Small Days

I think I mostly used to live for the Big Days.  The tropical vacations, the international getaways, the lavish 10-course meals that ashamedly tallied up close to a mortgage payment.  Before our daughter, Brad and I had a lot more of those.   He caressed the binding of new edition Lonely Planets and I scoured the gastronomic menus at all the North American Michelin stars.  I was addicted to the planning, the anticipating, the sheer adventure of escaping from the daily grind.   I loved my life.   There were big days with lychee martinis, passport stamps, and inventive camera poses while scaling rocks, eating seaweed, and perching under street signs written in Arabic. Now there are Small Days with milk dribbling out of sippy cups, twisted car seat straps, and deranged-looking dinosaurs drawn in purple bath crayon.    Yet, it didn’t take me long to make peace with that.  My new reality may not be big, but it’s bountiful.  

Last month, however, I found myself in a bit of funk.   I was dreading the cold this winter, bracing for the gray monotony of piling on layers of wool, gripping frigid steering wheels, and drying out wet socks on the radiator.  I wanted to travel.  I wanted to go somewhere fabulous.  Somewhere exotic with fruit I didn’t recognize and sand that felt like powdered sugar.  A place that required three planes, a boat and an ATV to get to.  And then, one morning I made the sluggish trek down the hall in my fleece robe and slippers to pluck my toddler out of her crib and she greeted me with those words I had been waiting two years to hear, “I love me, Mama.”  (Well, close enough).  And I felt the sweet rush only a small day can provide.  Never mind that she then proceeded to squat down and poop.  I was smitten.   I am slowly learning as a parent that life is actually the meat in between whatever big days we are granted.   It is our sustenance.  And it is delicious.

That is what makes today, December 14^th, an otherwise small day in my life, a day of such profound sadness.  Today marks the one year anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting.   As a mother I cannot help but feel gutted about the events of that day.   I remember staring dejectedly at the news that week, shaking from my safe perch on the living room coach, tangled with conflicting emotions: feeling lucky, terrified, outraged and yet, bloated with empathy.   For several nights I laid in bed, confounded that something like this could happen.   I wrote a blog entry in attempt to mourn the profound loss I was feeling after grasping how little control I actually have over the safety of my own child.

Twenty-six lives were taken that day at Sandy Hook.  Twenty of them children.  7300 small days.  Simply stolen.  7300 nights without a pajama-clad child brushing their teeth over the sink while pretending to slay dragons and 7300 mornings of zipping coats and tying shoes by the door that were denied existence.  There were no trips to the library or underdogs at the park or running after the ice cream truck in bare feet, waving a dollar.  There were no puppet shows or twirling in dress-up clothes or building forts out of sofa cushions.   I am guessing the anguished parents of those children felt the most cheated by all the small days they had missed.  All the minuscule moments; the bony hugs after soccer practice, leaps over sidewalk cracks, kissed-away paper cuts, cookie-batter licks, and sleepy yawns at bedtime that patch together a day. I am guessing they most miss the mundane.

The Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America movement isn’t calling for a moment of silence on December 14^th at 9:30am EST.  They are organizing gatherings all around the country to make noise.  They are convening the masses in three dozen states to ring bells in honor of those who died at Sandy Hook and to the 30,000 others who lost their lives to gun violence this past year.   They are gathering to mourn, but to mourn with purpose and resolve.  Something must be done to provoke continued progress in the legislative fight against automatic assault weapons.  Something must be done to reform gun control and secure universal background checks.  Our children are dying.   Twenty-six school shootings have occurred in the 365 days since the tragedy in Newtown. CT.  Twenty six.  One for every life at Sandy Hook.  

Moms around the country are demanding action.   So I am making noise.  With my daughter by my side, I am ringing my bell today.  In a small way.  In my small house.  On an otherwise simple, single, small day that is anything but mundane. 

