These Days by Stephanie

In 1985, we moved to Westchester. I still refer to the day we left and moved back to Manhattan as the day I was given parole. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, and although the suburbs and I were never a great match, the kids grew up well and went to good public schools, and so it was…despite my protests, it all worked out for the best.

We had a small budget back in 1985. Actually, we had no budget in 1985 given the fact that we had two babies ( Ellie at six months and David at two years), I was unemployed (a nanny would have made more than I did, so what was the point?) and Mark was just starting out in practice. Brokers heard “doctor’s wife” and took me to every house well out of reach of my budget, explaining that there was nothing I could possibly live in that would be adequate for the price we had in mind. Nearly everyday, I loaded my babies into their car seats in our brown Dodge Dart and headed up the Major Deegan to look at what was going to be unaffordable.

And then I found it: the owners had bought the barn-like red house on “spec,” and forgot to turn on the heat in the dead of that winter. Every window had blown out, the floors were peeling and iced-over, the roof was in sore need of repair. Yet it sat at the end of a dead-end street and although the backyard was just a stone’s throw from the highway (I pretended the swish of traffic was a waterfall), it also abutted a golf course, so it felt like acres and acres. The neglect and disrepair made the price right, and without hesitation, I looked at the baffled broker and said, “We’ll take it.”

When I brought my mother to see the house, she was aghast. Of course, she didn’t want me to move to the suburbs altogether – away from her, away from the city that was my home. She was more than direct about her every apprehension, including her fears that I would become a Stepford wife sequestered in the suburbs, not to mention that the house was not her “cup of tea.”

But then a few months later, with a lot of sweat and toil, the house looked like a little English cottage. All it needed was lavender fields. The following Spring, it was supposed to have 100 tulips in bloom, but alas, city girl that I was, I’d planted them all upside down. But my vision had come to fruition, and even my mother was quite amazed.

That was 24 years ago, and it felt like a lifetime ago until yesterday when Ellie called to say that she and Larry (her significant other) placed a bid on a house. A house that’s in disrepair, has one bathroom (with only a claw foot tub and toilet – no sink), and a great kitchen (but it’s missing counters and cabinets), has knob and tube wiring that needs significant updating, and comes with a gray house cat who’s probably a good mouser.

I inhaled.

“Oh, Mom,” Ellie said. “It’s just perfect. I wish you could see it right now.”

And I wished she lived around the corner instead of a five-hour drive away. But here I sat on the other end of the phone, looking at photographs online of the little gray clapboard house where Ellie and Larry would live, and thought back to the pink and white nursery in the house on the highway 24 years ago.

Just now, Ellie sent an email saying, “We put in a signed offer on the house. Sort of a big step, huh?”

Sort of?

I remember Ellie’s first steps when she was just a day over a year. She wore a gray and white striped dress trimmed in lace with a pink bow on the bodice.

Gray dress. Baby steps.

Gray clapboard. Big steps.

Gray cat, though?

I exhaled.

“It’s going to be great,” I said remembering the blown-out windows when it was Once Upon a Time for Mark and me.

We will bring bread and salt to Ellie and Larry when they move in…whether it’s this house or another. My grandmother always said that is what you bring for good luck, and even my skeptical mother brought that to us… and we will wish that all their dreams come true…and then some.

He was lying on the floor outside the music store at the mall wearing baggy jeans barely held up by a heavy leather belt, a Nike tee shirt, and a small gold hoop in is ear. She, long dark hair and a fresh young face, wearing tight jeans and a skimpy sweatshirt pulled down on one shoulder, lay sprawled beside him with one leg thrown over his thigh.

I quickened my pace self-consciously, my children, 10, 12, and 14, trailing behind me with their heads spun around, red-faced, staring…no… gawking at the couple. Partially, I walked faster hoping my children wouldn’t catch the raw display, and partially because I felt embarrassed and, to be perfectly honest, a little envious of the couple’s oblivion and passion.

I hadn’t washed my hair for two days, wore a pair of worn, baggy, faded velveteen leggings, and my husband’s No Fear sweatshirt. I’d planned to take the kids bowling and didn’t bother with my “outfit” – but the bowling alley had a senior citizen’s league playing that day so the mall seemed the only alternative on this Easter Monday (a holiday I don’t recall having when I was a kid, by the way).

If I’d known that the mall was going to be inhabited by the neighborhood’s hair-done/nails polished crowd and every member of the teen population, I might have washed my hair and put on lipstick. I felt foolish in my husband’s No Fear sweatshirt – like it was a cry for help.

I recalled kissing a boy one night beneath my mother’s bathroom window, and then hearing the shade snap up like an alarm as she spied me in the clinch. And I remembered kissing a boy under the ping pong table in our basement and another on a park bench in Central Park. Snapshots of me at 15 when I was ruled by raging hormones and the raging bulls around me.

When I was a teenager, I thought my generation invented sex – certainly the Summer of Love was proclaimed as though we’d started the whole thing, and surely I thought my own parents had never even danced with anyone but each other. As my two older children are beginning to get swept up in their own hormone storms, they think mine are diminishing. Actually, they don’t think mine are diminishing, they don’t think I have any. Not to mention I’m certain they think they were some sort of immaculate conception.

I lugged my shopping bag filled with Tupperware, orange juice glasses, a spatula, and dragged my 10-year-old (who was covered with strawberry ice cream) and walked briskly past all the young lovers scattered all over the mall. And I thought how I wished I could meet my husband in the city and walk down the streets holding his hand and go out to dinner at some sidewalk café – but he said that he’s coming early to do the tax returns, and could I make an early dinner…

I wanted to tell all those kids in the mall, don’t let my greasy hair and U.S. Keds fool you: There’s life in the old girl yet.

