These Days by Stephanie

The windows in our apartment are massive panes of glass that open vertically as opposed to horizontally. There is also a metal guard, presumably a safety precaution for children, that stops the windows from opening more than three inches. I can’t argue with that. I installed window locks for my own children when we had our house. Right now, metal guards are no longer necessary. Admittedly, I am claustrophobic by nature. Even elevators make me a little squirmy. I want to open the damn windows as wide as possible and let in the air.

I spend far too much time opening and closing the windows in the apartment, adjusting the heat which either blasts, or there’s none at all. Global temperatures are so variable these days (sixty degrees on one day and thirty degrees with snow on the next day) that finding an even keel is nearly impossible. Not to mention that my own fluctuations in body temperature are variable to say the least. And so, I spend my days trying to find a middle ground, something temperate, a comfort level where I feel a sense of climatic satisfaction.

This opening and closing of windows, this longing for air is literally riddled with symbolism: But is it my age, time in life, global warming, urban living, dealing all day long with the needs of my aging parents, my husband and children or all of the above that prevents me lately from having that sense of “inner peace” and freedom? What exactly am I missing? What exactly do I need? And worse, what’s the reason I can’t quite put my finger on it all?

Last Saturday, Mark and I made a pilgrimage to our storage locker in the suburbs – a 10 X 10 rented room with a 20-foot ceiling where our ex-basement is piled precariously high with boxes. Our primary mission was to retrieve the artificial Christmas tree I bought last year – something that horrified my grown kids who were accustomed to the Balsam Fir carted home every year on the top of my station wagon. No amount of seasonally-scented oil from The Body Shop could disguise that the pre-lit tree was artificial. It was David, 25, who touched an artificial branch, and then denounced me as I defensively explained that the tree was eco-friendly, didn’t pose a fire hazard, and didn’t shed pine needles in the small apartment. I was met with a “look,” but he’s since adjusted.

Of course, the storage locker project morphed into yet another stroll down memory lane. There have been far too many in the last few years. The boxes, veritable time capsules for my kids, labeled in black magic marker: grades K-3, 4-8, 9-12, camp stuff, baby clothes. A number of items didn’t hold up – namely stuffed animals that not only smelled like mildew, but were clearly covered with mildew, the contents of my husband’s former desk (that he didn’t look through at the time of The Move, so I just dumped the drawers into a plastic box and shut the lid), and various odds and ends (a rusted Christmas tree stand, out of date business cards, old stationary). As I opened boxes of plastic Ninja turtle figurines, metal Matchbox cars, baseball cards, and Beanie Babies, Mark said they’re probably worth something on eBay. I was duly horrified to have them reduced to monetary gain, and simply closed up the boxes and re-stacked them. I found a box of bubble-wrapped silver-framed black and white photos of my mother which, at the time of the move, were too painful to bring to the new apartment. I took them home – finally at the point where I can see her in her heyday as opposed to what I see each time I visit her now. And there , center stage in the locker, was Lady Ace – my bicycle won in a raffle nearly 30 years ago that became my constant companion as I rode to work and tooled around Manhattan, unable to afford public transportation. I keep wanting to bring her home – I know she’d be fine to ride on the path by the Seaport. And yet Mark says there’s no room to transport her in the car, and that she’s a “relic” anyway. At this point, he knows better than to even suggest that I toss her. He also contends that I shouldn’t be riding a bike around the city “at my age.” Gee, am I a relic, too?

