All I Can Say

#84: My mother's gift

It was my mother who taught me, by example, how to let go. She lived her life open handed, and allowed things to slip through her fingers without any compulsion to grab onto them. She lost a father and two husbands before she was thirty-five, and let each one of them go. When we sold our island after my father died, and later the house that his parents had built, she let those go, too. And as she acquired things, it was her habit to purge what she no longer needed at pretty much the same rate. Despite her capacity for living a joyful life, there was also, always, a profound sense of loss about her.

Once I came home from school and found her stretched out on the sofa. She wore tartan plaid pants and a cream colored turtleneck. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she had her glasses on, oversized tortoise shell frames that magnified her dark eyebrows and lashes. She had fallen asleep reading, and her hands were folded lightly across her chest, resting on top of her book. Her mouth was turned down into a gentle frown. I stood by her feet, watching her, wanting and not wanting to wake her up. 

As I was growing up and negotiating my independence, I would ask for her permission to spend the night at a friend’s house, or to go on some excursion with my friends, and then later on, if I could take her car. My mother always answered me with the same weary resignation: “I guess,” she would sigh, as though I was asking for something that was costing her dearly.

But when it was time, she encouraged me to enroll in a college that was five hours away. And after graduation, she was the one who investigated a way for me to get my green card so that I could live and work in the United States, and be with my friends from college. I moved to Boston, ten hours away by car, and she visited me only once in three years. She said that she was happy after the visit to be able to picture me in my apartment, to have seen where I worked, and to visualize my new life. But she seemed unable to accompany me in any way; she only knew how to let me go, because that was how she survived.

It was my mother’s gift to me to let me go, and I know now that it did cost her dearly. There’s an inexorable sorrow within a mother’s love. We nurture growth, and growth leads our children out into the world, away from us.

#82: Urge for knowing

As a girl growing up in the heartland of Ontario, I’m not sure when I first became aware of the state of Maine. I didn’t read the McCloskey books, other than Make Way for Ducklings, so that wouldn’t have been my introduction. At some point in my youth, though, the perception of Maine as a sleepy, hazy, watery place took shape, and I can still call up that sketchy impression, despite that Maine has become every bit as familiar to me as my landlocked birthplace.

The first time I laid eyes on the ocean was from the oval window of an airplane that was taking my family and me to Florida when I was about six years old. The ocean was the color of my mother’s dazzling jade earrings, and an equally inviting milky green along the shore. I did not know water could be this color; Lake Huron, where we would go to the beach in the summer, was inky blue, almost black if it was overcast.

On that first trip to Florida, it was dark by the time we arrived at our hotel, and I remember changing into our pajamas and being allowed to run out onto the beach with my brother and sisters, struggling in the soft, cool sand, with the sultry wind whipping against us. The waves collapsing onto the beach produced the loudest natural sound I’d ever heard, and for seven nights we fell asleep to the ocean’s percussions from our little bungalow on the beach. Maine, my future home, was fifteen hundred miles up the coast, and I didn’t even know it existed.

By the time I went to college in upstate New York, I had learned a little more about Maine: that it’s a large but thinly populated state; that it contains vast forests; that it’s best known for fishing and lobstering. I finally met my first Mainer in college. But I did not know that I would one day live here.

And all through those years at college I slept under the warmth of a twin size feather duvet that, eventually, was passed along to my daughter. I did not know I would have a daughter. If I had been given some foreshadowing of this, it might have made all the difference to me during my darkest days when what I considered my “real life” seemed so hopelessly in the future. Sometimes I imagine that I can travel back and whisper into my younger self's ear and offer some encouragement: "Have faith. Hang in there. You're going to be okay." But maybe I can do this in some way after all. Maybe that's what it is to believe in yourself.

When I first came here to Maine and met JH, I climbed four flights of stairs to his office. We shook hands. We talked about his work and what was going on in town (not much). We were each involved with someone else, so of course I did not know that we would marry, and raise kids together, and grow older together and, and…

the rest is unknowable.

