Bowl o’ Cherriesbowl o’ cherries

Sam got home from school last Thursday.  I picked him up from South Station.  Max arrived this past Saturday evening on a bus from New York.  Mark and I were at a party for our favorite nonagenarian, so we couldn’t get him. A friend of his ferried him to the house.  And on Monday, after she’d finished her exams, handed in her last essay, and tidied her room, Lily got an extra special lift home from Max and Sam, who had driven out to Western Mass to bring her home from college.  The three of them took a detour on their way back to collect a gorgeous ceramic bowl they’d ordered.

Each is growing — up and out and away.  At the same time, they are choosing to continue to be a part of each others’ lives.  Perhaps it’s true that we middle class mothers at the beginning of the new millennium have fetishized child rearing to the point that we’ve created an even bigger chasm between rich and poor.  At the moment, I’m glad I’ve been able to give these three a sense that making family takes conscious effort.  Because now, in this first stretch of time away from home, they understand that it takes effort to continue their relationships with one another and with Mark and me.

And guess what? They gave me that beautiful bowl for Chanukah. I am filling it with new memories, the fruits of my labor.

I dropped Max at South Station about an hour ago. He left New York at 10 PM Friday night to hop a bus for Boston, hoping to escape what at the time seemed to be a cataclysmic hurricane. By this morning, we knew that Irene was an erratic mess-maker, causing wind and water damage in spots, leaving other places unscathed. Time for Max to get back to New York and his new life as a City Year corps member.

On our drive to South Station, Max and I saw Boston washed clean. The rising sun shone blindingly, brilliantly.  Cool crisp winds shooed away the blanket of heavy, wet air that’d been stalled over the Atlantic coast.  I watched as Max lugged to the terminal a backpack and bags filled with freshly laundered clothing and giant speakers.  Should he have made such a fuss to get back to Boston, after all?

A radio announcer voiced a piece in which New Yorkers posed similar questions. They criticized New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg for what this morning seems like over-the-top evacuation plans. As I sped along the Mass Pike, the city before me, I wished we could all be a bit more grateful. Thank goodness it wasn’t worse. Halleluyah that an ordinarily pro-business public figure was willing to take an “anti-business” stance in favor of keeping people safe. How lucky we are that the worst most of us can complain of is a wet basement or a loss of power. I’ll bet the folks down in New Orleans, where today they’re marking the sixth anniversary of that storm’s landfall, would love to have so little to report.

Two Ends

Two of the kids – Lily and Max – finished high school in early June.  I know, I know.  They call it “commencement.”  It’s supposed to be a beginning, the start of what’s coming next.  I like the idea of “graduation.”  You move (up?) from one step to another.  But, really, it felt so much like an ending.  The end of waving kids off in the morning from the breakfast table, the end of dropping kids at the train station and picking them up again in the afternoon, the end of having supper ready for everybody and hearing holy hell when everybody is sick of chicken, the end of having gangs of boys hanging out in the basement in front of the TV.  It was hard to think about beginnings, especially because nothing had begun yet.  It will.  I know it.  But it hadn’t then and hasn’t yet.

We celebrated a lot of these ends, and it was joyful.  I threw parties.  Grandparents traveled to Boston from distant locales.  There were presents.  Everybody dressed up and looked spiffy.  Mark, the kids, and I traversed Alaska’s Inside Passage, from Juneau to Ketchikan, as a way to note these endings.  The five of us had – let it be publicly acknowledged – a lot of fun. Together.  As a family.  A dream come true.

For Sam, of course, things haven’t exactly ended, because he is spending another year boarding and will have his commencement/graduation/end next June.  It’ll be different, in part because he’ll already have made the leap to “away.”  And it’ll be different because he won’t be graduating near home, so I can’t make all my neighbors gather and fuss.  But with luck we’ll all be together again – grandparents included – and it’ll be a big huge deal.  That’s the way it seems to be turning out in this family.  Reaching goals, coming to a place of achievement, marking rites of passage: we notice, and we eat cake.