Our babysitter, Andrea, is 24. She and her boyfriend just moved into their own apartment. They have no pots and pans, no silverware, no dishes…just a bed and a stereo. I gave them a frying pan, some kitchen utensils, dish towels, and ceramic plates as a housewarming gift. Andrea called when I got back from the mall. “We ate oatmeal out of your frying pan,” she said, laughing. “We still don’t have spoons, though. But at least we have a bed.”

No spoons? I run to the supermarket if I’m out of ammonia, and who even uses ammonia? What’s happened to me? I remember when Mark and I only needed a bed. And now we have chairs, tables, video games, televisions, crock pots, skillets…all kinds of distractions. OK, and three children and four dogs. And we’re getting to the point where our children are getting to the point where if we lock our bedroom door at night before we know they’re sleeping, it could look “suspicious.” They look disgusted if they catch us kissing or dancing to “old music” in the family room. The other day, David’s friend Evan said I was a “nice old mother” as I handed him a sleeve of Vienna Fingers.

About two weeks later, Mark and I went to see The Allman Brothers Band. The audience was filled with old rockers – women lining up at the phone booth in the lobby of The Beacon to call the babysitter, and men in suits, their ties loosened around their necks or stuffed in their pockets. One guy was wearing a T-shirt that read, “This isn’t a bald spot. It’s a solar panel for a sex machine.” I felt sorry for him, poor soul. The arena began to empty around 11 o’clock. I think The Allman Brothers were as tired as all of the old rockers…some sign of the times. We’d had dinner in a hurry before the show, and faced a long drive back to the ‘burbs.

I kept sighing.

In the car, my husband pulled something from his pocket.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Roll of Maalox,” he said.

At that point, I groaned.

“Want one?” he asked. “See? Ant-acid. Get it?”

“Oh, God help us,” I said.

He leaned over and pulled me close. Then he kissed me on the cheek.

“Come on, baby.” He laughed. “Things are still the same. Just sex and drugs and rock and roll.”

And yes, at that point I took a Maalox.

In the January 19^th issue of The New Yorker Marianna Cook has a one-page excerpted essay accompanied by a black and white photo of Barack and Michelle Obama sitting on their sofa at home in Hyde Park. The essay and the photo are dated May 26, 1996. You can probably find it online if you don’t have the magazine. It appears to be a portrait of what appears to be a real relationship, let alone a real marriage. The two look significantly younger, innocent, entwined in one another as they sit on a sofa. Everything around them is minimalist. The essay speaks of what the future might hold for them, their views on one another, their marriage, politics, expectation.

Thirteen years ago.

And now look what the future has brought, and more, what the future holds for this couple.

I watched the inauguration along with the rest of the nation last Tuesday – cameras panning audiences around the country – from the Washington Mall to Times Square to what appeared to be a classroom in Memphis where people sat at school desks and watched an overhead TV. I saw the faces of the people: Some with tears, some with smiles, some simply mesmerized. As I walked around my neighborhood doing errands at the end of the day, there were people celebrating in the street – much like they do before New Year’s Eve begins – not with drunken abandon after the fact, but with anticipation for a new beginning.

At one time in my life, late high school and college years, I was a true activist: marching against the War in Vietnam, never taking off my black arm band nor my button that said Make Love, Not War, protesting the incarceration of Angela Davis, even refusing to salute the flag and say the Lord’s Prayer at school each morning. I was brought before the student council, given detention – and all in the name of what I believed was right, not caring what the repercussions might be at school or at home. A true pacifist, the one thing I never espoused was violence. And I didn’t call the police “pigs,” and I thought that the young men who returned from their tours in Vietnam were simply soldiers either performing a duty they believed in or one they performed with little choice. I wore flowers in my hair, ragged bell bottoms, granny glasses and all the accessories that publicly stated my “anti-establishment” persona.

So, given my former activism, I wondered why I looked at this inauguration with a less political eye, and instead chose to see the Obama’s as a married couple who were swept away – albeit by choice and with great pride, determination, victory, history-making precedent, and desire – but swept into a public arena: And I wondered how it would affect their marriage and simply their private selves as two people in that marriage?

I wondered how Mrs. Obama feels as she becomes the focus for the media circus who scrutinizes even her fashion choices….this brilliant woman who went to Harvard Law and put her career on hold for her husband who happened to become President of the United States. How does President Obama really feel about living with his mother-in-law – even though it appears that he hopes having her there will give his daughters a sense of family now that Mom has other duties? How deeply did he miss his grandmother when he delivered his address? Will he sneak cigarettes in some corner of the White House? And if he’s caught, what will be the repercussions? How will their marriage weather the inevitable tabloid headlines, the rumors, the comparisons to the Kennedy’s, the constant presence of Secret Service? How will Malia and Sascha fare now as they become “first children?” What will their play dates be like? Can they still keep their childhood secrets? Write in their diaries? Fight with their Mom? How sweet it was that Sascha was filming her Dad with her own little video camera, looking at her camera not at the crowd, the big screens around her, head down the entire time. That’s what went through my head as I looked at the photo essay sitting on my desk and then looked at the Obama standing on the steps of The Capitol: The juxtaposition of just another couple 13 years ago who had dreams and the glamorous and oh, so visible couple today.

