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Category: Personal

On Being a Tortoise

found at search.tb.ask.com

“I was the tortoise.”

My father announced this at the dinner table one day, after one discussion led to another, and ultimately to Aunt Betty and Uncle Gene. My father, Stanley, was a man of few words, except when he was telling a story. When he was telling a story, he was always animated and dramatic. Enthralling, really. But when it came to matters of personal relations, he spoke in short sentences. Sentences that weren’t always direct, but were simple and gruff, and contained all of his otherwise unexpressed heart. “I was the tortoise,” was all we’d get, but it was enough. Everything I had observed growing up told me that Aunt Betty, Uncle Gene and their offspring were hares, and we were tortoises.

Aunt Betty had been a beauty in her youth, and was pampered and adorned just enough to fetch a prize husband, which she did. Uncle Gene had piercing good looks and an animal air, and was a college graduate poised to “climb the ladder.” When I became consistently conscious of him, he had already become an extremely successful executive, a “six figure man” in the late nineteen sixties, of what company or in what business my little six or seven year old self never understood, but all the rewards of which were easy enough for me to grasp. Aunt Betty wore furs, large gemstones and outfits no one else wore, except in glamour magazines or on television. Uncle Gene wore polo shirts, checked blazers, and pinkie rings. He had the trapped energy of someone with some place more important to be. He spoke even less than my father, and, when he did, with far more menace. His yellow eyes, black hair, which was all over his arms, at the opening of his collar, even in his ears, and his rumbling voice, used so rarely and always in short bursts, made him seem always ready to pounce, like some kind of hairy, full-bodied raptor. I had as little to do with him as possible, and he seemed glad of it.

My father, though moody and sometimes brusque, was, I was later to understand, the softest member in his family growing up. This, and his lackluster energy to make something remarkable of himself were the two strikes against him. Since he “wasn’t college material,” the next best thing was a job with a handsome uniform, authority and a pension. He became a cop. And as he was an extremely good looking and a jaunty, Bogart-esque fellow, that handsome uniform served him well when he approached a pretty, caring, demure and capable woman, my mother, who, to her discredit, was the daughter of immigrants. My father’s mother, Gussie, or “Gus” for short, was herself an immigrant, but it didn’t count somehow because she was born on the boat coming over. She had not a lick of an Eastern European accent and fancied herself a woman of the times. And while her first husband (an immigrant) killed himself during the Depression and left her a struggling widow with two young kids to feed, within 2 years time she was remarried to a successful dentist, living in a splendid Grand Concourse apartment, with sunken living room, dining room, eat in kitchen, and two large bedrooms. Her second husband Seymour was born in this country, the son of furriers. Gus and Seymour lived a very comfortable life, a steep rise from the small Harlem tenement where Gus lived with her two children, and Betty and Gene surpassed them. So when my father brought home the soft spoken and unassuming daughter of an immigrant seamstress, Gus looked her up and down, told her that she would be joining a family of a certain caliber and said “I hope you can live up to it.”

Aunt Betty and Uncle Gene invited us to attend a couple of the swank parties they threw at the Spindle Top, a private club and restaurant at the top of a New York City building. My sisters and I were always dressed in our best clothes, and warned to behave like little ladies. What this meant for me was that for the 3 hours or so that we were there I said hardly a word, and just stayed to the outer edges of the scene taking it in with big eyes. I remember, once, Uncle Gene, loosened by whiskey and the satisfaction of success, gave some kind of short toast with wide sweeping gestures, and Aunt Betty floated from guest to guest wearing a white turban that matched her striking white dress. I don’t know if she ever spoke to my sisters, who were older and suitable playmates for my cousins, but she never said a word to me in those years. We would visit them at their homes in Morris Plains, New Jersey and Natick, Massachusetts, often greeted by the barking and highly temperamental “Thor,” a snarling German Short-haired Pointer, usually on a chain just short enough to keep him from actually reaching us but long enough to make it frightfully questionable every time, and then ushered into custom homes with chic décor and noticeable amounts of purple and navy blue. By contrast, we lived in a development where all the homes were virtually identical. Our downstairs floors were pressed linoleum, and something that wasn’t quite wood paneled our family room walls. And yet, we all felt like it was a palace. Our wonderful claim to membership in a thriving suburban town and a huge change from the compact Bronx apartment where we had lived before. It was a home of our own, warm and familiar, just large enough for my sisters and I each to have our own bedrooms, and to find, inside and out, places of absolute solitude to dream.

Though my parents never said as much, I understood that we were the humble cousins in the story. I don’t know if my aunt and uncle saw my mother and father’s quiet nodding and expressions of interest as proper humility, but I saw them for what they were: acts of graciousness. For I was pretty sure that Aunt Betty and Uncle Gene weren’t very nice. They’d peer at me as though I was something to be tolerated, as though the entire visit was something to be tolerated, and, somehow, I felt that my parents knew it, knew that Betty and Gene weren’t very nice and believed they were better than Betty’s uncultured and underachieving brother and his quaint but suitable wife. But my parents pretended otherwise. Everyone was pretending. Aunt Betty and Uncle Gene pretended that that were happy to be there, and my parents pretended they were happy to host them. I watched my parents, who had no use for luxury, who would have just like to have had more breathing space financially, and perhaps a safer and less soul depleting job for my father, attend to any and all of Betty’s commentary, opinions and narratives about good connections, good taste, sophisticated circles and exotic cruises with patience, and kind, if feigned interest. I listened as my mother punctuated Betty’s narrative with the required utterances.