The “stroll” became a study in Personality 101 as the differences between my husband and myself literally smacked us (well, smacked me, in the head). He kept a box of letters from his days at summer camp, and was ready to throw out the box of Hallmark cards the kids and I sent him over the years – which I rescued, took home, and plan to make into some sort of collage. He wanted to keep a dried out tubular humidifier for a guitar, a staple remover and White-Out (the latter two he examined as though they’d been uncovered at an ancient dig). He kept a team tee marker from the Dow Jones Open held only once in 1971 at The Upper Montclair Country Club. His father took him, he explained, and as the last group passed through, my husband swiped the tee marker. He even remembers that Bobby Nichols won the purse that day and the amount. I heard the whole damn detailed story. That man’s brain carries more golf trivia than Wikipedia. He was really jazzed and nearly teary-eyed. For me, it fell into the I Could Care Less category. Could I hide the look of disdain on my face that the rusty old team marker held more sentiment that the Hallmark cards or Lady Ace? Needless to say, I could never win an Oscar. I suppose it simply boils down to the fact that my husband and I have different histories as well as those we share. As for the Hallmark cards, in deference to Mark – three children and 25 years later, really, how many cards can you keep?

The problem is that I want to keep it all when it comes to our shared history. I can’t let go. A state of mind that, in the therapeutic realm, is probably the result of my mother who was never a keeper (whatever my sister and I found in our parents’ apartment was disorganized and haphazard, hardly chronicled in the way of our locker).

My near obsession to save these triggers to memories might be almost pathological. It’s nearly a fear that if I don’t keep these memories, my family history will otherwise slide into the landscape and be forgotten – that the lives of those I love will cease to exist. I think of people who’ve lost their memories in fires, bombings, floods, and as much as I wish my memories were with me in my apartment, who am I to complain because I no longer have an attic or a basement, and merely a storage locker?

So, back to the windows where all of this started. I have come to realize that time and space are both physical and spiritual – and, for me, the two are interdependent, symbiotic, and as vital as oxygen. I need to open windows as wide as I want, take the padlock from my tangible memories, unlock them if even for a few hours, and have them surround me, live in my skin, and savor them. Maybe what’s missing is really sort of foolish – that kitchen shelf in the old house that held clay molds of my childrens’ hand prints, woven pot holders, and lanyard key chains. I’d like to get rid of the locker one day as well…take off the padlock and bring everything home. Get rid of the window locks…

Lady Ace sat in a corner of our garage for the last 15 years, her blue chrome frame covered with cobwebs. Her tires were flat and grooveless. The red reflector light was shaded with a thick coating of soot. Every time we cleaned the garage, my husband asked if the bicycle shouldn’t be donated along with the plastic Little Tykes cars and the tricycles, the Wiffle ball sets, sand pails, and shovels. And each time I moved Lay Ace back into her corner, showing my husband that the kick stand still held her up.
Just leave her there, I’d say. You never know.
In 1978, I held a sketchy job as an assistant editor for a group of “how-to” magazines. How to build a boat, a house, a deck. I wrote captions for numbered diagrams based on technical instructions. The editor-in-chief sat at a desk across from mine with a bottle of Jack Daniels hanging out of half-open file drawer next to him. On Fridays, he handed me a check for $98 and from that I figured out how to eat, pay rent, and budget transportation.
Little was left over for bus fare (and I only ate one meal a day), so I walked to and from the office, the equivalent of about two city miles each way. One day, I went to a fund-raising party and bought a one dollar raffle. The draw produced a few winning tickets  - one of which was mine. I won the gleaming Lady Ace, my ticket to freedom.
Freedom was arrested a few years later, however, when Mark and I got married and three kids came along in not quite four years. There was never a time when we could ride carrying a baby on the back of bicycles since one baby would always be left behind. A classic case of three’s a crowd, and Mark was never much of a bike rider to begin with. So, Lady Ace sat as a reminder of different days.
As the men in our lives headed for the golf course this summer, my daughter Ellie and I were hard-pressed for something to do other than sit by the town pool with catalogues and magazines. So, Ellie bought a mountain bike with her baby-sitting money, and I took Lady Ace in for a tune-up, sprayed her gears and joints with WD40, and washed her down with soapy water.
It is true what they say about getting back on a bicycle, though my first go-round was awfully wobbly. I wondered how on earth I rode that bike around New York City, darting in and out of traffic, and weaving around construction sites. I remembered the time a cab door flew open somewhere along Vanderbilt Avenue near Grand Central Station: it knocked me right off the Lady, but I dusted myself off and hopped back on. We didn’t wear helmets back then. There was no gadget to hold a water bottle. The only gadget I owned was a pair of ankle clips so my bell bottoms wouldn’t catch on the pedals.