As Obama delivered his speech, there were a few words that jumped at me…Patchwork, Legacy, Spirit. He used those words to describe our country, our young history, our future. And yet those are the words that describe a marriage and a family as well. And, of course, Change. He is determined to enact Change. He makes no false promises. And I wondered about the promises we make in our marriages…those we make in the beginning when we say our vows, and how the path we travel after we say “I do” is often fraught with change: bumps in the road, compromise, sacrifice, hurt, exhilaration, realization, joy, and a constant effort to navigate all the detours and make sure, when your marriage gets lost in the forest, that you find your way to a clearing and get back on the road. Patchwork: that was the most compelling word for me. The one that got under my skin the most – America is a patchwork.

Marriage, too, is a patchwork. I wonder, when does patchwork become a quilt?

By nature, I am a worrier. I need things to be in order. I need things to be honest, true, vetted, vented. Yet nothing is ever linear for me; my brain runs all over a giant map. And so, in keeping with that characteristic, as Obama spoke, I thought about our country and her future, the Obama marriage, my marriage and the 65-year marriage of my parents which, if I look back at them in their forties and fifties, who would have predicted where their marriage is now?

We begin marriage with such innocence and hope. We often endure unanticipated detours that shake our innocence, forcing us to start again if we’re lucky.

So what happens to a marriage when your husband becomes the “most powerful man in the world?” When your wife is the “First Lady?” As the President labors to right the country, I hope his marriage stays on course. It’s hard to stay on course in a marriage when you’re merely an “invisible” couple – when work, kids, lack of sleep, and little time for conversation can knock you off course. Marriage and family: the true fabric of the world.

All of us, the most ordinary of people, can do nothing successfully unless we are true to what we have at home and in our hearts – and in our own heartland.

I don’t think I’ve fully grasped the impact of the verb “to adjust” until quite recently.
I’ve always believed that women adjust rather well, attributable to our very cyclical biology which demands a monthly period of change from the time we are 12. Not to mention pregnancy, a state of change we are thrown into rather abruptly (there is NO such thing as being “just a little pregnant”). We are faced rather suddenly with a swollen belly not to mention swollen ankles and lips, morning sickness, back ache, and various other forms of bodily sabotage that screams out impending motherhood to strangers who suddenly feel they have the right to pat our bellies. Which brings me to the ultimate transition: after carrying that load for nine months, we are, after excruciating pains (something previously unthinkable), presented with a helpless human being albeit a bundle of joy – but one who is totally dependent upon us as soon as we push that baby into the world. This person will now interrupt our sleep patterns, takes nutrition from our breasts, and one to whom we are committed for the rest of our lives. Within nine months, we go from being free creatures to mothers, a role which often translates, as the child grows older, into that of indentured servant. And we can neither quit the job nor move up the ranks. We can’t even really take off a few days and figure someone else will cover us. And there’s no applause or commendation for a job well done – except, of course, the end-product of raising self-sufficient, kind, responsible, loving individuals whom we adore.
And then we come to middle age, and our bodies betray us. What was once a regular cycle invariably becomes off-kilter or abruptly ceases. Clearly, we women don’t really get to EASE into adjustments, but rather we are thrown into them, and thus my theory on why women cope and adjust more efficiently, and forgive me fellows, than men do – because we HAVE to. We really don’t have a choice. We have to bounce: It’s a question of survival  for ourselves as we cope, and for the human beings who depend upon us unconditionally.
Despite the pride I’ve often had in my ability to cope with change, I must admit that lately I am finding myself a bit envious of the optional transitions that everyone else is going through, and my life is an exercise in making that verb, “to adjust” work for me on a nearly moment-to-moment basis. For the last 22 years, I have been a mother, a job description which pretty much preempts a woman from making monumental changes when it comes to her own lifestyle and needs. Transitions and subsequent adjustments have been dictated by my kids as they’ve morphed from babies to toddlers, adolescents to young adults. And now that my three are young adults, I envy their new horizons as they move along, up, and out. My oldest is taking an apartment in Manhattan next week with one of his best friends, and working for a real estate company. My daughter will enter her senior year in college, and will live in an off-campus apartment with two good friends. My youngest will enter his first year of college, a vista that looms both exciting and somewhat daunting as he leaves the shelter of this home. And although I have been through this before with the older two as they embarked on college, I am still not quite accustomed to the push me/ pull you effect this has on my youngest as he forages his way into what is indeed a brave new world. Life with him, these days, as it was with the other two, is a constant bandying about of me: he needs me, he rejects me. He talks to me; he closes the door in my face. It’s hard to keep up when one lives with Mercury.
And so here I am once again faced with mastery of the verb “to adjust” on what feels to be a moment’s notice. Whereas once upon a time this house was filled to the brim, I anticipate a quiet that I know will resound with emptiness at first. Even my best girlfriend has sold her house and moved to an apartment in the city as her kids leave her nest as well. But for the first time in 22 years, I am allowed choices. In a perverse way, as much as I sheltered my children, they also sheltered me. As they spread their wings and fly, their freedom gives me back the ability to fly again.
And so I feel these suburbs have served my family well, and it’s time to go home. The gardens I planted with flowers and vegetables were more for the kids than for me who grew up in Manhattan where I thought the silvery shimmers in the concrete streets were diamonds. I am tired of shoveling snow and running to the supermarket to “stock up” before the country roads are impassable. I want to be back in Manhattan where shutters aren’t drawn come 9 o’clock, and where I can take an elevator down to a street bustling with people. I want to be near Broadway theater, and clubs where music is blaring out into the street, to window shop again in stores that aren’t in congested malls, and walk the length of a few city blocks and decide which kind of ethnic take-out I want. I WANT. Two words that really have not been in my lexicon for a long time. So odd: since just months ago I swore I’d never leave this house. Never move. Afraid, perhaps, of letting go as everything changed around me. Yet as I fantasize, and picture a sprawling city apartment apartment with a river view, I also picture our children and their significant others around the table. There are certain things I’d never change.

