Untended Consequences

 I felt the dryness of the tendrilling vine as I grasped the offending weed and gave it a hard tug. It was only afterward - its withered remains sprawled out in a wheelbarrow – that I recognized the sting of a thousand tiny thorns the “volunteer” had used to try and defend itself from my attempts to tear it, stem and root, from its hiding place beneath my admittedly inglorious hydrangea.

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I assume the blame.

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Last year, the blooms were so large and plentiful they obscured their own leafy greens. I didn’t take credit for them, though, since the entire neighborhood was brimming with stunning floral poms.

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My gardening skills, I will tell you, are, almost in their entirety, knowing the difference between the things I’ve planted and the things that came in on the wind. What I think sets me apart from other black thumbs is how I might decide long after the season ebbs which of the weedy plants I will try to nurture next year.

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It’s not pretty, but the planter box is littered with evening primrose, juniper, and any number of seedlings I didn’t plant.

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“This is just one of a thousand reasons gardening is just NOT my thing,” I tell myself as I tend to the burning in my hand more closely.

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The “burrs” looked innocuous enough. Flat, brown little flakes - like loose tobacco - sticking to the meat of my palm. I tried to brush them off, but only managed to transfer them and their burning sensation to my other hand.

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This could be the ghost of a thistle I planted several years ago for its purulent purple flowers. I had the cheeky thoughts back when I’d reluctantly become a gardener that I would only plant risquély named or appearing flora.

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I imagined nonchalantly telling anyone who asked after the identity of the pretty pink flowers dipping their clustered blooms over a shrub of leafy green at the edge of the driveway, “Oh, that’s Hot Lips Turtlehead.”

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No one ever asked.

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I can’t help but think that was the direct result of my directionless care. For instance, I have no idea what pH number my plants would prefer any more than I know how to make the soil measure up. I also never planned for height or color or lighting needs. Which means each season brings a new surprise.

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Some are remarkable, but most of the surprises are unbecoming to a garden.

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I know it doesn’t take as much effort as I think it will. A few weed plucks here, a few pruning clips there, will give the garden enough shape to look landscaped.

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For all the years my children needed tending at the bus stop, the garden looked unlike nature had always intended.

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Those days are long gone. And while I miss them, I have found ways to move on.

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As I clear away the prior year’s leaf litter —- again — I toy with the idea of scrubbing it all. Scorching the earth…. mowing it all down … maybe even paving it over so the fruits of past labor can’t revisit.

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But I won’t.

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I’ll just plan my time better and always wear gloves.

Call, Waiting

We stood on the street corner, full from a late lunch, just looking at each other silently.

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It had been a long day.

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We had driven two and a half hours with a carload of our son’s favorite possessions, and spent another three hours taking them up to his new dorm room in four trips. The last, inadvisable, one was after I talked the boy into eschewing the line at the elevators and opting to carry the last few items up fifteen flights of stairs instead.

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Essentially, what I had done was condemn us to climbing in circles up a dimly lit, non-air-conditioned stairwell. My armload of feather-light things had me feeling like Sisyphus.

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I made it to the eighth floor before I realized I would have to sit down and rest.

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The boy sprinted onward with his much heavier boxes and returned a few minutes later to find me at the 9th floor, making slower and steadier progress.

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“Boys are different,” I tell myself on a loop. Nearly everything we unpacked was a thing he argued he didn’t need.

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The afternoon was turning to evening, and we had done what we set out to do.

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In his new room on the fifteenth floor of a building that also houses a burger chain restaurant and a bank, his bed was made, his bags unpacked, and his computer was set up and working on his new desk.

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I had hidden the cleaning products he didn’t want to bring in the back of the wardrobe he insisted wasn’t included, behind the three-tiered shoe rack (that he also thought was unnecessary but his father had dutifully assembled at my insistence).  

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I want to say this is not my first rodeo – and that in time my son will come to rely on the surprising comfort of a few unnecessary things, like his sister – but I’m not sure it’s true.

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Once we’d finished, I took a last look around. His first-year room looked sparse in comparison to hers. He looked happy.

