The pleasure of pressures

When I was in college, and away from home, I used to be so annoyed with my mother.

“Out of sight, out of mind,” she’d say glibly. I didn’t know how she meant it, but I assumed it to be a tiny jab at my expense for not being more communicative; as well as a liberal amount of self defense – maybe a window into how a mother’s anxiety evolves by degrees as her children neglect to call or write after leaving the nest.

In the days of landlines, before caller ID, she’d answer the phone, hear my voice, and ask: “What-do-you-want?” as if the question contained only one word but was loaded with angst.  

It would always set me on edge. My knee-jerk reply was always to say I didn’t want anything. I just wanted to check-in. I would then take time to meander through pleasantries and a retelling of a parent-friendly escapade before getting, invariably, to the point – the real reasons I was calling home … whatever it was that had gone wrong.

I think of her often these days, usually as I settle in for an evening of night-time television viewing, or before retiring to bed at what seems like an impossibly early hour.

Days and nights go by. We don’t hear from our worldly firstborn. 

For the past few weeks, we've had scant news from our college student. A text here, letting me know showing me two pictures: a baking sheet full of vegetables, and the soup they became was very yummy; and a text there, telling me a social event she had planned – Dogs, Donuts, and Democracy – as part of her duties as Resident Assistant to encourage voting, and which included Campus Police puppies, Munchkins and hand-outs on how to apply for absentee ballots was also well received.

I still worry. 

But I also console myself using the same words I heard my mother say: Bad news travels fast. 

Which is why my heart jumps into my throat whenever her face lights up my phone.

No matter what the interwebs or TikTok or Googly-peg tell you, ANY phone call from your newly-adult children will raise your heart rate no matter what time of day it arrives. Maybe especially at the ungodly twenty-something hours of 8 a.m.

I did not panic.

“Hey! How’s it going?” I answer, trying to keep my voice calm.

She dispenses with small talk and gets to the point.

“When you replaced the tires, do you remember which you replaced?”

Of course, I couldn’t remember. With three cars that have been my responsibility to maintain over the past four years, it seems like all I have done recently is buy new tires for cars I don’t drive.

“Why?” I asked tightly, worried she was calling from a roadside with four flat tires and cars cartoonishly piling up in the aftermath.

“Because I’ve had to replace the air in a few of them two or three times in the last few months. It’s starting to worry me. Can you ask Dad?”

I try not to let on that the last bit annoys me. Not only had I been the one to handle car maintenance, but how many times had she been with me as I pressure-tested tires, or filled them up when the sensors alerted me to a slow leak? 

This is my wheelhouse.

I can hear her voice relax when I tell her not to worry. And for the next twenty or so minutes as she carries me around the gas station air pump, reading the pressure for each tire into the phone, she tells me about her day, her worries, and her petty grievances. 

“These are all fine.”

Pressures are relieved all around.

Into the void

 The day started with disappointment.

“Hey did you move the sign?” My husband brought me the first cup of the day and bad news.

The sign, his gift to me, was a hand-painted, snake-shaped uterus and the words “The Don’t Tread on Me.” And evidently, it was missing from the end of our driveway where it had lived for two years and four months.

I shook my head and shrugged as I took the coffee. “I guess Scary Season is upon us.”

After I felt a smidge more human, I slithered out of bed and zombie-walked to my desk, where, still drowsy, I sat staring blanking into a blank screen staring back.

 

I slurped from my mug and absently tapped at the keys. I hover my chin over the mug and tap a little harder. The computer hadn’t awakened from its sleep. 

My eyes finally opened to full attention, and as I pushed all the dim possibilities from my thoughts, landing on a similar time in history when I had parked in front of the bus station to wait for a friend’s arrival … theatrically reading the sign plastered on the wall in front of me … I’d said it aloud, over and over, making my voice sound as strange and Muppet-like as I was able … until the words’ meaning suddenly settled in: “We’ve moved.”

Oh. No one was there to witness my chagrin as I turned the ignition key and followed the sign’s directions to the new station building. 

In my office, I reached behind the screen and blindly located the computer’s ignition switch to press it. After a moment, my breath caught as the starting chime was interrupted leaving the screen dark and lifeless.

Each new attempt at a fix - checking cord connections, and power sources, unplugging all peripheral instruments, and trying the steps again. 

Nothing.

 

Hard starts, safe starts, and jump starts never got off the ground. The hobgoblins of technology blocked each and every attempt at multi-key depressive reconciliation.

I’m not sure I could tell you what I might have given for just a momentary glimpse of color, even if it were the feared Blue Screen of Death.

After swishing another cup of three of java down my gullet, I called out the Independent IT Cavalry … who would be sending someone directly ... or perhaps as directly as a squirrel in rush-hour traffic. Things are busy right now.