One day, we learned the bad news that Uncle Gene had lost his job in the economic recession. As a man in his 50’s so high on the ladder, we were told, he was having difficulty finding anything remotely like his previous position. It seemed inconceivable to me that anyone would have had the nerve to turn Uncle Gene down; he was that scary. My sisters and I listened solemnly to our mother’s updates: Aunt Betty had to sell this and that piece of jewelry, and Uncle Gene had to take a job beneath him, selling cheap merchandise from China. On a couple of occasions, Aunt Betty came to our house, bringing with her Benetton sweaters, French perfumes and other items, and I watched as she lay things out for my mother’s inspection, explaining the quality and assuring her that $25 for this or that was a bargain. I was older then, and sat in on the proceedings as an additional prospective buyer, gauging my mother’s assessment of whether something was worth buying or would actually be useful, even though we had little cash to spare, and taking my cues from her. And so, after stealing a glance at my mom, and seeing the, “Yes, that would be all right” face, I’d say, “I’d like that, Mom.” And the deal would be struck.

In the many, many years that followed, my father would occasionally give his sister money outright, as any loving and decent sibling would do. Even if he had been disinclined, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t, my grandmother made sure to remind him, “That’s what a brother does!” A man who at his retirement age never cleared 30,000 dollars salary, and who never received one generous gesture from his sister when she and her husband were living large, gave his sister money to get by, and they never spoke of it. Nor did any of us, for my mother explained the humiliation for my aunt and uncle, to be the poor, dependent relations – a humiliation that did nothing to soften them up or make them take much interest in us. Betty referred to me as Little Lisa, and I was pretty sure she had forgotten my actual, name, Elisa, if she ever knew it. Gene never addressed me, except once at the lunch following my grandfather’s funeral when he saw me watching him put his napkin on his coffee saucer and explained to me that it was a technique to absorb any possible spillage and thereby prevent any drips of coffee on his shirt. No, wait, there was also the time when I was five and he drove my mother and me to a local clinic after I split my chin open falling on the hard cement in their basement during a visit. As the doctor stuck me with the anesthetizing needle and I screamed and wailed, Gene burst out with “Oh come on! Act like a big girl!” (I remember thinking in response, “I’m five.”) Aunt Betty’s comments to me were limited to those absolutely required by circumstance. We ran into trouble when a specific utterance wasn’t indicated, and where, for others, some ease or warmth would have normally filled the space. On one occasion where we found ourselves together at the sinks in the ladies’ room of a restaurant, she said, “You shouldn’t wear your hair long like that. Your face is too big for it.” Then she dried her hands and left.

Our relationships with Betty and Gene’s offspring were also less than ideal. In the early years, Janice and Glenn seemed to enjoy my older sisters, with whom they could play games and have adventures roaming the neighborhood. I was too young to be of interest, and, worse, I was ridiculed and excluded by Janice and Glenn wherever possible- a quiet, sensitive mouse of a little girl who was a tag-along, detracted from their cool and needed looking after. My sisters, each a bit younger than Janice and Glen, respectively, were relieved to be considered worthy and I envied them, wanting to be worthy as well. As the years went by, however, whatever connection there was between the four older cousins waned, and once Gene lost his job the full family visits ceased altogether. Betty came by herself, when she did come, and we were never invited to their home again. My mother explained this was because Betty would not be able to afford to host us in the way she would have liked.

Still, the past had its hold on me. I wanted so badly to have an aunt who actually cared about me, and with whom I could find some common ground. In my mid-twenties, I called her up and asked if I could drive out to visit with her. She accepted, and out to New Jersey I went. For hours we chatted, drank coffee and even shared her cigarettes, something I did in a desperate attempt to connect with her, and which was particularly bizarre seeing as how she had recently been diagnosed with emphysema. I put on my best impression of a hard-boiled person, making small talk peppered with cynical observations. It must have worked because she actually expressed some surprise that I turned out to be so interesting, and she insisted I stay for dinner. The elation I felt at her acknowledgment was short-lived, and in retrospect stung as pathetic. I had achieved a false stamp of acceptance, without my aunt having any idea of who I actually was. I never saw her again. She did not want to be seen at my wedding with a portable oxygen tank and died not long after.

Misfortune in that family continued. My cousin Glen had once been a handsome little devil, who knew how to charm my grandma, and get away with everything, until Gene sent him off to a military school to teach him discipline. It was a failed experiment. Glen had the misfortune of being a soft-hearted boy trying to disguise himself as a hard-ass to survive in his own family, and military school only worsened his hell. He did manage to marry someone he loved deeply, and work as an electrician for many years. My parents, with the happy hope that Glen at least would be close with us, even hired him whenever they needed an electrician. But Glen carried his own demons. He smoked like a furnace and put impulse purchases and drugs before his lovely wife and children. His wife left him, and he left us, after my father had to turn down his request for money. My father turned Glen down, not because he refused to support Glen, but because he had already exhausted his small savings helping Glen out once before. And so we lost Glen, who after that had nothing further to do with us, whether through indignation or shame, and who died alone from emphysema and lung cancer a few years later.”

