Not worth the gamble

I know I wasn't hallucinating. 

I had been under the influence of sedation, but I had concrete proof. 

Five years ago, after my first big milestone screening test – the one that no one remembers but ends with a report complete with the most colorful but least scenic tourism photography imaginable – my lower digestive tract was declared completely unremarkable except for the appearance of a redundancy – an “extra loop” – which had put a gleam in the doctor’s eye, and which he assured me was not abnormal nor would preclude me from membership in the elusive 10-year club. 

“Congratulations.”

It felt like I had won the lottery.

But the form letter that arrived in the mail just a few weeks ago was an unexpected invitation to take the sightseeing journey early.

“Oh yes,” the lady who answered the phone said when I asked about why they were taking away half my lottery winnings and making me spin the wheel again. “I see that your recall was shortened. Probably happened during a review of your files when your doctor retired. You could postpone …”

“Or I could just get it over with, and not spend the next five years wondering what could be growing unchecked in the recesses of my ascending colon.”

“Probably not worth the gamble.”

So I made the appointment, which turned out to be two days after Christmas. 

And though I tried to keep it all very hush-hush, buying the preparations on the sly, and keeping my nervous energy in check, my secret was discovered when the boy found bottles of electrolytes hidden in a cabinet behind the lunch boxes.

“So when is the colonoscopy?”

Why would you think that?

“Because you never buy Gatorade, and Grandma never buys Gatorade, but I found it in her house last summer and she said she had just had a colonoscopy.”

“It’s two days after Christmas.”

“That's a pretty crappy gift … all puns intended.”

Yes … and no.

The prep is a time-consuming process that requires precision. And test anxiety is ever-present. 

But in my experience, and as strange as it seems, there are more uncomfortable procedures than colonoscopy. And since it's truly preventative, the test can also be a treatment, preventing cancer before it begins. 

The hardest part, for me, has always been having to coordinate a driver. 

If it were an option, I would prefer to wait out the drug-induced delirium and drive myself home.

As it is, I will have to suffer the slings and arrows of my husband telling jokes, ad nauseam, about the funny things I said or did while under the influence of sedation. 

But, thanks to pandemic protocols, he was waiting in the parking lot and not in attendance to witness me waking up drowsily in recovery. 

Even if I danced on top of the nurses’ station, he wasn't there to see it, so the question of it happening would be moot anyway. 

As it turned out, the big day was just another Wednesday in December. With a mid-morning nap, unremarkable results, and my new place in the Five-Year Club celebrated as solid.  

Season's Greetings

 Tomorrow we will sleep in.

That's the plan, anyway.

Tonight we are neither on guard nor on our best behavior. There will be at least four cheeky arguments over which holiday movie is the one WE ALWAYS (or WE NEVER) watch on Christmas Eve. (It's NOT Waking Ned Devine, no matter what my husband says.)

Santa's workshop - also known as the downstairs guest bedroom, where parental elves have toiled into the wee hours on the 24th day of December for the last two decades – has finally experienced the sluggishness of an aging demographic. 

There aren't mountains of gifts to sift through anymore. There is nothing to assemble. Any wrapping we might do is quite actually the work of but a moment. 

(There's plenty of time for wine).

I count myself fortunate that this shift to something smaller hasn't resulted in big or hard feelings. 

Not only have our children matured beyond the stage of development where they are salty that Santa’s magic has always been connected to their parents by cartoonishly visible nylon strings, but we Middle-Agers are salty that we awaken before dawn, whether we want to or not, without any impish joy.

They wake up slowly, wanting warm liquids and breakfast before commencing a round-robin style gift delivery they see as tradition.

“Did you know some people just go all in … they just find their names and start shredding?” my daughter says when I ask her to tell me her favorite part of Christmas morning. “I love that it takes us all day to get through the same amount of presents others tear through in minutes. It’s just nice.”

And she misses what we all miss: Grandpa setting up his toy trains under the tree, and Grandma nagging him to “let the kids play engineer, for goodness sake!”

For all the things we lose in this life, there are so many things still to find.

For instance, I find myself in a new camaraderie with strangers in snippets of overheard conversations. 

I want to high-five the man at the jewelry store shopping for a gift for his daughter who is finally home for the holidays. 

I want to hug the lady at the supermarket who was buying a sweet treat for a loved one in hospice. 