Ellie and I found a path that runs along the Sound. Narrow streets wend their way around the beach, filled with cyclists and roller bladers. Cars drive slowly around the curves with drivers motioning cyclists to proceed. Strangers say hello, and you can lean your bike against a sea wall while you sit on a rock sipping tepid water from a bottle that fits on the bike. The only bad experience I’ve had so far has been with the young salesman at the trendy bike shop by the beach. I wanted a basket for the Lady’s handlebars. He looked at me and Lady Ace as though we’d just stepped out of a time warp.
“What’s the matter?” I asked hotly. “Haven’t you ever seen an older lady before?”
Ah, the joys of double entendre.
Yesterday, Ellie and I stopped on the beach and bought hot dogs from the truck whose side is painted with red letters saying “Boy! What a Dog!” and then we bought ice cream from the Good Humor man. We wore bathing suits under our shorts and had towels in our knapsacks. The beach was quiet in the cove where we sat. There were some middle-aged couples, reading under striped umbrellas. Older women sat in a group, all wearing shiny bikinis, their skin coated with oil. They didn’t care that their bellies protruded, or that their bathing suit tops (straps down) dropped with the weight of their bosoms as they sun-worshiped. A few young women sat at the shore, watching naked babies carrying heavy pails of water to sand castles. Sailboats floated in the distance,
Ellie rolled onto her stomach. The sun pounded her back, her eye were closed, her head tilted to the side. It was a position I hadn’t assumed on the beach for years. For the last 15 years, I have always sat upright on the beach in a folding chair, keeping a vigilant watch over my children as they played in the sand, waving my hand as I beckoned them to “come back” as they ventured too deep into the water. But I rolled onto my stomach like Ellie, closed my eyes, listening to the muffled conversations around me pierced occasionally by the cry of a seagull.
My mind wandered to that peaceful state between consciousness and sleep when a million thoughts pass through in seconds. It was a place I’d been a long time ago before I was married with children. It brought me back to carefree days, days taken for granted when life seemed as infinite as the horizon.
Everything distilled when my daughter stirred beside me.
“Mommy? Are you there?” she asked, eyes closed.
“Of course, I’m here,” I answered.
Ellie and Lady Ace reminded me of who I am now, who I once was, and who I long to be again – and there I was  - just for a few moments.

My parents have lived in the same apartment since 1957. My sister (Bobbi, though everyone knows her as Barbara) and I remember when: the trappings of everything contemporary avocado green appliances, florescent lighting, free-standing televisions with remote controls (that changed the seven channels and turned on and off), crystal chandeliers, faux marble tiles in the foyer, a linoleum kitchen floor, matching floral bedspreads and draperies in the bedrooms, and cornices in the dining and living rooms; the manual elevator with the uniformed and white-gloved operator, the sparkle of the mosaics in the lobby, the newness and luxury.
Two years ago, after our mother’s stroke, our parents spent a month in Florida, and Bobbi and I decided to take advantage of their time away and clean out the place. Every day for that month, we met at the apartment. Our parents phones were the old corded variety, stationed in every room but the living room where we made our “camp.” To the living room, we carted papers from every surface that our father had piled up in our mother’s absentia (and probably from way before since I recall my mother’s daily phone calls complaining about how my father used every available dresser, desk, table to stack his “junk”).
We emptied every closet filled with photographs and letters that our mother promised every year (week?) to organize, blankets that were moth-eaten, threadbare towels, mismatched linens, books so old the yellowed pages were brittle, clothing…The living room looked like a war zone as we sat on the floor among the rubble - sorting through. We ordered in sushi for lunch, taking our break at the coffee table in the living room, not wanting to be in the kitchen under the antiquated fluorescent lighting. And over lunch, we still sifted through deciding what to toss, what to keep, and laughing and crying with hardly a segue as we came across memories. Every time our father called from Florida to “check up on us” (what seemed like dozens of times each day), we took turns unhinging our middle-aged knees to limp into the kitchen and answer his call. Neither of our cell phones got service in the apartment, so they were a non-viable alternative.
