highway

Mother’s Day and Other Things I’ve Been Utterly Certain Yet Completely Wrong About

May 13th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Last Sunday, we reprised a tradition we’ve been keeping every year since we moved to Charlottesville: breakfast at La Taza on Mother’s Day. This year, only two other people were at the restaurant. I wasn’t offered a complimentary mimosa, unlike all the other years. The server didn’t even wish me a happy Mother’s Day.

We brought the New York Times and the local paper’s Sunday funnies. Not one mention of Mother’s Day. What was the world coming to?

You get where I’m going with this. Something was wrong. But it didn’t occur to me that that something was me.

Not until after lunch, when I telephoned my mother. “Happy Mother’s Day!” I said, with enough enthusiasm to make up for everyone else’s seeming indifference. Then came a long, uncomfortable pause, not my mother’s usual effusive response. What was going on?

Finally, she said, “It’s next week, Sharon.” Another pause. “But thanks for the flowers.”

After that, the signs were everywhere. Literally. At the mall, every surface was covered with these words: “Mother’s Day is May 13th.” How had I missed them?

I’m not telling this story because I revel in exposing my every embarrassing gaffe (although I do). I’m telling this story because I was so certain yet so wrong that Mother’s Day was May 6. What else am I sure but deluded about? Sometimes we hold beliefs so stubbornly we ignore every hint that contradicts what we already think. Let’s not even start with politics and religion. Those are divisive topics, inappropriate on the holiday that unites our whole country. Mother’s Day.

Which is today. Right?

Joan Didion on Mothering

May 5th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Is every generation of children less independent than the previous one? When I talk to mothers of my generation, many bemoan the way childhood has changed into an overscheduled, chaperoned, playdate-studded sanctuary. They remember whole summers when they were children, playing Mother May I, but never needing to actually ask for permission to wander their neighborhood, all day until supper.

But when I read Joan Didion’s most recent memoir, Blue Nights, I was struck by how much she thought her childhood had been free, but her daughter’s had not. Her daughter, who died recently, would have been my age.

“It so happened that I was a child during World War Two,” she says, “which meant that I grew up in circumstances in which even more stress than usual was placed on independence. . . There was a war in progress. That war did not revolve around or in any way hinge upon the wishes of children. In return for tolerating these home truths, children were allowed to invent their own lives. The notion that they could be left to their own devices—were in fact best left so—went unquestioned. Once the war was over . . . this laissez-faire approach continued.”

And she’s not just talking about children being allowed to walk to school by themselves. “I remember getting my learner’s driving permit at age fifteen-and-a-half,” she writes, “and interpreting it as a local mandate to drive from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe after dinner, two or three hours up one of the switchbacked highways into the mountains and, if you just turned around and kept driving, which was all we did, since we already had whatever we wanted to drink in the car with us, two or three hours back. This disappearance into the heart of the Sierra Nevada on what amounted to an overnight DUI went without comment from my mother and father.” It’s a wonder any of them survived to have their own children!

Her generation of parents, by contrast, are naggers and coddlers. “Parenting,” she says, “has undergone a telling transformation: we used to define success as the ability to encourage the child to grow into independent (which is to say into adult) life, to “raise” the child, to let the child go. If a child wanted to try out his or her new bicycle on the steepest hill in the neighborhood, there may have been a pro forma reminder that the steepest hill in the neighborhood descended into a four-way intersection, but such a reminder, because independence was still seen as the desired end of the day, stopped short of nagging.”

Didion is my mother’s generation, a generation that became parents not during World War II, but Vietnam. In my memory, it is my mother’s generation that encouraged independence, while my generation of parents coddles and nags. Maybe every generation feels this way. When my daughter becomes a parent, will she look back at her childhood as relatively free? Will she be wistful for the way things are today?

Blanket Bear

April 3rd, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink


When you want to dig deep into your past and unearth essential truths, what do you do if you’re only eight years old? My daughter just wrote the mini personal essay below, about the day after she was born. No pseudonyms or composite characters were used. Some of the facts, however, may be secondhand or slightly anthropomorphized. Stay tuned for the next installments, backstories about each plush animal she has ever loved, hated, or remained completely indifferent about.