I can reread every letter my kids wrote to Santa from memory as I walk past the families waiting in line at the Shopping Mall’s North Pole.

I am grateful my girl is home. And that we will talk late into the night. I will rejoice that for the brief time between now and New Year, she will drive her brother anywhere he wants to go; and he won't drive her crazy. 

It seems like every Christmas we've ever shared is playing on a loop. 

I feel so lucky I want to knock on wood. 

By the time we are ready to sleep again, we will have laughed, cried, and chatted late into the night with the favorite members of our far-flung families. We will have heard old stories and told some with details that seem entirely new. 

We won't want the season to end.

Accepting a different kind of festive

The house looks like it always does. There are mountains of clean laundry piled on chairs throughout the downstairs rooms waiting to be folded. Dishes in the sink that have yet to be stacked in the dishwasher. And there are bits of debris from snacks of toast and crackers strewn about the carpet like confetti that need to be vacuumed. 

It's a different kind of festive this year. 

The only things here that are reminiscent of a traditional winter holiday season are a garland of some variety of ever-plastic greenery and a sign wishing all who enter a Merry Christmas. Both of which have managed to lurk in their respective haunts perennially. 

The cards, ordered late, have arrived but haven't been processed for mailing. A single round of holiday baking has occurred, but my resolve to plan more has ebbed. 

Ordinarily, we would have a Christmas tree by now. Procured by the time the sun had set on Black Friday. The six-foot balsam would be shedding its needles all over the carpet while the dog and cats would be drinking out of its Christmas-flavored water receptacle. In addition to vacuuming up pine scent on the daily, I would be playing a never-ending game of picking up decorations from the floor and returning them to the low-hanging branches, from whence the cat had scattered them.  

I know it's just timing. What with the daughter off at college, not scheduled to return until just about the time Santa is supposed to be finalizing his lists; And the boy being in absolute solidarity for waiting. 

 But this new compression has also seemed to wring some of the joy from my holiday heart, leaving me with a complicated math of emptying the storage compartment of all our ancient ornament just in time to put them all away within a fortnight. 

Honestly, I wondered about this day. 

The first Christmas that slopes with me into middle age. 

The first Christmas that'll light has dimmed from childhood joy. Where there are fewer gifts to buy and cards to send. Fewer place settings at the table. And yet despite this winnowing, somehow, even the littlest thing will feel like a gargantuan chore.

I mean … I don't even know if those lazy snowflake light cannons work anymore let alone where in the garage they might have landed. 

I certainly would have noticed if I'd had to 

mow around them. 

Or at least I think I would.

This all rattles around in my brain as I sit amid friends during the coffee talk portion of our mid-week run.

Talk of miles and ailments has ended and the banter of baseball starts to wane. Christmas takes its place. The cost of a live tree is only a momentary complaint before postcards from our pasts start to sail around the table. 

Who among us hedged their bets at the tree farm by leaving a glove on a contender only to have misplaced the tree and the glove? Who was the earliest riser on Christmas morning and whose mom let them open just one present? What was the strangest tradition?

By the end of the hour, I had absorbed so many sweet secrets, that it felt as if I had been visited by the ghosts of my own Christmas’ - past, present, and future. 

And I felt more relaxed. I don't have to be ready, I just have to remember.

A lock on time

Who is that woman? 

Her hair, frizzy and dry, was a tri-blend of color that needed … at the very least … a bit of attention. 

She looked vaguely familiar but I avoided making eye contact. It’s a small place. It would be awkward, if not painful, to stare directly into the mirror. 

If this had been a campground, I would have been the tent pole; with a full circle of fabric cascading around my neck, covering the place I inhabit almost entirely. I held my phone between my two hands, prayer style. I could still feel its warmth even if I couldn’t read the screen. Like the fire.

It might be nice to be small under the stars. Quiet-like. 

The young woman who had welcomed me motioned to a seat and then disappeared into a back room to collect materials. The place was abuzz with activity. Soft music played while scissor blades whisked against each other. Conversation floated above us in gentle waves. 

Before long, she selected strands of my hair, parted and stretched them, then painted and folded each piece between sheets of colorful foil. Layering upward, the woman peering back at me from the mirror looked like she was wearing the roof of a pagoda as a hat.

She is quick efficient and naturally personable. She takes her work so seriously that she uses her spare time to prepare.

