony. I flung my arms around her and said, "I've been waiting my whole life for this!" I can buy myself instruments and books, and I can find a lot of joy in solitary practice. But there's no joy quite like the joy of making music together, and I can't sing harmony with myself.

She spent a long time at that piano yesterday, much to my delight. I don't know if this newfound interest will last; I'm not going to pressure her, obviously. But I do love to watch a lightbulb flicker on, and I will hold on tightly to the memory of our voices blending together as she learned how to do something new and satisfying.

Secret Ingredient

Stella's been preparing for today for months. People came from all over the region for a daylong music competition at her high school. She had a piano solo in the morning and a voice solo in the afternoon. 

It's a stressful thing to perform a solo for a judge, and she was feeling it pretty keenly in the run-up to the event. She told me today about an anxiety dream from last night, in which her teeth liquefied and came streaming out of her mouth and Dream Mom was really angry about it. Yikes, right??

I was aiming for a mix of sympathy and lightheartedness in response to her anxiety. I told her to imagine slurping out all of her anxiety with a vacuum and dumping it in my invisible wheelbarrow, where I would keep track of it for her. "Leave yourself just a tiny bit of that alert feeling," I told her, "because when your heart beats faster it carries lots of blood to your brain and your muscles. A little teeny bit of adrenaline is just your body's way of saying it's getting you ready to do a hard thing." Thankfully, she was more amused than embarrassed by my choice to trundle the invisible wheelbarrow across the high school parking lot, and she asked if we could play I'm Going to Grandma's House as a diversion while she waited to be called.

Do you ever play this game at your house? I've been using it to distract kids for more than 25 years now. I'm going to grandma's house and taking an armadillo, you're taking her an armadillo and a banana, I'm taking her an armadillo, a banana, and Corinthian bagpipes (I don't know what those are either; they were Stella's idea), etc. When we got to L I said, naturally, that I was bringing liquid teeth. I was also in charge of T: tooth smoothie. We had a good laugh about tooth smoothies, they called her in to perform, she nailed it, and we headed out in a haze of relief.

At dinner we were talking about the contest with Pete, who came home for a visit today. "Stella had a dream in which her teeth liquefied!" I told him. Right off the bat he said "tooth smoothie!" He and Stella and I were laughing together about the fact that our brains did the same thing with that dream, and then Elwood spoke up. "TOOTH SMOOTHIE?!" he said, horrified, and the three of us fell apart. We were gasping for breath, clutching our sides, howling with laughter, imagining a world in which the Tooth Fairy runs a Smoothie King franchise with some very special add-ins.

When I think back on today I want to remember the sweetness of Stella's voice and her confident treatment of a tricky Mozart piece; she earned the top rating for both solos. I also want to remember the girl who said this morning with a quiver in her voice that she felt like her anxiety was an elephant sitting on her chest, and the way that same girl was laughing uproariously at the end of the day, her nightmare transformed into a source of shared hilarity.

So perky

Stella is taking first-year German with Pete's former teacher, and she texted him for assistance. "Your task is to write a note to a teacher," said another teacher in a different class, and Stella picked Frau H.

"Help!" she wrote him. "What should I say to Frau H?"

Pete answered her right away with a couple of German sentences, and she copied and pasted his suggestion into her note. When I got home she told me about it. "I'm not quite sure what I said," she admitted.

I looked at her phone and burst out laughing.

Pete had told her to say, "I like to eat shoes! They are very tasty!"

Pete loves German; right now he's taking a college German class that he's really enjoying. When we're together we slide between English and German all the time, laughing frequently at our clunky German sentences. Last week he asked me if I had time to talk on the phone and for a moment my innards seized up. He's a Gen Z kind of guy, and I have hardly ever spoken to him on the phone even though we text regularly. Was something wrong??

Nothing was wrong -- he wanted to tell me a funny story from one of his classes. But he wanted to tell me in German, and I couldn't keep up. The connection was bad, and it felt harder to untangle what he was saying with no visual input, and after a few minutes I said, "Sorry, sweetheart, can we switch to English?" 

Anyway: the point is that he likes thinking about constructing sentences in German and he was well equipped to give his sister some useful input. But instead he told her to say she likes to eat delicious shoes.

"What in the world?" I asked him.

It goes back to Joe, who told Pete before his first-ever German class that he should greet the teacher with "ich mag Schuhe essen!" Pete is a dutiful guy, and he introduced himself to Frau H. with "ich mag Schuhe essen!" He's not sure she'll remember it, though; she might just think Stella, like Miracle Max, is partial to a tasty MLT. In this case, though, it's a Mary Jane, lettuce, and tomato.