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His father pressed the hex key that came with the shoe rack into the boy’s hand, and, in a hushed voice, instructed him to tuck it away despite the likelihood that he would never need it again. Our son smiled and closed his hand around the tool.

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It was time to say our goodbyes.

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There was no sadness. No tears.

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He accepted his dad’s bear hug with a quick release and double shoulder taps. He agreed to call or write with news of his first few days, lest we worry. He didn’t need to be reminded that his parents would miss his presence … even though I kept saying it … like a skip in a record.

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He hugged me last. Holding on a little longer than I know he is comfortable. All for me.

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Maybe he knew I would spend the next few days immersed in his childhood, cleaning his room and finding a small lifetime of treasures and literal trash … not to mention seven water bottles, a mostly uneaten Easter Basket he received in 2021, and MY long-lost backpack under his bed.

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Maybe he didn’t know that’s how I would have to get through the first few days of call waiting.

HIgher Powers

When we moved into our house, with its Main Road energy and deep backyard pool, the children were five and two years old. Neither my husband nor I had ever had much experience with either.

As most parents may admit, close proximity to such childhood hazards tend to haunt us. We made all kinds of plans and rules that the children mostly followed. They learned to cross streets under our watchful eye and, above and beyond the dual-locking fence gate, promised to never swim without an adult present.

We promised ourselves we would minimize any and all distractions when we were on swim or traffic duty. Which I know I faithfully executed.

But I can admit, it certainly felt like I was holding my breath for three months each summer – once my husband happily and fearlessly peeled back the pool cover – until he stretched it back over the gaping waterhole.

Finally, I could exhale.

Of course, the inverse held true for the state of my respirations at the start of each school year, and the summer months always provided a respite from news of mass shootings inside places of education. Only the fear seemed so much more daunting because in my mind there was little more I could do to prevent tragedy from visiting our family than deciding not to own a gun that could be turned against me or someone else.

So, without any other form of control, the only thing left to do is push it as far from the front of your thoughts as possible. Let it live in the shadowy gray hope of Things Like This Don’t Happen Here. Despite knowing well enough that they do.

I focused instead on making sure the kids’ were prepared for school, right down to ensuring their vaccinations were up to date.

The hardest part of it all is knowing that it doesn’t have to be this way.

We have never been without power to make our lives and our experiences better. Just like the fence that encircles our pool … or the seatbelts that brought three-point restraint to all occupants of a car (regardless of which seat one inhabited or how old the passenger is who is sitting there.

We know these small changes save lives. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, seatbelts have saved more than 375,000 lives since laws mandating their use was implemented in 1975.

And as for water safety? Center for Disease Control  injury prevention experts, in one of their last studies before their jobs were eliminated this year, found that hundreds of lives could be saved with wider use of fencing and life jackets. The CDC’s modeling found that out of 4,509 drowning deaths reported in 2022, fifty-one could have been prevented by better pool fencing and 297 could have been prevented by wearing a life vest while boating.

There was a time when the leaders of the nation would think 51 deaths from a preventable cause was worth pursuing meaningful change. That is no longer the case. Especially not when the case is about deaths by firearms.

Multiple research organizations across many platforms, from healthcare to academia to those born by tragedy in our communities nationwide, agree that tens of thousands of deaths could be prevented by strengthening laws that include safe storage laws, bans on assault weapons, purchase waiting periods, and red flag confiscations. State-by-state comparisons show the correlation between restrictions and a lower death toll from guns.

So much more to worry about now, it’s hard to focus. 

As our children go back to school … be it a neighborhood primary school or a sprawling university campus .. let’s take a time to catch our breath and remember: We are not powerless.

Were all stuck holding the bag

 Why are we always so willing to hold the bag?

It’s 2:11 … a.m. 

Nothing is happening. No emergency that is new, or fresh, or pressing. There is just me, wide awake, trying to block out the sounds of my husband snoring beside me and the thoughts in my head.

After I’d tried tossing and turning for a few hours, I gave up and decided to catch up on the previous day’s events. When that became horrifying, I swerved abruptly into puzzling through Wordle, and Strands and Pips until I got pulled into the dark corner of mainstream media where we are saved from all our doom-scrolling by credulous solutions to our tinnitus and skin tags, or where we can finally find The Perfect BagTM.

