Browsing Tag

parenting

Guest Posts, parenting

Twenty-Three Loads of Laundry

January 13, 2024
room

A mid-afternoon text message from my son flashes on my screen.

“Are you free to talk for a second?”

He’s a sophomore at a small liberal arts college half an hour away from the Connecticut suburb where he was raised, and where his dad and I live separately but on the same street, as we have done since our divorce five years ago.

At the sight of the brief text my heart skips a beat. I have come to learn that usually, when my son reaches out it’s because he needs me, emotionally. He’s a super sensitive soul and an empath, so I worry easily he’s sad in some way, although generally I take it in stride since it seems the waxing and waning of existential blues experienced by a young adult is par for the course.

“Hey mamma, what do you do whenever you’re feeling depressed?”

There’s a slow rush to my head, hopeful by his seemingly upbeat “hey” but jarred by the word “depressed.” I know depressed. I remember suffering as a young adult walking around in a kind of grey daze from poor nights’ sleep, alternating between rapid heartbeats accompanied by cold sweats and waves of grating anxieties, obsessing about, well, most tings. But it usually passed after a week or two, and these occasional bouts diminished in my mid-twenties, after I got dogs (first), then children (later).

I swipe the screen on my phone and my fingers start their familiar tap dance across the miniscule keyboard.

“That depends how depressed,” I begin. “Let me call you this evening and we’ll talk about it, ok?”

Then I continue in rapid succession,

“Hang in there.”

“It will pass.”

“In the meantime, be good to yourself and trust that it will get better.”

But I know deep down that only if he’s lucky will it get better by itself, and that if not, it may be a much longer journey. I had watched my closest friend’s husband spiral down the path of mental illness, and it taught me not think lightly of calls for help.

“<3333,” my son answers.

I switch to the emoji keyboard and send him back three read hearts.

Before the back and forth ends, his string of short texts forms the narrative of a young man asking for help:

“Between you and me I’m in a bit of a rut right now.”

“Can you talk?”

“Can I call you around 4pm before I start my work shift?”

We touch base later that day and the conversation is just vaguely about his state of mind and more about daily stuff. We agree to meet for lunch the next day, a proposition my son rarely turns down since it means a free, non-cafeteria meal at one of the many delicious restaurants in his college town, with a side of helpful mamma-conversation.

Luckily, he is open and likes to share, if I can just pin him down. We both enjoy these moments of mother-son tête-à-têtes; one of the perks of having your child go to college close to home.

Zooming down the highway a sunny fall afternoon the next day, I call to let him know that I’m there in five minutes.

“Should I pick you up from work?” I offer, knowing he’s just ending his lunch shift at a campus restaurant.

“Nah, that’s ok,” he answers, and I hear him breathing heavy and figure he is walking.

“I’m already almost back at my place.”

I wonder if he is hurrying home to pick up any telling paraphernalia in his room (cigarette packs, bong, condoms…).

“I’m just gonna take a quick shower,” he adds.

“You can wait outside in the car, and I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

I resign myself to a longish wait; I know his sense of time isn’t mine. Parked in front of his house, I wait for a while, but then get antsy and decide to go in. The door is unlocked, and I first take a seat in the kitchen he and his roommates share, noticing the door leading to his room is slightly ajar. He’s in the shower upstairs, most likely taking his time to get rid of the cigarette smell he knows I don’t like.

Against my better judgment, I get up and slowly push open the door to his room. From the scene that reveals itself it’s clear that something’s off. This isn’t a regular college kid’s messy room. There’s garbage scattered on the floor, cigarette butts in paper cups, dirty cereal bowls piled under his low coffee table, many with soured, crusty and milky cereal remnants; partially empty cans, cups, and bottles lined up along the edge of the bottom of the couch, and dirty laundry dropped on the floor and furniture, pell-mell. The hangers that used to hold his clothes are tossed to the side haphazardly, his closet ravaged, and the dust on his coffee table has accumulated over so long it now looks more like a grey furry carpet littered with coins, lighters, strands of tobacco and empty soda cans. I take a deep breath and notice myself mutter “Oh sweetie…”

When I hear him come down the stairs, I quickly slip back to the kitchen and pretend that I haven’t seen a thing, because I don’t know how to start the conversation right then and there. I need to think about how to tread lightly, not to put him on the defensive.

“Hi mamma! How are ya?”

A bath towel draped around his waist, he tries to sound cheerful and gives me a peck on the cheek before disappearing into his room. His hair is overgrown, and he has let his scraggly facial hair sprout in all directions.

“Just gimme a sec!” he calls out from behind the door.

I hear him scramble, probably to find something, anything, that is clean enough to wear.

On the way to the restaurant, we catch up on this and that, but no mention of his state of mind or what I had witnessed in his room.

Once seated across from each other in a cozy booth with green leather seats, we order our drinks and food, and the midday sun shines through the window warming our spot like a caring and encouraging embrace. We fall silent for a minute, and when I look up, I notice his eyes tearing up.

“Do you want to talk about how you’re feeling, honey?”

He doesn’t answer and I can tell he is fighting back tears. He lets out a big breath, more like a resigned, quivery sigh, and leans forward reaching his arm across the table, his hand looking for mine. My boy is not in a good place.

I grab the big, warm, strong hand of my former heavyweight-wrestling-champion-and- football-team-son, the English-and-sociology-major-uber-empath-sensitive-musician-son, the son who prefers to get lost in books and music, much more than huddling in testosteroney powwows with fellow athletes.

His size made him a coveted athlete and joining in sports made the transitions easier from a small Jewish elementary and middle school to public high school and then college. It also gave him an immediate sense of belonging – which reduced his social unease.

Now, he had quit football and wrestling in what I saw as a brave act of being true to himself, but he had not yet started new extracurricular activities, like the music or writing he wanted to develop, things that would help build a new network of peers, of poetry, of inspiration.

To make things worse, his fraternity, where he had been the house manager and where he had lived and worked over the summer, was unexpectedly closed by campus administration after a troubled year for campus fraternities. This meant that just as the fall semester was staring, he and about twenty-five other students were scrambling for places to live, and he was placed in a senior house with four Asian foreign students who were all business majors. Great kids, but not necessarily a good fit, socially.

Add to this the fact his first significant romantic relationship had ended in a dramatic way the prior semester. While he and his girlfriend were in NYC for a weekend, his girlfriend had a panic attack and was evacuated by her dad, leaving my son alone and confused in the AirBnB apartment they had rented.

Difficult experiences had accumulated during the year, and the emotional fallout was significant.

In the restaurant, he finally begins to speak through his tears. But when he tells me that everything feels hopeless, I realize it isn’t just a mild case of the blues. Holding on tight but tenderly to his hand with both of mine, I look at him and tell him how I too, had struggled with those kids of emotions when I was his age. I recall the feeling of not being myself, watching helplessly from the outside while the shell of me would suffer quietly, a feeling he could identify with. I tell him I am happy he is asking for help, how much I love that he is open and shares with me, and that we’ll find a way through this together.

When I add that I kind of knew the lay of the land because I had peeked into his room, he quietly groans.

“Let’s face it honey,” I add, trying my best to sound positive, “I’ve seen it all!” I smile.

“Now let’s take some small steps to pick up the pieces and make you whole and happy again.”

He tries to smile and thanks me for being me and for being there with him; words that make a mamma’s heart swell with tenderness. I try not to show how helpless I feel. How in that moment, I wish I could lift his sadness and hopelessness from him and carry that heavy burden for him, stuff it into my body, at any cost.

“I know this may seem superficial,” I begin, “but taking care of a few obvious external things can be one small step toward dealing with the situation. Let’s stop in at the barber next door and just clean this mess up,” I say, motioning to his head and face. We both chuckle at the obvious double meaning of “this mess.”

He groans again and mutters “fine,” knowing that he is in my hands now. Soon he is draped in a black smock at the young, hip, Latino barber’s shop next door, and the two of them are discussing music while the buzzer runs its course. I take the opportunity to step outside and search the student health website of the college for resources. My fingers are jittery from the heightened emotions, but I feel unstoppable now; a hyper-alert lioness pushed into assertive protective mode for her wounded cub.

Before he emerges clean-shaven and already looking less weighed down, I’ve booked him an appointment with the school nurse who can refer him to the school psychologist. I have also written an email to the dean in charge of mentoring his class, sharing with her that right now is a time my son could use an on-campus supporter, asking her to reach out and follow up with him.

In the car on the way back to campus I say I want to come back to his room to help him clear the disaster zone. He doesn’t try to stop me since at this point, he has realized I will not relent, and he has no energy to resist.

In his room, I discover that he has been stuffing dirty laundry into huge garbage bags and shoved them under his bed for what must have been months. We pull so much stuff out from there that even he is amazed at what we find, and laughs. It warms my heart to see him smile. In the cleanup process, we hug and chitchat while I try my best to sound upbeat and positive.

But on the inside, I feel scared for my son, and humbled by how easy it has been to lose sight of how he really was doing, when our only way of staying in touch had been reduced to texting or Facebook messaging, since he had never been that good about returning actual phone calls, and especially not lately.

Leaving campus, my car is stuffed to the gills with humongous black, plastic trash bags filled with dirty laundry, in addition to his towering plastic hamper, bedding, and other miscellaneous items that clearly need to be washed.

We agree that I will come back the next day with his clean laundry, and with the cleaning equipment we will need to tackle the grime in his room. We talk a little about how once he’ll feel better, he’ll have to get used to his dirty laundry not being miraculously airlifted for mommy-service; that a regular, weekly run to the laundromat will be an added value for keeping up a stable sense of well-being.

Schlepping the masses of dirty laundry up to my apartment from the garage is an experience in itself. The bulky bags are so heavy that in my physical exertion – and probably because I’m finally alone and can let my emotions do their thing – I burst into tears. I feel sad, upset, and even guilty, that my boy has been hurting without me knowing. As I empty the bags on the floor in my living room, a colorful mountain forms and soon spills over and becomes more of a mountainous range. Picking through the laundry I almost gag from the emanating fetid smell of sour, old stains, spills, and dirty socks. I remind myself how lucky I am that after all my son is alive, although depressed, remembering the people I know who have lost children to mental illness or drug and alcohol abuse. He is alive and he will get better. He had still gone to class and kept his work schedule. These are good signs, I tell myself.