Betty was gone, Glen was gone, Janice was gone, to California to start a new life, and Gene was living with a woman whom we’d never meet and only vaguely knew of. My grandmother had died shortly after Betty’s death, which was such a heavy blow to her, and was not alive to see Glenn follow too soon. We had no contact with Gene after that, and learned of his passing after the fact, each of us filled with a wordless sorrow.

So, when my dad declared, “I was the tortoise” and then glanced around the table to see if we got it, we quietly nodded. He had reached the finish line, without fanfare, and, yes, with a small measure of satisfaction but, more importantly, with good will and a soft heart. We had all won, really. We were all tortoises. We had family, love, hard work, steady, modest achievement, and gratitude. Everything that could be good about people I learned from my watching my parents make that slow and ultimately far-reaching journey together. But, now, some 25 or so years later, I think that maybe my father wasn’t talking about a race against his sister’s family or even about a race at all. Maybe he was finally free to reject out loud the voices in his head telling him that anyone who wasn’t a go-getter, anyone who delighted in simple things, who wasted time daydreaming about fantastic adventures he didn’t actually want for himself, who didn’t “climb the ladder” and who was content to end each day at home with his family and his books, was a bit of a stooge. Maybe he was trying to tell us that it’s not even about whether fast and flashy are better. It’s about where you’re heading that matters.

found at pet petful.com Mikhail Esteves

March 25, 2016
The Surprise Plate

found at dherbs.com/#.U39_SvldV5M

There have been a few things about raising my children I have been a genius at, though, to be honest, these were more of the my-god-they-are-such-gullible-newbies variety and not so much of the I-must-get-them-to-understand-this variety. My most genius invention was the surprise plate. Even more so than the secret cameras I convinced them I had set up at their elementary and middle schools (achieving this through minutely detailed and accurate reportage of tiny incidents that happened in school which I had either witnessed unbeknownst to them or had related to me by other parents who were there). The surprise plate was sheer beauty: so simple but so incredibly effective.

Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if millions of other mothers out there have all come upon the surprise plate as well, because mothers are indeed a clever bunch, but it sure felt like my own genius magic, whipping it up one day almost out of thin air, and getting instant results. It happened on a day when the kids were not hungry enough to start whining about the exact meal they would require, down to each ridiculously innutritious item (with extra frosting!), if they were to be expected to mellow out and not escalate to a tantrum, but still were invested enough to inquire with some interest as to what I intended to present as “lunch.” I hesitated in my response, having been thrown by the fact that it was nowhere near close to lunch, and the kids, thinking they were sniffing disaster, instantly became alarmed. Didn’t my hesitation mean I was planning a bad, awful, disgusting lunch? But like a highly tuned instrument of bio-feedback making a thousand tiny adjustments every moment to prevent the otherwise oncoming meltdown, my scrambling brain made a sudden leap. I turned serenely toward them with wide grin, and, sweeping my arm out in a servile and unctuous arc, I told them, “I didn’t want to tell you, but I’m making you surprise plates.”

“What’s on a surprise plate?” they nervously asked. And with the suavity of a practiced TV host, and the beatific smile and manner of a magical fairy, I answered, “Well, it’s a surprise!”

by Samantha Lee, found at http://blogs.disney.com/oh-my-disney/2015/10/14/13-pieces-of-disney-food-art-cute-enough-to-eat/

And they nodded in this information, with a half-understanding, a bit of game curiosity and a good dose of skepticism. I felt that I had averted a storm, at least for the time being. As the time for lunch drew near, I had to figure out what would go on those damn plates. “Okay, there’s the Goldfish, and those grapes I had this morning didn’t have that bad aftertaste from the skin… but what else? What ELSE? And I rifled through the fridge till I found some bologna to roll up and some cooked broccoli left overs, and scouted the pantry till I lighted upon the canned sliced peaches. Sweet, but still marginally nutritious. And to seal the deal, Hostess yodels!

At lunch, I served them with great pomp and circumstance. “Here are your surprise plates!” The fun they had pointing out the various items, their relief in not be served something truly repugnant and, moreover, their delight also in getting not just canned peaches, but a yodel besides, rendered the bologna completely benign. And the broccoli! The broccoli was transformed! It was now merely a mildly confusing disappointment, no longer something to cause eruptions of yowls and hideous, grimacing expressions. “But Mom, there’s broccoli.”

I shrugged with raised upturned hands and philosophically said, “Well, it’s a surprise plate. You never know what you’re gonna get.” This, to my well hidden amazement, led to them affirming with a mix of glee and resignation, “You never know what you’re gonna get!” They ate the broccoli.

The next day, they pleaded in chorus for surprise plates. “Oh no,” I said, “that’s an only once in a while thing,” and I insisted on serving them an “ordinary” lunch of chicken nuggets, banana slices, some green beans and two oreos. After a few times of them asking when they’d get surprise plates again, I finally, and “begrudgingly” said, “Okay, okay! I’ll make surprise plates.” This time it was hardboiled eggs, a one-serving of Mott’s applesauce, some M & M’s, carrot sticks with a little puddle of ranch dressing and cooked zucchini. “Yay, M & M’s! Eww, zucchini!” but they ate it all. That was it! I felt like Dr. Frankenstein must have when he gave life to his monster. “I HAVE DONE IT!”

Those once in a while surprise plates helped me get all kinds of vegetables into my kids’ mouths, and the good-natured-oh-well ingestion of these veggies often led to their eventual acceptance onto both “ordinary” lunch and dinner plates. (Though I wasn’t fool enough try the really challenging ones, like collard greens or kale. Why risk spoiling a good thing?)