I know such a product doesn’t really exist. 

But in just a few page rolls, I have a contender: a sleek, white satchel that reminds me of a gym bag I owned in grammar school. Only this one, I assume, because of its listed specifications and sharp-focus photograph, is an upgrade from the plastic-handled grip bag of memory, with its chipboard bottom attached by rivets to a blue outer shell of some indiscernible material that zips up the center. Could be canvas ... Could be cardboard. Back then, I was unconcerned by not knowing.

Nevertheless, I am intractably swayed by jaunty marketing campaigns designed help me place myself in the whimsical, carefree picture long enough to make me fish out a credit card and transfer the maximum amount of digits I am willing to transfer to someone else’s bank account for what I know in my bones to be a relatively short moment in time where I will be holding The Bag.

But my thoughts keep churning through the ever-accumulating detritus that has become the news cycle. 

The normalization of misdeeds by a cotton-haired ogre who uses his SCOTUS-granted perch above what is lawful to strip the country of its valuable parts – its diversity and its democracy –  to enrich himself and take potshots at rivals. 

What will remain in the end will be a brittle frame with nothing of substance inside.

I wonder how the paper of record can just echo Trump’s “accusation” of fiscal fraud when Trump and his cohorts use blatant authoritarian threats to target his opposition, when they also print stories like this one and this. The administration continues its policy of saying the quiet parts aloud, and the Times keeps repeating them as if the facts are unknowable. It's like they're all just trolling us ... they even give the people doing the dirty work the most sinister job titles.

It’s all been happening in plain sight. 

The Texas Legislature wrestled power away from its people to help this deeply unpopular president game the midterm elections, where he will learn how successful they were at creating a political system that answers only to MAGA.

They are spiking their followers’ cocktails with rhetoric of strong-armed security while “watering down” our nation’s safety with poison.

Just read any comment section of any OpEd anywhere when a proud Republican gets a taste of their party’s bitter pills, yet still manages to swallow them. They won’t be convinced the pain they feel is anything more than a pesky side effect that was meant for others … not themselves.

They are numbing themselves, too.

But we will all be holding the bag.

Undoing

What will you do with yourself?

I don’t know if she had asked the question I was trying to answer, but I found myself drilling down into some complicated feelings about the space left over once my youngest child goes off to college. 

My mother-in-law is a sharp lady; she knows this would be a question for me and not her son. But I feel sharp, too. In all the wrong ways, perhaps. All edges and elbows. 

She shared her experiences and gave a tidbit of good advice: ” Reclaim something you had to give up.“ 

I hate how it sounds when it tumbles out of my mouth; how everything always sounds whenever I try to bend words into a shape that fits me: “I don’t feel like I sacrificed anything for my children.” 

As if I fear, by definition I won’t ever be able to fit into anything else. 

I try again: I never gave up anything that I truly loved. If anything, I found more and more things to do as the children grew into adolescents.

Even the word - adolescents - feels like a time when adults are supposed to step a few paces back. 

All of it felt like a surprise, or just a thing I learned about myself by giving new things a whirl. I learned new skills, made new friends, decided running was fun, and then started to volunteer.

She smiled, drew a breath and wondered if the transition would be easier for me since I could already fill my time with work, hobbies, and friends. 

Perhaps it’s the thousands of little tasks that mothers don’t exactly take for granted. We labor over them, as if they were entirely new life forms to cajole and nurture into recognizable shapes. 

Parenthood was just one part of the puzzlement. 

If anything, I gained so much more from navigating the ups and downs. The friction that comes from doing or delegating the work. 

It wasn’t always a joy, but it hardly felt like a burden either. Not that it was glamorous: There is always something that needs doing: the mountains of laundry, the piles of dishes, the “omg, how long has the cat vomit been steaming over there on the carpet?”

There will still be laundry, and dinners I clean up (because I don’t cook them), and pet messes that, while deeply unpleasant, won’t make me feel the physical urge to add to the upset. 

Which is to say, there will still be a husband … THE husband. A man who might need to be disabused of the notion that he, in any way, sacrificed me to the children. Or that I sacrificed him. Realizing instead that we are still on the same path, despite how it meanders and winds through time.

