Blowing Stuff Up, Blowing Stuff Open

The Flaggy Shore of Ireland

Driving with my daughter the other day, she said: "I really don't want to become a grown-up."

And in my mind, I answered her: Ahhh, daughter.  I hear you. This pandemic. The tragedy everywhere around us. Trump at his Trumpiest. The appalling behavior of other grown-ups and especially those in power. The shooting in Nova Scotia. The stories you hear on the news and in your parents' discussions about the state of the world.  It's all just too much, isn't it?

My heart clenched when she said those words, as my mind unspooled in a stream of second-guessing.  Maybe we shouldn't watch Rachel every night and bring that daily dose of downer and despair into our home.  And we definitely need to be checking in with the kids more and seeing how they are processing the news about the coronavirus and everything else going wrong around the world.  What kind of support does this child need? What do they all need?  What have I missed, what have I not noticed, while I've been in one Zoom meeting after another?  How can I make it up to her?

And then she went on:

"I mean, you have to remember so much stuff as an adult!  I don't think I can do that!  For example, I learned in science class that if you just mix a bunch of chemicals together, you could blow everything up!  What if I don't remember that?  I mean, YOU remember that, because we've never blown anything up, but what if I forget and then the whole house explodes?  I'm never going to remember that.  I'll never remember all the things I'm supposed to remember! How do you do it?"

And once again, I am reminded that a child's perspective on the world is endlessly interesting and often hilarious.  The rest of the car ride was a rather enjoyable romp through imagining all the possibilities of things blowing up.

She's not wrong.  Being a grown-up means remembering, among other things:

• to lock the doors at night;
• where the batteries are;
• when you last gave a child #1 medicine;
• what child #2 asked for from the store;
• not to blow stuff up;
• that YOU are the adult, meaning it's not advisable to have a tantrum in the kitchen with the entire family watching;
• when to change the oil;
• to take the chicken out to thaw;
• to make follow up appointments.  Also?  To go to follow up appointments;
• to pay the bills;
• birthdays;
• to switch the laundry;
• that the garbage cans have to go out on Sunday nights and be brought back in on Monday morning;
• that kids are not always pains in the ass;
• that kids are not yet fully human and therefore require otherwordly amounts of patience and compassion;
• where you put your patience and compassion -- check under laundry pile;
• that the best way to raise a kid is to be good to your spouse (if you are lucky enough to have one);
• to eat your vegetables;
• to exercise so that when you're 80 you can still move;
• to drink water.  Lots and lots of water.  More water than beer.  Or bourbon.  For some reason, this one is hard for me;
• who is allergic to what;
• to wear sunscreen and make everyone under your roof do so as well;
• to pack the sunscreen;
• to get the CUBED pineapple at the store and not the crushed.  Your teriyaki skewers will thank you, and your people will not be disappointed;
• to always put your keys in the same place;
• not to scream every time you want to.

And so much more.  Apparently, it also means never assuming you know what a kid is talking about until you listen just a little longer.  I went from heading down a rabbit hole of worry to giggling with Tallulah about stuff blowing up in a few short seconds.  It's not the first time I've experienced the whiplash of parenthood; it won't be the last.

Later, as I was weeding in the garden, I thought about how much there is we want our kids to know about life and growing up. There's no getting around the intense impulse to teach them things, so many things, ALL the things. We are, as the saying goes, their first teachers. As Rick and I get ready to send our third child off to college this Fall (hopefully: who knows what tricks corona's got up its sleeve), I know I'll once again feel that familiar urgency to make sure she knows how to cook rice, be smart at parties, navigate bureaucracy, iron things, stand up for herself, talk to professors, and the list goes on.

But the list is not what matters. The What You Need To Know Before You Go To College list is not the measure of successful parenting, any more than the Things Grown-Ups Remember list is the measure of successful adulting.

The longer I am a parent, the more I suspect that all of my lists -- things to do, things to teach, things to manage, for my family, for myself -- while important, are not the be-all and end-all. Teaching my children things pales in comparison to what I hope I do better than anything else in life: loving them. And enjoying them. Celebrating them. Crying with them. Talking to them. Listening to them. Laughing with them. Cooking with them. Listening to music with them. Being with them, always.  I suppose that's a list of sorts, but one you never cross things off of. You get to get up every day and do all of those things again and again and again, in endless variety, in constant relationship.