I kept up those surprise plates until the day finally came, sadly, when it occurred to one of them to say, “I’m not eating that, Ma.” And just like that, the magic of the surprise plate was gone. Oh well. It was good while it lasted. And thinking about it now, I recall that the idea wasn’t really mine, but actually was my mother’s. She had once told me about the surprise plates she had made for my nieces when they stayed with her, and the notion must have lodged in my brain, waiting for the perfect time to come out. Did she know about the power of the plate to induce the eating of vegetables? She must have. She was a mother, after all.

found at biblemoneymatters.com/how-to-create-a-decorated-handprint-plate/

January 24, 2016
Grateful

These days, I reserve the word grateful for those things that bring a stab of pain to my heart as it overfills. If you find a pop tart left behind in your pantry by your ravenous kids you might feel a small rush of glee contemplating how you get to eat it, but that is not gratitude. If, however, you find that pop tart hidden behind some rubble in your post-apocalyptic home, where you have been starving for a week, you might instead experience that overwhelming tidal wave of joy, relief, thankfulness and humility that is gratitude.

photo by Gregory Mancuso; see gregorymancuso.com

I have many things in my life that blow me down with gratitude when I think about them. At 54, seeing all the disease and infirmities around me, I am practically in tears contemplating how I have thus far remained healthy and strong. And just a week ago, I was hanging out with both my kids, during their college winter breaks, when it dawned on me that they are my greatest accomplishment. I’ll happily share the glory for that accomplishment with their father, for there is more than enough to go around. It hit me, watching them riff jokes off something on the television, displaying their quick humor, their intelligence and warmth, their affection for each other and various other aspects of their personalities, that I really didn’t need to accomplish another single thing in my life in order to feel that my time on Earth served its purpose. For how could I achieve anything greater than creating these two extraordinarily wonderful people? Watching them there, I felt the gratitude coming along full bore, building and building, until it crashed over me, leaving me blubbering like a baby. They will tell you. I really was blubbering.

section from photo by Anton Jankovoy; see jankovoy.com

Standing here in the temporary desert of my own personal post-apocalyptic world, another thing that flattens me low with gratitude is the fact that I have loved with abandon, not once, but four times. Four times! That’s crazy! But true. This isn’t me mistaking for the real thing the times that I was merely infatuated or just out for sex or trying so hard to love someone I just couldn’t. I actually loved with abandon four times. I spoke uninhibited words to my lovers, purely, without agenda. I cared deeply how their family histories, their fears and triumphs, and their dreams shaped who they were. I wanted them to soar, and be everything they wanted to be. I looked right into their eyes and revealed myself. So, it matters not if I end up alone in my old age. I have seen the mountaintop. And in at least two of the cases, I actually stood on the mountaintop; I was loved with abandon in return. And the wave that tumbles me when I think about that is still a rush and a humbling.

Something happens to us adults as we maneuver the scary social complexities of society. We grow ever more hard-boiled, ever more guarded, every more cynical and ever more bitter. We forget all that we have to be dizzyingly grateful for. And we forget how to love with abandon. We sneer at it as folly. A recipe for disaster. And risking that much exposure and surrender often leads to terrible heartache, it’s true. It came to that for me in all four cases. So we hover nervously when we see our children take those risks, talking them out of it and predicting doom in our desire to protect them. But oh! That sublime feeling, when you surpass your boundaries, and lay yourself bare, there is nothing more thrilling, more alive, more beautiful. How could we not want that for our children? How is it that we focus on the downfall instead of the loft? I tell my daughter I am so, so happy for her that she has achieved love with abandon. For she has something for which she can be forever grateful, something she will always keep, no matter what happens. And you do. You keep it always.

photo by Andrea McChesney; found at iheartfaces.com

December 29, 2015
Atonement

Found at 2me4art.com

Over my life a particular memory visited me from time to time. Whenever it came, I always gave it its due attention. But it seemed to serve no purpose other than replaying a long ago hurt and, despite the gentler perspective granted with age and experience, always triggered the same painful mix of bio-chemicals that squirted forth when it actually happened so many years ago.

Of late, the memory began popping up more frequently.

At first, I wasn’t even wondering why. Then, when it finally dawned on me that the same episode was running again and again on my brain’s T.V. screen, I began to suspect that the constant replay was a demand to be noticed. Like a loud megaphone: Hey, dummy! Does this remind you of anything?

It was a time in my life when I was a real pain in the ass. Somewhere between the ages of 8 and 11, I was experiencing the fallout from being taken away from a life that worked for me. In that wonderful former life in the Bronx, my older sister Michele played with me more than she socialized with our eldest sister Renee. In that life, my best friend lived directly across the hall from me, and was available most of the time for companionship. In that life, my mother was home most of the time; and, when she did go out without me, I had the security of my best friend’s mom across the hall, or or my grandmother (who lived two floors below us) and never once felt alone. But in this new suburban life I was now in, I hadn’t made any real friends yet, my companionable sister had crossed over and was now a fellow traveler of our eldest sister, and my mother worked as a teacher. Little did I know that day when we were all so proud of her for graduating and huddled together, smiling for the camera to mark the occasion, that I should have been singing a dirge. For my mother of course did the next logical thing, which was to get a job as a teacher. Not that it affected me during school hours. But, after school, in place of my attentive, soft and patient mother, offering snacks and asking me about my day, there was a different mother. This one was stressed. A new teacher, preparing lessons for the next day. Working on her masters degree, and sometimes traveling into the city for evening classes, or spending yet more hours doing her assignments.