One Cup of $5 Tea

Next Wednesday, Sept 25^th, I will turn 33.  There was never any question in my mind that I might not reach this age.  That I wouldn’t be married, settled in the suburbs with a toddler hanging off my hip, scrubbing crusted spaghetti sauce off the inside of the microwave.  I am certain I have managed to take for granted most of my 12,000 plus days here on Earth and I have done so with the careless comfort of believing that death was something you fumbled upon in your 80's and even 90's.  I have had other vital matters to attend to.   Like fretting over the zit that perennially forms in the crease of my chin and those flights that were delayed over two hours due to tornadoes in the Oklahoma Panhandle and the nor’easter in Maine, and my beloved houndstooth sweater that shrunk in the dryer, not once but twice.    I have been aimlessly distracted, attempting to recall ridiculously devised computer passwords, hunting down parking spots, burning frozen pizzas in the oven, and making sure my daughter didn’t rip the pages out of all the Dr. Seuss books.  For the past 33 years, I have had that pleasure.   This past year, however, everything was jarred.   Shaken up and stirred. 

 

I found out a year ago this past July that my best friend from college’s sister-in-law had been diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer at 28.   She was a star volleyball player in college, a newlywed, a gorgeous and avid athlete, and a person who had never once touched a cigarette.  Her name is also Emily.  And I guarantee you she would have given anything that summer to worry about marinara in her microwave.

Emily’s good friends started a blog last year (http://embenkickscancer.wordpress.com ) to help keep those who cared for her informed throughout her journey.  She endured multiple rounds of chemo out in Los Angeles, which led to a complete lung removal surgery in New York this February, followed by 28 unrelenting radiation treatments.   With her family, a buttress of steel behind her, Emily has battled, fought, persevered, and maintained her lovely sense of humor and gracious spirit with gargantuan grit and guts.  She is officially NED (No Evidence of Disease) as of this spring, and is gaining her strength and stamina back little by little with the support of streaming Netflix, electrolyte water, daily walks with her pooch, and her loving and devoted husband, Miles.  Likely not in that order.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being a guest in the audience when Emily made her television debut at a taping of the Steve Harvey show here in Chicago. The producers had flown her in from the West Coast so that she could surprise and thank her mentor and hero, Bonnie Addario, Founder and President of the Bonnie Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, who has raised over $10 million for research, medical support, and awareness to eradicate this devastating disease.  There was Steve Harvey’s perfectly-positioned couch.  And there was this breathtakingly beautiful girl with long brown hair and a poppy red dress, poised and postured with her ankles crossed under the glare of the studio cameras.   The gasps in the audience were audible when it was revealed that she was in fact the face of lung cancer.  This bright young woman, oozing with the promise of a giant life yet to live, sitting there, confiding her brutal battle to simply survive. 

    

I was shocked at how neglected lung cancer funding is when I did some digging online.   It is the most lethal cancer, and yet it receives the least amount of funding from the National Cancer Institute.   It garners a fraction of the dollars that go to breast cancer, for example, and yet is second only to heart disease in cause of death.    There seems to be a stigma associated with lung cancer as a smoker’s condition that is self-inflicted.  However, more and more young non-smokers and especially women are contracting it.  All the while funding is desperately needed to aid these patients and educate the public on belying the myths of lung cancer.   Even the ribbon signifying the disease was formerly clear, giving subtle reference to its invisibility and lack of deserved attention.  It has since evolved to white and I will be proudly wearing that ribbon next week when I run in the Your Next Step is the Cure 5K in San Francisco with Team EmBen.  Did I say run?  Okay, jog… well, powerwalk for sure.  I will cross that finish line though, despite being embarrassingly out of shape and floppy in various key places. 