“Oh, I didn't have much of an interest in the Barbie movie, myself, but I knew it would be something my clients might want to talk about, so I thought it would be good to see it.”

The women in chairs all around me talked about their families. Their pets. The best things to watch on Netflix. They upsold travels and downplayed travails. Keeping the conversation steady and effortless. 

With cordiality considered there seemed to be no unsafe subjects.

It occurred to me as I sat there in my tinfoil hat, waiting for science and artistry to transform the cantankerous keratinous filaments I had too long ignored, that the so-called journey had led me here kicking and screaming. 

Far far too long, this ritual of self had felt like just another chore. And a chore that could also be fraught with personal failure under the gaze of a professional. 

And although I stopped coloring (and trimming) my own hair long ago, I have not managed to keep these tresses any better managed. Nor have I ceased worrying that the state of its split ends and tangles shouldn't be justification for semi-public shaming, But I have accepted my age and the changes it has visited upon my hair and I have committed to increasing the number of visits I make to the professionals per annum. At least two times as we go around the sun. 

“How has it taken me so long to prioritize,” I wonder each time I leave the salon and sit in my car. My hair feels lighter. Younger. Full of possibilities. And if I squint I can almost recognize the girl in my rearview mirror.

Adulting in Z formation

“When you come can you bring one of the air mattresses?” 

An undulating college commute for the holidays - where we spend a few non-continuous weekends together as a family here and there before a month-long respite takes hold -  was underway and negotiations were getting heated. 

“I could” … I retorted cheekily. “But why do you want it?”

“We need something to sit on … and something for people to sleep on if they stay over,” she replied, reasonably enough. The months-long season of multi-festivity was coming in fits and starts, but the one thing she has this year that she didn't have last term was a place to keep her stuff during the interim.

Though she is living in a dorm, I would tell anyone who asks that she and her roommates live in a pretty “epic” apartment. 

Wording it that way makes me feel as if my own salad days weren’t so long ago.

Now, I never lived in a fifth-floor corner city apartment with secure access and hardwood floors. I didn’t have a balcony-like window that looked out lovingly over my campus.

But I did have a windowless room in a basement that was all my own, even if it was more than seventeen blocks away.

And I NEVER would have asked my mother to donate the old folding cot in the basement to my cause to find accommodation and party furnishings.  

I would have resorted to doing what all the countless Xers of my Generation did - take a walking tour of the better neighborhoods on trash day. 

That is, after all, how I procured one AMAZING mid-century modern sectional couch with a Hollywood Regency flair that lasted more than a dozen years – through one party after another, one apartment after another – all the way into the new century. 

And I would still have it now if I hadn’t felt the call of nostalgia and released the blonde, jacquard beauty to a new generation of college students one fateful trash day. 

But that is not how Gen Z rolls. Afterall, my daughter points out, there are epidemics of bed bugs and other forever-pests to think about now.

“One of the air mattresses will be fine,” she says with a heavy sigh, as if wading through my nostalgia were the physical equivalent of swimming the English Channel. 

“Or … it would have been fine if the dog didn’t puncture the thing last time we had guests,” I said, narrating the sudden memory I had miraculously withdrawn from my post-pandemic memory bank and accepted as true without the arduous task of investigating the evidence so as to avoid doing a thorough search of all 11 tote bags in bottom of the front hall closet where the thing is probably jammed.

“How about I get you a bean bag lounger instead … Did you know companies make human size dog beds now? They are so versatile. They can be a lounger, or a couch, or a bed.”

“I know! We live in WILD times.”

“The only thing wilder would be if a drone had delivered the 40-pound, vacuum-packed box to your balcony window within the five- to seven-day shipping window. … As it is, we’re going to need your brother’s help to schlep it up the stoop and into the elevator.”

“I’m sure dragging it out to the sidewalk on move-out day will be much easier.”

Togetherness

 We separated this holiday season. 

I took one kid and a carload of stuff.

He took the dog, and the pickup truck, and a trailer with an old rusted tractor riding on top, the kind that could weather an apocalypse and be in working order for any surviving organisms with opposable thumbs to use its mower deck and horsepower to rid their gardens of choking bittersweet.

“Working the tractor requires a little more finesse than that,” he’d say if he were reading over my shoulder right now. 

But he is not. 

There is nothing fair about my feelings. 

I downplay his lofty intentions on this family weekend to wax defensive about the straw I had pulled. It was my job to pick up all the humans after the workday had ended, whether at home or in Boston and drive them to Maine.