Not a lattice

"I'm glad I"m not in school right now," said Stella upon her return from outside. "It'd be miserable doing PE in this weather." 

"They wouldn't let you," I said. "Just like they have a floor temperature in the winter, below which you can't do outdoor PE--"

"--40 degrees--" she reminded me.

"--they'd have a ceiling temperature. Like, above 90 degrees you'd have to stay inside in the air conditioning. Now, when I was a girl...." I trailed off there, because it's a running joke in this house for grownups to talk about The Olden Days. I was thinking back to the half of my childhood that I spent in New Orleans, tearing around outside in ridiculous heat and humidity. Indoor recess was not a thing at Ella Dolhonde Elementary School.

"Don't you mean when you were a lattice?" Stella asked.

"...a...lattice?" I echoed, totally perplexed.

"You know how men say, 'When I was a lad'? So weren't you a lad-ess?"

"A lass," I reminded her. "The word you want there is lass."

Nur auf Deutsch

Pete is in AP German this year, taking the AP exam in May. (Not the point of this post, but: can you even believe that my first blog baby is turning 17 this spring?) He really, really wants a 5. In the past year or so he has discovered a fiery enthusiasm about the workings of language: he reads linguistics texts for fun and has decided that he wants to study computational linguistics in college instead of majoring in plants.

His determination to get better at German has highlighted for him -- and for me -- the gulf between genuine proficiency in a language and competent performance in a high school class. He has recruited me as his companion in the quest for genuine proficiency. When I am biking to nowhere in the basement, he sits with me and we practice German vocabulary. In the evenings sometimes we listen to the Slow German podcast on Spotify. And now he has decided that the two of us should only speak German to each other. 

Have I told you my story of learning German? It was a Life Lesson in the limitations of proficiency testing. In the fall quarter of my freshman year I took elementary German and loved it. My instructor was an Irish grad student, and I am still unlearning the Irish accent with which I unknowingly adorned my beginner German. The only thing, though, was that I thought the class should move faster. I decided I would take a Latin literature class instead during the winter quarter, learn second-quarter German on my own, and jump back in for the spring quarter. 

As spring quarter approached I began to have second thoughts, and I spent a fair amount of spring break cramming reflexive verbs into my brain. But it worked out swimmingly, and I decided to do the same thing again: take French in the fall quarter of my sophomore year, and jump back into winter-quarter German.

At the beginning of the winter quarter I got cold feet. It had been more than six months since I had been in a German classroom. Was I going to land myself in hot water? What if I didn't remember enough of the German I had taught myself in seat-of-the-pants fashion? I decided to take the proficiency test, and placed into a third-year class. This seemed bonkers to me, but the placement coordinator was not eager for me to take a second-year class once I had passed his test. "Off you go!" he said. "This test is a bear! You'll be fine." 

This is how, with only two-thirds of the first-year German curriculum under my belt, I wound up in a third-year German lit class for which I was woefully underprepared. HOO BOY, I still remember the inner shiver I felt when the imposing professor would look at me over the tops of his spectacles. "Und was denken Sie, Fräulein Most?" he would rumble, and I would tremble. I squeaked by, with many tears and much gnashing of teeth, and never took another German class. (I was also left with some enduring skepticism about the merits of proficiency testing.)

It turns out that a long-ago class on post-war German fiction doesn't really equip a person to hold a conversation in German, so I have been filling in some of the gaps slowly, leaning on Duolingo, children's books, and chats with Pete. I have learned most of what Duolingo has to teach me, but there's still such a long way to go. 

Pete's idea that we should only speak to each other in German is a real stretch for me: I just don't have the vocabulary. But I am trying, with a lot of circumlocution and sound effects. This morning I was trying to tell him about a complicated local situation that arose in the wake of a snowstorm, and I needed to know how to say "tow truck." (Turns out it's Abschleppwagen: away-haul-wagon.) I also don't have good code-switching abilities. If I were fluent, I could slide back and forth between German and English without thinking too much about it. Instead of sliding, I am clunking. "SPEAK GERMAN," I tell my brain, and it does its best to comply. But then Elwood asks me a question and I have to pause. "NOT TO ELWOOD," I tell my brain, which has obligingly served up a response to his question in a language he does not speak.

I have been preaching the glories of language to my children for as long as I have had children, and they have mostly nodded along without sharing my enthusiasm. But Pete, suddenly, turned around and said "YES, GLORIOUS, SO GLORIOUS!" It's so much fun.

