I Need A Day

I have a greeting card in my desk with a picture of a giant porcelain toilet bowl on the front.  Inside is written “If men can miss such a large target at close range, then why are they in charge of the world’s nuclear weapons?” I bought it a few years ago at an art museum gift shop without any occasion or recipient in mind, but simply because it gave me a chuckle.  Today I am not laughing.

Earlier I watched Hillary Clinton’s concession speech on CNN and she is more magnanimous and gracious than I.  I am all for unifying the country and a peaceful transition of power and approaching the next four years with as open of a mind as I can muster, but for goodness sake, I need a day.  I need a day to wallow in grief and shake my head and hover over my steaming cup of ginger tea, staring into oblivion in my slipper socks. I need a day to curse at the uneducated white males in this country, sob in the shower, and fantasize that last night was only a misguided spoof on Saturday Night Live. In the words of the Dixie Chicks: “I’m not ready to make nice.”  I need a day to get it together.

    

My 91-year-old grandmother demanded she vote early this year because she said when you are 91, you can’t afford to take any chances. My mom told me she left the booth giddy and gliding, shaking her cane at the line of people waiting to vote and proclaiming, “I just voted for the first woman president!”  This morning on the phone she broke down into tears and implored me, “Emilushka, what is happening to my Dreamland?” This is a woman who fled her German-occupied homeland during World War II. She was an immigrant who, to this day, is profoundly grateful to my grandfather for bringing her to this country. She learned English, embraced American values, built a home, and raised two successful children here. She put down roots and today the soil resembles sand.

   

I glimpsed a post on Facebook earlier that read: “Worst Day in America 9/11.  Second worst day in America 11/9.”  This morning’s shock when I awoke to the official news had the impact of an assassination.  I will remember where I was on this election year.  I will remember Bridget’s crestfallen face when I shared the news and my blundering attempt to explain to a five-year-old how someone who spouts such hateful things can be a decisive winner. I will remember many of my friends admitting that they were curled in the fetal position or calling their mothers to cry or praying for the first time in years.  I will remember my daughter holding up her laminated map of the United States and asking why there were not more states she could color in blue.

As a friend in St. Louis reminded me this morning, we went from electing our first African American President eight years ago to one last night who was endorsed by the KKK.  Our next Commander-in-Chief is a man who has insulted every possible faction of society who neglects to mirror his own orangutan-esque appearance or beliefs (apologies to our primate cousins for that unfortunate comparison): Muslims, women, Latinos, African Americans, Asians, POWs, and hell, even Iowans, my husband’s home state.  It is a slap in the collective face of this country. 

I am still attempting to digest the vile truth that we voluntarily elected a man to our most elite position of power who brags about grabbing women by the pussy.  I am still dreading all the social progress that may be unraveled and bulldozed after four years of his leadership.  I am still reeling from the realization that his Supreme Court nominations have the potential to cripple the rights and freedoms of my daughters for decades to come.  His extreme smugness and blatant narcissism I resent being rewarded, but that is not the worst part.  What horrifies me the most is that his hateful rhetoric is what precipitated his election. His ascent to power came at the expense of trampling those with weaker voices, in smaller numbers, and with everything to lose.  The rural white populace swallowed the Kool-Aid and somehow believes that this one person with a sweep of his magic orange toupee is going to eradicate Islamic terrorism, put cash in their pockets, and construct a wall to keep out all the drug dealers, rapists and abhorrent immigrants soiling our American innocence. They believe this entitled, conniving dipshit with a gold-plated spoon in his mouth is going to actually roll up his sleeves. To all the coal miners and steelworkers out there, Trump’s hands are soft and supple– it is his conscience that is calloused.

   

As I fumble through my day today, keenly aware I am marching through the well-documented stages of grief, I linger on an over-arching cloud of sadness. I think about last weekend when my mom, sister and I spent a few days in Manhattan, taking in the sites and foot traffic and carb-laden bagels. One of our favorite stops was exploring the 1.5 mile High Line, an elevated linear park built out of the old train line.  It was Marathon weekend in New York City and as we walked through this beautiful garden of trees and shrubs, we encountered so many from around the globe, basking in this rare green space. The sun was shining, teasing the air to a perfect crisp 60 degrees and around us the leaves had morphed into hues of rust and cranberry.  I heard fragments of Mandarin, rapid directions in French, and a toddler exclaiming in Spanish while pointing excitedly at a sparrow.  I relished in the shared experience of accents and took a photo for a family from England who was traveling with their teenage son in a wheelchair.  I thought, yes, we are a melting pot.  And the colors intermixing are magnificent. There were no walls. No barriers. Just trees.