Twenty-three loads of laundry later, stacks of neatly folded clothes, sheets, and towels form colorful towers around my apartment. T-shirts, pants, and sweaters, underwear, socks, and athletic wear all sorted on the family couch, on his old bed, on the dining room table and kitchen bar.

Aside from his clothes, I have also pulled out from the dryer a little black dress probably left behind by a female friend or perhaps his ex-girlfriend, several cheap plastic lighters, the kind they give out for free at the convenience store (he has told me), and a few condom wrappers. I don’t flinch but am just relieved to find the traces of a normal college experience.

The next day we carry all the clean laundry from my car back to his room, but not until after we give his room a top to bottom cleaning, using the arsenal of cleaning equipment and spray bottles I have brought from home. When his room is finally transformed to an uncluttered space where we can find a clear spot to sit and even see the coffee table surface, sans fur, a mild fresh scent of cleaning products lingers in the air, and it feels as though the darkest part of a cloud has lifted.

We light a scented candle and sit down next to each other on the black leather hand-me-down loveseat, and as I lean back and sigh, my back aching from all the hard work, he wraps his arm around my shoulder, kisses the side of my head. A string of red chili pepper lights shimmers from the window with a warm glow, and a few family photos on the ledge of his bookshelf show familiar faces, smiling down at us. He repeats how nice it looks and seems genuinely relieved to at least get out from under the material weight of the signs from his difficult period.

Finally, we pop the lids off the small round clear plastic containers of chocolate chip cookie dough we picked up from a café on campus. Our plan was to have them as rewards once our herculean efforts were completed, and now we enjoy our well-deserved sweet sticky treats, licking our fingers clean, and gaze around a cozy room.

*

In the days and weeks that follow, we stay in touch more frequently than usual, and I sometimes have to nudge him to remember his appointments and ask him about how they have been. I try to suggest that taking walks, joining a yoga group, or making efforts to eat a healthier diet might be things that would help him feel better and stay better, but in the end, I think he’ll do things the way it works for him. I doubt eating more veggies and chanting “OM” are among them.

Slowly but surely, he begins to talk about “normal” things again, like volunteering for inner-city kids as a music teacher or social events that he looks forward to.

Eventually it becomes clear that he has emerged from the tunnel and that he is on a brighter path and in better spirits. He begins to enjoy his classes, his professors, and his work. He is back to his old self; I can hear it in the energy of his voice, and I am immensely relieved.

He’s a junior now, and it’s almost a year and many conversations later when another text from him lights up the home screen on my phone. It’s been maybe a week, or perhaps two, of little to no contact:

“Hey, can I call you a little later today?”

“Sure. U ok?”

“Yeah I’m good, just had something I wanted to consult with you about.”

I feel a fleeting rush of relief as my heart swells the kind of unconditional and primordial love mothers have for their kids, and I text back:

“Sure honey. Let’s talk tonight, ok? Miss you and love you! <3”

Nina B. Lichtenstein is a native of Oslo, Norway who lives in Maine. She holds an MFA from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program (2020) and a PhD in French from UCONN (2007). Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Lilith, Full Grown People, Tablet Magazine, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and Brevity, among other places, as well as in two anthologies, INK by Hippocampus Books (Spring 2022) and STAINED: an anthology of writing about menstruation, (Querencia Press, 2023).

***

Our friends at Circe have launched an anti-advice column, and it is fire!

Circe

Click above to get details on how to ask Gina and Emily for advice and let us know what you think!

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, motherhood

On the Couch

October 19, 2023
couch

I was on the couch, enjoying a good book for once. It was summer. The pandemic was sort of over, and I wasn’t working without childcare, at least, as I’d been the last two years, and so sanity was hovering closer to the line of normal than usual, if you didn’t read the news.

We were in a heat wave. I basked in AC splendor, on the couch, and for most of the time I could forget about the impending electric bill—the cost of electric had gone up drastically this year and we hadn’t yet used our AC for a billing cycle, and who knew what to expect? Or the rats that had stationed themselves under our porch, probably due to the city’s construction. But also (and I don’t admit this to too many people) maybe due to our habit last winter of throwing Fuzzy’s bunny poops out the back door, one by one, when he’d mark his territory on the door mat?

I was enjoying a good book for once, on the couch. Ralph was snoring beside me, an eighty-pound heating pad, who occasionally transformed into a barking, nipping hot mess when anyone entered our home—including everyone he knew and didn’t know—eliciting extended family members to mutter, “I think he’s gotten worse.” George, a former children’s therapy dog, was elegantly splayed on her dog bed beside the gas fireplace, looking timeless, I told myself, even though, at thirteen, her clock was ticking.

I could never live without George. I could probably live without Ralph.

I was enjoying that great book, anyway, for some time, with my animal friends, in my lovely home that I was considering putting on the market, even though we’d have nowhere to go—because: rats. (I love this home, actually; I’ll never leave.

Unless I have to. Or want to.)

Such a good book, but after two hours passed, and Leo had been home from his run for one hour, the calm became too eerie, so I told Leo he could finally go upstairs and shower. He’d been drenched in sweat at first but it was now dried, and he was standing in the kitchen looking at videos on TikTok, I assumed, and smelling like onion salad, for sure. Now that he was shirtless, I wondered where he’d placed the shirt.

“It’s okay to wake them,” I said, releasing him of his purgatory, which would close the door to my splendor.

“Are you sure?”

“They’ll never sleep tonight if you don’t.” I felt low-blood-sugar suddenly. I kept my eyes on my book as he whiffed by.

Behind two glass doors before me the rabbit was nibbling on a stick of hay in his room—I mean the playroom that he’d overpowered—as though it were a cigar.

Leo descended the staircase minutes later without having showered. He had two hot muffins in tow: one, five years old and sweaty-cheeked with curly hair flinging itself free of a braid; she was bare-foot and leaning on the banister. The other, red and puffy, two years old, was in his arms.

“We,” the five-year-old said, proudly, “were in the attic! We were,” but her face changed as she watched my face, which must have been moving on its own without my telling it to, and so did her tone, “having an…adventure?”

In our attic—which is separated from the five-year-old by another room and a door that is suctioned shut by a long shard of insulation foam—is glassy-breaky-stuff, a giant air conditioner with lots of tubes that looks like the inspiration for the next Stranger Things villain, and worst of all two windows that curiously peer toward the yard and the road, and whose sufficiency I’ve still never tested. Anxiety surged, as it’s wont to do.

During my moment of rest, my children could have fallen out the windows.

My sanity equals my dead children.

I wasn’t even resting that much.

The book dropped. I examined my children. I interrogated the one who talked well: “How are you feeling? Did you touch the AC? Did you touch the windows? Are you okay? Are you too hot? Were you ever afraid you couldn’t get out?” I said some of these questions out loud until I forced myself to let the others leak out more gradually.

Leo said, “They were just calmly sitting there reading.”

“Wow,” I said.

“They had also gotten out our old wedding vases” (enter: glassy-breaky-stuff).

“It’s okay to go up there,” I said to my five-year-old, “with a grownup. There are lots of sharp things up there. Do you have any splinters?”

It is my job to worry—I think—to protect them from danger.

“I don’t think so?” said my five-year-old, whose sense of adventure was, perhaps, being overshadowed by my sense of impending doom.

It is my job to be free and joyful—I think—to keep them alive.

“Let’s go up there again sometime, all together,” I said, smiling. “I’m glad you had fun. You’re not in trouble. We’ll do it safely next time.”

Her expression suggested suspicion.

The littler one said, “I’m poopin’, Mama.”

I knew she was done pooping, and that she just had not yet mastered the use of past-tense, but I was tired, so I said, “Are you still poopin’?”

“Da,” she said, which meant yes. Which just meant she didn’t want me to change her. Which was fine with me.

That bought some more time on the couch. Leo went up to shower and the two girls and I sat on the couch and read the books they had found up there. I sat in the middle; their hot bodies warming me, so odious and sweet. A clean diaper and packet of wipes was nearby on the coffee table, a warning that this moment would never last, which made it all the purer. Their curly hair touching my chin.

George hadn’t moved from her slumber; she had entered a new stage of her life called don’t-give-a-fuck, of which I was jealous, even if it meant that attitude grew stronger, it seemed, the closer you got to dying. Maybe that was a consolation prize for it all being over some day—or a preview of the freedom yet to be.

I gave so many fucks.

I read a book about a hippo becoming friends with an ancient tortoise, which is totally against all reptilian instincts, and I nearly cried. My children were still close, and their sweat reminded me of the summer we inhabited, and the shower running upstairs hoped for Leo’s own relief, and the milkweed blooming outside kept the butterflies close, and the rabbit splayed out on his side in his room, his soft belly sighing, meant he was happy, so I was happy, and my children’s small hairs were sticking up from the cool of the AC on their backs and arms, and the sun streaming through the window made my littlest interrupt the reading multiple times to say, “I see sun, Mama,” and as I imagined their soft bodies pushed through the window glass of the attic, and landing with a thud, on the hard ground, forever, I had to imagine holding them tightly to me—I couldn’t squeeze them for real, as the older one, in becoming herself, was known to elbow me away.

Marni Berger holds an MFA in writing from Columbia University and a BA in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic. Marni’s short story “Hurricane” appeared in The Carolina Quarterly 2020 summer issue and her short story “Edge of the Road with Lydia Jones” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize (Matador Review). Her short story “Waterside” appeared in Issue 96 of Glimmer Train.

Marni’s work has also appeared at Motherwell, Barnstorm, The Manifest-Station, The Common, The Days of Yore, The Millions, Lotus-Eater, COG Magazine, The Critical Flame, Drunk Monkeys, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Fringe Magazine. She has been a finalist or received honorable mention in nine Glimmer Train contests and one New Millennium Writings contest. Marni’s novel-in-progress, Love Will Make You Invincible, is a dark comedy about a mother and her precocious tween, who, refusing to believe his long-lost father has committed suicide, instead becomes convinced that his father is a citizen of a secret underwater village. Marni lives in Portland, Maine.

She has taught writing at Columbia University and Manhattanville College. She currently teaches writing at University of Southern Maine.

***

Wondering what to read next? 

We are huge fans of messy stories. Uncomfortable stories. Stories of imperfection.