Last Sunday night, I decided to take an at-home vacation. I thought, What can I do to possibly make life simpler this week? And since all of the other complexities, complications, and obligations were ones that I couldn’t eschew, I decided not to cook. My mother brought me up with an old-world European mentality, and I have been cooking since I was 21. I mean, really cooking – not opening cans and using frozen vegetables and rice mixes. But sauces “from scratch,” and slow-cooked stews, roasted game hens, poached salmon and such. I can remember my mother sitting at the kitchen table in an apron… shelling peas, cutting the tips off green beans, mashing potatoes with a fork. We were the only kids who begged our mother to buy us Swanson’s TV dinners. I didn’t have pizza until I was 18, and I still remember the night that my college boyfriend Michael introduced me to Burger King and Nathan’s. I was in fast-food heaven. My daughter, Ellie, has acquired this nutritional legacy, and even David and Ben like to cook. And Ellie packs lunches for Larry. Yes, I confess: I pack a lunch for my husband every day – wanting him to have something healthy as opposed to a deli sandwich.

My poor Ellie. This legacy is somewhat of a curse.

My sister didn’t get the anal compulsive culinary gene. As a matter of fact, she is the anti-domestic goddess: On Christmas Eve, she came into my kitchen demanding to know why dinner was taking so long.

“My oven isn’t great,” I explained. “I have it at 400, but it’s only at 325. It just sucks.”

“Oh, for God sakes,” Bobbi said irritably. “It’s at 729. What’s the matter with you?”

A brilliant woman: She was looking at the oven’s digital clock. Sad, but true.

So, I defied the gods this past week, needing in some way or other to give myself a break from domestic duties which have become overwhelming as I care for my family – and Ben who has been on winter break since the middle of December. With Ben in L.A. for the week, I admit, it was easier to take this stance. If the truth be known, it’s really caring for my parents that’s the overwhelming part.

Like so many of us “of a certain age,” I don’t sleep well at night. I am, and have always been, a victim of the over-cranking brain – and now, when I awaken at 3 a.m., tossing off the covers, drenched in perspiration (some women refer to these episodes as “power surges” – sorry, but they’re hot flashes, and that’s the bottom line), my mind starts racing, and then as I begin to freeze as the body heat ebbs, I grab my pillow and a throw blanket, head to the couch, turn on the TV, and watch infomercials until I am bored into sleep again. I’ve calculated that I’ve had an extra three hours of freedom each day – what with not grocery shopping, not cooking, and not doing dishes. And despite the sleep deprivation, I find myself more rested, calmer, not pressed for time. I am nearly heady with freedom.

This “freedom” allowed me to visit a friend yesterday – someone whom I always enjoy talking with, someone who is a great mentor, who shares stories with me, who inspires me to write and makes me think…and thinking is really the most difficult aspect of writing. You must have a book written in your head before it’s down on paper. About 15 minutes into conversation, he asked, “Would you like a glass of wine?” It was just after 3 p.m., and without hesitation, I said YES – with such enthusiasm I surprised myself. When was the last time I drank mid-week in the middle of the day? At that point, I was feeling nearly hedonistic.

So, there it was: An epiphany. What are some of the little things we can do when life gets in the way, and we really need to let things go? I can’t forsake my parents and their daily needs – but it was, unequivocally, their daily needs that were beginning to enervate me. It became apparent that I need to substitute some time – give back the hours I spent caring for them to myself without making anyone else a casualty. My sister confessed that she spent a few hours this past week watching Law and Order re-runs. We’re in this together with our parents: She also needed to just stop.

Coming home on the subway during rush hour (after the wine), I switched subway cars three times. I guess it was the wine that allowed me to do this with abandon, not worrying what the other riders might think as I exited at a stop only to enter the next car/same train. But in the first car there was a woman on an imaginary soapbox ranting about Obama, and then in the second car, a man with a large stick and an empty Dunkin Donuts cup asking for money because there is a war in the Middle East (I didn’t get that connection), and in the third car, a man who slept across three seats, and then awakened only to harass passengers. I was mugged four times in the 1970’s. For whatever reason, I attract lunacy. And so I changed cars until I found one that wasn’t threatening.

Last night, when I awakened at 3 a.m. and took to the couch, I wondered what my mother ever did to liberate herself from the daily grind. She was the quintessential product of her generation: a woman caught somewhere between her apron and burning her bra, tantalized by The Feminine Mystique yet all too tentative when it came to liberation. When I wrote my first novel in between a full-time job and domesticity, she replied (upon hearing that it was accepted for publication), “I wish that I had time to write a novel.” It angered me then. Why wasn’t she happier for me? Prouder? I have come to realize that her response was from her gut. In her world, she not only didn’t have time, and felt she had no right to even steal time. So, between the afternoon wine, not cooking, and refusing to feel threatened albeit by people who can’t help themselves and are barely surviving in this arctic cold let alone with the demons in their heads, I decided to take care of me. I invite you all to think of one thing you can do to make your lives easier this week, to do what you need and aren’t simply “supposed to do.” It’s liberating.