If there is a new frontier, I suppose it will have many familiar hills and valleys. It won’t be exotic or remote. We will come to realize it never really “left off” anywhere to pick up again. It’s just a journey we have been on together, marveling at all of the scenery changes. 

Supply Chains

This place is a maze. 

I feel overwhelmed. 

All around me are giant metal racks containing pallets of merchandise. The shelves above are wrapped in layers of shrink, with their contents still visible if I squint.  The skids at eye level are fully accessible; the clinging plastic peeled away to reveal super-sized versions of things our grocery store sells, but for a price we assume is a significant savings. I notice the pallets of things overhead don’t match anything offered nearby.

This alone makes my head swim.

I can’t quite figure out the system that makes this place hum, but I suppose it includes market research and feasibility studies that prove even a cynic, such as myself, will travel a hundred miles or more outside our domestic domains - just to spend copious amounts of cash in this consumer-land amusement park.  

I’m not sure if we need any of it, but it’s something to do on vacation that feels both extravagant and frugal. So I follow my husband, who is driving the extra-wide cart. 

He shows delight at each turn. His face lit up at seeing reams of colorful sticky-note pads in sizes that fit the curve of his beefy hand when it’s gripping a pen. He chortles as he flings two of them into the cart. So far, he’s collected a few office supplies, a dozen razor blades, a pair of shorts, and a pillow-sized bag of dried fruit as we crest the first turn.  

I don’t seem to have the same luck as I try to focus on a list of supplies our college students desire: a water-filter pitcher, a mattress topper, and an inexpensive vacuum. 

It’s here somewhere, I presume, just in the wrong sizes and price points once located.

For those things, I resign to go elsewhere. Here I will settle on multi-packages of consumables like toothpaste, shave creams, soaps, tonics, sodas, and D vitamins.

I know these are things I can add to the cart without triggering my husband’s left eyebrow to lift a full inch higher than his right. More durable items require more dialogue and the potential for old wounds to resurface. 

Thanks in part to my taking a chance on a $25 name-branded toaster that has since decided unknowably and seemingly on its own whether both sides of the bread would be toasted or whether one side would be scorched and the other left raw.  

“It wasn't the purchase,” He argues quite correctly. “It was you getting rid of the ugly old serviceable toaster that worked just fine.” 

The truth is, I hate it here.

Paying for the privilege of copping here. 

This place, its business model, the whole, proverbial, timeline. It feels like a more accurate Everest. 

Some outsized escapade that requires no small amount of training beforehand and a whole different kind of stamina to get through the judgments that abound at every turn: from the entry, to the aisles, and the checkout lines, and the reading of receipts. Because trust and bargains do not coexist. I always do some deep soul searching afterward, the whole path, like Everest, littered with excesses and detritus all along the way. 

A literal price hike that might cost us our souls. 

Nourishment for the soul

In the grocery store … near the baking aisle … are shelves filled with sauce packets. In essence, they are dry ingredients that when mixed with ordinary tap water and stirred until incorporated will leap-frog a roux and land you a sauce.

My parents — who were not chefs but never burned or broke the flour and butter base that will become a rich and flavorful gravy  — I am sure, would have given me a heaping measure of side-eye, not to mention curled-lip for tossing two packets of the stuff into my cart.

It goes against the grain.

Of all the things one should know, I can conjure my mother saying mid-lecture, is the simple act of making the thickening agent for a gravy from scratch. She (and my father, thanks to her practiced instruction) could do it in their sleep.

First they’d melt an amount of butter in a saucepan before adding an equal amount of flour, then whisking until the color they desired majestically appeared. Depending on what the savory sauce would be ladled over my mother could match white, beige or caramel brown as if she were cooking in a Pantone chart. They’d add a liquid … water, milk or broth and whisk constantly to prevent lumps. The heat would be medium or low, and they wouldn’t take their eyes off the task until the finished product was velvety and the exact consistency they intended.

I always thought there was something miraculous in that marinade. Divine intervention, however, it wasn’t. As I recall, my mother, a nurse by training, was ready and able to doctor the sauce if any accident, such as a burner’s heat being set too high, happened to occur. She could diagnose the problem and its treatment – adding water here or a sprinkle of thickener there – by intuition.