(He thought I should write this blog post in German, but I exercised my veto power on that one.)

Advanced Age

Today I was sorting through some papers and from the comfort of my couch I dealt with a check that needed to be deposited. I have known for years that this option existed, but I've always just gone to the ATM (or sometimes to the teller inside). "Elwood," I said to the person in my household least likely to use electronic banking options, "guess what I just did? It's because I'm so hip and cool, just like the kids these days."

"Ah, yes," he said, "that's exactly what the kids these days are doing: depositing paper checks."

We laughed.

**

Today I got the itch to pull out my violin for the first time in a long time, and Pete wanted to talk about the tiny quarter-sized violin that lives under the music room loveseat. "It was mine when I was little," I told him. "I got it when I was four."

"Wow," he said. "So it's REALLY* OLD!"

*Pete, reading over my shoulder, disputes this recollection. He says it was "kinda old," which might be true. But I'll point out that it's entirely possible to say "kinda" in a tone that means "really."

We joked about it at dinner, how he keeps bumping up against the fact that his parents' childhoods fell in an era that feels like the distant past to him. 

**

Tonight he was sitting on the couch next to me and he said, "I know you've been sad today, and I wish I could help. But you don't have to tell me why you're sad if you don't want to." It was a small thing I've been trying unsuccessfully to shake off all day, so I told him. He responded so kindly. He said, "When I come to you and I feel sad, you can always help me feel better. I wish I could do that for you, but I guess it just comes with age OOOHHHHH NOOOOOOO!" He went on, "I was trying to make you feel better and instead I just said you were oooooold!"

But I laughed so hard that I did wind up feeling better.

25

On this day 25 years ago, my oldest son was born. This means I have been a mom for 49% of my life now.

I was worried about being a mother. I was afraid I would be bad at it, and it seemed like a pretty high-stakes thing to be bad at. One of the great gifts of motherhood is that it has compelled me to be less afraid of making mistakes. 

Back in the summer, a couple of weeks apart, two people close to me said things that I wanted to remember and also felt shy about recording here. But I am going to blog them anyway, before they slip into the mists of murky memory.

One of my best friends has spent a lot of time here with my kids and me, and she said something that took me by surprise. She said, "It is part of the culture of your family that your children adore you." She described a moment in June when one of my big kids was upset, and looked to me to put things in perspective. She said, "It's not that I'm envious -- but no, actually, I'm a little envious." 

My brother saw us in August for the first time in two years, and he said, "One of my favorite things about spending time with your family is how much you all obviously enjoy being together."

I did not know, 25 years ago, how many good things awaited me. I did not know how much love I would soak up, how much merriment we would enjoy together. I did not know that my inscrutable baby would become one of my favorite adults. Twenty-five years ago tonight he lay in the NICU, mechanically ventilated after a traumatic birth resulting in an initial APGAR of 1. When, in those early days, I thought about what the future might hold, I was pretty pessimistic.

I was so wrong. I'm so glad I was so wrong.

They have their own thoughts

The title of this post comes from the Kahlil Gibran poem about children, the one with the line about how we can house their bodies but not their souls. When I was a kid I thought it was very sensible, especially the bits like "You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you." When I got older I wondered if Kahlil Gibran had had any children of his own. (Google suggests that he did not, but I could be wrong about that.) It is a true fact about teenagers that they have a knack for taking the things that are particularly important to you and choosing them as the ground in which to plant their flags, to say, "I am separate from you; I am different from you."

Case in point: I have a kid who spent his entire childhood hearing that it is good to live simply, to embrace frugality, to go thrifting instead of buying new, to opt for less house and less car than you can afford so that you have more margin for giving and saving. And this child, once grown, pursued affluence with determination bordering on ferocity. He is a generous guy with a good head on his shoulders, but he is not interested in eating any more lentils.

This has happened in different ways with both of my 20-something children, and I have done my best to roll with it -- to let them know that I love them always, whichever flags they happen to be flying in whichever bits of territory I had marked out as important. But you know, sometimes a parent has to take a stand.

Joe came home last weekend and he said, "Mom and Dad, I might get disowned for this."

I raised an eyebrow.

He cleared his throat. "I've been buying fat-free cheese."

So yes, it's true: you can spend almost TWO DECADES telling a kid that fat is what God put in food to make it taste good, and backing it up with actual taste-bud-tickling evidence, only to have them reject the truth and embrace the lie of fat-free "cheese."

I'm still getting over that one.