Life isn’t easy and in this gem of a book, Amy Ferris takes us on a tender and fierce journey with this collection of stories that gives us real answers to tough questions. This is a fantastic follow-up to Ferris’ Marrying George Clooney: Confessions of a Midlife Crisis and we are all in!

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, courage, Fiction

The Arboretum

May 13, 2022
kids

If you saw it, you’d agree: It’s the gem of our town. Not as big as the one in Vellum Heights, but clean, well-designed, with paved walking paths, a pond full of vibrant, speckled koi, and a climbing apparatus built just for the kids. Its half-mile circumference holds five hundred trees – towering oaks and regal sycamores, luscious magnolias that flower in spring, beeches with smooth grey elephant skin, papery birches and prickly ash.

Some of us are old enough to remember those trees – not those trees of course, but ones like them, that grew in our yards and in the neighborhood park, a mute green watercolor backdrop to our lives. We remember the smells of fresh-cut grass, and rain, and mud, and the breeze on our face. Indescribable now, like the sky when it was blue.

Now we all wear the mask. For the sake of our kids, we pretend not to hate it as much as we do, but it makes no difference; our kids refuse to put it on. From the moment they exit their sleeping pods, after every meal and every bath, we are reduced to chasing them around the house like ogres out of some macabre fairy tale. We hold them down as they kick and scream, force the nozzle over their nose and mouth, tighten the straps at their temples and jaw. It’s not pretty. It’s not what we imagined for them. They claw at their heads and call us terrible names. They say they can’t breathe, which of course isn’t true.

We pine for what the big cities have: renovated, airtight, oxygenated schools and offices and condos, amenities we can’t afford. The arboretum, though – we lobbied for a year, went door to door, convinced the mayor to sign on. We spoke at town hall meetings to unanimous applause, though some high schoolers gave us a run for our money. Julia Meyers, sixteen at the time, stormed up to the podium, flanked by four of her friends. “People are dying and you want to build a park?” As if we’d asked those people to come to our town, with their makeshift tents and sprawling filth. Yes, we knew their children had died. Of course it was sad. And we’d let them stay. Occasionally we saw them roaming our streets, dirty rags tied around their noses and mouths. Some rattled cans, and we gave them change.

We told the youth, some problems are too big to fix.

From afar, the arboretum’s domed-glass roof resembles a snow-globe embedded in the ground, an alluring green planet in the center of our town. The earth’s bounty shrunk to a fraction of its size. We love it. Without it, we’d lose our minds.

Today we have come for the Live Butterflies, and the line extends around the block. Our kids fidget, shift from foot to foot, bounce on their toes as we wait to get in. Connor Watson pokes his little sister in the back, tugs the end of her sash, undoing the bow. “Stop it!” she wails, her hands grasping at the crimped, dangling ribbons of her dress. Her eyes narrow through the porthole lenses of her mask. She kicks him hard in the shin. He slaps her arm. “Cut it out,” their father says, “or we’re going straight home.” In our masks, we all look like giant anthropods with oversized black heads and elongated snouts. Bug-eyed creatures, an alien race. The line inches forward, in shuffling steps. We move as a herd, bovine with exhaustion, the kids like puppies straining their leashes.

From behind the entrance window, the security guard – Jeremy Knowles, the mayor’s son, slumped, unshaven, bored out of his mind, as if his mask-free job were not coveted by all – waves us through the first checkpoint. We pass into a wide vestibule, a large steel box with hydraulic doors. The floor vibrates through the soles of our shoes as the air is sucked out, hermetically sealing us in. Then through a smaller set of glass doors, into the crystal-cool chamber of the dome.

It’s like stepping into the great outdoors, a green so lush it hums in our teeth. The kids are now beside themselves. We fumble with the child-kidssafety locks on their masks, an impossible array of buckles and clasps. So close to freedom, they wriggle and whine. We try not to curse. “Would you just hold still?”

Their masks come off. We let them run – bare-faced and wild, ferocious with glee, torpedoing towards the center of the dome where the jungle gym looms like a skeleton god. Beams and bars and tunnels and slides, they lose themselves in its vertiginous maze. They move in a charged and zealous blur, and something inside us moves with them.

The relief, as we loosen the straps of our mask, breaking suction, peeling the rubber from our face. Our pores exhale, our sweat evaporates. We gulp the cool air. It’s a thirst, and we drink. The humid, heavenly scent of leaves and loamy earth and linden blooms. Sawdust and pine and soft damp moss. Each breath we take returns us to ourselves.

Here we are: sallow and prematurely grey, defying extinction for better or worse. We sit on the benches and watch our kids play. At least our kids still know how to play. They are making do, like the bonsai in its pot – stunted, pruned, inhabiting tiny truncated lives. We water them, we clip their leaves. We don’t tell them how many of us there once were.

Their screams and laughter echo through the dome. More families stream in – our neighbors, our friends – our din pulsating like the chambers of a heart. There are strollers everywhere. Our masks are scattered like empty chrysalides. Lina Hernandez, a mother of two, is squinting worriedly into the crowd.

The crowd, as if by magnetic force, is moving, rippling, parting to make way for a scarecrow of a man who is lurching down the path.

He reeks of sour, festering rot. His face is raw and stippled with a rash. His eyes are bloodshot, his hair a greasy pelt. He could be thirty or sixty-five. He weaves tipsily among the trees, approaching the teeming mob of our kids. They don’t see him, not until they hear our shouts.

“Izzy!”

“Jackson!”

“Get over here, Taij!”

They scatter in confusion, into our arms. Because we are frightened, so are they. We pull them close and give the man a wide berth. He lies down on a bench and closes his eyes. Our children stare, at the labored rise and fall of his thin chest, the dirty sweat on his brow. Two park staff approach – Ravi Price and Jeff Sanchez, young men, acned, visibly sheepish. “Sir?” The stranger opens one eye and mumbles, annoyed, like they’ve come to him in his private backyard, woken him up from his afternoon nap. When they try to help him up, he turns over on his side, his back to us, and wraps his arms around himself. Like Liza, our beloved childhood dog, when she crawled under a porch and wouldn’t come out. Refusing food, growling at whoever came near. We didn’t understand that she’d gone there to die.

Two security guards appear, masked, wearing protective gloves. We flinch as they pull the man to his feet. He splutters in protest, then begins to cough, a croupy bark that wracks his frame. They hold him up by the armpits as he spasms, retches, his vomit splashing at their feet. We hold our kids tighter, try to cover their eyes. Spellbound, they push our hands away. Pink spittle dangles like a worm from his mouth. His head lolls, feet dragging as they take him away.

Already, the kids are wriggling out of our grip. Jeff and Ravi start to clean up the mess, and the kids gather around to watch the spectacle. “Stand back,” we warn. They are like dogs, drawn to the most revolting things. We are glad when the job is finally done, our eyes watering from the sting of disinfectant in the air. Gladder still when Elsie Cho’s four-year-old daughter points down the path and shouts, “the butterflies are here!”

Another staffer – Julia Meyers, all grown up now, having abandoned her needling adolescent righteousness – has appeared with a small mesh cage full of them. They are Holly Blues, lab-hatched upstate. The kids surge around her like a bubbling tide. She releases the swarm, an azure whirlwind. The children shriek. The butterflies rise, a cloud of glitter dispersing in the air, the kids leaping, spinning, chasing after them.

At least we have managed to give them this. Pig-tailed Jenny Ames beatific on her father’s shoulders, the butterflies grazing her outstretched fingertips. Little Elroy Carter toddling about, flapping his arms and squealing with joy.

Within an hour, the butterflies carpet the ground like fallen leaves, having lived their entire lifespan before our eyes. The kids pick them up, study them in dismay – the paper-thin wings and half-crushed legs, the powdery dust coming off on their hands. “Next week,” we say, ushering them back to the benches, where our masks – and the inevitable tantrums – await.  “There’ll be more next week.” It is closing time. When we leave, wings stick to the bottom of our shoes.

This essay originally appeared in Call Me [Brackets].

Talia Weisz lives in Brooklyn, NY and is the author of two chapbooks: Sisters in Another Life (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and When Flying Over Water (Plan B Press, 2009). Her short fiction appears in Entropy and Call Me [Brackets]. 

***

Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

 

Guest Posts, parenting

Playing by the Rules

January 30, 2022
game

Old Maid

Players: One single mom
One daughter, ages 3-8, prone to illness

Directions: Shuffle and deal. Players take turns drawing cards from each other. If you draw a card that matches one in your hand, place the matches face up. If not, add the card to your hand.

Play continues until all pairs have been matched. The player left holding the old maid card loses the game and becomes the “old maid” unless, alarmed by the message this sends, you abruptly alter the rules. Unless you impulsively tell your daughter, “The player left holding the old maid wins! She gets to hang out with this fabulous independent woman who has the pioneering courage to violate tradition and forge her own path!”

Stick to this improvised rule until, at eight, your daughter hoards the old maid card at a sleepover, relishing the moment that she’ll throw it down and win the game. The next morning when you pick her up she will confront you, tone fraught with betrayal and disillusionment and humiliation. She wanted to win, but because of you, she lost miserably.

You used to love games, even the dumb ones of your childhood like Mystery Date. The object of that one was to win one of the cute dates inside the secret door—the guy dressed for a formal dance, a bowling alley, or the beach—and avoid the dud. He looked just like the other dates, except, you thought, cuter, a little scruffier, with messy hair and a five o’clock shadow.

But the ulterior motives of Old Maid and Mystery Date were pretty much the same: to teach players to avoid undesireable people, guys who don’t wash, women who don’t marry. Never mind the messages of other thankfully now-vintage games, like say, Mother’s Helper, described by the copy on the box as “A Real Fun Game that Takes you Upstairs. . . Downstairs. . . All Through the House!”

And so what you once thought of as easy forms of entertainment during endless winter weekends and long days when your daughter is home from school sick all seem like minefields, full of explosive subtexts you must head off about women and girls, about roles and choices, about the very nature of competition itself.

 Candyland

Players: One desperate mom seeking diversion for her

4-year-old daughter home sick from daycare again

Directions:  Draw a card and move your piece to the space matching the color on the card. Continue in this manner along the game’s colorful winding paths, past the peppermint forest and lollipop woods and peanut brittle house, past the blond twins and gumdrop-shaped monsters, until you reach the candy castle.

