Reflexives

Tina, who works with me, called yesterday to say that her father had died. Just dropped in front of them all while they were in the yard. They'd done CPR and he'd been alive when they took him to the hospital, but Tina was calling at 10am, from the hospital, and he wasn't alive then. Later she texted me, around 5, and was only leaving the hospital then. I obsessed on that all day--on what had transpired to keep her at the hospital for seven hours after she knew he was dead. I calibrated it to Dad's death, Tom's death. (This is Tom, to the left, in the yard of his home in Ireland, a few weeks before that horrible day. Too young for a cane, but he'd rejected physical therapy after a hip replacement. Too young to be dead, too, but I'm starting to understand and even accept that endings just come when they do.) I didn't want to spend Saturday doing this--I had things to get done--but all day I clocked through the day Dad died, like a film in the VCR. Had I overlooked something that should have kept me with him for seven hours instead of one? Maybe Tina's family stayed with her father until he was ready to be moved to the funeral home. Maybe he didn't have to have an autopsy. Maybe they simply sat with him after he was dead longer than we did.... My God, did we leave too soon? Dad hated being alone--hated it more than anything. Nobody rushed us out: we just couldn't stand around him staring down at him any longer than we did.

I see how this goes for me now, when the facts of a death--so mundane, so common to us all--trigger the reel. I'm both dreading and anticipating the funeral: dreading the reality of Tina's loss; anticipating the excuse to visit with my own. (I lie when Liam asks from the other room, "Who are you talking to, Mom?" "Just myself," I tell him. I remember my mother saying the same to me when I was a child, and now I understand: she had an entire community of beloveds on the other side of the wall, and part of her went with them.)

***

So much has changed in life since I last posted here in 2009. New job, and new life in Georgia.  A horrible year last year--a real crusher. But we survived, and above obsession notwithstanding; we're solid again.

Putting on the face

A friend's wife took a tumble outside her office in Manhattan. Hit the marbled sidewalk at Rock Plaza with her forehead, and came home with stitches through her eyebrow. A few days later, she sent him to the local drugstore to pick up this green pancake makeup that her doctor had told her would neutralize the purple of the bruise, so that when she put regular makeup over it, nobody would know she looked like a train wreck underneath. He goes to the drugstore and finds that there's actually a slot on the makeup wall for green pancake. And it's all sold out.

Ah, Westport.

By the pound

Food and fat--is there a more tedious topic??

I'm back on Weight Watchers--firmly on it. Nothing tempts me. Pangs of hunger comfort me. It's been a month now, and it's true that I feel better eating well. True that I have more energy. True that thin people live longer, and with two kids you'd think attaining longevity would be a very simple everyday priority. But the time will come, as it always does, when I stop losing--for weeks on end--and when that happens, this simple, clean engagement will be harder to maintain. I'll begin to feel as if I am pulling on a rope for every ounce I toss off, and that if I let go even for a second, the scale will fly back to its original spot. It will feel as if the body wants one thing, and I want another. So I will try to prod it--punish it--by exercising more and eating less. And less. Until one day I see stars in the shower, and I let go of the rope.

A person gets tired of a cycle like this. Weight is such a public battle. You estimate the makeup of an overweight person a whole lot faster than you can a wife beater, or a pedophile. It's humiliating. And so pedestrian an issue to be the number one struggle of a life. But there you go. No body, no life.

I'm going to try love this time. Loving the body, as a favorite pair of jeans. Give it the time it needs, as a mother to a child. Let's see how that goes, when the clouds roll in.

Social contract

My brother lives a derailed life--derailed by his own hand, though I suppose you could trace it all back to some dysfunctions he suffered as a child. Dyslexia. Encopresis. I think people have suffered worse and still lived an honorable life. But we are not all the same.

Now he has five children, a trail of crimes he's never been nailed for, and a broken marriage. And so he has betaken himself and his children next door to my parents' house, and there they have been since June. His children are waiting on the road now for the school bus; they've been registered for schools--fantastic schools in a community my brother will never, ever be able to afford to live in off the sweat of his brow; they can only attend these schools if somebody else sustains them. Despite the story he's told my folks, all signs are that this is a visit without end.