I was not looking forward to the task: the traffic, the crosswalks, and people leaning on car horns. I was not sure I could be the aggressive driver I needed to be to muscle my way through rush hour. I imagined we’d be driving for days. 

But I didn't say anything.

I just listened to him go on about wanting to get in at least one day’s work at his mom’s house before the rain and the rest of the family descended for a festive weekend.

His parting words gave me hope, though I feel guilty about wishing.

“Maybe I'll pick up the girl in the city on my way. That way it would be a straight shot for you.”

My heart skipped a beat. 

If you do that PLEASE take a picture. I want to see you pull up to the dorm towing a beat-up Massey Furguson through Bean Town. 

A truly Tom Sawyer move. Painting this fence would be so much fun!

He said he would keep me posted.

But he didn't. Staying vigilant about the sway of his heavy load was foremost in his mind.

I didn't hear a peep from the college student either. 

So I stalk them both using the surveillance powers of Find My Phone. His dot traveled steadily along the Mass Pike, while hers hovered over the address she proudly calls home. 

“I knew when your dot was in your dorm

and his dot was zooming up 290 that your twains would not meet. So I will be hunting down Huntington tomorrow.”

She blinked twice and narrowed her eyes.

WOops.

“How often do you use location services to find me,” she asked.

I had broken the first rule in cyberstalking: Talking about cyberstalking. Don’t let on that you know she was at El Jefe’s at midnight last Friday night. 

It’s not as if your intent was nefarious. 

You never intended to call her out for her choices. You just liked knowing her dot was out there somewhere that I could still see and feel connected. Even if only remotely so.

And of course, I imagined she got the churros and that were cooked to perfection with just the right amount of cinnamon sugar.

On this, I hope, we can come together. 

Well enough

 The clicker isn't working.

I rattle it against my hand. Twice. Then I try again.

This time it turns the television on, but it won't change channels or lower the volume.

The batteries are probably losing their juice. It's been a few minutes since the loud, announcer voice started repeating the intro to a broadcast I don't want to see. It might be a show or a movie or a swatch of the news. It doesn't matter. 

I could probably get used to the narration repeating if I focus on closing my ears. It occurs to me that I don't have the stamina right now to process new things. 

And I don't want to get up. 

I am comfortable under a blanket on the couch: a putty-colored throw that is filled with down but otherwise nondescript. It is more subdued than the one made of t-shirts that my husband prefers, or the green woolen Mexican blanket that is older than our marriage. The longer it stays, the harder it is to jettison. 

 

My blanket is different, though. It is timeless. It blends in so well it seems invisible. It has no weight. It has no color. And I have no recollection of its purchase. It just appeared one day when I was cleaning out a closet. 

The moment I saw it I had an urge to hold it to my face. Rubbing it against my cheek. It felt uncommonly soft and smelled of cedar. It came as a surprise when it spoke to me. 

I felt like I'd just met an old friend. A friend I do not wish to offend.

Like I did my old hand mixer - the one I bought at a hardware shop one Thanksgiving eve when I was in my early 20s. 

It was in my first apartment, hosting my first holiday dinner but it had never been my job to make the mashed potatoes. Now it was. In addition to the delicate-fleshed yellow gold spuds, I selected the Easy Mix Proctor-Silex hand mixer with five speeds. $11.99 plus tax.

I didn’t think about the purchase, I just stopped by the hardware store after I’d packed the car with groceries and carried the only electric-mixing product they had on display to the register.

It worked well enough, even though I had to apply a certain directional pressure I alone understood, to keep the top speed humming. And it continued to work well enough for the next thirty years as other machines started taking up residence, such as a stand mixer; an immersion blender; and even a classic, low-tech, potato mashing tool, which also came to live in our kitchen.

Though … I must admit, the allure of seasonal displays of perfect pyramids of kitchen gadgets over the years had tempted me to replace the working-well-enough mixer with one that might work more perfectly than well enough.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to have a pretty mixer that came with a storage compartment? One that would work at all speeds without hesitation? One that I had thought about for more than a moment and that would fulfill some understanding I have about my life?

YES! I admitted. “Yes! Thirty years is a good long time,” I reasoned. “It may even be wise to replace such an elderly appliance. Who knows how much moldering cake batter is kerning around inside the works.”

