Category Archives: Anniversaries, Birthdays and Half-Birthdays

Oh, What a Beautiful Day!

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20080111-01

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“I might be going to the co-op today. Do you want anything?” I asked Beth. We were standing in the bathroom, snatching a brief conversation in between the everyday crises of a weekday morning. Noah was dragging his feet about getting ready for school. We were out of eggs. Our internet connection had gone missing.

“Eggs,” she replied, naming my second reason for going.

“I’m after yogurt,” I told her. “I’m going to measure what we have and see if there’s enough.”

“What do you need it for?” Beth asked.

“The cake,” I answered, smiling a little. The cookbook had been on the kitchen counter open to the recipe since the day before.

“Oh, the cake!” Beth said, sudden realization showing on her face. “Happy Anniversary!” she said. We exchanged a quick kiss. Our grown-up celebration, when we leave June with a paid sitter for the first time ever and have brunch at Savory, will be Sunday so it had slipped her mind that the actual day was today.

Now if you’re scratching your head and thinking, “Wasn’t there an anniversary post on this blog not six months ago?” we celebrate two, the dating anniversary in July and the commitment ceremony anniversary in January. I guess we do it for the same reason we celebrate the kids’ half-birthdays. We like celebrations and we like cake.

The cake is a moist, dense spice cake with a lemon glaze. It was our wedding cake and I’ve made it almost every January 11 since 1992, the year of our commitment ceremony.

Our commitment ceremony was largely a homemade affair. We were just months out of grad school (the first round for me). Beth had a part-time job at ERIC (www.eric.ed.gov/) and for most of the time between my proposal in July and the ceremony in January I was unemployed. I started working at Project Vote (www.projectvote.org/) in mid-December. Our parents were less supportive of our relationship than they are now, so we were on our own when it came to planning and financing the ceremony.

Except we weren’t, not really. A friend with bakery experience decorated the cake. Another friend helped us track down all the pink and purple potted violets and purple eucalyptus branches available at local florists and one of my college advisors paid for them. Guests brought food and made speeches and wrote touching notes in the guest book. Although we were pinched for cash (we had a thousand dollar budget), it ended up being just what we wanted, small and personal and meaningful. Better still, it served as a turning point in our parents’ acceptance of us as a couple. Five of the six parents and stepparents attended and after the ceremony the two who were having the hardest time letting go of their vision of how their daughters’ lives would unfold started to come around, one quickly and the other gradually.

We didn’t have enough yogurt so after Beth and Noah were gone, June was bathed and a load of laundry was started, we ventured out into a cold and drizzly morning, headed for the co-op where I purchased yogurt, eggs and an anniversary card.

I made the cake in the afternoon, shortly before Noah’s bus came. I managed to get most of the ingredients into the bowl while June was in the high chair eating a late lunch of vegetarian hot dogs and succotash, so I only had the add the last few, mix them up and pour the batter into the greased pan while she clung to my legs and screamed. This is the hallmark of a successful baking experience by my current standards. I had a moment’s hesitation before pouring out the batter. It seemed thin. I wondered if I’d only put in one cup of flour instead of two. I was almost sure I’d put in two, though, so I slid the pan into the oven and hoped for the best.

When Noah got home, the clouds were clearing so we played outside a bit, and then the focus of the day shifted to getting him undressed, into his bathing suit and back into his clothes by 4:00 p.m.. He had a swimming lesson at 5:30 and he watches television from 4:00 to 5:00 most weekdays. June usually watches with him so I used most of the hour to work on an editing project I’m doing for Word Girl (www.wordgirl.biz), interrupted every five or ten minutes or so by June coming in with her little cup held out Oliver Twist-style while she pleaded “Mir ov?” (Translation: “More olives.” Sliced black olives are one of June’s favorite afternoon snacks and she can really put them away.) When only fifteen minutes remained, I checked to see if the cake was cool and I poured the glaze over it. Then I outlined it with a ring of red frosting from a can (leftover from Beth’s Buzz cake) and drew a sixteen in the middle. Finally I sprinkled pink and purple sparkles (meant to evoke the pink and purple violets) liberally over the whole creation. Noah came in to see it when his television was over and he declared it “beautiful.”

