Untangling Knots

A few weeks ago, my daughter Tallulah found one of her favorite necklaces, a sweet silver angel with a rhinestone heart, in a jumbled tangle under the passenger seat of my car. She asked me to fix it. “Sure, yeah, just stick it on the dashboard.” I may have a habit of saying “sure, yeah, later” to my kids and their 47 daily requests for me to do something for them.

Days went by, and I made no effort to fix it. Driving to and from work, grocery shopping, picking up girls from soccer practice, I would look at the small lump in the corner of my dash and push it out of my mind. It took me a few days to realize that I wasn’t merely putting off a mundane task.  I was actively avoiding it. Why was that little thing taunting me? Why did the sight of it fill me with something like dread?

A few more days went by before I realized it was because of Ann.

* * *

Ann and I met when I was 13 and she 14. Immediately, I realized that she was basically good at everything. She knew how to ride horses, and taught me how as well. She got better grades than I did (than nearly everyone did), and helped me in my classes. She trained me at the deli where we both worked, and where we first met. She was confident and humble, and I looked up to her, even as we became good friends.

A couple of years later, she had her driver’s license, a brown diesel Volkswagon Rabbit, and a sense of adventure bigger than mine. Powered by Ann, we went to the Sonoma Coast, on hillside hikes, and to exotic San Francisco, always exploring. I followed her everywhere, literally and figuratively, and I relied on her for many things, large and small.

Among her many talents, she was particularly good at fixing tangled necklaces. Such necklaces would have gone to the top of my dresser to die if not for Ann. Lacking as I did the patience to fix them myself, I would save them up for her, my more patient and optimistic friend.

“Ann’ll do that for me,” I’d half think to myself before tossing them aside. And she would, always. She never seemed irritated or bothered. She went about the work of untangling knots as if she had all the time in the world and no more important thing to give her attention to. She is the reason my necklaces survived my teenage years.

In many ways, she is the reason I survived my teenage years, my college years, my 20s and 30s and 40s. As one of my closest friends, she eased my fears and insecurities for decades. When I needed to study, she helped me buckle down and focus. Ever the caretaker, she knew that I didn’t eat much when I was stressed, so she’d show up at my house with apple fritters drowning in butter. Later, as a doctor, she helped me understand the medical issues faced by my children as they grew and my parents as they aged; I would often call her after leaving a doctor’s office to get The Ann Translation, because I knew she would tell me what I needed to know, with the perfect metaphor to help me understand, and that she would ease my anxieties over the health and well being of my family.

She even once pulled a tick out of two-year-old Lola’s neck, because I was just too completely freaked out to do it myself. Never mind that she was all dressed up for her own daughter’s baptism, never mind that she had a house full of people to host. She responded to my plaintive “Aaaaaannnnn!” by whisking my child up to the bathroom and applying her tweezers and surgical skills to the nape of Lola’s neck. In no time, that tick was surfing down the toilet drain, giving rise to yet another opportunity for me to say: “Thank God for Ann.”

Ann died of cancer in July of 2017. I can’t call her anymore to ask what some weird medical thing means. We won’t be going on any more jaunts to Goat Rock beach. I can’t indulge with her in chocolate chip cookie dough or apple fritters. She will not be talking me down from any more social-anxiety ledges.

And I can no longer save up tangled knots for her to fix.

* * *

Last week, I found myself at a soccer field, waiting for a notoriously over-time coach to finally call the end of practice. As I sat there simmering in mild annoyance and thinking uncharitable thoughts about the coach, my eye fell upon Tallulah’s necklace. This time, I didn’t push it out of my mind. Instead, I pulled it and so many memories of Ann towards me.

“OK, dammit, I can fix this stupid thing,” I thought as I tackled the job of picking the knots apart. With no small measure of bitterness, I looped pieces this way and that, followed dead-end paths, and stubbornly tried again. I stared at clots of chain, willing my eyes to pierce the mysteries of which lengths went where. More than once, I chastised Ann for leaving me to deal with this mess without her.