A Middle

So, now, it’s high summer – August – and I feel like a yo-yo.  I keep pinging around.  I helped Lily get set up on the Cape so she could work her usual summer job at the fruit’n’veg stand.  I helped Sam get started at Berklee, where he’s been percussing away. I’ve helped Max and four others find an apartment in New York, where they’ll be volunteering with City Year for 11 months in public schools. Max hasn’t started yet, but he’s fully engaged in planning and will soon head with Mark in a U-Haul filled with furniture donated from generous friends.

And I’m in the middle of too many projects.  I’m working on the syllabus for the course I’ll be teaching in the fall.  I’ve done another round of research for a long piece, but I haven’t written it yet.  I’ve emptied my office of books, but I still have a dozen, deep file cabinet drawers to sort through and vast stacks of papers to sort.  Good news: underneath the horrible, mouldy carpet lies a hard wood floor.  Such potential.  Kind of a metaphor for everything else.  Who knows what’s underneath?  Maybe something that with a bit of polish will shine?

I feel stuck in the middle, meanwhile. After all the fanfare, not much has changed.  I’m still buying groceries and emptying the dishwasher.  The kids are keenly aware that new sorts of independence are just around the corner, but they haven’t quite reached the corner yet.  A bit of push-me-pull-you has ensued.  Normal, I know, in the Separation Derby, but not always comfortable.

A Beginning

You give everything you’ve got to these growing, shifting children, and if you are actually able to give what they need – not necessarily what they want or you expect – you get … to be left alone.  This somehow seems a bad bargain at the moment, although older friends tell me it’s actually great.  Right now, I think, “Who’d be crazy enough to sign on?  Three times?”  But that’s what the Bowl o’ Cherries is all about.  You’ve got to savor the delicious fruit of raising a family, recognizing that you’re going to be left with a messy napkin filled with pits.  The tasty fruit is gone.  The seeds are to scatter.  They’re going to mature into the loveliest trees. Probably in someone else’s yard.  You’ve been so busy getting to this point that other parts of the garden have lain fallow or even gone to seed. What to do?  Begin again.

Mired in the middle after so many endings, I am engaging in a tiny beginning. I’ve had my first two cello lessons and can now play both the “Dreidel” song and “Jingle Bells.”  Pizzicato only.  I told this to a neighbor’s son, a young man I have loved since he and my kids were all 5.  He’s a wonderful musician with a wry sense of humor.  Next, he assured me: Bach’s cello suites – preferably Number Two.  I told him to check back with me in 2014.

Lily and I strolled along the shore this afternoon for our first beach walk of the spring. We saw a dark figure from a distance. What was it? The undulations made it clear that we weren’t looking at anything with legs.

Had to be a seal. Was it a baby? Or just small? Neither of us could tell, but we felt protective, all the same. We weren’t carrying cell phones, so we couldn’t call for help. As we moved closer, our shoes ran over the edge of a message some previous walker had left in the sand. “ANIMAL STRANDING KNOWS.” We weren’t the first to have come across the seal. No point, then, in trying to send an alert. I wrote my own message in the sand: “SEAL VERY TIRED 3 PM TH.” Who would read this? Certainly not the seal.

We watched the seal labor its way to the dune.  It left an odd trail, pushing off with flippers, propelling its sleek, round body in short slithers.  Eyes open, blondish whiskers on end, it drew deep breaths from its muzzle into its chest, then drooped its head onto the sand. Were we anthropomorphizing to imagine the seal felt defeated?

Last summer, we routinely swam at high tide with seals in the Atlantic. We walked on the beach at low tide and waved to them. Our dog Amos barked and barked, begging them to come ashore to play. And then he braved the surf, paddling out to meet them. They didn’t appreciate his pathological friendliness, diving beneath the waves as soon as he got near. All of us, human and canine, wanted to bond with these pup-like creatures.  We stopped trying when the Coast Guard issued alerts about Great White sightings. The sharks were apparently as interested in these uncharacteristically large groups of seals as were we.

What was the kindest thing Lily and I could do? Lily walked behind the seal, thinking the seal might move away from her down towards the water. The seal made a few short moves, then took a deep breath and stopped. Our distress increased. The tide was going out. If the seal didn’t get itself into the ocean, it’d be another six hours before the tide rose enough to buoy it back into the sea. By then, we figured, the little seal would be dead. We spoke to the seal as if we were speaking to Amos. Which is sort of how we’d speak to a toddler. The seal lifted its head and opened its eyes. It took another deep breath and looked — we thought — as confused as we felt. Then it moved towards the high water mark in the sand.  We cheered it on as it approached the water’s edge. And then it stopped.