Teaching them stuff will only take them so far. Giving them a soft place to land, a hard surface to bounce things off of, a net that will always catch them, and arms that will never let go, no matter how far they travel, will take them everywhere.

It turns out, parenting is the Flaggy Shore of family life:

Useless to think you'll park or capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

-- Seamus Heaney, Postscript

* * *

If We Were Siblings

Based on the news, my Twitter feed, and the depressing New Yorker articles I've been reading lately, I have come to the conclusion that life in the time of corona is marked by fear and mistrust.

Americans do not trust each other, and without that trust, we will not stand.  We will be a house divided.  If we could fight like siblings, we would stand a chance, but we fight instead like strangers who cut each other off in traffic and give each other the finger as we blaze past with furious indignation oozing from the glares we leave behind.

I wish we could fight like siblings.  Sure, we’d probably still flip each other the bird and we would definitely get just as enraged at perceived injustices and stupidity.  But maybe sometimes we would stick around to thrash it out too.

----

Everywhere I look, I see the ways in which we don't trust each other.  It's in the protestors who want to open the country back up, facing down the health care workers who want us to stay at home.  It's in the vicious twitterstorms we consume in great, endless scrolls.  It's in the way we talk about virtually every issue we face as a country.

Take health care: Low-income Alabamians are opposed to the Affordable Care Act because they don't want "aliens and welfare queens" to take advantage of taxpayers' hard-earned money.  Have they asked for proof that this actually happens, or are they believing their so-called leaders -- leaders who very well could have ulterior motives for wanting to pit poor and oppressed people against each other?

You can blame the New Yorker, and Eyal Press specifically, for this rant.  His piece A Preventable Cancer is on the Rise in Alabama got my brain and blood both boiling.

Why do the "have nots" give their solidarity and loyalty to the "haves," who show no capacity for generosity or justice or simple decency?

To the question of people gaming the system: how many welfare queens would be acceptable if it means poor people could get the health care they need so they don’t die from easily preventable disease?  If 100 deserving citizens get covered through the ACA, while two or three welfare queens pull a fast one, sneaking themselves and their 10-12 children on to the rolls, even though they’re lazy, good-for-nothings who waste their time and our dime, would that be worth it?  Or 7-8 of them?  What about 20?

And what exactly is a welfare queen? Should we take a look at what life on welfare actually looks like and root out the people who are living like royalty? Does that even happen?  Should we find out who is actually being prosecuted for fraud?  Does anyone besides me suspect that it might be mostly white people?  Not necessarily because they're worse people but because there are more of them?

And don't get me started on the 10-12 babies thing.

As if people have babies to make their lives easier...
As if big families deserve less of a safety net than smaller ones...
As if the people complaining about 10-12 babies from welfare queens aren't the same ones saying All Lives Are Precious, meaning, apparently, only the unborn ones because once you draw breath, suddenly you're a drain on honest taxpayers -- at least you are if you're born into a family that doesn't fit American mythology.

Swerving from that New Yorker article, with its wider implications for health care during a pandemic, to the coverage of Trump doing his trumpiest and protestors with rifles demanding the right to go out for burger, I can’t help but wonder if people on opposite sides of the most important issue we face can ever come together.

The divide feels too deep to cross.

Even siblings have to fight like hell to bridge their divides, to remind themselves to be compassionate, to put themselves in each others' shoes.

It seems that Americans take for granted the things we say we stand for.  We behave as if slogans are true without effort, that flags and symbols are enough all on their own, that we don't need vigilance and struggle and conversations and challenge and compromise.  Maybe that's why human beings keep fighting wars: because being on the righteous side of a fight does in fact unite us, perhaps like nothing else, and because so often, we need to be brought together again.  Being united against a common enemy lays bare the secondary importance of daily grievances and even policy differences, by stripping away what does not matter.  What's left is truly, only, what is worth dying for.

So what do we do when we can't even agree on what is worth dying for?

We've got front line workers who show us, every day, that other people are worth dying for. And we've got other people, some of them elected leaders, who seem to believe that the economy is worth dying for -- MORE worth it than saving the lives of a whole lot other people.

If we take this second group at their word, they are willing to have Americans die from COVID19 so that the economy survives.  Don't they see that the vast majority of those who will do the dying are those for whom the economy wasn't working in the first place?  Their policy ideas belie their blindness to how millions upon millions of Americans actually live.  When they say "the solution can't be worse than the problem," they belie their privilege and their inability to truly see what is happening around them.