After countless fruitless tugs this way and that, one loop finally got a little bigger and pieces started sliding through. As I worked, I found myself warming to the task, and concentrating more willingly and hopefully on my goal. More spaces opened up, knots resolved one by one until at last the angel was free. It probably took no more than 20 minutes, but I lived a lifetime in those minutes, a lifetime of thinking about all ways I miss having Ann in my life.

Something else happened too: I caught a glimpse of her spirit, of the way she did a job with purpose and single-mindedness -- and without self-interest or complaint. It seems too flippant to say I was channeling her, but I was bringing her to life for myself once more, by doing a task the way she would do it. As I worked at the tangles, I grew calmer and less bitter. Knowing how happy my daughter would be made me experience something like joy in the process. Realizing that Ann once did these things for me, and now I would need to do them myself, made me want to do this job and do it well.

This is is how she will live on for me: not merely by my remembering her or thinking about the things we did together, but by embodying her way of being in the world and making her present in the actions I take each day.

Hopping in the car after practice, Tallulah noticed her newly liberated angel swinging back and forth from the rearview mirror and happily exclaimed: “My necklace! Thank you! You’re so good at fixing tangled chains, mom!” With her words, I realized that I have adopted a little bit of Ann to take with me into the years ahead. Tallulah will probably save up her jumbled necklaces and shove them in my direction for the next several decades, and I will welcome them. Each one will bring with it another chance to have Ann by my side.

She once helped me smooth every tangle and resolve every knot; now I know that she will do that forever, from deep in my heart.

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Cupcake Dreams

I want to be a kid again.  I want to tell stories the way my youngest daughter does.  I want to dream about cupcakes.  And I really, really want a Dream Teller of my very own.

During dinner last night, Little T was devouring my homemade spaghetti sauce and making me feel like Martha Stewart, Julia Child, and Ree Drummond, all rolled into one, and she mentioned that she knew she was going to have a good dinner tonight because her Dream Teller told her so.

Come again, daughter?

Your what?

That's right.  She has a Dream Teller.  Every morning, after a night of dreaming about cupcakes and unicorns and whatever other lovelies visit her while she is sleeping, her Dream Teller tells her what her dreams mean.  Here's last night's:

Actually, I don't want to be a kid again: I want to be THIS KID.

* * *

The World Cup is Here!

When Sam was seven years old, he colored thirty-two flags for every nation in the 2006 world cup, and thus was born a tradition.

The Wall of Nations!
Flags will come down as countries are eliminated.

For the record, we are supporting -- of course -- the United States, as well as Croatia (my heritage) and Spain (because we love them).  

For the record, we are NOT supporting Ghana or Portugal.

For the record, we are psyched, ready, giddy, and not a little bit bummed that this thing called work will get in the way of lots and lots of soccer viewing.

Love.

To players and fans everywhere -- enjoy the next four weeks!  I know we will!

* * *

Death and Life

My son asked me the other day how long it takes to get over the death of someone you love.  There is an inherent hope in that question, that getting over loss is possible, that everything will be OK at some point in the future.  I didn't want to answer him, because...well...who wants to tell a child that there are things you never get over?  But I answered.  I told him that you never get over a death, that you always miss a person whom you love, and no one and nothing ever can take his (or her) place in your life.  It's also possible, I told him, to go on and live a wonderful, full, exciting and happy life, to meet other people that you end up loving very much, to be joyful and to enjoy your life to the fullest.  But you don't get over death.  You don't ever go back to the way you were before a person you love dies.

My other son asked me questions today about 9/11.  He asked how it was possible for a small plane to bring down a building as big as the World Trade Center.  He had it in his head that the terrorists who flew into buildings that day were in small two or three seater planes, and had just taken off from wherever and flown to their targets.  I watched his face as I explained that no, actually, the planes were as big as the one he flew on to his cousin's wedding, that the terrorists were not the only people on board, that there were passengers on those planes as well.