I bent down low.  My hands scooped wet sand, which I threw at the seal. Lily was appalled. But the seal scooched towards the water.  So I scooped more sand and lunked it seal-ward. “Wah!” the seal said. Lily and I froze. “Wah!” we said back. The seal took yet another deep breath and stopped moving. The water was so close! A few more slide-hops, and that little round pinniped would be in place so the waves would grab it. Lily and I reverted to the only seal language we could muster.  We pulled in our elbows and clapped our hands together, making barking noises that sounded like…humans trying to sound like cartoon seals. I threw a little more sand. The seal began to wriggle parallel to the water, then once again faced the dune.

“No more sand throwing!” Lily shouted. I argued that we should do everything we could to get the seal back in the ocean. Lily argued that if the seal wanted to get into the water, it would already have done so. After another fifteen minutes mostly of watching, we walked back to the car. We periodically swiveled our heads to check — the seal still wasn’t near the water.

Was it sick? Was it too tired to swim? Do seals get too tired to swim? Was it a very small, very old seal whose time had come?

My run-in with the little seal reminded me of the stunned birds I’ve tried to nurse back to health, the stray animals I’ve tried and failed to revive. Unlike others who might nurse the stunned and stray out of altruism, I’ve always been hoping that if they get better, they’ll tell me what happened. No matter who or what I meet, I always want to have a conversation.  I want to hear the story, to understand.  And this exasperates my husband and children. Sam to me, a few years ago: “Can’t you just go through the check-out line without…asking???”  The answer then, now, and probably forever?  Um, no. Today, I longed for a translator fish to pop in my ear, a la Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide, to communicate with everyone and everything — strangers, teenagers and, especially, seals.

Lily came out of her interview at a small, elite New England liberal arts college sure that she’d had a good conversation but frustrated by the content. She knew she was supposed to “take charge” of the interview, so she asked a question about how well the college accommodated students with learning differences. She wanted to know, specifically, how she would go about fulfilling a language requirement given she’s dyslexic. The interviewer reassured her that the academic dean was always willing to go to bat for students with documented disabilities. Some professors wouldn’t “get it,” the interviewer said, but college policy would always back up LD students. With accommodations, Lily would be able to fulfill her requirements, just like everyone else. “Besides,” the interviewer told Lily, “it’s no one’s business.”

I shook my head as Lily gave me the report. The phrase “no one’s business” evoked the kinds of things people who considered themselves enlightened would say about “different lifestyles” when I was growing up. Upon learning that so-and-so was lesbian or gay, a free-thinker in the ’70s might say, “I don’t have a problem with that. It’s no one’s business, whatever two people choose to do behind closed doors.”

How far we’ve come as a country in terms of sexuality. Our goal isn’t to tolerate but to embrace. Full equality means that workers put same-sex partners on health insurance policies, high school students take whomever they wish to the prom, and little kids grow up celebrating family as two moms, two dads, one mom, one dad, a mom and a dad, or any combination thereof. Ads, TV shows, films, music — all forms of popular culture normalize the range of sexuality at long last.

In the best of all possible worlds, every college admissions interviewer would openly ask students about their learning styles. Kids wouldn’t just submit standardized tests. They’d submit learning profiles. The goal wouldn’t be to see if institutions of higher learning adhered to the law.  It would be to make sure that every professor, lecturer, and teaching assistant had undergone rigorous training in multi-modal learning.  Every syllabus would offer a variety of assessment techniques.  All students would be choosing courses based on what would maximize their chances to master material and produce good work.

Hip schools have come to promote LGBTQ safe spaces, pasting rainbow-colored stickers on classrooms, offices, and meeting areas, making it everybody’s business to protect against discrimination and danger. I’d like to see LD communities developing a similar icon, something that would immediately signify that kids with learning differences are welcome and safe.  The ADA may have reached its 20th anniversary, but we still have a long way to go when college admissions officers think they’re being sensitive when they tell students “it’s no one’s business” if they’re LD.