Beth was home by 5:05 and we hurried to get everyone’s shoes and jackets on and to get out the door. We were going out for pizza after Noah’s lesson and it seemed quickest for everyone to leave together. June, who had been trying to organize the expedition–“Shoes on! Mommy jacket on! Where Baf?”—now trotted happily down the driveway, holding my hand. Despite the fact that she usually has no idea where we are going, she is always up for a trip. We got everyone buckled in. Beth turned the key in the ignition. And the car didn’t start.

Beth closed her eyes in frustration. Just the night before she’d come home early to attend Math Night at Noah’s school when they got in the car, the battery wouldn’t start. They’d walked to school instead and afterward her auto service came to jump-start the car. She’d driven around a while and we thought it was fixed. Everyone got out of the car. June’s face crumpled and she began to cry when I took her out of her seat and she was snatched from the brink an outing.

“I think we should still go out,” Beth said. “We should do the fun part, go out for pizza.” So she called the Y and rescheduled Noah’s lesson for Sunday afternoon, then we all trooped out to the bus stop. As we waited for a bus, she said, “I’m glad we’re a hardy family and can change plans like this.”

Once we were on a bus, we called to order ahead and once we arrived at zpizza (zpizza.com/), there was a small pineapple pizza for the kids and a pesto, eggplant and pine nut one for the grownups ready and waiting. The eggplant slices were cut into a flower pattern and they were so pretty against the green background of the pesto that I almost didn’t want to take a slice until Beth, who was waiting in a long line for drinks, had a chance to see the whole effect. But it seemed foolish not to eat when the kids were eating because who knew when they’d been tearing around the restaurant like maniacs, so after I cut June’s slice into pieces and slipped Beth’s card onto her plate, I ate.

The pizza was delicious, the kids did not descend into any truly uncivilized behavior (though June did deconstruct a stack of booster seats so she could sit in each one in turn) and we left the restaurant happy.

As we approached the bus stop we noticed a 17, the bus we needed, pulling away. They come every twenty minutes so we were in for a wait. As we got closer to the stop we noticed there was a line of buses (all different routes) standing at the stop and not moving. This was because traffic wasn’t moving. At all. We might be in for an even longer wait than we thought. I took June out of the stroller prematurely when I thought I saw a 17 approaching the stop (it was a 16). This was a grave error, because once unrestrained she wanted to run. She did not want to sit next to me on the bench. She did not want to be held (my mind flashed back to the afternoon when I had been trying to mix cake batter and it had been imperative that she be held). She squirmed and cried and twisted through a very long wait. Once we got on a bus, it limped along until the traffic cleared a couple blocks from the stop and we were on our way home.

We got home around 7:45, much later than we expected, so we couldn’t watch Fraggle Rock and we decided to skip Noah’s bath. We sat around the table to eat cake. I was a bit nervous slicing into it–had I really put two cups’ flour in? And it was fine, a moist, dense spicy cake, deeply familiar, and deeply comforting. Because even though it was rainy and cold and Noah missed his swim lesson, the important things still turned out fine. We had each other’s company, hot pizza waiting for us, a beautiful cake at home. And no matter what the weather or what plans go awry on it, January 11 will always be a beautiful day.

Giving Thanks: Food, Water and Love

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The day before Thanksgiving, Noah came home from school with a paper turkey he’d cut out and colored. It had three feathers with the pre-printed words “Doy gracias por” (“I give thanks for”). He’d filled in the blanks with “comida” (“food”), “agua” (“water”) and “mi abuela” (“my grandmother”). He’d included food and water, he explained to me, “because no one can survive” without them. He looked at the last feather. “I have two grandmothers,” he commented, as if I didn’t know. Food, water and love, I thought, that’s why we give thanks.

We drove to Wheeling on Thanksgiving Day, partly to beat the traffic and partly so Noah wouldn’t miss any school. We bought relief from his whining on the trip by listening to three unabridged Magic Tree House audio books. I actually fell asleep for ten to twenty minutes during the last one, even though I normally can’t sleep in the car unless I’m pregnant. I was pretty tired since June had been up for over an hour and a half in the middle of the night. (Unfortunately, this is not an unusual occurrence.) By the end of that wake up she was trying to sing herself back to sleep. Her version of “All the Pretty Little Horses” sounds something like this:

Hush bye, don’t cry
Go seep, baby
(Several lines of unintelligible babble except for the word “cake” pronounced clearly and with great enthusiasm.)

I wonder if this is how I sound to her when I sing it.

Anyway, my fatigue, combined with the astoundingly repetitive adventures of Jack and Annie recounted in the stilted prose of Mary Pope Osbourne knocked me right out. I missed several chapters.