#79: For want of sleep

I didn’t sleep well as a child. When I was about seven or eight, the attic rooms in our house, which had been finished off into a nanny’s quarters, were redecorated to accommodate my two sisters and me. My older sister had her own room, and my younger sister and I shared the other. They were sprawling rooms with dormer windows and lots of irregular roof angles. The walls and ceiling were covered with a white wallpaper that had a random pattern of irregular shaped yellow spots in different sizes. Quintessential Seventies cool.

Staring up from my bed, the spots jumped and spun, and if I strained my eyes a little I could make the spots converge. I decided that a particular grouping of three spots, two on top and one below, was the shape of God. I could stare at my walls and see in them my own personal image of God. We were not very religious and rarely went to church, so I wasn’t familiar with the iconography or the liturgy. When my best friend sat down at our piano once and plunked out Jesus Loves Me, singing loud and without any subtlety, I was appalled. To me, her song was both presumptuous and naïve.

Long after bedtime, my younger sister and I would play quietly together, refusing to go to sleep. And when she finally tucked herself into bed, I would sit at the top of the stairs listening to the house sounds — the clicks and hums and gurgles — and feel the vibrations through the floor. I'd rock back and forth slightly, entranced by the creaking in my body that traveled through my jaw, down my neck, into my spine. Eventually I would lie down on the carpet, pulling my ice cold feet up inside my nightgown. Often my bones were aching — elongating. At some point, I would crawl off to bed.

Lately I’ve been in a poor sleep pattern. I wake up in the middle of the night and toss and turn for hours, my back, hips and legs throbbing from not properly stretching after exercise. The other morning at around four o’clock, I heard the startling but familiar call of a single bird. A robin’s call — one high plaintive note followed by a low one. But it sounded strange — abbreviated and somehow strained — and it went unanswered. The temperature outside was well below zero, and I wondered if this was a sacrificial robin, the one in the flock chosen to stay behind to see if it could survive the winter — a canary in the coal mine. How else would migratory patterns change?

But then all was quiet, and I thought maybe I had only imagined the robin call in my half-awake state.

#60: And playing the part of the victim today will be...someone else

I give you fair warning that, once again, I am looking backward to when I was a young girl. About 12 or 13.

One of my friends had a creepy dad. If he drove a group of us to the movies, he would reach his hand into the backseat and try to grab our legs, grunting and laughing. If you were the unlucky one stuck in the back seat behind him, that meant you were the last one out of the car, and he would be grabbing for you as you tried to scramble out and slam the door shut, screeching. When we were at her house, he would call me into the den where he would be lying on the couch and ask me to sit with him, which I would do, and he would keep me there, talking to me, putting his hand on my knee. I would sit frozen, with my eyes on the TV, just waiting for the chance to get away from him. Sometimes he would ask me to lie on top of him, and I know that I did once or twice, but I can’t summon clear details, other than that I felt trapped and embarrassed and desperate to escape. Eventually my friend would come in and rescue me, or from the kitchen her mother would say something like, “Oh leave her alone, for Pete’s sake.” Out of all the girls that ever came over, he singled me out, because I was painfully shy and he knew I wouldn’t say, “No way,” and run out of the room like my friends would all do. It was impossible for me to say something like that to an adult. I was defenseless; I did what I was told. I didn’t know that I had any choice in the matter. I suppose he thought this was all just fun and games, but it was torture for me. And I wonder what sorts of things went on between this pedophile father and his daughter.

For some reason, I lacked a voice, and a belief that what I wanted mattered — that I mattered — as a child. I was the perfect victim. Nothing happened to me, other than being coerced to lie fully clothed on top of a perverted man, who was also fully clothed. But it was still a kind of rape.

This sort of scenario could never happen to N, mainly because we talk all the time about her freedom to say no, to listen to the voice that tells her something isn’t right, and to act on her own behalf. She took karate for four years, and the most important thing she learned in all that time was not that she could put a swift sidekick into someone’s ribs, groin or knee if necessary. She learned that she has personal power, something I didn’t know when I was her age. So instead of being paralyzingly worried about N, I have confidence that she will know what to do in a difficult situation. This doesn't mean that I don’t protect her, but part of protecting her is giving her the skills she needs to protect herself.