My father was also withdrawing. Not that he ever was the warm and cuddly type. He was a cop, and had to keep up his hard-boiled exterior. But when we lived in the Bronx, it was a few simple steps for him to come into the bedroom I shared with my sisters, to tell us some stories, make us laugh or sing to us. Now, we all inhabited our own separate rooms, up a flight of stairs, and my sisters were getting too old for that sort of thing anyway. And, too, he was facing his own wearying challenges. He was now commuting from the suburbs into a part of the Bronx that was getting scarier and more disassociated from that place where he grew up. The absence of any men who really could relate to him on any level in our upward striving suburban community, and the surreal and battering horror of traveling back and forth from dainty civilization to dystopia on a daily basis, caused him to retreat further into his world of books and pipe tobacco when he was home. And my sisters were off tittering about some shared secret knowledge or hanging out with their friends. I was no longer a cute diversion holding any interest for them, and my felt banishment filled me with resentment and longing.

From The Children’s Encyclopedia, by Arthur Mee. (London: The Education Company. Orig pub. as The Children’s Encyclopædia 1908), “Ideas” section, Volume I, p. 112.

The final loss, in a twisted turn of poor timing, I also was no longer my mother’s “warm little bundle.” This I learned when she started telling me all the time “Oh you used to be my warm little bundle!” As I was getting larger and losing what was left of my wide-eyed and sweet puppy features, it was not possible, had I even tried, to fool anyone into thinking I still needed slack for my hesitations and cluelessness. People expected me to get with the program, understand my responsibilities, stop expecting time made to soothe and redress my little hurts and disappointments.

One Sunday afternoon in particular I was sadder than usual. My sadness moved into broken-heartedness, and I felt strangely incapacitated, virtually listless. I became convinced that I had some sort of mysterious malady, which only a mother would understand, and certainly have the remedy for, if I could just muster up the energy to call for her, which I did. She was all the way downstairs, using up what free weekend time she had entertaining my Aunt Betty, and so I had to summon up quite a bit of energy for my call of “Mahhhhh-meeeeee!” to reach her. That I was in such a sorry state as to be required to use every last bit of my strength to make such an effort only made me that much more broken-hearted. Years later, I understood that what I wanted to see, what I ached to see, was my mother, coming up into the master bedroom (where my incapacitated little body lay), with a gentle reassuring face, soon to be stroking my hair and telling me that if only she could get ride of Aunt Betty she’d be there with me, taking care of me and making everything all right. What I got instead was a slightly exasperated mother, with firmly set lips, who was there to get to the bottom of why her then 9 year old thought she was incapable of walking down the stairs. When I told her that I wasn’t feeling well, she strode over, checked my forehead for heat and looked at me hard, trying to size up which reaction I deserved. I received the, “Well, just rest here and I’ll check on you later” response, which was far short of what I so desperately wanted. She went back down. I spent the next 15 to 20 minutes wondering what went wrong. Why didn’t I get the loving stroking of the hair and the reassurance that our bond remained intact despite all the demands on her time? And, convinced that I didn’t do a good enough job of conveying how broken-hearted I was, I decided as only a 9 year old can that the best way forward was to call her again, and this time really make sure she understood. Although this time I never got to say anything. As soon as I called out my even more plaintive “Mahhhhh-meeeeee!” I could hear Aunt Betty clucking her tongue about what a nuisance I was for my poor mother, and could almost see my mother’s face pained with exhaustion and embarrassment (for Aunt Betty made it clear always that she tolerated no such nonsense from her children). When she appeared at the bedroom door, having made the climb for the second time, someone even more removed from the mother I grieved for was there. I can’t remember what she said, but the words were irrelevant. Her angry expression and tone said it all. I was a burden, whiny, unreasonable and selfish. Something to deal with. Not a hurt little girl, her daughter, without words to express to her mother how alone she felt in her losses. In that moment, I understood fully and perhaps for the first time that my sweet childhood was truly over. I endured the moments of bitter reprimand that followed and said nothing more.

So why the increased frequency of replay? What was I hoping to find in that memory? As early as young adulthood, I had figured out that my mother was in an almost impossible situation, working full time, running our home and raising her girls all without much input or support from my father. I had already worked out that my father was steeling his soft and poetic nature every day for the work of a mercenary, patrolling an unsafe community that was no longer his own. I had already grown to understand that my sisters were just experiencing their own lives with all the complications and transitions that adolescence brings. I had nothing more to learn from that memory, or so I thought.

My own daughter, now 21, has had her own difficult journey. As the first born, she had no older sibling to shelter her when she first entered the world outside of her mother’s arms. She would return home from a difficult day at school to find me, formerly unflagging in my soothing attention, now preoccupied with her younger brother, or in the middle of house chores, or chafing against something gone wrong in my life that I hadn’t put to words or even understood but which only served to unnerve her all the more.