Then he asked me about the field in Pennsylvania: why did the terrorists want to crash into a field?  Again, I watched his face as I explained that they actually wanted to hit another building, perhaps the U. S. Congress, and that some of the passengers fought back and caused the plane to crash into a field, and that by doing that, they saved the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who would have been killed had the plane reached its target.

I cannot describe the look on his face when I explained those things to him.  Horror, disbelief, rejection... Rejection comes close.  He didn't want to know this about the world, I could tell.  He thought he knew the story of 9/11 -- I thought he did too.  But the details, as one learns them and lets them sink in, are freshly tortuous each time, for each person.  I watched those details torture him today.

I turned my face away from him, because I teared up telling him these things.  I felt like the hijackers were making me hurt my son by showing him that these things are possible, that people can really do unspeakable things, and that people are faced with impossible choices.  He couldn't respond to me in words.  He had no more questions.  He just sat there, looking stricken and sick, and we drove on to the field where he would be playing in a soccer game in another hour.

* * *

9/11 gave us devastation, pain, suffering.

9/11 gave us the knowledge that people can do evil.

9/11 gave us dust covered faces and falling bodies.

9/11 gave us goodbye voicemails.

9/11 gave us a scorched Pennsylvania field.

9/11 gave us widows and orphans, and 3000 unfillable holes.

9/11 gave us sorrow.

9/11 gave me, gave Rick and I, something else, too.  9/11, five years later, gave us the deepest, fiercest kind of love, the strongest and best thing two people can produce together, 9/11 gave us Little T, in all her defiant and radiant glory.

She turns 5 as the country marks 10.  She'll wake up tomorrow overjoyed that this is her day, that she was born, that she is to be celebrated, even as the country wakes up to remember, soberly, lives that were lost to dust and steel 10 years ago.  She sees tomorrow as the greatest day ever in the history of the universe and in the history of every person ever born...because this is a kid who loves life like few people ever will.

When she said good night to me tonight, she asked about her Fruit Loops, since we let the kids eat sugary cereal on their birthdays.  I told her I still needed to go to the store and buy them, and she asked if I would be going tonight, or tomorrow morning very early.  When I told her I wasn't sure yet, she said, in that crazy cartoon voice of hers: 

"Well, if you leave tonight, and you think I'm asleep, and you leave without giving me a hug or a kiss?  Well, you can still hug and kiss me, even if I'm asleep, because I really don't ever want you to leave without giving me a hug and a kiss.  And sometimes, when I wake up and your car is gone, I think you should have given me a hug and kiss before you left."

And then she hugged me, with her strong and spindly arms and legs, and I felt her small frame pressed against mine, and I felt her smooth cheek, and I thought to myself there is nothing as purely good and right as the hug of a little kid.

She is --  all of my children are -- my hope that love will triumph over the evil done on 9/11 and the pain and suffering that reverberate out from that day.  She reverberates too: a resounding and repeating song of grabbing life with both hands, jumping in with abandon, and hanging on for the laughter filled ride.  

9/11/01 and 9/11/06 have given me the very same thing, namely this lesson:  hug and kiss the people you love, each and every time you leave them.  

* * *

Love and Math

I posted the following on Facebook this morning:

‎♥ ♥ ♥

...another gift homeschooling has given me: I love Valentine's Day again. I had the energy to do something nice for my own kids instead of coming up with 100+ cheapie valentines for them to give their classmates.

♥ ♥ ♥

It's true. Early this morning, I got up and cut out five big red and pink construction paper hearts. I wrote little love notes to each of my kids, attached a small box of chocolates and a small box of conversation hearts to each one, and put them on the dining room table.

