Carrots, Exercise, and Outside Time

Articles and friends told me, "Your kids will eat vegetables if you make them.  Make the vegetables the only option.  They'll come along."

Our children were four and two, and I thought, I have to get Sebastian (age 4) to eat more vegetables.  He eats only sweet potatoes for vegetables.  I will insist, and we will succeed.   I put the carrots on Mary's (age 2) plate and on Sebastian's plate.  He didn't eat them.  After dinner, I told him, "You have to eat those in order to be done."  He sat at the table some more, looking at the carrots.  I got ready to go to the YMCA to work out.  The kids wanted to come to play in the kid room; I said, "After you eat your carrots."  I was grouchy, inflexible, eager to get out the door.  He stood in the kitchen, this teary but determined four-year-old.  "Okay, okay, I will," he said.  I got more impatient, knowing that the Y kid room was closing soon, that my workout minutes were shrinking the longer it took him to eat the carrots.

Finally, he bit into one.

He gagged, choked a little, teared up a little.  Gagged again.

------------------------------------------------

I've not required Sebastian to eat a carrot since, nor has he eaten one voluntarily.  At age fourteen, he still eats sweet potatoes, and two years ago, he added onions and peppers to his diet (at a sleepover at a friend's house, the dad cooked onions and peppers with the meat, and Sebastian reported his feat the next morning on the ride home) and avocado (since Sebastian considers Tostitos and salsa a standard meal, he's come to like guacamole).  No carrots.  I still feel bad that I forced him as a four-year-old to eat the carrots.  He gagged.  

But how do we know how much to push or whether to push when it comes to vegetables and other things that we think are good for our kids?

(I asked a friend once, "Why do you make your kids play instruments?"  I was debating whether we wanted to keep pushing our kids on this one since they rarely practiced.  She said, "It's good for them.  It's like eating vegetables."  We kept scheduling and paying for lessons even when they didn't practice.  I even stopped my threat of, "If you don't practice, we're going to stop paying for lessons!" because really, even one lesson a week and one practice the hour before the lesson seemed better than nothing.  Now they sit at the piano for fun to learn each other's songs or to play around with a buddy.)

-------------------------------------------------

For summer, I have told the kids that they need to write for fifteen minutes a day (standard summer practice in our house except for last summer) and read for thirty minutes a day.  The latter most of them will do without being asked so long as they have a good book.  Covid makes this trickier, since the libraries aren't open, and two kids lost their kindles last year.  They don't balk at the reading, and they balk a little at the writing, but at this point they pretty much accept it, too.  Write for fifteen minutes a day Monday through Friday.  Or write for ten minutes and spend five minutes going over what you wrote with an adult.  I don't insist on math or summer packets from the elementary school teachers.  Reading and writing and playing.  They would likely argue that there are also chores thrown in and sometimes yard work or extra chores and sometimes lawn mowing (a paid job in the neighborhood).  

So they groan, and I push, and we get through it.  We're used to each other, and for the most part, they trust me.

----------------------------------------------------

We're four months into Covid, semi-quarantine, and Sebastian often does not get out of the house until five in the afternoon.  Classes are over, and mostly he wants to play Magic the Gathering ("Mom, we just call it 'Magic,' "he reminds me), splayed out on the living room floor.  Sometimes he lies in bed or on the couch and reads a book, but mostly he reads about Magic cards and rules and updates on his phone.  He's not on social media: he's on the sites that talk about Magic.  His favorite topic is Magic -- who won (he or his sister or his friend), why, how, which cards are the best, what changes Magic is making, the color combinations, the strategy, the Cube, Commander, the next draft, the potential reopening of the small stores that run tournaments, MTG Arena online.  

Magic is his world.

I am thrilled that he is passionate about something, even something I am not even close to understanding.  

And I want him to get fresh air.  And exercise.  He's fourteen: he fights me on it until I'm worn down.  "But I play Ultimate most days around 5 o'clock!" he argues.  Most days he does, it's true.  But not always.  And I want him to get some fresh air at some point in the morning, just a little exposure to fresh air and sunlight and life outside our house.  I tell him that he needs one hour of outside time by lunch each day.  Half an hour of this hour must be exercise.

Often I have felt like the anomaly in this time of kid activities in the twenty-first century.  I insist that the kids do something physical, and they choose what it is.  One activity is plenty.  No academic enrichment classes or activities unless they ask.  No need to push for honors level classes unless they're a good fit.  I would like them to practice instruments more, and I am aware that if I get back to learning piano for fifteen minutes a day, they will likely start doing the same.  Their dad plays all the time, but he is so talented and skilled that his playing does not necessarily attract them to the bench the way my tap-tap-tapping does as I try to learn the scales and songs they have already mastered.

I feel like the anomaly because we have not pushed them to achieve achieve achieve.  And while this feels right and good for me, sometimes I wonder whether we should have pushed them for their own sakes --would they feel accomplished and thrilled to be so good at soccer or basketball or piano?   Will they resent that we didn't push them to excel as their peers did?

I've given up the carrot fight.  I've given in to phones once you turn twelve.  We've increased screen time since Covid.  But I want something, too: I want exercise and outside time.  This pains Sebastian.  His body slumps and his face scrunches up and he says, "But why?  Do I have to?  But I get outside.  It's not like I'm getting fat."  He's over six feet.  I'm not worried about his BMI.  I'm worried about his lethargy and happiness.  I can control neither, but fresh air and adrenaline would be good.  But he fights me.  And I wonder, Do I push the fresh air and exercise or are they the carrots?

-----------------------------------------------

Two days ago Sebastian hadn't gotten outside by 1pm.  He'd slept in (something we've allowed though my parents never let us sleep past 8am on any day of the week), showered,  eaten his Cheerios.  He asked me to go on a walk with him, just a half hour, he said.  We went into the woods, and he talked about Magic and tried to teach me what he could.  I pointed to the longer loop -- the hour one -- and he said, "Yeah," and kept talking about Magic, which colors go together, and why it matters, how a Draft works, how his sister and brother do with the Drafts at tournaments.  We walked and walked and talked and talked.  The hour went by.

We were both sweating going up the hills.  We were talking, laughing.  He was expressing his admiration for his eight-year-old sister and how she keeps up in Magic.  I understood about thirty percent of what he told me and basked in his walking with me.

Later I said, "Was that hard for you?  It was hot, and you were sweating."

He said, "Really?  I didn't notice."

The next day he slept in, showered, and then did a chess activity that his school was offering (I'd forgotten about it until I saw him at the computer and he shushed me as I walked through the hallway flapping away in my flip-flops).  He came down later, told me he was going for a walk.  When he returned almost an hour later, he asked if he could finish listening to his Magic podcast.  There was a minute left.  "Yes," I said.  "Where'd you walk?"

"The walk we did the other day," he said.

--------------------------------------------------

Then we played a game of chess, after I found my cheat sheet from nine years ago, the notes that he dictated to me back then, telling me which directions each piece can move.  I sipped my Barry's Tea and my water and tried not to lose.  That was the goal: just don't lose too fast.  A draw.  

--------------------------------------------------

This morning their neighborhood buddies were going on a walk with their mom.  We rounded up which kids wanted to go.  We told the mom, "Sebastian is still sleeping."  It was about 9am.  

The mom stood outside the door on the steps.  We heard noise from the upstairs window.  Sebastian was yelling down, "Catie, can you wait for me to take a shower?"

"If you can take a one minute shower," she yelled back.

------------------------------------------------

I'm not expecting that every day will be an easy task in getting this fourteen-year-old outside and doing exercise.  But I'll take these three days in a row.  Maybe we're at least turning a corner.

ALS 5K in Covid time

"Our doing the 5K for ALS in memory of Jimmy is the equivalent to a memorial mass," I tell my kids.  "In my family you go to mass each year to remember the person who died.  Instead of doing that for Jimmy, we do this 5k."

In the beginning, we all went to the ALS 5K each June.  Jimmy died in 2007, and I think we started doing the race in 2009.  As the kids got older and had activities and opinions, some of us went.  So attendance -- which some years meant hanging about with my extended family and eating treats and not actually running or walking -- went from mandatory family activity to optional event if you want to come.  Some years it was all six of us; others, two or three of us.  

