These Days by Stephanie

One of our Thanksgiving traditions began when our youngest, Ben, was around two: macaroni and cheese. Getting him to eat anything other than dairy was a near impossibility, so home-made mac and cheese seemed a good alternative to turkey for part of his meal. That, along with my introduction of The Annual Coca-Cola Glazed Ham circa 1989, became Thanksgiving “staples.”
Last year, I figured that everyone had outgrown the mac and cheese…slaves to protein and carb counters that they are. The omission evoked horror at the table  – so traumatic, in fact, that I whipped up a Pyrex dish of mac and cheese while everyone was already eating, and promised never to deviate from that tradition again.
This year, Ellie is making the mac and cheese, something that worried Ben at first: Was his sister up to the task? He even called her, making sure the bread crumb sprinkle would be on top “like Mom’s.” Ellie is also making the stuffing, a recipe that was passed on to me by my mother, as well as Ellie’s own invention of pumpkin and applesauce cookies.
I ask myself: Have I created traditions or neuroses? Probably a little of both.
Traditions notwithstanding, things have changed over the holidays as the years have gone by. For one, our former house with the real wood-burning fireplace in the dining room now belongs to others. I have to stop myself from picturing the scene there…as though the new owners are intruders rather than people to whom the house was sold. There are people who are no longer guests at our table  who have either moved away, are absent because we have moved too far away, and, in truth, because some friendships change over time. This year, there are guests for whom the trip has been arduous in recent years  – namely my parents.
Thanksgiving will be at my sister and brother-in-law’s house – a two-hour drive away in upstate New York where The Berkshires are postcard vistas, and the house can sleep plenty what with aero beds and pull-out sofas. Fifteen of us this year –  all family.
My sister and her husband (Bobbi and Edward) were married three weeks ago to this day. She and I haven’t had Thanksgiving together since we were kids, a result of her living in Paris for 25 years until Edward came along. She’s making the salad and setting the table,  both of which she does with great aplomb and panache  while Ellie and I are cooking. Thanksgiving hasn’t been Bobbi’s “holiday” until this year. She hates sweet potatoes and turkey, and this morning I convinced her that we don’t need shrimp and smoked salmon appetizers, that the Thanksgiving meal is plenty. She just informed me that she has muffin tins (Fantastic! Because I was just about to run out and buy some)  only to call me back, realizing upon closer look, that they are egg poachers. Alas, her one true culinary specialty is chili con carne….but compensating for culinary input, she’s the one who’s driving our parents upstate on Thursday morning, and I wouldn’t trade places with her for the world as I cook the 24-pound turkey and glaze the ham.
Although my father is looking forward to the gathering, there is a part of him that’s clearly concerned about the journey, the change of environment, the impact that the large gathering will have upon our mother, and he forgets that Bobbi really does know how to drive (we keep reminding him that she circumvented Parisian avenues for 25 years which should give her good standing in Nascar).
I am concerned that the meal, planned to be served at four o’clock, will find my mother sleeping since that’s the time of day she typically naps. I remind myself that I have friends for whom this year will be the first Thanksgiving without their parents, this being the time in so many of our lives when our parents are “gone”  in one way or the other. And so, four o’clock it is, and perhaps we can change my mother’s nap time on Thursday so she’s awake for the event.
Holidays are often filled with anxiety despite the notion of festivity. And then as my friend Gary put it, “It’s one of my favorite holidays once you get past the familial dysfunction.”  This year, in particular, is an exercise in maintaining good cheer, what with the condition of our mother, reeling in the kids from so many geographic directions and learning to sit back and take in that old dynamic, introducing Edward’s daughter to my kids, and generally an awareness of these times where abundance on a table seems more than irony.
As much as I look forward to this year’s Thanksgiving, a part of me just wants it to be over: I’m looking forward to looking back with a sigh of relief that we all made it through, and everyone was sated, happy, and there were no crises – no displays of that undercurrent of families who put the fun in dysfunction.
My sister and I wondered this morning how many times our father would clink his glass to make a toast  – a habit of his since we’re small, and one of those Pavlovian triggers that makes us both cringe. It would take years of therapy to figure out why we both have the same reaction as he taps his wine glass and a hush falls over the room. For some reason, it reminds me of Khrushchev’s metronomic banging of his shoe on the table at the U.N. It has that sort of ominous iconic tone to it that takes us right back to Dysfunction. Now, our father’s toast is riddled with delusion that drives us crazy while we also understand, and feel a mix of compassion and hopelessness.
“Here’s to Mother’s full recovery,” he says.
Bobbi and I have been hearing this refrain for at least three years now, and as the years go on, it’s becoming tougher to hear. We know the reality, and understand that this hope keeps our father sane, and so we raise our glasses with increasingly masked bravado, downing more wine that we typically might on other occasions, and trying not to look at one another: We could laugh inappropriately — or cry. Together, at moments like those, we have an average age of about ten. And then of course, there’s that old dynamic that inevitably rears its head among my three kids when the twenty-something’s are suddenly reduced to 6, 8, and 10 with “you idiot” punctuating sentences as the wine is poured.
Perhaps a crystal ball would come in handy right about now - just some assurance that it will all go smoothly, efficiently, happily -  and become the day it’s supposed to be that’s filled with the counting of blessings and gratitude for what we have.
The thing is, I am tired,  and I wonder whether this is age-related fatigue or whether it’s simply that I have been running on empty for the last year, juggling too many balls in the air that keep hitting me on the head every so often. I think it’s that membership in the sandwich generation: between being parent to the parents, parent to the children, being wife, friend, sister, and trying to fit in my career/myself somewhere in the melee. A woman 20 years younger might feel exhausted, I assure myself. The groceries arrived yesterday morning at the crack of dawn (and I laugh now because I recall my mother using that expression years ago: Who the hell is Dawn? I’d ask, and then watch her face show disapproval at my comment ). I didn’t tackle the preparations with my usual verve yesterday. I looked at all the supplies - yams, onions, cranberries, flour, sugar, eggs…and poured myself a steaming cup of coffee and wanted to pour myself a Scotch.
But I remind myself as I chug along here that things like mac and cheese, my mother’s stuffing, the glazed ham, the addition of Ellie’s pumpkin cookies and my sister’s wickedly good Parisian salade dijon are really mortar in a family… traditions that shore up the foundation, that promise to hold us together, allowing us to embrace what was, make us thankful for what is and what remains,  and definitely tap our senses of humor when something like a clink on a glass makes us want to duck and cover.
So cheers with a clink, everyone, and Happy Thanksgiving.

