Note from a Proud Mom

You all probably already know that I think Tori is pretty impressive, but she outdid herself this week. She got the keys to her first apartment (on fairly short notice) last weekend. She was super-excited about the move, of course, but there was one little glitch: she had some time-sensitive work to finish for her "day job" (yeah, she works for me, but the time pressure was external) and she'd already announced the launch of her new business for October 12.

Somehow, she did it all: finished my work, got her apartment set up, moved the essentials, gentled her crazy rescue dog through the transition and launched Juliet Nail Design on schedule today. 

She's selling hand-painted pre-made and custom press-on nails, all of her own creation. She even found time in the midst of all this activity to make up a set for me.

I can't wait to see where this goes.

The Waiting Game

Waiting really isn't all that bad.

Circles of Life

Last night, I spent a very long night at the hospital with my stepdaughter, Beth. We were hoping (in vain, it turned out) to transform that very large bump in her midsection into a very small child we could hand around and coo over and share the burden of carrying. Being pregnant when it's 93 degrees at 6 p.m. is no picnic, even without the contractions and odd compulsion to clean.

With Beth, Beth's husband Shawn and me all at the hospital, my 18-year-old stepson and 14-year-old daughter stepped up to take care of Andrew, Beth and Shawn's older child (older being a relative term that sounds a little silly when applied to a 2-year-old).

They did a great job, and even managed to get him calmed down to sleep in a strange hotel room with mom and dad both away. And that's when my life retrospective unexpectedly began.

As I sat in the hospital thinking about Beth at five, playing mother to her younger brother, and listening to the heartbeat of her second child, Tori sent me a text message. It said, "I don't know how Beth ever sleeps. I think I would just look at Andrew all the time. He's so beautiful."
I couldn't argue with that, but I have to admit that my beautiful grandson didn't have my full attention. Because in that moment I was transported back to Valentine's Day of 1996. At daybreak, my little sister tiptoed into my bedroom, looked at my 37-hour-old daughter and said, "Have you slept at all, or do you just look at her?"

My sister was 23 that morning. She wore silver shorts that zipped all the way around and had her new boyfriend in tow; his rainbow-snow-cone tinted hair was covered by a red velvet hat and although he insists to this day that it was a crooked smile he had painted on his face, I know that it was a fishhook coming out of the corner of his mouth.

Today, my sister is a 36-year-old librarian at a Catholic College. I haven't seen the silver shorts in years, and she's handed off her fishnets.

The infant she joined me in gazing upon that morning has become the babysitter, sitting up late at night watching her nephew sleep.

And the boy who trailed into my bedroom behind my sister in the early-morning hours, carrying a black rose, is married and about to become a father himself.

And, of course, that baby my daughter sat up watching last night is just days--or even hours--from becoming the big brother. And after that, the babysitter...the bridegroom...the expectant father himself. It may seem strange to think that far ahead--to look at a toddler and see new generations--but it would have seemed just as strange to think about the four-year-old wishing on a star at the drive-in as the mother, or the little boy whose "best birthday ever" happened at Chuck E. Cheese in July of 1997 as the 18-year-old babysitter, or my own infant daughter as the teenager who would get out of bed to comfort her nephew when he missed his mother in the middle of the night.

It's Not Nice to Laugh at Your Old Mother

At least, that's what my mom tells me. Fortunately, my mom isn't all that old, so stll consider her fair game.

Because we live in a split-level townhouse and our living room and kitchen are below ground, there is approximately one month out of every year that we have an earwig problem. Since we have a dog only marginally larger than an earwig, I'm afraid to spray, so we just have to deal with it and count the days until they die off for the year.

Unfortunately, my daughter has a fear of earwigs that borders on phobic. This was undoubtedly triggered by the fact that when she was little, we were sleeping over at a lock-in in the children's department of the Rochelle Public Library when she saw an earwig crossing the floor toward me. I was asleep. She shined her flashlight on it and one of the library workers ran over to tell her to turn it off and go back to bed. She reported the earwig and the woman said "Okay" and turned away. Tori thought she was going to get something to kill it with, but instead she just went on about her business and the earwig finished its journey and bit me on the arm (or pinched me or whatever they do), leaving my arm red and sore and swollen for days. That's a lot of responsibility for a pre-schooler.