I felt terrible telling Lily to steer future interview conversations away from dyslexia and accommodations.  What did she want the admissions folks to know about her?  That she is a tremendous student? That she is a budding documentary filmmaker?  That she has tons of experience working with young children and is interested in human development?  That she loves to spend time outdoors?  Only after an institution has admitted her should she bring up dyslexia, because, as the admissions officer explained all too clearly, we’re living in an academic world of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

I slowed my pace Saturday afternoon. I fell back to savor the view. Six long, suntanned legs in step, striding along a wide, dirt path. I wasn’t straining to hear the conversation, but I couldn’t help hearing the laughter. I just wanted to look.

In my arms: Sam’s black trousers, rumpled white button down shirt, black belt, black tie, black socks, and dust-covered black shoes. It’d taken him a few trips into his cabin at camp to find everything he’d need to wear for the concert that night. I cradled the outfit, remembering trips to Macy’s and Target to secure each item, several of which have been pressed into service for years.

A summer of firsts. This isn’t Sam’s first time at music camp.  It’s actually his fifth. But it’s the first time his sibs have been able to visit. Instead of going away on their own adventures, they’ve spent the summer close to home. Lily’s been working in a produce market. Max has been punching in at Economy Hardware and training for soccer. They’ve both been getting ready to apply to colleges (emphasis on the getting). Sam will take an extra year before he’s at this stage. He’s going to boarding school in September for another go at junior year before rushing headlong into college madness. While he finishes off music camp this week, Lily, Max, and I will visit colleges.

Sam will leave home first. It’s a year earlier than I’d anticipated. I thought I was done with my grieving, having had my fill of middle-of-the night waking this past spring. I was wrong. It’s all right at the surface again, and I am mourning the loss of time with gifted, goofy Sam. But I’m not the only one grieving.  Lily and Max are having to figure out the letting-go themselves. “It’s like missing a piece of a puzzle,” Lily tells me.  ”When we’re together, it’s like, ‘Ahh. Yeah.  There’s that missing piece.’” As with everything else in our family, things are complicated.  The celebrations.  The milestones. The losses. There are inevitable feelings of comparison and competition that are known to all families with children, but these are magnified exponentially with multiples. Who talked first?  Walked? Rode a bike? Started dating? And now: the first to leave home?

The competition evaporated — at least for a little while Saturday — as the three fell in together.  I wanted to stand right next to Sam and hear the full report. But instead, I hung back. I marveled at the three sets of long legs with the same intensity that I counted toes after their birth. I thought about the almost 18 years of work Mark and I have done to create a family where these three can delight in such close connection and also claim what each needs and knows.  I loved.

Tomorrow, May 1, is D-Day for high school seniors.  All those who have been put through brutal application and acceptance processes, these kids who have a new appreciation for the concept of a “wait list,” will have to make up their minds.  By tomorrow, they’ve got to fill out paperwork and mail deposits into the colleges of their choice.  This is it.

I’m hearing from family and friends how hard it is to balance feelings of pride and delight against the sadness of upcoming loss as their kids make these sometimes tough decisions. I spoke on the phone last night with my sister-in-law who lives in Virginia. Her daughter — my niece — has decided to start school next September in California.  A beloved friend in San Diego is coming to terms with her son’s decision to head to Boston. The silver lining is that we’ll have more opportunities to visit, but that doesn’t ease her heartache at having her son leave home in such a definitive way. And I am struggling with the implications of one of my kids’ decision to attend boarding school in New Hampshire in the fall.  Distance.  Life as we know it is about the change dramatically.

My sister-in-law, my friend, I — we are all members of the tail end of the Baby Boom.  We have all made choices to curtail professional ambitions so that we’ve been able to have more time with our growing children. Sociologists and gender analysts in a few decades will surely have a field day when they pick apart our lives.  I shudder to think what they will conclude.  Here on the ground, in the moment, what I see is a desire for deep connection with family.  A friend has told me since her kids were born that her greatest accomplishment will be if her kids want to come home for Thanksgiving when they are grown.  I think she speaks for an entire generation.

I don’t know if our desire for proximity and reciprocity among our growing children is good or bad.  Don’t know if it’s mostly about us or our kids.  Do we want something for them that we didn’t have? Is this deep-seated desire yet another manifestation of the narcissism of our generation?