We moved into our old Victorian house in March 1989 when the kids were two, four, and six. David, the eldest, ran through the halls and backyard exploring, convinced he’d find relics from a long, lost time. Ben, the youngest, had little to say, although for some still unknown reason, he insisted on wearing his blue rubber rain boots that were stenciled with gold half moons and stars, and wouldn’t take them off except to sleep. Ellie, the middle one and only girl, refused to attend nursery school as soon as we moved in. The principal wanted her to go for “therapy,” but I knew she simply had a justifiable case of “Mommy-itis” brought on by the change, and that she would heal in time. Sure enough, about a month later, she got up one morning, dressed, ate a big breakfast and went to school with little fanfare. Shortly after that, Ben removed the boots, and David’s accrued “treasures” he’d dug up in the backyard were placed on a shelf: shimmery rocks, pieces of broken china, old metal miniature cars, and plastic soldiers.
And so, within months, this house became home.
The wraparound porch where they once roller skated and rode their tricycles on inclement days morphed into a teen hangout on both winter and summer eves, the air filled with cigar smoke (yet another phase the boys went through), while a boom box played CDs in the still of the night, and laughter wafted up to our bedroom window. In the morning we’d invariably find an occasional (okay, more than occasional) empty can of Budweiser hidden in the grove of hydrangea. Thanksgivings and Christmases smelled like applewood and pine from the wood-burning stove, with typically 20 people – friends, relatives, and small children, filling the small contiguous rooms.
Now, our house is for sale, and this past Thursday was most likely our last Thanksgiving here. The guest list dwindled as adult friends have chosen to visit parents in Florida who can no longer make the journey, and many relatives have become too infirm to travel, or simply too tired for an arduous drive. This year, it was just the five of us, something that concerned me when I broke the news to the kids, yet surprisingly, they were all pleased to be just our core group on what was a most poignant day.
At first, I was mystified by my reaction to letting go of this house. I questioned why it wasn’t more difficult for me. I’ve concluded that it’s because memories live within the mind and heart, and there comes a time when letting go is far better than hanging on to a past when the future beckons, and it’s simply time to move on.
My parents have lived in the same Manhattan apartment since 1957. I can’t bear to go there these days. It’s not the modern, well-appointed home that I recall from my youth. My old bedroom is no longer the little girl room with doll-lined shelves and floral chintz, that then became the teenager’s room with postered walls cautioning to Make Love, Not War. In fact, the room that was once mine is now my mother’s “hospital room “replete with mechanical bed, and medical supplies piled to the ceiling, her wheelchair in the corner. You see, my parents stayed too long. I so often wished they were more like so many of my friends’ parents who retired to a warm clime, or simply moved to another, newer place when they were in their own middle age and my sister, brother, and I had moved along. That way the apartment would not have become a place where white walls are now gray and peeling, and memories have become blurred and tainted by the scourge of aging and illness.
I neither want that sort of decay for my children, nor for my husband and myself. I want to enter a new phase, as my children forge lives of their own. I hear my friends talk about the glorious prospect of grandchildren within the next decade, and I cringe when they say this old house could be filled with even more family. Have I become selfish, or is that time is galloping, and although I can’t slow it down, I don’t have to push it along?
I have had our babies. I have smelled their sweet necks powdered with talc. I have seen my children take first steps, speak first words, go from home to school, from tricycles to bicycles to cars. I’ve stayed awake until dawn with children who had fevers and earaches, waited half the night for them to come from a party when they were teens. I have packed their bags to leave home for college, from college to their own apartments. I have cried, laughed, burst with pride, and ached for them – sometimes to a point where it placed marriage at a distinct disadvantage when it came to making time for romance, let alone conversation. It was nothing that we all haven’t done as parents  - nothing heroic. But, in fact, it was unquestionably a sacrifice, and one we gladly made, although at times it took its toll. It’s hard to be a wife, mother, husband, father, lover, worker, and friend all at the same time without sometimes leaving yourself and someone else in the dust.
And so with the letting go of this house, I don’t let go of history. My memories are vibrant and sweet. I don’t let go of all the wonders of my children growing up into three of my favorite people on earth. I only let go of the house, and want to spare my children the despair of one day seeing something that once was beautiful become unwieldy with memories tainted by time instead of preserved in the gossamer of the heart and soul.
After 24 years of marriage, we look back and realize that in the beginning, in so many ways, we were nearly strangers. And as strangers, we had babies and made a home, but only saw each other in stolen moments, and neither of us was that good a thief. And so, perhaps an oxymoron, we begin now in the middle as the best of lovers and the best of friends.