I did not spend a minute of the past weekend helping five kids produce 20-30 valentines each for their classmates. I did not waste a bit of money on cheaply made crap. I did not have to purchase a single Disney product or participate in cross-promoting the latest drivel passing for children's entertainment. I did not waste an ounce of energy trying to convince two pre-teen boys to write the names of their friends on each card. I did not have to walk the pre-schooler and the 1st grader through spelling 20+ different names. I did not have to check and re-check five different class lists to make sure we remembered everyone. I didn't have to worry about having enough or about the littlest kid absconding with already labeled Valentines, hiding under a table and scribbling all over them with a sharpie.

Now, mid-morning, it's raining, and we have a fire in the fireplace. Daddy took the girls out for the morning, and the boys are sitting at the dining room table with their math tutor, learning pre-algebra from someone other than me, and I am sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea and blogging.

My boys are laughing and chatting with their tutor. About math. I am listening to him (the tutor) tell them they are math geniuses and to them shouting out answers and questions. I am watching their experience of math transform before my very eyes.

Life and Valentine's Day are good.

Vincenzo made this dish at art class recently, and we pressed it into service today.

Construction paper + a black sharpie + some nice words + sugar = love.

With all of this love and math in the air, I may just run away with the math tutor.

* * *

The Abandoned Road

I drove past an abandoned road the other day.

It was an old farming road, not paved, and it bent away from the main highway and into marshy hay fields that bent and swished in the breeze. An old and unconvincing fence stood across the entrance to the road, keeping out people, but not time. The marsh lands had begun to take the road back, grasses and weeds encroached its edges, rising up along its center and asserting their quiet, persistent strength against human enterprise. About 75 yards down the road, off to the left, stood an empty threshing house, only its frame still standing. The concrete floor was swept clean by the breeze, as if at any moment it could be used once more to catch, cut, and cube bales of hay for a prosperous farm. But it too was abandoned, no longer an active or thriving place.

I had a few moments to gaze at this essentially empty scene, sitting as I was in an unmoving line of bumper to bumper traffic, impatiently waiting to thread through a two lane highway and into the business of the coming day. Cars stretched out endlessly in front of me and behind me, and I sat there frustrated by this inconvenience which had interrupted my progress, my productivity, my efficiency.

But with the interruption came the gift of this little abandoned road. As I looked at it, I imagined a time when it was heavily traveled by trucks and tractors and men whose livelihood depended upon the threshing that happened at its end. I imagined the farmer, employing the men and working beside them, all of them striving together to accomplish a task, to bring in the hay, and send it back out in a useful form. They must have worked very hard, sweating daily at a dirty and tedious task, but there no longer existed any trace of their efforts or struggles.

My fellow travelers on the highway were, like me, scurrying to work, to errands, to things that must be done. Some of us, no doubt, were bound for important destinations, such as hospitals to care for the ill or schools to teach the young or markets to deliver needed goods. Some were probably going shopping, or headed out to the beach, or on their way to the dentist. But all of the sudden, none of those destinations mattered. Because once upon a time, the threshing house at the end of this road mattered, too. Once upon a time, it represented a family's sustenance; now, it stands empty, abandoned, unimportant. Once, it was the center of a worker's day, the sum total of his productivity and purpose; now, it is useless and ignored.

But somewhere, there is a child whose father, or grandfather, or great-grandfather, drove down this road every single day, in order to bring back food to his family's table and keep them healthy. Somewhere, a child lives and breathes because of another person who traveled this road and worked in this threshing house each and every day. Behind the work and the struggle: a beating heart, a grasping hand, a dripping nose, a lilting voice. Because of the work and the struggle: generations roll forward, people meet, children grow. This is what lasts, what does not become abandoned or forgotten. This is what transcends utility and productivity.

Someday, all our efforts and struggles and projects and goals will be taken over by marshy wetlands and quiet, persistent weeds. Someday, none of what masquerades as important today will matter. But there are other things, things that do not tremor with utility or economy or productivity, things that seem lesser because they simply exist and don't do anything at all.