Her fear, in fact, is so great that she won't say "earwig" and doesn't want anyone else to. It conjures up anxiety. Every year, she comes up with a different name for them, but this year she's settled on "devil bugs". She says that she refuses to believe that God could have created them, so they must be minions of the devil. She often invites them to go back "home" where they belong.

The other day I was out and she was on the phone with my mother when she spotted one. She exclaimed, "devil bug! devil bug!" Then told my mother to hang on because she had to kill a devil bug and needed both hands. When she returned to the phone, she said something like "Okay, I killed the devil bug."

My mother asked what a devil bug was, then said, "Oh, are they those ones you don't like? What are they, earwigs?"

Tori said, "we don't use that word" and my mom said...

"Oh, okay. What do we call them?"

Forks in the Road

This morning, I sat in the cafeteria of a small private high school my daughter might attend next year and stared--discreetly, I hope--at a man. It's happened to all of us, hasn't it? In some unexpected place, you suddenly spot someone you're 95% sure is someone from your past--someone who was once so significant that you wouldn't have believed you'd ever be unsure--but you are unsure. Unsure enough that you're afraid to speak, not because you're afraid that you're wrong, but because the question mark you'd have to attach to his name would be unforgivable if you were right.

We were both early. I had plenty of time to study him (discreetly, I hope) before the meeting commenced. I thought about walking in the snow with him, about eating rhubarb straight from the garden and blackberries plucked from a bush. I summoned up the one time I'd seen him with his wife and children, years earlier, and tried to remember exactly how he'd looked then, but it was futile. I could only see him refusing to dance with me under the first disco ball I'd ever seen, jumping to defend me during a basketball game in his friend's driveway, appearing at my side with a delicate, powdered-sugar laced Christmas cookie after some silly spat.

I come from a large family. I have cousins I've never met and cousins I've seen only once or twice in my life. I probably have cousins I don't even know exist. But this cousin, I loved. We played with Play-Dough and crayons together, imagined arctic expeditions in his back yard and went to movie matinees together every Wednesday in summer. It was to his house that I took my brand new Pong game and my handheld electronic football game; we made tattoos with marker and applied them to one another and to our younger siblings. I remember what I bought him for his ninth birthday, the day he brought his new puppy to my house, the first time I walked to his house alone. I even remember waiting impatiently for him to get up from his nap when he was still in his crib but I had achieved the lofty age of three.

And now I don't know what he looks like.

I sat in a room for two hours this morning and didn't know whether or not he was sitting thirty feet from me. And somehow, not knowing whether or not I was seeing him made me sad in a way that knowing I wasn't never did.

Mental Snapshots

Tuesday afternoon, as we were packing to travel out of state for my daughter's great-grandmother's funeral, I picked up my camera.

"I don't think you're going to want to bring your camera to a funeral!" my daughter protested.

No, I agreed, but we were going to be spending a couple of days with her father's family. We'd be spending the night at my stepdaughter's house, and we might want to take pictures at some other point during the trip. Since that grandbaby came along, I'm pretty good about remembering the camera.

It turned out that I didn't take any pictures during the trip, but I definitely found myself wishing that it weren't inappropriate to take pictures at a wake or funeral. Maybe that sounds morbid, but I can tell you that I was snapping pictures in my mind, pictures of family at its very best.

If it were proper to record a funeral as we do weddings and birthday parties and every other occasion of our lives, I'd have snapped my sister-in-law quietly slipping into the chair next to her mother after she saw her start to cry from across the room. I'd have photographed my daughter and stepson from the back, her dark head under his blond one, buried in his shoulder as he held her close. My grandson stretched out sound asleep on a bench in the hallway. My future son-in-law whisking his baby out of the room at the first peep, before my stepdaughter was fully out of her chair. My ex-husband's cousin on her knees in the grass, lifting a flower from the casket to hand to her mother. One young man slipping a supportive arm around another. A glass of water or a tissue quietly extended. People I love at their best.

Yes, funerals are sad and solemn, and it would be inappropriate to be snapping pictures. But I'm holding them in my mind, those snapshots of people unselfconsciously loving one another, reaching out to share.