(One year I was in Colorado for a conference.  My husband left me a voice mail the night before the ALS 5K, saying that they were going to skip the race because they were all exhausted, having attended end-of-year events and preschool graduation that week.  He said to let him know if that didn't work.  I could understand his weariness and his not wanting to get four kids (ages 4, 6, 8, 10) out the door at 7:30 on a Saturday morning.  I called and left a message: "You do need to go to the race.  Christine is counting on you, on us.  Showing up means a lot to her."  When I called him the next morning, hoping that he's heard my message, the noise was loud and excited: our oldest ran the whole thing!  they were with my sisters!  they were eating pizza!)

------------------------------------------

Annual memorial masses were part of growing up.  When someone died, we went to the funeral or maybe just my parents went to the funeral, but a year later and in subsequent years, close to the date of the person's passing, we went to a memorial mass for the person.  Uncle Joe, Gramps (paternal grandfather), Pat (maternal grandfather).  A year after my mom died, my dad started the ritual for her.  He expressed to me at one point that it was a custom that he wasn't sure about, though he is still a practicing Catholic.  He just wasn't sure why we did it and whether he wanted to do it.  But still, for the past fifteen years, he's organized a mass in her memory -- which means that he has called St. Peter's Church, put her name in, and at a regularly scheduled mass on a Saturday afternoon, the priest says my mom's name -- Ann Sullivan -- twice during the mass.  Then we go back to my dad and his wife's house and have a dinner with everyone who has showed up -- aunts, uncles, cousins.

It's a nice ritual, whether you're Catholic or not, setting aside a few hours to be together in memory of that person.  Rarely do we actually talk about my mom at this annual gathering.  But we all know why we're there, and that's enough.

------------------------------------------

My brother-in-law Jimmy wasn't Catholic or religious.  He told my sister not to have a funeral when he died, so she didn't.  A year or two after he died, she had shirts made for the run, and then, a few years later, when she married again, she and her husband made a team called Team Jimmy, to honor the memory of both her husband Jimmy and her new husband's father, also named Jimmy, who had also died from ALS.  (Yes, strange coincidence.)

-----------------------------------------

It's COVID time 2020, so there's no ALS gathering this year -- no balloons and pizza and bagels and cookies and Ben and Jerry's and face painting and shoot the basketball for $5 (which I never have on me, and my Dad and sisters give my kids money for).  I plan to do the 5K here in my city, so eight-year-old Hannah says that she'll join me.  When we wake up, we search different websites that can map a route for us; it's possible that we spend more time dealing with the computer's making us a route than we will spend running.  We decide that 5.4 kilometers is close enough since it's a loop, and we want to begin and end at our driveway.

Hannah borrows her brother's phone (he's fourteen and has a phone), he makes her a playlist for the run, and we write out the route on a piece of paper -- Bacon to Lexington to Beaver to Main and looping back to Bacon then Greenwood then Claremont (our street).  I'm expecting that I'll run the 5K in about thirty-five minutes, and I'll spend a lot of time going back to check on Hannah, run with her, direct her.  We've got a plan.

But her brother's phone needs to be charged, so we have to wait for that.  And I want some new songs on my phone, so I purchase those and wait for them to download (no matter how often I buy songs from itunes, I make this process time-consuming and confusing -- how do I get off the screen that advertises apple music for $9.99 a month?  how do I find my song?  how do I get the song that I've bought on the computer onto my phone?  how many times do I need to restart my phone to see the songs and get them onto my running playlist -- the only playlist I have?).  Hannah makes me a playlist on youtube also, so we'll have some of the same songs -- "High Hopes" and "Senza Farlo Posto" and "Count on Me" and "Shotgun" -- and Sebastian can't believe that we still haven't left.  We're about an hour behind schedule (yes, our own, since there is no set time for this virtual race or event...in fact, we're doing it a day early to accommodate another kid's birthday wishes).

We finally get up from the table with our map and playlists, ready to go.

Ten-year-old Connor runs in the door.  

"I'm coming!"  he says.

"Why?" I ask him.

"Because I was bored at my friend's house.  So I want to come."

"All right.  Let's go over the map.  You sure you'll be okay to do this?  It's really really hot, and you haven't run in months," I say.

"Yep.  Let's go over the map," he says.

So we do.

He draws it twice and we review it, and he's ready to go even without music.  Tracking Connor and Hannah around Waltham was not how I had envisioned this run (I run once a week both because it makes me tremendously happy and because I love to listen to my music.  Running more than once a week I would feel in my knees or hips or back -- at forty-seven years old.  Ah, well.  Once a week is perfect.), but I go with it: an eight-year-old and ten-year-old who want to go on a 5K run or walk with me on a summer day of eighty-five degrees -- I am delighted.

------------------------------------------------

Connor starts off fast, but stops and waits patiently at the first light.  I usually jog at lights, a break that I like, but if I keep moving, even in place, I count it as part of my run.  He runs with ease, even without music, calm and quick (or quick to me).  Hannah turns around and points to her feet while boogying a bit: this means that she's listening to "One Foot" (Walk the Moon) at the moment.  I've run with Hannah before, so I know that she won't put too much pressure on herself: she'll stop when she needs, walk a bit, sit a bit, get going again when she feels ready.  I worry more about Connor, who is competitive and might want to prove that he can do this 5K better than his younger sister and I can.  He'll push himself, and I'm a little concerned about his passing out.  But he's stopping at the lights and standing in the shade.  He's walking a little.  He's not blocks behind, and I haven't even once gone back to find or check in with either Hannah or him.  They both stay ahead of me.

Hannah turns around again, crosses her arms and puts a leg out to show me that "Wherever I Go" (Miley Cyrus) is on.  I smile as she taps her foot out a bit.  I smile as she catches up to Connor, and the two of them run side by side until they get to the next light, then stand in the shade together.  Their faces are so red, and they are sweaty and breathing heavy, but when the light changes, on they go.  I cannot adore them more.  

Some years ago a neighbor called Connor and Hannah "the littles," in distinguishing them from their two older siblings.  It stuck.  As a kid, I was one of the "three little kids," so I project on them the comfort I had in belonging to the "three little kids," (as opposed to the big kids, who were our older brother and sister).  The Bigs are at home hanging out, at age thirteen and fourteen.  But The Littles are running and walking around Waltham, passing each other, slowing down, taking breaks, doing dance moves, checking in, passing me.  

--------------------------------------------------------

They speed ahead as we get near our street, gunning it to our driveway.  Later, when they discuss the race, Connor says, "Hannah beat me by a second or maybe two."

Hannah responds, "No.  Definitely two seconds."

I arrive thirty to sixty seconds after they do.

Connor says to me, "Can we do that run again next week?"

-------------------------------------------------------

My brother-in-law, their Uncle Jimmy, died in 2007.  He was thirty-six.  Connor and Hannah never met him.  But I imagine him smiling at them as they pour water over their heads and walk around the block to stretch out and discuss the final two seconds of the run.  

A mass.  A dinner.  A run.  A walk.  A laugh.  

There are so many ways to remember.

What you notice in quarantine

If not for quarantine, would I have spoken up?  would I have insisted that Daniel leave?  You hear that couples and families and singles -- everyone, then -- have trouble during this pandemic, but I thought back in March, Are you kidding?  I get more time with my kids than I ever get; I get to take walks in the woods daily; I have zero commute; and my husband and I are spending more time together.  These are serious silver linings.

As always with being home, I noticed more: the windows in the kids' dressing room need to be replaced; the yard needs work; my husband is on his phone a lot; the new chairs in the living room are fabulous; the little kids have so much love for me; my husband's phone dings a lot; the big kids work hard at school; our Italian friend responds to my husband's messages more promptly than to mine; our fourteen-year-old cares a lot about how he does in school; our twelve-year-old gets happier when she talks to her friends over zoom; the little kids can actually write decently; I like the break from school life; I don't need as much sleep because I'm not commuting and spending all day at school; my husband is doing Italian and texting with our Italian friend before I am even up in the morning.

My awareness of these things was not entirely new.  On some level, I had already noticed all of these at some point or points and had put them aside.  Raking one afternoon, I listened to the podcast Modern Love.  The topic was relationships during quarantine: some couples were beginning their relationships; some had just ended their relationship but were still living together, trying to endure; some were in the middle of a break-up when quarantine began.  I raked and listened, mesmerized.  I thought, I'm lucky that I've had more time during quarantine to talk with Daniel, to walk him to work when he goes, to hang out.  It was easy to find the positive.

