Going Home Again

I live in the town I grew up in, less than a mile from the house I grew up in and my parents' current home and the elementary school I attended. And I'll admit that sometimes I enjoy the parallel experiences, the flash of memory that comes as I set ice cream in front of my daughter at the green picnic table outside Dairy Queen and remember doing the same for my sister the summer I was thirteen and babysitting her while my mother worked, or the familiar crunch of gravel under my feet as I carried my toddler to the concession stand at the same drive-in where my cousin Richie and I watched the Planet of the Apes movies side-by-side in early childhood. But the sad fact is, this isn't home.

Home, in my mind, is the little town my daughter grew up in. It's a place of Christmas walks where you know everyone on the street and local businesses owned by your neighbors and restaurants that aren't franchises. It's only 40 miles away, but traveling there is more like journeying back in time than a 45-minute commute. We don't visit very often. Even when we lived there, most of my friends were in the suburbs--I'd grown up here and I worked here. And the years between 3rd grade and 8th are big ones; my daughter has lost touch with most of her childhood friends as well.

But every once in a while, she'll turn to me late at night and say, "It's a good night for a drive." It's always a cool, summery night, and it's always well after dark. Last night, she followed that up with "We could take the dog. He's never been there." The "there" made me smile; apparently, all drives end in the same place.

So just after 10 p.m. we gathered the dog and the cord that attaches Tori's iPod to the car radio and bottles of water and hit the road. First stop, always, is Tori's elementary school playground. It's small and quiet and the grass is soft, and we both have fond memories of our first late-night visit there, when Tori hadn't yet started school and she and my sister and I played on the swings in the dark and talked about her upcoming kindergarten days.

The place is changing, but slowly. It hasn't yet been overrun with franchises and look-alike signs. A new video store has moved in; Tom & Jerry's has moved across the street. The school has done some new landscaping. But the late-night sounds are the same: frogs and trains and a slight breeze in the trees. The parking lot where I drew fake sidewalks in blue chalk so that Tori could learn to turn corners on her two-wheeler still stands open and welcoming; the pier at the tiny lake is just as rickety and yet somehow always holds. Our church is unchanged, and at midnight there are four or five cars in the lot--something I've never seen in the suburbs. The swimming pool where we sat day after day when Tori wanted desperately to learn how to swim but was too frightened by her early "drowning" experience to jump in (and where she eventually let me hold her in the water, and then jumped into my waiting arms, and then one day swam to the deep end and back all alone) still carries the same soft scent of chlorine and sunshine.

But more important than the specific places, more important than the way the town moves more slowly and appears to exist in an earlier era, is the way walking its quiet streets carries us back. My daughter is 14 now, but on her grade-school playground we both touch, for a moment, the days when she walked by my side, holding my hand and looking up and me and talking about her day on the way home from kindergarten.

The Difference a Quarter of a Century Makes

The first time I saw the movie The Big Chill, I was in college. Being in the midst of those heady days of intimate relationships with those whose lives overlapped my own minute by minute, it was easy for me to believe not only in the depth of connection the main characters shared, but in the implication that nothing better had ever come along. When Glenn Close's character said that she'd been the best she ever was back in those days, with those friends, it seemed only natural to me. College was, after all, the best time of your life, right? That's the way it looked to me, sitting in the Student Center movie theater watching The Big Chill for a dollar. That's what seemed to be suggested by authors like Anton Myrer and Erich Segal. That's what my friends and I anticipated when we camped out on the bridge on a starlit night or drank wine coolers from 2-liter bottles by the lagoon and sang old Supremes and Van Morrison songs to one another. It was the underlying assumption in the writings I so carefully preserved from those days, the descriptions of the moments I'd never want to forget.

At 19, I thought the way those characters came back together and the things they shared were romantic and touching. In some ways, they were. But at 44, Glenn Close's line made me sad. Not, as it might have made me sad the first time through, with nostalgia for those lovely lost days, but because with a quarter of a century of additional life experience under my belt, it struck me as tragic that a woman in her mid-thirties would have peaked during her college days (or even feel that she had).

I loved college, and I had an amazing group of interesting, eclectic, talented and supportive friends whose influence in my life I will always cherish. But I was just beginning when I spent those long winter afternoons in the dorm with them, talking about art and philosophy and politics. I was just beginning to learn how to do something about the things I believed, and the things I saw as most important in those days were informed in part by a lack of information. I like to think that I'm the best I've ever been with my daughter; I like to think the best I'll ever be has yet to come.

"Paybacks" Are Actually Quite Lovely, Thank You

Part of this post is undoubtedly a rerun. It's one of those things that rises up to touch me again every summer, and whenever it does, I can't resist talking about it.