And what do we do as a country when one solution will minimize how many of us must die while damaging the fortunes of corporations and the other solution will minimize the economic damage while increasing the number of people -- likely poor -- who will die?

If we were siblings and had to choose for our great big family, wouldn't we choose life over dollars?  Call it a choice between two bad outcomes: in perfect world we wouldn't have to choose.

But the fact that the choice exists is not evidence of moral failure. The problem we have does not mean that libtards suck or that MAGAs are a bunch of deplorable #BranchCovidians.  The reality we are facing does not require us to lay blame at each others' feet.  The problem is that we are battling a global pandemic that is big, nasty, overwhelming, terrible, and that touches everything from the personal to the political, the systemic to the idiosyncratic.  The problem is, basically, a war -- a battle that should be uniting us to come together and save lives.

When we don't do that -- when we can't be brothers and sisters and agree on the enemy -- when that happens, no flag can help us.  If we want that flag, our country, to save us, then shouldn't we put some energy, time, and goodwill into the fight, with our questions, our actions, our kindness?  Shouldn't we each give the best of ourselves to each other, instead of our vitriol and venom?

So many of us are making masks, and hosting neighborhood "distance happy hours," and showing solidarity with the Class of 2020, and finding ways to help, soothe, comfort.  We are coming together in those important ways and places.

But in perhaps the toughest places of all -- the places where we disagree -- nothing feels farther from the truth than "we're all in this together."  We're too busy shouting at each other for that to be true.

And so, a plea: If you disagree with me, please don't flip the bird at me and rush past in disgust.  Engage me. Ask me what I care about and why. Tell me those things about yourself.  Tell me what you are afraid of.  Push, with love, on the most urgent questions we are facing together.

I want to do the same.  I want to be your sister.

Say Zoom One More Time

I dare you.  Go ahead.  Whisper it or shout. Weave it into conversation.  See what happens.

I can't be held responsible for the reflexive, bitter stream of vitriol that might come your way.  You have been warned.

Don't get me wrong.  I've zoomed my way through a few delightful happy hours with friends. My office HR department hosted a lovely little virtual water cooler gathering that warmed my heart.  My fiddle teacher's band live-streamed a concert in place of one they had to cancel, and it made me happy.  And there's no question that I am able to work from home productively thanks in no small part to the wonders of teleconferencing.

And yet.  My household participated in at least ten zoom meetings today, and we didn't make it to all of them.  With three "distance learners" and two "distance workers" -- none of whom have nearly enough distance from each other -- the bloom has officially faded from the rose of virtual meetings.  (We also have one grocery store employee who is still heading out that door to work each day: he's our very own superhero.)

Day seven, and I don't feel so much connected to the world by Zoom as bludgeoned over the head with it.

The virtual requests keep coming: all three girls' soccer teams are or will be holding online sessions; Rick will be hosting online sessions for the two teams he coaches, in addition to the coaches' meetings he's already doing.  Tomorrow I have four separate online meetings for work.  My fiddle lessons are now virtual.  Here at Casa de Alatorre, we're Zooming.  We're Google Hanging-Out.  We're FaceTiming.  We're FB Living. We're doin' it all and we might just be losing something in the process.

Every external activity we engage in, for work, health or recreation, has moved online.  It seems that the entire world is offering to zoom on into our home to provide connection! exercise! wellness!  interaction! community! self-improvement! fulfillment! nirvana!

Ok, maybe no one is offering nirvana-via-zoom.

The new Zoom-infused reality we are living in has got some kinks to work out.  The onslaught comes from a truly well-meaning place: people need connection, kids still need to be part of their soccer teams, work still needs to get done.  But the virtual frenzy needs to calm the f*** down.  We need to take a minute. a real, non-virtual minute, to process what's happening and how we can and should respond.  I'd calgon myself away from this madness, but chances are, someone's in the bathroom with a laptop or phone, and that's not the kind of livestream I think anyone needs right now.

Maybe, just maybe, we all need to take a breather.  Shelter in place is hard.  But maybe the answer isn't frantically figuring out how to deliver every possible experience via the internet.  I, personally, need some time to prioritize and think and consider what virtual experiences are actually going to help me and my family in this monumentally challenging time.