And as my car finally toiled away from the abandoned road, I saw with clarity that the business of the coming day was in many ways only a distraction, not to be confused with what really matters. So I will tend to those lesser things, the things that do not produce, that are not useful, and that will not pass away. I will tend to you, my love, and to the small sweaty hands that come from our tending of each other, and to the hearts that beat because ours beat together.

Happy Birthday, my own true love. I love you with all my heart, all my soul, all my strength, and all my breath.

* * *

This reflection was written 11 years ago, originally as an Anniversary Essay; converted to a Birthday Essay this year, and shared with my readers.

* * *

Family Time

We put up our Christmas tree last night. Simultaneously, we were finishing up a bit of painting in our dining room, installing some shelving on a dining room wall, and re-hanging doors on my kitchen cupboards.

I think it's safe to say we were attempting to do a few too many things all at once. That's how we roll.

So that could be the reason. The reason our Christmas Tree Decorating Family Time was a bit wonky. Family time around here is always a layered, complicated affair. We've got the children happily diving into ornament boxes, emerging with old favorites and happy memories. We've got the dizzying range of Christmas music filling the house, from the Messiah to Bob Dylan. We've got kids coming up with lovely ways to decorate their own rooms with left over tree branches and lights. We've got children dancing around the tree with sheer, unadulterated glee.

We've also got the bickering, the hurt feelings, the jockeying for prominent position for favored ornaments. We've got: "Her ornament is so ugly -- if we put it in front of the window, people will be able to see it! Can't we hide it?" We've got tears of disappointment when it turns out to be too late to start watching It's a Wonderful Life. We've got grumpy parents and ungrateful offspring.

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

And I think that's the point: to shed any notion of what perfect family time is supposed to look like and take each other where we are. The oldest and the 4th born? They feel animosity towards each other for the other 11 months of the year, so they aren't going to miraculously be good to each other just because it's Advent. The youngest? She has no design sense. Her contributions to the tree are sort of an anti-Martha anthem. The middle one? The one over there weeping in the corner? Maybe she's over tired, or her head hurts, or she's pissed that there's no hot chocolate. And the one who can't quite believe that even though we brought a tree home tonight, I still made him do his evening chore of washing the dinner dishes, well, I have to believe he will get over it.

In the end, a tree imperfectly purchased, lugged home, put up, lit and decorated is still a Christmas tree. The messy house still smells like pine needles. The ornaments still invite us to reminisce about Christmases past. In the end, before they trundle off to bed, some grumpy, some not, they still got to stand in front of the house oo-ing and ah-ing over the pretty white lights.

Family time, like my house, is messy. As are love, Christmas, children, marriage and life. In other words, everything good.

* * *

You Won't Convince Me Otherwise

I have a kid who is not a hugger. He regularly eschews anything touchy-feely. He says "OK" when I tell him I love him, which is often. His father, one very affectionate and demonstrative dude, tells him: "We're Alatorres. We hug. Get over here." This kid resists.

But guess what? Lately, he has been letting me hug him. I've actually gotten to tickle him this summer. He's more and more playful. Just now, I sent him off to bed with an I Love You, and I got one back in return. I almost fell over, and not because I've had a few glasses of red wine.

I attribute this new found state of relaxation to the fact that he is not returning to school this year. This is the kid who, upon learning that we would be home schooling him and his siblings for 2010-11, sullenly responded "Why didn't you do this a year ago?" That was back before he was letting me hug him. Now, in his new, more-huggable state, he seems like a kid more comfortable in his own skin, happy, funny, playful. He seems like the kid he was back before he started going to school.

I could weep from joy. This is why we are home schooling.

Tonight, he asked me if we could have a morning this winter, while we are homeschooling, where they get up and I make them hot chocolate and they can bring their blankets down to the living room and sit in front of the fire and drink hot chocolate and then later we can go to the library. He wants to check out comic books. Whatever, I totally said YES.