So I marched into the hardware store and bought the prettiest, most elegantly designed mixer they had – a six-speed beauty with a snap-on case. $37.99 plus tax.   

And when I got it home and fired it up … it worked well enough.

 

Training day

“You want to go to the gym?”

If you are like me … you probably don’t.

You’d rather curl up in your favorite chair with a cup of coffee and a sleeve of crumbly cookies and scroll through Netflix for something that will take your mind off the world for roughly 45 to 120 minutes.

On the other hand, also like me, you might be painfully aware that the question is coming from a gangly teenager who is only two months (and a few days) shy of being eligible to drive himself.

After that … It is a mere 18 months until he’s packing up for college.

And then he won’t be asking me to do much of anything.

It is all part of the unspoken contract we have with ourselves as parents to soak it all in before it’s all over.

Time is of the essence.

So I change into clothes that might facilitate a four-way “stretch,” and start the search for my keys.

He raises his hand and swipes the air. Around his finger hangs the electronic fob. 

“Ahem.”

He might have stood there forever, silently dangling the non-jangling device, before I would have noticed my hunt would be for naught.

“I’ll drive.”

His voice, as he says this, is imbued with more snark than excitement. The last time we made this trip I had insisted on driving and, well, let’s just say I made one navigational error that would live on in infamy in the novice driver’s mind. He is careful in his gloating. Knowing full well he still has to play to the audience, who is at this moment feeling a bit chagrined.  

“Of course. You could always use more practice driving at night.”

We don’t speak much on the commute. Instead, we listen to the soundtrack he has carefully programmed so that it won’t require him to take his eyes off the road even for a second. It sounds like the fast-beat celebratory music that plays at the end of just about every 80s-era arcade game. I don’t understand how he does it, but the fast-paced beats seem to keep him calm and focused. It makes me want to crawl out of my skin.

And it makes me realize he’s not such a novice anymore.

Because in trying to block out the visions of Froggers falling off logs or getting splattered on roadways, I focus on his driving. The starts and stops. The consistency of speeds. Smooth and unlabored. He’s come a long way. Gone are the days we inched toward the end of the driveway … it seems five inches per minute.

Tonight, in a moonless sky, we will practice using high beams. 

He is good at it. Turning them down the moment a car approaches but before it comes into view. 

Before long we arrived at our destination. We park and head into the gym, I assume, to our separate corners. He will go to the free weights, and I will go to the circuits.  

Do you want me to show you how to use the squat stand?

I resist the urge to laugh at the oxymoron in that sentence, and just follow along.

Time is of the essence, especially in the world of personal training.

Safety Third

I read with interest linguist John McWhorter's essay on the loss of the freer-ranging childhood of his youth (NYT Opinion Nov. 2).

In it he explores the more than five-decade history of childhood between the 1970s and now, wherein our nation's kids increasingly found their movements tethered and under the near-constant observation of adults. 

He surveys the time after chattel enslavement and the industrial age, skipping past civil rights and Jim Crow. He lands in the early 80s where the numbers of kids seen and heard in the wild seem to precipitously decline. 

We went from teens and tweens on every corner, to witnessing virtually no unaccompanied minors anywhere. 

He uses studious theories to foment the rational argument that our kids are experiencing a decline in mental health like no other generation because they have no opportunities to navigate our communities alone. 

He cites thinkers who believe it's the eyes upon them that keep our kids from becoming the stable, reliable adults we think we became. 

As a member of GenX, and someone who experienced the barely restricted freedom to pedal off into the world alone and unhelmeted - I identify with McWhorter's sense of grief.

I, too, believed my childhood was marked by a sheen of magic that has dulled for my children. 

I say this despite the dangers I know my parents worried about at the time: dog bites, cars colliding with bikes, even the unspeakable attentions of men no one in polite society would have suspected.

But McWhorter, like most of us, focused on 1981 as the flashpoint. 

In my mind and probably the minds of many, the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh at the hands of a stranger is what shattered our idyllic veneer. 

It changed the way society viewed the ways we could and should protect our children.

“Stranger” became synonymous with danger. And a new crime entered our unshakable belief system: parents who would leave their children alone or let them go anywhere unsupervised for even short lengths of time could be charged with neglect. Even if nothing foul befell their kids.

McWhorter makes good points as he implores our fearful leaders to support new laws that won’t criminalize parents for allowing their children to “range” more freely.