I Heart My Job and Other Thanksgiving Thoughts

Once upon a time, Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday. It didn't have any of the fuss and glitter and time pressure and commercialism of Christmas, or even Easter. You didn't have to dress up in costumes or shop or hide eggs--all you had to do was bask in the warm glow of your life, spending time with friends and family and acknowledging all that you'd been given.

But three years ago, something changed...or perhaps, many things changed at once. My husband moved out of state. My mother had heart surgery and my daughter and I went to stay with her temporarily and never went home; when eventually we moved into our own place again, it was miles from our true home and the lives we'd built there. Returning to the workforce full time put a terrible strain on my health and my daughter's security, and for three years, my life was about keeping us alive and very little else.

I traded in a great job where the commute was (literally) killing me for another job that was great in a different way and involved no commute, but often had me working 18 hour days.

And all along the way, there were things in my life to be grateful for. I KNEW that. I could see them. But I couldn't feel them. They all seemed to come with an "at least" or a trade-off. I was grateful that my mother survived her surgery (though she didn't seem to feel any better after it than she had before). I was grateful that I was able to support myself and my daughter far better than many single mothers can (but I'd been hospitalized over it twice, and the strain on my daughter was tremendous). I was grateful for the wonderful people in my life (but I didn't SEE them or spend time with them, because I was too busy with the bare elements of survival) and so on.

Most of the year, I gave these things little thought. I was simply too busy. And I knew that I was fortunate to have interesting work that used my background and paid the bills. But each year at Thanksgiving, I had a crisis when I realized that, however much I knew that objectively, I simply couldn't muster that feeling I'd once had of being truly blessed. My daughter would invite us, at Thanksgiving dinner, to say what we were thankful for, and my mind raced in search of something I could say honestly. I came to dread the event as one more fabricated ritual.

And then, just in time for Thanksgiving, my life changed again, in a way that shifts my perspective not only on today, but on all that has come in the past three years. It's often hard to see where you're going when you're in the process, but the pendulum seems to have settled now, and the purpose is clear.

So, for the first time since 2004, I am going into Thanksgiving able to sincerely say "I am so blessed", and know it with more than my mind.

I am thankful for the new/old job I just started, which will allow me to do something interesting and related to my background from home, without killing myself, and will leave me time to sleep, parent, socialize...maybe even write. And I'm thankful for the company I'm returning to (and the people who created it) even if/when I'm not working with them, because they restore my faith by being people first and building a family in the ever-growing office even as their revenues keep multiplying.

I am thankful for the friends who have insisted on staying in my life even though I was, for a very long time, too rushed and brittle to possibly be any fun or comfort to them. And to those who patiently waited a year or two or three to get together.

I am thankful for the fact that my beautiful daughter, at nearly 13, has transformed from the warm ball of hugs and love that most tiny children are to one that is entirely unique to her--but with no diminishment of warmth or affection.

I am thankful that my family is so close by, and involved in our lives on a daily basis. I wish that everyone had this, even though I suspect that many people would tell me they were quite glad that they did not.

But mostly, I think, I'm thankful that I seem to still be inside myself somewhere--that as the pressure and the frantic pace and the desperation fall away, I am (and not nearly so gradually as I might have expected) discovering a person I used to be.

So I'm Kind of Sort of Almost Going to Be a Grandmother Tomorrow

I suppose technically the child of my ex-stepdaughter is not my grandchild, but "ex" and "daughter" don't really work well together, even if there is that pesky prefix involved. When you've sewn a child's curtains and made her breakfast and taught her to write her name and later helped her fill out her first job application, when you've walked her to the door the first day at a new school (and been shocked that, at thirteen, she kissed you goodbye in the hallway) and cheered her on during swim meets, there's no end to that.


At seven, holding on to MY baby...watch this space next week for pictures of her cradling her own.


Her ninth birthday, at Discovery Zone.


Creeping up on adolescence (with brother Matt, cousin Branden and my daughter)



And all grown up...I'm still not quite sure how this happened, how we got here from homemade Power Ranger pillows and Barbies and even N'Sync and summer jobs and teenage boys at the door.