As varied and mystifying as family time can be, as hard as it is to be sheltered together by necessity, the situation does present a family with a unique opportunity to spend time differently.  Virtual gatherings of all kinds are not necessarily helping, and may instead be making it harder for us to come together and weather this storm.  When the world can come inside the house at all hours of the day and night, it feels like we have less control as a family over how our family is, simply with each other.

This is not a new observation for me: I've long despised the long tentacles of marketing that are able to reach my kids through their phones, robbing them of precious quietness of mind.

But this feels like next-level infiltration, dressed up in good intentions, and it's currently colliding with the intense experience of six people trying to navigate COVID19 without losing our minds.  There is a reason we come home and relax, finally through the work and school and practice day: home is where we escape the grind.  Now, it feels like the grind is zooming into where it does not belong.   I want to say ENOUGH, but I don't yet know what we can say no to and what we can't -- and everything is happening so fast.

Zoom and all the other platforms out there are good tools that will help us through Shelter In Place -- but they are not the answer and they might be obscuring the question.  What are our families not figuring out, as we turn to online platform after online platform?  I don't know: I want the time and space to wrestle with this question.

Still not gonna miss my 8am virtual pilates with Starr, and bless her for zooming that particular activity into my home.  :)

#FamilyInPlace

Family In Place: Reality Check

With Shelter-In-Place in effect, I have rushed to fill my social media with fun posts and photos about my family's response to this new reality.  The incredible responses I've seen from around the country and the world -- Italy's citizens singing to each other at their windows, friends hosting Yoga via Zoom, the endless hilarious memes that make us laugh -- have inspired me to be creative with my family and to focus on staying positive and motivated in the face of this daunting challenge.  This makes sense: we all need inspiration and motivation.

But last night, my 17-year-old daughter said: "Mom, your social media posts are making it look like we are having fun with all of this."

Good point.  It has not been fun.  There have been bright moments, and I'm proud of my kids for how they have managed things so far, but it has not been fun.  Here are some real moments from AIRY5 in the past few days:

One kid, screaming at another: "STOP LOOKING AT ME OR I WILL KILL YOU."  This was not said in jest.  It was not playful.  It came from a deep and primal place, familiar to siblings around the world.  The scream reverberated throughout the house and hung in the air for a good long time.  Speaking for myself only, it definitely depressed me, while simultaneously causing me to question my parenting and worry about the future of my childrens' relationships.  Temporarily, anyway.

I added a blank list of 5 or 6 lines to our family mural, with the heading: DAY 2: HOW WILL WE SURVIVE?  Then I texted everyone and asked them to help fill it in.  My oldest wanted to put "Eat the little one" on the list.  I didn't let him.  The list went unfilled, except for one suggestion: "Rob a bank."  No one was feeling like coming up with hopeful and creative ways to help each other through Day 2, apparently.

Despite the art mural on our dining room table, despite the basketball hoop my son made out of a Sierra Nevada six-pack container, despite the kickback Rick constructed yesterday for the kids, the most common sight in this household is still teenagers with bad posture, staring at their phones.  Rick and I have talked about the need to institute "tech-free time" each day, and we will do that, but we haven't yet.  What can I say: we are weak.

Yesterday afternoon, I took to my bed, overwhelmed and sad. I'm overwhelmed by the sheer number of articles and resources coming my way, sent by family and friends and posted all over social media.  I'm saddened by what is happening around the world and how many people are suffering.  I'm horrified by how our president is talking about the crisis.  I'm scared because it feels like this country is not doing what needs to be done.  I'm sad for my daughter, who is a senior this year, as she faces the possibility of not having any of the senior-year milestones and moments she and we have been looking forward to.  Did I, without realizing it, watch her play her last soccer game a few weeks ago?  I stayed in bed for two hours, before forcing myself to get up and take the dog out.

THIS.  IS.  HARD.

I told my kids that our family's Shelter In Place experience will be filled with all kinds of moments: good, bad, ugly, and strikingly beautiful.  I believe this is true.  And we should acknowledge all of it, and let it be.

Hang in there, community.  Share what makes you happy, but also feel free to share what makes you feel sad or scared or mad, if you want.  You are not alone.

#MyCorona

cute dog pic cuz she's my
favorite baby right now

Well, THIS is going to be interesting.

And by "interesting," I mean excruciating.