There are a lot of things that confound and anger me about this whole scene, but there's one piece in particular that I'll share. Years ago, when I was unemployed and then underemployed and scrambling to keep things going, there were things I simply could not bring myself to do. It was a point of pride--a point of shame. I accepted unemployment payments as long as I was allowed (though that first call killed me); I'd paid into it, and so many of my former colleagues were in the same boat, so it became a sort of new normal for our times. What I couldn't do, though, was ask the local YMCA to let us in for free. I wouldn't tell the schools that I couldn't afford to buy the supplies, or send the checks for the field trips, or pay for school lunches. I wouldn't file for food stamps or Medicaid. I wouldn't. I would not allow my children to be raised up on charity. Our circumstances were temporary, and I would not formalize a temporary circumstance. To be precise, I was too proud to give anyone the opportunity to look at us through different eyes. Do you know what I mean?

It also meant that, for a period of time, none of us had health insurance. I paid for any care out of pocket. Looking back, that's the only choice I regret; that was a risky choice. A stupid choice.

My brother has embraced all of the benefits offered to people with no income. His children went to the YMCA camp for free all summer--swam and did crafts and played with other children. They had had their teeth repaired, their eyes checked and glasses acquired, their orthodontia covered--all courtesy of you and me. Their food is paid for by you and me. My yougest niece will attend the same preschool Liam attended--only I worked overtime stocking shelves at Borders to pay for it, but my brother will do nothing and my niece will attend for free.

So there's the knee-jerk pissed-off-ness about the sheer inequity of circumstance, though I know I could have dove into the pool of freebies just like anybody else with a hard-luck tale to tell.
My brother is the welfare mother. He has no shame--indeed, he has a sense of entitlement. And all the stories I ever told myself about the welfare mother--institutional racism, the long-term disabled, generational poverty, etc.--don't apply to my brother. Which makes me question everything about my position on social programs. My loser brother could turn me into a fricking Republican.

Not really.

The conflicting part is that my nieces and nephews are faring far better with a parent who embraces poverty than my own children fared with a mother who wouldn't go near it. And if you think about it, which set of kids really felt poor when they were poor? Not his.

***

Liam broke his wrist on Saturday; a pile of shit on top of a display fell on him when we were school shopping at Staples. My brother, it occurs to me, would sue the store.

Off to the orthopedic guy.

How it might look

I can't believe I was writing about moving three months ago. How does it still feel like a new and unfamiliar notion to me--something I'm sharing only now for the first time? It speaks to how many issues there are attached to the decision, and how conflicted I am.

I've found this adorable little red house in the woods. Cheapish, relatively speaking, for reasons I'll share. The main house was built in 1760, and the most recent owners, now deceased, added a pole barn to it in 1990, making it a livable size for a family of 3. It seems structurally sound, though the addition has its flaws--like the uneven floors between new and old. Amateur mistake. The floorplan is quirky; it'd take some thought to figure out how to overcome the feeling that it's really two houses with no relationship but a point of contact. Liam doesn't like the third bedroom--the one that would be his; it's under the eaves, and he thinks it's spooky. (There is that old-house energy in the old part. No question. You can almost feel the families that moved through it over the centuries. People with names like Lewis and Issac and Abel. I love this stuff. Got the history of ownership from the historical society.) Oh, and there's no kitchen. Literally. Somebody ripped out whatever kitchen there had been in the original house, and they put in the plumbing and electric for the kitchen in the new part of the house. But they ran out of steam or interest, or cash. I've lived in in-progress homes all my life in a family of builders. Can manage that.

The town has 3-acre zoning, and this property--most of it wild--is heavy with old trees, and the air is moist from the wetlands and the reservoir. I feel at peace there--something I haven't felt in years--though I'm privately wondering if I have the guts to take on the isolation. And the high taxes. What's the worst that could happen? I lose my job? Foreclosure? Hightail to a rental? People survive those things. I cast backwards in my life and think my greatest mistakes have always been acts of ommission. Acts of caution. This time I'm mining for courage.

Intentions

We are planning a move to Redding—20 minutes from here. Local taxes went up $800/month, and I’m tired of the expense. The kids don’t want to move—they like their school, they love their friends. They fear we are poor—they ask me and I tell them we are not. But I don’t know how to explain why I am forcing a move without explaining that this town we’re in is too pricey, and we can live easier elsewhere. I have, I’m sure, handled this all wrong. But there you go.