That does not seem quite fair

If you've been around for a while, you might remember the Night of the Bat. I was lying next to Stella right before she went to sleep, and a bat wriggled in between the storm and the window. We heard it skittering in distress there. It still gives me the shivers to remember its winged silhouette, scrabbling frantically at the interior glass.

This felt like a worrying development, in the moment. I was pretty sure that a bat able to squeeze in through the tiny space between the upper and lower parts of the storm window could find a way to squeeze through the similarly tiny space between between the upper and lower parts of the interior window, and the prospect caused me some alarm.

Recently Stella was telling the story, and I discovered that our memories diverged. In my version of the story, I told Stella in a calm but firm voice to go right away and lie down in Joe's room with the door closed while I figured out how to relocate the bat safely. But in Stella's version, I said, "AAAAAHHHHHH, IT'S A BAT GET OUT OF HERE GO GO GO GO GO!!!!!!!!!!" Only with more exclamation points.

I suppose in a way we are both right. What actually came out of my mouth would have passed for calm and firm with anyone, literally anyone, outside my immediate family. I promise you, it would have sounded calm and firm to you. But my kids know me well enough to know when I am faking the calm part, and Stella was filling in my (completely accurate) thought bubble.

I've grumbled about this before, the way that my kids knew I was faking calm when our car developed a power train fault while we were hundreds of miles from home. The part I didn't know was that their brains -- or at least Stella's brain -- will apparently just go ahead and fill in the flail-y inner monologue even though I am doing an EXTREMELY PERSUASIVE impersonation of a calm person responding sensibly to a fixable problem.

Maybe it's good that kids know me so well? Maybe it's good that it's rare for me to try to hide something from them, even if the something is panic? I'm casting about for a positive spin here, because it does not seem quite fair to me.

Gladly Family Annals

On this date my 16yo got up on Saturday morning and started on his weekend chores, unprompted. He took the recycling outside and thought to himself, "Huh, the grass is pretty long and it's my turn to mow and it's only going to get warmer. I'd better do it now." He mowed the grass and put the mower away; he came back inside and went about his Saturday morning business. (He opted for the motorless mower, so this was a quiet undertaking. And our lawn is tiny, so it only took 20 minutes or so.)

I am now in my second decade of mothering teenagers and this is the first time one of them has ever said, unprompted, "You know what I think I'll do? Mow the grass, that's what." I was outside admiring the blooming bachelor's buttons when it dawned on me that the grass was mysteriously shorter than it had been and there were severed bits of it lying on the lawn. What could have happened? Was it, like, an alien crop circle except in a rectangle? 

I scrunched up my face in puzzlement and turned to Pete. "Did you...mow?" "You noticed!" he said.

Tonight at dinner we were talking about all the years in which there was all that seemingly endless peeing on the floor. "Having kids sounds really hard," said Pete. "Is it worth it?" "Yes," I said, "a thousand times yes." And even though this is the fourth time I've watched it happen it's still the coolest thing to see: the way that the little tiny person who needed so much help grows into a teenager who wants to give back.

Get off my mawn, she said

Tonight at dinner Stella asked if we could have a socially distanced yard sale. I thought (but did not say), "I'd rather have a tooth filled than have a yard sale, even when there isn't a pandemic happening. COVID probably bumps it up into 'I'd rather have a root canal' territory." What I said was, "What would you want to sell?""

"Lots of things," she answered. "The old strollers. And the mawnlower."

"The what?" asked Joe.

"The mawnlower," she continued, "and lots of the old things in the garage."

"Hold on," said Joe, "tell me more about the mawnlower."

Stella realized her error and blushed, but we all liked the substitution. "It works," said one of the boys, "because when you cut the grass you do actually lower it."

"I think that one will stick around," I said. "Like girl cheese sandwiches."

I said. "You know, sometimes I feel bad about our lawn because it's not a neat expanse of turf. Sometimes I tell myself that it's good to buck the lawn-as-monoculture trend and just embrace the violet/clover/wild strawberry/creeping charlie situation, and sometimes I look at it and feel like I'm flunking Homeowner 101. But what if it's not supposed to be a lawn? What if it's actually a mawn? A mawn that we lower when it gets too shaggy!"

Joe added, "Maybe there could be a mawnlower for your scalp. When your hair gets too high, you lower it! And someone needs to invent a mawnhigher for when you get too much hair cut off."

I think that the person who brings a mawnhigher to market as a solution for haircuts gone wrong could make a lot of money.