And now I can protect myself, too. I have been practicing karate for three years, and making the decision to do it, putting on that uniform for the first time and tying that white belt around my waist, was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. I was entering into something incalculable and complicated and mysterious. But I found it liberating to be a beginner, and after a few months when I graduated to my yellow belt, I was regretful to leave that first part of the journey behind.

I feel empowered in many ways by my karate. I have physical power as well as some tricks up my sleeve, and if someone ever attacked me, I think he would be quite surprised by my reaction. I know for certain that I would act, that I wouldn’t cower and retreat and plead. I would kick and fight and be gone. That confidence feels good, although obviously I never want to be in the position to try it out. I don’t feel like a victim at all anymore. Some days during training, I will kick a pad or a bag with all my intensity, and it’s both the victimizers and the me-as-victim that I am in combat with.

I'm strong, but still very much a beginner.

What can we really ensure?

Have you heard about the school in Massachusetts that has banned the game of tag from the playground because it was deemed too dangerous and violent? The school officials state there is no way to ensure the safety of the children in their care if they are running and possibly pushing each other. That word comes up a lot when it comes to children and safety: ensure. And its evil cousin, insure, is always lurking there in the shadows, too.

Where does this idea come from that safety can be ensured? Parents, school administrators, insurance companies — and all their teams of lawyers — are in the business of insisting that we do that, or someone will pay. But the real price is being paid by our children, who are being raised these days like milk-fed veal.

I’m going to journey into my own childhood for a moment, noticing along the way all the invisible dangers I faced on a daily basis. From the age of 5, as a kindergartner, I walked to school and back, a mile each way, without any parental supervision. The kids were dismissed and we flowed like a river down the streets to our various homes. I don’t remember a single incident. It was a nice time, actually, after school, to wander home and notice the leaves on the trees, or the icicles melting, or the smell of the earth in springtime. It was a time when I would daydream, or walk with friends, or just kids I knew. Sometimes a game would start up, without any adult planning, and we would find ourselves in a group of kids we might not choose to play with: the nerds, the prissies, the bullies, the little brothers. And we found that we could get along with those kids too.

My parents never once called another parent to ask if Mary/Lisa/Diane would like to come over and play. Mary/Lisa/Diane was probably already over, or I was over at her house. There was no drop off and no pick up. We had choices and freedom, and we could explore together, get into fights and stomp home mad, or resolve them. We learned how to get along —  with the kids who were our friends and with the kids who weren’t. And everyone was home by dinner.

I didn’t look to my mother or father to entertain me. If I whined that I was bored I was told to go outside. And so I’d go. That sense of freedom nourished my imagination. I would get on my bike and ride around the neighborhood, inventing stories about what I saw. And there was something so electrifying about that. I could be anyone, anywhere, in any time.

We roamed the neighborhood and played kick the can, skateboarded down the street, rode bikes, jumped rope, played tennis against the school walls, climbed trees and played hide and seek. We even played tag. And when I think about it, there was so much physical activity we must have eaten heartily and slept like babies.

Today, it’s scheduled activities, play-dates, car seats and helmets — and all of these things are good things by themselves. It’s the excessive measures we take to ensure that our children are 100% safe at all times that is choking the life out of them, because there is no such thing as 100% safe. If we are alive then we are at risk of injury or death, no avoiding it. We can try to minimize that risk, but the tendency in this culture is to take this concept, like all concepts, to the extreme. In recent decades, I’ve noticed that the very word “extreme” has morphed from a negative into something decidedly positive.

How will today’s risk-averse mindset impact the next generation? My children! If I could give our kids anything, it would be more freedom so they could develop curiosity, originality, confidence and self-sufficiency. They would learn instincts, social skills and how to make decisions and live by them. I would let them play and actually compete, and winning would teach them drive, and losing would teach them empathy. Still, they wouldn't be 100% safe, but they’d be happier, and better equipped for what awaits them outside the safety gates of childhood.

