Sharon Harrigan

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Resolved: To Be More Like a Man

30oz sirloin

My husband, daughter, and I were sitting at the breakfast table. I was folding James’ underwear when he burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” I asked, and he read aloud a story about football teams competing in a “beef bowl,” eating up to eight pounds each at a sitting.

“That’s disgusting,” Ella and I agreed.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s funny, too.”

“The only thing a man proves by gorging on meat is how insecure he is about his masculinity,” I said.

“It’s selfish,” Ella said. “They should leave some meat for everybody else. It’s like people who want to kill wolves because the hunters want all the elk meat to themselves.” She’d been following the New York Times stories about the wolf debate in the West. I wasn’t sure I saw the connection, but I gave her credit for trying.

“Men,” Ella and I said to each other with our eyes.

I hate “battle of the sexes” conversations, and I didn’t mean to engage in one. My husband is the most accommodating man I know. I have no complaints.

“The beef bowl is pretty funny,” I admitted. “As funny as me sitting here folding your underwear.”

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “It’s a gesture of love.” And then I started to silently laugh. At myself.

How many other ways did I use my time carelessly, as a mother, wife, writer, editor, and friend? It’s the time for New Year’s resolutions. I resolve to be more selfish. More driven. More focused. I resolve to work more like a man.

I realize that last line is provocative, that I am perpetuating nothing more than a stereotype. That’s because I don’t need to be more like a real man, but more like a stereotypical one.

I vow to put my work first, to make finishing my book this year my first priority. In the past two months, I agreed to write four interviews and five book reviews. I’ll follow-through with my promises, but I won’t agree to take on any projects in the interests of being a good “literary citizen” until my own work is done. I’ll try to make 2014 the year in which I don’t do the metaphorical equivalent of folding my husband’s underwear, in my career.

We’ll see what happens. If I’m seized with uncontrollable cravings for a plate of meat as heavy as a newborn baby, I’ll let you know. It could be funny.

By

Odyssey

book

Last week my aunt and uncle drove me back to the woods of northern Michigan where I spent many idyllic childhood summer days, first with my family and then, after my father’s death, with my grandparents. We used to drive four hours from the city starting at four in the morning. We would arrive at eight, the whole day ahead of us.

This time we drove at five and arrived at nine. It was the first time I’d been back since I moved out of Michigan for college and for good. I’d returned to Detroit (“downstate,” as we Michiganders call it), the place I was raised, many times. But northern Michigan, where my grandparents and ancestors were born, feels like my spiritual home. The pipelines overgrown with blackberry brambles, the red pines, the white pines, the salt licks for game, the deer blinds. The intersection of Sharon Road with Shively Road, my first and maiden name. The place my people come from.

I am writing a book about my father, who died when I was seven. Why have I waited decades to try to remember—and discover—the facts about his life? Why haven’t I returned Up North since I became an adult?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that on this trip my aunt and uncle gave me my father’s copy of The Odyssey, his name inscribed and notes peppered throughout. It’s the only book of his I own. A treasure. A relic even. I’m listening to it, as quietly and purposefully as a hunter listens as she waits for a porcupine to pop its head out of a hole in a tree before she shoots.

This is one thing the book says to me: Odysseus took decades to return to Ithaca from Troy. He was sidetracked and detoured, sirened and lured, tempted and tricked. Yet he never gave up hope. He finally made it home. So will I.

By

Season of Grief

deaf leaves

My blog has been quiet lately. It’s been hard to know what to say at a time like this. I’ve found, when trying to comfort my family, that sometimes silence works best. Just listening.

At first I tried to tell my husband, who lost his father last week: The situation could be worse. A long, happy life and a peaceful end are all any of us can hope for. But those platitudes weren’t helpful. Grief is not like the chicken pox. It’s not something we can inoculate ourselves against. We have to allow the pain of loss to run its course, the pox on our hearts; the mental and metaphysical sores that blister and ooze.

Grief makes us different from our normal selves. My husband wanted me to sit in his office with him the day he heard his father’s end was near. He teared up a little in front of his classes when he told them. And, of course, they understood, some of them writing him sympathy notes afterwards. Even self-centered undergraduates can understand the death of a parent.

My normally happy-go-lucky daughter has been weighed down, too. I don’t tell her not to cry. I don’t say: At least Grandpapa lived a long life. I don’t tell her not to feel sad. She has to. We all do.

I will miss my father-in-law. I am grateful that he welcomed me into the family with warmth and enthusiasm. But my husband and daughter’s grief is more primal, the kind that turns your life into Before and After. You never forget your first experience with death. I’ve never forgotten mine. Losing my father when I was seven was the most significant thing that happened to me. My daughter will always remember when she learned—on a personal and visceral level—that we indeed do not live forever.

In the past month or so, I’ve also lost two aunts on my mother’s side, one as young as fifty-six. My mother is visiting now, and I hope I can comfort her. She brought me photographs and shared my aunt’s “sumo wrestler” hug. I want to pass on that hug to my husband and daughter. To my mother-in-law. To my mother.

What do we say to help absorb the grief of others? When my daughter cries in the middle of a store or a story or a playdate, I hand her a tissue. I try to respond to her questions, but some of them don’t have easy answers.

Why did Grandpapa have to die? Why? Why? She pulled a dictionary off the shelf and read aloud the definition for death. She flipped further and read the definition of love. Don’t we all wish we could find the answers to life’s mysteries in the dictionary?