People, Rick and I are now trapped in a small house with three teenagers and a 21-year old male.  So essentially, four teenagers.  The fifth boy child is still away at college: his university is closed down, but he lives in a house, not a dorm, so for now, he's staying where he is. He is safer there than here in the Bay Area, where cases of coronavirus are growing.

It is true that when we heard the news today that as of midnight tonight we would be sheltering in place for the next three weeks -- along with 6.7 million other Bay Area residents -- my teenagers looked at me with equal parts horror and fury.  It took me about five seconds to recognize the look in their eyes, eyes pointed AT ME.  I knew what that look meant: it meant they were pissed AT ME for the shelter in place.

A tense silence hung in the air until I said: "Just remember, I personally did not decree this shelter in place, despite how you might be feeling or tempted to react."

One of my daughters pointed right at me and said: "I WILL BREAK YOU! I will NOT stay here for three weeks.  I WILL WEAR YOU DOWN AND I WILL LEAVE THIS HOUSE!"

Me: "So, this is starting off well."

• • • 

Today was tough.  One college kid home and pissed off that he can't go anywhere...one 7th grader bumping through the process of figuring out how to do "distance learning" on the computer...one senior in high school confronting the possibility of no prom, no graduation ceremony, no final spring soccer season, no life...one child sick and, yes, feverish, and one doctor-by-phone-appointment to determine that she likely has a sinus infection...one proposal deadline for the job I'm still responsible for...and one shelter-in-place order throwing a giant curveball over all of it.

Rick went to the closest grocery store shortly after the shelter-in-place was announced, and spent 30 minutes shopping and almost two hours standing in line waiting to get to the cashier.  Never fear though, he brought home 9 bags of chips and a whole lotta beer: I'd marry him all over again today. (In his defense, the store was completely out of everything that was actually on our list: EVERYTHING.)

I went to pick up a prescription for the sinus infection, and the scene at our local Kaiser hospital was surreal: a triage center out in front, people pulling up to the curb looking very very sick, everyone in masks, lots of health care workers shouting directions to everyone.

It's almost time for bed here, and Rick just said to me: "Well, we made it through one day!"  I had to remind him that yes, we did make it through one day, but the three-week process actually starts tomorrow, so...

These are strange times.  We are all going through something monumental both together and alone.  One thing is certain: the next three weeks will be a fascinating study in family life, the good, the bad and the ugly.  Can a person be both subject and researcher at the same time?  

We shall find out!

• • •

She Makes Me Happy. And Tired.

Good Lord.  Yesterday nearly did me in.

Some of you may know we got a dog for Christmas, 2018.  Ever since losing our beloved black lab, Tule, on Mother's Day 2017, most of our family has been lobbying hard for another dog.  I was the lone holdout, so when I -- as the mom and all around boss (sorry, hon) -- decided we were ready, we were finally ready.

This was that special moment:

Zuzu is now a little over a year old, and she is adorable and awesome and so much fun and...problematic.

We take her for hour-long off-leash walks, where she frolics like a maniac with other dogs, as often as we can, and it's not enough.  She needs more.  When we got her, the people selling her told us she is part black lab, part Australian Shepard.  This may or may not be true, but she is 100% pure energy, plus another 35% neurosis.  She's a hot mess most of the time.  All that puppy energy, plus a couple of breeds with high activity quotients means we basically adopted a full-time job.

No worries, you're thinking: this family has five kids!  Plenty of help with a new dog!  Riiiiiiight.  Have you met my children?  I love them to the ends of being and ideal grace, but they're basically worthless when it comes to sharing any kind of workload.

Don't get me wrong, I went into the whole "let's get a new dog" thing with my eyes wide open.  I knew it would be Rick and me doing most of the work.  Luckily, I fell so hard in love with that little munchkin that I'm ready to sacrifice cooking for my human children to fulfill her needs.  I am repaid handsomely in love and devotion, so it all works out.

Anyway, I recently realized that our hour-long walks are not doing the trick, so yesterday I had a mission: Get. Zuzu. Tired.