We arrived mid-afternoon and dinner wasn’t until seven, so we had time for the kids to burn off some pent-up energy running around outside and for me to bathe June before we got the kids dressed for dinner. June wore a dress with a black velvet top and a puffy, gold satin skirt that a friend of Andrea’s bought for her. Andrea said she looked just like a doll. Beth’s brother Johnny and I both said, independently of each other, that she looked like the Infanta Margarita in this painting (http://www.artchive.com/meninas.htm). In either case, doll or princess, it was a new look for her.

Johnny organized Thanksgiving dinner, making cooking assignments that spread the work out among the diners. He and his wife Abby did the bulk of the cooking, making the turkey and stuffing, the mashed potatoes and a dish of broiled squash and parsnips; with Beth and me bringing the vegetarian gravy, green bean casserole and brandied sweet potatoes; Beth’s father John making the turkey gravy; and Andrea making the cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. Noah and I made turkey centerpieces out of apples, toothpicks, raisins, green olives and pistachios. Everyone got his or her favorite dish and Andrea exclaimed over and over again how thankful she was to have her children do most of the cooking.

Dinner finished up late so we let Noah and June eat their pie (or in June’s case, just the whipped cream off the top) before everyone else and we hustled them off the bed. I decided to forgo pie so I could get to bed myself. I paused only to put the kids’ cranberry-stained clothes to soak in the bathtub. I wanted everyone to get a good night’s rest. Noah was awake for a while singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” but by 9:30 all three of us were fast asleep in our shared attic bedroom.

June woke at 9:45. I popped the pacifier back in and she went back to sleep. Noah fell out of bed at 10:55. I helped him back in. Beth stayed up late chatting with Johnny and came to bed at 11:20. At last, everyone was settled in. We slept until 3:15, when all hell broke loose.

It started out pretty normal. June woke and wanted to nurse. “Nap!” she insisted when I tried the pacifier. (Nursing and sleeping are so intertwined in her mind that this is her word for nursing.) I was still down on her mat with her when Noah woke at 3:25 and wanted help going to the bathroom. Beth got up to help him. And then neither of the kids went back to sleep.

Around 3:45, Beth and June switched places. The bed was a double, too small for the three of us, and I thought June might sleep better with me, but it took another hour to get her to drop off. Meanwhile, Beth slept fitfully on the mat on the floor and Noah was wide-awake on the airbed next to me. He rolled around in bed. He sat up and watched the numbers change on the digital clock. He made shadow puppets in the light from the nightlight. He sang softly, but audibly, under his breath. He whispered numbers divisible by both two and five to himself. He saw scary shapes in the dark and needed me to drape blankets over them. He got up to go to the bathroom multiple times.

I tried patiently telling him to lie still, be quiet and go to sleep. I tried scolding him. I tried ignoring him. At 6:00 on the dot he jumped out of bed and was dashing around the corner heading for Beth’s mat. I stopped him and he protested it was time for Beth to get up and play with him. He seemed to have genuinely forgotten that he hasn’t been allowed to wake us at 6:00 since July. The new time is 6:30. At 6:30, having just finished nursing June again, I got up to find him some socks (he’d been complaining of cold feet) and a book. I was meaning to banish him downstairs and try to get back to sleep after having been awake for over three hours. But June woke while I was searching for Noah’s suitcase in the dark room and her crying woke Beth and soon the four of us were all downstairs and up for the day.

And that’s how Beth’s forty-first birthday began.

Last year on the evening of the day after Beth’s fortieth birthday, we got even less sleep, at least she and I did. Shortly after going to bed that night she had a gallbladder attack. We were at my mother and stepfather’s house for Thanksgiving and my mom took her to the emergency room while I stayed home with the kids. They were there almost all night. I was sick with worry, thinking it was a heart attack and slept little. I cuddled with June all night, nursing her when she woke. Beth and my mom returned close to dawn with the news that it was her gallbladder and she’d have to have it out but she was going to be okay. When Noah and June woke I quickly got them dressed and fed and out of the house so Beth and my mom could get some sleep. We wandered around town all morning, hanging out in a local coffee shop and the public library. We came home around lunchtime to find everyone awake and Beth still alive.