Experience relief that you can offer this simple, colorful world to your daughter who is prone to asthma attacks that land her in emergency rooms, to fevers that flare suddenly in crowds, to mysterious swellings of knees and lips, to throbbing headaches and upset stomachs. This game might encourage the rotting of her teeth but otherwise carries no negative implications, as far as you can see.

Should this seemingly pleasant innocuous game get tedious—and it will, in no time—try reverse cheating, stacking the deck so that every card your daughter draws will be purple. She’s too young to be suspicious of easy wins, and this method will speed her right along to victory. Wonder: are you doing her any favors? But your pride takes over. Look how fully you’ve embraced motherhood and self-sacrifice! Look at how little you care about winning!

Monopoly Junior

Players: One daughter, ages 5-8, becoming a competitive gymnast and making fewer trips to the ER

One mom

  • who suddenly finds herself having childhood flashbacks, reliving those moments when she sat poised to pounce and crow and gloat as soon as her big brother landed on Park Place. Reliving the moment that her brother, whose jokes about BO Railroad had lost their edge, flicked his Scottie dog game piece across the room and turned on the TV, saying, “I’m not playing with you anymore. You’re too competitive,” and then her cousins all deserted too, enragingly unconcerned that she’d been deprived of her moment of glory. Leaving her feeling caught out, a girl who’d harbored a fierce desire not to soothe other’s feelings but to smash their egos
  • who as a child eventually learned to space out during games like Monopoly, her detachment more acceptable to her peers than her previous bloodthirsty focus on amassing cash and celebrating others’ destitution
  • whose altered approach, while perhaps suggesting a more harmonious worldview, meant that she’d never win another Monopoly game
  • who when young was pleased to take second place in a beauty contest, winning $10 and an imaginary sash and bouquet
  • who was happy to take a trip on Reading Railroad, since she loved to read and pictured herself on a train with a pile of books
  • who joined her friends in cooing over the cute game pieces, the top hat, the shoe, the thimble, the dog
  • who learned to be relieved at cooperative games, like the Ouijia board, which told her when she was thirteen that she would grow up to be a dill pickle
  • who now is happy that Title 9 has fully kicked in. That girls aren’t pressured to be ashamed of their competitive instincts anymore. That girls get to enjoy winning too.

Directions: Get past the sense of dread that overcomes you when Monopoly Junior appears in your mailbox on your daughter’s fifth birthday, the memories of your complicated relationship with competition. Tell yourself that you should instead be relieved to be yanked from a vibrant candy landscape into the seemingly more interesting cutthroat world of shady real estate deals and rent gouging. Be shocked to discover that it’s just as boring. Invent new rules to hurry it along.

Feel burdened by an enormous weight of responsibility: to model the balance between striving for achievement but not basing your whole sense of worth on it. To encourage her to push herself but never feel that you approval is out of her reach.

But when she wins at Monopoly Junior, wonder: are you cheering for her or just cheering that the game is over?

The Game of Life

Players: A Mom, increasingly perturbed at the sneaky cultural conditioning of games

A Daughter, 10, who sleeps a lot but is mostly healthy

Followed by

A Daughter, 10

A Babysitter

The babysitter’s children, 11, 9, and 5

Directions: Travel the Path of LIFE making decisions, building a family, earning money, buying homes, and collecting LIFE tiles. Win by accumulating the most wealth by the end of the game.

First, spin the spinner and move your car forward in the direction of the arrows. If you choose the computer version of this game, it works exactly the same way, except that it won’t move forward until you enter a heterosexual union. If you object, purchase the board game version so that you can exercise choice and acknowledge gender fluidity, the continuum of sexuality, and the range of possibilities regarding social conformity and parenthood.

With the board game, you can resist the official rules and decide whether to be a pink peg or a blue peg or no peg at all should you not be in the mood to adhere to cultural constructions of gender, or should you be feeling that day like a square peg unlikely to fit into a round hole. Decide whether to choose a life partner, and if so, one of the same sex, or one of the opposite? Decide whether to have children, with or without a partner.

But be forewarned that at her babysitter’s house, your daughter, after choosing a pink peg for herself, might land on the marriage square and reach for another pink peg, musing, “I think I’ll be a lesbian.”

And that her babysitter might rear back as if a bullet had just zinged past her head, throwing out her hands as if to cover the ears of her own children, and bellow, “No!”

And that later you will have to come to terms with the fact that not only do the babysitter’s values not remotely align with yours, but you also find rearing up around that babysitter all of those competitive instincts you thought you’d conquered. You’re convinced that she sees parenting as a contest she’s determined to win, requiring everyone else to lose.

Wonder how to respond when this woman makes disparaging remarks about your daughter’s handwriting and spelling; when she corrects (incorrectly) your daughter’s pronunciation of a novel character’s name; when she brags that her kids walked much earlier than your daughter, who had developmental delays but is now a gymnast; or when she criticizes your daughter’s future marriage prospects after your daughter announces that Disney princesses are too dependent on men. You know that heteronormativity is par for the course in your conservative small town. Still, discover that the babysitter’s reaction to your daughter’s choices during the Game of Life adds another layer to your concerns about the childcare arrangement.

Clue

Players:

A mom who can’t play this game without remembering the time when she was nine that Natasha Landers insisted that she was cheating by making out the reflections of Natasha’s cards in her glasses

A ten-year-old daughter, doing pretty well, if a bit confused by her babysitter’s criticisms

followed by

That same ten-year-old daughter, still mostly healthy

That same babysitter

Those same babysitter’s children

Directions: Mr. Boddy is found dead inside of his mansion. The object of the game is to use deductive strategies to determine the killer, the murder weapons, and the room in which the crime occurred.

Expect that your daughter will be entranced by the colorful, cozy rooms and the adorable little weapons—the coil of rope, the cast iron lead pipe. Allow her to remain oblivious to the inherent sexism that the female game characters, Miss Scarlet, Mrs. White, and Mrs. Peacock,  are all titled according to their marital status while the male characters, Colonel Mustard and Professor Plum their professions. It’s best that you not point this out to your daughter, who might bring it up and be subjected to more of the babysitter’s ridicule.

Then make the vast mistake of teaching your daughter how to use the process of elimination to trounce her opponents. Be surprised that as a result, the babysitter’s family will accuse her of cheating. To win, it seems, is regarded as antisocial, though not so much when the babysitter’s children win.

Find yourself troubled by ambiguous messages about female achievement in opposition to the actual rules of the game, the bizarre idea that there is something not nice about logical thinking, that, in order to avoid disapproving opponents, players should confine themselves to random guessing.

Mancala

Players: A daughter, 10,

  • who learned to play Mancala at a museum, where a volunteer challenged her to a game, then, kindly, the mom thinks, allowed her to win ten times in a row.
  • Who then proceeded to beat not just her mom, but her mom’s friend with a genius IQ and her rocket scientist husband

and a mom

  • who gets beat every single time and feels secretly proud of her daughter every single time
  • who is totally okay with losing this one, unlike when she was young and couldn’t ever seem to win games with her cousins, who were sadistically pleased to disqualify her. Like during Scattergories, when the category was “Things that are cold” and the answers all had to start with the letter S, and the cousins jotted down sherbet, Siberia, snow, spritzers, salad, Saturn, then ruled out the future mom’s answers, like Socks in the freezer and then banned her answers again over what they saw as her misinterpretation of Category C, “Things to trim a tree” because they’d filled in words like candy canes, creches, and ceramic angels, while hers made her sound like the family psychopath, someone who’d once again failed the good girl test, a purple peg in the Game of Life, without any place where she fit, and she was convinced that they were just punishing her for her overzealous childhood competitive streak. Her own answers had nothing to do with holiday decorating: cutting tools, chainsaws, the cuticles of Edward’s scissorhands.

followed by

A Daughter, 10

The babysitter’s children, 11, 9, and 5

Directions: Players take turns removing stones from pits along the edges of a wooden board and depositing one stone at a time into neighboring pits, each time adding a stone to a larger pit, or bank, on the end of the board. The object is to collect the most.

“Why are you letting her win?” the babysitter will scold her children. “You’re the smart ones!”

“I’m not smart?” your daughter will ask you that night.

Terminate the babysitting arrangement. Thereafter, keep tabs on every mediocre performance and instance of unoriginal thought on the part of the babysitter’s children.

Apples to Apples

Players: A single mom

  • who basks in compliments about her daughter’s sharp wit or fast tumbling speed, but who runs the other way rather than cross paths with braggy moms in the grocery store
  • who knows that her aversion to boasting parents isn’t just about them, but about the person she becomes around them, reaching back to an insecure younger self, struggling, sometimes unsuccessfully, to resist the pressure to match their boasting
  • who tries just replying to their bragging, “That’s great!” or instead relates anecdotes that emphasize her delight in her daughter as a whole person, not just as a list of activities and accomplishments, or, alternately, asks questions designed to elicit the same sorts of stories about their children, though in response other parents eye her suspiciously, like she’s employing some sneaky technique for finding fault with them
  • who cringes at the fact that the high school honor roll is published in the local newspaper, and upon spotting her daughter’s name, feels less proud than relieved, then tense, knowing full well that her daughter’s increasingly frequent illnesses might knock her out of the running next time
  • who knows it’s unhealthy to see your child as an extension of yourself, your child’s wins as yours, even when she’s beating you, yet lives with a sense of vague dread, wondering how she’ll weather it when, not if, her daughter fails. When, not if, she loses. Because, after all, failure and loss are inevitable. Necessary even.