And I ignored the things I was noticing, things I had noticed for months, but had convinced myself out of.  Cristina and Daniel text much more than Cristina and I do; he's putting more time into learning and improving his Italian.  Cristina and Daniel leave each other many voice messages.  Daniel's enthusiasm for Cristina and hers for him seem more than I'm comfortable with; I can work on not being jealous -- we're all friends.

Cristina and Marco and their son Emanuele had planned to come to visit us -- and stay with us for three weeks -- in June.  Daniel had mapped out a schedule, including a camping trip to Lake Umbagagog.  I hadn't committed to going, thinking that, with a three-week-stay, I might like a break from all the company at home.  I vacillated though, because being out camping sounded pretty great, too.  I like camping (provided that our kids or Daniel sets up all the tent gear).  Back in January or February, I had thought, I don't think I can go camping with them.  It will be too much to be around Daniel and Cristina and their flirty energy.  I'll need a break.  I didn't think that anything physical was going to happen between them; it was more their excessive admiration of each other, an admiration that seemed to have grown since our return to the states, that now, I sensed and saw on some texts, was more than I was comfortable with.  I told myself, They're friends.  We're friends.  It will fade.  He needs attention, and eventually this will run out.  I'd seen it before -- twice with an ex-girlfriend and once with a woman who lived in our city.  Not full-out romantic relationships, but emotionally-charged-building-in-intensity-time-consuming relationships that gave him energy and made him feel happy and purposeful.  Until I said, You can't be in touch with ex-girlfriend because you told her that you dream that, if something happens to me, you'll grow old with her.  Or until I emailed same woman years later and said, No more contact between the two of you, and does your husband know about these emails reliving the past?  Or until I said, You lied to me about Gabby.  You lied.  You said that you were by yourself one night, but she was here, too.  You need to move out of the house.  (It was a brief three week exile of which our kids never learned since he left after bed and arrived by breakfast.  They were small.)

So I told myself, Don't be jealous.  Check in with him.  Put more time into your friendship with Cristina.  Work on your Italian and your communication with Cristina to get rid of your jealousy.  Give Daniel more attention.  He needs attention.

I did all of these.

Ding, ding, ding.

The texts came in during the day.  I heard his speaking in Italian leaving voice messages before I even got out of bed.  When he'd been up for a couple of hours before me, and I asked, Oh, did you meditate?  He'd sometimes say, Not yet.  I was working on my Italian flashcards.  Flashcards that had not only Italian words but entire phrases and sentences in quotes with dates from Cristina's WhatsApp messages.  I asked him one day, "Don't the flashcards with Cristina's sentences on them make you then think about her and her messages or the conversation you had?  They would for me."  "No," he said.  

I said, "These are pretty effusive, this message about how you send messages with enthusiasm, passion, with the heart, with happiness."

"Yes," he said.

In response to her list of emotions with which she sent him messages (con entusiasmo, con allegria, con cuore, con passione, con amore), he wrote: "Tutto per me?"  (All for me?) and she answered, "Tutto per te, Daniel William Keleher. 😊"  And I thought, But that's a line from one of our favorite movies, Love Actually.  The secretary says to her married boss, when he compliments her on her planning of the holiday party, "It's for you.  It's all for you."  So we have used that line, too.  I tried not to think too much more about it.  Even if he wasn't aware of the movie reference here the way I was, it was still a line that goes over a line.  

Having conversations about his friendships with women in the past haven't gone well.  Even now, years after I insisted that he not have relationships with the ex-girlfriend and the woman in our city, he told me that he didn't like that he couldn't have these relationships; that he didn't think it was fair and didn't really get it.  I thought, I can try harder, try to accommodate his need for attention and Italian learning.  But it wasn't enough.

I started checking his phone when he was outside or in the shower.  Him in Italian: I love you.  This friendship isn't just fun for me; it's integral to who I am and how I live and brings me so much happiness.  Her: I love you, too.  Last night I went to sleep smiling thinking about this message of yours.  You're my favorite/best friend.  

And the mundane: I'm at the grocery store that you used to shop at here in Italy!  Here's how you say "than" in Italian, depending on the context.  You are amazing, wonderful, incredible, talented.  I am full of admiration for you.  I woke up so happy today and with a hundred smiles and I am sending them all to you today!  

------------------------------------------------

I was becoming more unhappy.  My attentions, no matter how much, were not slowing down Daniel's outreach and messages to Cristina or hers to him.  

I started asking for reassurance in ways I never had before: Am I your number one?  Will I always be your number one?  Will we stay married forever?  Questions I never could have imagined asking.  He said, "Yes," and moved on.  

I noticed that I needed to speak up.  Okay, with the help of two girlfriends who said that I wasn't just being jealous.

I noticed that even then, his focus was more on how Cristina felt after I sent her an email than on how I felt.

I noticed that again, I was told that I had misunderstood, that it was only friendship, that this friendship was important.

I noticed that he couldn't stop being in touch with her even after I asked for their not being in touch.  He still texted her son on Cristina's phone, facetimed her and her family on his birthday, called her by accident one Saturday morning.

When I thought that the worst was over, after we had read Olive, Again aloud in bed and made love one midnight, I lay there afterwards and asked, "What do you understand now?"  I was curious, hopeful, eager.  I wanted to know that he understood what hadn't been okay, how hurt I was; I wanted reassurance. 

He said, "I understand that you were hurt by my relationship with Cristina.  Cristina has been a huge part of my life.  She plays an integral role in my life.  She lives out what I'm learning in meditation.  She has given me more support than anyone else in my passion to engage citizens."  There was more.  Ten minutes more of Cristina's enthusiasm and love of life and engagement and insight and generosity. 

-----------------------------------------------

I was miserable.

Finally I had to change something -- and this time it wasn't myself.

I noticed that the rules I was living by -- that you stay married, that you compromise and find depths of flexibility for your marriage and your family, that you speak up but you don't fight in front of the kids, that you try to understand the other person's needs, that you use only "I feel" language to talk about your hurt, that you support your spouse, that you accept your spouse -- were not good enough.  Finally not good enough.

----------------------------------------------

I noticed that I wanted more.  That this was not enough.

I noticed that I didn't have to follow these rules any more.

Writing: no matter the age

In the summer our four kids need to write for fifteen minutes each weekday.  They can write about whatever they want.  During quarantine the two of elementary school age need to write for ten minutes each day, and then review with an adult for five minutes.

This is hard work.  For everyone.

There's a good bit of push back: 

I don't want to.

I don't know what to write about.

This takes so long.

It's fine.  I don't want to go over it with you.

Why are you saying it's bad?  It's bad!

Can you not make me do it over?

Can you give me some topics?

No, I don't like those topics.

I have nothing to write about.

I want to go play.  Can't I just go play?

I hate this.

And then you're going to say I have to go outside.  I have no free time!

Then I still have to do my chore.  I have no free time!

This is boring.

Yesterday morning I plopped myself down on the couch early while the house was quiet and I wrote.  Even with only five hours of sleep, I felt happy for so much of the day.  Today I intended to do the same thing.

I woke up and journaled.   Then Hannah wanted to show me a card trick.  Three times.  I needed breakfast.  I needed a walk.  I needed to clean last night's pyrex that was still in the sink.  I needed a little snack.  At 11:30am I finally got back to the couch (o the discipline to plop on the couch!  not even trying to get myself to sit at a desk!) and opened my computer.  Sebastian, age fourteen, sat down.  He wanted to chat.  It's hard for me to pass up an opportunity to chat with one of the kids.

I opened the computer again.  Got the blank space.

I have nothing to write about.

I don't know what to write.

What do I write about?

Is there anything worth writing about?

Maybe I should go clean the basement.

Maybe I should offer to play ping pong with one of the kids.

I shouldn't be on the computer so much.

When am I going to review those resumes?

I need a topic.

What's a good topic?

I am my children.  Any topic is fine.  Just write.  Tree trunks.  Apologies.  Getting started.