I am often cranky and out of sorts after a bad night, but all that day I was deliriously, giddily happy because Beth had not been taken from me. I wondered if it would be possible to somehow hold on to that happiness, that pure thankfulness without an intervening crisis. I suspected it would not. The petty annoyances of life have such power to drag us down. Still, I wanted to try. It’s a year later now and I can’t say I’ve never been frustrated, bored or angry. I can’t say I’ve never lost sight of the big picture and forgotten all my blessings. But I often remember that night, and that day, two days after Thanksgiving, and when I do, I try to give thanks.

Noah and I decorated Beth’s cake right after breakfast. He had his heart set on a cake decorated like Buzz, the villain’s robot henchman from Cyberchase (because a Buzz cake is what every forty-something mom secretly years for). I wondered if I was losing a key pre-Christmas opportunity here to work on the concept of giving what the recipient wants instead of what you would want, but he was just so earnest and excited about the idea I caved. To compound matters, I also let him get her a pirate-themed game for her gift after he offered to chip in five dollars of his own money (more than a month’s allowance).

Johnny and Abby took Noah out to lunch and to a science museum in Pittsburgh and they were gone six hours. Andrea’s sister Sue, her stepdaughter in-law Melody and Melody’s eighteen-month-old daughter Lily visited in the morning. After lunch, June and I crashed, taking a long nap. Beth and Andrea braved the Black Friday crowds and went shopping. Andrea bought Beth an iPhone that consumed her attention for the rest of the day and a pointer light to amuse Scarlet the cat. I think Beth’s dad had as much fun making the cat chase the streaking red light as she did chasing it. June and I watched five deer (which June insisted were camels) graze in the backyard. Johnny, Abby and a very sleepy Noah returned from their adventures (he’d slept all the way home) and regaled us with tales of the model trains and the real submarine they’d seen. We had Chinese takeout and cake for dinner and watched an episode of Fraggle Rock, which Johnny remembers fondly. (He was eleven to Beth’s fifteen when it came out and he actually watched it back then, which neither Beth nor I did.) Johnny’s a real Renaissance man, appreciating both seventeenth-century Spanish art and 1980s pop culture. I like that about him.

Just before bed, when we brought the kids downstairs to say goodnight to everyone, Noah and Andrea sang a duet of the first two verses of “Down in the Valley.” (It was late and he had to be dissuaded from singing all five.) When they got to the line “Angels in heaven know I love you,” Andrea enveloped him in a big, grandmotherly hug.

Even with a nap, I was crazy tired all day and not beside myself with joy, but still quietly, deeply, truly thankful, for food, for water and for love.

Turn! Turn! Turn!

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To everything
(Turn, turn, turn)
There is a season
(Turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose
Under Heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

From “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season)” by Pete Seeger
Adapted from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=246

Sometimes you know when things will happen. Fall arrived at 5:51 a.m. this morning, as expected. Even though it’s been warm for late September, the humidity is largely gone and there’s a chill in the air in the mornings when I go out to collect the newspaper. The red berries have appeared on our dogwood tree; its leaves are tinged with scarlet and some have even fallen. We’re at a moment of balance between the light and the dark (that blessed time of year when you can still get good corn and tomatoes at the farmers’ market and sweet, crisp apples and pears are for sale as well), but the tipping point is here. Each time we go to the Y to swim at the outdoor pool, I wonder a little sadly if it will be the last time this year. Yet at the same time I look forward to seeing the leaves turn and the snowfall through June’s eyes, this first year she’s likely to notice such things.

June’s half birthday falls on the equinox this year. Like the seasons, she’s halfway between one thing and the next. Starting tomorrow, she will be closer to two than one. Some parts of this transition are hard. She still wants her morning nap and gets very cranky without it. So by way of compromise I take her for a ride in the stroller or Beth drives her somewhere to induce a short nap that will carry her to her afternoon nap. That’s the theory anyway. In practice, the abbreviated morning nap is sometimes still too long or comes too late and interferes with the afternoon nap, returning us to our original problem. I’m going to give it at least another week to work itself out before giving up and switching tactics.

Other steps she’s taking on her journey from baby to little girl seem almost magically effortless. June is currently experiencing what the developmental psychologists call a “word explosion.” That’s just what it seems like, too. Words are just bubbling to the surface and exploding out of her. Noah says if she were a character on Super Why, her superpower would be “the power to talk.” She knows more than eighty words and adds new ones daily. She’s eager to learn more and often points to an object whose name she doesn’t know and demands, “Say!” Sometimes when she improves her pronunciation of a word (for instance when she said “yummy” for the first time instead of “nummy” which is how she usually says it), she beams and looks to me or to Beth for approval. She lets us know now when she needs a diaper change by announcing “Boopy.” (We are hoping this means she will show more of an interest in toilet training than her brother did.)