Tonight's dinner also featured a Jokes We Know And Love segment, with this contribution from my husband:

An infinite number of mathematicians walks into a bar. The first one says to the bartender, "I'll have a beer." The second one says, "I'll have half a beer." The third one says, "I'll have a quarter of a beer." "All right, all right," says the bartender. He pushes two beers in their direction. "You've reached your limit."

Tell me: are people having socially distanced yard sales in your neck of the woods? Or un-socially distanced yard sales? I'm feeling like this whole season is one long fraught negotiation, in which we're all just making our best guesses with inadequate and alarmingly polarized information. 

Awkward Phone Calls

Joe wants to go to a party at a friend's house. It's more complicated since he's at boarding school. I used to know lots of his classmates' parents because we waited outside together for our grade-schoolers to head out and walk home with us, and then I knew(-ish) a moderate number of his junior high classmates' parents because we had friends in common, and now I only know a tiny handful of his classmates' parents because he goes to school two hours away.

It's great for him to have far-flung friends who invite him to visit and be part of things with their families. I'm in favor of that idea. It also makes the "trust but verify" approach to parenting teens a little trickier to execute. In June he was invited to an older friend's graduation party, and his plan was to stay overnight with a different kid who was also attending the party. I asked him for a phone number to check in with a parent at the house where he was going to stay. I can't remember now if Joe said "Nobody else's mom is calling the hosts," or if I just felt awkward about it after the last time I tried to check in about a party in advance, but I definitely felt a little weird about it. The other mom was great -- she seemed perfectly happy to talk to me -- but I felt like Joe's Old-Fashioned Mom Being Embarrassing.

Not long after that Joe invited some friends to come and visit. They came from almost three hours away and stayed overnight with us, and I did not hear a single peep from a single one of the parents. This still strikes me as a little unlikely. How do they know I'm not running a cult? I mean, okay, I'm probably not going to lure their impressionable children into the Cult of Soul-Suckedness, or sell their organs on the black market while they sleep, but how do they know I'm even going to be home? Would you put a 17-year-old into the car and send him three hours away without confirming that there would be an adult at his destination?

Joe wants to go to a party at another friend's house this weekend, far enough from school that he'll be staying overnight again. I would like to check in with the parents before I give my teenager permission to leave campus with them, but I'm a little uncomfortable about being Joe's Old-Fashioned And Embarrassing Mom -- especially if I'm the only mom in his friend group cut from that particular cloth.

I'm pretty sure I'll do it anyway, but only pretty sure.

There will be toast in America

On an October day in 1999 I woke up early, in labor with my second son. I labored quietly all day, and less quietly all night, until with an immense exhausting effort I brought him forth shortly before dawn.

The midwife turned him over and I saw his face for the first time. We had no boys' names chosen, but I knew immediately what his name was.

I am awash in tactile memories from those early days: of walking the hospital hallways in the wee hours before he was born, of the warmth of him tucked in my encircling arm as we rested afterward, of the weight of him tucked in a sling, of the vanished smell of his milky breath.

He moved out today.

This is a normal healthy thing for my normal healthy teenager to do, I know. We are all kinds of lucky to be able to send him off like this. But I am going to sit here and leak a few more slow tears into this keyboard, because his departure is leaving a hole in my world. He has become such a great kid: thoughtful, reliable, interesting. Plus he laughs at my jokes, even the obscure ones. 

The night that we left Scotland, 18 years ago now, our oldest son was in a state. He didn't remember life in the US, and he was worried about what he would be leaving behind. "Will there be toast in America?" he asked urgently. "Will there be bread in America? Will there be butter?" "Yes, darling," I told him. "There will be toast in America."

It became a family joke, a gentle reminder for our children that our fears are often unreasonable, no matter how fiercely they may burn. "I can assure you," I told my 18yo yesterday, as he stewed about what else he might need to pack, "that there will be toast in Mathlyville."

Only two children will sleep under my roof tonight, the youngest of whom is halfway to adulthood. I have presided over a crowded house and a noisy dinner table for so long that I feel adrift when I think about empty bedrooms and quiet meals. I don't know what the future holds, but it looks like it will involve less laundry.

So I am reminding myself today, too: it is reasonable and fitting to feel uncertain about journeying into the unknown. But there will be toast in America. And even butter.

Maybe screen time is underrated as a summer activity

Today I told the kids that I needed an hour's worth of Concentration-with-a-capital-C, in which I could get week 2 of my online summer class all ready to roll, and then we went out for a picnic afterward. We pulled up to the park just as a bunch of kids from our parish school showed up, and after Stella finished her lunch she ran off to play with a friend.