I found a book the other day called Bay Area Hikes with Dogs, and found a lovely hike less than 20 miles from home that looked like it might take me a couple of hours and introduce me to some local nature trails new to me: Bort Meadow Trail, sort of near Lake Chabot. I loaded whacko little Zuzu in the car and off we went.  This is how she felt about the experience shortly after we arrived:

And this is how the rest of the experience went:

Turns out, Bay Area Hikes for Dogs is less than exact in its trail directions, and what I thought would be a two-hour hike turned into a 3.5-hour long epic, during which I asked myself several times "Am I lost?  I'm not lost, am I? I'm probably not lost."  And while texting my husband, I assured him I was not lost, while not exactly sure of that myself.  (True story, hon.)

The directions in the book, while less than clear, matched many of the things I saw.  The book said that at one point, it would seem like the trail ended, but that I should continue on the paved portion of road for .2 miles until picking it up again just past the water tower.  Well, long after having taken a wrong turn that I blame on the less than clear directions, I did in fact come upon a spot where it seemed like the trail ended and a paved path took over for about .2 miles.  I picked up the trail again and kept going, for a long while.  I passed a golf course; I passed Lake Chabot.  The book did not mention either of these rather significant sightings, and I started to get suspicious.

Finally, I came upon a trail map and consulted it, and could tell I was nowhere near where I was supposed to be.   So I started backtracking.  I drank all my water. I ate my apple.  I stopped seeing people.  It got cold and windy.  I started cursing all that nature.  I became a bitter, unhappy hiker. It was ENDLESS.

Did I mention the signs that warned that this area was home to coyotes?  That was fun.

Also fun was the part where I was finally less than half a mile from my car, and the only path back had a sign next to it saying: "Trail closed; this path will be reopened when it is safe for the public."   It took me about 5 seconds to decide to take my chances on the closed path rather than (a) backtrack for another two hours or (b) continue on the main path with no idea where it went or how it would get me back to my car.  The book said that this smaller trail -- Buckeye Trail -- was a lovely, very secluded path back to Bort Meadow.  Damn that “closed path” BS, I needed the shortest distance between me and my Prius. Blowing past the TRAIL CLOSED sign, I felt like such a little nature rebel.  But here I am, writing about it, so we know it all worked out.

At the end of the whole thing, I had walked 21,000 steps, I was dirty, dusty, grumpy and tired.

But LOOK WHAT I DID:

It's hard to take a photo of a black dog, but trust me: that pup was OUT.

Success! So basically, I need to quit my job and devote myself to making this dog tired 4 hours of every day.  We might not be able to feed the kids, pay college tuition, or keep our house, but Zuzu will be well cared for, so it's all good.

She makes me happy.

Better Parenting Through Selfishness

The other day, Elizabeth told me that a friend of hers "aspires to be like you when she's a mom."

Photo from a recent hike:
I do those for myself too!

Um...come again?

First of all, I was not previously aware that I had made any impression whatsoever on said friend.  To be honest, I wasn't even sure that if I saw this girl somewhere without my daughter in tow, she would know who I was.  Second, what could she possibly be basing this aspiration upon? How well I pull up to the parking lot to pick Elizabeth up from soccer practice?  The food I bring to games when I miraculously remember we are on snack duty?  My mad sideline cheering skillz?

Before I got too puffed up about inspiring the younger generation, I had to ask: Why, Elizabeth? Why does your friend want to be like me?

Turns out, she aspires to be like me because I "do pilates" and take violin lessons and otherwise do things for myself and not solely for my children.

FASCINATING!

Here we are killing ourselves to do ALL OF THE THINGS for our kids and gnashing our teeth over whether or not we're doing it all right, and it turns out, the children like it when we take care of ourselves!

This is very good news.  Never mind putting the needs of the child first.  Don't worry about those permission slips and nutritious lunches (unless they are for you) and clean, matching socks.  Release yourself from carpool duty and school supply shopping and bedtime/bathtime routines.  Really, the key to parenting success is to treat yourself right.  Have drinks with friends, go to baby goat yoga, play an instrument, train for a 5K fun run or for a marathon -- the world is your oyster!  And if you wanna eat oysters -- with or without horseradish -- DO IT!

It makes sense too: it must not be that interesting for kids to watch parents who have no lives beyond pick up and drop off, who make adult life look like it's solely about doing stuff for other people.  It turns out, kids want us to be happy. It helps them look forward to adulthood and see family life as more than just years and years of impossibly hard work.  They will surely figure that part out for themselves.

So, to those of you who have lists of things you need to do this weekend for your kids: shred that thing immediately. Start over, and this time, make a list filled with fun things that will make you happy.

