On Turning Fifty

Posted on May 17, 2017 by Steph

Before my birthday

I got the AARP card in the mail about a week before I turned fifty. Even though a few of my friends have already turned fifty and mentioned that this happens, I was still surprised. I don’t mind turning fifty, but it does take you aback.

Ten years ago, I wrote about turning forty with flashbacks to my tenth, twentieth, and thirtieth birthdays thrown in for fun. To sum up the last two milestone birthdays: When I turned thirty I was mired in the endless, early stage of dissertation writing and not sure if I was going to make it through my Ph.D. program, and when I turned forty I’d recently come to the decision to quit looking for academic work, after a decade spent finishing the degree, then working at non-tenure track jobs or none, while chasing after the brass ring of a tenure track job. I described myself as “somewhat adrift” and uncertain what would come next. But I was an at-home mom to a one year old and six year old, so I was plenty busy and had some time to think about a plan.

But instead of planning a new career, I just sort of fell into the work I do now. That summer I started doing a couple hours of research a week for my sister’s free-lance writing business because she had a big project and she needed some help. After another year or so I was ghost-writing the occasional article for a natural foods newsletter for her. When June started kindergarten, we made it a regular part-time job. Will I still be working with Sara when I turn sixty? Your guess is as good as mine.

The weekend before my birthday Beth and I went to see Fun Home, a musical adapted from Allison Bechdel’s graphic novel memoir of the same name. I’d asked for tickets as a birthday present, because I am a fan of Bechdel’s work in general and this book in particular. Part of it even takes place at Oberlin as Bechdel attended Oberlin, graduating in 1981, seven years before Beth and eight years before me. And while the scenes depicting a young lesbian coming out at our small liberal arts college during roughly the same historical period I did were certainly familiar, the childhood scenes were, too. Like Bechdel, I also lived in a small town in Pennsylvania in a Victorian house my unhappily married parents were restoring. There were differences, too, of course. The two main ones being my father wasn’t a closeted gay man and he did not die by suicide. Also, we only lived in that town for four and half years, not my whole childhood, so we weren’t rooted there. But I still consider that period from the end of third grade to the middle of eighth grade to be the heart of my childhood and it had outsize importance to me. Anyway, the play was well written and well acted and we enjoyed it.

The evening before my birthday I spent pleasantly sequestered in my room, reading with Noah or looking at my phone, under orders not to come out while everyone was wrapping presents and signing cards and the smell of a chocolate cake baking wafted into the room.

The Big 5-0

The day itself was a normal work day. In the morning, I cleaned the bathroom and then I ghost wrote a blog post about pregnant women’s intake of omega-3 fatty acids. I did take myself out for a late lunch at Republic, where I had a Brie, arugula, apricot, and pistachio sandwich. From there I walked to Capital City Cheesecake where I ran into the children’s librarian from our public library. She greeted me my name, even though it’s been quite a while since June and I were regulars at her Circle Time for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers. I told her it was my fiftieth birthday and she said, “That’s a big one,” in the exact same tone she uses when someone is turning three and she’s about to lead the room in a round of “Happy Birthday.” (And if that sounds like it was patronizing, it wasn’t at all. She’s not one to talk down to kids.) I got a latte and free mini chocolate mousse there because it was my birthday. (I would not have known free treats were on offer if Karen hadn’t told me while we were in line). Then I headed back home to exercise and wait for Beth and the kids to come home.

Beth and June came home around the same time (which early for Beth and late for June) because Beth cut out after a meeting and June had been walking a practice 5K with her running club. (She’s not confident enough on her recently healed feet to run yet.) It was a cold, wet day and she was soaked through, so I hustled her off to a warm bath while Beth went out to pick up dinner, which was Mexican take out at my request.

I opened my presents after dinner. Noah got me two graphic novels by Margaret Atwood I didn’t even know existed, so that was a nice surprise. And June got me a gift certificate to Starbucks, a purple tie-dyed beach towel, and a home-made gift certificate for the Tea and Spice Exchange in Rehoboth because my big present, from Beth, was a weekend in Rehoboth.

I knew there was a surprise planned for this weekend because Beth told me not to schedule anything and we had to cancel some plans as well. I was thinking a trip to Rehoboth was likely but I didn’t know for sure until I was working at the computer on the morning of my birthday and a notification about our hotel reservations flashed across the screen. I resolved not to tell anyone I knew and even rehearsed what I’d say when I opened the card to make it sound as if I was just learning the news.

“Hooray! That’s what I hoped it would be,” I said, which was true.

I didn’t fool Beth for a second. “You knew,” she said, so I told her about the notification.

I’d eaten a late lunch and a big dinner so I wanted to wait on the cake. I read Deadweather and Sunrise to June and then we had cake and ice cream. It was a chocolate cake with strawberry frosting, which is the cake I most often request for my birthday—you would, too, if you ever tried Beth’s chocolate cake with strawberry frosting—and Neapolitan ice cream.

Friday

The next day was our beach trip. We hit the road around 4:45 in the afternoon. It was raining on and off, sometimes pretty hard, so between the rain and rush hour traffic and a stop for dinner (at a pizza place near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge where June got a sorbet served in a frozen, hollowed out lemon for dessert) it was around 9:15 by the time we checked into our hotel. June and I slipped down to the beach for a quick visit and we all went to bed around ten.

Saturday

We went out for breakfast at Victoria’s, a restaurant in a boardwalk hotel June likes for its fancy Victorian décor and I like for the ocean view. The food’s not bad either. Beth and I both got the blueberry banana blintzes. The day was cold and rainy so we decided I’d hole up in the hotel room and read with Noah in hopes it would clear up later. Meanwhile Beth and June went to the hotel pool. We had lunch at Grandpa Mac where three out of four of us got mac and cheese with various add-ins. (I went with spinach.)

In the early afternoon, I took a walk on the beach. It had stopped raining but it was still chilly and overcast. As I walked, I was feeling pensive about turning fifty. I saw several teenage girls who seemed to be playing volleyball without a net. They were all in identical black capri leggings, which made me think they were in uniform under their various hoodies and windbreakers. Then I saw an older man in a tweed jacket and a ball cap who was probably doing tai chi. I thought life is like that. Sometimes you’re just reacting to other people’s moves, knowing what general direction you want to move the ball, but unsure if you’re getting over the goal or not because you can’t see it. And sometimes it’s being on your own, making what may look like crazy moves even as they have an underlying purpose and grace.

Beth and June had gone to Funland, so I headed over there to meet them. I got nostalgic walking past the little kid rides, but then I remembered I’ll have a chance to see my niece ride them this summer, which was a cheering thought.

June had almost used up her ride tickets and was moving on to the games. We left with two new stuffed animals (a llama she named Lorenzo and a tiny sea turtle she named Flo) to add to the little Japanese cat (Sakura) she bought earlier in the day at Candy Kitchen. We swung by the tea and spice shop where I got three kinds of tea, vanilla sugar, and a new infuser. Then we got some free Earl Gray crème tea they were giving away for Mother’s Day. I’m not sure if they were giving it to all women or just those with kids in tow.

Back at the hotel where Noah was doing pre-calc, I took June back to the pool. We read for a little while, but it was too loud to keep going, so we gave up. She got in the water, I stayed poolside and we tossed a ball back and forth. Then Beth came down and I went up to the room to read with Noah. By dinnertime, we were three-fourths of the way through the 120-page reading he had to do in The Sympathizer, a novel about espionage within the Vietnamese-American community shortly after the Vietnam war. It’s good, but intense, so I would have preferred it in smaller doses.

We had dinner at Grotto. I was supposed to pick all the restaurants because it was my birthday weekend, but there would have been an uprising if we hadn’t gone to Grotto and to tell the truth, a trip to Rehoboth would have felt strange without it.

While June was in the bath, I made a quick visit to the beach. It wasn’t raining but it was still cold and windy. The waves were big and full of foam, which the boardwalk lights gave a yellowish cast, like the whites in old photographs. The foam gathered on the sand, only to be half blown away before the next wave could wipe the remnants off the wet sand.

Mother’s Day

Sunday morning was sunny and sparkly, so June and I took a pre-breakfast walk down on the beach. We saw volleyball nets all lined up om the beach, as if for a tournament and someone setting up mile markers for a race on the boardwalk.

We’d wondered if everywhere would be mobbed for Mother’s Day, but we got to Egg by eight and there was only a twenty-minute wait, so we took a walk by the canal. I recommend the peanut butter French toast, (though if you’re there in the fall or winter, the pumpkin pecan French toast is even better). Noah’s lemon curd crepes looked pretty good, too.

We returned to the hotel where Noah and I sat on the balcony and knocked off another chapter of The Sympathizer, while occasionally looking up to enjoy the ocean view. Beth and June made their third visit to the pool. After we checked out of the hotel, Noah went to work in the lounge of another hotel, Beth and June went to a coffee shop and I walked down the boardwalk, where I saw a man playing the pan pipes and a group of mostly middle aged and older folks—a church group perhaps—gathered by one of the gazebos singing “Kumbaya.” I heard someone say they saw dolphins but I couldn’t spy any.

We all met up and gathered food from various establishments to eat on the boardwalk and then June and I went to put our feet in the water before leaving. (She did it in boots, I did it barefoot as it had gotten surprisingly warm.) While we were on the beach we did see a few dolphins. Then we drove home to unpack, grocery shop, and open our Mother’s Day presents- a Busboys and Poets gift certificate for Beth and a black umbrella with clouds on the underside for me. (I’d just left my umbrella on a bus the week before.)

Though my birthday weekend is over, I am not quite finished with celebration. I’m having dinner out with several friends, but not for a few weeks because June’s Girl Scout is going camping next weekend and over Memorial Day weekend, we’re going to New York City to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on Broadway, which was one of June’s birthday presents. Fifty is getting off to a busy start.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Posted on November 20, 2015 by Steph

“Why does it say we’re having ‘Chaos Unleashed on Earth’ for dinner on Wednesday?” June asked. She was looking at the whiteboard on the fridge where I write the week’s dinner menus. And it did say “W: Chaos Unleashed on Earth” right after “M: Squash + Kale on Bowties,” and “T: Baked Eggs on Potato Hash.”