Living Again

My husband and I are separated.  Rarely these days do I have a conversation with a friend or family member without talking about this difficulty, change, sadness, development.  He moved out two weeks ago.  I don't want to go to couple's counseling or spend my days talking with him about our marriage/relationship, but I also don't know how to spend my days without talking about our relationship with other people.  My friends are my bedrock at the moment.  They always have been, and now they are even more.

That's a realization: my friends have been my bedrock.

Don't people usually say spouse?

But this is not the point.  The point is that, as I read Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, I think, Oh, time to move on from topic of Husband (hers is Boyfriend), and get to what I want.  If I don't want him or this marriage, it's time to think about what I do want or to actually do what I want.  I can't have it both ways: miserable with him and miserable without him.

This morning, I biked to the post office to mail back clothing returns from Gap (v-neck t-shirts too low), L. L. Bean (tank tops too loose), Eddie Bauer (cute sleeveless shirts too falling off shoulder).  Walking down the sidewalk (marciapiede! -- I remember a little Italian!), I saw a postal worker emptying out the blue mailbox.  He opened the bottom half of the mailbox, slid out a white crate with United States Postal Service stamped on it, full of envelopes, reached in to grab the other loose envelopes that had missed the crate, added these to his crate, then put in a new white empty crate.  So that's how it works, I thought.  

And I laughed at myself, thinking, Do I want to take a picture of this blue mailbox, this postal worker, this process of his removing the mail?

My family spent a year in Italy for the 2018-2019 school year.  Even though I'd spent time in Italy before, everything was new: the grocery store, the streets, the people, the post office, the mailbox.  So I focused not on the big details and big trips we took, but on the daily, ordinary details, the things that made up daily life.  I didn't want to keep a travel blog so much as a blog of daily, ordinary life.  Life is in the details.  One day I wrote about going to the post office and spending seventy euro on stamps; another day I took a picture of a red mailbox and wrote about snail mail.  Now I've been back in the United States for almost a year, and finally I realize that I have things to write about.  A mailbox.  

--------------------------------------

While I still have a good bit of work, teaching life is done for two and a half months.  The days are opening up.  And I realize that I have wanted to be happy, to feel free, to do what I want to do, to have the mental and physical space to take care of myself.  Now there's no more blaming Husband or Marriage.  It's up to me.

--------------------------------------

Today is Monday, and I know that I have ten-hour work days for Tuesday and Wednesday (we are interviewing for a new Head of School), so today is my free day to do whatever I want and to be off my computer and zoom or bluejeans meetings all day.  I didn't sleep well (eight-year-old slept with me and kicked a good bit), and I feel a little stuck when I wake up (sveglio!), unsure of what to do with myself.  I write in my Five Minute a Day Journal, text a friend about talking on her commute, and do a meditation with Headspace for fifteen minutes.  I walk around the block talking to said friend on her non-commute (because of social distancing, she's doing appointments virtually from home).  I eat my Cheerios and read the local paper from last week.  I do eight-year-old's challenge assignment that she made.  I do two short pilates videos of Robin Long (one abs, one legs).  

I admit it: I feel both a little lost and a little overwhelmed.  I have errands and chores, but I don't want to do errands or chores.  I want to relax, but I don't know what to do.  Finally I decide to bike to the post office to do my returns.  I borrow eight-year-old's lock, pack up my returns, and head out.  It's maybe a mile and a half to the post office.  We're all wearing our masks inside, giving each other space, standing on the marked yellow circles in line.  An older woman is ahead of me in line; she takes her time, getting some stamps, mailing an envelope.  

When I leave, I head to UPS on the corner to take care of the final return.  I walk in, ask where to put the package, drop it, walk out.  On the walk back to my bike I see the postal worker emptying out the mailbox.

Yes, I think.  This is it.  This is the living that I did for those two weeks alone in Italy before Daniel and the kids arrived.  For two weeks I made simple plans, like going to the post office or finding a store.  I took my time, I noticed a lot without trying, I rested and read and wrote some each afternoon, without ever making a schedule.  I had apartment projects and cleaning to do to move in and to prepare for my family's arrival.  One day I worked on reading the cereal box.  Another day I worked through learning the recycling system (which I still messed up more than once).  I reveled in the necessity of slowing down in order to understand anything around me, of getting used to a new place and adapting.

Waltham is not new.  Having my kids home all the time is not new.  Not being responsible to or for another adult is new.  Having more independence and autonomy is new.  Mary Oliver: What will you do with your one wild and precious life?

I will live as I lived for that year in Italy -- exploring and noticing and listening and growing.  I can do that right here in Waltham, it turns out.  It's more of a challenge for me, but I can do it.

-----------------------------------------

At times I've felt that I needed to move to change.  Staying in the same place and changing sounds more difficult than moving and changing life up.  After teaching for two years and feeling like I wanted to try social work, I felt like I needed to make a big move in order to leave this stable, fascinating, wonderful job.  So I moved from Massachusetts to California.  It seemed too hard to stay in Massachusetts and leave the good, loved job.

--------------------------------------

I'm not moving.  Daniel moved out.  I'm in our house with our kids.  It's summer.  The purpose and necessary being present that comes with teaching are not happening now.  I need to make my own purpose.  Biking and standing in line at the post office and watching that postal worker at the blue mailbox, I thought, Oh, okay.  I can do this.  I can treat the days this summer as I treated the days for those two solo weeks.  There are more complications and interruptions because I have four kids with me every day, but I can get back those solo Italy days, those days where I felt emotionally free and available and thrilled to explore my world.

-----------------------------------------

I took out my computer to write when I got home, but our fourteen-year-old wanted to debate my summer rule of one hour outside by 1pm.  When I finally sat down at the computer, he came and called my bluff, "Would you play basketball with me now?"

------------------------------------------

I am not solo as I was in Italy for those two weeks, and I am so glad.  I am so glad that I get to be around these four kids for the summer, that I can notice them and life and myself again.  

Week Two

I've done it.  We've done it: Daniel has moved out.  He is still here at the house every day, and we have some figuring out to do with that.  But perhaps rather than be fixated on how much he's here and how hard that is for me, I can focus on the first big step: he's not living here, not sleeping in my bed, not here when I wake up in the morning.

And I am grateful.

The energy in the house feels lighter for me.  I don't tense when he lies beside me in bed.  I feel some ease and some freedom.  When he's here, I do wonder what he's doing and whether he's helping the kids with their schoolwork; when he's not here, I don't wonder what he's doing.  I'm glad to have this space to myself, this physical, mental, and emotional space.

When I wake up, I don't feel that sinking feeling in my chest, wondering how many texts he's already exchanged with Cristina or how much Italian he's been doing since 4am while his clothes and papers are strewn in various spots around the house.  I don't feel relegated to meditating in bed because he's meditating in the living room.  

I'm grateful because I feel like a better version of myself.  I sit with the kids for breakfast if they ask.  I make dinner simply, happily.  I laugh on the phone with my girlfriends.  I go for my walks.  

During a faculty meeting two days ago, I had a sudden thought and wrote it down.  It went something like this: "I am healthy.  I can be healthy now."  I don't feel weighed down by every small decision that must be debated when he is here, whether about loading dishes into the dishwasher or buying a car that holds six of us or how he should manage female friendships.

We haven't figured out a schedule yet, but we'll get there.

For now, I feel lighter, and this is be a good thing.

Trunks and Mounds

The trunks swayed in the woods this morning.  I sat down while talking with a friend on the phone, and I watched them.  They were tall and skinny for tree trunks, and they swayed, and I thought, Oh, this is how they go down.  I never see them when they fall, only afterwards.  After a storm, we take walks through the woods and we notice which trees have fallen, admiring the trunks or walking on them, checking out the uprooted roots (polyptoton!  Maddie Farrell's favorite figure of speech...).  We climb and explore and check out the place where the trunk split.

I've started to slow down on my walks.  During the school year I am focused and goal-oriented, wanting my one hour walk through neighborhoods near school or so focused on chatting with a girlfriend in person or on the phone that I don't notice my surroundings as much...except maybe the flowers on the corner, near the water tower in Braintree.  You can't miss those.

But today I sat on a downed trunk and looked across fifty yards, as my girlfriend and I talked, just sat there and watched the swaying trunks.  Maybe they'll be down tomorrow.

Today the mounds were gone.  Six or seven huge mounds of dirt that have covered a trail for the past three years -- gone.  