Bring on my new life. I can't wait to see how it unfolds.


* * *

Restlessness Passes. Thanks Mom.

My last post was a little...well...restless, wasn't it? It matched my mood. I suppose the mood makes much more sense in light of the fact that I had gone to a memorial Mass on Friday (the day before The Great Restlessness) for my son's 5th grade teacher. We just left the warm embrace of her classroom last month, and now she is gone. She was a wonderful teacher, a wonderful woman. We will miss her very much.

So I think I was recovering a little bit when that post came pouring out. Too bad I didn't realize this on Saturday; I might have been much easier on myself. But the comments I received helped in that regard, so thank you to everyone who wrote.

Especially lovely was the note I got from my mom, who couldn't get the commenting window to work on my post and sent it in an email instead. (Don't worry mom, it probably wasn't you: the same thing happened to me today when I tried to leave a comment on another blog.) Here's what she said:

Anyway, I just wanted to comment on your "restlessness" piece - actually, taking your kids to the park and getting a load of laundry done is a pretty good day's work. You know all those people you see making "progress?" They think they are not getting anywhere. They could not begin to do what you do in a day.

It depends on how you define "progress." Just getting your kids through another day is progress.

Mom

Thank you, mom. Those words helped. I will have to hear them many times over the next several years, but this weekend, they helped enormously.

I did get them to the park, and they had a fabulous time. I did too, even if it was a lot of work to shepherd them around, coax little ones to use gross bathrooms, tend to boo-boos, and yes, push the damn swing. (Why am I so swing-averse?) I took them out again today, to Wildcat Canyon. Fresh air does wonders for us.

To thank my mom, I am posting a sort of photo album of our recent Fresh Air Refueling trips. Restlessness passes. These smiles live forever.

Lucky Number 13

Tis' my 13th wedding anniversary today. In honor of that momentous event, I am "reposting" a post that originally appeared around Christmas 2007. I originally wrote this as a response to a "Fun Monday" assignment: Show us your favorite Christmas ornament and tell us why it's your favorite. I think it works well for our wedding Anniversary as well.

* * *

Once upon a time, there were two young people who were very much in love and had recently gotten engaged. They were carefree, full of hope and anticipation, giddy...clueless.

One of my favorite Christmas ornaments captures the clueless joy of my then-fiance and me perfectly, and I must thank my wonderful mother-in-law for making this ornament and giving it to us.



I love looking at this ornament and laughing at how much I didn't know then, and wishing for a little of that innocence today. Twelve years and five children later, we are no longer that clueless. We have been through miscarriages and labor. We have endured mind-numbing sleep deprivation. We've had our share of financial challenges. We've lost members of our extended family, one at far too young an age. We've changed many, many diapers. We've been to Back to School Night three times now. We've cleaned up after sick children (just tonight, in fact! Rick actually hosed off some bedding in the street tonight...it was just too much stuff for the washing machine.) We've looked at each other in quiet amazement that yes, in fact, all five of them can cry, whine, complain, and yell at the same time. We've looked at each other in quiet and not-so-quiet amazement that this child performed Shakespeare! This one drew a beautiful picture of Mary and Joseph on the road to Bethlehem! This one eats steak, and salmon, and raw garlic, and spicy salsa, and sweet and sour soup! We've raised these five kids each and every day of the last several years, and been through all of the highs and lows that we all get to experience as parents.

We are older and wiser now, not so giddy anymore. But now we get to be something better than giddy: now we get to be that kind of happy that is deep and tired, sometimes shabby like the Velvetine Rabbit, always abiding deep in our hearts. And we are still achieving this kind of happiness. We've still got the teenage years ahead of us to really test our mettle.

Who knew that happiness was scrappy and messy? Not those two kids in the ornament picture. But when I look at that picture, I realize that this is the very lesson I am learning every day, and I smile because I miss those early days and because I wouldn't change places with that girl for all the gold in the world.

* * *