Let’s have some faith and let the kids play tag!

True story

For a few years when I was a child, my family owned an island in Georgian Bay, Ontario. Back then, it was still a remote and mostly undiscovered part of Lake Huron, but now is overbuilt and overrun by cottagers. We enjoyed three or four blissful summers on that island, swimming, boating, exploring, picnicking, feasting on the blueberries that grew wild. When I was nine, my father hired a man to stay on the island until spring. There was even a caretaker’s house on one end that, unlike our cottage, was winterized. It was a typical sixties style ranch, outfitted with paneling and linoleum, and completely incongruous on its perch at the head of our natural, tranquil island. The caretaker and his family moved in at the end of summer, and when we would come up on weekends during the fall, my two sisters and brother and I would play with their three children. One of the boys was older than us, in high school, and the other boy was about my age. Their youngest was a girl who was eight, my younger sister’s age.

We arrived on Friday night and ran straight to the caretaker’s cottage. Having playmates on the island, other than each other, was thrilling for us, even though it seemed odd for them to be so at home on our island, and to have them take us places and show us things, instead of the other way around.

Saturday, my little brother and sister and I were splashing our feet in the chilly water in one of the island’s little bays. The caretaker’s younger boy was climbing a tree that reached out over the water. There was some discussion about secrets, and could we be trusted — we assured him we could. So he scrabbled down the tree and led us to his house where his mother stood in the kitchen stirring something in an electric frying pan. We paraded past her and into one of the little bedrooms in back where, when we opened the door, we saw a makeshift pen that was built into the back half of the room, and contained swarms of pink-eyed rats, squirming around on the linoleum floor. There had to be more than a hundred of them. The boy told us his older brother was raising them to sell to a laboratory in Midland, the town where the three of them, exotically to me, went by boat to school each day. It was hot in there, and smelled of wood shavings and faintly of garbage. A smaller pen in the corner housed a dozen or so tiny babies, nearly translucent under the orange glow of the warming lights, their eyes hidden behind the thinnest film of waxy, pink skin.

The mother came in, wiping her hands on her apron, and herded us all out of the room. She seemed bewildered and anxious, and spoke to her son in hushed tones. “You said I could trust you,” the boy said when we were all outside. “Please don’t tell your father. You promised,” he pleaded. We hurried away. My little brother and sister did not want to tell on their new friend, but I disagreed. All those rats were more than just creepy; I knew they were dangerous, although I couldn’t say exactly how or why.

An hour later, the caretaker and his family were loading crates and crates of the rats onto their boat. Not until later did we learn that they themselves would be vacating our island for good. We didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to them, or to explain our betrayal. All the while they were packing up, we stayed on our side of the island, which would have to winter on its own that year.

In March my father died of meningitis, and a year after that we sold the island. I have never seen it since, but I dream of it, and I have always felt that it still somehow belongs to me.

My life in lasts

There are some things that I know for certain I will never do again. Not as in, I will never again sit through an entire all-school band concert. Not as in, I will never again eat a plate of nachos. I mean the kind of things that I know I will never do, that I can’t ever do. Like change N’s diaper. Feed G a bottle. See my mother’s face or hear my sister’s voice. I’ve done those things for the last time.

In some cases, I was aware of those “lasts” as they were unfolding. I seem to remember when N was giving up her bottle and taking notice of that last one, but I was pretty sure I would have another child so I knew there were bottles aplenty in my future. I was typically thrilled and unsentimental to see her move forward, out of her crib and into a big bed, out of the high chair, out of diapers. It’s hard to get sentimental about diapers, so that last went by without even the slightest backward glance.