Her utterances are getting longer and more complex as well as more numerous. Her first four-word sentence was “No way! No seat!” meaning “If you think I’m getting in that car seat you have another thing coming.” One recent morning she saw a school bus out the window and said, “Bus. Noah back.” And not only does she use words to communicate with us and to keep up little running commentaries for her own amusement, she also made her toys talk to each other for the first time today. I watched her sitting on the couch with a foam rubber dinosaur in each hand. She held them so they faced each other.

“Go,” one dinosaur said.

“Shoes,” the other suggested.

“Thank you,” the first dinosaur replied.

“Thank you,” the second dinosaur returned.

And so on and so on.

She’s physically more agile as well. At the playground she tries to climb on equipment designed for much older and bigger kids. About a month ago she learned to climb the ladder to Noah’s top bunk. We had to take it down for her safety as well as the safety of the toys Noah wants to stash in a June-free zone. He’s adjusted by learning to climb up the back of the bunks. Every now and then, though, we put the ladder back and let her climb (under close maternal supervision). It gives her such joy. This afternoon as an impromptu half-birthday present I dug Noah’s old push bike out from the basement and gave it to June. I had Noah demonstrate how to sit on it and push it along with his feet. She was eager to try, but couldn’t quite figure out how to do it. She ended up alternately sitting on the seat and bouncing up and down and walking alongside it, pulling it by the handlebars. I tried to remember how we taught Noah to ride it, then I remembered he was already in daycare when he got it for Christmas at the age of almost twenty months and that he’d been riding a similar one there, so we didn’t have to teach him. I guess she will figure it out on her own. I doubt it will take long.

She’s also “prettier every day.” I know because our neighbor told me. (I am a little sad to see the red fading from her hair as she gets blonder, but her curls are more than adequate compensation. At the risk of sounding shallow, I admit I wanted curly-haired children. My own wavy golden-brown hair is my only physical vanity, even if I usually wear it back.)

Tonight, after an equinox supper of pesto burgers, corn on the cob and apple cider, we had cupcakes with orange and brown frosting and yellow sprinkles to celebrate June’s half birthday. “Nummy cake,” she commented appreciatively. Then she pointed to something on the table and began to grunt excitedly.

“What do you want, June?” I asked.

“I want…I want…” she said and trailed off, the word eluding her.

Beth and I stared at each other. “Did you hear that? She just said ‘I want’” Beth said. I nodded silently. Both words were firsts. It was an almost solemn thrill to hear her first “I,” marred only slightly by the fact that we never did figure out what she wanted.

Of course any toddler worth her salt needs to know how to throw a proper tantrum. June’s working on that, too. As Noah got ready for bed and Beth gathered up the week’s recycling and I tried to wash a pomegranate juice stain out of her light gray onesie, June expressed her displeasure that no-one was paying attention to her at that precise moment by hurling herself onto the floor in a high traffic area (between the living and dining rooms) and screaming. She doesn’t have the kicking part down yet but I’m sure she’ll get there. It’s part of what comes between one and two.

Not all change can be so easily predicted, however. This week Beth and I were deeply saddened and angered by the decision of the Maryland Supreme Court that the denial of marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples is constitutional (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/18/AR2007091802177.html & http://equalitymaryland.org/). The decision was longer in coming than expected. At one point Beth and I were daring to hope we might be married on our twentieth anniversary in July, and even after that day passed with no decision handed down, we still hoped, almost never speaking of it to each other, so as not to jinx anything. After the decision, Beth confided in me that she’d been wondering where to go for our honeymoon. I admitted I’d been wondering if we should buy Noah his first suit for the wedding. I’d also been mulling over whether he could be trusted with gold jewelry and if June could possibly follow directions well enough to strew flower petals at our feet in front of the judge. But now, something we were allowing ourselves to think of as at least potentially happening in weeks or months is again years (or decades) off. I think history is on our side, but when you look at history it’s easy to pinpoint an event as being at the beginning, middle or end of a social movement. When you are living in history, it’s harder to tell. It took American women seventy-two years to get the vote, counting from the first women’s rights convention, held in 1848 in Seneca, New York (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/naw/nawstime.html). If we take the Stonewall Riots (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots) as the birth of the modern gay rights movement and it takes much longer than that, Beth and I might be shuffling down the aisle in our walkers. She’s worth the wait, but it would be easier if I knew how long the wait would be.