Except...then she disappeared. I wasn't worried at first, because there's a lot of tall equipment at this park and there were a lot of kids running around. But after a bit I said to Petely, "I'm going to find Stella. Can you stay with our things?"

She wasn't climbing the trees on the south edge of the playground. She wasn't splashing in the little creek. I thought maybe I should run back to the shelter where the school kids had their drinks and snacks set up, but something nudged me to keep going further away from the playground. I called her name. No answer. I kept calling, thinking, "She can't possibly have come this far," and there was still no answer. But when I stopped calling, I heard crying.

The reason I couldn't see her and the reason she couldn't hear me were the same reason: she had climbed a tree -- a colossal pine tree with lovely tempting closely-spaced branches -- and wound up terrified on a high branch, too fearful to move.

You guys, she was more than 25 feet up.

In the moment I was the calmest briskest most confident version of myself. "You are going to be OKAY, darling," I called up with utter conviction. "Take a deep breath and say a Hail Mary!" [pausing for a sec here to swallow back some tears, because the certainty that infused my voice was not entirely warranted under the circumstances] I didn't quite know what to do, though. My tree-climbing skills are not what they used to be, and I was worried that I might make the situation worse if I went after her -- getting stuck myself, or blocking the path downward, or something. I tried to talk her through it, but that didn't work very well ("try that branch! no, sweetie, the one pointing east!" --not so helpful, Mom). And she was so scared. I talked her over to a spot where two branches formed a V she could sit on, and told her I was going to get Pete, the current tree-climbing champ in our family, to help her out.

I pelted back to our picnic table, directing some very emphatic petitions to her guardian angel as I went, and sent Pete running to her tree. When I saw him in action I was really grateful I hadn't tried to go after her myself-- he seemed stuck only a third of the way up, and he was on the opposite side of the trunk unable to see how to help.

Somehow I was still entirely calm. "You don't have to be afraid, sweetheart," I yelled up at her. "You can absolutely do this. I am going to take you and Pete out for ice cream after you get down, and we are going to sit together at our table and laugh about this."

Slowly at first, and then faster, she found a path back down. I want to remember the way it felt to hug her when she was back on the ground: the smell of sun-warmed hair and the stickiness of sap-splotched hands and the RELIEF, the towering staggering RELIEF that she had not fallen from 25 feet.

"That was really hard, Stella," said Pete. "How'd you do it?"

"When Mom said we would go for ice cream," she told him, "I decided I could do it."

We have agreed that tree-climbing is an activity that requires a buddy.

This is the same park where Pete concussed himself six years ago. Maybe...we need a different park.

Obsolescence is actually overrated

Shortly before my oldest son started eighth grade, I wrote a wistful post prompted by two friends who were each sending their oldest daughters off to college. Isn't it strange how quickly they change, I mused.

I am writing this post shortly after my oldest son finished college. (No, you didn't lose track of time there. He finished on an unusually speedy schedule, assisted by college math classes taken as a high school junior and senior along with a bunch of AP credit.) He spent a couple of weeks with us over Christmas, and last night I took him back to his apartment.

The NYC internship from last summer has turned into a full-time job. He'll be traveling for all of January -- a birthday trip with friends, a work trip to Switzerland, a work trip to Canada -- and then settling down in New York City at the beginning of February. I've known this for a while now. This is a great next step for him. It is exactly what he wants: they will compensate him well to do work he loves in his favorite city. Who could ask for anything more?

Well, me. That's who.

I got out of the car last night to hug him. I said, "I hope your adventures..." And then my voice stopped working. 

He's been leaving for a while now, my Alex has. The summer after I wrote that post he CIT'd at Scout camp, and then he worked there during the following two summers. He hasn't really lived in our house since May of 2015. He had already started talking about returning to his apartment as "going home." And yet-- it's different now. It was weird having him in NYC last summer, but it was temporary. Most of the time we could pop over to campus and bring him home for a sibling's birthday. He never needed me to bring him chicken soup when he was sick, but the option existed. I was still the person who sent him to the dentist.

IT IS SILLY TO BE WEEPY ABOUT MAKING ONE LESS DENTIST APPOINTMENT, JAMIE. SUPER SUPER SILLY.

[pauses to find a Kleenex]

While he was home he spent hours and hours helping his brother with college applications, nudging my 18yo through multiple revisions until he wound up with an essay to be proud of. Late one night he came to Stella's aid, fetching her water and Tylenol and rinsing out a puked-in trash can without ever waking me up. I slipped out to feed the meter quickly while we were having lunch one day, and he picked up the check while I was gone.