Blanket Bear was old, the oldest resident in Ella’s toybox, and all the toys respected her for it. The day after Ella was born, Blanket Bear had come, a gift from Aunt Mary. Blanket Bear, who had always shown great affection for her girl, was seldom taken out of the toybox. She had all the other stuffed animals to play with, so you shouldn’t judge Ella too harshly. Blanket Bear will never forget Ella’s face when she arrived: so peaceful. Her mother unwrapped her box and gently set Blanket Bear down into the crib. Ella didn’t wake up, only circled her hand around her. Blanket Bear was one of Ella’s comforts, more than she’ll ever realize. Just knowing that Blanket Bear is there is a certain consolation, even now. You don’t check to see if your heart is beating. It just is. Just like Blanket Bear, you take it for granted, but that doesn’t make it any less necessary. Blanket Bear or your heart.

Valentine’s Day Odyssey

February 13th, 2012 § 3 comments § permalink


“We have a lot to live up to if we’re going to be a model couple,” my husband James said after comments from two friends. One, about ten years my junior, told us she and her husband want to be like us “when they grow up.”

The other comparison—a far more common one—was from a man whose marriage is starting to end. He said he looks at James and me, both divorced and happily remarried, and sees his future.

Our marriage is a fairy tale to me, still. It’s also the end of an odyssey fraught with monsters.

Neither of these two friends knew my ex-husband, who, after my son was born, spiraled into agoraphobia, manic depression, and panic disorder. Who stopped working and racked up debt and became afraid to be alone. Who threatened to kill himself if I left. Who clung to me like I was a life raft, even though I knew if I stayed we both would drown.

Like Odysseus, I finally found my way home. And here I am, in a marriage almost ten years old, which produced a daughter whose entire life is calm seas and fair weather.

Happy Valentines Day, sweet child. May you and your future husband be like us when you grow up, too. Though may God, Zeus, or your own good sense spare you the journey that landed us here.

Reading Anne: Lessons on Bloody War and Underwear

February 3rd, 2012 § 2 comments § permalink

“The Nazis are good now,” my eight-year-old daughter Ella half asked, half said.

“No, the Nazis are still bad. But the Germans are good.”

“That’s what I meant,” she said.

World War II was still an abstraction to her. It didn’t have the human connection that would make it real. It was time to read Anne Frank.

We finished The Diary of a Young Girl last night, and although the book is so famous it has almost become a cliché, its painful, hopeful beauty startled me. I expected to have to explain words like D-Day and Gestapo, to tell Ella about the horrors of Auchwitz and the evils of anti-Semitism. But I didn’t realize I would have to teach her about puberty.

Anne lived in the Secret Annexe from the ages of twelve to fifteen, and the timing of her period is a frequent topic. (“What’s a period?” Ella asked, in the same breath as “What’s an invasion?”) Anne is mostly cheerful and even keeled, but she also becomes a rebellious teenager, writing a letter to father saying that she is responsible to no one and will no longer obey him.

In our minds, Anne will always be a teenager, because her life was cut short. Thanks to her book, both my daughter and I grew up a little bit, ourselves.

Why Kids Shouldn’t Read Grown-Up Books—Or Maybe They Should

January 26th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink


Yesterday I was at the public library with my eight-year-old daughter, Ella, looking for information on French culture for a school report. The librarian found one book on the juvenile shelves then gave us a call number for a book in the adult section. Ella wanted to read the adult book immediately, so we installed ourselves around the only empty table in the children’s section and she opened the book to the middle. “I don’t know why this was in the grown-up section,” Ella said.

“Because it’s for grown-ups,” I said. Although I wondered, too—for about thirty seconds.

Because the next thing Ella said was: “What is A-B-O-R-T-I-O-N?

“What?” I said. Not that I couldn’t spell.

“ABORTION!” Ella shouted, as if my only problem was that I couldn’t hear. All heads—from toddlers to tweens, their parents, and every librarian—turned to see what I would say. Or maybe they were just wondering what kind of mother would let her eight-year-old read a book about abortion.

I pulled the book to my side of the table. She had opened it to the chapter on “Courtship and Marriage” and was reading about how changing views on the Catholic Church in France have affected abortion practices and therefore birth rates. “That’s why this book is for grown-ups,” I said.

“But what does abortion mean?” she persisted.

“I don’t want to tell you.” Those were my exact words, juvenile and stubborn, like a playground taunt. Ella pouted, of course now more curious than ever. I scooped up the book and told her it was time to go home.