He's not wrong.  

In his essay, McWhorter reminds us that on the whole, the dangers we envisioned haven't materialized. Violent crime is down, and children are as safe as they ever were during those magical days of our youth. 

If they happened before the 1990s.

Of course, we now have cars that drivers need cameras to see out of; and a Supreme Court that will let states take away voting rights and health care choices, but they will let just about anyone have a gun. 

Because of that, our schools have armed guards and active shooter drills because some of our leaders would rather have a right to a private arsenal than a public education. 

We may think that safety is our FIRST priority, but the reality is that safety figures much, much lower on the list. 

We should be reminding ourselves as well as our leaders that our desire to make our kids safer has driven innovation: it gave us bicycle helmets; backup cameras, hearing protective earbuds, and protected bike paths.

We should be reassuring ourselves, too, that most of our children will grow up and become loving and protective members of society. And they will likely have fond memories of their childhoods they wish their children could share. 

The infancy of a fall

 

The dog pounces at the blowing leaves, testing the limits of her collar at the edge of the driveway as we wait for traffic to pass. Her nightly walk always starts this way. Both of us heading in the same direction, a line of webbing between us, pulling against one another. 

It is a kind of give-and-take that the two of us have received and bestowed for a dozen years.

The sun is momentarily blinding as it dips beneath the trees. Its light channels through red and yellow leaves electrifying the neighborhood and making it seem as if the whole world was on fire.

In a good way. An exhilarating way.

When it is finally safe we cross. 

The neighbors have already started the ritual cleansing of their yards. The fruits of their raking and pruning line the sidewalks, ready for an official transport to wherever it is we mulch or compost as a collective good.

The season is still in its infancy … the blink and you’ll miss it kind of development.

The crabapples gave up the fight during the summer. For a few years now I've noticed these diminutive trees that live near the mossy side of our dwelling bow out early. Not long after they flower and unfurl foliage, the leaves just seem to slowly give up. Fluttering to the ground here and there until the branches are mostly bare in the eighth month.

Stressed. I worry the trees might be dying. A fungus or a blight. Something other than old age. 

The sugar maples are holding on to their color while the oaks get ready for their turn. Hickory will follow soon after.

The drying leaves that have begun their descent, curl into feather-weight shells and crunch underneath our feet as we walk. It is a satisfying sound. 

The dog sniffs at the piles as I scuff along the edges. Careful not to undo the work of the rake. I want to rustle leaves, not feathers.

A teardrop leaf caught my eye. Its center was a translucent gold while sawtooth edges blazed fiery red. They hung on the shrub like a wave of festive garlands. 

Oh, what a celebration!

Oh, how I wish I could bark orders at our dogwoods. Get them to burst forth and shuffle off this mortal coil before the municipal sweeping ends … dog-willing.

But I would be barking up the wrong tree. The leaves will fall when they are good and ready. Certainly, after the birds have feasted on the fruit and left the remnants to molder underneath. 

My internal almanac can predict with witnessed assurance that the town trucks will have just made the switch from vacuums to other winter attachments when the lot will give up the ghost and finally unburden the tree.

Of course, they will stay put until after the first snow. That's how my memory tells me it happens. And I remind my husband that in those years we are content to let the lawnmower, Mother Nature, and the squirrels building nests recycle the remnants.

The dog will have a clear view of their abode, and she will remind us as the show piles up there is work for her outside. Haranguing, corralling, squirrel-patrol work. 

Until spring. When we are distracted by the leaves of old when fresh flowers and chutes poke out of whatever remains are left.

Changing spaces

I drummed my fingers on the table. Tapped my foot in imperfect time with the music. My thoughts jumbled an informal to-do list until I decided to finally write it down.

There was so much to do before we left and I didn’t want to forget a single thing.

I was filled with nervous energy because in just a three-hour drive (give or take some traffic) we’d be reacquainting ourselves with our daughter, who had, only a month and a few days prior, packed up just a smidgeon of the top-tier elements of her personal collection and moved them to a dorm room in Boston.

First things first: I had to locate the black, down jacket she’d need now that the temperature was dropping; and the red, bedazzled tights that would certainly not keep her warm in this year’s Halloween costume. 

She had directed me to her things as if she’d had them mapped. The tights would be in the topmost drawer of her dresser. The coat would be hanging up. 