 Growing up in my household, emotional turmoil was met with the advice to “buckle down,” “pull yourself together,” and then there was always the cold water on the face that promised to somehow alter a mood with a, “Gee, thanks, I needed that. Whew. Much better now.”

That said, all those tricks to extricate myself from the depths of anxiety came in handy last night when my mother had unexpected surgery. My father and brother were with her in Boston as I sat here, and thank goodness for cell phones, we communicated until 4 a.m. when she was finally in recovery. I waited for the “all clear” call, squirming, flipping channels on the television where nothing captured my attention, wondrous at the notion that I couldn’t wait to go up to Boston, see her, touch her, and have her ask in that inimitable way, “What is that you’re wearing?” I fantasized further, pictured her looking me up and down, “And those shoes! Don’t they hurt your feet? Oh my, they’re so pointy.” I longed for that somewhat imperious look on her face as she couches questions about my wardrobe with too much diplomacy, and I always perceive them as criticism and am reduced to 12 again. Last night, I longed to wear the wrong thing. Her words would be music to my ears.

Being a mother is not easy. We can do as much damage as good if we’re not careful. Having been a mother now for twenty-one years, I’m painfully aware of this responsibility. It’s a fine line between when to hold on and let go; when to speak and remain silent. Sometimes it feels like no matter what we do or say, it’s never the right thing at the right time. The dual threat and promise that, “You’ll understand once you have children” is something not far at all from the truth, if not the truth. We become mothers, and realize that our own mothers also did their best as we do, but it’s not always good enough.

So, as I lay awake last night, long after the all-clear call, vignettes of life with my mother passed through my mind, making me alternately angry, melancholy, happy and frightened. My anger was puzzling until it dawned on me that I didn’t like the fact that she was weak and vulnerable. It became as clear as water: Anger was a form of fear at a safer distance. At fifty, I’m still her child, a confession I would not have conceded even a decade ago when I was still sawing away at the cord. Born of a generation of daughters who were determined to be “different,” we were going to keep our last names when we married, have careers, raise children, and do everything bigger and better than our mothers. The problem with my mother and me remains that the boundaries between us were, and are, often blurred: sometimes we are equal and peer; sometimes we are mother and daughter. I want to be like her; be like me. We have ping-ponged over the years as well: she suggesting that keeping my maiden name might be an affront to my husband — to which I replied hotly that I don’t recall ever having been a maiden. She, asking when I returned to work, if it would “sit well” with my husband. Yet as the years wore on, my mother became my champion, espousing my “feminist causes” to the point where I worried she might burn her bra a generation too late.

Unlike my sons, my daughter alternately sings my praises, and blames me for who she is and isn’t. My sons lack the palpable conflict. I’m just like you, my daughter will say in a moment of gratitude after she cooks an impromptu dinner for a crowd, writes a logical essay on Nietzsche, or touts her organizational skills. When it comes to what is not mundane and cerebral, she’ll condemn me – especially when her heart feels like it’s breaking, and it’s right there on her sleeve. She’ll condemn me even more when she sees MY heart breaking, because no daughter wants to see her mother in a fragile state – emotional or physical: If I am to shatter, then who’ll take care of her? Worse, if I’m too strong, too cavalier, too stoic – well, then where does that leave her when she feels like she’s breaking in two? Does it mean she’s not good enough? Not tough enough? Unquestionably, sometimes it’s difficult to tell where one of us leaves off and the other begins. With my sons, if I’m crying, they’ll throw a sweaty arm around me and joke me out of it, or say unabashedly that they “can’t take it when I’m upset.” With my daughter, my tears become her own.

I spoke to my mother a few hours ago. My brother was the one who answered the phone. “She’s doing great,” he said. “She looks pretty good.” My father took the phone and said the same, before handing the receiver to my mother. “I’m really not okay,” she said tentatively, her voice not her own.

There was a synapse between the moment my back went up as I wondered why she wasn’t more reassuring, why she felt compelled to confess her weakness to me. There it was, the blurred line between us as she lay in a bed between the son and the husband who put the equivalent of the sweaty arm around her.

“I know you’re not okay,” I said, mustering up objectivity.

Her confession; my concession. She became a mortal woman for a moment. I put the mother-daughter stuff aside, making it only about her, not me as her extension. Still sawing away at the cord.