I like to interpret her gesture as this: Love is what comes after death. It’s what doesn’t die.

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David and Goliath, or Monoprix and Giant

chatpuccino


One of the best things about our location in Paris was the store next door. Monoprix is a supermarket. It’s also a microcosm, the contemporary equivalent of old-fashioned general stores in small towns. Flour and butter and eggs and really good merguez sausage and coeur coulant chocolate cakes beckoned from the back. Clothes, books, office supplies, make-up, toiletries and kitchen gear lured people in from the street. If Monoprix didn’t stock something, that meant you didn’t need it. And yet the store wasn’t big.

Not like Giant. That’s my local supermarket here in the States. The physical space is as huge as its name, with aisles wide enough to drive a pick-up through. They sell only food and toiletries.

I have fidelity cards for both stores, so I receive e-mails from Giant and Monoprix, sometimes on the same day. The contrast makes me laugh.

Giant’s e-mail today says “Feed a family of four for $7 or less with budget-friendly recipes. This week is tuna and vegetable stove-top casserole: 1 box Rice-a-Roni Broccoli Au Gratin, 1 cup frozen peas, 1 can tuna. Mix.” Last week’s missive was a three-ingredient recipe for turkey chili.

Monoprix’s newsletter features breakfast made from three sale items: braided brioche, mango preserves, and orange juice. It reads, in French: “Add to your table a few cravings, a hint of indulgence and a lot of balance for breakfast. A slice of brioche will start you off on the right foot.” Bread, jam, and juice cost 9.26 Euros, or almost twice as much as the $7 dinner-for-four from Giant. Coffee costs extra, especially if you get a chatpuccio, or cat cappuchino, like the one Monoprix sent me (pictured above).

Or, for about the same amount as the tuna casserole or turkey chili, you can buy from Monoprix several “men’s beauty” items, the e-mail says. I can’t imagine my supermarket with the big, burly name ever daring to put the words “men” and “beauty” in the same sentence.

Because we had such a small pantry and refrigerator in Paris, I shopped at Monoprix every day. At least that’s how it felt. If I stayed away too long, I’d joke about going through “Monoprix withdrawal.”

We loved that store so much we are even considering naming our not-yet-adopted dog for it. Monop for short. It’s got a ring to it, doesn’t it?

Or do you think we should name our dog Giant? Such a name might be confusing, since he won’t be a big dog. He’s got to be small enough to slip into a handbag. Then we can take him grocery shopping.

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Are American Teachers Too Nice?

strict

My fifth-grade daughter Ella and I shook hands with her pediatrician, then he launched his check-up questions, starting with “How’s school?”

“The teachers are too nice,” Ella said.

He repressed a grin that struggled to creep up. “That’s not usually the complaint I get. Kids say their teachers aren’t nice enough.”

 Ella shrugged.

“Maybe you mean they don’t keep order in the classroom, they let kids act however they want.”

“No,” Ella said. “I mean they keep saying Good Job! even when somebody hasn’t done a good job.”

The doctor looked at me to see whether he was missing the sarcasm in Ella’s deadpan delivery.

I explained that Ella wasn’t reacting to her teachers specifically, but to the American way of praising students.“We just got back from France. Teachers are much stricter there. That’s what she’s used to.”

When Ella first started school in Paris, she was soft, overfed on an American diet of unearned praise. So it was a shock, when she saw that every piece of homework in France is graded on a scale of 20, and nobody—ever—gets a 20. “Only God gets 20,” I’ve heard people say. It is even possible to get a negative grade, since a point is taken off for every spelling error, and it’s not hard to have more than 20 errors in even one French sentence. I heard that children sometimes cried (if not in her class, at least in her school) when their test results came back. Those who didn’t cry in class sometimes did so at bedtime. If you didn’t have a thick skin, you could get beaten down.

Ella didn’t cry. Instead, she worked harder than she ever had in her short school life. The threat of a bad grade, either on paper or (worse) announced to the whole class after an oral exam, motivated her to do her best. To deserve the rare praise when it came. She doesn’t have a fragile ego. If she did, I bet the title of this blog post would be, “French Teachers Are Too Strict.” Without a question mark.

Everyone knows, after Pamela Druckerman’s book, Bringing Up Bebe (called French Children Don’t Throw Food in Britain) that stricter parenting means better behaved kids. I saw Druckerman speak in Paris, where she lives, and she won my heart. I dare you to find anything she says that isn’t common sense. But before I met her, when I’d only read how her critics summarized and sensationalized her work, I was ready to hate her. I don’t think I’m alone in that misperception because a woman in the audience at her talk said, “Isn’t your book just like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? You just want to make all us other mothers, whose children aren’t perfect, look bad?”

Druckerman replied that the Tiger Mother book and hers couldn’t be more different. Tiger mothers are ultra hands-on, spend much more time than the average Anglo or American mother on their kids, drilling them and supervising their violin practice. French mothers are ultra hands-off, teaching their children at a young age that they need to be self-sufficient. “Sois sage, comme une image,” or “Be still as a picture,” is their motto. Sage, though, means much more than still. It means wise, in the sense of smart enough to know you should be well-behaved, savvy enough that you don’t have to be told that it’s for your own good.

When Ella’s pediatrician finished checking her eyes and ears and grilling her about what she eats for breakfast, he pronounced her healthy, despite excessive levels of teacher niceness in her system. I told him that I’d try to even out the balance by being extra, extra strict at home. Now he let himself smile, and even laugh.