A daughter, 11-16

  • who has never shown much interest in going the extra mile for an A or seeking promotions to higher gymnastics levels
  • who used to be healthy more than she was sick, but then at fifteen flips that ratio, developing debilitating headaches and severe fatigue
  • who can’t get out of bed some mornings, who suffers from nausea and throws up constantly
  • who is at first sick for a week at a time, then two, then a month, then, in the spring of her junior year, misses five months. Gives up altogether during her senior year. Lies in bed.

and the mom

  • listening to other parents sort their children neatly into categories—valedictorian, prom royalty, champion athlete—fights to get homebound tutors just to keep her daughter from dropping out of school
  • worries her way through those quiet days when her child sleeps in her room, doesn’t pass Go, doesn’t collect $200, doesn’t even go upstairs, downstairs, all through the house
  • drops, or is kicked, out of the world of parental one-up-manship as doctors keep concluding, frowning and staring at their charts, avoiding eye contact, that the daughter’s problems are emotional. Psychosomatic. Stress. What doctors always say when they can’t make a diagnosis
  • is sent into a tailspin, wondering why the daughter would be so stressed that she can’t function
  • lives with a nagging belief that her daughter’s illness must be her fault. That she transformed from unacceptably competitive girl to harmfully competitive mom, that she was only fooling herself when she thought that she was taming and channeling that drive. Why else had she allowed the babysitter’s comments to throw her into such turmoil? Why else had she harbored so many barely-suppressed savage impulses toward this woman? How much had her reactions inadvertently pressured her daughter, allowing twinges of disappointment to show, deep fears of failure to surface?
  • is stricken with guilt that she caused this as her daughter squints at her through pained eyes
  • is convinced that she’d managed to head off the troubling messages of so many games only to send her child the worst one: that winning mattered too much
  • wonders why the braggy moms have managed not to damage their functional children, exceptional children, robustly healthy and energetic children who calmly get out of bed each morning and rake in awards and accolades while she just keeps thinking about more S things that are cold, like the Sorrow of believing that somehow, by enjoying winning, you have ultimately lost.

And then the daughter

  • finishes high school through homebound instruction, and when she walks across the stage, her mom will think about all of the kids not wearing honor cords, not raking in multiple scholarships, who maybe aren’t going to college at all, kids for whom this graduation, despite family crises, illnesses or disabilities, or the need to work to survive,  is a bigger achievement than anyone in the audience can ever imagine
  • eventually also will finish college, and over time her symptoms will be traced one by one to food allergies and other sources, all of them physiological, none of them, after all, related to her mom’s shameful lifelong competitive impulses, her deeply internalized belief that being competitive can hurt people, can cause lasting harm, but will always know that illness may not be a game you ever really win. Even if symptoms dissipate, recovery may not be quick. And then at any moment, despite all efforts at control, they may flare up again.

Directions: Apples to Apples is a game of comparisons. Its title suggests that it’s about comparing things that can be reasonably compared, unlike different children, which is like comparing apples to oranges. In the game, power rotates, each player serving as the judge and making capricious decisions, blatantly favoring their children or best friends, faking out opponents, or leveraging knowledge of others’ psychology.

If, for instance, you’re the judge and the word is boring, and to illustrate it, everyone else throws out cards that say The Shopping Channel, Shakespeare, and Sleepy Cats, your daughter knows it’s an easy point if she plays the Candyland card. Or say the word is sickening and your daughter is the judge: you know that she will choose, over Getting a Shot, Teenagers, and Gorillas, the card that says A Princess.

So often you have no perfect answer in your hand and you just have to select from limited options. You might get Intelligence but have no Honor Roll, National Merit Scholar, or Child Prodigy cards in your hand, but no cards, either, for Quick Comebacks to Any Insult, Ability to Assemble a Bookshelf in No Time, or Skill in Writing a Parody in Response to a School Acrostic Assignment.

For Courage, there is not, but should be, Girl Who Just Keeps Going despite Impossible Odds. For Love, or Pride, or Joy, no cards for the things you’re left with when life won’t let you play by anyone else’s rules. Mom who Learns to be Thrilled Whether Daughter Becomes a Doctor or a Dill Pickle. No cards for the things that are, after all, perfect, despite, or maybe because, of the fact that they’re so improbably miniature, so exquisitely tiny: cast iron top hats, thimbles, candlesticks, wrenches. Or because of the simple pleasure of their smooth, cool feel in your hands, like stones gently lining up in their little slots.

Nancy McCabe’s creative nonfiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, Newsweek, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, Los Angeles Review of Books, and others. She’s the recipient of the Pushcart Prize and eight recognitions in the notable sections of Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She’s the author of six books, most recently Can This Marriage Be Saved? A Memoir (Missouri 2020). 

*********

We are looking for wordpress editors — Find out more here.

*********

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

Family, Guest Posts, memories

Future Past

December 18, 2021
portland maine lighthouse

by Casey Walsh

I’ve been craving just one good beach day all summer, nothing to do but lie in the sun and gaze at the peaceful horizon. There’s something hopeful about looking out at the sea, as though you can see the past and the future, all there in the shimmering expanse of blue. Beyond the children on the sand and in the shallow water, past the more capable swimmers and surfers and the small vessels, ocean kayaks and canoes and catamarans, farther even than the cargo and cruise ships miles out, there is, at some point, nothing but sea and sky, no hint of a destination. No end in sight.

I’ve finally had the day I dreamed of—two of them in fact—at Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, MA. My husband, Kevin, and I spent a couple of days there and two more in Newburyport, just what we’ve needed as fall closes in.  Now we settle in for a meandering drive home, including a planned detour north along the coast.

Leaving Newburyport’s historic downtown, I assume my role as navigator to Kevin’s as driver. When we first began this alliance, my task typically involved paper maps. Now, though, it’s a dance of devices. As we drive over the Merrimack River on Route 1, I plug the address into the dashboard GPS, and while it calculates, I alternate between checking the Maps app and the radar on my iPhone. Glancing up to admire the boats in the inland harbor, I plan our route and hope the weather will hold while we explore Portsmouth, NH.

For the past few days, I’ve been focused on local treks, how to get from our hotel into town or from one hotel to the next. But as we turn off onto 1a—the scenic road along the coast—I take a broader look at our surroundings. It surprises me we’re so close to Hampton Beach, the crowded honky-tonk seaside scene my first husband and I had thought was fun back in the dark ages, before kids, when we still believed we’d be together forever. It won’t take Kevin and me long to reach Portsmouth. We’ll get a feel for the city, browse the shops, and grab a bite to eat before heading home to Albany.

Scrolling up on my phone as we drive, I see the places where my high school friends spent yearly summer vacations with their families: Kittery, York, Ogunquit, Wells, Old Orchard Beach, places I only dreamed of. I scroll still more, farther up than I remember, and there it is: South Portland.

Suddenly, it’s fall 1997 again, and I’m driving east across Massachusetts, then up into New Hampshire with my oldest son, Eric. We reached the outskirts of Portsmouth, then ventured on into Maine, past exits for beach towns, and finally arrived in South Portland. I was instantly enchanted by this small city, with its cobblestone streets and cyclists and parks, as we drove along the mouth of the Fore River. I pictured Eric here in the fall, riding his bike to a job in town, making a little cash to keep him afloat.

Eric and I drove out of downtown and out toward the water, where the Spring Point Ledge Lighthouse marks a dangerous obstruction on the west side of the main shipping channel into Portland Harbor. Like most lighthouses, its distinctive beam patterns, varied sequences of light and dark, not only warn sailors of hazards but help them find their position as well.

Beautiful as it is, the lighthouse was not our destination. We were here to see the campus of South Portland Technical College, where the lighthouse is located on a breakwater at the tip.

Earlier in the year, I’d ventured into Eric’s high school guidance office asking for information about colleges for him. While the counselors offered personalized support to top-tier students, they paid little attention to kids like my son—those who had caused more headaches than pride for faculty in recent semesters. Screw ups…I believe that was the technical term. I was fairly certain the only way we’d figure out the right direction was for me to show up in person, put my best intelligent, efficient foot forward, and ask all the right questions. Essentially, I would stand in for Eric: patiently navigate the information, lay out his options, and apply just the right spin to help him see all the world could offer outside of Cambridge, our small upstate New York village.

Predictably, the counselors were busy, busy, busy, but they could steer me to a computer with a program that allowed a filtered search. Carefully, as though his life depended on it, I entered my criteria, channeling Eric as best I could: Industrial Drafting and Design. Dorms. Intercollegiate soccer program. Bingo. South Portland Technical College it is, I thought, within driving distance yet far enough to allow him to see what’s out there.

I gathered materials and made my pitch. Eric was surprisingly enthusiastic, devouring the catalogs, and soon we were planning a visit. I remember the tour, Eric realizing he’d had such good preparation at Cambridge, having already taken many courses in high school not available to some of the other students on the tour. And the coach was bursting with enthusiasm for what Eric would add to the team. All spring phone calls and letters arrived from the college, encouraging Eric to keep up his grades and updating him on who had been recruited, what promise lay ahead.

“By the time I graduate, I will have made so many new friends, snowboarded on the toughest mountains, and played college soccer,” he’d said with his trademark grin, slipping into the future past tense that swelled with optimism.

“Ah, but first you have to do well on that chemistry exam,” I’d teased.

From Eric, in characteristic form: “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

After years of guiding him through life closer to home, it seemed he, too, was ready to broaden his view to a world that just might include South Portland.

None of this would ever be. In the end, Eric settled on a local community college rather than leave his on-again off-again girlfriend, who had somehow completely drowned his ability to imagine a future on his own. That semester was a bust; partying and killing time killed all of his focus and enthusiasm for life. Afterward, he floundered for a while, searching for a path until he chose the Navy. He scored so well on the ASVAB that he was selected for aircraft technician school in Pensacola, FL, following completion of naval basic training in Illinois. If only he would stay the course.

Yet each of these options was somehow part of the tornado of trouble, the huge disturbance that had already begun its wreckage and was simply too big to fail. Though they offered brief glimmers of possibility, it was obvious even then that they were never to be. There would be stressors of a divorce that no amount of my own intelligence or efficiency could allay, adults who let him down, bad decisions and bad luck. There would be factors even I, the better part of two decades later, couldn’t begin to understand. Ultimately, a tragic crash would end his life.

Still, I remember so well how South Portland, where it all began, had a different vibe entirely. It seemed its lighthouse—which had protected seafaring travelers on Casco Bay from all sorts of dangers for more than a century—had the power to keep my son safe as well. But first he would have had to get there. Once Eric had turned away from that beam of hope, he lost his way. With nothing but sea and sky, no hint of a destination, there was no end in sight.

I squirm in my seat next to Kevin, who is oblivious to the places I’ve gone in my mind. Staring out the window at the sand and the waves, I feel the lump form in my throat, feel the tears form, hot and insistent. I let them wash over me. I’ve learned there’s no use in the fight, anyway. It’s a mystery to me, how I can feel so resolved at times, accepting of Eric’s life and of his passing as what was. What is. Then come days like this one, when everything is so present, invading my thoughts, refusing to share space with my current life, teasing me with visions of the life he never had.