We had the carpets and draperies professionally cleaned, bought new linens and towels, scrubbed down the bathrooms with Tilex, threw out medications that had expired decades (yes, decades!) before, polished silver, hung paintings that were stacked in a closet (from their country home which we’d emptied and sold a few months before), bought fresh cushions for the kitchen chairs…the list goes on and on. Suffice it to say, by the end of each day, we were spent  - physically, and even more, emotionally. There was a bar just a few blocks away from the apartment, and like clockwork come 5 p.m., we went in for Margaritas and some sort of shared appetizer, and it only took a drink each to feel that “buzz” since our exhaustion level was at an all-time high.
And yet there are silver linings. That month was a turning point for my sister and me. We are six years apart, a distance that gives us different family histories. We weren’t close growing up, the age difference a major factor in those years, as well as the fact that we both had our own tumultuous episodes. There was even a time when our relationship was adversarial - something we have chosen to let go unsaid, not wanting to exhume the past, and simply move forward. It was that month in the apartment, as well as the month we spent in the country house  cleaning it for the brokers, preparing the tag sale and pulling items at the last minute, keeping them for our father as it all tugged at our heartstrings  that allowed us to become close yet not without trepidation. Like any relationship, time breeds trust, and so as we got to know one another as women  - each of us with very different and distinct flaws, idiosyncracies, characteristics, and personalities - we became not only sisters, but the best of friends. Those months were a study in family dynamics  we were near guinea pigs in an experiment of what happens to siblings if left to their own devices without parental interference or intervention, and we lucked out. Perhaps the strangest thing we noticed in those months were the similarities we shared despite the years we had spent apart  - gestures, figures of speech, words said in unison, penchants for black leggings and over-sized tops as work clothes, a mutual taste for sushi and Margaritas, the ways in which we laughed and cried over the same memories,  albeit for different reasons, and the residue of different experiences. And we even fought  as sisters do.
The day came when the apartment rehab was finished, when it gleamed as best it could despite its age. I cooked dinner for our parents homecoming, and Bobbi set the table with new placemats and cloth napkins. We placed fresh flowers throughout the apartment, and then we closed the door behind us and went for manicures, our nails jagged and broken, our hands marred with so many paper cuts that the polish remover burned. But we were done. And then over our traditional Margaritas we confessed that we were both trying to bury certain thoughts, wondering about that day when we would do this again and if it would be for a homecoming or a more permanent closing down.
It wasn’t until a few weeks ago when I was back at the apartment (I go every week just to make sure that things are staying current - mail, bills, journals, magazines) that I took the box Bobbi and I made and marked “personal.” The fact that the box was sitting on a shelf in my mother’s closet was bothering me. It was something that needed to be in a safer place; I was worried that somehow it could get tossed by an overzealous or careless housekeeper. I took it home. And then last Friday, feeling somewhat like a thief, I read through the letters from my mother to my father. They dated back to the 60’s and 70’s when my sister and I were late teens/early 20’s. And they were love letters  - nothing of an intimate or revealing variety, but still love letters. And in my mother’s hand I saw my own letters redolent of those I have written to my husband over the years, and I was both shaken and comforted at the similarities between my mother and myself when it comes to loving a man.
This afternoon, my sister and I will have lunch together, celebrating our birthdays that fall within 10 days of one another. Lunch is something we try to do every couple of weeks anyway. Coincidentally, we live two blocks apart, and despite the proximity, we really don’t see one another that often although we talk every day. On Friday, we will have lunch with our father, something else we try to do every few weeks just to give him a lift.