Dreamscape by wbsloan on Flickr

And at those times, when my daughter needed me, I’d deliver a sort of patched together, half-hearted exasperated offering of my own. Sometimes I even lost my patience with her, when all she really wanted was for me to scoop her up and tell her that she was loved, and special, and that I was glad to have her home. Instead, she knew that part of me wished she was still at school, so I could catch my breath, and have just that bit more peace, and maybe somehow get grounded back to who I was. When she came home from her own battles each day, she was greeted, not by the loving, tender mother she wanted, but by the same overwrought mother, with strained smile and limited patience, that I had greeted. The same mother who hoped to fix her daughter’s unhappiness by suggesting better ways to have handled something, as though that would stem the onslaught of painful experiences. The same mother who felt guilty and helpless whenever she witnessed her child’s pain, and never said the right thing. How is it that I determined to do things so differently from my mother, so that my children would not feel the same rejections and misunderstanding I had, but ended up failing so completely in that regard?

Brave and determined soul that she is, my daughter set herself to exorcising all causes for resentments from our relationship while she was still a teenager. After years of less effective confrontations, at 21 she finally developed the language to convey (and I finally refined my listening enough to receive) the simple truth that she had felt like a burden to me. She felt she was the problem child that made everything harder for me… for us. She confessed it to me one night, one night of wonderful, vulnerable, almost scary bonding and revelation. And there it was, at the ready, finally able to reveal why it had been plaguing me: that memory of my own mother, angry with me for needing her when she was barely hanging on herself, and resentful for not knowing how to fix it all, that aching in me and in herself. And I whispered to my darling daughter, “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry that I didn’t simply hold you and tell you I loved you, that everything would be okay. That all of it mattered, yes, but that none of it mattered now that you were in my arms.” How long would that have taken? Ten minutes? Ten minutes to soothe a child facing the world without her mother. A child without sheltering siblings and with no trusted friends yet. Why couldn’t I just have simply hugged her, without judgment or the desperate wish that all her problems, that she, the way she was, would just change into something else that would make my life easier? Instead, I contributed to a pattern that would haunt us for years: the lonely and misfit daughter and the overwhelmed, worried and ineffectual mother. I’d come to pick her up from a birthday party, with a dreading expression, expecting before being told that there had been some pain for her in the proceedings, some conflict that all the other children and moms couldn’t understand, or prevent, and wished would magically disappear; and instead of scooping her up and being on her side, I’d wish it would all disappear too. I wished she would just be easier. For my sake as well as hers.

So here is my atonement. To my daughter, for doing exactly what my own mother did, and what her mother did before her. For not wanting to acknowledge the legitimacy, the normalcy, and even the inevitability of the hurts a sensitive child feels when weaned from her mother’s side. For not wanting to explore my part in those hurts, making them worse by adding my own frustration, resentment, guilt and feelings of inadequacy as insult to injury. But my atonement also is to my mother. I atone for having judged her as not up to the task of understanding and comforting an angry, sad, lost child. It is a very difficult task, maybe impossible; I know that now. I atone for my high-handed thinking, when I became an adult, that I was big enough and wise enough to forgive her. There was nothing to forgive. She loved me, and my pain pained her. She was a wonderful, wonderful mother, all the more so in light of all she carried. I atone whole-heartedly, seeking her forgiveness for assessing her and finding her wanting, now understanding finally that all the love and best intentions, all the experiences and memories we swear we will bring to our own child-rearing, may not be enough to overcome the limitations and distortions hammered into us by whatever stressors and unspoken resentments are plaguing us at any given time in our adult lives.

The cycle of hurt between parent and child will continue, I suppose. I pray that my daughter will be able to break it should she have an unhappy child. And I hope in any event that my daughter too comes to understand that I loved her always, and that her pain pained me, and that I wish more than anything that I could redo some of those moments she remembers, bringing the perspective I have now, and taking the hurt away.

October 27, 2015
Estelle

found at creepypasta.wikia.com

The tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is so much a part of our popular culture that virtually everyone knows its key premise, without ever having read it, or even knowing who wrote it (Robert Louis Stevenson). For some reason (I’m guessing insanity), Jekyll wants to segregate the selfish, depraved and conscience-free half of his nature from his altruistic, civil and dutiful side. He dreams of how wonderful it would be if each half could function without inhibition, free from the influence of the other. Sounds to me like a rationalization to let the dark side go nuts. Jekyll invents a potion to achieve the schism, the actual scientific means by which he accomplishes this left a mystery to the reader. After Jekyll drinks the foul brew, hideous, corporeal Hyde begins to roam the night. Unrestrained by the goodness and civility of Jekyll, Hyde not only degenerates into a murderous fiend, but becomes harder and harder to control. A cautionary tale, indeed.

Well, it turns out that I too have a “screw that!” conscience-free side to my personality, though thankfully she is neither villain nor murderous fiend. I have decided to call her “Estelle.” The most subversive thing Estelle ever did was to buy the loudly ticking antique pendulum clock that is now hanging just to the left of our family room television, despite knowing darn well that the men in the household didn’t want anything distracting from their view of whatever sports game or movie was on, let alone something that made noise and moved. She may also have had a hand in my apparently sudden decision, while accompanying my daughter to a piercing shop, to get a nose stud at age 52 (C’mon! You’ve wanted one for YEARS, you gutless suburbanite!), but I’m not sure about that one.

found at bokehphotography.uk.com

Estelle isn’t out to make trouble. She is just the morality-free, propriety-free, completely selfish truth teller who has finally learned how to jab her way forward to “keep things real.” She tells it like it is… loudly. Indeed, the longer I pretend not to hear her, the louder she gets. Like that ticking clock she insists “Oh yeah? Well here I am! Get used to it!” I first came to know her in the wee hours, when she’d awaken me in the dark, hoarsely whispering to me about how I’d been on autopilot for much of my adult life, navigating according to values or standards that never quite fit me. About how, as a result, the current configuration of my life was suffocating me. About how for years I’d been a pretender in my marriage, my own home, to my family and friends, trying to convince everyone and myself that I was happy.