I explained we had a lot going on that night. Beth, Noah, and I had an appointment with a doctor in Bethesda to discuss whether to try a new medication for his ADHD—we’re still looking for the right drug and/or dose. I didn’t think we would get back until six at the earliest and then June had basketball practice at seven and I had book club at seven-thirty. So instead of a home-cooked meal that night, we were all going to eat various frozen foods.

Both kids looked at me silently, but skeptically. I asked if they thought calling a doctor’s appointment, basketball practice, and book club on the same afternoon and evening “chaos unleashed on earth” might be a bit of an exaggeration. Two heads nodded.

The point is…I am a creature of habit. Small changes seem like something completely different to me. Sometimes deviations from routine can be fun, though. We’ve had a few unusual days recently, and they all had something to recommend them.

Week 1

Wednesday: Veteran’s Day

On Veteran’s Day, Beth had the day off, June had a half-day, and Noah had a full day of school. The reason for the discrepancy is that K-8 teachers have parent-teacher conferences those afternoons. I’ve been going to these so long I didn’t realize they don’t do them in high school until I asked Beth whether we’d be trying to see Noah’s teachers before our appointment with June’s math teacher and she told me we wouldn’t be seeing them at all, which made the day simpler, though I do miss having that opportunity to touch base with his teachers on a one-to-one basis.

The kids left for school and we were left to our own devices in the morning, so Beth and I went to Busboys and Poets for breakfast. We saw another lesbian couple we know (moms to two elementary school-aged kids) come in as we were leaving. I guess it’s the lesbian-moms-briefly-without-kids hot spot in Takoma. Anyway, it was pleasant to have a mocha and an avocado omelet and uninterrupted adult conversation for breakfast instead of cereal and the newspaper, as is my usual habit.

In the afternoon, we went to see June’s math teacher, who explained what they were studying and told us nice things about June and gave us her report card. June had said earlier that she finds it nerve-wracking when she knows we’re talking to her teachers, so she was happy to hear it went well—not that we were expecting anything else. She just gets a little high strung sometimes.

As far as June was concerned, the big excitement of the day was the first basketball practice of the season. The Pandas’ coach, Mike, had decided to start practice early this year, in November instead of December. The Pandas had a 0-8 season last year, and he must have thought it would be nice to win a game or two. Not that the losing streak affected the team’s enthusiasm. Those girls have heart. It’s the Panda way.

Not counting Mike and his daughter Maggie, we were the first ones there, but soon the gym was ringing with the sound of running feet and shouting voices. I always enjoy basketball practice, partly for the opportunity to socialize with other moms, but also just to watch the girls. They always seem to be having fun and this was no exception.

Thursday: The Day after Veteran’s Day

June had another half-day because it takes two days for teachers to get through all the conferences. I had an appointment for a mammogram in the city that I knew would eat up a good bit of the day, mostly in transit, so I arranged for her to go home with a friend and stay the whole afternoon, so I could get in a couple hours of work before Noah got home at four.

If I have a late morning or early afternoon appointment in the city I nearly always get lunch out so I tried a new (to me) rice/noodle bowl place. It’s the kind where you get a card with checklist of ingredients and you pick a certain number from different categories and then you get in line and hand it to them and they make it in front of you. I got buckwheat noodles in miso broth, with a fried egg, tofu, peanuts, seaweed, and other vegetables. It was really good.

For most of the five hours I was out of the house, I was binge-listening to a new NPR psychology podcast, Hidden Brain, which I recommend if you’re in need of a new podcast in your life. Other than the actual mammogram, the whole day was another pleasant change of pace.

Week 2

Monday: Sick Day

Nevertheless, I was looking forward to a week of the both kids being in school for five full days. We were two weeks into the second quarter and we’d had exactly four of those this year. So of course June woke up on Monday saying she felt sick and wanted to stay home.

She had no verifiable symptoms and I wasn’t sure she was really sick, but I let her stay home because I never want to send her to school when she says she’s sick and then have the school nurse call me and say she’s thrown up or something. Beth had an idea that she might have been nervous about a missing homework paper. She’d left it at Zoë’s house on Thursday and had been fretting about it ever since, even though she’d called Zoë, who had promised to bring it to school. I’m not sure if that was the problem or not, but that afternoon we checked and found out Zoë came through, giving the paper to their English teacher.

Anyway, she stayed in bed until 12:30, weakly requesting some chamomile tea and toast around 10:30. She seems to have figured out exactly how long she needs to stay in bed before I think walking her to school and back just isn’t worth it, because at lunchtime she was recovered, wanting lunch and cutting out fabric for a dress she wanted to make for one of her dolls.

The fact that June lays low and stays out of my way when she’s home sick means it’s no longer a lost day of work for me. I wrote some web copy about selenium and zinc, exercised, and even read a chapter of Daniel Deronda, which I’d be discussing at book club in two days. I did spend much of the afternoon with her, though, and, as always when something had to give, it was housework. I gave up plans to vacuum and sort through the masses of paper that continually drift onto the dining room table.

What I did instead was read two chapters of The Horse and His Boy to her and quiz her on the multiplication tables and on U.S. geography, as the qualifying test for GeoBowl was Wednesday. Since she was no longer feeling sick, I also had her practice her violin, finish her Native American diorama, and take the laundry down off the line. I kept her busy until dinner time. In exchange for letting her stay home when she requests it, I try to make sure sick days aren’t too appealing.

Wednesday: Chaos Unleashed on Earth

So, I bet you’re wondering how did that busy Wednesday go? It was fine. We got back from the doctor’s appointment at 5:50 (with a new prescription), heated up frozen lasagna, empanadas, and enchiladas and ate more or less at the same time. Beth and June left for practice around 6:45. I stayed at home until 7:25, which was cutting it close, because Noah was working on a 300-word opinion piece about American imperialism and I wanted to be there if he ran into a snag. But he’d written his introductory paragraph with no help by the time I left and for him that’s lightening speed so I was happy as I rode the bus (which came on time) to book club. I was only five minutes late.

I usually manage to remove myself from whatever I’m currently fretting about at book club. I think that’s part of why I find it so restorative—that and because it engages a part of my mind that used to get a lot more exercise—but I did occasionally wonder how Noah’s essay was coming as we discussed the psychological, sociological, and narrative elements of Daniel Deronda.

By the time I got home, around 9:20, Noah was in the bathroom in his pajamas, flossing. The essay was not finished but he was up against the word limit already. I offered to take a look at it and suggest cuts and he seemed open to that plan. Writing to word limits is something I do a lot these days, but he doesn’t always want to avail himself of my expertise. He was probably happy not to be told he had to go to bed with the essay unfinished, as it was twenty minutes past his bedtime.

We moved to the study. I told him to put in his required quotes before we started looking for places to cut. He did that while I perused Facebook. When he had all his points included, the essay was 360 words and had no conclusion. I started highlighting places where he could word things more succinctly and pretty soon he got into the swing of it and was finding them himself. A lot of the changes were actually improvements, but there were a few things I was sorry to see go. His quotes were pretty truncated and would have been more effective if he could have included more of them, but he got it down to 300 words, including a brief concluding sentence.

I help Noah with his homework frequently, everything from quizzing him on Spanish vocabulary, to reading to him (I’d read the one of the two required sources for the essay to him the night before), to helping him outline ideas or edit, to just being in the same room to make sure he’s attending to his work. Some of it I do just to make his life more manageable, but because he’s in a humanities program, some of it is actually fun for me. Anything to do with writing usually falls into that camp.

He was in bed, paper printed, by 10:10. Beth and I go to bed very early, around 9:30 or 9:45 most nights, so she was already asleep. But what with all the mental stimulation of the evening, I was wide awake, so I took a melatonin tablet and stayed up another twenty minutes or so, so I wouldn’t end up tossing and turning in bed. And the chaotic day was over.

Monday is Beth’s birthday, which ushers in the holiday season for us. In the coming weeks, there will be a good deal more joyful chaos in our lives. I think I’m up for it.

The King and Queens of Halloween

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Steph

Early Saturday afternoon, after gymnastics and a quick lunch, June was in the bathroom applying her corpse makeup. She was already in her corpse clothes, a long-sleeved black t-shirt and jeans from the thrift store she’d distressed the weekend before. Most of the holes were in the front of the clothes, though, and I was looking at her from the back. As a result, when I first saw her (without focusing on her gruesome-looking face), it felt as if I was catching a glimpse of June in high school or college, in her black top, skinny jeans, and ankle boots, putting the finishing touches on her makeup. This was a disconcerting vision, but Halloween is all about being unsettled, isn’t it?

I was actually kind of unsettled for the three weeks leading up to Halloween. It was for a happy reason. My sister was in China, picking up her newly adopted daughter and her business was temporarily closed. I had some small work projects to do and I picked up a big outside editing job so I had work, but not as much as usual and I was continually uncertain as to how I should be divvying up my time and spent a lot of time fretting about it, which made the extra free time feel less like leisure.

Worse still, very few of the big housework projects I had in mind, other than the usual cooking, cleaning and laundry, actually happened. I dealt with a drawer full of papers and cleaned most of the fridge, but I didn’t even finish that. I did read more than usual. I read an Agatha Christie mystery and Stephen King novel I somehow missed when it came out (Blaze). I got about of a third of the way through Daniel Deronda (which my book club is reading this fall) and I spent the last two hours of my furlough before June got home from school on Friday finishing Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, which seemed like an appropriate thing to do the day before Halloween.

Speaking of Halloween—this is a post about Halloween, so I suppose I should get back to Halloween—as I was watching June in the bathroom, we were all getting ready to leave for the Halloween parade. Noah’s Fiji Water bottle costume was so big we needed to go in shifts. Beth drove June and me to the Co-op parking lot where some carnival games were in progress and then she went back home for Noah.