My mother never wanted to live any place other than New York City – although every summer, from the time I was seven months old, she rented a summer house, typically by the shore.
The houses were simply furnished, had dishes and pots and pans, and yet my mother, single-handedly, imported sheets, towels, toys, books, clothing, and whatever other necessities didn’t come with the house. She barreled up to Connecticut in her wood-paneled station wagon come Memorial Day weekend , and packed up come Labor Day. It all seemed so effortless. And now, as a mother, I realize it wasn’t.
An old friend of my mother’s recently explained my mother’s rationale for the summer house: she wanted me to have a perspective not offered in the city, a carefree sense of summer that camp schedules and routines didn’t have, exposure to the “country” and the seashore . A mandate came in my fourteenth summer: I had to work, either gainfully or volunteer, but I had to give back, and not just toast my summer skin.
In 1971, my mother bought her own “summer house,” despite the unrealistic figure imposed upon her by my father. In retrospect, it was nearly a dare. Even the real estate agents said she’d never find a house that was close to my father’s bottom dollar line. But my mother found a home on five acres with a kidney-shaped pool (alas, no seashore)  – the divorcing owners were so acrimonious that the house was truly a distress sale, with both punitive spouses determined that neither would profit. It got to the point about ten years ago that my mother was tired of the back and forth, yet the home had become my father’s “Tara,” and he refused to let go. It was only after my mother’s illness and our father’s reluctant sanction  that my sister and I emptied the home in 2006. We sifted through memories, held a tag sale, salvaged what we deemed sentimental and items my father wanted to keep, tossed the rest into two huge dumpsters, and sold the house. For us, with our mother “gone,” the house had really been abandoned for the last two years.
My sister and I took mementos: for me, the pasta bowl my mother used every Sunday to serve lunch, and my grandmother’s hand-painted candy dish that graced the coffee table and my mother once promised me; for my sister, a crystal ashtray etched in blue, and a tray that held our mother’s perfumes. Oh, and I took a little china canister from my mother’s dresser. It was empty, and looked like it was designed to hold toothpicks. White and painted in pastels, it is scripted with “Always look for life’s rainbows.” It struck me as something my mother wouldn’t have bought, and certainly it wasn’t a philosophy that I thought my mother espoused. It sits now on the hutch of my desk – somewhat of a mystery, a constant reminder to me that I don’t really know, and never did, certain aspects of my mother as a woman.
In 1985, when my husband and I moved to the suburbs, my mother was duly horrified. Living in the suburbs was anathema to her,  and to me as well as I have said so many times before. Perhaps, in part, it was being that much farther away from one another: We’d always been walking distance or a subway ride away. The word “suburb” was new to my vocabulary back then, and felt like limbo, neither city nor country. And yet now, as we search for what will be our third NYC apartment in three years since we sold our house, I long for our “home.” I loved our house with a passion:  an odd, quirky, old Victorian among McMansions in what was a homogeneous “bedroom community.”
Lately, I walk around with a lot of baggage. Not the kind we talk about in therapy that’s steeped in the past, but real baggage: an over-sized leather purse and a cloth zipper-topped bag with the logo “Strand” (the venerable NYC bookshop). In these bags, I carry everything I need should I find myself stranded. Hmmm…Was the Strand bag’s purchase a true Freudian slip?
The bags hold blush, lipstick, Advil, Nexium, Stim-u-Dents, Rolaids, antihistamine, Epi-pens, tissues, comb, glasses, hand sanitizer, sunglasses, baseball cap (and I never wear one), folding umbrella, keys, Metropass, wallet, gym card, two novels (in case I finish reading one on the subway, I can begin the next one), comfy but ugly shoes (what if my feet ache from pounding the pavement?), a slip of paper with everyone’s bank account numbers (ours, our kids, my parents), a water bottle, chewing gum, and a somewhat stale granola bar. Not very glamorous…
The last time I carried such baggage was for my kids: plastic-lined diaper bags “
filled with snacks, clean diapers, juices, moistened wipes, liquid medications, pacifiers, plastic keys…
Is this baggage the middle-aged equivalent of the diaper bag? Is it because after 20 years of owning a home, I am now at the mercy of landlords and want to make sure I have my own stuff at all times? Is this the reason my mother was (and she was just around my age) so determined to find the permanent summer house?
My parents live in the same apartment they rented in 1957. Did my mother want stability that didn’t come with the lease, never believing they’d still be there 51 years later? And I hope she doesn’t have an inkling on the days when she is more lucid that the apartment has become a sort of Grey Gardens. Did she want the summer house as a place where her family could gather with significant others, spouses, grandchildren? I mean, there were three weddings at that house…
My mother was never able to finesse the weekly weekend trek. She was forever transporting “boat bags”  filled with supplies, and a small suitcase of clothing.
We often battled: “Why can’t you just LEAVE things there?” I’d ask with frustration. “Leave clothing, frozen foods, a second set of pots and pans and duplicates of cosmetics?”
And she simply answered that it wasn’t her way, often punctuated with “Just leave me alone.”
And now, there is a part of me, as I get older, who wonders how much like my mother I am becoming – witnessed by this need I suddenly have to carry my belongings with me like a gypsy who feels unsettled, not knowing where she’ll land. And that giant “why?” Again, is it endemic to middle age, or am I more like my mother than I ever cared to imagine? Did we both suffer from something that made us feel unsettled, and also the need to know that we are able to flee on a moment’s notice?
Like my mother, as she searched for the country house, I am searching for what may not exist in New York City unless, of course, money wasn’t an object. I long for a place that will house my family (albeit leased) whenever the need arises…weekend visits, holidays, homecomings for no reason other than family. As for a summer house, that remains a pipe dream…
My sister, my father, and my children have said (more than several times in the last few months) that I exhibit an expression, use a phrase, proffer a behavior that is redolent of my mother. Her tangible daily baggage was unlike my bags of “stuff.” Hers was an elegant and slender pocketbook, filled with a few necessities, and always holding an embroidered handkerchief scented with Arpege. But given what others have noticed about me lately…the comparisons made to her… I wonder what other ties she and I might have…what other more amorphous baggage we shared, upon which topics we might have compared notes once I moved back to her beloved NYC. What might we have discovered had she been capable of expressing herself…and had I been receptive to her, and willing to open up? How much of our baggage, the other kind, has become similar now?
Yesterday afternoon, my sister and I watched one of my family’s old home movies  – the one right after the birth of my oldest child. My sister wanted to hear our mother’s voice again. My mother (then the same age that my older sister is now) was holding David, marveling at how perfect a creature he was, saying in her melodic voice, “He doesn’t look like a new one!” Calling to me as I was “off camera” that she threw out old food from my refrigerator. Did I see myself in her gestures, the tone of her voice, expressions I might have said myself? How strange that I wanted to…uncertain if I really did.
And so, I continue to comb the city for the perfect apartment that will take us through the next several years, defiantly optimistic as my mother was, looking beyond eyesores in neighborhoods that are “up and coming,” determined to make a home. I glance at that peculiar jar and its suggestion to look for life’s rainbows, and wonder, what exactly was over her rainbow when she was in her 50s  and what exactly is over mine?