The truth is, everything we do for our parents is not altruistic -  in many ways, we do it for ourselves. It’s a recapturing, or perhaps really a capturing, of what we missed growing up as sisters and can retrieve now. We see ourselves in our mother in ways we never knew existed. We see ourselves in each other in ways we never knew existed. We’re mirrors in some ways.
Maybe I’ll show her the love letters (before I return them to the closet shelf) over a couple of Margaritas one of these days since now, in our middle age, we’re making memories together that we never had the opportunity to have before - proving that it’s never too late for anything, and that possibilities, even at our ages, can still be endless.

The painting hangs over the two wing chairs in our living room. It looks like a Modigliani: a woman with a long, beautiful and almost sorrowful face, dressed in bright garb, sitting in a living room of her own. The chairs and the painting are three of my favorite possessions: once they belonged to my grandparents.
This morning’s assignment for the newspaper was on tag sales. The woman who runs them, Esther, took me to an elderly woman’s house and explained: The woman’s husband had recently died, her children are middle-aged and married with children. The woman is heading to Florida. She needs to empty her home.
The woman welcomed us, stepping aside to let us in. And then we traipsed
through her house that was all too quiet. Rooms left over from
when children still lived there. Though fairly intact, the rooms were without the decorations that children typically have, with bright spots on dark walls marking what had once had been. There was an apparent absence of posters, empty shelves, bare dresser tops. Night stands held lamps with brittle shades and tired arrangements of silk flowers, perhaps a china knick knack. As we went through the house, the woman plumped up pillows on the beds, and apologized for the tattered spreads.
“My cat jumps on everything,”she explained.
I marveled at the woman’s ability to be alone and still make sure that although worn, the house was cared for and tidy. She even walked around with a canister of furniture polish and a soft rag, dusting here and there  - veneers that were too old to bring to a shine, juxtaposed to the upholstery that was shiny from wear. The yellow carpet was faded and worn, but vacuumed and clean. A small drop-leaf table sat in her kitchen, two chairs facing each other on opposite ends,
“This table was a wedding gift from my mother,” the woman said to Esther. “It’s 55 years old now. It’s funny, I never really liked it. I’m willing to let it go.”
And I questioned the woman’s sentiment.
Then she showed us some ornate Japanese boxes, souvenirs she and her husband had picked up on one of their myriad trips to Japan. She confessed that she never really liked the boxes either. She was practical, wanting to keep whatever furniture – a desk, some end tables, a dresser - that were small enough in size and would fit into her scaled-down tropical apartment.
Esther was admirably professional. She priced items accordingly, and encouraged the woman to keep certain things or give them to her daughters. Of course, those were the items that would never sell, so how could Esther say to throw them away?
We went down to the basement, and saw the late husband’s collection of hunting guns, cases of wine dated 1953 and 1959,  the bottles covered in dust, stored in cracked wooden crates, labels peeling off. His model airplanes.
“Toys for the boys,” the woman said, her lips set, eyes downward.
As we walked through her home, the woman’s past unfolded. The history of a marriage, of a partnership, a family. I filled in the blanks. Her years past flew by before my eyes like pages of a book turning in the wind. From the small kitchen table and the chipped stoneware to the tarnished silver and bent appliances, ladles, strainers, spoons…years of living. Wear and tear. The woman’s stories began to unravel as she rummaged through boxes, as her hands glided over each item, each one attached to a memory. She pointed out the air-brushed drawings on the living room wall that she’d done in her prime, when her knuckles weren’t swollen from arthritis, she said, when her hands were steady and her eyesight was keen.
Esther lady jotted down notes and prices and dates while the older woman reminisced. Clearly, unlike me, Esther was accustomed to this. Despite the woman’s determination to “start over,” despite the joke she made saying she was ready to relinquish the king size bed since she wasn’t planning to marry again, I swore I could see the pain, trying as she might to be stoically pragmatic. She was untangling her life, giving up bits and pieces that were concrete reminders of a past. I wasn’t sure whether this was courage, stoicism  – or both.