Before the mounds, as we've called them in our house, were trucked and dumped here, there was a trail that we walked when we didn't have time or energy to go to the top and do the full loop.  This trail cuts across the creek, then by a metal bench that looks like it came from a soccer or football field (how did that get there and how many years ago?  I've imagined teenagers wanting a place to drink, and one night hauling this metal bench up to the woods, pleased with themselves to have set up their own drinking spot in the woods rather than a parking lot, as kids did when I was in high school -- I was never cool enough to be in the parking lot crowd, but I my older sister was and my soccer and cheerleader friends, too), then by a ledge edged (polyptoton again...well, sort of...) with poison ivy on both sides.  When I walked this way with my husband, who gets poison ivy easily, he'd say, "We need to wash our pants when we get home."  He did; I didn't.  The trail winds a bit more and then finally comes to the top of a dead end road.  It was our short loop, the loop to do before dinner with a friend and her dog, with a child who needed to get outside but didn't want to be out too long, with myself when I needed a feel of the woods.

One day (maybe) three years ago, the last fifty yards of the trail, the part that led to the road, was gone.  Where the trail had been were huge mounds of dirt, seemingly impassable.  The city had forced the owner of this land to take down his radio tower nearby in the woods.  The owner of the radio tower was so angry with the city that he put these hills of dirt, about ten feet high and seven feet wide, over this part of the trail, we assumed, to block it.  (When I asked our City Councilor about it, he said, "I've told the owner that he's not hurting the city by putting the dirt there; he's hurting his neighbors.")  For a long time, we didn't use the trail.  It was blocked.  But at some point, likely because of a child's curiosity, we tried going over the mounds, as we called them.  The kids loved to climb over them, and I got used to them as just part of a the walk, a different way to do this part of the trail.  We came to love the mounds, as obstacles or fun or just another aspect of the park.

But today, after I pass the metal bench and the poison ivy and wind around to the road, the mounds do not hinder my view.  The ground is flat.  It's dirt, just flat dirt, looking like it's ready for a paving.  Our mounds are gone.   The kids might be disappointed.  Part of me is excited and part of me is disappointed, too.  I had come to like the mounds.

I wonder if that's the way changes go.  In one moment a hardship or obstacle; in another, a challenge; in another, a familiar part of life that you come not just to accept, but like and enjoy.

Italy Saturday here in Massachusetts

Once every week or two, I meet my aunt Margo, who is seventy-six, to do her grocery shopping.  We text to set up the time; she sends an email with her grocery list (I don't know how she lives on so little; the list is a tour through the store, ordered just as the store is -- a work of art, both the store and her list); I send a text when I leave here since I'm almost always leaving later than I planned; we meet in the parking lot of Wegman's after I've shopped, we load them into her car, she gives me cash (since quarantine shopping I've not had to go to an ATM once), we stand in the parking lot and visit.  Sometimes our visit is ten minutes.  Yesterday it was an hour.

When I was a kid, I didn't find it easy to talk with Margo.  In fact, I felt a bit uncomfortable around her.  My mom's only sister, she seemed more serious and more strict than my mom.  I didn't know the rules, and we needed to be good around Margo.  We needed to be good around Gram (our grandmother, mom of her and my mom), too, but Gram's affection for us was so obvious that we knew that she'd always forgive us anything anyway.  She loved the very existence of us.  Margo was single and adventurous and serious, or at least that's how I saw her when we were kids.  She was a special education teacher and traveled every summer; she took cooking and baking and photography classes; she had lots of friends; she practiced her tests on me before she administered them for real; she read the newspaper and disagreed with my dad about politics and education the way my mom didn't.  We knew she loved us and paid attention to us, too: she made our birthday cakes every year, each one decorated differently and especially for the birthday kid.  Incredible cakes.  Before our birthdays we'd discuss what she might make for the upcoming birthday.  I remember a yellow phone -- two pieces because that's what they looked like back in the 1980s, receiver and base; Cookie Monster; softball Snoopy; tennis Snoopy; Miss Piggy; a book; Huey Lewis and the News; golf Snoopy; soccer Snoopy.  One year for Halloween she showed up at our house dressed as Miss Piggy.  She took us to every Muppet movie and to the Fogg Museum and to Swensen's.  And we loved her and admired and appreciated her.

But I wouldn't just sit down and chat with her as I did with my grandmother.

At twenty-three, I moved to San Francisco.  The night before I left, Margo and Gram came over for dinner at my parents'.  When I walked them out to their car, Margo gave me a hug and said, "We'll miss you.  She'll miss you."  She was referring to Gram, besides my mom, my favorite person in the world.  Margo would miss me.  She knew that Gram would miss me.  Somehow this was revelatory to me.  You don't say these types of things in Irish Catholic households, or at least you didn't in 1996.  Margo liked me and appreciated me: I could feel it and was so surprised and pleased by this.

-----------------------------------------

It's almost twenty-fve years later.  Gram has passed, and Mom has passed, but Margo is here.  And over the years we have talked about love and teaching and working and parenting and friends and travel and family.  We talk often.  We laugh.  My kids are more comfortable with her than I was at their age.  She takes them for ice cream or to movies as she did for us.  She sits and chats.  She drives them when I'm in a bind.  She comes to their plays and games and performances, and she adores them.  She gets the girls their Christmas dresses and Easter dresses as she did for my sisters and me when we were kids.  She still reads the newspaper and can tell you every detail of Trump misconduct.  (Yesterday it was his insistence on being at the West Point graduation.)  Our teenagers say, "You know, it's really easy to talk to Margo.  It's like she's interested in what we're saying.  She really listens.  And she asks questions, and it makes it easy to talk with her.  It's nice."  (Maybe they're more mature than I was at their age? or more confident? or maybe Margo seems less serious to them than she did to me?)

We stand in the parking lot at Wegman's, and we put the bags into the back of her RAV4 (she's had Toyotas for the last thirty years).  She hands me a bag of cookies for the kids and me, cookies she knows I'll eat some of us the minute I get in the car.  Somehow I go into Wegman's for her, but she gets to a store and bakery to get cookies or chocolates or fudge for us.  Every time.  She pulls out cash, and we do that exchange.

And then we stand in the parking lot for another hour and talk.  Just talk.  We talk about whether people can change and we talk about her friends and we talk about my kids and about me.  And the news.  Aways the news and whichever of her electronics are not working -- tv or phone or computer.   She has an unspoken rule that she won't give advice, but today she gives her opinion in little bits, and if I pay attention, I catch them.

Italians are visiting with family all the time.  It's not just for big holiday gatherings: it's a way of life, being with family all the time -- parents, kids, siblings, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles.  It's a Saturday, and we're not sitting at a bar with a cappuccino, but we're standing here in a parking lot, just the two of us (and a car every twenty minutes or so moving in or out of the parking space beside us), visiting, talking, being.  

I'm back in Italy on a Saturday morning.  This time I'm not in awe of the Italians and nostalgic for people I know.  I'm just with Margo, talking, listening, present (though a little worried about the strawberrries and blueberries and spinach that might be wilting in the heat of her car on this June day).

-------------------------

Starbucks is across the street.  Masked, I order a chai tea latte.  "What size?" the barista at the table at the door asks.  "Big," I say.  I can never remember the Starbucks sizes, but I know that I want the biggest one they have.

I take my iced chai tea latte (courtesy of our letter carrier's gift cards, which she received one Christmas; she doesn't go to Starbucks, so I've lucked out), sit on a bench nearby, and read my book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.  (I heard an interview last year with the author, and then two friends told me that they had read the book.  So I gifted it to two other friends, who loved it.  So this copy belongs to one of these friends who then sent it back to me so I could read it.)  I sit there in the sun, reading, sipping, laughing out loud.  (Friend who sent it warns me that other parts are not laugh-out-loud but cry-cry-cry.)

An hour of sitting.  Reading.  Sipping a drink.  

I used to do this in Italy with no concern about what was coming next or what was on a to-do list.

--------------------------

I drive ten minutes to Blue Hills.  Blue Hills is a reservation with trails.  I drive by every day when I commute to work.  It's only twenty-five minutes from our house, but I've never come hiking here.  We have Prospect Hill and Paine Estate, two wooded areas minutes from our house, so I don't often drive to go for a walk or hike.