We have old 16 millimeter films of our family  – parents and grandparents – from well over a half century ago that we recently transferred to videotape. Despite the modern configuration, we have to focus on the expressions and body language of our loved ones, some still here and others long gone, since there are no words or living color. We’re forced to fill in the blanks, guessing as to what they were saying, how they felt at those captured moments. We can’t even tell if the days were sunny or overcast.
Last week, my sister and I had dinner with our parents at the restaurant where the waiters and maitre d’hotel have greeted our parents for the last thirty years. Our mother used to walk down the beige carpeted steps in her Bruno Magli high-heeled sandals, an entrance no less than regal. Her complexion was always pure without a trace of make-up except for perfectly applied lipstick, and only in the last few years, perhaps a hint of blush in winter. Regardless of how well we were turned-out, our mother was always the show-stopper, exuding a dignity and elegance that teetered on aristocracy. And now she is pushed in a wheel chair through a side entrance with a metal ramp, unable to move her left side, her speech halting at best, her eyes the only window to her soul.
The waiters and the maitre d are wonderful to our mother. You see, they knew her “before.” And then there are the others  – the strangers who stare and then look away, or those who approach her kindly, but talk in voices too loud with speech overly enunciated and too slow as though she no longer has any faculties at all. She can hear you, I long to say. She can understand. I can only imagine what my mother must be thinking. Too often, these days, she is treated like a child, called “honey” and “sweetheart” and other endearments by those who don’t know her. My sister and I know that the strangers mean well, but for us, she is not merely the ailing older woman pushed into the dining room: She’s our mother.
How do we explain to strangers that once, just months ago, she was so different? How she spoke not just perfect English, but Russian (her first language) and German and French with a fluency that made people wonder which was her native tongue. How just months before the stroke felled her, she was studying Italian, and loved the opera. How she had a quiet flair for fashion, made lavish dinner parties, could hold court with anyone about politics and literature, held strong social opinions with a rebellious bent, and always walked to the beat of a different drummer, her tongue poised with snappy comebacks as she fearlessly championed whoever was the underdog. How her nimble fingers flew over the piano keys as she played Bach and Chopin. The way she drove her Volvo through the streets of Manhattan vying with every cab driver for the territory, once even hurling back an expletive replete with hand gesture that we didn’t even know was in her lexicon.
It is my sister who has enabled me to finally cry over our mother. Until very recently, I’ve held the tears inside, fearful about how uncontrolled they might be as they flowed. My sister cried easily when she first saw her, perhaps because the night the stroke attacked my mother I was there shortly afterwards in the emergency room, and spent the next few days witnessing her slow but insidious demise. My sister, who lives overseas, didn’t see her until the stroke had seized hold viciously, and the juxtaposition between who our mother was and is was all too staggering. For my sister, our mother was suddenly unrecognizable.
Our mother’s narrow skirts and fitted jackets have been placed on cushioned hangers in her armoire, the Bruno Magli shoes lined up beneath them. My sister (the one who inherited the fashion sense of our mother) has bought her flowing cotton pants embossed with shimmery threads, and soft scooped-neck tops outlined in glitter, clip-on earrings, strands of beads, and open-toed shoes with wedge heels – clothes that our mother wouldn’t wear typically, but fit her new lifestyle with a comfort and grace that still allows her to reek of that elegance. I am the one who cooks for our parents (I inherited the culinary sense from our mother), and our mother suddenly has a penchant for foods she never ate before – comfort foods like macaroni and cheese and strawberry ice cream and chocolate souffles. We buy her creams and balms and orthopedic accoutrements to make her life easier. We took her to Mr. Umberto who washed and set her hair. Last week, we bought her a pillow that reads “I’d Rather Be in Paris,”  and it made her laugh and murmur something that sounded like “for sure.”
We watch our mother now much the way we watch the old black and white silent movies – using our imaginations to wonder what she might be thinking and longing to say, trying to fill in the blanks for her, as she all too often shakes her head in frustration because the words won’t come. For us, there is a letting go of her at the same time that there is a nearly relentless holding on to her. My sister and I know that the only saving grace we have right now is one another, and the glorious concession that that neither of us will ever fill Bruno Maglis the way she did. With that, we adjust, find peace, and fill in the blanks – grateful for memories and silent films.