This afternoon, I went to meet my daughter and her friend at a local pool. The other girl's mother had taken them while I was still working, and at 5:00 I got changed and headed over to meet them. My late arrival afforded me the opportunity to watch from across the room as my daughter grabbed her friend's hand and the two of them took a running leap into the pool. A little later, returning to the pool, she simply stepped off the edge and dropped into the water.

Yeah, I know. You're probably wondering what the big deal is, especially if you know that my daughter is 13.

This is it: the summer my daughter was five, she was so eager to learn to swim that she was practically quivering with it. She, like me, loved the water passionately, and she couldn't wait to swim. I signed her up for lessons and on the first day they lined up along the edge of the pool and the teacher said, "Okay, let's get in the water..." and Tori popped off the edge and straight to the bottom. By the time I reached the edge of the pool, she was safely back on the side, but sobbing. When I asked her what had happened she said, "I drowned."

For the rest of that summer, her craving to get back in the water warred with her terror. She resolutely got ready to go to her lesson each week, but could never bring herself to get in the water. In between, we went to the pool every day, and though she stared out at the water with longing, it was a solid month before she moved off the stairs...and then only to allow me to carry her a few steps out into the water, while she clung to me with what seemed like more arms and legs than I'd known she possessed. It was the end of the summer before she'd allow me to hold her at arm's length in the water, and the weather was turning before she relaxed enough to ride on my back while I walked through the water. Even then, she clenched her little arms so tightly around my neck that sometimes I had to carry her back to the safety of the side just so that I could get a few good breaths.

But every day, she asked to go swimming.

The next summer she steeled herself to jump from the side of the pool into my waiting arms, most of her body never reaching the three-foot-deep water. Slowly, ever so slowly, we edged forward: she'd jump in holding my hands, then just one hand. She'd ride on my back while I swam across the pool in shallow water. She'd hold on to the side and kick if I stayed next to her, and then if I didn't. We edged our way all the way to today, when she splashed laughing into the pool at the bottom of the water slide, oblivious to my presence.

In the greater scheme of things, I suppose it doesn't matter much that my child is happy in the water, but I have a moment like this every season, when I see her laughing and confident in the water and am overwhelmed with the feeling that it was just SO WORTH IT to sit on the steps of that pool for an hour every afternoon and not push her to go any further.

So much of parenting seems to be about second-guessing ourselves. We want to be so much for and offer so much to our children that it's inevitable that we're going to fall short, and the small mistakes and missed opportunities often loom much larger than the successes. But every summer there is at least one moment when I sit by the edge of a pool or on the sand at a beach--once even at the edge of the ocean--and am reminded of the things I've gotten right.

That Stuff We Used to Drink at Your Grandmother's House

I overheard that phrase when my daughter was on the telephone the other day. She tends to talk on speaker, in the room with me, so eavesdropping is almost mandatory. In fact, it's not unusual for her friends to ask whether they're on speaker and then address something to me. A couple of days ago, I just caught this reference to "that stuff we used to drink at your grandmother's house" from a girl who moved out of state two years ago. It turned out to be Ovaltine.

It made me smile. I could picture the girls, back in fourth and fifth grade, sitting in my mother's kitchen and drinking chocolate Ovaltine. It was funny that something so universal should be specifically associated in her mind with my mother's house. And I liked that this child, who's had a tough life since she moved away, had such clear memories of those days. But I was also reminded of a conversation with one of my childhood friends.

We were in our early thirties, at the grocery store together, when I spotted Necco wafers and reached back to grab them. She said she'd never had them. "Impossible," I scoffed. "There's no way that you were around my father all those years and never had a Necco wafer." I tried to describe them, to no avail. She'd never seen them, heard of them or tasted them.

Later that afternoon, I cracked open the roll and offered her one. A pink one. No sooner had she popped it into her mouth than her eyes widened. "We used to eat these in the convertible!" Indeed we had, a full three decades earlier, sitting up on the back of the backseat in the years before common sense and seatbelt laws. It wasn't the only conversation we had like that, either. One lazy summer Sunday morning as we contemplated brunch she asked, "Do you know how to make those eggs?"

And I said, "yes". With no elaboration, at least 25 years after we'd last eaten them together--and as far as I could recall, we'd never discussed them before--I knew that she was talking about the fluffy baked omelette with deviled ham inside that my father had made when we were children.

It made me think about the way we're forming memories in all of the little, seemingly meaningless things we do with our children, or that they do themselves. I'm sure that my friend never sat at my parents' table and thought "I'll remember these eggs for the rest of my life." My daughter and her friends just drifted through the days, carefree and taking each moment as it came, like children should. Did they know that the day they tangled themselves up in yarn in the front yard would stick in their minds for years to come? That my daughter would know years later what song they had on repeat the day they sat on lawn chairs on the back patio and read Girl's Life together?