I take deep breaths.

“This is no time to panic,” I tell myself, using my inner puppet voice for levity. I see no sense in getting all worked up when all isn’t lost … just yet.

But while I wait for the madness that I am sure will descend, I have other methods at my disposal.

I dig out my laptop, which I hope will allow me to work from a backup I have tended faithfully but never had to employ. I have no reason to believe it will work. At least not effortlessly. 

  

My mind may be in the early stages of hardening against the updates of software or losing the flexibility and muscle memory to adapt to programs that speak to Kids Today (I’m talking about you SnapChat) but I refuse to give up.

And so … I  convince myself, after careful Googling, I discover that when it comes to this alternate frontier, space is likely the issue. And I might be able to free up some of it and at least get some work accomplished, if I just press “Yes” on the button that appears for a second time, giving me one last chance to back out from performing a function that in plain text sounds as if it will, in one fell swoop, will magically, tragically, but entirely make everything inside my computer disappear like smoke into a Cloud.

And off it went. 

Into the void.

.

Just as I should have suspected. All I can do now is to get another cup of coffee, dig out some new sign board, and wait for the calvary. There’s nowhere to go but up.

Fast forward

We were already sitting around the table when our son walked through the door. Strode, more like, or so I thought. He seemed to glide into the guidance counselor’s office, leaning back on his heels. Effortless.

He smiled tightly before making a joke. “Fancy! Meeting you here.”

His father told a similar quip on our way through the parking lot, dodging raindrops and digging for our driver’s licenses. “I feel like we’re being summoned to the principal’s office.”

“I shrug my shoulders. If you were summoned here it was only by me,” I remind him. This meeting is for the boy, letting us sit in is merely a courtesy.”

After we handed over our I.D.s and were given visitors’ badges, I struggled to separate my sticker from its waxed backing, managing to get the adhesive tangled in my hair. This does not bode well, I think to myself. I feel self-conscious that I chose to wear comfy clothes in pretty colors rather than something more muted and presentable.

What would his counselor think?

I couldn’t read anything into her smile as she introduced herself. She asked a few questions before our kid arrived. Mostly we spoke about predictions about the rain.

The boy filled the last vacant chair and for a moment the room became silent.

This may be the last time we find ourselves in high school, talking about our son and his future.

The counselor opens a pocket folder and fans out papers. Organized by importance and collated for convenience, she tells us they include step-by-step instructions on how to navigate this next journey on the road to Higher Education: Applying to colleges. 

I watch my son’s expressions as he follows her finger down the page. Each line is something on his to-do list that he will need to research, register, and check off when completed. It’s meant to streamline the process. Make it less daunting.

He smiles and explains that he has already started the process … he may even be nearly halfway through the framework by the looks of it … and all with the help of a class designed for this purpose. 

He would use his last year of high school - three study halls and all - as a bounding board for whatever comes next. 

I only vaguely remember a similar meeting with his sister … that would have been four years earlier. 

Suddenly, I feel a little de ja vu. A recurring dream … the one where I am suddenly back in high school after a hundred years and I have a test that I am wholly ill-prepared to take, having not attended a single class during the last three decades, let alone the previous semester.

That’s exactly what this feels like. The thing we should have been prepping for, but failed.

I feel as if I should already know all the answers. At the very least I should understand the difference between Early Action and Early Decision. I should have the application deadlines committed to memory. I should certainly be more nervous than I seem.

A month into senior year, I finally understood this was the scariest season. Time is already short.

One career is ending as deadlines for a new one are approaching.

It almost feels as if I have slept-walked into this moment.

Date night

We ordered a drink and sat down to wait.

Two pairs of friends sit across from each other at a picnic table in the brewery courtyard. The swells of warm summer-ebbing air and the sounds of weekend dad bands competing for attention surround them.

You can picture it, can’t you?

By the looks of it, they could fit a stereotype. Middle-aged, middle-class, soon-to-be empty-nesters who could sleep in on a Sunday morning if they wanted to, were it not for age-related insomnia.

They are smiling and laughing, enjoying each other’s company.

We might assume they are long-time friends with kids who don’t have babysitters or curfews anymore. Their hobbies are watching sports and listening to podcasts. They hate weeding but worry the neighbors are judging the angle of the lines they mow onto their lawns. In other words: Boring. Like us.

I will as I start a game of bad-lip-reading. I make up all the other details with which I will create their story out of thin air. 

A child lugging a well-loved toy clatters past. The women turn their heads grinning with nostalgia. Their kids were once that young. Their faces light up, perhaps to hide any judgment that might have grown on them with age.

Just as we do.