June entered a contest to guess how many plastic spiders were in a jar and then she won a tiny checkers set with cardboard pieces in the shapes of pumpkins by throwing a football into a net with holes. Mostly, though, we wandered around, looking for people we knew. We found Keira, a fifth-grader from June’s school, who always has great costumes. This year she was a contortionist. She achieved this by covering her own legs with drapery and having fake legs bent over her shoulders. Then we met Grace (the witch from Wicked) and Lottie (Mozart), who in real life are two sisters June knows from years of drama camp. Lottie said, “June, I can’t look at your face. You are freaking me out.” I think this was exactly the reaction June had for been going for when she and Beth covered her face with peeling latex flesh and bloody wounds. It might have been especially satisfying because Lottie is two years older than June.

One of the parade officials announced the parade would start in fifteen minutes, which made me nervous because Beth and Noah hadn’t arrived yet and I didn’t want him to miss the judging. His water bottle costume was beautifully executed and he’d been working on it for several days, unlike last Halloween when he basically threw together his (still impressive) calculator costume in less than a day. Indulge me and take a close look at the details—the QTY line at the bottom of the front is one of my favorite parts, as is the whole back panel.

I caught sight of Noah shortly after the announcement. Shuffling along in the big blue box that covered most of his body, he was hard to miss. I directed him to the section of the street where teen and adults were supposed to stand. Luckily, it was right next to the nine-to-twelve area. Beth was parking the car, so she didn’t arrive until later, just in time to adjust the straps that attached June’s coffin to her back. Noah was having trouble keeping his lid on his head, so I was staying near him to balance it as needed.

Noah scoped out the competition and decided the motorized cupcake was the only real threat for Most Original. At first I thought it was a wheelchair costume, but when I looked more carefully at the wheels, they didn’t look like wheelchair wheels, so it might have been constructed over an ATV. In any case, the cupcake-on-wheels was getting a lot of attention. There was a zombie with a zombie dog, but I figured she was probably shooting for Scariest. A judge did complement Noah on his costume as she passed through the area and later a teenage girl ran up to him and said, “Fiji Water, I love you!”

“Do you think she’s a fan of Fiji Water or is she in love with you?” I asked him and he gave me an irritated look. (What’s the point of parenting a teen if you don’t embarrass him every now and then?)

There were photographers circulating, both journalists from the Takoma Voice and regular parade-goers. Both kids had their picture taken multiple times and June was interviewed. But the judges took June’s name and not Noah’s. In our experience, having a judge take your name doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily won (June’s was taken last year for instance and she didn’t win that year) but Noah’s never won without having had his name taken, and he’s won Most Original in his age group three times. I held out a sliver of hope, though, because I do remember a few times a winner being announced by costume only. It doesn’t happen often, though. Trust me, we are pretty close observers of the ways of this contest. It’s serious business to our kids. June’s been gunning for Scariest for a few years and so far, she had never won.

I don’t know if it was a desire to win that made her insistent on the gory makeup, or if it’s a developmental stage. At the a Halloween party at her friend Claire’s house the weekend before Halloween, Claire was a “psycho clown” and June’s friend Zoë was a “zombie triathlete” so maybe they are all just ready for scarier costumes. This does seem to happen at an earlier age than when I was a kid, though. And even as a fan of things scary, I’m not sure that acceleration is a good thing. The only thing I did to put the brakes on it, though, was not to offer to buy her a little wooden axe at the Takoma Park street festival two weeks ago. I saw it, thought it would be perfect for her costume, then wondered what I’d say if she asked for it. As I was thinking it over, she picked up a dagger from the same stand and pretended to fence with it, but then she just put it back and didn’t ask for either weapon and I didn’t suggest we buy them. I think having a weapon stuck in her mid-section would have been over the line for me…this year anyway.

Soon the judging was over and the parade started moving. We’d find out who won at the end of the route. Noah’s costume proved cumbersome to walk in, so sometimes he’d hike it up higher, which made walking easier but seeing impossible. I held his hand, which stuck out through a slot in the side of the box and told him when to slow down or stop to avoid trampling small children. When he got tired of not being able to see, he’d lower the costume again and walk more slowly. After a while he gave me the lid and I wore it on my head. I told him we were a group costume now. He was the bottle and I was the lid.

Once we got to the end of the route, the Grandsons, Jr. were playing. In between numbers, Rec Center employees announced the winners of the contest, starting with the four-and-unders. June and I went in search of a bathroom because we knew there would be at least one song between age groups and we both had to go.

We got back in time to hear the winners for the five-to-eight group. I have to say this particular set of judging was mystifying. A girl dressed as Hermione won Scariest. Hermione is many fine things, but scary is not one of them. A girl dressed as Katniss won Funniest. Again, Katniss is many fine things, but funny isn’t what comes to mind. Now we never saw Katniss so I allowed maybe it was a joke costume, maybe a cat with a bow and arrow or something. But then a Rubik’s cube won Most Original and I gave up any hope of things making sense for the poor five-to-eight year olds, one of whom was wearing a Montgomery County basketball league t-shirt and had half a basketball on her head, her face painted to resemble the rest of the ball, and was walking around with her head in a hoop with a backboard behind her. Clearly this child was robbed. But that’s how it goes sometimes.

We could only hope for better judging in the nine-to-twelve group. Scariest was announced first and it was June! They mangled her last name, but she didn’t care. She’d finally won! Beth looked relieved and said, “Thank God.” June’s been more gracious in recent years about Noah’s string of wins than she was when they were five and ten, but she’s seen him win several times and never won herself and they have at least the normal allotment of sibling rivalry, so she really wanted it. It helps that they’re never in the same age group and thus not in direct competition with each other, but still…

June went up to collect her bag of prizes (candy, pencils, a $10 gift certificate for Rec Department programs we can use for drama camp, etc.) A boy dressed as a ninja in a mechanized contraption along with dummies of the villain from Scream and a mummy with all three of them hooked up to each other to move in unison won Funniest and a girl in a shower stall won Most Original.

More songs, more waiting… Finally, they announced the teen and adult results. Scariest was predictably the zombie with zombie dog. Funniest went to the cupcake, which I thought might leave an opening for Noah to win Most Original after all. But it went to the lamppost from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. None of us had even seen said lamppost, which was odd because the teen and adult area was not as crowded as some of the kids’ groups where it would be easy to miss someone.

Noah was disappointed, as were Beth and I for him, but he took it okay. He’s generally a pretty easy-going kid. I hope this doesn’t sound like favoritism because I don’t think it is, but I seem to feel his disappointments more keenly because of that. He’s the one who doesn’t ask for as much, so I want him to have those things he does want. But you win some and you lose some. That’s life. We all know that. And he takes satisfaction and pride in crafting his costumes for their own sake, even if he also likes the outside validation. (He ended up getting some of that by tweeting a picture of his costume to Fiji Water. They re-tweeted it and by the time he went to bed he had more than a dozen shares or re-tweets or something. I don’t really understand Twitter.)

We waited to see who won the group competition, out of curiosity, and because June’s friend Marisa’s family always enters that and they’ve had some spectacular costumes over the years. This year they were the “Atoms Family” according to a sign they carried. They were all in black clothes, with hula-hoops orbiting their bodies at various angles. They won Most Original. We exchanged congratulations with them, and headed home to 1) make some adjustments to Noah’s costume (trimming it for easier walking and making a chin strap for the lid), 2) watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, 3) put the finishing touches (spotlights, fog machines, etc.) on our yard display and 4) to eat a supper of butternut squash ravioli and broccoli.

The kids left for trick-or-treating around 6:45. Last year they went with friends, but this year they decided to go together, which I thought was sweet. I stood on the porch watching the corpse and the water bottle go around the corner while I stayed behind to greet a few dozen trick-or-treaters. The first one came while we were still watching Charlie Brown. She was a tiny Princess Leia who was too shy to say either “Trick or Treat” or “thank you,” despite her father’s gentle reminders.

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” the dad said, gesturing to the skeleton and zombie emerging from the ground and all the ghosts, skeletons, etc., hanging from the trees and porch.

The kids were home and trading candy with each other by just after eight. Based on their walk around the neighborhood, Noah reported we were still “the king and queens of Halloween decoration.” Of some of our neighbors he said, “It’s like they don’t even take it seriously.”

The kids had today off school and June spent the day going from makeup violin lesson to first play date to second play date. When the second mom brought her home, she surveyed our yard and said, “You went all out.”

We go all out. We take it seriously. Don’t you worry about that.

March Madness

Posted on March 15, 2015 by Steph

I don’t even know what to say about the last few weeks. The last week of February was difficult and the first week of March was worse.

The last Thursday of February Beth and June and I attended a memorial service for a forty-four-year-old woman who died of breast cancer. We did not know her well, but she was the mother of one of June’s preschool classmates, a girl who also played on a soccer team with June in first grade and on her basketball team from kindergarten to second grade. Grief would be too strong a word to use because we weren’t friends, but her death did make me very sad, for her not being able to see her children grow up, for her widowed husband, and most of all for her four girls, aged six to twelve.

And then there was the weather. In the space of two weeks school was cancelled on four days, not to mention a two-hour delay and an early dismissal. (That last one was scheduled, at least.) This brought us to seven cancellations for the year, three over what’s built into the school year. And even though the school district promised to make the days up this year, they’ve gone back on that and applied for a waiver from the state, which means my consolation prize of three days of uninterrupted work in mid-June might not come to pass either. We’ll see.

When a friend asked on Facebook why a few of us stay-at-home and work-at-home moms were complaining so bitterly about the days off, I answered:

It’s the disruption of trying to work with kids at home, it’s needing to decide which of the things other than work that I usually do that I am not going to do, it’s the loss of quiet time that’s important for me as an introvert, it’s the fact that I also lose the chance to recharge through exercise when the pool at PBES is closed or through socializing with other adults when basketball practice or my book club is cancelled…And this is unique to me, but it brings back my grief for my father because he died shortly before the big storms of 2010.

This is what I meant about my father. It doesn’t happen every time school is suddenly closed, but when we have a great many cancellations in quick succession, it often brings me back to the-world-is-spinning-out-of-control feeling I had in the winter of 2010, when the kids missed two and three weeks of school respectively. (June was in morning preschool then and if the school district had a two-hour delay, her whole day was cancelled.) The bulk of those storms happened the month after my dad died and it’s clear that these two events got cemented together in my mind in a way that makes me overreact to the real but honestly not dire inconvenience of having the kids at home on a workday. I understand it’s not quite rational but that doesn’t change it. Add some painful private difficulties to the mix and I haven’t been much fun lately.