***
They fought like cats and dogs all day yesterday—stuck in the house with a snow day, Liam with his cast, and Maisie out of some twisted solidarity or sheer disinterest in playing outside alone. They pulled an 8-foot bookcase away from the wall so that they could climb into a small closet behind it—a bookcase packed with stories I love that would’ve killed them if they’d only miscalculated a bit. They pondered the things they might do to get into the Guinness Book of World Records, and Liam determined that he could claim two things: 1) an enormous collection of elephant figurines; 2) his ability to stick a needle in his thumb 32 times.

“Wait—what??”—my head snaps up, and I’m waiting.

He holds up his thumb. Maisie brings me her phone with this photo, which captures another of the activities I missed when I went to work. They are gleeful. I feel bile in the back of my throat, and my eyes burn. I start to holler. Their faces fall. He begins to cry. I keep hollering. I talk about tetanus shots and infection. I’m so angry—with him, with her, with the adults next door who were supposed to be watching them.

When I stop hollering, he explains himself.

“I don’t want to move. Maisie and I were trying to think what we could do to make some money and save our house.” At “save our house” he’s holding up both hands for emphasis, because he feels such urgency. “So I thought if I sent this photo to Guinness Book of World Records they’d send me some prize money and we wouldn’t have to move.”

32 needles in his finger to save our house.

There are no words.

Life

It was, as predicted, a tense, unhappy experience. Three hours of a Saturday afternoon standing in Party City with M, trying every strategy in the book to help her choose--including not helping her choose. (L found his pink princess dress in about ten seconds, accessorized with a blonde Hannah Montana wig and a furry crown, and was ready to leave.) She reduced the picks to two costumes--both of them short pirate dresses (which I will make her wear with leggings)--and when we got to the front to pay for the one she'd picked, she wobbled again, in tears, uncertain this was the right choice.

In the car, later--after I'd cooled down--I tried to get at what was so hard for her. "I know you don't like it!" she cried. "Honey, I'd have you in princess dresses until you're 30--it's not about what I like. It's about what YOU like," I said. "I like princess dresses, too," she wailed. "I'd LOVE to wear a princess dress, but the kids at school would laugh at me."

Ah.

"Honey," I tell her, "somebody's going to laugh at you no matter what you choose. Kids laugh--it's part of the wiring at this age. So you may as well choose something that YOU really feel good about--not something that you think everyone else wants you to wear."

(It contrasts with Liam's gleeful attitude: he can't wait to put on that pink dress--can't wait to make the villagers laugh. He's been blessed with that hard wiring.)

She gets home, tries it on, feels better about it. Gets excited about it, even. Calls her Dad this morning to tell him about it, he puts his girlfriend on the phone, and girlfriend laughs at the costume.

Jay-sus.

Fall

Fall is here; the edges of the trees are turning orange, and we turned the heat on this morning for the first time this year. (And will turn it off again, as soon as I dig out all the sweaters and thick socks from the attic.) And so, all minds turn to the critical matter of Halloween.

We're tackling the great Halloween costume debate this weekend. M wants to make her own. Which I love in principle, except that her ambitions have been molded by the prefab costumes--the wenches with the laced bodices; the princesses with the hooped skirts--and they (her ambitions) are not remotely matched by my sewing skills or patience. Last year was a complete debacle; that wood nymph (my idea--an after-the-fact identity for the frothy confection of brown and gold gauze that was supposed to be a Great Lady) required a real leap of imagination, and that (in case you wonder) is bad. I forced her to wear it; I wouldn't spend the money on fabric AND spend on some prefab costume. It's this, I told her, or you can throw a sheet over your head and call it a day. And so here we are again, and she has no memory of last year's fun, and I'm determined not to spend more than today--this one day--dealing with the costume drama. And it's already 12:45.

L's ambitions are simple. L's going as a girl. I am so profoundly grateful, I can't even tell you.

I've had the strangest feeling all week; all week I've sensed that a friend of mine who died 15 years ago has been right next to me, or behind me. I could almost swear I smell his cologne. I've been trying to think what the subconscious issue is: it's not his birthday; not the anniversary of his death. Lying awake at 2am, I sensed him again. Turned on the radio to hear that OJ is finally going to jail, and realized that Jim died before the Bronco chase on the freeway. He died before the Berlin Wall went down. Man, he would've enjoyed these years. The letters we would've written!