But why didn’t I tell her? I don’t think it was just because it seemed like my entire town was watching or that I was afraid the two- and three-year-olds would look up from their Very Hungry Caterpillars and become prematurely sex-starved.

Maybe I didn’t tell her because the word means so many different things to so many different people. But if I don’t provide Ella with my version, she’ll fill the void with rumor and misinformation.

She’s bound to hear the word during the presidential campaign. I remember canvassing in my neighborhood for local and national politicians and hearing some people tell me, from behind their screen doors, that abortion was the one issue they considered when choosing a candidate. I sometimes take Ella canvassing with me, and I don’t want her to have abortion explained to her by angry Tea Partiers.

I don’t remember explaining abortion to my son, since it fell to my husband to give him the “sex talk.” What I do recall is discussing the book Freakonomics with my son when he was thirteen, including the chapter that explains the drop in crime rate as a link to Roe versus Wade (fewer crimes were committed because fewer criminals had been born).

No matter what side of the political spectrum you’re are on, abortion is not a happy subject to talk to your children about. Part of me is sad that I can’t keep Ella innocent of it forever. But the other part of me realizes it’s my duty to keep her informed. Now if I could just figure out what I’m going to say.

To Paris, with Love and Red Cowboy Boots

November 13th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Are we in Paris, France or Paris, Texas? My essay in The Nervous Breakdown ponders the way we never know how American we are until we leave the country.
Here is the link:
The Nervous Breakdown

Thirty-two

November 13th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink


The other day I went to a birthday party for a friend. That morning, I told my son about it. “She’s turning thirty-two,” I said. “So young.”

Predictably, he said, “Seems pretty old to me.” To a seventeen-year-old, when you’re thirty-two you’re practically in your grave.

I know how he feels, actually.

Thirty-two was the year when I felt the oldest, when every day my mortality hit me more keenly than it ever has before or since. It is the age my father was when he died, and it still seems strange that I should live to be older than he ever will be.

Scary Night

November 1st, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

As darkness overcame Charlottesville, vampires, zombies, and witches trolled the streets, followed by a few frighteningly cute ballerinas and creepily kitschy Pillsbury Dough Boys. But for me, the real scary moment came when I watched my seventeen-year-old son click the “Submit” button on his college application.

When the application process began, I vowed to be hands off, a promise my son reminded me of daily. I would let him make his own choices, write his own essays. And I did.

Yet it’s hard to let go. I want to tell the Admissions Committee about this person I have lived with and cared so deeply for all his life, but there is no place on the application for me.

I want to tell them about the time last summer when my son called me from his job as counselor at a sleepaway camp. “One of my campers had an asthma attack in the night and the other counselor took him to the emergency room,” my son said. “Now I’m in charge of the whole cabin by myself.” He called me again two days later, in the same situation. He told me about helping one of his campers with dialysis and recounted the story of another boy who started the session having tantrums every time he didn’t want to move from one activity to another. None of the other counselors wanted to discipline this troubled boy, especially since he was the son of one of the camp trustees. My son said, “At first I couldn’t stand the kid. But then I realized he just wanted attention. He was homesick.” He sat with the boy and described his favorite foods—stacks of pancakes dripping with syrup—and gradually the boy came around, and the tantrums stopped. “After that, he became one of my favorite kids,” my son said.

But the story of moving from child to parental figure is not the one my son wanted to tell about himself. Instead, he wrote about overcoming his fear of insects after watching the creatures treated with reverence and made beautiful through the lens of a Terence Malik film. He also wrote about the short distance between “harasser” and “enforcer” at the camp waste stations, after moving from one role to the next in a year. He described seeing his former self—his ghost, perhaps, since he wrote it on Halloween—in the mischievous smirks of the kids who kept trying to get away with ever more elaborate pranks.

He wrote about how he sees himself, not how I see him. And that is how it should be. Dear Admissions Committee, I hope you agree.

Reading Fiction about September 11 on September 11

September 29th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

My essay about celebrating the 10th anniversary of September 11 by reading Jess Walters’s novel The Zero and Deborah Eisenberg’s story “Twilight of the Superheroes” recently appeared in The Nervous Breakdown.

Here is the link:
The Nervous Breakdown

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