But so far I haven’t had a day as bad as Saint Patrick’s Day last year (our tenth and last cancelled day that year). I spent that day mostly in bed, with the blinds drawn, listening to an audiobook–and to make matters worse, it a pretty bad audiobook. I was afraid all this winter of going back to that place and I thought I had around two weeks ago, on the first Monday of March.

We’d had an ice storm and school was cancelled. I’d woken at 5:45, sore all over from having spent two hours the previous afternoon chipping ice off our sidewalk, but at 9:00, I was still in bed and I hadn’t eaten breakfast. It wasn’t that I wasn’t hungry. Getting out of bed and getting myself something to eat just seemed too daunting. I finally did get up, though, by focusing on the goal of putting a load of laundry in the washer. I decided to get the newspaper while I was at it and bring it back to bed. When I went outside at first I thought it was raining, which was strange because it was a bright, sunny day. Then I noticed that when I wasn’t standing under a tree it wasn’t raining and I realized it was water dripping from the rapidly melting ice. It was such a strange phenomenon I called June outside and we walked all over the sunny, sparkly, ice-covered yard, looking at every twig and every tall weed outlined as if in glass and listening to the water patter on the frozen ground and the ice breaking and falling off the tree limbs and the shrubbery and the clothes line.

Startled out my lethargy, I decided to eat breakfast instead of going back to bed and told June I was going to the creek to do something and asked if she wanted to go. What was I going to do? Come and see, I said and then I went back to the front yard and filled the wheelbarrow. Noah, watching from the porch in his pajamas, guessed correctly. “Are you going to dump that in the creek?” he said.

June did come with me, half amused and half embarrassed, as I pushed the wheelbarrow a block from our house and then she watched, bemused, as I heaved the contents over the railing of the bridge. She told me I was “completely insane.” Perhaps, but I felt better enough to muddle through with my day and not to go completely off the rails when school was cancelled again on Thursday and Friday. Though when Beth took June to work with her on Friday I really wasn’t sure if she did it because June likes to go to work with her, or to give me a chance to work in a quieter house, or because she wanted to spare June from me because I was still in a pretty bad mood. She didn’t say and I didn’t ask.

On that day, after I finished working, I walked to the library to return a book and while cutting across the campus of the university near our house I saw ten robins crowded onto a strip of exposed grass and mud over what must have been a warm underground pipe. Two days later on the same campus, I saw two clumps of crocuses, yellow and purple, almost a month later than they usually emerge, but there nonetheless. And now, after a week of warm weather, we have crocuses in our yard, too, and hyacinth and daffodils poking their way out of the newly visible ground.

Over the course of last week, life slowly settled back into its usual groove. The kids went to school five days in a row. I swam on Sunday and had a book club meeting on Wednesday. June had a violin lesson, a Girl Scout meeting, a basketball practice, gymnastics class and a basketball game. Nothing was cancelled. Although I appreciate this normalcy, I still feel tender and exhausted. I have a mistrustful feeling about it, like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The change to Daylight Saving Time, which has seemed easier in recent years as the kids get older, seemed very hard this year. I’ve been tired all week, and I’m not the only one. On Friday night June put herself to bed, fully clothed and without telling us. I only discovered her fast asleep when I went to tell her to get ready for bed.

The Pandas’ last game was yesterday. They lost, which was not surprising as they lost every game this season. Their defense is pretty good and while four or five players are on the verge of becoming good offensive players, they have no one who can consistently score, and if you can’t score, you can’t win. Mike, their coach, has somehow remained positive and encouraging through all this, and for the most part the girls have been positive, too. I mean, look at the picture. It was taken right after the end of the last game. Do they look discouraged?

They’re eight and nine years old and while some of them want to win, some of them just want to have a good time. Plus they were on their way to an end-of-season party (graciously hosted by Talia’s family) and they were excited about that. They live more in the moment than I do. I know June was very solemn at the memorial service and sad at the death of her friend’s mother, but I don’t think it touched her too deeply. It’s harder for me now not to be touched by things like that, even when they’re peripheral to my life.

My book club is reading Anna Karenina and I found when I got up to the part when she confesses her affair to her husband, it seemed so much sadder to me than when I read it as a grad student. It was the whole situation–Alexei’s pain, the way he hides it (from himself and Anna), which leads her to read him as cold and uncaring, which makes her think she might as well tell him what he already half-suspects and desperately wants not to know for certain. I felt so sorry for both of them…I think I read more emotionally now, maybe because I’ve been out of academia for almost a decade and I no longer worry about being sufficiently detached and theoretical. Or it could just be that I’m middle-aged and I’ve seen more of life and what it does to people.

I don’t think I’ll end up throwing myself under a train any time soon, though. I have children to raise, after all, and daffodils coming up in my yard.

With What’s Available

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Steph

I have been having trouble keeping the Ship of Steph from running aground recently. This is only one small example, but on Sunday afternoon when I was walking home from my weekly swim at Piney Branch Pool, I ran into my dissertation director and her partner (maybe wife now—I don’t know), another English professor, who was also on my committee. They also live in Takoma Park, a town of approximately 18,000 people, but oddly, I never see them. In the fifteen years since I got my Ph.d, I’ve seen the partner/wife once in a coffee shop, and the dissertation director…never. We had a brief, awkward conversation that left me feeling awash in feelings of failure and shame over the wreck of my academic career. It wasn’t their fault really, and I may even have been unintentionally rude to them in my brusqueness, but clearly even after nine and a half years out of the classroom and seven and a half years after I gave up on finding academic work (5/11/07), I am not completely over this loss.

I told two friends about this encounter; the first one works at the Folger Institute. Our older kids went to preschool together and for a long time I envied her job. Non-university-affiliated jobs for a Shakespearian are few and far between, so it seemed to me she’d hit the jackpot. Just now, she’s frustrated to be doing more work on the website and less scholarship and teaching than she’d like, so it was a shift of perspective for me to know the job I’d envied her for years was not perfect. On the flip side, the other person I told, a stay-at-home mom/blogger/part-time graduate student in library science, told me she was jealous of my job, because I work at home, writing, and get paid for it. Again, more perspective.

Then on Monday evening, June had a migraine and Noah was struggling with some middle school social drama I probably shouldn’t detail here and I just felt so sorry for both of them and in Noah’s case, helpless to do anything for him. I at least know what to do when June has a headache. (Give her painkiller and anti-nausea medicine, put her to bed, hold her while she sobs, hold the basin and her hair when the anti-nausea medicine fails to work, stay with her until she’s almost asleep, then leave.)

But my moodiness, June’s headaches, and Noah’s being thirteen aside, I do have a positive story to tell you. Here goes:

The Halloween parade and costume contest was Saturday afternoon. On Friday afternoon, I wasn’t even sure Noah was going to be in it. Noah takes this contest very seriously, especially after he won in the most original category when he was ten (dressed as a newspaper, 11/1/11) and again when he was twelve (dressed as a SmarTrip, 10/28/13). This year, between being busy with school, and possibly more importantly, paralyzed by his desire to top last year’s costume, he didn’t even have any ideas yet. He just kept saying, “What could be better than a SmarTrip?” and I kept telling him it didn’t have to be better, it just had to be half-decent, and achievable with the available materials and time. He gets fixated sometimes, on the way he thinks things should be and can’t move forward with the way they are. Where do you think he gets that particular character trait? It’s a mystery.

Meanwhile, June’s costume was all set. She’s going as the girl from the ghost story who wears a green ribbon around her neck and when she takes it off her head falls off. The previous weekend we’d gone to Value Village to buy her an old-fashioned looking second-hand black velour dress and some lace-up black boots and Target to get black tights and Jo-Ann’s to get some green ribbon. June wanted to add some fake blood dripping out from underneath the ribbon to complete the effect (on the big day Beth managed to get a soaking-through-the ribbon look).

While I was waiting for the kids to come home from school Friday, I was thinking about the Halloween I was ten or so and dressed as a stick of Wrigley’s gum—a costume made of crepe paper and aluminum foil, which ripped almost as soon as I set out. I came home in tears and my mom thought for a few moments, and then left and came back with a rain slicker, an umbrella and a container of Morton’s salt. “You’re the Morton’s salt girl,” she said and Halloween was salvaged. I was thinking Noah might need a similar maternal miracle and wishing I could provide it.

But a little while after Noah came home, inspiration struck. He wanted to be a calculator. This seemed like a good idea. We had some large cardboard boxes he could cut up for a front and back panel. All he would need was some paint. We called Beth and she offered to pick some up at the hardware store on the way home. In the meanwhile, he printed an image of a calculator, superimposed a grid on it, and then with June’s help, drew a grid on his cardboard. Next he sketched out the buttons, the display panel, etc. There are a lot of nice details, but my favorite is the number the calculator was displaying: 10.31.

By the time he went to bed the first coat of paint (dark gray, the background color) was applied. It needed to dry before he could add other colors. In the morning he did a second coat and then did homework while that coat dried, and in the early afternoon, he applied the third and final coat.

He wasn’t ready yet when it was time to leave at one, so Beth drove June and me to the parade staging ground, where carnival games were in progress. The games were a new part of the festivities so it wasn’t clear when the contest and parade would start. Luckily, they went on long enough so that when Noah arrived around two, there was enough time to spare to watch his sister throw a ball at a pyramid of cans, and for them to stick their hands in boxes to feel “eyes” (grapes), “veins,” (spaghetti), etc. The jelly “guts” were so sticky when Noah put his hand in the “teeth” (dried beans) bin his hand came out with beans stuck all over it.

When it was time for the contestants to gather under the banners with their ages, June and I went to the seven and eight year old area and Noah and Beth went to teens and adults. We met up there with June’s friend Maggie, who was dressed as a leopard queen. She was wearing more leopard print items than I could count and a small tiara. Her face was masterfully painted as well. Noah wanted to know if she was queen of the leopards or a queen who just happened to be a leopard but we never got a straight answer. One of the judges asked June her name, which is a sign you are under consideration. I think this was the first year she’s been asked. The judge took Maggie’s name, too. (Last year Maggie won scariest for her zombie princess costume.)