So, as I said, I need a day to be a sore loser.  To fantasize about his impending failures, but at the same time to be utterly vulnerable in my love for this country.  After our stroll on the High Line, we headed uptown to Central Park where we had a lunch reservation.  We had almost canceled it the week prior when we discovered the restaurant was actually in the Trump International Hotel.  We decided we could stomach the indiscretion at the expense of Jean-Georges’ French rolls, but on the way out, the three of us joked about hiking up our skirts and publicly urinating on his ostentatious gold sign.  After breakfast this morning, my sister lamented to me on the phone that she wished we had done it when we had the chance.  I happen to agree and something tells me we nasty women would have had pretty good aim. 

Fifteen Years Later

Fifteen years ago on a brisk Tuesday morning in September, I laced up my running shoes and jogged around Lake Lagunita on the Stanford campus. The air was cool and dewy with the fog still clinging to the foothills, but by mid-run I had tied my sweatshirt around my waist and was damp with perspiration.  The day would be a warm one.   School didn’t start for another few weeks, but all the Residential Assistants had arrived early for training.  Upon my return to the dorm, I hurried down the hall to women’s bathroom and heard murmurs and gasps coming from the lounge. It would a moment that would forever imprint in my memory. A day plucked from thousands. One that I can conjure as vividly and intensely as the births of my own daughters.

RA Training was inevitably canceled that day.  Instead, eighty or so of us upperclassman gathered in a conference room and scrutinized the live television coverage on a 28-inch tube TV in make-shift rows of hard plastic chairs.  The room was eerily somber. Even when the same coverage began to loop over and over, smoke billowing from the towers and the surreal shot of that second plane hovering on the brink of the building, we sat there, stupefied and welded to our seats.  There were rumors of a plane still in flight bound for San Francisco.  United Airlines Flight 93.  All of us, silently wondering if there was someone on that flight whom we might know.  All of us, mentally scanning our roster of incoming freshman for those who listed New York City as home.  Fearing whose father, whose aunt, whose cousin might be perilously stranded on the upper floors of the World Trade Center.

I remember calling my family that day, clinging to my desk phone like a barnacle as I heard by mom’s colossal heave of maternal relief.  I called my grandparents, my siblings, my friends scattered about the country, even one long-distance dial to Australia.  I felt the urgent need to gather them all, to hear their voices and familiar cadences and inflections. I curled up on my yellow bean bag chair with the sagging smiley face flattened beneath me and let them all envelop me.  Here was proof. There was still something good. 

  

I laced up my sneakers again today, but this time to escape on a walk through my neighborhood.  The normal upheaval of my family’s early morning breakfast routine - protests over hand-washing, fits over the amount of cereal milk and pouts over who claimed the Ariel sippy cup proved especially suffocating.  I needed some solitude.  

It was another gorgeous September 11th morning.  The infant sun was already white and blinding, forcing me to squint under the shield of my sunglasses.  Fleetwood Mac was playing in my earbuds, but I could still hear the satisfying pop of fallen acorns crunching under the weight of my heels.   I was thinking about the legacy of this day.  Despite not personally knowing anyone who lost their life fifteen years ago, I felt the weight of it before I went to sleep last night and it was my first thought as my dreams dissipated into wakefulness.

To my four-year-old daughter, this day is simply Grandpa’s birthday and the Lemonade Stand, an annual charity fundraiser my parent’s block started in 2002.  We go every year, drop cash in a bucket for a local non-profit and watch the neighborhood kids frolic around with brownie smudges on their faces and dirt caked on bare feet.  It has become an end of summer ritual and one that is filled with face painting and balloon animals and visits from the local fire department.  The real reason behind the lemonade stand I cannot share with her yet, though I find myself searching for an honest and somehow restrained way to one day explain it.  Right now, I can still turn off the evening news and turn on Daniel Tiger.  I can still distract her with her math games on her iPad as we disrobe and file through airport security.  She doesn’t understand the ‘why’ behind it all yet and it hasn’t dawned on her to ask.