Which leads me to my 33^rd birthday.  I’m not in the habit of buying lavish birthday gifts for my compadres, but who doesn’t love splurging on a draft pint or classy cosmo for a friend, toasting to their companionship and to another year of warding off grey hair?  Pretend I am that friend this week….. that you are treating me to a steaming cup of earl grey (decaf for those who really know me) and a long overdue chat, and instead toss some change to the Bonnie Addario fundraising site in honor of EmBen.   I even put the website here to make it easy for you.   

http://yournextstepisthecure.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=1064916&lis=1&kntae1064916=0EBB876A6D3E43699289AFB2F4BB336F&supId=389755678

And remember to set your DVRs  this Thursday, September 19 to watch a poignant story of survival and support unfold on the Steve Harvey Show (NBC).  Never mind that it comes after a teen sexting segment, I promise you will be moved.   I promise you will turn off the television and not care that you forgot to buy the orange juice at the supermarket.     And I hope you may just feel inspired enough to “take me out” for a $5 tea. 

We OWN it!

If you look at the numbers, I suppose Brad and I have unofficially achieved 66% of the American Dream.  We are 1.5 kids, 1 cocker spaniel named Millie, and a ½ picket fence short, but last Wednesday we officially became home-owners (disgruntled property tax payers.)   And it only took us a combined 75 years to get there.  I will not miss our lousy landlord or the shared driveway.  I will not mourn the silverware drawer you have to pry open with an athletic stance and two hands only to have it litter our muffin tins with toxic sawdust in the cabinet below.  I will not grieve for the prehistoric centipedes that scamper out of dark corners when Brad is not home – god help me; I am utterly creeped out by those repugnant legs.  I will not pine for the crumbling front step or purple toilet seat or pink toilet seat or even the marigold-orange toilet seat, despite the fact that is it unquestionably the most tasteful of the three.


There is a lot I won’t miss about this house, but it has been witness to two of the best years of my life.  This will always be our transition house when Brad and I sort through our stash of various return address stickers that we ordered in bulk, but haven’t thrown out because we are both certifiable hoarders.  It was our trial rental suburban house to ensure we could handle the quieter, simpler life nine miles from downtown where drivers actually halt at stop signs and kids do cartwheels in front of lemonade stands.  The house with the crazy mail slot in the downstairs powder room beside the aforementioned purple toilet seat.  The house, three blocks down from where I grew up, that lovingly welcomed our hefty nine-pounder after she was born and the house she practiced her first wobbly steps in.  The house where we warmly hosted family, friends, neighbors, plastic Fisher-Price gadgets, Baby Einstein clutter, Evenflo thingamajigs, as well as a Rody, red tricycle, used cozy coupe with a gimp wheel, wagon, and thirty-seven stuffed animals in a span of twenty-four months.  As I learned from our last move from the city two summers ago, a home is a merely a decorative shell for all of our shit.  And, perhaps, a vessel for the moments that captivate, inspire, surprise, sadden, amuse, anger, and delight us as humans….but we can have those anywhere.   Still, there is some melancholy as we leave Bonnie Brae.

As with any kind of change, this marks an end of a chapter for us.  And that closure makes me feel old in a way, forcing me to acknowledge with pristine clarity that two years have simply whizzed by.  That there is nothing I can do to get that time back even if I wanted to. That the unknown awaits us as well as a giant lawn that will require weekly mowing in 90 degree heat.    Now that our savings account smacks of a sieve, we are busying ourselves with painting and planting and prettifying (that is actually a word) to create the most hospitable “shell” possible to live out the memories that await us.  I know there will be disappointments and setbacks in our new abode.  I am anticipating some toddler mega-meltdowns and decibel-deafening teenage tantrums from behind slammed doors.  I accept there will be a leaking faucet, some nail polish stains on the rug, perhaps a summer baseball through the back window.  I will even permit the occasional spider or even a spring infiltration of ants, but I refuse to cohabitate with those prehistoric, heinous centipedes.

In contrast, there will be lovely moments too.  Many of them.  And then, there will be a few really exquisite ones.  Moments so rare and gorgeous that the house itself may even smile.  And they will all be ours.  We own it.  Along with our 1000 new self-sticking address labels.