While we were waiting to start marching June and I heard one of her peers say, “Daddy, I saw someone dressed as a calculator,” and I thought I saw a flash of annoyance cross June’s face, as if she was thinking, really, here in my area?

We walked with Maggie and her dad the rest of the route and met up with Beth and Noah at the end. Beth reported the judges had taken Noah’s name, too. A local band (one of Noah’s favorites, was playing while people milled around and waited for the contest results.

This was the first year the parade has been held in middle of the afternoon. In the past it’s always been at dusk, which is spookier. We were all a little cranky about that, except June because it meant the parade didn’t conflict with her friend Claire’s Halloween party this year so she could attend both. Another advantage was that it was not freezing cold like last year. In fact, it was quite warm. June was actually hot in her black velour dress.

Finally the band took a rest while they announced contest results. A baby dressed as Ruth Bader Ginsburg won a prize, as did a preschooler dressed as a forest fire. In June’s age group, the leopard queen won most original (or maybe it was funniest) and scariest, the category June has decided is her goal, went to a Day of the Dead-style sugar skull. June was very gracious, clapping for everyone who won and running over to offer her congratulations to Maggie.

Before they moved on to the nine-to-twelve group, the band played another song, as we waited rather impatiently. When it was time to announce most original the announcer discovered the name was missing and said he’d come back to it. I was hoping it would be Keira, a fourth grader from our bus stop who was dressed as a person tied to a rocket, with stuffed jeans-clad legs emerging from her waist as her real legs were hidden under the rocket’s flames. She won last year for her picnic table costume.

Teen to adult was next and when they announced the winners, Noah won for most original. June clapped and congratulated him. She has matured a lot since Noah first won a costume contest prize and she was jealous as could be, like a caricature of jealousy, really. Even so, we reminded her that Noah was ten and had worn a lot of very original costumes before his winning streak (three out of the past four years) started, so she shouldn’t be discouraged. The winner for most original in the nine-to-twelve group was finally confirmed and sure enough, it was the girl on the rocket.

We hung around to see who won the group costumes. Most original went to the family of one of June’s friends. They were dressed as a campsite (tent, can of bug spray, campfire, and s’more). Once we’d heard all the results, I bought Noah a Grandsons CD as a keepsake and we went to CVS to buy candy corn to eat during our next activity: pumpkin carving.

Later, while June attended Claire’s party, Beth, Noah and I ate Chinese takeout and I read him the first chapter of The Haunting of Hill House, one of my very favorite horror novels. It was a pleasant evening, one I will try to remember when I forget things don’t have to be perfect, just half-decent, and achievable with what’s available.

Artful April

Posted on April 12, 2014 by Steph

When I flipped the calendar page to April I noticed it looked busy, and notably artistic. Here’s a sample of what we did during the first two weeks of the month (a lot of which never even made it onto the calendar).

Tuesday: 4 p.m. June’s violin lesson
Wednesday: 3:15 p.m. Observation day for last meeting of June’s drama class
7:30 p.m. Steph’s book club (The Iliad, books 1-6)
Saturday: 9:30 a.m. June’s makeup violin lesson
10:15 a.m. First meeting of kung fu class for June.
Sunday: 11:05 a.m. June performs at her music school’s booth at the farmers’ market
3 p.m. Movie date for Beth and Steph (The Grand Hotel Budapest)
Tuesday: 7:40 a.m. Band festival drop-off for Noah
4 p.m. June’s violin lesson
Wednesday: 7:30 p.m. Steph’s book club (The Good Lord Bird)
Friday: 5:30 p.m. June’s violin recital for June

Noah also had five band practices during this period. He normally has them after school every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but the teacher cancelled practice the day of the festival. And I feel compelled to note I’m not even considering two meetings of the discussion group for the MOOC Beth is taking on American Capitalism, as I am focusing on the (martial) arts here.

Wednesday Afternoon: Drama Class

Wednesday was the last meeting of June’s after school drama class. The winter session of after school activities was supposed to end in mid-March but we had so many snow days this year, it was pushed to the first week of April and they still had to extend the class time of three of the meetings from forty-five minutes to an hour to recoup the lost time.

Sadly, the school district as a whole is not being as honorable about making up lost days as the after school activities program. We had ten snow days this year, six over the limit of built-in ones, and we will only make up two of those six, but I will spare you a rant about that right now. Maybe I’ll save it for when school ends a week before I think it should. I should still be plenty bitter by then.

Anyway, parents were invited to observe the last class. It was originally billed as a performance but then the instructors clarified it wouldn’t be anything different than what they do on a normal day. Nevertheless, there were more parents present than kids, so most of the nine kids in the class must have had at least one parent there.

They started with warm-up exercises and pretended to be zoo animals and then one of the teachers read them We’re Going on a Lion Hunt. You may know this chant as “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,” especially if you frequent library story times. Then they brainstormed all the different places the children in the book go (grassland, lake, cave) and the kinds of animals one might encounter in these habitats. Creative answers were encouraged. Next, they pretended to visit each locale. Two children pretended to be the explorers and the rest were animals. My favorite part was when they all put their hands on each other’s shoulders to form a long, conga line-style snake.

When it was over I asked June if it was like a normal class and she said not really because everyone was behaving themselves. I knew sometimes the teachers had classroom management challenges. This frustrates June whether it’s in regular class or extracurricular activities because she takes everything she does seriously and she expects the same of her peers. Overall, though, she said she did enjoy the class and she’s looking forward to her spring after school activity—Indian dance, which starts in late April.

Wednesday Evening: Book Club

That same day my book club had its second meeting on The Iliad. This book club is officially two different book clubs, although the members are basically the same. The Big Book Club covers two classics a year, at least four sessions per book. The first meeting is always a lecture by a professor or graduate student who’s an expert on the book. (The Bi-Monthly Book Club, or as it’s sometimes jokingly called, the Small Book Club, tends to focus more on contemporary fiction.)

This was our first post-lecture discussion of The Iliad and it was a lively one. We covered questions such as whether the gods who orchestrate all the action could be seen as symbols of different psychological states, the role of women, whether all the violence was glorified, lamented or both, and the sheer loveliness of the extended similes. As I consider myself an expatriate from academia at times, this book club has been a real lifeline for me. I almost always come home from it feeling energized, sometimes to the point of not being able to sleep when I get home.

Saturday Morning: Kung Fu

I met Beth and June at her kung fu class, as they were coming from her make-up violin lesson (which she attended in her kung fu uniform). The original lesson was, of course a snow-related cancellation. June’s music school is also more conscientious about making up snow days than our school district, it should be noted, if one cares about that sort of thing, which you may have guessed by now, I do.

I got there first and was surprised to see as other kids arrived that they were mostly wearing black kung fu uniforms like hers. We got hers as a hand-me-down, but when June last took kung fu two years ago only one kid had a uniform and everyone else wore street clothes. Not much else seems to have changed in the interim, other than that June is now no longer one of the younger kids in the class. Now she’s probably one of the oldest ones, though she falls in the middle in terms of size. Two kids had white belts already. June had debated whether or not to wear hers to class and decided not to, as she has forgotten a lot of her white belt skills and thought she might need to test for it again.

I remember being startled at the first class two years ago at how the rather gruff teacher just launched right into exercises without any introduction or much in the way of instructions. It was like that again. He did acknowledge June, saying, “It’s been a long time,” warmly when he saw her. He had the children sit cross-legged and they took turns closing their eyes and trying to locate coins he dropped around them by the sound of them clattering to the wood floor. June remembered this exercise and had said she hoped they would do it at the first class. He said, “Good job, June,” when she found them. I wasn’t sure if he’d remember her name or not, so that was nice.

He introduced the children who were returning to the new ones and praised their skills. “June was very good,” he said, with a slight emphasis on the past tense and then they got started. They practiced various poses and stretches. He liked June’s shark fin. He went up and down the line, critiquing and re-positioning kids until they were in the right pose, talking to them about self-control and hard work and suggesting if they weren’t up for the rigors of kung fu, they should take karate or tae kwan do. I was glad June didn’t pipe up that she had taken karate since she last saw him. It wouldn’t have gone over well. He’s sure of his own way of doing things and he doles out criticism as readily as praise. I think June actually likes that about him because she knows when she’s really earned an encouraging word. It was forty minutes into class before a child who wasn’t paying sufficient attention was temporarily exiled to sit with his mother. I remember it usually happening earlier than that.

About forty-five minutes into class they started kicks and I could see June was glad to get to that part. Then the instructor had the two white belts and another of the returning student demonstrate the forms everyone else would need to learn. Then he said, “Let’s see what June remembers.”

She came to the front of the class, bowed, did two or three forms and said, “That’s it.” He seemed satisfied and sent most of the class to the water fountain so he could have a little extra instructional time with the two white belts. When the class was re-assembled he showed everyone what he wanted them to practice and class was over.

Sunday Morning: Street Performance

When June had her violin lesson on Saturday, her teacher mentioned the school was going to have a booth at the farmers’ market the next morning and she didn’t have to but would she like to stand in front of it and play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and her recital songs? Would she? June was all over that.

They didn’t give us a time slot since they’d be there for the whole four hours the market was open and when we showed up at 10:15 they were still setting up the tent so we finished our shopping and came back a little after eleven. Beth went to get us a couple coffees and missed June going through her repertoire the first two times, but she did see the last round. June ran to meet her when she returned and reported to her she’d drawn “quite a crowd” in Beth’s absence and she did. About a dozen people stopped (not all at the same time) to stop and clap for her. She bowed after every song and seemed quite pleased.

Sunday Afternoon: Film

Sunday was quite an exciting day for June as she woke up at Zoë’s slumber party, went straight to the farmers’ market and was home long enough to eat lunch and play in the yard for a little while before Becky and Eleanor came to pick her up for her afternoon that featured a manicure, gelato, a tea party, and a walk in the woods. (This was a birthday present.) June was waiting impatiently for them on the porch when they arrived.