I think of something I heard years ago—how sadness is missing what has been lost, but sorrow is missing what will never be—and I’m overcome with a rare wave of anxiety, something I haven’t felt in quite this way since the day Eric dashed out the front door that one last time. If only I could reach back and change one little thing, it all so easily could have happened for him. He’d been so damn close. I picture Kevin and me driving to Maine to visit Eric and his wife and outdoor-loving, risk-taking kids living out their happy lives in an idyllic seaside town. It tortures me.

I sit silently for a while as we drive along the coast, wallowing really, and fantasize about the student Eric could have been—living in the dorms, playing on the soccer team, making new friends on campus and in town, enjoying the ocean views that might have inspired him as they do me. Caught in the past, I’ve been exercising my best Google-fu, frantically searching for the online home of the place that had once drawn us in, frustrated that SPTC seems to have vanished along with the life I imagined for my son, and for me. Using the lighthouse as the beacon it was meant to be, I finally locate Southern Maine Community College on the web, the same campus anointed with a new name, another entity entirely. How like my own life, it strikes me, completely rewritten, though some of the old remains in different form. Still, the college will never again be what it was on that day, at that time.

And neither will I.

I notice we’re about to reach Portsmouth.  Kevin and I are on vacation, after all, and I owe it to him to at least attempt to come up for air. “Hey, listen to this,” I offer, feigning enthusiasm, hoping the feelings will follow.  “They even have a comic book on their website describing the lighthouse and its origins.”

Step Into History!  the title commands.

If only it were history, I think, not a future imagined but never fulfilled.

I close the app, drop the phone into my bag, and turn my eyes to the road ahead.

Casey Walsh is a writer and former speech-language pathologist living with her husband in West Sand Lake, New York. She writes about life at the intersection of grief and joy and embracing the in-between. Her work has appeared in The Good Men Project; Fresh.Ink, The Under Review; Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine; Barren Magazine; Brevity Blog; and ModernLoss, among others. Casey’s essays also appear at TheFHFoundation.org, an organization dedicated to the genetic cardiac disorder that affects her family. Learn more at www.caseymulliganwalsh.com.  Casey is currently seeking representation for her memoir, The Full Catastrophe.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Interested in joining the Manifest-Station Squad?

We are looking for readers and/or wordpress editors.

Find out more here.

Guest Posts, Abuse, healing

What I Didn’t Know

August 9, 2021
ugly

by Ruth Arnold

I didn’t know that a father wouldn’t solve all of my issues of being fatherless for my children.I didn’t know he would yell. I didn’t know he would make us feel bad. I didn’t know he wouldn’t be home a lot. I thought I could manage him and still give my children the luxury of two parents. I didn’t know that when he was yelling in the house that they were getting hurt and made to feel unsafe. I didn’t know that when I calmed him and told them he’d had a bad day that they felt I was choosing him over them. I didn’t know that they would feel better at home when he wasn’t there. I didn’t know that  things wouldn’t get better. I didn’t know that yelling was not better than silence than not speaking as in the house I grew up in.

I didn’t know that I couldn’t fix him. I didn’t know that when he was annoyed with me it wasn’t about me being annoying. I didn’t know that I couldn’t modify myself enough to make him happy. I didn’t know that if he was unhappy with me that my children would feel he was also unhappy with them. I didn’t know that spending more time with him in my life would only make things worse. I didn’t know why I felt so lonely in a house with three people. I didn’t know how to make things different without also making them worse. I didn’t know that being quiet and also talking were both problematic so I had no mode of behavior that would make it better.

I didn’t know that loving talent and intelligence were not love. I didn’t know that the first person who asked me to marry him actually gave me a choice of yes or no. I didn’t know that I was worthy of seeking. I didn’t know that staying married wouldn’t prove everyone wrong because nobody was checking. I didn’t know that if I told everyone about how good things were with my husband it wouldn’t make it true. I didn’t know that I was not the only problem. I didn’t know that he wasn’t better than me. I didn’t know that he could be kind to others and so unkind to me. I didn’t know that he could be so unavailable to his family yet so able to stay late at work and help others when they needed extra time.

I didn’t know that I should feel good in my home. I didn’t know that I wasn’t mentally ill. I didn’t know that I wasn’t ugly. I didn’t know that I wasn’t boring. I didn’t know that I was worthy. I didn’t know that I should’ve been treated with kindness. I didn’t know that when I was sick I should’ve been helped. I didn’t know that everything wasn’t my responsibility. I didn’t know that I was doing everything for everyone and being challenged for not doing better.

I didn’t know that while we were sexless he was seeking sex with others. I didn’t know he regarded me as so awful. I didn’t know that he didn’t hope for things to improve. I didn’t know that he felt lying to me was justified. I didn’t know he kept his schedule nebulous for more reasons than real conflicts. I didn’t know that he was available to others for intimacy but not for me. I didn’t know he spoke ill of me to others.

I didn’t know he would die But then he did. And then I knew.

Ruth Arnold is a widowed mother of two boys living with metastatic breast cancer. Her husband passed away almost 11 years ago but only lately has Ruth begun to share her story due to complicated grief and shame that she is working to overcome. This essay was inspired after she shared the story of her husband’s death to her two sons ages 10 and 16 who were 9 and 5 years old when he died. In spite of this darkness, Ruth is living happily and well.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Margaret Attwood swooned over The Child Finder and The Butterfly Girl, but Enchanted is the novel that we keep going back to. The world of Enchanted is magical, mysterious, and perilous. The place itself is an old stone prison and the story is raw and beautiful. We are big fans of Rene Denfeld. Her advocacy and her creativity are inspiring. Check out our Rene Denfeld Archive.

Order the book from Amazon or Bookshop.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Guest Posts

On The Cusp

August 7, 2021
steve

by Joy Riggs

Elias packed everything he needed for eight weeks away at college, and Steve helped him stow it all in the trunk of my car. Everything except the bean bag chair, which they smushed into the right rear passenger seat. The trunk contained a plastic laundry basket brimming with bedding for an extra-long twin bed. A suitcase packed with spring clothes and a few sweaters. Books, new spiral notebooks, a desk lamp, classical piano music, plates and utensils for in-room dining (the cafeteria still under a pickup-only operation). A laptop. Three bottles of allergy medication. A fan, which Elias had deliberated about – how hot would it get by the end of May? He wasn’t on campus last spring, so he didn’t know.

The trees in our yard stood tall and bare, ready for new buds to emerge. The snow was gone. Elias left his winter coat on a hook inside the house.

After he hugged his brother, who was staying back with the dog, Elias buckled himself in next to the bean bag chair, and we set off on a four-hour drive, grasping the welcome chance to inject some life into what remained of his sophomore year.

Forty minutes into the trip, Steve realized he’d forgotten his sunglasses. He was usually uber-organized when it came to vacations, but we weren’t used to traveling anymore. The opportunity to plan this overnight trip had made him almost giddy.

“There are some plastic sunglasses in the driver’s side door, if you need them,” I said.

Ahead of us, the afternoon sky was a dull gray; rain seemed more inevitable than sun. I turned my head to look back at Elias. His long fingers were tapping out a rhythm on his knee.

“Have you thought of anything you’ve forgotten?”

He paused. “I might run out of toothpaste. I have a few travel-sized ones,” he said.

“Well, if that’s all you’ve forgotten, you’ve done well. That can be easily remedied.”

Elias was the youngest and most organized of our three children. But I never thought of him as “the baby.” He’d always seemed like an old soul, from the  he emerged at the hospital, with his shock of sandy brown hair, clear blue eyes, and laid-back demeanor. Although most people said he looked like Steve, he reminded me of me, personality-wise. Responsible, steady, high-achieving but modest. Slow to anger – in fact, had I ever really seen him angry? Not for years. He grew up being talked over by his older sister and brother; when he made the effort now to speak up, it was usually because he had something thoughtful to say.

The rest of the drive was uneventful and drizzly. That evening, we met up with Elias’s girlfriend, Nameera, and ate dinner outside in the 40-degree weather, preferring to risk frostbite over COVID. The next morning, we chose “grab-and-go” items from the hotel breakfast area and ate them in our room.

I felt like I should say something meaningful, but after sheltering together for twelve months of the pandemic, what more was there to say?

“I’m really proud of you. It’s been quite a year,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s been strange,” he said.

Tears formed in my eyes, so I changed the subject.

“How did you sleep last night?”

“I had trouble getting to sleep at first,” he said. “I’m really excited.”

At the campus center, he picked up a room key and a plastic bag stuffed with snacks, hand sanitizing wipes, and a face shield – essentials provided by the college. What had they given him at the start of freshman year – a lanyard, a water bottle? It was hard to remember now. He made two trips to carry everything from the car to his dorm room; we weren’t allowed to help him.

When he returned to say goodbye, I pulled out my phone. “Can we get a picture? And can you take it? Your arms are the longest.”

The three of us squinted into the morning sun, and he snapped a picture for posterity.

“I love you,” I said, as I hugged him.

“I love you, too.”

Steve and I walked back to the car, wiping tears from our eyes.

“It actually seems harder saying goodbye this time,” I said.

“I know, that’s what I was thinking,” Steve said. “Why is that?”

As Steve and I drove out of town, I stared at the trees. A derecho had struck Iowa in August, and the damage inflicted by the straight-line winds was still apparent. Trees with their tops shorn off, as though snipped with a giant scissors. Trees stripped of branches and bark. Trees bent in half, as though bent over in grief.

Yet, against the backdrop of trees and dormant farm fields, I also spotted life: cows in pastures, raptors soaring overhead, songbirds flitting across the highway. A gentler wind was blowing. We were on the cusp of spring.

JOy Riggs’ essays have appeared in numerous publications including Toho Journal Online, Topology Magazine, and Peacock Journal. She lives and writes in Northfield, Minnesota. Joy is the author of the nonfiction book Crackerjack Bands and Hometown Boosters: The Story of a Minnesota Music Man.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Margaret Attwood swooned over The Child Finder and The Butterfly Girl, but Enchanted is the novel that we keep going back to. The world of Enchanted is magical, mysterious, and perilous. The place itself is an old stone prison and the story is raw and beautiful. We are big fans of Rene Denfeld. Her advocacy and her creativity are inspiring. Check out our Rene Denfeld Archive.