As I crossed a vacant soccer field this morning, the damp grass licking at my ankles, I heard the rumble of a jet overhead.  It was one of those jumbo 747’s having just ascended from O’Hare with the upper deck visible from the side before it turned and soared directly above me.  The sky was a vast canvas of cornflower blue without a single cloudy blemish and as the plane passed overhead, its outstretched wings seemed to glide through the air with the natural ease of an albatross.   The sight was so magnificent and peaceful that I pulled the buds from my ears and was awed by the sheer miracle of man-made flight.   I watched that mammoth plane carve out its path in the sky until it was gone and only its contrail lingered, a spidery wisp of white dissolving into azure.

   

As I resumed my walk I wondered if there had perhaps been a passenger aboard peering down at my smallness through his oval window.  I wondered if he might have seen me, a mere speck of color amidst a blanket of green grass.  Just a single human, standing erect, watching with reverence, mourning a loss, but with a hand on her heart.  

My Mother's Day Apology: Thirty-some Years in the Making

My favorite line in the classic holiday movie, A Christmas Story , is not “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid” or “I can’t put my arms down!” or even “Fra-gi-le…must be Italian.” – although that last one makes me chuckle every time.  It’s without a doubt the one movie line that amuses me during the feral frenzy of dinner hour as I shell pistachios, boil pasta, pour organic milk into sippy cups, and dance around discarded Cheerios, all with a one-year old clinging to my leg like a ring-tailed lemur:  

  

“My mother had not had a hot meal for herself in fifteen years.”

Those may be the truest words ever spoken.

On this Mother’s Day weekend, I’ve been reflecting on the vast quantity of otherwise overlooked and unacknowledged sacrifices my own mother made throughout my childhood.  I barely remember a sliver of them, but there were thousands, tens of thousands.   And I’m only aware of them now because I’m the one doling out the martyrdom for two little toe-heads of my own.

I found that the transition to parenthood unraveled much like astronomy.  One minute you are gazing into a blank, black infinite sky and the next, you have been handed a telescope.  The sheer shower of stars and luminous galaxies were always there, but you are awakened to them as abruptly as an infant’s head emerges from the womb.   Suddenly, there is another person in the room.  A tiny, squawking, pink, gooey ruckus of limbs that right then and there, without a quiver of hesitation, you would give your life to protect.

  

There is a ferocity to motherhood that often lies dormant in the day to day tedium and tasks.  But, it is the life force, the heart that pumps the blood to all those branching veins of altruism.  It is what makes you willing to pull back in the driveway even though you are running late because your daughter forgot her stuffed ponies on the front porch.   It is why you forgo sipping your Chardonnay while flipping through a fashion magazine to practice spelling words with your second grader.  It is why you are a caffeinated, sleep-deprived, often weary woman who can’t find the damn car keys, sporting shabby five-year-old capris from Kohl’s, an old nursing bra, and a ponytail.  We are mothers first and everything else second.  

So, thank you, Mom.  Thirty-plus years late and three decades humbled.  I watch you now with my girls and it makes my heart leap and hurt all at once.  I recall how tender you always were.  How creative and attentive and pure when I wasn’t capable of appreciating it.  With you at the helm, we made placemats with Con-Tact paper and pressed autumn leaves.  We baked cookies with real butter, licked the beaters, and never once contracted salmonella.  Hell, when it was raining you even got out the finger paint.  Something I now avoid as stealthily as those 80-page tongue-tying Dr. Seuss books.

The truth is, you’re an extraordinary act to follow.

Mom, here’s the crux of it.  

I’m sorry about all those inside-out socks and underwear tangled in pant legs.  I’m sorry about the roast pork I regurgitated in a napkin after you had devoted five hours to chopping, dicing, and braising.  I’m sorry for the nights I tiptoed down in search of a sip of water or because my covers were not cooperating or the shade was not pulled down to the exact perfect spot when all you wanted was 30 minutes to watch Siskel and Ebert.   I’m sorry for all the dress shoes that I insisted felt great in the store, only to whine that they were digging into my baby toe half-way through church.

I’m sorry for any and all melodramatic protests that may have occurred when I was asked to put on a coat or heaven forbid, go pee before leaving the house.  I’m sorry for the many times I used your arm sleeve to smear snot or coughed in your face or spat out my gum in your hand in the middle of the supermarket because the flavor was completely gone after exactly three and half minutes.  And I’m sorry for all the times I ran away from you to join my friends and forgot to wave or even glance backwards.