I stared straight into her closet, but I couldn't see past the things she’d left behind: Things I’d bought her. A library of children’s books, a zoo of stuffed animals, a rack full of clothes that still fit her body but no longer fit her style.

And for the very first time since she left I understood that she doesn’t live here anymore.

Once I find this jacket … and the tights … 

“Oh … if you could bring the curling iron with the small barrel, too, that would be great. You should find it in the bookcase, bottom left basket.” 

Where in the … ?

Voila. There it was. The curling iron.

“Oh .. and some clothes hangers. I don’t know why mine keep disappearing.”

Once I fit the clothes hangers into a bag with the other items I’ve unearthed from her room, I would reckon with my nerves.

The last time I’d been this nervous was just before I met her. I had so many questions.

What kind of mother would I be? What kind of relationship would we have? 

Of course, I didn’t take the time to thoroughly explore these questions that flit through the minds of so many parents while we are still elbow-deep in diapers and daycare until we are surprised to find ourselves tiptoeing through a proverbial teenage wasteland. 

My daughter will only be a teenager for a moment longer. 

Which is the overwhelming feeling I have as we reach her address and wait for her to make an appearance. She is smiling as she exits the building and jogs down the stairs. She gives each of us a hug. Mine is extra long.

We have so many plans for this weekend. Dinner reservations. Tickets to a home game. Plans for shopping and sightseeing.

But as much as we have been excited to see her again, she has been preparing herself, too.

It’s a delicate reunion. 

We are a different family here and she is the first to know it. In as much as we have prepared to visit, she has prepared to receive us. We are in her city now. 

Hoping for the best

I’ve been thinking about “family” a lot recently.

Particularly about the connections we’re born with … and the connections that fray as we meander through the seasons of our lives. A wall of silence is a reminder that relationships can be as hard as our feelings.

Our wanting to do better than our parents did. Our hoping that we will. And the likelihood that we will fall short seems to be the embodiment of the human condition itself.

A friend reminded me of my own setting and resetting of boundaries as she recounted a rollercoaster ride of familial discord twice removed. The kind of thing that starts as a friend of a friend’s story of hurt and misunderstanding so big that it becomes a telegraphing parable of a story for the ages.

In this story, the daughter had a tumultuous relationship with the father, which had ebbed and flowed over the years in predictable ways. Admiration floated naturally along with the jetsam of off-the-cuff banter that eventually led to a host of invisible wounds that were healed with silence. Some of which she let go, but some gathered to her like scar tissue, overgrowing, becoming proud flesh. 

I know the feeling. Anxiety often rules these interactions. We interpret words - sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly - and commit them to a dictionary of feelings we’ve written in our minds. 

We bring our fallible selves to witness and often we can't help but believe the worst. 

My friend’s friend has erected fences and barricades to protect herself. It had been in her best interest. Anything to blunt the hurt, she understood, allowed some form of relationship to remain. 

 

Which is what I had done for a time. Like the friend of my friend, I had harbored the pain of a mother’s harsh gaze and thoughtless words and let them resonate within. I had wondered if love could be extracted and measured. That we just had to accept that love could coexist with unsolicited advice, disappointment-laced judgmental tone, and the occasional I-told-you-so. 

But we didn't have to like it. 

Avoidance of discomfort sometimes becomes central to our relationships. Not that we shouldn't mitigate abuse via the least taxing ways possible.

After all, avoidance feels like it does the least harm.

But why don't we have an impermeable layer that prevents the muck of our thoughts from drenching us in toxins? 

Maybe that’s where we will find ourselves one day If we were unlucky enough to have been wrong; once avoidance is no longer required  … maybe it will be in a box of old letters or the pages of a journal.

Maybe we will find the evidence of the loving parent we had never known or had forgotten.

And we will see ourselves in a different light. A dimmer one that missed enough possibilities to have mattered. 

My friend found it heartbreaking. All those years of animosity and keeping oneself at arms-length for naught.

For some reason, I found it comforting. 

The note, in my mother’s handwriting, about her joy at some tiny thing I didn't even remember doing, was reassuring that my fears about being unliked, let alone unloved, were unfounded. 

Though it didn't erase any of the awkwardness that had existed in our relationship, it reminded me that my feelings are not always as reliable as they seem and that stoicism isn't the absence of love. And that the work of understanding was neither hers nor mine alone. 

It may even take more than one lifetime.