My inner truth-teller, Estelle

Naturally, at first, Estelle frightened me, and I tried to hush her up. But she wouldn’t relent. Estelle was the first one to tell me that there was no way I could pull off preppy, country club clothing. (With those bazooms and that unmistakably Semitic visage??) To flat out say that I’d never be friends with the women in my synagogue’s Sisterhood so why did I keep trying (You don’t even like them!!). To pester me into admitting out loud that I had developed somewhat of a drinking problem. Nothing gets by Estelle. Her inconvenient and sometimes painful truths are often disruptive, but they are always liberating, even if at times anti-social. For example, Estelle helps me understand that when I nagged everyone in my family not to eat potato chips from the bag, it was really just because I resented being the only one who cared about a clean sofa or being the one left with the broken, saliva encrusted detritus at the bottom of the bag, but now that I have the house to myself, I too can happily jam my hand into the bag, cram chips in my mouth and lick my fingers, all while watching Dawn of the Planet of the Apes at an unsustainably loud volume on the surround sound. Estelle says, “This is awesome!”

But while I am thankful that Estelle keeps me honest and helps me cast off the “supposed to’s” that dull, dishearten or, worse, crush me, I have realized that, of course, Stevenson is right. Even when it comes to my loud-no-bullshit-can’t-help-but-love-her Estelle, free reign would be a disaster. She must remain an internal force, a passenger on my crowded bus of characters. There will be no potion taking for me. For though she keeps the constructs of others from making me miserable, Estelle unleashed would be a misery to everyone else. She is blunt, inconsiderate, obnoxious, unintentionally but unsparingly hurtful. I learned this when, over the last two years or so she began taking more liberties, perhaps giddy with her vindication that she had been right about so many things.

On one such occasion, my daughter and I had just concluded a long, overwrought argument in a restaurant, my husband and son trying desperately to act like they weren’t with us, even though we were all at the same table. It finally seemed like my family would be able to move on to a nice dinner; peace and harmony had been thrown up in the air, but were once again beginning to settle on us like a blanket. Nevertheless, upon hearing the last half-hearted diss my daughter flung at me, which ordinarily I would have easily ignored for the greater good, Estelle came roaring forth. I found myself actually snorting and loudly muttering, in the most unmotherly way imaginable, “Give me a break.” Fortunately, all at the table, including my daughter, were so astonished at this aberration, the complete abandon of such a declaration, its sheer reckless nerve, that everyone started laughing and dinner was saved. But in another surfacing of Estelle, I wasn’t so lucky. My son was fervently and sincerely, if a just a wee bit sanctimoniously, trying to explain why something had mattered to him, and Estelle burst free, changing my aspect so completely that she was virtually corporeal like Hyde. Momentarily whisking me to some far away place, where she apparently knew I’d secretly rather be, she blithely sighed, “Blah, Blah, Blah,” in an absent-minded, sing song kind of way. My son and I were both shocked. We had just seen and heard something or someone that wasn’t at all the entity usually in charge, and this force, whatever it was, was completely unconcerned with his feelings. Estelle, it seems, doesn’t give a good goddamn about anyone but me. My son told me it was probably the coldest, and therefore the most hurtful thing I had ever done or said to him, and I could see why. Yow.

Poor Estelle! She only wants me to remain true to myself. She champions my causes. But she has indeed led me to hurt people I love when I’ve let her steer the bus. She takes me to the other extreme. So, to actually remain true to myself, my entire self, I’ll take her under advisement, but negotiate compromise and find my center. Thanks Estelle! Now, will you shut up?

found at jalopyjournal.com

September 11, 2015
You Like Me!

People of a certain age may remember that moment in 1984 when Sally Field won an Oscar for her performance in Places in the Heart. In her acceptance speech she was overcome with emotion. Barely but beautifully managing to remain coherent, she expressed her profound happiness and amazement that despite not having had an “orthodox” career (after all, she was Gidget and The Flying Nun), and wanting so much to be respected as a serious actress, she was now being recognized as such. Or, as she more succinctly put it: “…I can’t deny the fact that you like me! Right now, you like me!!” Immediately there were jokes on late night comedy shows, teasing remarks in the media, sniggering banter among the general public, all indicting poor Sally for being so unabashedly preoccupied, apparently, with whether people liked and respected her acting. “How embarrassing! How neurotic! How nakedly needy!” went the chatter, and all nodded in agreement. It became something of a meme, pre-internet, and even resurfaced nine years later in The Mask, a bit altered but still clearly a grotesque homage to the original, when Jim Carrey’s Loki character suddenly receives an Oscar in the midst of his violent encounter with the bad guys. Carrey tearfully and vehemently grasps the statuette and sobs, “You love me! You really love me!”