Bought myself a bike. Envisioning myself moving fast--deep, clear breaths, strong muscles, every one of them a fat-burning maching. The world is my oyster.

Beasts

I am absolutely defeated--not forever, but today--by how hateful the kids are to each other sometimes. I catch the unfiltered reality now and then--when they're talking to me on the phone at work, and one of them forgets to hang it up after we've said goodbye; or when I'm napping. They're young enough still to prefer to be next to me if they can; nobody wants to disappear to her room or go outside by himself. And so I can witness, when they haven't noticed I'm not really asleep. It's the kind of nasty we would never commit upon another person as adults--sneery, clear-eyed, direct hits, aimed squarely at the vulnerable spots mapped only for family. He stays calmer than she, delivering hit after hit, and she quickly becomes emotional, at which point she's lost and knows it. So she slugs him, and he cries the kind of canny cry he knows will deliver the ultimate final word from Granny or Poppop, and when confronted by one of them, she lies about having hit him because she doesn't have the words to express the wounds he's just delivered, and because the behavior is all so patterned now that G & P have decided she's guilty before she opens her mouth. Which--guilty--she is. But so is he. The little prince. It is the same dynamic I had with my younger brother, who could engineer a stern punishment for me and then grin at me when the adult left the room. A child's sense of justice is so big.

Suppose I have to buy a book and engage this. I want to shake them and tell them how hard it is to find a safe port as an adult--how lucky they are to have each other, how they're going to need each other again and again in their lives. Note that my brother and I never rely on each other. Not ever. But I have five siblings.

Hence my despair. Which will pass.

The carnival's in town. Poor schmucks--setting the thing up for three days, and the day it opens, the skies open up and stay opened for all but four hours on Saturday. Rough biz.

Deep Thoughts

He loves them, so far. Turns to me and talks about the "cool things" about glasses--like how the world looks blurry if you peek above or below them, and how sometimes you forget you're even wearing them. He marvels at the color of grass and the cutting details of light. He sits in the back seat and stares up at the passing tree line, mouth open. "Wow...."

Did you notice McCain's sideburns last night--one of them an inch longer than the other? He looked like somebody's distracted grandpa. His staff didn't serve him well.

My 16-year-old niece is visiting for three weeks--sister to the boys who were here a week ago. She has matured through a kind of sexual precociousness that alarmed me a few years ago, and has turned out to be a beautiful, smart, interesting kid. An eye opener for me, and a relief.

I finished another quilt last night. Am getting better at it, I have to say. I've made ten now--mostly for children. There's such unexpected pleasure in piecing something together for someone--in imaging their personalities, and picking the patterns, and sitting up close with it--with them--for a period. Having started at a place in time, there's a backlog of siblings who need quilts, too, because if getting a quilt is an act of love, not getting one is not an act of love. Next up: my sister's other daughter. Then my brother's two boys. And then my own two, who have sat patiently, watching.

A guest stopped by the house just before dinner the other night. My father had done the cooking. "You're welcome to stay," he said to them, "but we don't have enough food to feed you." The guest left. Dad recounted this to us later at the dinner table. He was identifying his invitation to stay as a point of generosity, but was frustrated that this person always seems to show up before meal time. I didn't comment until L asked me, "What would you have done?" This person is unemployed. She's a single parent. "I'd have invited her to stay for dinner," I said. "But there's not enough food," L said. "I'd have given her my food," I said. My mother finds her voice then and remembers life as a child in Ireland. "My grandmother would feed anyone who showed up at the door," she said. "And she'd whisper to us children, 'Go away with you, now--we'll find you something to eat later.'" My father, alarmed to find he missed the mark on this one, remembers, "When I was small bums from the road would stop by all the time looking for food. Mamma had ten children to feed. She couldn't feed bums." My mother's family had money. My father's family were poor. Nothing is simple.

School starts in a week. The bus drivers have been practicing the routes, up and down the hill for a week now. It's been a fun summer.

Girls

M asks me this morning whether a breast gets droopy after breastfeeding. (Not, I swear, to connect all body dots to her father, but invariably these sorts of questions follow prolonged time in Baltimore.) "Breasts get droopy for all kinds of reasons, most of all growing older," I tell her. "Yes, breastfeeding can change the way a breast looks." She tells me that her older sister--her Dad's other daughter--had breast surgery to repair droopy breasts after breastfeeding her three children.