I have many pieces of china and crystal, jewelry and books that belonged to my grandparents. I have the Modigliani-like painting and two wing chairs. So many crowning jewels in my “heritage collection.” One thing I covet tremendously is my grandmother’s unusable carrot peeler: the wooden handle is loose, cracked, and bent; the metal part is dull and useless. But my family knows not to throw it away:  I trust them, keeping it in the kitchen drawer where it belongs, rather than in a “safer” place.
I have a problem with tag sales. Somehow giving one’s belongings to strangers makes me ache inside. It seems like the sale sends memories into some amorphous vacuum, and onto strangers. It’s a letting go with which I can’t make peace. Maybe I should be more realistic, mature, and realize that Esther can sell all the now “useless” possessions and still the woman will not be without her memories. But what about that tactile sense of things? Her sagging overstuffed sofa, the lacquered Japanese box, the cracked stoneware tea cup? Will parting with them deny her past? And what does she see in her future? And doesn’t she, deep down inside, want to keep them?
I asked Esther if her throat ever clutches as she helps the elderly divest of their possessions and their homes. She said it used to, a long time ago, and still once in a while she feels a pit in her stomach.
And then Esther drew back her shoulders and said, “Look, business is business.”
“But…,” I started to say and never got to finish the sentence.
“Sometimes you have to help people let go, you know,” she said gently.
And I thought of the carrot peeler. I can’t let go. Not yet.

My cousin Judy (who is really my mother’s first cousin but sits between my mother’s and my generation) is one of the most consistently philosophical women I’ve ever known. Over the years, unwittingly, she has given me pearls of wisdom, typically after we have a conversation where I relate a circumstance, trial, or curve that was thrown. One of Judy’s best pearls in the last several years as we’ve discussed our marriages and the marriages of our parents (her father was my grandfather’s brother) is that children never really know their parents’ marriage….that children, regardless of their ages, know their parents as parents only.
In the last few years as my parents have both become “unfiltered,” I have become an unwilling and unwitting witness to the two of them as man and woman/husband and wife rather than Mom and Dad. Being privy to the nuances of their marriage has been both illuminating and distressing as they’ve both exposed aspects of their personalities and the dynamic between them. Yes, it piques my curiosity and gives me insight (and fodder for fiction), but there is often “too much information” to digest even at my middle age. Their every secret (and certainly, I don’t know the half of them) unleashes when my father needs to vent, or when my mother’s unfiltered reactions are all too transparent. The revelation of their marital symbiosis validates what Judy has taught me in an almost cautionary way: As children, we can’t judge our parents marriage, and there’s a lot we don’t know, and a lot we don’t want to know.
My husband recalls meeting me in 1979 at a New Year’s Eve party I gave with my Then Boyfriend. He recalls that I was wearing poured-on silver leather pants (God, what was I thinking?). I don’t remember meeting Mark that night. I do remember, about a year later, meeting him at a mutual friend’s apartment — he was pouring a drink as I stood waiting to pour my own. I remember his eyes…dark and soulful…that just looked right through me. I also remember sitting in my mother’s kitchen the following day. Now, understand, at the time I had already been divorced, and was already dating the Then Boyfriend.
“Last night, I met the man I’m going to marry,”  I said to my mother.
I can still see her now, turning around from the stove, spatula waving in the air, nearly screaming, “Are you crazy?”
And smugly, I answered, “Hey, you’ll see.”
And then she just shook her head and went back to cooking.
I was a little wild back then. Romantically wild. Not promiscuous and not a “party girl,” simply wild when it came to matters of the heart. The ex-husband was someone I knew I couldn’t live with forever, and the Then Boyfriend was the Transition Guy,  but when I met Mark, I wanted Forever. I asked him recently if when he met me he knew that he wanted to marry me. He said that wasn’t exactly what went through his head at the time. That’s what I mean by “romantically wild:” I saw him and visualized a wedding, children, and the white picket fence…my mind racing ahead to the fairytale.