A Woman We All Call Baba

For ten minutes after my grandfather passed away in December 2001, I did nothing but lean over the side of his hospital bed and smell his hands.  I had always been infatuated by the sheer amount of long white hair that protruded from his forearm and carpeted its way down to his wide knuckles.  They were good hands. Carpenter hands. Swollen in spots, but sturdy in touch and they were still warm when I tried to memorize his scent.  Honey cough drops.  Brut aftershave.  Oatmeal.  I hovered over him and begged God to give me four more years with Baba, my grandma, and his wife for 19,645 sunsets.

‘I’m only asking for four,’ I rationalized in my own head.  By then she will be the same age as Grandpa.  It only seemed fair.  I would be twenty-five in four years.  Surely old enough to go on without her. ‘Please don’t take her,’ I pleaded to anyone with any power over the universe. ‘I still need her.’

Baba is not your average granny.  Granted, she whips up delicious stews and soups out of bones from the freezer.  Sure, she is a miracle seamstress who can transform a size 4 bridesmaid dress into a gown that will accommodate a seven-month pregnant belly and bust.  Without question, she boils water on the stove instead of in the microwave, and makes her own soap.  Of course, her blooming orchids stop traffic from the side window.  But, it is more than that.  There is a long-standing joke in our family that if you could bring three things with you to a deserted island, one of them should without question be Baba. Then, perhaps the fresh water.  But, Baba would find a way – god dangit - to keep you alive.  There is an unapologetic gumption in her that likely stemmed from surviving two wars, an alcoholic father, and immigrating to America at twenty-one without knowing a breath of English.  Like so many from that generation, she had a hard life, worked with her hands, made things from scratch and never ever complained.  Hell, she persevered without paper towels, epidurals and Dove bars.  This woman is solid oak.

But, she is also a pretty cool cat.  My brother and sister used to drunk-dial her on occasion from Cornell because she relished the fanfare of all the party-goers as they passed the phone around like a flask.  I remember her doling out shots of apricot brandy for stomach-aches (even to minors) and she has yet to flinch whenever I swear.  The woman also has genuine mystical psychic powers.  To the degree of annoyance.  She knows when you have plucked an innocuous pickle teetering on the edge of the deli tray before supper or when you have spit a piece of food in your napkin.  Even with her back turned.  She knows you are cold, especially on nights when you dismissed her multiple warnings to bring a coat. And she knows you are being polite when you insist the soup is perfect and doesn’t need more salt.  This is a Baba who can see through bullshit.  A Baba who knew I was attempting to throw my first (and consequently last) high school kegger when my parents were out of town because she casually stopped by that afternoon and caught me straightening the basement pillows.  A Baba who knows you are lying about the sale price of strawberries and sour cream as she digs in her wallet to stubbornly “settle” her bill.

She is her own beautiful tapestry of nouns, verbs and contradictions.  English lavender soap, chicory coffee, Humphrey Bogart movies, Aldi groceries, yellow fingernails, dumpling soup, adorable mispronunciations, hairnets, lily of the valley bouquets, poppy seeds, cold-sores, sun hats, crusty butts of rye bread, blouses with bows, doilies, ripened tomatoes, crisp dollar bills, kolachy, war-briding, limping, sewing, egg-painting, back-scratching, White-Zin guzzling, dress-catalog admiring, real-butter eating, Czech-song singing, gardening, restaurant sugar-snatching, love ‘em and leave ‘em lady.

Eleven years and five months have gone by since that night in the hospital and I think each time that anniversary passes that I have been given such an impossibly sacred gift.  During that time, Baba was there for so many summers, perched on her deck chair in Michigan to help us brush the sand from our shins and scold us for not wearing proper hats.  She was there in California to watch me advance across the stage in my ill-fitting cap and gown with tears in her eyes and hands up in victory.  She was there to answer the phone when I called from a pebbled beach in Nice after I had dyed all of my backpacking clothes pink and missed my train to Bayonne and was desperate to hear a familiar voice from home.  She was there to bid me congratulations on my first real job and there to kiss me goodbye as my U-Haul pulled out of the driveway en route to St. Louis.  She was there, suffering alongside me, when I moved back home, heartbroken and betrayed. She was there, sipping champagne in Napa Valley when I married the love of my life.  She was there when I sat her down at the kitchen table with the calendar open in front of us and asked her if she would be available to meet her new great-grandchild on November 11th.  She was there to hum Czech lullabies to my daughter on the day she was born and there to chase her around the house with a cane to squeals of toddler delight.