But today I need the change.  We've been social distancing for three months, and I need occasional change.  I park on the side of the road and start up a trail.  I have no map, no direction, no plan.  I just walk higher.  I call my friend Christa (roommate in California), and we talk for two hours as I walk, and then sit on a rock.  The sun, the woods, a talk with a girlfriend.  I want for nothing else for these two hours.

In Italy, we walked the Via Francigena sometimes on Saturdays.  We had no house projects or people to see, so it was easy to motivate the kids to take an excursion.  Blue Hills by myself today -- and with Christa.

Tomorrow, I'll bring some kids.

--------------------------

Waltham is a city.  It's not a cute town with a quaint center.  It's a wonderfully diverse city with great restaurants and woods and a mix of families, singles, and older folks.  There is the Waltham Common, green grass with benches and concrete walkways, and there is a main drag of restaurants nearby, Moody Street.  So it has the Common, and it has restaurants and ice cream and even a cafe.  But it's not cute.

However, for restaurants to open back up during phase 2 (of opening the economy), the City decided to shut down Moody Street to cars and allow restaurants to place tables and serve food right in the street.  Dining al fresco.  I walk up and down Moody Street debating what to eat and where to sit.  I choose nothing.  Instead, I walk up and down, staring at people and restaurants, checking out menus, mostly admiring how cute the street looks, how quaint.

Quarantine has actually made Moody Street look pretty.  People are outside talking and laughing and eating.  I'm not sitting down, but the scene beautiful.  I belong here, just looking, the way I would do if I were walking through Rome, watching people eat outside.

-------------------------

Moody Street, with all its good restaurants and outside tables, didn't call to me.  I got back in my car and headed to Chipotle.  There are some tables out there, too, where I can sit with my chicken burrito and chips and read my book and write.

A family I know walks by on their way home from a Black Lives Matter march.  We talk.  The husband and daughter move on.  The mom, a woman my age (40s), and her neighbor, who seems our age, too, stay and we talk at a distance -- they stand about fifteen feet away and I keep sitting, not wanting to make the neighbor I don't know nervous.  I'm not wearing a mask, and I don't want to make them anxious, so I sit and they stand, and we keep talking -- kids, parenting, education, life.  I also don't move because I don't want to shift the dynamic.  The three of us are not just talking: we are connecting and understanding each other and laughing.  My computer is open, but I don't want to get back to it.  I just want to stay in this conversation.

Last year we had some friends in Italy, but we didn't often just stop on the street to chat with someone we knew.  We were the Americans in our walled city.  I envied the Italians as they bumped into people they knew at the bar, on the street, in a piazza.  I'm outside Chipotle, not some cute Italian bar, but it doesn't matter.  I feel connected.

I am home.

noticing flowers... and other things

When we were in Italy for the year, everything was novel: walking around our walled city of Viterbo; getting a coffee; taking a walk along the Via Francigena; going to a lake; making friends.  We have been home for a year, and so much has happened in the past year -- we returned on July 1, 2019, and it is now June 14, 2020, so, yes, a year -- and yet, I have felt stymied about what to write, thinking that I had nothing to write since we were back to normal life, life as everyone knows it.  I did not have the adventure of a new place and new people, nothing that anyone would want to hear.  But, really, if I were to look at back at my 100+ entries from that Italy year, I would see that most entries were about ordinary things -- students, classes, walking our kids to school, moments on ordinary days, patterns that came up, good days, bad days, learning to speak up, decreasing confidence, increasing confidence, beauty, connection.

Back here in Waltham, Massachusetts, I will see, if I use those topics as guiding topics, that so much has happened in the last year to notice, to write.  My Italy blog wasn't about my awe in seeing St. Peter's or Caravaggios or Venice; it was about the simple, the ordinary, the daily.    And the more I wrote, the more I noticed.  The more there was to write about.

-------------------------------------------

One summer I lived in Alaska for graduate school.  I thought that I would love that the sun does not entirely go down, that it stays light all day; I didn't -- I missed the cover of dark to rest naturally and not feel that I should keep going.  I thought that I could never learn flowers, that flowers were flowers; but then I learned a few flowers that a friend mentioned before I went -- Indian paint brush and forget-me-nots and fireweed and lupine.  As I learned Indian paint brush, I started to notice what was beside it.  As I learned the flower beside it, I noticed another.  Eventually, I knew five different flowers.  By knowing one flower and then two and then three, I started to see more.

-----------------------------------------

While I did yoga in the living room a few mornings ago, Hannah, age 8, did her homework that was due at 10am.  She said, "I need a flower!"  She ran outside and came back with something pink.  When her dad helped her, he asked her, "Where'd you get the flower?"  She pointed out the window.  "Okay," he said.  "You've got a rhododendron."

My mom liked rhododendrons.  I like them, too.  We have a rhododendron bush -- bushes? -- in our yard.  It is difficult for me to learn flowers, in the same way it is difficult for me to learn trees and people's faces.  If the trees could speak and tell me their stories, I would learn their stories, and eventually I would notice enough details about their bark and trunks and leaves and branches to remember their names.  But I know that at first it would be where they are and what their stories are.  For people I need a similar framework -- a context for where they are and what their story is.  Then, after a few -- or many -- interactions, I'll remember their face.

In Berkeley, California, where I lived for four years, wisteria abounds.  It wouldn't do as well here, but lilac reminds me of wisteria.  Lilac leaves help me to identify it, too.  Daniel has pointed it out for years, so I've gotten pretty good at identifying it.  But it's work for me, paying attention to details of flowers and trees and houses.  I also want to know which trees are boxwood, Japanese maple, dogwoods.  My mom knew them.  When I was in my twenties, I did some weeding for my mom when she wasn't home because she had asked me to or mentioned it or maybe I was making up for being a pill, I don't remember.  When she came home and I showed her my progress, she said, "Those were all flowers that you pulled up."

----------------------------------------------

There is plenty for me to notice from the past year back here at home.  Does it matter whether the observations are from Italy or from Waltham?  No.  

Take the time, I tell myself, to notice and to sit with what you notice.  

Write it.

surgery

Crumpled into a wheelchair, not interacting or being barely polite with the man pushing me, I thought, "Is this how it's going to end?"

The corridors were empty, silent, dark.  It was one in the morning.  We were heading to the elevators.  But they were so far away, and we couldn't get there.  Down in the ER, I had told a nurse that the pain had gotten much worse.  The morphine from a couple hours ago must have worn off.  My husband had just left when the pain got so bad that I needed to tell someone.  The nurse said, "Can you wait until you get upstairs for more medicine?"  I said, "Okay."  I didn't want to trouble anyone.  (Yes, I would do this differently, knowing what I know now.) 

She told me, "We want to get you into a room.  They say they'll likely do surgery later tonight or tomorrow to remove the appendix.  But the elevators down here aren't working.  So we can take you outside and in an ambulance to the other side of the hospital, or we can put you in a wheelchair and take you around the hospital to the other side."  I was so cold.  I had a fever.  I didn't want to have to get ready to go outside.  I had told them that the pain was like the pain of labor.  I'd had four kids, one without the epidural.  That's what I told them -- like labor without drugs.  They shook their heads okay.  Note to self: don't use that analogy again.  While it meant everything to me, the most severe pain of my life, it meant nothing to them.

I thought of Grey's Anatomy.  Wasn't there an episode (I've watched many seasons) where someone gets kidnapped in the bowels of the hospital?  This was me, away from everyone except one man an this wheelchair, in search of an elevator we might never find.  Who knew we were here?  And I might die on the way anyway.  He had no medicine with him; his job was simply to get me upstairs.

--------------------------------------------------------

I crouched out of the wheelchair and into the bed.  Safe.  Relieved.  And yet in so much pain.  The nurse tried to hook me up to things (which things, I don't know), but it was hard.  And I complained and complained every time she touched me or even when she didn't touch me.  I kept repeating, It hurts so much it hurts so much it hurts so much.  She called in reinforcements.  They tried and tried.  But the needles wouldn't go in, the blood pressure was too low, they couldn't give the pain medication.  I remember it all as a haze, of being in the middle of a few people who were trying to get me comfortable but couldn't, and I cried and cried and cried and complained -- oh, I felt bad about being so difficult, but I couldn't stop whining and crying and saying, That hurts!