Beth and I seized the opportunity to go see a movie. It was actually our second movie of the weekend. The night before while June was at Zoë’s house, we had some one-kid-two-moms time with Noah, going out to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Silver Spring and watching the first half hour of the first Harry Potter movie. June has caught up by herself and we hope to finish it all together over spring break.

For the adult movie, we chose Grand Budapest Hotel. This was fun, a bit more violent than I realized it would be, having not read much about it, but engaging and a nice getaway with Beth. We’ve seen three movies in a theater since Christmas, which may be some kind of post-kids record for us.

Tuesday Morning: Band Festival

The first thing I heard Tuesday morning was Beth exhorting Noah to get into his band clothes—“I’m not kidding,” she was saying tensely. The bus for the band festival was leaving from Noah’s school at 7:40, she had to drive him there, and time was running short. I managed to snap a quick picture of him before they left. See what an enthusiastic subject he was?

In the spring the band travels to a number of judged festivals and other performances, including one outside Hershey Park, after which the kids go to—you guessed it—Hershey Park. Tuesday was their first one, a countywide competition. Noah was hoping the band would score well enough to advance to the state-level competition, as the chorus already had. After all, who wants to be beaten out by the chorus? Last year they did advance and went on to get a perfect score at the state competition.

That afternoon Beth forwarded me an email from the band teacher. The band had done very well, scoring “superior” from two judges and “excellent” from two more, but they needed a perfect score to advance.

June and I crossed paths with Noah as he was walking home from the bus stop and we were headed to another bus stop for her violin lesson. I yelled congratulations mixed with condolences from across the street, and then called him a few minutes later on my cell phone. He sounded a little disappointed, but he was a good sport about it, as is his way.

Wednesday Evening: Book Club

The next evening the other book club met. We discussed The Good Lord Bird, a piece of historical fiction by James McBride about John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, told from the point of view of an African-American adolescent boy who travels with Brown. It’s narrated in a sort of American picaresque style—a lot of the discussion focused on connections to Huckleberry Finn—with a dash of postmodernism. It was a good discussion, but I would have liked to talk more about the fact that the protagonist cross-dresses for most of the novel.

Friday Afternoon: Violin Recital

On Thursday evening at dinner June said Friday was going to be “the best day ever!” She cashed in forty tiger paws (a reward system at her school) to have lunch in the classroom with her teacher, she was going to Maggie’s birthday party directly after school and from there she’d go to her recital.

I’d spent a good deal of the week ferrying June’s violin from place to place. She broke the bridge on Monday afternoon while she was practicing so Tuesday morning I took it to the music store to buy a new one and get it installed. Later that afternoon at her lesson, the teacher said the new bridge was too high and we needed to get it shaved down to fit the violin, which is a quarter sized one. Indeed, June had to press harder on the strings and was making mistakes she hadn’t been making before, so I called the store—found out the employee should not have put it in as is—and arranged for a loaner while we get the bridge customized. I went back to trade violins on Wednesday morning, so June could finally practice. (She did an extra long practice that evening.)

Friday I brought the violin to Maggie’s house where her birthday party was in full swing. (Literally, the kids were taking turns on the backyard swing.) June had already changed into her recital clothes and after her turn being pushed high into the air by Maggie’s dad (who is also her basketball coach), she gathered up the cup and saucer she’d painted and the cupcake Maggie’s mom packed for the road and we were off to the recital.

On arriving, June learned from the program that she was going first and she looked a little stricken, but her teacher told her they were going to a practice room to run through her songs, “and then you won’t be nervous any more.” She sounded convincing, and when June came back she did look more confident. It turned out I knew one of the moms in the audience. Her kids went to the same preschool mine did, but in different years. Her third grader was going to play the guitar in the recital.

June was the only student in the recital to play three songs and also the only one listed as an arranger of her own music. (She was improvising a tune based on a half scale.) There was a small mistake in her first song but she recovered and went on to play the rest of her songs well, took a bow, and looked relieved to be able to sit and listen to the other violinist, the guitarist, pianists and the tiny girl playing a drum kit. There were ten musicians in all, most of them ten or under, and the whole program over completed in twenty minutes. Then it was time for juice and cookies and a celebratory pizza dinner at Roscoe’s.

The most artful part of April was over, but it was the first evening of spring break so more adventures awaited us…

Pi Day

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Steph

I finished with my week’s work Thursday morning just before lunch. After being busy for all of January and most of February, my work has slowed. I knew this would happen eventually because Sara had warned me at the end of last year when one of her major clients scaled back, but coming a few months before summer, a season in which I usually work and earn less and spend more (on vacations and summer camps for the kids), it’s not a welcome development. So I’m casting about for ideas about how to earn some supplemental income, but also trying to enjoy the extra time instead of fretting about it.

This was my third week on reduced hours and the first week I minded it. The first week I was glad of the break and I got some satisfying cleaning projects done, and the second week the kids had two days off school—more weather-related cancellations—don’t even get me started—four inches in March, in Maryland! It’s not like we live in the Klondike, except apparently we do. And then later that week I was sick, so it was just as well I didn’t need to work much.

After lunch, I cleaned the bathroom, and then set out on some errands. June’s birthday party—her first slumber party—is in about a week. Her party theme is outer space and I was wondering if the post office was currently selling any stamps with pictures of the moon, or stars, or something like that for the invitations. I’ve often had good luck with this pleasing little detail of party preparation, but not this year. The closest thing would have been stamps picturing the Medal of Honor, which is star-shaped, but not particularly celestial, so I passed. I ended up using international forever stamps with a picture of the Earth seen from outer space we already had, even though they are worth more than the postage required. I did get her a birthday card, however, with a face made of the sun on one side, and the moon on the other. When you open it, there are stars and it says, “Wishing you the sun, the moon, and the stars,” so the trip felt like a success anyway.

Next, at Beth’s suggestion, I stopped at Capital City Cheesecake and bought four mini-pies for Pi Day on Friday (March 14, or 3/14, if you’ve never heard of this holiday). I got two apples, a coconut cream, and a pecan. I would have stopped at the Co-op for milk, but I needed to get home to meet June’s bus and I didn’t want to cut it too close.

Often I’m still wrapping up my work for the day when June comes home, but I always spend at least the first fifteen minutes she’s home having some one-on-one time with her before her brother gets home. Then I will often go back to work while she starts her homework, unless it’s a violin lesson or drama class day. Thursday was neither and I had no work, so I suggested we take a walk in the woods where the crocuses were blooming. I’d noticed them the day before when I was picking her up from drama class. Every year I look forward to the day I first see them, a riot of tiny pale purple flowers, bursting out all along the banks of the creek and the winter-muddy path beside it. They all bloom at once, sometimes as early as mid-February, probably in late February on average. It was so cold this year they were late, but they finally came.

Wednesday had been warm, so warm I went bare-legged under a denim skirt, which turned out to be a bit of irrational exuberance; I was chilly much of the day but I refused to change clothes out of stubbornness, even wrapping my legs in a blanket as I read the Iliad (for book club) and drank hot tea on the porch. By Thursday, a cold front had come in—the high temperature was thirty-five degrees lower than the day before—and I was wearing long underwear under my corduroys and a sweater under a hooded sweatshirt. The crocuses were bundled up, too. Most of them had closed, even though it was a sunny day. Nevertheless, it was pleasant to be outside in the sun. I was watching June carefully for signs of an incipient migraine, as sudden drops in temperature often bring them on, but she was fine.

We’d packed an after school snack for June to eat at the picnic table by the creek—a vegetarian hot dog with ketchup wrapped in foil to keep it warm, a carrot and a bottle of ranch dressing, and a plastic baggie of chocolate and vanilla bunny-shaped cookies. I was putting the snack in a tote bag when June patiently informed me it really needed to be in a picnic basket. (I believe Beth made the same error the last time she took June on a picnic.)

After eating, admiring the flowers, practicing her Pocahontas pose on a small boulder, and pretending to be a princess in a magic forest, June was ready to go home. She helped me make the once weekly dinner she plans (scalloped potatoes and more hot dogs). Even though I would have liked to work more this week, it really had been a pleasant afternoon.

I had the whole day free Friday and I’d like to say I cleaned the house from top to bottom, or took some productive steps toward finding extra work, or started the story I’ve been meaning to write for Rehoboth Reads short story contest, but I didn’t do any of those things. Instead I spent too long online deciding which kind of paint to buy for the sun-catcher painting craft at June’s party. I did two loads of laundry and dried one of them on the clothesline. I straightened up the kitchen and dining room, and then went on a meandering series of errands.

I started with a leisurely cappuccino back at Capital City Cheesecake, where I heroically resisted the St. Patrick’s Day cupcakes (chocolate with green frosting), knowing there would be pie that evening, and then I headed to the Co-op for eggs, milk, and tofu. While there I got a birthday card for my sister and pondered whether or not to buy thank-you cards depicting a lighthouse and a starry sky for June’s post-birthday thank you notes. I decided not to, as June might rather make homemade cards. (She made her own invitations. I typed up and printed the logistical info for the inside of the cards and she drew an outer space scene on the front and a girl in a sleeping bag on the inside of each one.)

Then I took a bus to the closest county library in search of How to Train Your Dragon books because our town library has a low stock of them and is always out of the one June wants. I got the next two in the series. By the time I got home there was just enough time to ride the exercise bike before June’s bus came. For most of the day I was listening to my iPod, first a podcast and then twelve chapters of Anne Rice’s The Wolf Gift. (Hey, I can’t read Homer all the time.)

And speaking of books, when the kids came home, I read Pet’s Revenge to both of them on the porch. The Edgar and Ellen series is in the rare sweet spot of books both kids like so it’s quite a find, but because the kids are rarely free at the same time and Noah has a longer attention span I had been reading the books to each of them individually. I like the books, too, but not well enough to be reading them twice in such quick succession, so once June and I got to the end of book 3, I made her wait for Noah to catch up, and we started book 4 together.