NBC has tapped into these complicated feelings with its new drama Parenthood. The show airs Tuesdays at 10 PM Eastern Time.  It chronicles the ins and outs of the Braverman clan — two aging Early Boomer parents, their four mid-life Late Boomer kids, and their six growing grandchildren.  Each episode is studded with scenes in which adult children gather to celebrate even the smallest extended family happenings. The camera lovingly films the extended clan gathered at a local park to cheer on one of the kid’s baseball games.  It shows the entire family in a public pool as the youngest member successfully swims for the first time.   The Bravermans all grapple with demons.  None is perfect.  But none suffers alone. They share their imperfections, seeking each others’ advice in person and on the phone.  They take comfort in their ability to drop by each others’ homes and offices. Their lives are tightly braided together, and the show’s writers demonstrate again and again that this mostly brings the characters deep satisfaction.

I have come to think of Parenthood as family porn.  We Late Boomers who feed our children slow food at family suppers want more time with the people we have raised to adulthood.  And just as they are heading off to have their own adventures like so many tufts on a dandelion, we crave stories about families who choose to live in proximity.  The cameras filming Parenthood linger over the faces of siblings who choose to babysit each others’ children and attend their birthday parties.  We grew up watching Dynasty and Dallas, night time soap operas about the evil machinations of family members hell-bent on destroying each others’ lives.  Now we are hungry for shows that allow us to fantasize about the essential goodness of kin and connection. If we can’t have our own family suppers, at least we can watch the Bravermans enjoying theirs.

While Lily was hanging out Sunday at Smith College, getting a sense of what it means to attend an all-women’s institution in the 21st century, I was reading Hilary Mantel’s autobiography, Giving Up the Ghost (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003). Mantel recently won the Mann Booker Prize for her brilliant, challenging novel about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall. The book so intrigued me that I pulled everything of Mantel’s from my branch library’s shelves. The autobiography was among the haul and proved to be a fortuitous read on this particular trip.

Mantel was studying law in her late teens and early twenties, first at the London School of Economics, then, following her geologist husband, at Sheffield University. She described her disappointment with Sheffield: “one of my tutors was a bored local solicitor who made it plain that he didn’t think women had any place in his classroom.” (153) Mantel’s comment on her tutor’s approach to women’s education is worth sharing:

Some people have forgotten, or never known, why we needed the feminist movement so badly. This was why: so that some talentless prat in a nylon shirt couldn’t patronize you, while around you the spotty boys smirked and giggled, trying to worm into his favor. The birth control revolution of the late sixties had passed our elders by — educators and employers both.  It was assumed that marriage was the beginning of a woman’s affective life, and the end of her mental life.  It was assumed that she neither could nor would exercise choice over whether to breed; poor silly creature, no sooner would her degree certificate be in her hand before she’d cast all that book learning to the winds, and start swelling and simpering and knitting bootees. When you went for a job interview, you would be asked, if you were not wearing a wedding ring, whether you were engaged; if you were engaged or married, you would be asked when you intended to ‘start your family.’ Whether you were celibate, or gay, or just a sensible preplanner, you had to smile and jump through the flaming hoops held up for you by some grizzled ringmaster, shifty and semi-embarrassed as he asked a girl half his age to tell him about her sex life and account for her next ovulation. (153-154)

I wish Mantel had kept her verb tense in the present: why we need the feminist movement so badly. The fight’s not over. Here’s a not-so-subtle statistic I learned during the information session at Smith: at women’s colleges, women hold 100% of all leadership positions. At peer institutions, men hold 90% of all leadership positions. Lily will decide what she’ll decide when it comes to college. Meanwhile, if I had it to do all over again, I’d be inclined to explore women’s colleges with an open mind.

Mantel titled her memoir “Giving Up the Ghost” as a way to refer to the process she went through as she coped with surgical menopause and subsequent infertility. She was diagnosed with endometriosis in her late 20s. Her illness would end her law career, opening the way for her fiction writing but closing her path to parenthood.  ’Twould have been excellent if she’d added in one sentence about the importance of not giving up the ghost when it comes to feminism.