I suspect not. Yet somehow, it's these ordinary pieces that form our lives, our memories, and our relationships. And in a way, that's a relief--because it's easy, as a parent, to get caught up in trying to make memories. It turns out, they take care of themselves while we're just living everyday lives.

Days Gone By

This evening my daughter went to a slumber party. As a single mother, I don't get many evenings to myself, and I had a few possibilities for this one. I opted out of all of them and went out to dinner by myself, to a tiny Mexican restaurant that my daughter doesn't like. I ordered too much food and sat for more than an hour, picking at bits of it and reading an old Robert Parker novel that I'd somehow missed the first time around.

If you have children, perhaps you understand why I didn't go out to dinner with friends or my family or even take the all-too-rare opportunity to hear some live music. An hour of silence with a good book and food someone else cooked was like a little slice of heaven.

When I left the restaurant the night air was soft and so I rolled down the window and drove through town with the wind in my hair and a friend on my CD player and didn't feel the least bit like a grandmother. Quite by accident, that drive took me through the neighborhood where we lived when my daughter was a baby, and suddenly its cracked sidewalks and run-down houses looked a little bit like heaven, too.

I gave up my job when my daughter was born; my husband paid child support for his two older children. I scarcely exaggerate when I say that we didn't have a nickel to spare. More than once I went digging through coat pockets and purses in hopes of finding a few dollars to buy dinner with, and I put together a little book of dinners you could cook for under $3.00. And however we all tend to romanticize it, there's nothing glamorous about being poor. It's hard and it's stressful.

But what I found myself thinking about tonight was the quiet night air around that neighborhood, about walking the dog in the evening, about the adolescent neighbor girl who loved our baby so much that she became like part of the family. There was something somehow richer and more real about that neighborhood, where my husband didn't want me to walk alone at night. There was a little dog whom I don't think I'll ever stop missing. But mostly, there was time.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the trade-off between time and money. For a parent, it's a Catch-22 of astronomical proportions. Your child wants and needs your presence at exactly the same time that she needs and wants your financial support. Then boom...one day she's supporting herself, busy with her own life, and you have time to slow down...but for what?

I know I have nothing to complain about. I've got a great job that allows me to earn a good living from home, family half a mile away, a fabulous kid whose friends have adopted me as a second mother...but some days I think that I'd give most of this money back and go back to digging for change in the seat cushions if I could have back those aimless days when my daughter sat sleep-mussed in the chair with a doll in her lap and said, "So...what do you want to do today?" and the answer was wide open.

OMGMMR! (And who really needs $353, anyway?)

Yesterday, I wrote about paying $353 for two tickets to the Jonas Brothers Concert at the Allstate Arena.

Tradition in our family is that we celebrate birthdays on the weekend; on the actual birthday, if it doesn't fall on the weekend, we just have a nice dinner and give one gift. Of course, in my daughter's case this usually means one gift from me and one from my parents and sometimes one from my sister.

Of course I wanted to give her the tickets as soon as possible, and of course I don't have them yet, so I printed out the seating chart for the Allstate Arena and marked her seats and gave that to her over dinner.

Her eyes got very wide and she said, "I can't scream in Chipotle, right?"

The remainder of our dinner conversation was a series of comments like, "It will be the real actual them."

At one point she actually said that her cheeks hurt, but she couldn't stop smiling.

She tried. She really couldn't.

We talked a little more about the fact that we'd be in the same room (albeit a very large one) with the Jonas Brothers.

We talked a little bit about how she'd tell everyone she knew, one at a time, at school today.

She folded up the seating chart, wrote "look at me all the time" on the outside of it, and said that she was going to carry it in her pocket today.

When we got back in the car, she got on the phone, and said, "OMG MMR!"

Apparently (you may already be aware) this means "Oh my God, My Mom Rules!"

When we got out of the car she asked if she could finally scream and I said yes and she did, and it didn't seem the least bit put on. She stood in the kitchen and stomped her feet and yelled, "I'm going to see the Jonas Brothers!" and then she did it again. And then she covered her mouth, but the foot-stomping took a little time to die down.

At bedtime, since she's still on the cusp, she showed the seating chart to her stuffed animals.

And I started understanding those thousand-dollar tickets.

Later, I talked to my mother. My mother's outlook on my spending money is very predictable. She gasps lightly and says, in a drawn-out and rather dramatic way, "Yo...u'....re craaaaazy!"

Not this time. She said, "I can still remember the look on Tori's face the first time she saw the carousel at Charlestowne Mall. And dancing in the aisles at Molly. No, it's worth it."