And he's just so funny -- so funny. [makes a valiant effort not to say "WHO WILL MAKE ME LAUGH NOW?!?!"]

On the morning he was born, 21 years ago, things looked bleak initially. His initial APGAR was 1; after urgent resuscitation efforts he spent a day on a ventilator and a few more days recovering. When the midwife was narrating the NICU staff's resuscitation efforts she said to me, "He has your cleft in his chin, Jamie." I thought about that moment when we were at my parents' house for his birthday weekend; I could see that cleft clearly in silhouette, covered with red stubble. I look at that chin, that red stubble, and I think, "That's my boy."

The nature of that possessive pronoun has been changing across his whole life. He was wholly mine as an infant, less so as a toddler, less and less so as the years stole by. He is still mine, and also no longer mine. It is fitting and appropriate, and also kind of painful.

So here you go, New York; we are sending you our brilliant generous hilarious handsome firstborn. Please treat him kindly.

House of Geeks, part 3,762,598

I am feeling quiet this morning, after an earlier-than-usual start to the day and a tiring workout, so I am just listening while the CRAUVAS twins* chat.

My 18yo is feeling unusually chatty this morning. He starts off telling his sister about the development of color terms in other languages. (He's firmly on the side of Berlin and Kay.) They look up the Arabic word for "blue"; he struggles to pronounce it. "Their grammar is different from ours," Stella opines. "That's true," her older brother says kindly, "but what's relevant here is their phonotactics."

The topic shifts and they pull the Molymod set down. In this picture he is saying "And your body builds its own proteins! And do you know about DNA yet?" -- followed shortly by "Let me show you where we keep our polysaccharides," and a quick trip to the flour canister.

*One morning I woke up my now-18yo, but I called him by his sister's name. "Mom," he groaned, "wrong name." On the face of it this was a ridiculous mistake to make -- he was six feet tall with a big baritone voice and she was not -- but I thought about it for a minute. "I know!" I exclaimed. "It's because both of your names start with anterior unchecked vowels followed by alveolar sonorants!" "Mom," he groaned again, "it's too early for that stuff." We have another child whose name starts with an anterior unchecked vowel followed by an alveolar sonorant, but he isn't living here now. So the CRAUVAS twins are the Currently Resident Anterior Unchecked Vowels-Alveolar Sonorants kids. Just in case you wondered.

Eighteen years is not as long as it used to be

October 29, 1999

October 29, 2017

Welcome to adulthood, sweetheart.

One lovely day

This morning I woke up at 8:30 in a house that held all six of my most favorite people in the world. The littles waited patiently for me to finish coffee and Lauds, after which I made pancakes and said yes to Nutella on top (though seriously, Stella, shall we review the importance of temperance?). We went to church together, all lined up in one pew. The two oldest boys are taller than both of us; Joe is taller than me but not Elwood. I didn't know, when they were small and Mass was a struggle, that I would be so happy to get them all back in one pew again.

After Mass Elwood ran to the grocery store for picnic supplies, while I whipped up chocolate pudding for the younger kids and mocha pudding for the older ones. (Mocha pudding = stir a splash of leftover coffee into the chocolate pudding.) I packed it up in the cooler and we all headed out into the sunshine.

After we picnicked Pete asked us to kick soccer balls toward his makeshift goal so he could practice defending it. We played a brief and breathless game of family ultimate frisbee, and Elwood headed out with Alex to return him to school.

After our goodbyes the rest of us made a Target run and a batch of Instant Pot potato-leek soup. My mother-in-law wanted to talk to me about a couple of things, and we chatted for a while as I was prepping dinner. She and my father-in-law were on the phone together, talking about their time with Joe last weekend. "You have done such a good job with those kids," she said, and he chimed in. "They are just so nice to be around."

This is not, you guys, a thing I would ever have thought I'd hear from them when I was in the trenches 10 and 15 years ago -- not in my wildest imaginings. If you are dealing with challenging toddlers just now, may I offer you a little smidgin of perspective? It really does get better, faster than you think it will in the moment.

Alex is gone, and Joe goes back tomorrow, and so I'm not sure when I will wake up again in a house with my six favorite people in it. But I'm really grateful for the chance to do it two days in a row. I'm really grateful for those six people.

Sweet Freedom

Back in December I blogged briefly about a really painful conversation with the mother of one of my kids' friends. At the time I estimated that I deserved about 30% of the wrath she directed at me: my kid exercised bad judgment in her home, I followed up with the kid but not with this other mom, and when the same kid had an absent-minded moment a few days later the mom flipped out. I mean she FLIPPED OUT. It was ridiculous.