------------------------------------------------------

A doctor walked in, fresh and morning-looking.  I had slept.  They must have gotten the medicine in somehow.  He reviewed my case with me, told me he was debating whether to give me antibiotics or to go in and remove the appendix just in case it was a problem.  I smiled and deferred.  Did I mention the horrific twenty hours preceding this morning?  No.  I didn't mention being hunched over at school between parent conferences, wishing to pass out so that I would get whisked away and taken care of and the stomach pain would go away and I wouldn't have to figure out what to do.  I didn't mention that I nearly crawled my way to my car; that I have a high tolerance for pain; that I thought that I was going to die the night before; that I'd never been in such bad shape in my entire life.  I'm a forty-seven year old healthy woman with four kids.  I teach high school, and I do yoga and walk every day.  I'm lucky and healthy and have a full life.  I'm never sick until I'm really sick.  This is the worst sick I'd been.  Debilitating.

I didn't say this.  He said, "But, you know, you look great.  I think I'll just give you the antibiotics, and that should clear things up."

He thought some more.  "On the other hand, maybe we should check it out just in case.  Just to be sure. Yeah, we can go in laprascopically to check things out and take out the appendix if it's a problem.  It's an easy surgery.  You'll be out of here this afternoon."

-------------------------------------------------------

 

Who Am I Today?

prompt from Journal of Expressive Writing: Who Am I Today?

I am my mother.  I am not my mother.  I want to keep everyone happy.  I want to speak up and make myself happy.

Today in sophomore English, I read Billy Collins' poem "On Turning Ten" with my students over zoom.  I was thinking that this poem might resonate more with them than the Tralfamadorians' sense of time in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.  I don't blame them for being confused by the Tralfamadorians.  The first time I read Slaughterhouse Five, over twenty years ago, I had no idea what was going on.  I got through it, but I thought, Gracious, I need to sit through a senior class where Donna (colleague) teaches this novel.  She had the structure of the novel down, and could break it into manageable parts to such a degree that every character and symbol and motif seemed obvious, glaringly obvious.

The Tralfamadorians don't see life as a linear experience.  They see it as all moments at the same time, co-existing.  They see it like a mountain range, peaks and lows all together, not separated or chronological.  Their version of time is so antithetical to ours, or at least to mine.  I am a linear thinker, goal-oriented, hour to hour and point to point.  Step to step to get to desired goal.  This summer I want to write every day, learn piano by picking up a song that one of the kids is working on and trying a measure or two, add to my Italian vocabulary.  I will be able to see how I started with nothing, reached point A by one date and point B by another date.  So, no, the Tralfamadorian version of time is not mine.

But then, as Billy Pilgrim experiences a moment in time and then is thrown into another moment of which he is reminded, I think Oh yes! This is how time works.  One moment reminds us of another moment that we think of as past, but really, it's also our present.  And our future.

In Billy Colllins' "On Turning Ten" the speaker was an Arabian wizard at one age and a soldier and a prince at others.  He used to think that, if he skinned his knee, he would shine.  He learns, upon turning ten, that, when he skins his knee, he actually bleeds.  I am not just a forty-seven year old woman, mom, friend, teacher, wife, neighbor.  I am also still the six-year-old who rejoiced when she realized that her first grade teacher, Sister Patricia Anne, adored her.  I am still the teenager who decided, when she saw a parent take away the confidence of her siblings and other parent, that she would never allow someone that much power over her, that she would never let someone take away her confidence.  I am still the twenty-four year old who needed to leave Boston and move to California jobless because she had to stretch.  I am still the adventurer of two years ago who took a job in Italy for a year and then moved with our family of six to Viterbo, Italy.  I am a mom who loves not driving to work during quarantine and instead settling in at home, prepping in the sunny dining room, spending time at home and being happy to be at home so much.  I am this homebody, too.  Is it Whitman who says that we are contradictions?  I'm one of those, too.  I am still learning to speak up, no matter how many times I've spoken up before.  I am working on not worrying about upsetting people or about whether people like me.

When I hide out because I am angry, I am that protective, self-preserving child.  When I hesitate to speak up at a faculty meeting, I am that dutiful Catholic school girl not wanting to get anything wrong and to get everything right; wanting to be liked and admired and not criticized.  

When I tell my husband that he needs to move out, I am that girl who read her books instead of playing flashlight tag because that's what she really wanted to do; that applied to go to Italy in college after an initial parental no; that moved to California with no job.

I am myself again.

smart

"Mom, you're great."

This is Sebastian, our fourteen-year old.  He is watching me practice a song on the piano.  He's been taking piano since he was five.  He likes playing the piano, or perhaps he likes being able to play the piano.

As I continue to hit the wrong keys, miss my cue to hit a key, hit three keys at once and at the wrong time, Sebastian stops and says, "Okay.  Now you're going to begin every time I hit the C."  We play, and he shakes his head a little to the time and he says, "C.....C.....C...."

I love his patience, his hands, his affection, his working with me.  I am in awe of his ability to teach me.  

I tell him, "Sebastian, you're really smart."

He looks at me and says, "Which kind of smart?"

I say, "The one where you get people.  The emotional smart."

He smiles.  

"Good," he says.

Battles

Connor has earned $17 by putting together two dining room chairs and mowing the lawn.  He decides that he wants to buy Skittles, a huge bag of Skittles that costs somewhere between ten and twenty dollars. We try to eat healthfully at home. A $17 bag of Skittles?  That's a big bag. Bad for the teeth.  Bad for the body. Bad for energy.

No way.

But if Connor wants to get Skittles, he'll walk with me through the woods to Staples to get them. This means an hour plus of walking and talking with Connor.

A retired friend emails, "I vote for the Skittles."

So do I.

Pat

The private school where I teach held a zoom vigil last week in the wake of recent killings of Black people.  Students of color spoke, faculty spoke, parents spoke. I watched and listened, amazed by the courage and strength, especially of the teenagers.  One junior spoke about growing up in Dorchester, around mostly Black people without money.  His mom told him, "When you drive, don't drive fast.  Don't play your music loud.  Don't put down your windows."

He said, "Then I came to Thayer, and the Thayer kids were all speeding into the parking lot in their jeeps, blasting their music, windows down.  And then I went to Scituate and Cohasset, and I thought, 'What is this?' " Scituate and Cohasset are wealthy South Shore towns with both year-round homes and summer homes.   You can leave your bike overnight at the beach, and no one will take it.  My husband and I have called Cohasset a "pretty how town," a phrase that I think we got from e.e. cummings. Scituate has at least two country clubs, and Cohasset at least one.  

Both Scituate and Cohasset are virtually all white.

-------------------------------------------

Scituate is my favorite place in the world.  We went to Scituate for the entire summer, starting when I was four.  I knew nothing about race, and I didn't think about whether a place was white, likely because ninety-nine percent of my life was white.  In the summers, we played tennis and golf and rode our bikes and went to the beach.  As we got older, we babysat almost daily.

When I was a junior in high school, I applied to a summer school program at Milton Academy.  It was called MASP -- Massachusetts Advanced Studies Program.  The guidance counselors at my Catholic school had told me about it, and they told me of other students who had gone.  Kids lived at Milton Academy for six weeks, and took classes six days a week.  I got wait-listed.  At the Open House, my mom and I listened to one teacher, Ted Allen, talk about writing.  He dazzled us -- I don't remember what he said, only that Mom and I were a bit starstruck, realizing, Oh, that's why kids come here.

The director spoke and some other teachers spoke about the program, diversity, learning.  

On the ride home, my mom said, "Well, now you know why you didn't get in."

I didn't know.  

She said, "They talked about diversity and increasing the number of minorities in the program this year.  You're not a minority."

When affirmative action comes up, one of my sisters still says to me, "Remember?  Because of affirmative action, you almost didn't get into that summer program."

-------------------------------------------------------

I was sixteen.  I went to a nearly all-white school.  My family was bitter about the waitlist; I was surprised since I'd always been told how smart I was by my Catholic school teachers, but not bitter.  I wasn't good enough; other kids were better.  I sent back the paper to say that I wanted to stay on the waitlist and hoped they would let me in.