Outwardly, we have much in common: They share a common location and appear to be about the same age. They talk small at first. They remark on the weather or the ease at which they were able to find suitable parking space.

Inwardly, I wonder what sets us apart.  

Surely not how hard it seems to make new friends or how seldom we try.

Over drinks and appetizers, we make this social meeting feel something akin to a job interview.

The stakes, though not as high, provoke enough anxiety to make us stumble over our words or worry about whether the amount we are sharing will sink any fledgling friendships.

We measure how good we are at small talk in the hopes we don’t come up short or cast our lines too far. We plan our discourse to unfold in ascending order.

“Can you believe this weather we’re having? “What’s your favorite childhood memory? Afterlife? Or no afterlife?”

How honest is too honest? We need to know if we want to be invited back. But we also want to make connections that matter. 

When is the right time to talk about our “procedures?” Certainly not on the first outing.

The goal right now is to ease into one topic and pivot to another, and another without members of the other party looking to settle up with the bartender. But the hope is to one day host a Friendsgiving where we can rest assured that no one will be merely tolerated. 

The thing that friends get to select but families have to stomach. 

Once our friends arrive and we ease into conversation, I lose track of our anonymous date-night neighbors. But as I look around, I feel joy at all the possibilities.

What’s an arch nemesis among friends

Surprises always seem to sneak up on me on Sundays.

 

Like water all over the kitchen floor, the water I thought was splatter from plunging a slow drain but was instead pouring out from a pipe under the sink that had finally given way to its corrosion.

Depending on which end of your particular brand of calendar on which the Lord’s Day rests, it’s either the end of one long, trying week in which your kitchen sink might have experienced a catastrophic failure but is fixable, or just the beginning, where one fix leads to another problem that will require a professional.

This is just what my husband and I are milling over in our minds as we slip through the sliding glass doors of a local Big Box hardware store headed for the plumbing section.

At this time I noticed something else that seemed strange.

“Why am I limping,” I asked myself aloud as we raced each other to Aisle 33.

“I-dunno.” my husband answered somewhat cheekily. “Maybe it has something to do with one or all of the eleven miles you ran earlier?”

Not that I had ruled such a thing out, but I still found it odd that I hadn’t noticed the pain until I tried to even out my stride as we passed the wall of cleaning products just after the entrance. In doing so, I unwittingly called “Center Arch … Left Foot!” to full attention. 

Doh!

 

Of course! My Summer training for an early Fall marathon had been fairly uneventful. But, I felt pretty good. I ran. I rested. I ran some more. I gradually built up to longer and longer distances. I kept myself hydrated. I fueled. I did hills. 

Sure, I did only enough speed work to check a box that no one would ever look over or grade.

Still, I am confident that I have wrestled myself away from being of two minds when it comes to such preparation: The one in which I pledge to ease in, increase my mileage only incrementally, and listen to the aches and pains my body registers and adjust accordingly until race day; against the one who says “SURE! LET’S DO IT” the instant a running buddy merely suggests adding on an extra mile or three to the route.

I may have let that last one lapse on the previous Saturday. 

We can’t know definitively which run will go off the rails when so many runs go according to schedule.

I won’t worry. Can’t worry. It is whatever it is, after all.

A strained muscle most likely. 

Mild even, or so my fairly prolific visits to the SELF-DOT-CALM School of Medicine would proclaim.

 

I will follow the conservative methods of treatment most self-diagnostics recommend:  Rest, Analgesics, Ice, and mild Stretching.

Mind you, I am starting my rehabilitation just as my husband locates the 1½ inch pipe fittings that he silently worried had been erroneously inventoried on the store’s website stock ticker and would throw all hope, including a fix for the kitchen sink, into next week or possibly never. 

Not that he bats an eye at such antics.

“Honestly, I get it. I don’t think I can face a professional after getting my certification from the YouTube Guild of Home Repair.”

Even one is too many

As my boy drove away from our house and toward the first day of his last year of high school, another boy, nearly a thousand miles away in Georgia, was putting a monstrous plan into action.

For all the horror mass shootings in the United States engender, they are far from shocking. And even as I pored over a jumble of confusing reporting, I was only shocked by one thing: The New York Times called it only the THIRD mass shooting of the year. 

The other two it noted were: 

Fordyce, Ark.: A gunman killed four people and wounded nine on June 21 at the Mad Butcher grocery store in a town of 3,400 people, about 70 miles south of Little Rock. Two police officers were injured in the attack, and the shooter was also wounded.

Forest Park, Ill.: A man fatally shot four passengers on September 2 as they slept on an L train in the Chicago suburbs, according to the authorities.