Last weekend, Ellie and I took a road trip, our first one alone, unless you count the ones when we checked out colleges in her senior year of high school. I still think about those trips often – especially the drive back from Northampton, Massachusetts after her admission to Mt. Holyoke College. Every time I hear Judy Collins singing Fires of Eden, a song of promises and innocence as someone leaves home, I think of Ellie. It’s a love song, but for me it was about my daughter. How I missed Ellie when she left, and how much I still do as dusk falls in the city. I still picture her driving home from work, walking up the steps to the home she shares with Larry in Northampton where she remained. Sometimes I visualize so intensely, I wonder if I am intrusive.

Ellie and I have needed this road trip for awhile now – to calm our souls, re-connect as women, re-connect as mother and daughter, and above all to re-connect with Andrea, someone who was and remains so cherished in our lives.

Andrea is our friend, but that doesn’t do her justice – she is more like Ellie’s big sister and my fourth child.

“Andrea was the one who taught me how to put on make-up, Mom,” Ellie mused as we drove. “You know, you never wore make-up. She knew about things like that.” And I also knew that in those years what Ellie couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me, she’d tell Andrea who guided her down the right path.

At 36, Andrea is married to Richard and living in Rhode Island with their new addition, Angelo, AKA “The World’s Most Fantastic Baby,” according to Andrea. Richard says she really should stop saying that to passers-by (although it happens to be true). As for Andrea, this is a woman who swore she’d never marry, “never ever” have children, and way back when, I wondered if she’d ever settle down and find peace. What she has found is beyond my wildest dreams and expectations.

Ellie drove, which always finds me gripping the car door and faux braking with my right foot braced ahead – analogous to men playing air guitar. When we lived in the ‘burbs, I logged more miles than Greyhound. I had a mini van and then a Subaru wagon and drove our children from the time they were infants until the time they had their drivers’ licenses. Since our move to the city, the subway has become my magic carpet, a faster alternative than the car. And so, the vehicular baton was passed to Ellie who dubbed me her co-pilot, in charge of the vague Mapquest directions. Right there was Change: Did Ellie realize that motherhood makes it hard not to be a backseat driver when you’ve spent you’re whole life both steering and navigating for your children?

Andrea and Richard’s house sits in the center of a suburban street in Cranston where yards back on to one another and a sense of home and neighborhood comforts you. The rooms inside are painted in muted shades of blues and greens, paintings and posters placed in just the right spots, the kitchen is pristine, everything appointed so perfectly without deliberation, but with ease – a far cry from the condition of the garage apartment she lived in when she spent her three years with us in our suburban home. She took us upstairs to Angelo, who had just awakened from his nap. Andrea deftly changed him as though she had mothered a dozen children before. On Saturday night, Ellie, Andrea, Vinnie (Andrea’s Dad who is my vintage) went out for our reunion, leaving Richard to babysit (and hoping that Angelo wouldn’t awaken to breast-feed). It was Andrea’s first night out solo since pregnancy. The girl who once could party until dawn and began the night just before midnight was yawning come ten o’clock, calling home on her cell, nursing her Sangria, drinking glass after glass of water. Vinnie and I mostly watched Ellie and Andrea laugh and talk as we sat across the table. The morning before we left, Andrea and Richard made a brunch that could easily rival the finest restaurant. Andrea, the girl who once felt that potato chips and frozen apple turnovers piled with ice cream was an adequate meal, made a sweet potato frittata and broiled salmon. And there was wine, water, coffee, cloth napkins – everything served with a quiet elegance.

Defined, a generation is thirty years, and although we three don’t fit Webster’s definition, it felt like three generations of women – two of whom I recall as girls. It was a significant marker of time – the embodiment of beauty, sweetness, past, present, and future with more to come. And of course, there was also the fairytale ending – Andrea’s “happily ever after” with Richard and Angelo, and Vinnie and I looking on once again – as though witnessing a miracle, like we’d never seen a family before.

The passing of time sometimes grabs hold of you when you least expect the grasp. As we sat around the dining table, the last ten years raced through my mind all at once. How much had happened to the three of us. How much we’d all been through, come through, particularly in the last few years when although, as Andrea so aptly put it, life was filled with chaos. Yet, although we three suffered a brief disconnect, we never left one another’s landscapes. Perhaps, above all, Andrea, with her new pixie haircut and porcelain skin, glowed so that it seemed like a halo surrounded her. She handed Angelo to me at brunch, and although it’s been 21 years since I’ve had a baby, it was second nature. She had just fed him — sweet potatoes, apple sauce and rice cereal, and as he sat on my lap, I felt that familiar rumble up his little spine, grabbed the cotton blanket from the table, and caught the part of his lunch that was too much for his tummy.

“How’d you know that was going to happen?” Ellie asked.

And I wanted to say, and maybe I did, that it’s kind of like driving, and riding a bicycle – you just don’t forget. And in that moment, there was so much I recalled and realized: holding Angelo brought back all that I wished I could recapture if just for a few hours.