It is eight days into the New Year and I have done 16 loads of laundry and slept on the couch for the last five nights because Mark brought in 2009 with a cold that morphed into bronchitis. I have also made about 21 meals, and a half dozen cups of tea (for Mark). My nails are unpolished, my hair needs to be cut, and because Walter (our cockapoo) loves to sleep on the couch during the day, I am blessed with flea bites on my back and rear. So, last night I flipped the sofa cushions and today I will vacuum it with mothballs in the vacuum cleaner bag (that works, by the way), give Walter a flea bath and slap a flea collar on him, and maybe on myself just in case. David has been granted a few grad school interviews and I am proud and happy for him. Ellie joined a gym and has put herself and Larry on a new diet and exercise regimen. Ben is heading to Los Angeles on Saturday to see what might be out there for him when he graduates in May.
Last night, I did a shooter of cognac after a conversation with my father that never has a great soporific effect before bedtime. My parents are aged, ailing, and not coming to the end of their lives with ease. They are not coming to the kind of end that many patients of my husband’s come to when they live each day well until the day they pass in their sleep, or in a hospital bed with family gathered around them and then peacefully slip away.
But such is life.
So, these days, life is “ knock wood, spit through my fingers, count my lucky stars, thank a greater power”  good.
I have come to the point in life where Perspective with a capital P and constant awareness is the driving force. An email came today from my friend Beth whose youngest daughter Wendy would have been 31 on January 12th. Beth reminded me that on Wendy’s birthday, she’ll be making four different kinds of soup and letting go balloons to honor Wendy as she does every year. In October 2000, Wendy was sitting in her car, talking to her girlfriends when a robbery (the girls handed over their wallets) turned into murder and a handgun took Wendy’s life at the age of 22. This defines senseless. This defines blasphemy. This defines injustice, grief, sorrow…on levels that are immeasurable. Yes, there was a trial and a conviction, and yet it only matters in terms of saving another life. It doesn’t bring back Wendy who is buried in a small cemetery about a five-minute walk from Beth’s home in Dallas where Beth visits every day and weeps as much as she did when Wendy was taken from her. Beth will never heal.
In her email, Beth said that Wendy had met John Travolta and Kelly Preston when she was out in L.A., and that because Wendy was Wendy, the Travolta’s remembered her. Wendy: the quintessential artist and free spirit who touched so many hearts including the heart of my mother who, although she asked about Wendy’s piercings said, “She’s just the sweetest thing.”
When Wendy was killed, John Travolta wrote a letter to Beth and family. And now Beth is sitting down to write to the Travolta’s for Jett. “I remember that he spoke about [the fact] that he could not believe ever going through the loss of one of his kids,” Beth’s email said. “Now I will write him a letter and I feel so very, very sad. Now I know he knows even more what it feels like. And that pains me.”
So, I listen to the news…the economic crisis, the wars in the Middle East and Iraq, global warming, famine, disease and I think that none of this is really new. It’s today news, but it’s not new. This country (the world!) has weathered setbacks and wars since pre-ancient times. As my friend Ellen asks, “Can we all really relate to a trillion dollar deficit? No. Not really. But can we relate to the loss of Jett?”
Yes. And Wendy. And then everything else just pales in comparison.
It sounds so crazy, but I have never been angry at my children. Unconditional love. Sure, they’ve annoyed me…but I have never been truly angry. And there is not a time when I either don™t think, and most of the time say, “I love you” before I say good night or good bye. I started saying I love you with even more intensity since my own mother “left” me. I think I need to tell my husband more often as well.
Beth’s email this morning just got me.
Perspective.

Until this morning, death was seldom a topic of conversation. Other than a bug squashed beneath a child’s shoes, a little one crying triumphantly, “It’s dead! I got him!” or a plant not watered and wilted from too much sunlight, death was rarely discussed. It was an acceptable ending for the life of the frog that the kids lost interest in after six days, though it lived for six years. The frog was flushed unceremoniously, the children watching over the bowl, and waving as it twirled down into the sewer. A burial at sea. On a more profound note, death visited at the funeral of my last grandparent two years ago. Again, an acceptable ending when, at the age of 101, Grandma decided she was tired, refused to take any sustenance, and willed herself away. Until today, death had been an acceptable ending to life that had a beginning, middle, and end.
Three weeks ago we bought a baby rabbit for ten-year-old Benjamin. This morning, the rabbit died. The cage sat in a corner Of Benjamin’s room, in a spot previously reserved for his baseball hats and guitar. Benjamin watched television with the rabbit on his chest, gave it fresh water, and fed it twice a day before his own breakfast and dinner. Last Saturday, the rabbit became ill. The cage was soiled with unimaginable signs of disease. The rabbit was listless and lifeless. We drove to the veterinarian and left the rabbit overnight, picking him up the next day armed with medication. He improved as we squirted tiny drops of cherry-flavored liquid into his mouth, but then last night for no apparent reason, he took a turn for the worse. He wouldn’t eat or drink, and except for his tiny size, one would have thought he was a very aged rabbit, weakened and frail. This time the doctor’s prognosis was no longer hopeful. The rabbit’s body temperature was below normal, his life signs barely visible. We left him in the hospital hooked up to a little intravenous.
Driving home from the veterinarian, the empty cage in the back of the van, I tried to hold Benjamin’s hand, but he wrenched it away. He stared out the window and spoke only once to make me promise that I wouldn’t tell his brother and sister how distraught he was. Comfort would only embarrass him. No one could ease his pain. Not even me, the one who until yesterday morning could kiss away tears, and put magical salves on hurts. This time I was powerless. Benjamin wanted me to say the rabbit would recover. “He’ll be all right, won’t he?” Benjamin pleaded. I wanted to reassure him, but I couldn’t lie. Where there was life, indeed there was always hope, I said, but this time it didn’t appear the bunny would survive. Benjamin said he knew that already from the expression on my face when I looked at the veterinarian. Rage and frustration filled Benjamin’s eyes, his face reddened, and he asked that horrible question, “Why?” There was no answer other than to say that sometimes bad things happen for reasons we don’t understand. Benjamin told me be had prayed all morning and all night. Then he asked, why was it that this time God wasn’t fair?
I remembered when my grandfather died after living with Alzheimer’s disease for ten years. I cried uncontrollably at his funeral, unable to read the eulogy I had written. For weeks afterwards, I cried while I made the beds, diapered my babies, and cooked dinner. My husband panicked at my inability to be consoled and called my father who advised him to step back and let me grieve. He told my husband no one could protect me.
It’s raining very hard today. The wind is blowing so wildly that the wind chimes on the porch sound like church bells. I threw away the little syringes we used to give the rabbit his medicine, and vacuumed Benjamin’s room for all traces of pine chips and Timothy hay that lay on the floor, reminders of something that wasn’t meant to be. My older son moved the rabbit’s cage to the basement. None of this has stopped Benjamin’s tears.
Benjamin still mourns while I stand by helplessly, unable to distract him, incapable of cheering him. He has lost some of his innocence. For sure, I have surrendered the feeling of maternal omnipotence I had until yesterday. I have no answers this time. I can offer only empty explanations like “sometimes these things happen.”
If there is a silver lining to any of this, an answer to the “why’s” or questionable fairness of The Almighty, it is that we have come through this episode intact. By choice, Benjamin waited inside with his brother and sister while I stood beside my husband in what used to be the vegetable patch in our garden, and watched him dig a small grave. My husband placed the little shoebox casket in the ground, and we bowed our heads, alone in the garden. Benjamin’s sister found a rock, ran outside, and placed it as a headstone.
This is the stuff that makes a family. One day when Benjamin is father to a child who has lost a pet or someone dear, he might remember this rainy Autumn day. Benjamin sat down to dinner tonight with a not-so-stiff upper lip. We were all a bit more mindful of one another,  the children saying “please pass the salt” instead of reaching. Everyone seemed more aware of precious times. Benjamin doesn’t know it now but this will make him stronger one day, wiser, better able to comfort, more accepting of reality. One day, hopefully, he’ll understand this is the answer to “why.” Oddly, it has been a lesson learned for me as well as for Benjamin.