Sometimes, though, change takes you by surprise, like the four purple crocuses that bloom every September in our front yard. When we moved here our old landlady was re-landscaping and gave us a bunch of bulbs she’d dug up to take to our new house. We planted them in spring, the wrong time of year for planting bulbs. Some of them, like the hyacinth and the tiger lilies, got themselves straightened out and bloom when the neighbors’ hyacinth and tiger lilies do. Other mystery bulbs never recovered from the shock and put forth only greenery and no flowers every year. (Or maybe they are greenery-only bulbs. Is there such a thing? I’m no gardener clearly.) The crocuses, however, lay dormant for several years, and now bloom every year out of season, at the time of year perhaps when the ratio of light to dark matches that in March. I’m not sure how it works, but I know it does. Despite the fact that they’ve done this before, I forget every year and I am surprised anew whenever I see them poking up out of the ground some time in the waning days of summer.

I hope some day, reading the newspaper, listening to the radio or perusing my email to be similarly surprised, by justice, come unexpected, sweet and beautiful after a long wait.

Happy Anniversary, Baby

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20070722-01

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Years ago I asked Beth if she could identify the moment she became a woman. It probably had something to do with my dissertation. I wrote it on female coming-of-age stories. For myself I had tentatively chosen the moment my mother and stepfather drove off, leaving me at college. Beth had no doubts. “It was when you first kissed me,” she said sweetly. It was the kind of answer that made me want to go back and revise mine.

That kiss was twenty years and a week ago. Well, twenty years and six days, technically, since it took place after midnight, but we’ve always celebrated it on the fifteenth because that’s when the date started. We had to discuss the kiss in an oblique, roundabout way for hours before we did it. But it did lead to two kids and a mortgage, so perhaps our caution was not misplaced.

Even after our long, tortured conversation, I jumped in blind, since Beth, who had wished on a star for me to fall in love with her, never got around to coming out to me, even after I came out to her and confessed my attraction. The whole thing was perplexing. We’d been friends for two years (she was the very first person I met at college) and our friendship had become more intense since the spring. I asked my friends the Jims, with whom I was living that summer, if they thought she was flirting with me or not. Jim K said yes. Jim B said no. In a way, their answers were not surprising since Jim K was not so secretly in love with Jim B, who did not return his feelings. In the end, the only way to find out was to kiss her and see if she kissed back. She did.

If I was the one brave enough to make the first move, Beth was the one clear-sighted enough to see the relationship for what it was, from the very beginning. When I left for a semester in Spain a month and a half later, she wrote me every day, mailed me Oreos, and bought a double futon, despite the fact that I was coming back to a boyfriend (he spent the summer at home and we’d decided to see other people until I got back from Spain in January) as well as to her and I hadn’t decided exactly what to do about that. Then there was the Spaniard who told me I had “la cara de un ángel” (the face of an angel) and tried to convince me to stay in Córdoba through the spring semester. The turning point was the November morning I found a bouquet of roses on my dorm room desk and I realized with a feeling approaching dread that I didn’t know who they were from. They were from the Spaniard and my instant disappointment that they weren’t from Beth pointed me in the right direction and showed me the way home.

Meanwhile, Beth, who was midway through her senior year in college, was making plans to stay in Oberlin an extra year until I graduated. She got a job at the campus computing center and then she followed me (to Iowa of all places) for grad school. It was shortly after our second move together (to D.C. two years later) that I proposed. We were twenty-four years old, with newly minted Masters degrees in impractical fields. Beth had a part-time job and I was unemployed. We were celebrating the fourth anniversary of our first kiss with a midweek trip to Rehoboth Beach we couldn’t really afford. I presented her with gifts made of paper, cotton, leather, and fruit and flowers (the materials associated with first through fourth anniversaries) and had her open them in backwards order, ending with the card. In the card, I asked her to be my life partner. This time I had no doubt about her answer. She had made it clear for years she was ready for this. Our commitment ceremony was the following January.

Over the years I’ve kept up the tradition of the anniversary materials, with the occasional adjustment. The fifteenth anniversary is crystal and I bought a set of glasses with endearments painted on them since we are not real crystal kind of people. (Noah was a year old that summer and let me tell you, shopping for items made of glass with a toddler in tow is more than a little stressful.) The twentieth anniversary is china. I decided anything ceramic would do and settled on a very pretty set of cobalt and sage green ice cream dishes made by a West Virginian potter.