Do it for the kids. 


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Bring On the 40 Days

Welcome, Lent.


This year, I am using this season to force myself to do something I've been meaning to do for a long time now: re-establish the habit of writing.

I stopped writing regularly awhile ago, and as a result, I don't know what I think about pretty much anything anymore, except that I really want the Trump presidency to come to a screeching halt.  But other than that, I can't really figure out much about life.  Writing used to help me make sense of things, and I'm hoping it will again.  Things like:

• Why do my teenage daughters' midriffs (and sculpted eyebrows and endless, curated selfies) bother me so much?
• How can one person make a stand against the divisions and rancor that are everywhere?
• When will I figure out how to make my iPhone serve me, rather than the other way around?
• Why is life so unbelievably hard?  Why is life so unbelievably beautiful?  And why is it so hard to focus on the beautiful?

I used to write a ton on this blog about raising my kids.  Now, I am deep into this parenting thing and have been doing it mostly without the outlet of writing.  I've now been parenting for almost 22 years.  Still have quite a few more years ahead before that day in the distant future when I invite my grown kids over for dinner.  I think about that day a lot -- what it will be like, who will be there.  Will I like the people my children bring in to the family?  How many grandkids will I have?  Will my adult children trash my house then as they do now?

I feel simultaneously seasoned at motherhood and baffled by every new experience that comes my way as each individual child grows and changes.  It's stunning, really, how unprepared I can still feel for the things that life throws our way.  And I think life is trying to teach me to never feel like I have arrived, to always stay open to learning more and changing and becoming who I am.

This week marks one very gigantic milestone in my family: we officially change pediatricians as of March 1, and I'm seriously deep in mourning over it.  21.5 years ago, after I had failed at one of the first TO DO items I ever became aware of as a newly expectant mother (research, interview and carefully choose a pediatrician for your new baby!), we were lucky enough to give birth on a night when Dr. Maria happened to be on call checking out all the newborns.  She asked if we had a pediatrician and I sheepishly said no.  She offered to be ours, and what the heck, she seemed nice, so we said YES.

It turned out to be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.  Ever since, she has been by my side.  She has helped us through the usual fevers and ear infections and viruses and sprains.  She got us through a lacerated kidney and a rather unusual bowel movement issue (nuff said, truly).  She has a perspective and approach to medicine that is fundamentally based on the relationships she is able to build with parents and kids, and IT WORKED FOR US.  I have never, for one minute, been a mother without the amazing Dr. Maria in my back pocket, as it were, and we -- me, my husband, and all five of these little shits -- are beyond fortunate to have fallen into her lap.

Alas, health insurance rates don't care one whit about those relationships.

Faced with a choice of sticking with Dr. Maria and seeing our health insurance cost go up by $450 per month or switching to a plan that will only go up $150 -- which is to say, not much of a choice at all -- we "adulted" and did the totally sucky responsible practical fiscally smart very sad thing, and switched.  (I'll have you know that I consciously chose not to use commas in that sentence because that's how it feels in my head: a steady, uninterrupted litany of yuckiness.)

It's fine.  We'll all be fine.  Maria will still be a big part of our lives (because BONUS: We became FRIENDS over the past two decades!  We play FIDDLE together!).  The kids will get another doctor, and I have a recommendation for a great one at Kaiser, where they will now be seen.  It will all be fine.  So why do feel like I'm in mourning?

Maria has been formative to my mothering, and to my identity as a mom.  So now, I have to forge a new mom-dentity, with a new pediatrician who doesn't know our history, who doesn't know that Sam is the sweetest boy ever, or that Vincenzo and Lola are basically Picassos, that Elizabeth is wicked smart and hilarious, that Tallulah is a force of nature that we're gonna try not to screw up too much.

The new doctor will learn.  She will come to see these kids as the freakin' miracles that they are.  If she doesn't, I'll find a new doctor.

I saw Maria tonight (fiddle lessons every Thursday, yo!), and told her of my heartbreak.  She gave me a hug and said: "I'll always be your pediatrician.  You can always call me with stuff -- I just can't prescribe for you anymore."

See?  She's gold.

Looking forward to seeing what I write about tomorrow.

Peace.

Weirdness

I learned the other day that my mother's death certificate says that the cause of her death was Alzheimer's Disease.