My husband’s parents have been “snowbirds” since their 50’s. As a matter of fact, my father-in-law retired at the age of 56 – much the same age my husband is now. Hard to imagine given that he is not, and was not, a wealthy man, and given today’s economic climate.

Maybe he was “onto something.” Because there’s my husband still hitting the subway at 7 a.m. and getting home just before 8 p.m. – if he’s lucky. My father, at almost 90, hauls himself to the “office” every day (we’re not sure what he really does these days but he does have human contact – he is, we all suppose, venerable, respected). Partially, he goes to work (we think) because he wouldn’t know what to do with himself staying at home every day with my mother who sits in her wheelchair and often stares into space. I often wonder what she’s thinking about, and if she’s thinking anything at all.

Every year for as along as I can remember, and probably longer than I can remember, my in-laws have gathered with friends on New Year’s Eve – dinner at someone’s home or now, a movie and dinner – and a chuckle that they’re all back at someone’s condo in their Florida community for “coffee and cake” by 10 p.m.

My parents used to go to galas – I mean real galas – where my father donned a tuxedo and my mother wore a ball gown. There were some years when they went to The Roosevelt Hotel and danced to the strains of “Mr. New Year’s Eve” Guy Lombardo or some event at The Plaza or The Waldorf. And in the mornings after, beside my bed, there were tired noisemakers and slightly deflated balloons, party hats and feather boas – souvenirs from my parents’ night on the town. On New Year’s Day, my mother made a meal – typically a leg of lamb and black-eyed peas, the latter a tradition that I only discovered recently is a symbol for good luck in the coming year. And we’d sit around the table, making our resolutions, we children allowed a half glass of champagne. And so it was.

Mark and I have never had a truly memorable New Year’s Eve. Well, wait, some have been memorable but not in the positive sense of the word. There was the New Year’s Eve when Mark gave me my engagement ring. In fact, he’d proposed the Thanksgiving before, but swore me to secrecy the next day – something for which I still can’t forgive him. Talk about cold feet. But on New Year’s Eve, he gave me a ring, and then he spent the rest of the night throwing up while I sat in the living room with two friends of ours who were also [publicly] engaged. And until I contracted the same virus a few days later, I was convinced that Mark’s gastrointestinal distress was a physical reaction to the prospect of getting married.

And then I think I was pregnant for the next New Year’s Eve, and then had an infant on the following one, and then another infant and then another pregnancy…so all in all, we were never a particularly whoop-di-doo couple on New Year’s until the house began to fill up with the kids’ friends. Those were fun times – although Mark might beg to differ. Ah yes. And there was the Milennium New Year’s Eve where vigilant though I was with a houseful of 13,15, and 17 year-olds who had to surrender car keys and contraband upon coming in the door, (and I did everything but frisk them upon arrival), we had an “incident:” I missed the kid who smuggled in a bottle of Cuervo Gold, and subsequently poured it into her plastic cup of Sprite. Come the stroke of midnight I was holding her limp body as she threw up into a black cardboard top hat. Everyone was worrying about Y2K, and as I missed the turning of the century, I just wondered Why Me?

So, this year I made reservations(with great reservation) at a small club in SoHo where my friend Irini sings. Determined to have some sort of middle ground between dinner and a movie and a Lombardo gala. I want to enjoy the first year when the kids are all “of age” and seem to have proven themselves to be responsible adults.

And then, at the last minute, we canceled the reservation. Work called…well, not exactly because Mark was not “on call” but as is often typical around the holidays a patient devoted only to him will call with an ailment, requiring attention, a diagnosis impossible to render over the phone…and there goes the evening.

And so we wandered across the street to the neighborhood Italian restaurant – the one where we go which is closest to home and feels like home, took our “usual” table and had dinner. We came home sometime around 11:30, watched the ball fall in Times Square, called our sets of parents, called our children on their cell phones just after midnight (noise and a lot of whooping in the background), and fell asleep – to awaken this morning at 10:30 (when was the last time we slept so late?) and ushered in 2009.