I am dumbfounded by this information. This woman is only in her 30s, and has spent the majority of her adult life unemployed or barely employed. (She's also, incidentally, drop-dead gorgeous.) For her to fund plastic surgery--well, it strikes me a bizarre ordering of priorities in a life. Must've been a whole lot of unhappiness about those boobs, I guess.

I tell M, "Your body is a roadmap of your life. As you get older, you carry more history on your body." I'm panicked by her fear of wrinkles, of fat, of freckles--by her criticisms of me, masked in something else. "It's something to celebrate--not hide. I'd never want to erase the signs that I was able to use my own body to feed you." Body not as temple, but tapestry.

It's a whole lot of politics, I know, and I'm not always opposed to plastic surgery. And I heartily approve of waxed brows and flattering bras, and I would love to slim down to slink, like in the old days. But God, it's a brutal landscape for raising well-adjusted girls--girls who like themselves and their bodies. Especially when we, ourselves, are so ambivalent about ourselves, so fucking weary of our own bodies.

"That dress looks awful on her," M notes just now, looking at Jennifer Lopez in a fairly classic evening gown in some movie. If Jennifer Lopez looks awful in a classic evening gown, the battle's lost.

Forecast

Despite my occasional morose spurts, in life--away from the blog--I tend to be fairly optimistic. I tend to have a stupid faith that things will sort out--that tough times will pass, that good things will come. It's an American trait--I've had it pointed it out to me by Indian friends, who find it annoying. But we get to decide where to put the periods in the life narrative, and so we also can choose what notes the sentences end on: good news or bad. Good is easier to live with. Why not?

Today I calculated that I spend nearly $175 a week on gas. $70 for each fillup, 2.5 times a week. That's a shitload of cash pouring into the tank. Not much I can do about it; the commuter train ends 20 minutes south of my office, and there's no bus. There are good reasons we can't move right now--too much to recount here. Oil for this house will be double what it was a year ago: about $10K this year. Oil company kindly sent a notice with our projected spending calculated for us. Yale sent me, in the same mailbox, a reminder that I still need to pay them the $3,000.00 deductible owed on my surgery. That's the deductible I pay WITH my employer-subsidized health insurance. Like, wow.

It's not easy, certainly. But were I were earning the average American salary, we'd be screwed, totally.

Mamma needs a paradigm shift. Things in the old one are looking mighty bad. Mighty bad.

July 5, 2001

"I don't really get the whole adoption thing," he says to me this morning.

"What don't you get?" I ask.

"If I was born into the Halder family, why don't I get to use that name, too?"

Here's the heart of the ambiguity: the legal reality vs the human one.

"You can use that name if you want to," I tell him. "It can't be your last name, or else people wouldn't know who you are. But you can make it one of your names."

Seven years ago this weekend we went to court and made it official.

"I wish you'd taken a picture inside the courtroom," he said today.

"I felt embarrassed because I was crying," I said. "I was too happy to take a picture."

He smiles.

Stuff

Found an old photo archive...

M's annual departure for summer with her dad was almost uneventful this year. "It's only a month--28 days. That'll fly," she said in the car, setting the tone, probably intentionally; she watched me carefully, looking for shadows. I don't want her upset. A long hug at the goodbye, and then off they went. L and I climbed back into the car after she'd left. "It was easy this time," he said. They're growing up. These are the moments when I see it.

The air is getting thick with summer here; you can see the moisture, and the sky is that heavy gray/blue. And it's not even in the 90s yet! I've won out again over the little ants that find their way into the kitchen every year when the weather changes; they never made it to the cabinets this time--I've learned how to beat them back. I've pulled the weeds from the garden by the door, and planted a few tomato plants. L will pick the ripe ones every morning, and cut some chives, and slice them all into his omelettes. (Must get his cholesterol checked; that boy loves his eggs...) Keeneye hurt his foot in some midnight adventure in the woods, so we kept him close yesterday, and he was like a sick child: lying against me on the floor, begging to have his stomach rubbed. L put baby aspirin in a piece of tuna and watched him swallow it down, and cooed to him for hours, whispering and murmering love. This morning he's better, just like that. And for a month things will feel odd, suspended, until M gets home. Not an adventure-packed existence. Even the missing is a little comforting.