Our marriage is an interesting one…and although there are time periods and episodes I wish I could erase, for the most part, I wouldn’t trade a moment of it. I am not a believer in that which is linear. That which is linear, for me, is not only boring, but doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for change and growth and exploration and excitement. Would I want our marriage to be linear? Not really. I believe it’s that intangible essence of what is so predictable and unanticipated (from an emotional point of view) that keeps this 27-year-old marriage of mine as dreamy as the night I met my husband. I’ve come to realize that all those fairytales printed with The End could have sequels: Wouldn’t Sleeping Beauty get to the point in her marriage to Prince Charming when she says, “Damn it! Could you stop waking me every morning? Can’t a princess sleep in once in a while? And this castle is so drafty, and the kids are driving me crazy, and the ladies in waiting are a little intrusive, you know? Where’s a spindle when you need one?”
So, the question is,  are there happy endings? And if there are happy endings, is that what we want? Do we want something that final? Or do we want to keep having happy endings as one chapter ends, and another begins? I opt for the latter. Happy denouements. Stories that close, perhaps, with “to be continued…”
Mark and I argued the day after Thanksgiving. Oh, I was angry that for the 27th year in a row, Mark did not get up with me at 5 a.m. on Thanksgiving morn as I carried the 24-pound turkey and lifted it along with the equally heavy roasting pan into the oven. He was angry that I was angry and didn’t try hard enough to wake him. We were both coming off the heels of what was a stressful week in general (actually, I called it a stressful decade): professional issues, medical issues (which resolved well, thank goodness), days that morphed into late nights, phone calls that interrupted every conversation we attempted to have…and the argument was, in general, one of those “he said, she said” laundry lists of gripes that ultimately get checked off in such a way that you clear the air and dump the garbage that’s been piling up, and then you both forget exactly why you’re arguing, and you feel a whole lot better when it’s over.
But the kids were around, and I wondered what they might think if they heard the argument? How easily it could be taken out of context despite the fact that the “kids” are twenty-something’s? Cousin Judy’s warning that children don’t really know their parents’ marriage haunted me. How do you explain to a child (of any age) what exactly is the dynamic in your marriage without revealing what has not only kept you together, but has kept you in love for 27 years? How do you explain that what might seem like anger to a child is also passion in a marriage? We weren’t always Mom and Dad…
At times, it’s nearly embarrassing, and lately kind of scary given the fate of my parents in their golden years, to admit that I truly love my husband, and worse, that I’m still in love with my husband. That despite the fact that his dark hair has turned gray, his eyes (although tired lately) are the same ones I saw that night I knew I’d marry him. And yes, there are times he infuriates me. And believe me, there are times I infuriate him. Neither of us are easy. And we’re as different as the proverbial night and day: He’s a man of few words and I’m a woman of too many; he could sleep until noon and I can’t sleep past 8 a.m; he proceeds with caution and I long to skydive; he is studied and clinical; I’m an emotional vortex; he still loves rock concerts and I hate crowds; he has to read the Sunday Times from cover to cover and I have a penchant for those forensic shows on Sunday mornings…the list goes on and on. Potato, PotAHto, Tomato, TomAHto…and we still haven’t called the whole thing off.
So, again: what do you say to a child in defense of what is (if you’re lucky) the most intimate union of all? How do you describe a marriage to your children which (if you’re lucky) is the most intimate union of all?
Perhaps you say there’s no such thing as perfect when it comes to love. You say there’s no such thing as flawless when it comes to being human. You say that fairytales are filled with imaginary characters and magical happenings. And you say that you know us as your parents, but not as husband and wife. And then you assure them that you’re planning to live happily ever after, but understand that the “afters” keep coming along…after the argument, after the holidays and the solo carting of the turkey, after the economic tanking, after whatever it is that sets you back for a year, a month, a minute when you get to start all over again, remembering things like silver leather pants and dark soulful eyes. All of which makes you believe in fairytales again in spite of your middle-aged self, and all you’ve learned and weathered. The perfection of imperfection, I suppose, hoping for the “to be continued…”

I am, in fact, not only a devotee of perspective, but often a slave as I forcibly make myself evaluate and reevaluate. This is something I learned early on. It was ingrained in me by MY mother who was often the devil’s advocate. In my youth, I often perceived this characteristic in her as being the embodiment of the devil himself yet she taught me the importance of objectivity - especially when it came to relationships. She taught me how imperative it is to look at both sides. Despite her precepts, I am still prone to emotionalism and unabashed romantic notions which often scuttle rationale and objectivity. Truly, the word “prone” might be an understatement – objectively speaking, of course. And just as my mother bedeviled me at times, I know I have bedeviled MY daughter, Ellie – but what I’ve learned as Ellie’s grown up is that she understands that my words and the words of my mother came with the best of intentions. And that what we chose not to tell and not to share was only omitted because certain things have to be learned on our own.