We are tentative this morning,waiting to see what the year will bring. Mark is listening to Delaney and Bonnie on vinyl. It was the first concert he ever attended. We lost Delaney Bramlett at age 69 this past week. Too young. And last night, perhaps as I said goodbye to 2008 in my sleep, I had that recurring dream about my mother – the one where she is dancing and talking and telling me she feels fine now and asking “What’s this all about?” It was almost like waking up to the souvenirs lying by the side of my bed…For sure, our memories sustain us as we make new ones.

Happy, healthy, peaceful New Year.

Christmas is over. A month of anticipation fraught with tree trimming, endless lists, and hurried trips to the mall ending in a flurry of wrapping paper at 8 a.m. on Christmas morning. Then there were scrambled eggs (with cheese), bacon, and toast, a meal that doesn’t come too often in this health-conscious household. And that was the end of Christmas. I knew it would happen that way. It’s happened that way every year since the kids were really little and every year since I was as well.

“I can’t wait ‘til….” was an expression I used so often as a child. It’s the same one that’s resounded through this house for the last month or so. My mother’s words echoed in my head and it took a great deal of effort not to repeat her phrase “The time will come fast enough. Don’t push the days.”

I look at my children who are growing up and tall and strong. And although I take great pride and comfort in these young people on the precipice of adulthood, I long to slow things down.

David will be sixteen in March. A milestone birthday that allows him to get a learner’s permit. Everyday there is the assiduous pronouncement counting down the days until he’s driving. A city kid who relied on public transportation until I was 19 (a friend of mine from the suburbs clued me in to the fact that I should have a license at 19 otherwise it might not have happened even then), I cannot imagine that this boy who still carouses the way he did when he was six should get behind the wheel of a car. There should be a law that states “anyone who still wears a backwards baseball cap. Needs reminders to do homework and take showers, and makes sandwiches without using a plate is not permitted to operate a vehicle.”

Ellie is 14, and recently went to her first big dance. A Sadie Hawkins event,

she asked an older boy (a sophomore). She wore a Betsey Johnson sheath

dotted with small red flowers, high heels, make-up, and styled her hair. I took a

million pictures. The boy came to the house wearing a tuxedo. His hair glistened and he wore a small hoop earring. He shook our hands, told Ellie that she looked “lovely,” and affixed a corsage to her wrist. He was, indeed, as Ellie has been saying for weeks, “very cute.” He was also smooth as smooth could be conjuring up images for me of Eddie Haskell. And I could see right through the veneer and knew he was hell on wheels. Mothers know these things. When Ellie came home at midnight, my hands were raw from wringing. She slipped out of the Betsey Johnson and dropped it most unceremoniously to the floor as I grabbed a hanger. She pulled on her flannel pajamas and flopped into bed, me sitting on the edge. “He’s a little wild, isn’t he?” I asked.

“God, how did you know?” she cried. “Yeah, he is. But not around me.”

And I knew then she was way too much like me – and maybe a lot like so many of us women who loved the bad boys at 14 (and then some). That winning combination of Puck and Galahad – and we were always going to rescue them…

Ben is 11, and to his dismay, still my baby. This rank is also resented at times by his older siblings who feel doesn’t pull his weight and gets away with murder. There are the telltale signs that he is rapidly outgrowing baby status. Most recently, his growing up has been documented by the locking of his bathroom door when showering, and a strong admonition that I need to stop calling him Benjie in front of his friends. He’s also concerned about my leaving a smudge of lipstick on his cheek and requests “privacy” when on the phone. Ah me.

So, tonight my three kids will have a total of a dozen kids here for New Year’s Eve. And they’re all sleeping over. A dozen of our friends are coming as well but they’ll be leaving shortly after the ball drops on Times Square – either relieving sitters or going to pick up children at various other soirees around the neighborhood. My husband thinks I’m a madwoman as he already dreads the morning when the kitchen is overrun by 16-year-old boys in sweat pants, 14-year-old girls in bathrobes, and 11-year-olds who are blasting Crash Bandicoot in the family room. For me, well, at least I know where my children are on New Year’s Eve, and for as long as they wish to slightly trash my house on this festive eve, it’s fine with me.

And there’s also Sandy, Lucy, Fred, and Cleo – the four dogs. There were only three until two weeks ago when I took in Cleo, the puppy we bought my parents for their wedding anniversary who became “too much to manage.” Mark thinks this is insane as well. He doesn’t understand that the puppy has quenched my thirst for a totally dependent little creature as everyone else is spreading their wings. Yesterday, I bought Cleo a rhinestone collar for New Year’s Eve.

So, this brings me to New Year’s resolutions. As corny as it sounds, this year I promise to savor the moments. Sometimes I look back on the babyhoods of my three, and they’re such blurs. That’s usually when I haul out the home movies and watch Ellie at three in that red sequined dance outfit she wore for her tap dance show. I see David dressed in cowboy chaps and a fringed vest perched in his favorite tree in our old backyard. I watch Benjie (excuse me, BEN) taking his first steps, staggering wild-eyed like a little drunkard.

Mark told me last night that friends of ours are going to London for New Year’s Eve. “Sounds nice, doesn’t it?” he asked dreamily as I placed rows of plastic glasses, paper party hats with feathers, leis, and noisemakers on the piano.

And although a part of me pictures the Thames and wonders how Big Ben resounds at midnight, I’d rather be here with Little Ben and his brother and sister. This is my Auld Lang Syne.

May you savor your moments. Happy New Year everyone!