A person I fired six months ago is a little crazy, it turns out; he's done a few unsettling things--to me, to a co-worker--and he turned up the volume last week. We've involved the police. I was alone in the house last night and my imagination got the best of me; couldn't sleep, listening for something. I thought, unaccountably, of an old woman I used to know when I was younger. She told me that we have the power in ourselves to deflect harm--with our thoughts. Whatever else, I know there is no upside to inviting in fear. It's odd that I feel safer when the children are home.

Process

My father sits in an upholstered computer chair, his head resting on his hand, his elbow on the armrest. He's asleep. On the screen, the scoreboards for two MLB games underway. He wakes up when I walk in. "Why don't you go rest on the couch?" I ask, since he looks uncomfortable. "No, I'm fine here," he says. "I can turn on the game for you," I say. "No, I can see the scores here," he says. He's been in that chair since 5:30 this morning, and it's the same every day. He sits and waits for any human activity to play out in his sight. If it's the children, he pounces on them--barking orders, hammering on his windows and shaking his fingers at them. They've come to hate him. If it's my mother, he turns to her like a neglected pet, cross at her absences, jealous of her friendships. My mother has begun to turn away from him, and he has begun to tell me about this. I see an opportunity here, and am building up my courage to do some straight talk. I fear he wants more to shut me down than I want to help him get unstuck.

The children are keeping summer journals--documenting the shapes of idle days. The entries are packed with careful accounts of pancakes eaten and chapters read--and quarrels between them, and a united front against my father. Today they ran around to the front of Dad's house and rang the doorbell--I know this from journal snooping. They did it twice, which is probably why what could have remained their little secret became an elaborate apology note. I watch them run over to deliver the written apologies, and I hope to God he accepts, as an adult, and lets them off the hook. He does, unpredictably. He wanders over later to wish us all goodnight--another unusual step. He waits for them to jump up and kiss him, as we used to as children. They need to be prompted. I compensate with a big smile and chatter.

I took this photo twenty years ago. My father's sister and her husband, both from a village on the border of Norway and Sweden. I love it, though I cut her feet off.

Memorial Day

That band of 100-or-so vets that marches in our local parade chokes me up every time. The eldest among them--the few WWII vets still alive--walk so proudly, their uniforms so carefully preserved and assembled on bodies that stoop and limp. The younger ones--still older than I--from Vietnam and Korea are a mixed lot: some visibly proud, some a little sheepish, grinning and slouching. I didn't see a younger vet--none who might have been in Iraq in the early 90s or now. I stood up as the assembly approached us. "Why are you standing," M asks? My neighbor chimes in before I can respond, "Those men fought for you, and we stand up to show respect." Which is a fair enough answer for a child. I stood because I could feel the weight of all the ones who weren't there marching, and I couldn't breathe sitting down. All those boys.

L learned last week that if the government needs soldiers and there aren't enough volunteers, they can draft more. "So they could MAKE me go and fight??" he asks, utterly incredulous. What do you tell your 8-year old when they ask you that one?

Home from Yale today, minus a few constituent parts, achey and sore and alternately weepy and euphoric.

I woke up after the surgery to the surgeon's face, close up. "No cancer," he said. "Do you understand? Nothing there." Such a beautiful face.

No cancer.

Remembering

Oskar Schindler's birthday is Monday, I discover accidentally, lending some after-the-fact permission to my indulgent midday viewing of Schindler's List today. I'd forgotten the experience of viewing that movie: forgotten that however powerful the movie itself, the most powerful part--the part that wrenches the sob from your chest--is the full-color, real-life bit at the end, when the Jews Schindler saved and their children and grandchildren walk past his grave and leave stones.

In sales conference this past week we introduced to our field reps a book chronicling the 48 hours of Kristallnacht. It's an oral history--told from both Jews and Germans, hour by hour. First of its kind. At the end of the editorial presentation, one of the reps pipes up with, "You know, it's great that you guys have uncovered this unknown bit of history!" We had to spell Kristallnacht for them. By the next day, they'd forgotten the word. Which was the moment, I think, that I felt the burden of remembrance, which led to today's matinee.

It's a beautiful Saturday. Happy weekend, friends.