This is fascinating to me.  My mom was given multiple diagnoses for her physical and mental decline in the five years that she was sick, ranging from Parkinson's to Alzheimer's, to not-Alzheimers, to other weird forms of dementia we had never heard of, to generic "decline."  That period of time was characterized by confusion and questions, by us figuring out over weeks and months that doctors, in general, don't know very much about the brain or its problems.

We've had two close family friends who also received Alzheimer's diagnoses.  Both of them exhibited textbooks signs of that disease like forgetting family members' names and their relationships to them and gradually losing the ability to converse. While mom experienced intense confusion sometimes and was clearly dealing with some kind of dementia, she never forgot who she was, who her family and friends were, never forgot names. She even remembered more than most of us sometimes: she could remember how she met a person or details from events far in the past.  She repeated herself a lot, but she could still carry on a conversation with us, and she asked questions about grandkids and jobs and other goings-on of life.

I remember when she died, we had to decide as a family whether or not to have an autopsy done.  It was the only way, we were told, to know definitively if she had suffered from Alzheimer's or not.  I had stopped expecting medicine to provide us with any answers, and my vote was NO, we didn't need that to happen.  Most of us agreed, and we didn't do it.

But someone, somewhere, decided to fill in the box on her death certificate with a specific answer, as if that were a thing that could be known for sure.  Who made that decision? Why? What purpose does it serve?  How is that information used, and by whom?

One the one hand, it doesn't feel very consequential.  On the other, I find it so strange that such a personal question -- how did she die? -- has apparently been officially answered when the actual, most true answer is that we don't know for sure. 

How trustworthy are official documents in general?  How do historians evaluate documents like this when they are doing research into famous or historical figures?  Seems like a giant guessing game to me.

That is all.  I just think it's weird and wanted to take note of the weirdness in writing.

Crave

I crave crunchy gravel,

Clean swept wooden decks,

Cool, misty sprinklers in the evening.

I crave the deepest forest quiet,

Leaves settling and pinging into place.

Hummingbird wings pulsing through thick summer air.

I crave the stillness of time.

The suspension of need and want and craving itself.

The commandments of land and water, field and sunshine.

Out there, everything makes sense and fits together.

Out there, we both belong and understand.

The dry creek beds and the smell of dirt tell us who we are.

Let’s go there together.

What Is Wrong With Us?

Our country is in a rather distressing situation.  I chose those mild words deliberately because losing my mind over the current state of affairs is getting exhausting.

But really, we do seem to be headed for a fall: everyone is angry at someone; everyone is sure their side is right.  Everyone feels panic about something: guns, abortion, immigrants, you name it.  But how do we break through the noise and weirdness that has gripped our national discourse?  How do we ask real questions and listen to real answers?  Nearly every single thing I see on Twitter, or Facebook, or in the news features someone spouting their incredulity at "the other side."  All around us, people are fighting and ranting.  No one seems to be getting past the rant. 

Rants feel great, don't they?  Just this morning, I went on a very satisfying one about my ungrateful children and how infuriating it is to confront what seems like their complete lack of awareness and consideration.  I ranted.  I raved.  I expressed myself, energetically.  And then I took a deep breath and remembered that I love those crazy ingrates and that "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?" is not an effective parenting strategy. 

Neither is it an effective governing policy or problem-solving approach. 

But we do have a problem in this country: we are divided, and divided, we cannot stand.  This division will not stop and it will destroy our country unless we can figure out how to listen to each other and how to respect each other's humanity.

Up to this point, I have not betrayed my politics in this post, because the division problem we have isn't about who is right and who is wrong.  It's not about who you're going to vote for, or who you think is Anti-American.  It's about the humanity of the people we disagree with and our inability to honor it or even see it.  And we should.  Even in the people who infuriate us; even in the people who want to keep their guns at the expense of our children's lives; even the people who say that Democrats support killing babies; even the people who think that cruelty as an immigration policy is a totally OK, ends-justifies-the-means kind of strategy.  So there, now you know my politics.  Now, you either think I'm on the side of All Things Right and Good or you think I'm a Godless Communist.  You'll either welcome me into your fold or you'll write me off as an idiot.  You'll either give me my humanity or you won't. 

None of this will stop when Trump goes away unless we figure out how to build community with people we disagree with.  It will not stop until together we ask and try to answer: What is wrong with us?