I took the train home from Amherst, Massachusetts on Sunday, stopping at Ellie and Larry’s for a sleep over on Saturday. The depot is literally a siding, a country track where the station house is closed on Sundays, and college kids cling to one another as either the boyfriend or girlfriend heads home from the weekend in the college town. It brought me back to my senior year in high school when I visited my boyfriend at Bucknell, taking the bus from Port Authority to Lewisburg, crying all the way home, wondering how I’d live without him until the next visit. And I looked at myself now, alternately feeling like my babies were born yesterday, wanting to recapture the desperation and passion of the kids at the bus stop, and as a wife of 28 years who often longs to be a girlfriend again – Mark’s girlfriend, but a girlfriend nonetheless. I thought of Andrea who is now a mother and wife, and Ellie who has made her home with Larry, and how their lives are just beginning. And I wondered how it was possible that Andrea and Ellie were so much alike in so many ways until the next day when an email came from Andrea that was more like a love letter, explaining (in one part) that she and Ellie are so much alike because they were both so influenced by me. Their 12-year age difference is no longer vast – they are woman to woman now with a lot of shared history. And I thought about the power of motherhood, and of all the successes I’ve had in my life – my children, with Andrea among them – are those which make me the most happy and proud.

Ten years ago, I cried and wrung my hands when Andrea left to chase her dream and moved (albeit briefly) to Tempe, Arizona. And when Ellie left for Mt. Holyoke, I was a wreck. Of course, with both of them, it would have been far easier had they been going places when they were ready to leave. Back then, neither were quite ready to go – both girls doing what they felt they were supposed to do, had to do, and didn’t necessarily want to do. The toughest part of motherhood is letting go.

I sat on the train, glancing at the scenery, doing a crossword, reading Sue Miller’s “For Love.” What an appropriately-titled book took me home and yet away from those two “girls” – leaving them in worlds where they belong with men they love, and who love them right back. I almost felt like I was the one now headed to Tempe or Mt. Holyoke – ready and yet not quite ready for the re-entry to New York City. Mark was waiting for me outside Penn Station. I breathed in the cold of his overcoat as he hugged me, tried to ignore the stale air of Manhattan, and wished the next day wasn’t a Monday so my landing could be more gentle. Mostly, I wished that Andrea and Ellie both lived right around the corner, but living in all the corners of my heart will have to do .

Andrea came to us three years ago wearing overalls and a turtleneck. She had long shagged hair, and carried a beat-up guitar case, and an old stereo. A friend of a friend, she needed a roof over her head, and I needed a babysitter, so it seemed rather serendipitous. She moved into the small apartment over our garage, and we always joked that it was an adoption, not a job. But from the moment the kids laid eyes upon her, they were in love. We were all in love.

At 23, she wasn’t the usual babysitter with a disciplinary agenda. Quite the contrary. She played the same music as the kids, liked junk food and potato chips as much as they did, didn’t care when they left their clothes on the floor, and gave them what they needed whether I was around or not – a mix of good values and affection. Her rules were simple: no swearing and nothing allowed that was remotely unkind. And it was all unspoken: She led by example.

But Andrea had a dream to be a folk singer. And yesterday, on her birthday, she left to chase that dream. For the last three years, after the day was done with the kids, after I put away all the manuscript pages and emerged from my office, she played guitar and sang her original compositions in bars and restaurants around Greenwich Village and every café in the suburbs. She made flyers on my computer billing herself as a “Folk Star” and placed them in the windows of coffee houses with bogus reviews from fictitious newspapers that she wrote herself. She went from the baggy overalls and turtlenecks to sleek black pants and sleeveless black tops. She cut her hair short (by herself), darkened her eyes with mascara, and pierced her ears. But despite the physical changes that made her look more Bohemian, folksier, more Greenwich Village…she never compromised herself. She never really changed a bit.

Over the years, it became increasingly difficult to define our relationship with Andrea. It got to the point when I was out with her and my three children that people asked if they were all “mine ” (she looked about 15), and I would simply say “yes” because, in fact, they were, biology or not. Even my daughter referred to Andrea as her big sister (something Ellie always wanted) – a status validated by the sharing of clothes, shoes, and secrets. Mark and I often teased Andrea that we were glad she didn’t care to go to college because, in fact, we’d find a way to send her. But instead of going to college, Andrea haunted the book stores, reading Fitzgerald, Hemingway, McCullers, Plath, Nin…whatever she could get her hands on. And she’d read at the kitchen counter, periodically asking me to define a word. “Penumbrage” was the one she loved the most. The one that made her giggle as she said it over and over again.

Her biological family is what our society calls dysfunctional. Two sisters, a brother, a broken home. There was a lot of neglect and abuse. Her greatest fear was always that the legacy would bleed into her life. She wanted to get as far away as possible, and so a few weeks ago, she booked passage on Amtrak, and she is headed for Tempe, Arizona, a town where she knows a young man who’s just “a friend.” She shipped her books in boxes I got from the liquor store. I shipped her bicycle. She took her guitar, tapes, and her few items of clothing and headed for the West. She’s filled with romantic notions and reading Kerouac. She didn’t say when she’d be back.

I put $100 in an envelope that she wasn’t to open until the train pulls out of Penn Station, and Mark gave her a loaded phone card. David and Ben bought her a Walkman, and Ellie bought her a dog tag inscribed with their names. And as we stood in the driveway, Mark told her that if she gets in trouble, we’ll send her airfare home. Her lip quivered and she said, defiantly, she doesn’t want us to bail her out. And then as my husband “tsked” at her she said, “OK, Big Guy,” her pet name for my husband that always brings a smile to his face. Her voice shook and I wondered if she was uncertain about Tempe, but at this point was going just to save face.