I didn’t get to give them to Beth on our actual anniversary, however, because she was on a three and a half day business trip to Toronto. We decided to celebrate on her return rather than before she left because I was pretty cranky about her leaving and I thought it would be a happier occasion if we waited.

I was sad while she was gone, but we muddled through. The kids got fed and bathed. Dishes and laundry got done. I was even ambitious enough to take the kids to Air and Space and to mow the lawn. (One of the advantages of using a push-mower is that you can safely mow with a toddler playing in the yard.) I took a vacation from cooking anything more complicated than mac and cheese from a box and pancakes, much to Noah’s delight. June’s naps were disrupted because I was taking Noah to and from camp instead of just picking him up and she kept falling asleep in the stroller. The hardest part turned out to be getting her settled at night. She’s used to falling asleep in Beth’s arms after I nurse her. I use this time to shower and do small chores around the house. After two nights of skipping the cat box, I finally had to clean it with June standing right there, wanting to sample their food and play in that fun sand box where Mommy was playing.

Late Tuesday night, Beth returned, bringing tales of exotic restaurants and the theater. She went to a play! I figured out that at the exact time the curtain rose, I must have been trying to stop June from engaging in texture play in the litter box. I am trying very hard not to begrudge Beth this experience.

Wednesday morning, we opened presents. We’d waited so Noah could watch. He’d been quite taken with the idea that he was “the only one in the whole world” who knew both my “versary” gift to her and hers to me. He kept the secrets faithfully, only letting slip that he thought Beth’s gift to me was better. “But they’re both good,” he added diplomatically. This piqued my curiosity since Beth had hinted she would make up for her absence on the actual day of our anniversary through the gift. Inside a store bought card with a picture of a falling star on it was a card she and Noah made on the computer. It had a photo of the house where I lived during the summer of 1987 on the front and the Rehoboth boardwalk on the inside. “We’re leaving Friday afternoon for Rehoboth Beach,” it said. It also said, “I can’t think of a better way to spend half my life.” Neither can I.

We went to our favorite Mexican restaurant that night to celebrate twenty years with spinach enchiladas and virgin mango daiquiris. At home we ate coffee and vanilla ice cream out of the new ice cream dishes.

The weekend at the beach raced by, as beach weekends do. This was our first summertime trip to the beach since June was a little baby and the first time she was able to really enjoy it. She fell head over heels in love with the sand, the surf, the whole experience. Noah and I spent hours making sand castles and pretending Jack and Annie from the Magic Tree House series (www.randomhouse.com/kids/magictreehouse/) were having adventures in them. This morning as we were headed to breakfast, we passed the guesthouse where I proposed to Beth. She was telling Noah for the umpteenth time to stay on the sidewalk and off the chemically treated lawns. I was a bit ahead, pushing June in the stroller and retrieving her sneakers as she repeatedly removed them and pitched them out onto the sidewalk. I stopped in front of the guesthouse and waited for Beth to catch up. I put my arms around her neck and kissed her. “Will you marry me?” I said.

She smiled and said yes, again.

On Turning Forty

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20070511-01

“I don’t think we’ve consulted you on your cake,” Beth called from another room a few days ago. June was fussing and I only caught about every other syllable. I had to think a while to re-construct what she might have said.

“You said consult and not insult, right?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, laughing.

“So it’s not going to say ‘Over the Hill’ on it or anything?”

“No.” She was still laughing.

I turned forty today. Somehow those birthdays that end in zero lead to introspection and a little prickliness. Well, maybe not all of them. I don’t remember much soul-searching at my tenth birthday, though I do remember a pretty cool cake decorated like a pirate chest. (My mom made great birthday cakes.) And my twentieth birthday was mainly memorable for a surprise party my friend and sophomore-year roommate Jim threw for me. He kept it surprising by throwing it four months before my actual birthday. I’d been complaining about how my mid-May birthday was always during reading period or finals and how I wished it was during the January term at Oberlin when everyone was taking just one class and actually had the time to go to a party. So four months to the day before my birthday, I had my party. There were balloons; there were presents; there was cake. He even contacted my mom and got her to send me a card. It was one the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