In case you were imagining an idyllic scene with the two of them listening raptly to the dulcet sounds of their mother reading in the mellow late afternoon light, it wasn’t much like that. Even though seating arrangements were carefully negotiated before we started, June’s not much for sitting still and she was either swinging dangerously fast and close to Noah and me, or repeatedly getting up from the sky chair and complaining when Noah repeatedly stole her place. The bickering made me think I might rather go back to reading the series twice in relative (if redundant) peace and quiet, but I’m not giving up yet. It just seems like the sort of idea that ought to work, so I’m going to try to make it work.

They both practiced their instruments next while I wrote this post, though once June was finished and Noah came upstairs for some music, they found the time to argue over the laptop. It made me wonder why they were fighting so much and then I realized it might be because basketball season’s over so June and I weren’t at Friday afternoon practice and they were both in the house without homework occupying Noah, which honestly doesn’t happen very often.

We had take-out pizza for dinner and the pies for dessert. Noah ate three slices of pizza and then used a ruler to approximate .14159 of a piece and ate that, too. We did not measure the radius of the pies and calculate their areas, but Beth tried to explain what pi means to June and although she didn’t quite follow, she recalled a Cyberchase episode about it. We then discussed why other irrational numbers don’t have their own holidays. I said I couldn’t think of another one that sounded like a food, but Noah said the square root of two. You could eat root vegetables for that one, or maybe carrot cake if you were feeling festive. It was a cheerful dinner, a good ending to my furlough day.

I’m sure I can find plenty of ways to fill my extra time over the next weeks, but if you happen to need a writer, researcher, or editor for short-term projects any time this spring, give me a holler.

Spy vs. Spy

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Steph

We went to the International Spy Museum on Saturday, with the kids and Noah’s friend Sasha. We all memorized details of undercover identities we chose. June enjoyed crawling around in the simulated air ducts and spying on the people below through small windows (she did it three times) and admired many of the gadgets on display, particularly a pistol disguised as a lipstick. She said she hoped no spy ever blew her lips off while using it. At one point she asked me if spies are “good guys or bad guys” and then we had a discussion about moral relativism right there in the museum.

The boys participated in a large group crime-solving activity having something to do with a nuclear detonator and toured the exhibit about villains from James Bond movies. Sasha bought a Spy vs. Spy book at the gift shop and June got some disappearing ink (it actually works!). We saw the Georgetown mailbox Aldrich Ames used to mark with chalk to communicate with his co-conspirators. I remember that detail from the case so it was kind of creepy to see that particular artifact.

Afterward we had dinner at Chinese-Japanese restaurant and got Fro-Zen-Yo. It was a highly satisfactory outing, even if June did get bored in the museum long before the boys did. (I took her to the Portrait Gallery across the street for a change of pace. Her preschool class took a field trip there years ago and whenever we set foot in this museum she always says, “Oh this is where Gabe set off the alarm.”)

That evening I told Beth I didn’t think I could be a spy, that I didn’t think I had it in me. Beth reminded me that the best spies are the ones no one would suspect, those who are above reproach. I suppose that was a compliment.

Earlier that week I was talking to my sister on the phone and we discussed how while I am a more private person than she is, Beth is even more private than me. There’s a reason I’m the one in the relationship with the blog, but also a reason there’s a lot that goes on in my life that never makes it into this space.

A few weeks ago I was tagged by Tyfanny from Come What May with an eleven-question meme. Nothing in it compromises national security and the questions might let you get to know me a little better, so here goes.

1. What food does your family eat often, either because it’s a go-to, easy food, or because it’s a favorite?

We have pizza for dinner every Friday, alternating takeout and frozen. This was a tradition my mom instituted during my early teens when she was a single mom who was both working and getting her Master’s degree, except then it was always takeout. I’m surprised we didn’t subsist entirely on takeout given how busy she must have been. The tradition has lived on—she and my stepfather still have pizza every Friday.

2. When your bed is made, how many pillows are on it? And then, how many do you actually sleep with? If there is a difference, please explain why.

Four at all times. (Except when the kids have knocked them to the floor, which is pretty often.) Two of them are feather pillows and pretty flat.

3. How far away do you currently live from where you grew up?

I grew up mostly in and around Philadelphia and now live in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Since my mom and stepfather moved to Oregon in January, I now have no family left in the Philadelphia area, which makes me feel unmoored if I think about it too long.

4. Should I get an iPhone 5, or hold out for the 5s? (I currently have a 3gs)

I can’t help you here. I don’t have a smart phone myself and most of the time I can’t even remember how to retrieve the messages from my cheap and simple cell phone, which is how techno-savvy I am. Guess who posts this blog? Hint: it’s not me.

5. What television show (that is currently on the air) do you really, really love?

I am not currently watching any television shows, but I was recently wondering if I stayed up later or was better with technology if I’d be watching Under the Dome, because I’d be interested to see how they stretched the book into a television series.

6. Are you excited for the start of football season? Why or why not?

I don’t follow football, or any other sport, though I used to enjoy watching baseball when I was a kid. When the Phillies were in the World Series in 1980, my dad took me to several of the games, including the winning one.

7. What was the last book you read, and did you enjoy it?

Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson. I picked it up at the library a couple weeks ago and realized within the first few pages I have already read it, but it was so good I kept reading it anyway.

8. What was the last movie you saw (doesn’t have to be at the theater, maybe you caught it on Netflix), and what did you think of it?

African Cats, a documentary about lions and cheetahs. I took the kids to see it few weeks ago at a theater that plays second-run movies in the summer for $1. We all enjoyed it, though I thought the narration (by Samuel Jackson) was a bit cheesy. The lives of wild animals are dramatic enough without overdoing it.

9. Tell me about your favorite pet, from any time in your life.

When I was a kid we had a Siamese cat named Alexei my parents got when I was a toddler. He was sweet and affectionate and good-natured, nothing like the stereotype of the high-strung Siamese. He lived to the age of twenty and died the week I graduated from college. (Amazingly, he wasn’t the longest-lived of my mom’s cats. She had another cat live to the age of twenty-two.)

10. What kind of music can you listen to, no matter what mood you’re in?

I have sometimes joked my iPod is like one of those Pandora stations based on a single artist where you hear that artist’s songs interspersed with others Pandora judges similar. In my case, it’s the Joni Mitchell station.

11. Do you already have a wish list started for Christmas? What would you like to see under the tree this year?

Hmm. Margaret Atwood has a new book out, the third in the trilogy that started with Oryx and Crake, but I don’t know if I can wait for Christmas to read it. Maybe iTunes gift certificates. I work at home and listen to music a lot while working and I’d like to have more digital music.

Now I’m supposed to come up with eleven more questions and tag eleven people to answer them. This is where this always falls apart for me, coming up with large numbers of people to tag, but I should be able to generate a list of questions. Here goes:

1. Do you think you have the skills to be a spy? Why or why not?

2. Would you enjoy it? Why or why not?

3. Where and when would you want to be stationed? Pick any historical period.

4. What would you choose as your undercover name?

5. How would you answer June’s question?

6. How do you feel about the NSA surveillance program?

7. Do you like to people watch in public?

8. Have you ever accidentally overheard something about yourself?

9. Do you have anything in your email archives you wouldn’t want your spouse or kids to read? (You can say yes or no without specifying.)

10. If someone had been spying on you all day yesterday, what would he or she have learned?

11. Do you ever spy on your kids? (Anything from eavesdropping to reading their email.)

I am not going to tag eleven people. In fact I’m not going to tag anyone directly, because I wouldn’t want to blow your cover, but if you have a son who pitched for Canada in the Little League World Series last month or if your daughter interrupted your game of Bejeweled the other day to ask you the meaning of life, or if you recently mustered the courage to reveal a traumatic part of your past on your blog, you know who you are. Your instructions are under the fallen log in Sligo Creek Park. Or if it’s more convenient you can read them on Tyffany’s blog in the August 9 post.

p.s. Anyone reading should feel free to answer any of the questions in the comments section. You don’t have to tackle them all.

No to Yes

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Steph

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The Trouble with Forty-Six

Forty-six is not exactly a milestone birthday, but in the weeks leading up to my birthday it occurred to me more than once that while my new age can still reasonably described as “mid-forties,” it indicates the scale is tipping. It’s closer to fifty than to forty. When I mentioned this to Beth, she said, “That’s the trouble with forty-six.” (She turned forty-six in November.) Certain meditations on age from sources as diverse at James Joyce and Bruce Springsteen kept jumping out at me:

I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general post-office of human life.

So you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore.

I feel that way some of the time, not all of the time. And of course, one of the nice things about having kids is that your age gets tied to theirs. If you’re curious to see what comes next in their lives, as I am, you have to accept getting older yourself as part of the bargain. Not that the childless get to opt out of aging, it just happens to take some of the sting out of it for me.

I did have a nice birthday weekend. The festivities started the day before, when June came into my bedroom at 6:30 a.m. bearing the toaster oven tray laden with a carrot, an apple, a cheese stick, a pita, butter, jam, peanut butter and a glass of water. “Happy day before your birthday!” she said. Noah had a band field trip to Hershey Park that day and Beth had to get him out the door by 6:15. Left to her own devices for the fifteen minutes between when Beth and Noah left and when she was allowed to wake me, she hatched this plan and executed it by herself. It was a very sweet surprise, even though I’d been in the mood for scrambled eggs (which I made for both of us once I got out of bed).

That evening, with Noah still gone, we had a girls’ night. We made pizza from a kit and topped it with Kalamata olives and broccoli (June’s choices) and watched Cinderella (also her choice.) She seemed to enjoy being the center of maternal attention for a couple hours.

My birthday was the next day. I opened presents in the morning after breakfast. This year I had the idea of asking for books by author friends of mine and I got two mysteries (http://www.amazon.com/Shallow-Roots-Anomie-K-Hatcher/dp/1450790569; http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dangerous-and-unseemly-kb-owen/1114666776) and a volume of poetry. I did this partly because the books sounded good, and partly of a desire to support my friends’ work, but also for indirect inspiration. I’m not planning to write a book of my own, but I do sometimes feel I need to be doing something besides raising kids and holding down a part-time writing job, something creative. I just don’t know what it is.