I’m sorry for all the dishes you washed,  pots you soaked, toilet paper rolls you replaced,  tears you wiped, Band-Aids you applied, t-shirts you folded, bread you peanut-buttered,  carpools you juggled, hugs you administered, and patience you bestowed without so much as a whisper of gratitude.

I can’t thank you enough.  As your daughter.  As your admirer.  As now the mother of your granddaughters.  Although, I would like to make you that roast pork again and make sure that this time you get to enjoy it actually sitting down and most importantly, piping hot.    

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. 

My Valentine

I have a dozen roses in a vase next to my desk, even though I told him not to bother.  I have a child’s homemade paper heart taped to my wall with four stick figures drawn in glitter glue.  Tomorrow morning I will wake up next to someone who puts the toilet seat down, squashes the basement spiders, fills my car up with gas, and takes the recycling out in slippers.  I love him more than my grandmother’s poppy seed bakery, which is pretty hard to top.  He and I will celebrate Valentine’s  Day with our two daughters, quietly, modestly, making banana pancakes and frosting sugar cookies with basketball on in the background and snow falling like cotton balls on the patio.  It will be a day that might so easily be taken for granted.   A normal day.  An unremarkably beige day.  A day among many that could get lost in the volume and the noise and the tempo.   A day that might otherwise be neglected like a lone glove lying in a parking lot. 

I am writing a letter of love to the woman who will not get a Valentine this year or a candlelit dinner or a tender embrace in the doorway.  She will wake up and take a tentative step into her daily nightmare. She will feed Frosted Mini-Wheats to her kids, dress them in corduroy, and pull back their winter hats to kiss them goodbye on their foreheads.  She will watch from behind the front curtain as they pile into their father’s car and the tears will begin to burn her eyes.  She will email her lawyer, boil some water for tea, and stare at the picture on the fridge of the four of them licking ice cream on the Cape last summer.   She will count the days since he told her about the affair…since she found out he was leaving and that everything was over.  She will count the days back to the last day that seemed real.   She will take a shower and collapse into a heap on the tile until the water runs cold. She will dry off, look at her face in the mirror and stare.  Trying to recognize herself.  Trying to hide herself. 

She will close her eyes, yearning to conjure all the past Valentine’s spent with her husband.  Their first, in college when he surprised her with chicken soup and Alka-Seltzer after she had caught her roommate’s cold.  The one spent devouring a pepperoni pizza on the floor and Ben & Jerry’s with a spatula a day after they had moved.  The year he proposed.   And after a while, overcome with a sudden parasitic rage, she will scream and throw her hair dryer across the room and tear all the towels from the linen closet.  She will curl up on the bed and sob ferociously and wildly until the dog nuzzles his way into the room and they can whimper together with her hand on his fur.  

This is my Valentine to the woman who doesn’t feel loveable this year.  To let her know she is not to blame.  That she is strong.  That she is brave.  That she is entirely worthy. 

This is my Valentine to the woman in survival mode.  Who is gutted and stripped, but manages to clench her grief and tuck her kids in at night and waits to cry until it can be silenced by her pillow. 

This is my Valentine to the woman wrestling with a new reality.  Grappling with the fact her life went off a cliff and she is still falling, waiting to hit bottom, bracing for the impacts yet to come.  A woman whose wounds are not only bleeding from loss but salted with betrayal. 

This is my Valentine to the woman slogging through the muck, slowly, gradually, gruelingly.  Sometimes falling over.  Sometimes still and stationary, but still doing it.  This is to the woman who keeps on getting up.

This is my Valentine to the woman who cannot yet see through the fog or master the minefield, but who will come out the other side.  A woman who will ascend this colossal mountain of misery and be able to look down one day and be humbled by the enormity of what she conquered. 

This is my Valentine to the woman who will heal.  Who will be forever changed, but who, in time, will emerge whole, experience levity again, and bask in the forgotten fragrance of her own laugh.

This is my Valentine to the woman who reminded me how tenderly you must covet a family composed of glitter and glue.   A woman who reminded me how euphoric beige can be after you experience what it’s like to be in the dark. 

 

This is my Valentine to the woman who needs to know she is never alone.