Order the book from Amazon or Bookshop.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Guest Posts, pandemic, parenting

A New Kind of Wild

August 2, 2021
bus

by Melissa Bauer

“I DON’T WANT TO DO SCHOOL ON THE COMPUTER!!” my five-year-old daughter shouts at me while catapulting herself onto the floor in the hallway, right outside of our kitchen.  I agitatedly glance at the clock on the microwave; her virtual class starts in five minutes.  Five minutes to try and rescue this sinking ship.  “I know,” I say, and walk over to try to soothe her.  “But you have to,” I add.  As if knowing you have to do something ever makes doing it any easier.

We’ve been in virtual schooling for about two weeks now.  The novelty, like my positivity, is wearing off.  My daughter’s friends and classmates from preschool have chosen not to go the virtual route for kindergarten.  “You can’t do kindergarten on the computer!” they all crooned in my ear, spewing their seeds of doubt.  So off to private school their kinder went while we forged ahead apprehensively with public school.  The pandemic, it seems, wiped clean all of our familiarity.  It feels as though we are navigating this alone.

Still lying on the floor, but crying now, my daughter continues to shout “Noooo!  I won’t!”  Exasperated, I walk back into the kitchen.  My eyes immediately dart towards my candle burning on the island, bonfire and spun sugar filling the air, but I can’t smell it.  My irritation is mounting.  And now my three year old is on my heels looking for a snack.  “Alexa” I yell to my echo dot “play Freeze Dance” in hopes to change the energy.  But as the rhythmic beats penetrate the air, things only get worse.  Her crying has turned into sobs.

We’ve officially entered Emotionville.  An unpleasant, foul little town where emotions are big and patience is small.

Here’s what I want to tell my daughter.  I DON’T want to do school on the computer either!  When I pictured my little, big girl going off to kindergarten, it certainly wasn’t through Microsoft Teams.  When I imagined buying her school supplies, it didn’t include a desk and chair for her online classroom.  Or where to comfortably place her desk and chair within our modest sized home.  By a window overlooking our wooded backyard so she can get a glimpse of nature while she learns?  Or will that be painful to see the open-air, verve beyond our four walls, just outside her reach.   No, I didn’t imagine buying a “reading buddy,” a stuffed grey elephant that sits on her table, substituting for another child.  Or how my back would ache from bending over her kid sized desk repeatedly when she needed my help completing her assignments.  But I don’t say any of this.  I swallow my feelings and pinch my eyes shut.

Breathe, I tell myself.  Remember to breathe.

One minute.  We have one minute now until class starts and my daughter is still lying lithe on the hardwood floor, her tears flowing, my anger rising.  It’s becoming a living, breathing thing, my anger, panting down my neck with each second that passes.  The smell of burning wood fills me now.  I pick her up, whispering tersely in her ear “I know honey, you don’t want to do this, but you’re going to” and I carry her over to her chair.  She sits begrudgingly, a limp and nimble rag doll, as the teacher’s voice rings through the speakers.  “Welcome back class!”  My daughter straightens up in her seat.  I breathe in, and smell wood and this time, a little sugar too.  I squeeze my daughter’s shoulder, an offering, I suppose.  All is calm for an exhale, and then my three year old shouts at me from the kitchen “MAMA, I wannnaaa snack!

———

Our virtual school days continued like this, more or less, for nine weeks until we slowly transitioned to face-to-face learning.  Phase 1 included a ninety-minute session, one day a week, for two children while the remaining ten classmates participated virtually.  We were assigned to Mondays.  Watching the other students participate in person while my daughter remained online was hard for her.  “That’s not fair!” she’d cry out to her computer on her non-assigned days.  “Soon it will be your turn,” I offered, silently counting down the minutes for both of us.

“Good morning sweetheart!” I chirped as I turned on the lights to wake my daughter up for her “first” day of school.  Sleepy eyed, but smiling she dressed and headed downstairs for breakfast.  “I can’t wait to ride the bus!” she squealed with a mouth full of cereal.  To her, riding the bus was akin to getting your driver’s license.  She could taste the freedom.  “Let’s go!” I shouted and we hastily ran to the bus stop.  Within minutes the bright lights of her yellow chariot rounded the corner.  “Don’t forget your mask,” I said as she donned it on her face.  “Bye mom!” she yelled over the loud engine as she entered the bus, one giant step at a time.  But my excitement soon faded when I looked around and noticed she was the sole rider.  Am I an irresponsible mom for sending my daughter to school in person?  With her big, curious blue eyes peering over her mask, she looked straight-ahead and then at me as the bus pulled away.  Her little hand went up in a wave, five fingers spread open.  My lungs filled with the smell of exhaust as the bus drove away.  My chest constricted.  I was overcome with the urge to run and grab her off that bus.  To take her home and cradle her inside our little bubble, where my candle burned at both ends, because at least there I could keep her safe.

“Bye sweetheart” I mouthed in the rearview.

——-

I walked back into my house, and felt like I was missing an appendage.  Our virtual schooling was tempestuous at best, but now I feared the silence.  I hadn’t had a moment to myself since my children’s preschool shut down the previous year.  Yet, I couldn’t relax.  Instead, I padded towards the kitchen worried for my little girl out there in the wild.  Will she have a hard time wearing a mask for 8 hours a day?  I washed our morning dishes and thought about her.  I stared at her empty desk.  Her vacant chair mocked me, a silent reminder of “what if?”

The days slipped by and I held my breath as we transitioned through each phase.  Slowly, more students joined her class in person.  Turns out, my daughter didn’t mind wearing a mask all day or eating a socially distanced lunch in the cafeteria.  Especially if it meant she could try the chocolate milk.

We settled into a new norm.  After several months, she was finally attending face-to-face learning full time with her entire class.  And I began breathing again.  What once felt wildly terrible and wildly devastating now felt wildly normal.

“What was your favorite part of school today?” I ask her, our hands clasped, her mask shoved into her backpack as we walk home from the bus.  “Recess!” she shouts, her lips curling into a smile at the mere memory of it.  A take-a-picture-and-show-it-your-sister kind of smile.

I’m smiling now too.

———-

Not long after face-to-face learning resumes, our town is hit with the after effects of a hurricane.  Hundred-year-old giant oak trees are uprooted by the winds, and they’ve fallen on houses and power lines.  They are blocking our roads.  School has been put on hold.  Again.  I am looking at one of those massive trees splayed out across our roads, like an enormous carcass, lying belly up, and I can’t help but think this is a metaphor.  This year stripped us bare; left our roots exposed.  And yet, in our shared vulnerability, we learned that hard times don’t last forever.  The wind eventually stops howling.  Fallen trees are removed.  And maybe, just maybe, we learn to love the view.

Melissa Bauer lives in Milton, Georgia with her husband and their two young kids. A former nurse turned stay at home mom; she has been writing about her journey through grief, loss, motherhood and healing since the death of her parents in 2010. An avid reader, podcast junkie, and mindfulness advocate she is passionate about living authentically and with gratitude. She values connection and the best compliment someone could give her is an honest ‘me too.’

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Margaret Attwood swooned over The Child Finder and The Butterfly Girl, but Enchanted is the novel that we keep going back to. The world of Enchanted is magical, mysterious, and perilous. The place itself is an old stone prison and the story is raw and beautiful. We are big fans of Rene Denfeld. Her advocacy and her creativity are inspiring. Check out our Rene Denfeld Archive.

Order the book from Amazon or Bookshop.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Adoption, Guest Posts

Born of Stars, This Love of Mine

July 22, 2021
stars

by Amy Sayers 

I held her in my arms, not believing all 6.8 pounds of her was real. For months she came to me in meditation, in visions, in my breath. But here she was in the flesh and perfect, all ten toes and ten perfectly slender fingers. Satin cheeks and searching eyes. What do you see, I wanted to ask—What are you thinking? Why is your brow furrowed? Then her belly peaked in a tent-like contraction. Was it a cramp? Was it hunger, gas? Or grief…

The bellowing began. The tubes and bottles from the breast pump tugged with her sucking but to no avail. All my dreams of loving and being loved by this child expired like air hissing out of a balloon. Not being able to feed her from my body made me feel a complete failure. I held her and rocked her, from her opening scream till the noontime nap. I walked her on my body, bathed her skin to skin, slept with her on my chest, wondering, what had I done.

Who was I to adopt this baby from her birth mother? Clearly she was missing her birthmom’s particular scent, the timbre of her voice, her touch. I struggled, knowing scent was primal, something that was part of her DNA, something I couldn’t replicate. Only in time would she come to recognize mine.

Colic can be digestive, allergies, fussiness—they don’t always know. I tend to think it was grief. And all I knew to combat it was steady love. So I held her, I sat in the swing and I sang the one lullaby I knew. I walked with her, I concocted home made formula, store-bought Whole Food’s colostrum, but nothing worked. I finally relied on the packaged formula, which probably had sugar in it and god knows what else, but she had to eat. She had to sleep. And so did I.

We made the mistake of reading the Ferber book which advocates letting your child cry themselves to sleep. It was hideous. No grace. No laughter. No song. No. Love. She’d make herself physically ill, throwing up, coughing, or an explosion of diarrhea. It was too much.

I said to my husband, “This doesn’t feel right. It’s not just belligerence. I’m convinced its grief. She needs to know she’s safe. She needs to feel love. This, for the rest of her life.”

Attachment is so crucial in the first months. And so we took turns sleeping with her, sometimes she snuggled in the middle, sometimes she slept with my husband, mostly with me, sleeping skin to skin. In time, the blankie served as a pacifier, in addition to the ‘bubba’, but she didn’t relinquish her bottle until she turned four. We then had to do a ceremony so that Blues-Clues wouldn’t feel abandoned. We wrapped him in tissue, sprinkled him with rose-petals, covered him in a fairy-box and sent him off in care of the angels.

Ceremony helped. Tough love is hard. I realized in an instant, I wanted it to be easy, without pain, pure and dazzling, mine to hers and hers to me. We had moments of that, along with laughter, song, dance and stories. Always stories. Birth stories, creation stories, and the hard questions that followed. The grief-stricken, angry, belligerent “you’re not my real mom” cry. The marking and cutting and other demons that broke her into her many scattered selves. The painful times where I felt so helpless, again, as to how to give sanctuary while she flailed in the darkness. Still, I continued to hold space and to listen. I offered therapists, healers, and for all the compassion, affection and love, I still couldn’t take away the pain. That being the hardest lesson to learn about love.