Similarly, my father, her sous chef,  could make the toughest piece of leftover meat melt in our mouths just by how he angled his knife. Unlike me, he could tell in the dimmest light, which way the grain was heading. No hesitation.

There was an economy to the procedure just as much as there was an economy to the product they plated up and set out on the kitchen table.

Those meals came vividly to life as I watched an episode of the FX show "The Bear" where chef Sydney Adamu doctors up a box of Hamburger Helper. As the episode progresses, we watch “Syd” balance the inexperience in other areas of her life with her surety and skills she possesses in the kitchen. As she connects with her young cousin and talks through the angst of living, I watch a recipe that brings nourishment of the soul and convenience come together in real time. A box of pasta. A packet of spices. A cup of water.  A squeeze of tomato paste. A smattering of toasted panko. A fresh nest of shredded cheddar cheese sprinkled over the top.

When Syd ladles two servings of her doctored Hamburger Helper into bowls and hands one to her young charge, I can almost feel the steam of that familiar comfort on my face.

Something about that scene reminded me of one of my favorite meals my mom used to make: fried rice using a box of Rice-a-Roni, leftover chicken or pork, and a scrambled egg. 

With just a dash of soy sauce, it was nourishment for the soul.

Sell outs

I was sleepy when I read the pitch in my inbox.

A civil liberties group had announced it would oppose efforts to dismiss a case it brought against the Consumer Product Safety Commission, its former commissioner, and the Department of Health and Human Services for daring to educate retailers about the dangers to infants posed by weighted baby blankets.

It was looking for journalists to take an interest and talk with their attorneys.

In its case against the government agencies, The New Civil Liberties Alliance contends that the agencies have made “unproven, unlawful attacks on weighted infant sleep products, (specifically in respect to their client’s wearable sleep blanket that contains weighted beans) because the agency had not conducted enough research to pursue rulemaking about the specific products it was warning against.

Does it matter that in June of 2023, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said in a letter to the CPSC that the weighted products should NEVER be used on babies? Or that years of study about sleep safety for infants have generally concluded that infants should not be put to bed with blankets, pillows, or stuffed toys because suffocation from these items is a known and provable danger to children under the age of one?

No. Because this lawsuit isn’t about the safety of products or the protection of infants. It's a result of jettisoning regulations and consumer protections. It’s about the liberties of an individual – in this particular case, the freedom of an entrepreneurial mom to sell their million-dollar idea to as many people as possible with the help of a retailer like Target.

It's about keeping the government from using any agency or expertise to make any recommendations whatsoever.

Because your pediatrician telling you to do something you are free to ignore is one thing, but government regulatory agencies taking the warnings to heart and altering the marketplace to the potential for harm is somehow a bridge too far? 

It takes time to gather data about dangerous products, many of which remain on store shelves for years while data about their harms accumulate, "new" and "improved" dangerous items come to market every day.

For instance, inclined infant sleepers with a pitch of more than 10 degrees from horizontal have been banned in the United States, but only after more than 100 infant deaths linked to their use during the course of 13 years.

The sale of weighted blankets for use on infants is a relatively new and worrisome phenomenon, but experts' understanding of their dangers is built on experience with similar products. This case, if it prevails, will conclude that agencies can't make. Each new product will be a lawsuit that reinvents the wheel.

For instance, doctors know that standard blankets and bedding can be deadly to sleeping infants. Given an infant's physiology, the risks posed by weighted bedding are a predictable likelihood.   

Each new blanket is a new court case waiting to happen thanks to the 2024 Supreme Court decision to end the Chevron Deference Doctrine, which allowed courts to defer to the expertise of regulatory agencies.

We can’t stop harm.

We don't know if we can limit dangerous guns, stop concealed carry of weapons, or curtail the creation of ghost guns. And yet we are contemplating the legalization of silencers and bumpstocks.

We can't even slow it down.

All we'll be able to do is conduct our own "research" from a new wave of dubious information.

And if these lawsuits prevail, we may find the true experts unable to warn others about the dangers. 

It feels like our eyes should be wide open now.