Last summer, my daughter fell in love. I’m sure there were times before that she felt she was in love but she never told me  - perhaps this one was revealed since it was, and is, the real thing. And as I watched her fall, and as I continue to watch her plunge into the depths of her heart and explore his, my own heart aches nearly as much as it rejoices. As I told my girlfriends who nodded their heads in sentiment and sympathy at once - the good news is that Ellie’s in love and has a boyfriend and, although it is probably all too wry and realistic, in some ways that’s the bad news as well. Well, okay, not BAD news but the point is, love can hurt.
If I had a reliable crystal ball that could predict how the relationship would play over the ensuing weeks, months, years and even a lifetime, I wouldn’t use it. And, the truth is, I don’t need a crystal ball since I have the oxymoronic prescience of experience that tells me that love is a roller coaster ride of laughter and tears, joy and anger, contentment and frustration. As Ellie laughs and cries (sometimes with equal intensity but not equal frequency), I try to be the objective observer. There are nights she comes home and flops down on my bed with a glow that only a nineteen-year- old girl in love can put forth…and then there have been a few nights in between where I’ve heard her door slam because something was either angering or disappointing and the night was not the way she dreamed or anticipated. She’s learning that it’s all part of the carnival ride. Predictions from a crystal or a soothsayer might make us retreat.
Just yesterday, someone asked if I feel that I’ve have changed since I was eighteen. I thought about it for only a moment. It was in a mere synapse that I remembered the yearbook photo when I was a senior in high school and had my own page where it said I loved beaches and sandals and dangling earrings…how it said that I was “lost without” someone to worry about and that “twenty years hence” I would be on the road with my “probable companion” Jack Kerouac. And although I have been ensconced in the suburbs since 1985 and my companion can in no way be compared to Kerouac, the fundamental essence of me hasn’t changed so my answer was a sot “no.” The eighteen-year-old feelings remain although they have been tempered and calmed by experience. I know, given what the last fifty years have brought me, that if I am fortunate there is still more to come. I know where the OLD stones lie in the road but I don’t know where the new ones are going to kick up and where they’ll lie in my path. I can look at this two ways and have decided to choose anticipation over panic.
My daughter wrestles with an ageless notion and expectation of romance that is similar to mine despite the myriad books she reads, and I once read, for feminist theory classes. The bottom line is that love comes fast and furious when we’re young and slower and more deliberately as we get older. But we grown women are still reduced to being nothing more than girls with hearts as fragile as porcelain and minds that don’t always think with clarity. There is, I believe, a beauty in all this if we’re tough enough to withstand it: we who believe in love forever and embrace eternity remain not jaded. Of course, the flip side to this is that no matter how old we are, we remain raw and vulnerable, experience and wisdom not withstanding.
I think the best line that ever summarized romantic love was in the movie, my all-time favorite, Moonstruck. Loretta (Cher) tells her mother (Olympia Dukakis) that she has met someone.
“Do you love him, Loretta?” the mother asks.
“I love him something awful,” Loretta answers.
“That’s too bad,” the mother says.
Those three lines say it all: when we love them, they can break our hearts. But if we’re too scared to love them, if we don’t put our hearts out there, we risk missing out on the best part of the ride as the roller coaster careens through the night.