This week was Baba’s 88th birthday.

My hope is that she will be here for many milestones to come, but at 88, I soberly recognize that the sand is likely getting low at the top.  Baba has in every way been as present in my life as my left arm.  It is inconceivable to think of her as anything but a permanent fixture of love in every scene yet to be written.

I realize now - that twenty-one year old girl was naïve, asking for four more years.  The truth is when it comes to love, we are all greedy.  The truth is I have been more than blessed to have her in my life for more than thirty-two years.  Many don’t have that kind of time with their own mothers, let alone grandmothers. But, I will always want more.  I will never really be ready and I realize that is how it is supposed to be.  It isn’t supposed to be easy.  She is supposed to feel like an indelible part of me, an imprint, a tattoo.  It means this woman has been ferociously, whole-heartedly, muscle-achingly loved.

Last month, we all ventured to the local photography studio to have a photo taken.  Baba, my mom, my daughter and me.  Four generation of females, bound by anemic blood and fair eczematic skin.  They used that very picture in their mail piece the next week to advertise their Memorial Day special.  It is a precious keepsake of a moment in time that my daughter will never remember, but that she will ask about in the years to come.  And I will sit down beside her with that image in hand, brush the fine hair from her face, and tell her about a woman who we all called Baba.  A woman whose hands smelled like English Lavender.

A Blink

They say life can change in the blink of an eye. 

On a Tuesday morning you can spoon-feed your toddler oatmeal while listening to Al Roker rattle on about the horrific weather out east.  You can decide to take a bite.  You can feel it slip out of the corner of your mouth, down your chin and fall into a goopy mess on your pajama pants.  You can pause for a moment, mentally trying to make sense how you managed to get food all over yourself as your eye spasms and your cheek goes numb.  And you can go to the mirror and realize you cannot move the entire left side of your face.  You can look on in horror at your reflection - your crooked attempt at a grin, your drooping nose, and the missing creases of your face.  You can stare as your right eye twitches furiously, no longer in sync with its partner.  Just an eerie, vacant, motionless half of a face.  Here is what I know.  Life doesn’t always change with the blink of an eye.  Sometimes a blink never comes. 

I am on day 33 of Bell’s palsy.  Bell’s palsy – a facial paralysis resulting from a dysfunction of the cranial nerve VII.  Usually temporary.  Usually.   Everyone has told me to write about my experience, but frankly it is has been difficult to put into words.  I considered going the comical route – of posting photos on Facebook of me sporting zany eye patches with mermaids and peace signs while out dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant or in the audience at Book of Mormon.  I contemplated relaying in humorous detail how in those first few minutes of onset, while in utter terror that I was having a stroke and about to die, I thought NOT of 911 but of Julia Roberts.  Julia Roberts as Shelby, lying unconscious in the final scenes of Steel Magnolias with her one-year-old screeching on the floor beside her and the pasta water boiling over on the stove.  Convinced this was my same fate, I scanned the kitchen to confirm I wasn’t cooking anything at seven in the morning and for a brief moment wondered where I could hide so my daughter wouldn’t have to watch me die.  Which, in retrospect, actually doesn’t sound very humorous.

After that, I figured that since I had contracted this weird, 1-in-40,000-people-worldwide-malady, I had earned the right to compose my most self-indulgent mass email yet.  A tale of pity (oh-woe-is-me), a real doozie of wallowing injustice and a shameless ploy to get friends and family to send me chicken casseroles and condolence cards.   But, there is this darn thing called perspective.  Someone somewhere knows somebody who invariably is going through worse stuff than you.  And after a few of those stories, I instantly felt like an ass for complaining.  