All jumbled up with her legitimate frustration was this other crud that I found very frustrating. She left an academic career to stay home with her kids. She thinks I am prioritizing career above children, and she felt compelled to remind me that my children need me. Oh, the earnestness with which she told me that they love me -- as if this had escaped my notice. Also mixed in: she thinks I am dangerously negligent because I have free-range kids. She told one of my kids, in all seriousness, that it would be irresponsible for her to permit said kid to sit alone on our porch for five minutes because of kidnappers. I might be heedless of my children's safety, but dernit, she would shield them from the bad guys on my behalf.

So. If you happened to think that I might be some sort of neighborhood parenting guru, let me assure you there are divergent opinions around here on the quality of my mothering.

It's complicated, though, because of the kids. I'm not willing to say that I will never interact with her again, because that would cause avoidable distress. Our kids miss each other keenly when they don't spend time together. Yesterday my youngest invited her youngest to come to the library with us.

Our library is a friendly place and my youngest kids have been going there since they were tiny babies. Pete and I were looking for books downstairs; Stella and the neighbor girl wanted to go upstairs. "Okay, girls," I said to them as they waited by the elevator, "I'll met you up there in just a minute."

Neighbor Girl turned to Stella, her eyes wide. "We're going in the elevator BY OURSELVES?" she gasped. Reader, she lived to tell the tale.

I hope, though, that she didn't tell that particular tale to her mother. I'm already in a deep enough hole.

Tenderly

After I wrote about the awkward sleepover situation I was thinking about the way I use my blog to process difficult interactions. If a person in my life makes me grumpy, odds are high that he or she will end up in these pages. This might leave you with the impression that I spend my life caroming from cranky to crabby and back again, but the reality is much happier. "I should write more happy blog posts," I thought to myself.

Last night was the first night of my fall running group. I was feeling a little uncomfortable about going after so much time on the couch this summer, but off I went anyway. It was, as is almost always the case, a ton of fun. We ran hills. (Well, this is Gladlyville. We ran a hill, repeatedly.) It was hard, in a good way. Everybody was welcoming. Nobody said, "Well, Jamie Gladly, I can see you've been hanging out on the couch all summer."

I didn't feel great afterward, and by the time I got home I was feeling decidedly icky-- dizzy and nauseated. I eased into the house and thought about sitting down on the steps by the back door, but instead I shuffled over to the couch and curled up there. I was okay as long as I lay still, but every movement brought a swell of nausea.

This doesn't sound like a happy post, right? Here's the happy part. 

Elwood came over and said, "Wow, you look beat. Can I get you anything?" "I'm going to be okay," I told him. "Just dizzy and nauseated."

Pete came over and said, "Mom, are you okay? Can I get you anything?" He patted me gently.

My 17yo came over separately and said, "Mom, are you okay? Do you need anything?"

Stella was playing outside, but when she came back in she checked on me right away: "Mom, are you okay? Do you need something?"

I told the kids that I thought I might just need some food, that I'd only eaten one meal that day and it had been a hard run. "That wasn't your best idea," said Pete, who fetched the tray they use for Mother's Day breakfast in bed and loaded it up. Pear, banana, Nuun, water-- all nice and digestible. "I brought you some [unintelligble] too," he said. He was aiming for "edamame," but wound up with something akin to "onomatopoeia." "I can get you some onomatopoeia if that would help!" exclaimed his older brother. "Bang! Drip! Crash! Splat! Cacophony! David Foster Wallace said cacophony is an example of onomatopoeia."

I ate the edamame appreciatively, and laughed at the onomatopoeia. I have been trying, you guys, to teach them what love looks like, and they have been paying attention. Love is feeding people. Love is trying to figure out what people need. Love is distracting people when they are suffering, making them laugh if you can. Meanwhile Elwood washed the dishes and set up the coffee for the next morning-- for him, love is service. 

Food didn't help; it seemed to be an attack of vertigo rather than low blood sugar. Elwood has used Epley's maneuvers on me successfully in past vertigo attacks, but they didn't do the trick last night. I went to bed, still wearing my sweaty running clothes because I was too nauseated to change into pajamas, and prayed for the best.

This morning I woke up free of nausea, feeling a little subdued but immensely grateful. I don't ever think (except in the wake of a vertigo episode) about what a gift it is to perceive my position in space easily: I am moving and that object is still; I am still and that object is moving. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, just like Joni Mitchell sang. So today I am attending to the many gifts I have been been given: a body that usually works pretty well here in its fifth decade, and a family full of people who love me more than I deserve.