But when was the last time I carried N? She is too big now to carry, other than via piggy back, which is not the same as cradling a child in your arms. I didn’t register that one, and I know she misses it; I do too. I can still carry G, which is now a good thing for my bone density. He loves to be carried, and will clasp his hands around my neck, lay his head on my shoulder, his long legs dangling below my knees. He still crawls into my lap daily and curls up, and I will wrap my arms around him, trying to provide the enclosure that he wants. Sweet. But how much longer will he want this?

“You can’t go back,” I told N, in tears, last night — to fourth grade. She is feeling overwhelmed by all that is expected of her this year. No more pandering in middle school, and I know the fact that she is struggling is partly my fault. In my hyper-efficiency I have been doing a lot of her organizing for her. I’ve been packing up her bag, making her bed, making sure that if it’s a P.E. day she’s wearing sneakers. So it probably seems unfair that I am totally backing off this year and letting her sink or swim. She is floundering at the moment, but I know she’ll figure it out.

The thing about N is, she’s bright enough and sensitive enough to understand what I mean about not being able to go back. She has pined for what she thinks of as her glory days — when she was two — ever since. It was a kind of peak for her, in a way. Precocious child that she was, all her feedback was positive at that age, and in that respect I can see how it’s gone downhill for her. And I do understand how she feels about wanting to go back to fourth grade. I remember when I turned eight, crawling into my parents’ bed that night and sobbing uncontrollably. I was growing old and I knew it. I was eight and I knew I could not go back.

We can't take notice of each and every one of our lasts, because doing so would interfere with the task of living. Sometimes the best we can do is recall and re-examine from some distance down the road. And the perspective that we gain over time can be helpful in understanding ourselves, but not always. I think there are times when what we see looking back is just plain off. So if no one can know about tomorrow, and even our memory of yesterday is unreliable, then all we really have is the current moment, the right now. And the task — the privilege — of living.

Am I strong enough?

In her blog, Stay of Execution (check it out: http://www.scheherazade.org), Sherry writes the very provocative statement, “I emerged from college more broken than I went in.” Wow. Me too.

I went off to college with a self-assurance that I haven’t seen since. What I really was though, was naïve. I had come from the extremely protective environment of an all-girls school and I had absolutely no sense that others were judging me. Wrong. They were, but I was blissfully unaware. So I arrived at college as a young girl who was free, and I came out imprisoned by the judging eyes of others. Stops along the way were: disillusionment, devastation, cynicism, recklessness, grief, and ultimately a realization that I had something to say that was worthwhile. I went in as a French major, and found creative writing, which put me on the road back to my self, and helped me survive those crazy four years with some dignity. It wasn’t all pain, either. I made some fabulous friends, and I could see that I was not alone in my struggles — everyone was trying to find his or her place. We had our ways of pushing all those insecurities aside, usually involving large quantities of beer. And, hey, that was fun.

My twenties were my most difficult decade, because I didn’t have the comfy college setting and I didn’t have that identity anymore. I needed to find something else — career, relationships, friends. I felt so much like I was in a state of suspension in those years, like I was waiting in the wings for my cue to enter the stage of life. I can view that as wasteful, but I was learning and growing during this time too.

In my thirties, I got married, had kids, and had to retool my identity yet again — not easy. But now at least I had what I had always wanted — husband, children, security. My purpose was uncomplicated: to keep my children safe and raise them with love; to help them realize their own potential; to be a good partner for my husband. Self be damned! Oh, but not for long. Self rears its head. Self refuses to be stifled. And that’s what my forties are all about, so far anyway.

The rebuilding has been hard work and plenty painful at times. And although I wish I had been better prepared for it, I think the tearing down at college was necessary. In the late teens we are busy fusing and hardening our craniums, and the teenage mindset itself seems sort of hard and closed. The self-centeredness, the petulance, the lack of empathy. No one can get away with that crap for very long! But it’s true: that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. My rebuilt self is way stronger than my old pre-college self, which is good for me, my relationship with my husband, my relationships with friends. And it’s certainly what I want to model for my daughter (my son too — although it just seems that girls are more embattled by this whole process), whose path will certainly take her through many of the same trials. Am I strong enough for that, though?