After hearing me complain repeatedly about how it’s been something like a year and a half since Stephen King’s last book was published Beth also pre-ordered his newest book, which won’t be out until next month. I didn’t even know it existed so it was a big surprise. She also signed us up for a composting service, because after years of dabbling with it, we’ve never quite gotten the hang of maintaining a compost pile. We will put our organic waste out for pickup and get composted dirt in return. It sounds like a good deal to me. Noah got me some fancy cheese and marmalades (pink grapefruit and lemon) and June got me some sea salt caramels. It was quite a haul and only the first day of presents because Mother’s Day was the very next day.

The rest of the day wasn’t exactly relaxing because we’d been away the weekend previous and so there was a lot to do in the house and garden, but I decided I’d spend the day on outdoor chores, as it was a lovely spring day. I prepared the pumpkin patch and transplanted the largest pumpkin seedling, which was getting too big for its pot, into the ground. I mowed the lawn and swept and hosed the dirt and pollen off the front porch. All the while I was listening to Ulysses on my iPod because I need to finish it by Wednesday for book club. (I am reading and listening to it. I finished the audio version on Sunday but I still have most of the Molly’s final forty-five page unpunctuated soliloquy to go in the print version.)

It was nice to be outside and moving most of the day and I felt cheerful and productive. We had dinner at Austin Grill and then came home for homemade chocolate cake topped with fresh strawberry frosting (my favorite frosting) and Hershey’s kisses Noah had brought home from Hershey Park. It was a sweet end to the day.

Just Mother’s Day

My birthday is always around Mother’s Day so I often feel sorry for Beth, for having to coordinate two gifts from each kid for me, but she came though, as always. June wanted to buy flowers for me so we held off exchanging gifts until after Beth and June went grocery shopping. At the farmers’ market, June selected a big bouquet of bachelor buttons and she also came home with a card that said, “the journey of a lifetime is in a single step from “no” to “yes.” She picked it because it had a seashell on the front. The funny thing about this was that Beth had originally nixed the idea of buying a card because June made cards for us at school, one in English for Beth and one in Spanish for me. But June has a way of turning no into yes, and Beth thought it was so fitting she bought the card. Noah got a selection of teas for me, and for Beth the kids got a mortar and pestle (June) and green and black rice (Noah).

We opened our gifts at the glass table in the back yard where we’d laid out a picnic lunch (June’s idea, of course). Beth made lemonade and we had the cheese from my birthday and Noah’s, crackers, watermelon, and the first local strawberries of the year. June also requested and received a grilled cheese sandwich and goldfish crackers. We finished the meal with leftover birthday cake. It was pleasant lingering at the table after the meal. I leaned back in my chair and looked up at the green leaves on the branches of our biggest maple and at the blue sky. But eventually we got up and I did the dishes, Noah went back to his homework and Beth went back to a project for work.

Later that afternoon, I went to swim laps. Beth asked if I was sure the pool was open and I said I thought so because it was “just Mother’s Day,” meaning not the kind of holiday that causes the pool to close.

“Just Mother’s Day!” she said in mock horror.

Even though it was full of chores, weekend felt celebratory enough. When I came home from the pool, Noah had more or less finished his homework and Beth was making tempeh reubens and June was in her doctor’s coat with the toy syringe preparing to perform surgery on Beth, whom I learned had dangerous germs in her bones. In other words, it was normal Sunday afternoon, but normal in a good way, in the way that turns the no of self-doubt into yes.

Right after the line I quoted from Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” the speaker urges, “Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night/You ain’t a beauty but hey, you’re all right.” (Beth has always maintained this is one of the best romantic lines in a rock and roll song.)

And you know how Ulysses ends, right?

Yes I said yes I will Yes.

Lucky Sevens

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Steph

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Saint Patrick’s Day is coming up and like many Americans, I’m part Irish, so maybe I should be expecting some luck. I did find the pot of gold at Capital City Cheesecake Tuesday morning when I dropped in for a cup of coffee and a macaroon while running an errand. It’s a promotion they’re running. Find the cardboard cutout of a pot of gold (which moves around the store from day to day) and you get 15-25% off your order, depending on how many people have found it that day. It felt pretty lucky, even though it was, objectively speaking, a rather small windfall. The satisfaction came mainly from the fact that the last time I was in there I couldn’t find the darn thing. A lot of things affect our perception of luck.

I was tagged by Tyfanny of Come What May (http://btmommy.blogspot.com/) and Teaberry of 04-05-08 (www.040508.blogspot.com) to do a version of the Seven Random Things meme. Thanks, Tyfanny! Thanks, Teaberry! I’ve done it before, but not for several years so I thought I’d give it another shot. The ironic part is it comes with this Versatile Blogger badge and I’m about to demonstrate my utter lack of versatility by refusing to do it as instructed. It’s the random part that does not come naturally to me. I always want my blog posts to hang together, so the last time I did this one, I told what was happening in my life five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty and thirty-five years prior to writing. This time I decided to play with sevens, or specifically dates with sevens in them, and the idea of luck. It gives me a couple of the same years as the previous Seven Random Things post, but I will try to say something a little different. (The older post is “Seven Snapshots from My Past,” on 11/16/07 in case you want to read fourteen not-so-random things about me.)

Here goes:

1967: This is an easy one because it’s the year I was born, so that’s clearly the luckiest thing that happened to me that year. I was born in Los Angeles in May of that year to a couple in their mid-twenties, a journalist and a nurse. I was their first child. I don’t remember life in California, as I was two and half when we moved to the East Coast, but we lived near the ocean and I spent a lot of time as a baby and a toddler on the beach. I think this could be why I feel so profoundly at home there.

1977: I was ten and living in Newtown, Pennsylvania with my parents and six-year-old sister. Some time in the beginning of fifth grade I was lucky enough to become close to the girl who would be my best friend for the next several years, including more than a year after we moved away in eighth grade. It took me a long time after the move to make new friends, so that friendship was sustaining, a lifeline really. I used to take the train to visit her for the weekend about once a month. She would come visit me sometimes, too, but not as often. As an adult and a parent, I’m impressed now with her parents’ generosity in having me as a guest in their house so frequently and for so long. In retrospect, I don’t think I was grateful enough.

1987: Another easy one. Late one July evening after a very long and circuitous conversation, I told Beth I’d never had a friendship as intense as ours that didn’t turn romantic. We discussed what might happen if I kissed her. She said she “wouldn’t mind.” Fortunately, I took this for a coy understatement and an invitation to proceed to the kiss. Later she told me she was being noncommittal, not because she didn’t want the kiss but because she was even more scared than I was. I kissed her. She kissed back. The rest is history.

7/15/91: Exactly four years later, in the bedroom of a B&B in Rehoboth Beach, I asked Beth to by my life partner. She said yes. Our commitment ceremony was about six months later.

1997: Finding something lucky about this year is actually kind of a stretch. Here’s what I wrote about it in a previous blog post:

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. (“On Turning Forty,” 5/11/07)

It’s hard for me to even say if getting the prospectus approved that year was lucky or not. I mostly regard my Ph.D as an expensive mistake these days, but I suppose if the committee hadn’t accepted it then I would have spent even longer banging my head against that particular wall, so I guess it will do.

2007: Now here I have to skip right over the birth of my kids because their birthdays have no sevens in them. That’s the random part, folks. So, by this time, I had finished the Ph.D, we’d traveled to all fifty states and our family was complete. Noah was six and June was one. This was the year I started writing this blog, a project I’d considered for years and one that’s been deeply satisfying to me. I feel lucky to have an outlet for my urge to write, and lucky that Beth maintains the site for me.

3/7/12: So, what was the luckiest thing that happened to me yesterday? It was a pretty normal day. I walked June to school because it’s Spirit Week and yesterday’s activity was “Eat Breakfast with Your Teacher” so she needed to be there early. I did laundry, straightened up the house a little, read Les Miserables for book club, exercised, edited a document about growing hydroponic cucumbers and summarized scientific abstracts about treating goiter with iodine. We went out for pizza because there was a fundraiser for Noah’s school at a Silver Spring pizzeria. I think the normalcy of the day might actually be the lucky part—having my family, my work and a bit of leisure. That’s luckier than 15% off a cup of coffee any day.

Okay now for the tagging part. There’s no way I can tag fifteen people. I don’t read that many blogs. Seven’s a stretch, as you will see. I just picked the last seven bloggers who commented on my blog, excluding the blogger who tagged Tyfanny because we don’t want this to get too circular, do we?

My sister Sara, who is not strictly speaking a blogger, because she has no blog…yet. But she sometimes says she might start one. You can consider yourself tagged in advance, Sara. And wouldn’t seven random things about yourself be a nice way to introduce yourself to your readers? Or alternately, you could leave me a comment with seven random I may not know about you.
Lesley, from Child Art Retrospective, another inappropriate choice because her blog is professional and not personal. But I am having fun imagining her list of seven random things she’s learned about art from preschoolers. Maybe leave it in a comment here?
Allison, at Bibliomania (http://www.bibliomama2.blogspot.com/). At last, an actual blogger who writes about her personal life (and her life of the mind). She’s funny and engaging and her posts often come back to zombies. I count this as a plus.
My good friend Megan at Perpetual Expat (http://mimi37.blogspot.com/), whom I may have already tagged with this very meme before. You did resolve to post more often this year, Megan. Here’s your chance.
Jane at Sugar and Puppy Dog Tales (http://www.littleboysaremadeof.blogspot.com/), who just asked for writing prompts. At your service, Jane.
Swistle, at Swistle. (http://www.swistle.blogspot.com/). A long shot, as I don’t think she does this kind of thing, but you should all go read her blog anyway. It’s one of my favorites.
Laura, from The Diniwilks (http://diniwilks.blogspot.com/) whose last post is another meme, so either she likes this kind of thing, or she’s meme-ed out. We’ll see.

Go forth and post. You might even follow the instructions. It’s worth a try.

Add the Versatile Award graphic on your blog post.
Thank the blogger who nominated you.
Share seven random things about yourself.
Nominate fifteen fellow bloggers.
Inform bloggers of their nomination.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Me, Myself and I