The truth is that this has not been an easy road.  From the first ten days, doped up on so many steroids that I simply wanted to curl into a beanbag of sobs, to the four-week checkup when my neurologist conveyed in that flat medical tone that he was “concerned” for my prognosis given the lack of improvement and that I should consider the possibility that I may not experience full recovery.  The bottom line is I don’t want “this” to be my “thing”.  My cause.   My life before and life after.   I want it to be a blip on the radar.  This crazy scare that happened to me one morning and the next minute was gone.   The accident you just avoided on an icy road.  The fall you almost took down the stairs.  It gets your heart racing, makes you sweat, and sinks your stomach, but it doesn’t change your life. 

Admittedly, I have gleaned both some valuable and some otherwise useless lessons from all of this.  For one, I have mastered the awkward “art” of taping down my eyelid so that my cornea doesn’t shrivel up like a Sunsweet prune.  And, it is an art - technique, precision, patience and an exhaustive amount of trial and error.   With bottles of eye drops and ointment littering the house, I have taught my 15 month-old to say “Mama Boo-boo” when she points at my face which I think is pretty impressive considering it is multi-syllabic AND a phrase.  I am also fully convinced that Ambien is a wonder drug.  It is the only reprieve from those dreaded nights.  When you are laying there with your left eye half-open under the tape, with no distractions against the nerve pain throbbing in your mastoid bone, which as a matter of fact, makes you even more pissed off that you now know what the heck a mastoid is.

On a more solemn level, I have gotten a glimpse into the life of someone who doesn’t quite fit the mold.   Vanity is not something I had given much thought to prior to this.   You can’t be too preoccupied with your appearance if you work from home and consider jeans to be dressing up.  Still, stepping out in public while talking out of one side of your mouth with a patch on your eye takes a little more gumption than a trip to Whole Foods in flannels and a ponytail.  You notice people trying not to stare, wondering what happened, and not knowing where to look when they ask you, “Credit or Debit?” You taste their pity.  You swallow your own awkwardness.  You attempt to maintain your dignity, surging with the need to explain, but realizing, “What’s the point?”.   I don’t want to pretend I fully understand what it would be like to be in a wheelchair or have a prosthetic limb or live with severe scars, but I think now I can relate to being different – to having the uncanny experience of being simultaneously invisible and conspicuous.

Without question I have begun to comprehend, more than ever, how important the gift of health is.  It is what we idly toast to on New Year’s Eve and scribble wishes for in our Christmas cards and spend ten minutes appreciating after we hear someone collapsed on the tennis courts at fifty-five.  The body is a complex machine with a myriad of miraculous moving parts and I don’t think I fully grasped the delicate dance of it all before my cranial nerve VII took a misstep.   

And finally, there is my spouse.  Through all this I have a renewed appreciation for the man who stood beside me on that ridge overlooking Napa valley three years ago and along with five other sequential “I do’s”  promised to love me in sickness and in health.  Many times, he has taken the brunt of my anger and sorrow, but he has never faltered from staying positive, giving me hope and reassuring me that he loves me even if I am sporting a pirate patch.  I knew I got one of the good ones, but to see it in practice truly solidifies that I am blessed. 

And so, we plod on.  My mom always reminded my siblings and me growing up that there is no perfect life.  You can peer down the block and assume, but every house has a story.   Every person is tested.  I read tidbits from strangers online about how recovery came slowly, after three months, after six months.  How they just learned to suck from a straw again after a year.  How after 45 days they could finally close their eye.  I guess that is what keeps me buoyant.  A few signs of progress.  A little twitch of my upper lip here and a half-centimeter more on my eyebrow raise there.   In the meantime, life goes on.  Dinner parties, work trips, dirty diapers, and a modest investment in eye lubrication companies.  And maybe some morning, some innocuous morning while I am feeding my daughter apple cinnamon oatmeal and the sun is streaming through the front window, just maybe, there will be a blink.   And that would be life-changing.