And so this morning, when I took out the trash, I realized that I didn’t need to close the lid quietly because there was no Andrea to awaken in the garage apartment. I took the key and walked across the lawn to turn the light off over her door and smiled: She never turns off that light, I thought. We must have asked her a million times. I went inside, walked up the stairs, and breathed the air heavy with the smell of incense. Relieved, I saw there were things she left behind: scented soaps and a few CDs coated with a thin layer of dust. The bulb in the kitchen was burned out, and I thought “I’ll have to replace it,” – and then caught myself, realizing there was no urgency.

But more, as I stood there, I felt empty. There would be no more afternoons drinking tea together on the front porch as we waited for the school bus. I would no longer fold the laundry she left in the dryer, promising to do it “later.” I would not race to get the phone while she strummed her guitar too loudly to hear it.

I picture her now sitting on the train, looking out the window as the country whizzes by. I hope she catches a glimpse of a cactus. She has the kind of courage that only youth knows. Part of me envies her and part of me worries. I wonder if it wasn’t my constant caring that’s forced her to prove she could go it alone. I am tempted to leave the light on over her door at night….Just in case.

I am not a morning person. Translated this means, please don’t look at me, talk to me, and God forbid, don’t phone me. When the kids were in school (as opposed to college), I had no choice other than to be a morning person. I was up at 6 a.m., making breakfasts and packing lunches, and trying to get myself dressed for work while throwing in loads of laundry that I’d dry at the end of the day. Oh, and the five dogs (and a number of other creatures as well….some domestic and some intruders in that big old house). Those of us with kids have all been there/done that – there’s nothing heroic or unusual about the scenario. Once, when things got particularly out of hand (the kids were 2,4, and 6), I went on strike. My strike lasted an eternal hour for the children (and did not apply to the 2-year-old, much to the dismay of the older kids), but for one whole hour, I decided NOT to dole out snacks, play games, break up fights, and interact. The kids broke my picket line with tears and promises to behave. They recall that episode to this day: apparently it somewhat traumatized them, not a great psychological move on my part. They still tease me when I’m feeling overwhelmed, asking if I’m planning to strike.
Yesterday, after fielding phone calls from my parents’ physicians, their GE appliance repairman, a call from their care giver, doing laundry, general housekeeping and errands, answering business emails, helping out a friend who had surgery, and trying to write my latest novel in between, I decided to disappear, and wondered if anyone would notice.
I was uptown visiting my friend in the hospital (we live “downtown”), and my husband said, “Call when you get home.” That was at 3 p.m. I deliberately didn’t call him. Yes, it was a test. Instead of heading home, I took the subway from 86th Street to 14th Street and walked across town to my waxing parlor called Boom Boom, a funky little place that looks like a mini-brothel and is run by two women with great senses of humor. I threw my coat and bags on the sofa, sat down in the chair, and asked them to just remove every unwanted hair on my body from top to toe. This is what I do to relax? I thought. What is wrong with this picture? Waxing is far worse than childbirth. I mean, childbirth is natural…
My daughter Ellie and I are going to Rhode Island this weekend, to visit our friend who just had a baby. So, after the waxing, I stopped for a quickie manicure, and then at an unknown hair salon to get highlights. This was all really daring and devil-may-care for me.
Still no cell phone call from my husband wondering where I am. Please note, my husband and I had what I thought was a lengthy talk yesterday morning about how much my back hurt so I wasn’t going to pilates (my daily end-of-day-soul salvation) until after the weekend to give it a rest. The aching back is a result of repairing my parents’ kitchen table last Saturday: I forgot that I’m no longer a kid, and crawling under a table with wrench is not the best for a non-professional.
Once home, I walked Walter in the pouring rain while an industrious homeless man went through the garbage piled in bags on the curb, collecting and tossing soda cans into large plastic bags. I ducked a few that were flying in the wind. A voicemail on the home line greeted me upon my return.
“I guess you went to pilates. I’m going to a meeting, then dinner with Steve. Talk to you later.”
Does the man not know why we carry cell phones? Did he not wonder why I didn’t call as requested to say I was “home?” Then he called again at 7 p.m., and I missed the call, booking my return train with Amtrak, on the other line. Did he not wonder where I was? I called him back  against my better judgment. Expecting a sigh of relief. But still, he didn’t ask where I’d been all day. So much for my vanishing act; my attempt to be a woman of mystery. The scenario reminded me of Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler which has the best first few pages I have ever read: Delia Grinstead is at Bethany Beach with her doctor husband (55) and three children(15, 19 and 21) and decides to take a walk….but she doesn’t come back. After hours, when it’s time to go home, the family finally notices that she’s missing. They call the police. When asked for Delia’s description, no one can describe her: maybe she’s 5′2″ or maybe she’s 5′5″. She’s wearing either pink or blue, her eyes are either blue, gray or green and she might be 90 pounds or 110. No one is sure. Now, Delia had the courage to vanish for a year.
So, how invisible are we as wives and mothers? I have decided these days that I am far too dependable and reliable. I long to be more mysterious, devil-may-care, careless, carefree irresponsible. And I can’t. And I can’t even get a rise out of anyone if I go missing for three hours. I am that glue, that rock, that sure thing. I am like an air traffic controller who can’t leave her post, or take her eyes off the radar screen.
“So, don’t you want to know where I was all afternoon?” I asked my husband when he came home from dinner with Steve.
He cocked his head to the side. Clearly, I caught him off guard.
“I had my hair done, my eyebrows and bikini waxed, and my nails done. You know, Ellie and I will be away this weekend.”
I was pretty sure the bikini wax would pique his interest in the sense that why on earth did I get a bikini wax if Ellie and I are going to visit Andrea and the baby?
“Nice,” he said. And then he took Walter for his walk.
I was going to make a meat loaf and various other easy foods so my husband doesn’t go hungry while I’m away. I was thinking of leaving notes telling him where certain things are located  – answers to questions like, “Where do you keep the toilet paper?” And “Do you have any Q-tips? I’m out.” And then I decided to be daring, and not. Will he miss me? I haven’t been away without him in three years. He was away last Spring with Ben on a golfing junket, but now he has yet to stay home alone without me. So, to answer the question, no, he won’t miss me unless, of course, he runs out of toilet paper. THEN might he call my cell phone? I’m tempted to seize the Charmin.
Is this marriage after 28 years? Am I that much of a constant? Am I too predictable? Too capable? Ah me. The blog below was written a dozen years ago. Seems the more things change, the more they stay the same. And the crazy thing is, after all these years, he still makes my heart skip a beat…for various reasons.