How could that be, I wondered as my fingers tapped furiously at the keyboard. Intent as I was ordering up facts and figures from various internet searches that would not put as fine a point on it: Because I hadn’t been keeping track of gun violence. I hadn’t been able to commit the daily atrocities to my long-term memory. But in combing the Gun Violence Archive, I understood in painful detail the GVA had reported 385 mass shootings in the United States in 2024 up to our district’s first full day of classes on Sept. 5.

Learning then that, as defined by the paper of record, “mass shootings” will only be counted as such if they occur in public places, claim at least four lives, and are the only crime associated with the occurrence. … So if a school shooter kills three students and injures 40, or a bank robber shoots all the customers in line behind him after he passes the teller his note … they probably won’t fall within NYT’s mass shooting rubric. 

GVA’s rubric for mass shootings seems a little different: Their accounting groups the crimes as a type of incident regardless of where they take place – public, private, workplace, family annihilations, gang disputes – but wherein a minimum of four people are shot, regardless of whether the victims are injured or killed.

Among the dozens of shootings listed in GVA’s six-page spreadsheet covering the calendar year until this point, was a May 11th incident at a May Day celebration in Stockton, Alabama where an argument in a crowd of over a 1,000 set off a series of gunshots that killed three and injured 15 other festival goers. Another incident on the same day, this one in a Louisville, Kentucky nightclub, cost two people their lives and two others sustained multiple gunshot injuries.

Neither were counted in the newspaper’s tally of mass shootings. Nor did it register a shooting in a Rochester, NY, park on July 28th that killed two and injured five others who were among hundreds who had gathered in a crowded park to enjoy the warm weather as well as an all-day gathering that had not required a permit. A separate shooting incident in the same park, this one in June, after the park was closed, injured six people. 

For whatever reason, The New York Times even discounted a shooting that killed 8 people in Joliet, Texas in January. That shooting occurred in two separate homes but was only discovered after the suspected gunman – who authorities believed had been related to all of the victims – died by suicide.

It must be merely a matter of time before we praise these omissions as some weird proof that thoughts and prayers can keep us safe from gun violence.

Because the truth is as long as we focus on protecting guns for use just about everywhere, our famiilies and their families will never be safe anywhere.

He owes her one (smile)

His face looked strained. Eyes squinting. Mouth tightened into a painful smile. His expression was transparent to anyone. My son would rather be anywhere else - perhaps even a fancy restaurant wearing an itchy suit - than at the edge of the ocean with me. 

“Are you sure you don’t want to wear your glasses?”

He had jammed his hands in the pockets of sage green shorts and hooked his specs onto the collar of his white t-shirt before his sister, who had been acting as my assistant, silently held out an outstretched hand to retrieve them.

“Ok, gramps. Hand ‘em over. I’ll hang onto them until this whole ordeal is over.”

She has always been an important part of his support system. 

She has always provided him with generous portions of sibling revelry, whether it be of the emotional or stylistic variety, while she supplied me with the efficiency of editors’ cuts. 

“Say less.”

This is how we’re going to get through it.

I’m not talking about his last year of high school. Or the wave of stressors that will visit as our youngest fords the approaching rapids that, we hope, will launch him (successfully) into higher education. 

I’m only talking about senior pictures. 

Honestly, I thought one day he’d be glad to have access to an archive of a magnitude that no second child of the 70s would ever be able to fathom.

Naturally, he rebelled. His face stretched and morphed into cartoonish shapes as if he even suspected me of thinking about snapping a photo of him. 

And naturally, the photographic likenesses of him have dwindled as the teen years barrel forward.

Why is this so hard?

All I want is one good picture that can go in a yearbook so we can seem …normal. But it seems inevitable that he is set on having a goofy selfie appear in place of my best intentions. 

I thought I knew how to do this. … I had been the official photographer of their entire youth. Documenting every play date, every birthday party, every moment of every zero-score sports ball season since 2009 as if it were breaking news. A zillion moments through which they might one day sift.

“Yeah … I hate that. I don’t want to do it.”

I can direct him to a place where the sun isn’t too spicy, where it won’t make his eyes turn into slits. I can tell him to stand this way, or that. I can walk him through the process of putting his best side forward: “Lift your chin slightly …not that much. Lower just a bit … too far. 

But I can’t make him smile. 

His sense of humor gets edgier and sharper to the point of cutting. 

I lose patience. Read him the Riot Act, further enshrining the cycle of weaponized maternal guilt: How “I risked life and limb for him for nine months and all the rest of my years, the least he could do is give me nine minutes of his time and a smile.”

I feel a quiet hand on my arm, his sister to my rescue.  

“Hey, champ. I don’t care what mom wants, but you CAN NOT be the weird kid who stands on his head or takes a picture of his left nostril. I deserve better. You’re connected to my LinkedIn.”