I don’t remember what Beth and I did for my thirtieth birthday, probably something that seemed unremarkable at the time (like dinner and a movie by ourselves) that would be an almost unthinkable luxury these days. What I do remember is how miserable I was to be turning thirty. I was mired in the dissertation-writing process, a year into it and all I’d done was write and rewrite the prospectus four times. My committee finally and grudgingly allowed me to start on the introduction after the fourth draft, but my confidence was pretty low by that point. Meanwhile, I’d decided I definitely wanted children a few years earlier but Beth was unsure and between her ambivalence and my academic paralysis, it seemed like it was never going to happen. I started haunting websites for moms and lurking on pregnancy message boards. To make matters worse, it was clear by that point that Beth and I were going to fall short of our goal of visiting all fifty states by our tenth anniversary that July. I felt like my life was going nowhere.

Fast forward ten years. I accomplished most of the unfinished business of my twenties in my thirties. I received my Ph.d at thirty-two, had my first child at almost thirty-four, visited the last state (Alaska) with Beth and Noah at thirty-eight, and had my last child at almost thirty-nine. So what’s left? It’s looking almost certain that the academic career for which I suffered through the Ph.d is just not going to happen. I spent the first two years of the last decade as a graduate student, the next two as an underpaid adjunct, the next four as a decently compensated but never secure “full-time temporary” assistant professor and the last two years unemployed (aside from the business of raising my kids). I’ve been on the market for a steady teaching job about half of that time. I don’t know if it’s turning forty or the dwindling response to the applications I send out, but I’m starting to feel for the first time that it’s time to call it quits, not in a year or six months if things don’t look up, but now. In a way it’s a relief, like getting off a merry-go-round that’s been making you sick for some time, but still, I step off with a heavy heart. The horses were so pretty and it always seemed like they really were going to go somewhere someday.

This leaves me somewhat adrift. I loved teaching freshman writing seminars at GW and it will be hard to think of something I would find as fulfilling. But some time before June gets on that big yellow bus I will need to come up with a Plan B. For now the work of being the primary caregiver to an aspiring toddler and an active kindergartener is overwhelming enough to keep me from thinking too deeply about it. Every now and then I pick up an academic odd job (tutoring a grad student writing a seminar paper, editing a chapter of a dissertation, scoring the written portion of the SAT) but mostly I am mommy. And while there’s real psychic danger to living too much through your kids, I think more about their accomplishments these days than my own. Noah is reading in two languages now, having learned to read in Spanish at school and how to read in English largely on his own (assisted a bit by the twenty or so episodes of The Electric Company we watched this winter and spring). June has learned two baby signs (cheese and shoes), is up to about ten spoken words, and as of a few days ago, she’s walking! She took her first step a little over a week ago. Over the next few days she would take more and more at a time. Then on Wednesday afternoon, while we were waiting for Noah at drama, she started to experiment, taking a step forward, then one to the side, one backwards, etc. It was almost like watching a dance (a careful, wobbly sort of dance). Then she sat down, stood immediately back up and took nine steps straight to me, ending by hurling herself into my arms. I laughed out loud and hugged her tightly, whispering, “I am so proud of you, Juney.” It was a moment of unalloyed joy for both of us.

Beth is six months older than me so she has scouted out the territory of our forties a bit for me. Right before her birthday, our gynecologist told her that when you turn forty you start to fall apart. Sure enough the day after she turned forty she had a gallbladder attack. She had it out in January and since then she’s had a lot of complicated dental work done. Right on schedule, I am having my first crown later this month. Other than that, though, I haven’t noticed much physical deterioration. The gray at my hairline is a bit more pronounced and in a certain light I can see tiny wrinkles on the backs of my hands, but overall I am holding up pretty well.

We went out for pizza tonight. Noah was not as badly behaved as he was last week at the Thai restaurant but I can’t say he was well behaved. June was restless in her high chair so I took her out and from then on it was a struggle to keep her from grabbing everything off the table while she was on my lap or eating off the floor while she was crawling under the table. My forty-year-old self thought somewhat nostalgically of the birthday dinner my thirty-year-old self must have had. Unmemorable though it was, I’m reasonably sure no one at the table cried and Beth and I must have finished quite a few sentences in a row. Even so, I know how my thirty-year-old self would have cherished a glimpse of this future, these children, however frustrating and imperfect. There was a woman at the next table over eating with her children. The oldest looked about ten and the youngest four or five. There was no one crying or whining and everyone stayed in his or her seat. Both my thirty-year-old self and my forty-year-old self looked on with interest, wondering what forty-four will bring.