Shortly before I was married, my friend Michelle and I traveled through Italy. We rented a beat up old Fiat and threw our duffel bags in the back seat. We had money and passports and two weeks vacation. We blared Italian music on the car’s tinny radio, and drank Chianti at roadside restaurants where we experimented with all the local culinary fare. Michelle made the mistake of drinking the water and suffered the consequences, but other than that, we had no problems. Total abandon. Footloose and fancy-free.

There was a store on a cobblestone street that had lingerie hanging on a makeshift clothesline. Red lace, Black lace, White cotton thongs trimmed with pastel lace. We screeched the car to a stop and grabbed dozens of pairs for little lire – and then we were off again, our prizes in tow.

Underwear is no longer a focal point of my life, but it used to be. It was something that was on a par with today’s necessities – like paper towel, Band-Aids and American cheese. I find this disturbing and all too symbolic. The other day, I realized that my underwear was look pretty pitiful.

“I’m going to Annie Sez to buy underwear,” I announced to the family. “Anyone want to come with me?”

“Why do you have to buy underwear?” asked 9-year-old Ben.

“Mine is getting ratty,”I said.

“Who cares? No one sees it anyway. Well, maybe Dad. But what does he care?”

A comment made out of total innocence. A 9-year-old boy views underwear as merely another encumbrance. Something else to put on before school that he would probably wear for days on end if not urged to bathe and change.

My husband was working at his desk. I knocked on the door.

“I have a question. Do you notice my underwear?” I asked.

“Why? Are you missing some? Maybe it’s in the dryer. You know, I lose socks all the time.”

“No,” I said patiently. “I mean, do you NOTICE my underwear?”

My husband put down his pen and looked at me. “Have I done something wrong?” he asked defensively,

“Not yet,” I said patiently. “I am asking you if you NOTICE my underwear.”

“Look, if you want me to help you find your underwear just tell me what it looks like and we’ll have a search. I think you’re over-reacting.”

Now, in all fairness, my questioning was vague, perhaps even provocative. But his curiosity was still not sufficiently piqued in my book. Now, I was having a mini-crisis.

Just a few months before I had bought a leopard bikini print underpant. As I pulled them from the dryer, my 13-year-old son was there and duly horrified.

“Whose are THOSE?” he cried out. “Not yours, I hope.”

“Of course not,” I said, tossing them into the small trash can in the corner.

“Well, then whose?” he demanded.

“They came in the mail, I think,” I lied. “Some promotion for, well, er, I don’t know.”

“What were they promoting? Sex?”

Ah, the days before he hits puberty, I thought.

I muttered something about women who wanted to save endangered species and although he remained skeptical, it staved him off.

So, what happened to the days when lingerie was such an essential part of my being? My persona as a woman? My sensuality? When did I start buying underwear in packages at The Price Club?

And that’s why I was heading out to Annie Sez. I was in a state of rebellion, seizing lost youth, remembering Italy, determined to have an Aviance night.

Annie Sez wasn’t exactly that roadside rack in Italy but there they were: high rise, low rise, bikini, thongs. Pastels, lace, see-through, black, red – forget the animal prints. Three for $5. Was I humming Pagliacci? I bought all styles, all colors, in small and medium. It was tough to tell how they’d fit.

The counter clerk eyed me suspiciously as I paid. “You have these in two sizes, you know. Is that what you wanted?”

“Yup. That’s fine,” I said, trying to be nonchalant.

“Okay-ay,” she said, shaking her head. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Once home with my prizes, 12-year-old Ellie grabbed the bag. “Oooh, Mommy, let’s see what you got!” And before I could stop her, she dumped the bag onto the floor.

“Mommy!” she screamed. “Some of these have no backs.” She was nearly breathless.

So much for privacy. David, hearing her cries, came into the room. He picked up a thong like it was a dead bug. “Either these are defective, or you are disgusting.” And then he glared at me.

I went back to Annie Sez, and went up to the same sales clerk. “I bought the wrong style,” I said, handing her the thong underwear. She smirked as she credited my account.

Twenty years ago when I bought that underwear in Italy, I wasn’t trying to be sexy, and for sure, there was no one implying that I was “disgusting.” Now there are three people taking an interest in my undergarments “that no one sees anyway.”

That night, my husband offered to take us all out to dinner.

“Hey, Mom, what is PMS?” asked David. “And I just hope it’s not contagious ‘cause Dad says you have it and I have a big game tomorrow.”

Why is it that any attempt to buy something personal – something other than American cheese – is attributed to hormonal flux? OK, so I kept one pair of black thongs and when I wear them, I am not telling a soul. Oh, solo mio.