Now she’s finding her way, making her own discoveries and our affirmations and prayers continue. She is a gift, my beam of light, my inspiration. But she is not of me, she is of her own soul. She came from the stars. She was born of my dreams. That is how she came through. This is love and I hope I am blessed to have it dazzle for years to come.

Amy Sayers is a mother, writer, artist, healer, and Pilates Instructor. Her memoir, TINY WHITE DRESSES is a synthesis of life events, a culmination of dreams and visions that led to the adoption of her daughter, Marika. She lives in Santa Fe, NM with her British husband and their two dogs. Amy is currently working on a novel with her editor, Alice Anderson, while querying her memoir. Amy paints in her free time and has exhibited in local galleries. Her essays have been published in local anthologies and magazines, as well as Manifest-Station—a chapter from the memoir called PLATTER OF ORANGES.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Although each of Jenny Offill’s books is great, this is the one we come back to, both to reread and to gift. Funny and thoughtful and true, this little gem moves through the feelings of a betrayed woman in a series of observations. The writing is beautiful, and the structure is intelligent and moving, and well worth a read.

Order the book from Amazon or Bookshop.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Guest Posts, Eating/Food, parenting

Saving Your Family, One (Complicated) Recipe at a Time

July 5, 2021
cake

by Lee Ann Cox

There’s a 20-year-old photo of me rolling out dough on a floured pastry board while wearing my son in a backpack. I was creating his first birthday cake.

The idea was sparked long before that moment, as I thumbed through the pages of the Martha Stewart catalogue, lingering over a set of oversized copper cookie cutters, a whimsical menagerie that included a bear, an alligator, a donkey, a dove. They were absurdly large, but then so was I, pregnant with this baby. I didn’t yet know what it would mean to balance a food writing career with an infant who merely dallied with the notion of sleep. I only knew the cookie cutters were adorable, a splurge, and I had to have them.

As the birthday neared and my vision for the project crystalized, I was fortunate that my husband’s parents were visiting from California; I had three adults to help distract my son as I set to work. I began by making quantities of sugar cookie dough to the sound of Bay’s chortling from the front room as he knocked down towers of blocks. His mood didn’t hold, hence the backpack.

I chilled and rolled the dough thick enough to achieve a sturdy giraffe whose head would not break loose from its slender neck. Soon an unadorned zoo sprawled on racks around our farmhouse kitchen while I made icing of pale yellow, deep sky blue, sea glass green. I mixed two consistencies of each color, one thick to outline the shape, forming a dam to hold the flood of flawless liquid color. Once set, I piped manes and claws on lions, fluffy wool on sheep, an intricate caparison for an elephant adorned with various colors of sanding sugar I had mixed myself.

Of course, this was to be a cake, so I picked a family favorite, vanilla with the layers split and alternately spread with lemon curd and cream cheese frosting. To achieve my fever dream of perfection, though, I needed two cakes of different sizes to stack, supported by wooden dowels. Over the course of a couple days, I had concocted a child’s version of a tiered wedding cake, graced, not by a spray of elegant flowers or ironic plastic newlyweds, but by a double carousel of handmade edible animals, each unique, one cuter than the next.

“Mom are you high?” my daughter would say now. I must have been undone.

This cake, I need to say, was not the centerpiece of an overdone celebration with too many presents and too many people; no hordes of aunts, uncles, and cousins were coming to admire my two creations. It was just us and a close friend and baby from playgroup. That eases my embarrassment and heightens my wonder at the forces that drive me. The birthday boy was too young to be enchanted by this cake (nor, it turns out, would any confection not chocolate ever achieve that standard). But when my husband held Bay aloft to blow out his single candle, both of them grinning, my camera shuttered on a moment of pure beauty.

*

Time spun out from there. Bay turned 18 having spent equal parts of his life with and without his dad, who died young of a rare cancer. On this birthday, the cake was a basic, rich chocolate number; his dinner request was the two-day cooking festival: the tagliatelle with braised lamb ragu he’d had in New York, helpfully codified in The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion and Cooking Manual, a book I highly recommend for the recipes and the writing. Even for a dish whose steps are helpfully divided into “Day 1” and “Day 2,” the authors charm you through the process, suggesting a flip of the lamb mid-roast “if you think of it” and, later, to remove the meat from the stock so it can rest and “regain its composure,” suggestions I recommend for the cook as well.

I bought my lamb and bones from a local Vermont farm, filled my basket with onions, carrots, fennel, and tarragon. I roasted and braised. I made the Frankies tomato sauce, a simple affair, demanding only devotion (along with your good olive oil and the best Italian tomatoes). “Take your time—there’s no rushing it… when you’re cooking the garlic, you want to very, very slowly convert the starches in it to sugars and then to caramelize those sugars. Slow and steady.”

By the second afternoon, I skimmed my lamb broth of fat in favor of fresh butter that married the tomato and lamb concoctions, finally, into a sensuous, swoony situation, like the ones that really should come from restaurants.

I will confess how the years have changed me, especially as I was also the one to make the cake and wrap the presents and parent the son and also his little sister. (First, no, she did not get a two-tiered carousel cake, an already preposterous enterprise without a baby, a toddler, a job, and a 130-pound Newfie upending the kitchen for any unmonitored morsel of food, but she has not been denied her share of fanciful cakes.) I dismissed the Frankies’ instruction to make a double recipe of Basic Pasta Dough from page 94, cut into tagliatelle. I bought the pasta.

*

Nearly a year later, I made the ragu again for my son’s farewell dinner before he left for college, 3,000 miles from home. I felt from the tender ache of my own bones as if they were rendered into that stew, an amalgam of everything I put in it, lovingly tended, and every hope I had for what it would yield. I hid my tears and fed the dreams we both shared, of joy and challenge, adventure and a new sense of belonging.

And then, abruptly, he was home. The pandemic put it all on ice, suspended him between two worlds.

With third-quarter finals cancelled and an extended spring break, Bay came to the kitchen. “Mom, I think we should cook something.” His grin suggested that it would not be banana bread.

“Watch this video with me,” he said, reaching for my laptop and pulling up Joshua Weissman’s YouTube page, introducing me to the obsessive food phenom with nearly three million followers. “Making the Popeyes Chicken Sandwich at Home, But Better” was Bay’s fixation; we would hit play and pause on that video uncountable times.

The next afternoon we got started, beginning with the Japanese milk buns (which begin with making the tangzhong). We mixed up our marinade, our spiced dredging flour, and our sauce, albeit without the optional oyster mushroom powder, and, more critically, and ashamedly, the black garlic—it’s clear now we had the time to start aging our own ingredients, since he wouldn’t return to school, but we lacked that kind of patience.

We did choose the largest boneless thighs we could find, properly slice our pickles lengthwise for maximum coverage, and toast the truly amazing buns. I taught my son how to deep fry. And I acquainted him with the fact that, no matter how much you clean as you go, the exalted experience at the table will temper at the sight of a grease-splattered stove and the general havoc wreaked preparing a plated meal. The regret, like the mess, is temporary.

*

For two decades I’ve thought about that birthday cake, wondered if there was an impulse behind it beyond what food writer Tamar Adler, in a recent essay I admired, called “a peacocky presentation of leisure time and skill.” I won’t argue there wasn’t a tinge of that, but if it was for anyone, honestly, it was me. I know it’s more, though, that I wasn’t quite kidding about being undone.

I feel so vulnerable at times, on the knife’s edge of joy and heartache. My infant son turns one, then moves far away. My infant daughter turns two with a party held in a hospital lounge near her dad’s room, then she’s a beautiful, maddeningly sassy teenager. The weave of love, longing, and potential loss is gossamer silk and the instinct to protect is fierce, tireless effort. That takes me to the kitchen. The sense of control is a mirage, but there’s art in the attempt and at the end you have dinner, or, even better, cake.

The crazy thing about COVID is that it upends the promise I made myself years ago to try to keep my anxieties and fears from infecting my kids. What I want—on my best, bravest days—is for them to live big, juicy, connected lives, for their regrets to be few, especially for experiences they didn’t seize. Now we’re told to hide our children at home and mask them from danger. There was a moment’s appeal in that, my deepest instincts sanctioned.

Mid-March was like the first hour or so of losing electricity—candlelight Scrabble and toasting marshmallows over a gas flame—before the melting down, before we met the grief spilling out from every angle of this disaster. There are worse things, to be sure, but I ache for my kids, for everyone’s. Instead of testing boundaries, they’re circumscribed by them.

At the end of the summer though, my son, unable to return to college in the fall, quarantined and then met up in a central location with his would-have-been roommates in an Airbnb for a week. Bay texted a photo of the meal he made for his friends: better-than-Popeyes’ fried chicken sandwiches. He had made the buns himself, crisped the coating on the tender thighs to tanned perfection, slathered on his homemade spicy sauce.

I imagine those big blue eyes gazing over my shoulder from his backpack, absorbing my need, the protective pulse that drove my energy. With food, he would now nurture the fledgling life he’d begun, hoping the web holds through untold months ahead in Zoomland. And sure, I’m guessing there was a serious dash of peacockiness behind it, too. I mean, that was an insane amount of work.

Lee Ann Cox is a Vermont-based writer whose work has appeared in Salon and The Rumpus, among other publications. She is a recipient of the Center for Fiction’s Christopher Doheny Award for the manuscript of my memoir Beauty Like That, as well as a Vermont Arts Council creation grant. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

emma

Stories of parent/child relationships can be complex, and Emma’s Laugh, The Gift of  Second Chances, is no exception.  Convinced of her inability to love her “imperfect” child and give her the best care and life she deserved, Diana gave Emma up for adoption. But as with all things that are meant to be, Emma found her way back home. As Emma grew, Diana watched her live life determinedly and unapologetically, radiating love always. Emma evolved from a survivor to a warrior, and the little girl that Diana didn’t think she could love enough rearranged her heart. In her short eighteen years of life, Emma gifted her family the indelible lesson of the healing and redemptive power of love.

Read Diana’s ManifestStation essay here

Order the book from Amazon or Bookshop.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Click here for all things Jen