-------------------------------------------------------

When MASP accepted me some time later, I sat at the kitchen table with my parents and debated whether to do the program.  I felt conflicted: on the one hand, I wanted to go; on the other hand, I felt impatient and false.  I kept saying that I wanted to become a social worker, but I wasn't doing anything towards that goal.  If I was serious, I should start working at a shelter now, for the summer.  Going to summer school seemed a luxury (and it cost money, a lot of money!  I think it was $1800 back in 1989), and I needed to get going on my career.

My parents listened.  To their credit, they didn't laugh or condescend.  They told me that I had plenty of time to work in shelters and that this summer program was for just one summer, that it wouldn't get in the way of my desire to be a social worker.

I signed up.

--------------------------------------------------------------

I got the writing teacher we'd heard speak, the charismatic one that impressed my mom and me.  Ted Allen.  He was dynamic, asked the hard questions, made us think on levels I didn't know existed.  At forty-seven years old, I think, Wow, it would be great to take that course now; I could get so much out of it.  I was a kid who liked happy endings, was dutiful and hardworking, and didn't, I think, really get nuance.  I loved Ted's dynamism, bluntness, charisma, intellect.  I was so out of my league, and I partly knew it, and I partly didn't.

He had us watch Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, and I was confused at the end.  I remember his reading from my journal one Friday (on Fridays he read excerpts from our journals; if there was something that you didn't want him to read or read aloud, you just had to mark that in your journal), and my entry started like this, "Do the Right Thing was good."  I remember being both excited that he was reading an entry of mine and embarrassed that my first sentence was so elementary.  I remember that I wasn't sure what the point of the movie was and that I didn't totally get it.  I appreciated it, but I didn't really get it.

One day Ted thrust his black arm out over the table (what I would ten years later learn was called a Harkness table) and said, "What do you see?"  We were quiet.  He repeated himself, "What do you see?  Say everything that comes to mind.  Go."

I'd never talked about race in a classroom before, never heard people talk openly about race anywhere.  I didn't know what to say, and I'm not sure whether I said anything.  But I remember that this boy, Jake, who lived in a town neighboring mine and who seemed so much more experienced and worldly and smart and mature than I was, spoke up and said something that wasn't positive, something that, it seemed to me, he didn't necessarily think, but he understood that others did and he understood that saying these things, these racist or biased things, was what Ted was trying to get us to do.  To go there to that place.  To get race right out there in front of us, like his black arm.

I said nothing.

------------------------------------------

One Saturday when I was sitting by the tennis courts, Ted came and sat with me.  I told him that MASP didn't look at all like my high school, which was nearly all white.  I didn't know what to do about this, how to make my high school more like MASP, more like the real world.  

Ted said, "Change schools."

I was about to be a senior in high school.  I didn't know what to do with that advice.

-------------------------------------------------

My family was still going to Scituate, but only on weekends.  This was the first summer, I think, that my family didn't go down from mid-June through Labor Day.  (This helped me to miss Scituate less, though I still missed it.)  One Sunday I invited a group of MASP friends to come down to Scituate for the day; it was about thirty minutes from Milton.  Caroline, Jenn, Cecilia, EunJin, Pat, another Jen, and maybe another person or two that I don't remember.

Caroline and Jenn and Jen are white, like me.  Cecilia and EunJin are Korean.  Pat is Haitian.  I was still trying to remember the difference between Asian and Haitian and got confused sometimes.  Pat was black, and she lived in Mattapan, I knew this.  And I knew from my parents that Mattapan could be a dangerous place.

But I wasn't thinking about all of this.  I was thinking about a Sunday in Scituate.

Someone -- my parents?  my grandmother and aunt who lived up the street? -- picked us up and drove us to my parents' beach house.  We hung out on the porch, we walked to the beach, we talked and talked and laughed and laughed.  Except Pat.  Pat sulked.  And I didn't know why.  We tried to get her to join in and talk, and I asked her what was wrong, but she shrugged, said very little, and kept a towel over her head at the beach.  I was annoyed: what was wrong with Pat?  I had invited her to spend the day at my favorite place in the world, at my parents' house, with this group of people that she was friends with, too.  I couldn't understand why she was in such a bad mood.

---------------------------------------------------

Pat and I stayed friends through the summer though I still felt frustrated by that Sunday in Scituate.  We exchanged letters that fall, and I remember that I was shocked by her elementary-school print and incomplete sentences.  And I wondered how well we had known each other.

--------------------------------------------------

It's thirty years later, and I'm at the zoom vigil to honor Black Lives Matter and the most recent violence against a Black person, against George Floyd, who was killed by a white police officer.  I'm listening to this black teenager talk about growing up in Dorchester and going to see his new Thayer friends in Scituate and Cohasset, and his being shocked that these places exist, places where white kids his age drive around in jeeps in their bathing suits, blasting music and singing and looking like something out of the movies.  I think, What a shock for him -- that these wealthy white towns exist just thirty minutes from his neighborhood where he has to be careful when he walks outside the house, where his mom doesn't want him going for runs these days because of what happened to Ahmed Aubery.

And it's then, thirty years later, that I remember Pat on the beach in Scituate, towel over her head, not talking to any of us, in a seemingly bad mood.  What was going on for her?  What worlds were colliding for her?  What did she feel driving down Ocean Avenue and sitting on the beach in a sea of white, so likely the only Black person in sight?

I sat in Ted's class and read and thought and talked about race and inequality and injustice.  I looked at his arm when he thrust it in front of me, afraid to speak and afraid not to speak.  But I didn't take the conversations and questions and pull them out of the classroom.  I wasn't a horrible or thoughtless kid, but I was ignorant.  I was so ignorant that I didn't take what I learned on Saturday in class and see it on Sunday in Scituate with my white family; didn't get that Pat's letter did reveal that we hadn't really gotten each other, or rather, I hadn't gotten her; her education or neighborhood or background hadn't crossed my mind.  

I turned seventeen that summer.  I can be disappointed in myself for not getting inequality or race or injustice or paying attention to the right things.  If I forgive myself, then I also need to forgive the students in front of me, the ones who worry more about their GPA's and college applications than the Black experience at our school.  But I'm the teacher now.  

Ted Allen told me years ago when I was the student, "Go to a different high school."  

I don't want to go to a different high school.

I want to make my classrooms better.  My school better.  I want to have the conversations in the classroom, in classrooms similar to those Milton classrooms, to get my students to see real life outside the classroom in ways that I didn't at their age.

The Hardest Step?

May 31, 2020

"I've read books about parents' getting divorced, but I never thought that it would happen to us," says Mary through tears.

I never did either.

I've thought and said aloud, "I'll stay in this marriage because of the kids."  We have four kids, ages 14, 13, 10, 8.  I teach high school Latin and English, and I remember the student essays about the worst moment of a kid's life, when parents sat down their kids to tell them that they were getting divorced.

I tell our kids on Sunday morning, "Your dad and I love you very much. And we have been having problems, so we are going to take a break.  He is moving out for some time."  I'm pretty sure that those are the words I use, though I stop and cry a lot, and Daniel adds to what I say.  The big kids sit on the couch, some tears streaming, saying very little.  Hannah sits on Daniel's lap.  Connor, age 10, sitting on the floor, keeps backing up, farther and farther until he's under the shelf that the tv is on.  He's made himself so small that he fits.  I told Daniel what Connor would ask.  And he does.

"Why is Dad the one moving out?"

"We think that it's best for you kids if I stay here," I tell him.

"Your mom is very competent," Daniel says.

Connor stays hunched in his corner under the tv.

Hannah is sitting on Daniel's lap.  She gets up and gives me a hug.  

The big kids sit and stare.

One kid says, "I thought you were going to say that we had to do a better job with our chores."

Another says, "I thought you were going to say that we were having a family movie."  

We laugh.  

We cry.

Part of me cannot believe that we are doing this to them.  That I am doing this to them.  I have a choice: I can forgive my husband for what is called an emotional affair.  The third.  Or fourth, if you count the high school ex-girlfriend twice.  But I'm not sure that I can really and truly forgive again (or maybe whether I ever did), and I don't want to be feeling anger and resentment in my own house every time something smaller comes up, something unrelated to these relationships.  

I need some ease. Emotional ease.

Our kids know that they are loved and valued.  I know they do.  I do not feel that way in my marriage.  

I wouldn't want them to stay where they didn't feel loved and valued.