Even at the time of Sally Field’s speech, I remember feeling a bit peeved by all the ridicule, mainly because it was Sally Field for godssake and who doesn’t love her? So what if she gushed something that sounded a bit too self-revelatory when she accepted her Oscar? It was an unbridled moment of shock, joy and gratitude. Who can be poised under those circumstances? Oh wait, we can. At least, that’s the myth, the standard, the expectation we all accept as gospel. No matter what, don’t reveal uncertainty, insecurity, or a care of any kind for what people think of you or how you are coming across, for that is weakness. And what do we do when we see weakness? Mock it, cluck our tongues, or thank god we haven’t displayed it ourselves. We align ourselves, so we imagine, with the strong, the confident, the unconcerned.

Now, however, on the back end of my presumed 100 years of life, I realize keenly that the myth is its own form of weakness. To be so comfortable in your own skin that you are truly unconcerned with how you come across, so that you neither avoid nor pretend away displays of uncertainty, doubt, or even idiocy is the sign of real confidence. It is the deniers, the mockers who are the poseurs. Their derision highlights their fear of being caught in the act of not being self-assured. The people who actually know me best may understand that this is certainly what I’d like to believe, anyway, for they know or at least suspect that I’ve been preoccupied for a good chunk of my life with how I come across to others. Huzzah! I’m free from it now. Finally and irreversibly free from that concern, but oh, how it plagued me! And I daresay it plagues a lot of people who never admit their affliction or even fully understand that they have it.

I knew I was preoccupied with the judgment of others from an early age; I kept my head down as much as possible. I was quiet with my peers, constantly scanning for whom it was I needed to avoid, or not antagonize, or win over if I were to evade being found out as the strange, uncool, uncertain creature that I was. My first taste of blissful freedom from this preoccupation came at age 12. It was then that I went to sleep away camp. It was a rough and bumpy first 3 weeks. What everyone chalked up to homesickness was actually misery and fear from being among peers who might brand me a loser. It was a misery I experienced all through 4^th, 5^th and 6^th grades, culminating in that summer at camp. I spent a good deal of time in the bunk of my 15 year old sister, sitting on her bed during free periods, learning macramé from the other girls in her bunk, or asking her to let me brush her hair (and surprisingly she did!). I never was so worshipful and doting and meek toward that particular sister as I was that summer, desperately subduing anything remotely pesky lest she banish me and I be cast adrift in the sea of my own bunkmates, all of whom seemed more self-assured, more popular, and more cool than I. Then, at the end of the third week, something extraordinary happened. I overheard two cute, adorable girls, whom everyone respected and admired, conversing about how nice I was! What happened was this: I was using the bathroom in the bunk when this girl Pam thought it would be funny to spy on me from above the divider. I was so surprised and mortified to have my private appointment with the toilet thus invaded, that I literally fell off the seat and cried out, resulting in a rush of girls to the scene. To my amazement, they started berating Pam for being so gross, so mean, so invasive, instead of laughing at me. In a dazed sort of aftershock from the whole affair, I wandered outside to the porch and sat down on a bench. Across the way were the two bunk darlings, Arlene and Mindy. I sat down just in time to hear Arlene say, “I really like Elisa, she’s so nice,” and Mindy answer, “Yeah, I really like her too, she’s so sweet.” They then looked up and saw me sitting there, and we all started laughing in sheepish embarrassment. Except I wasn’t just embarrassed. I was amazed, over the moon, astonished, delighted, so profoundly happy and confused. Could it be? These girls whose imprimatur of acceptance I could have only dreamed about actually enjoyed my presence? It was a seminal moment in my life. I transformed into a happy camper, literally, and proudly mixed in with my bunkmates as one of them. Camp became a place where I was free from the warfare of the cliques and popularity and meanness I witnessed back at elementary school, and it became so dear to me that I cried when it was time to leave. As I had been crying to my sister and my mother for the first 3 weeks about how I wanted to go home, this was somewhat perplexing to them, but nevertheless a huge relief for my mother who no doubt had been fluctuating between guilt and exasperation.

From that moment on the bunk porch, when I metaphorically clutched my own little award – I can’t deny, you like me! Right now, you LIKE me! – I developed greater ease, and a perspective on the wider world of social opportunity sufficiently broad enough to start looking for friends with whom I could connect. I stopped worrying about or trying to impress kids I really had nothing in common with and certainly didn’t genuinely respect. And in that effort I had wonderful success. I ended up having around me the most amazing authentic friends I could have hoped for. I was comfortable enough to be my goofy self. My more or less emotionally brave, honest, loyal, genuine, and caring self.

Then college happened, and once again I was thrown into a sea of young, uprooted and somewhat unsure and often posturing youth. My radar went back into primal overdrive. My information was distorted of course. I believed that everyone had someone to go to dinner with, everyone felt connected, everyone was cool, and everyone had a troupe from his or her freshman hall to rove with. Everyone, that is, except me. It never occurred to me that many others, if not most, had the same concerns of appearing easeful and smooth. And while, over the course of the four years, I slowly, slowly recovered from that setback and convinced myself I wasn’t the complete buffoon I feared, I never quite made it all the way back to that state of grace I found in high school among my dear, dear friends and family. And then, in a still somewhat overly self-editing and internally awkward state of mind, I unfortunately launched into law school and after that a corporate law firm (GAK!), a magnet for aggressive competitors and desperately posing associates who only know about half of what they pretend to know. Even the law partners, who must convince everyone and themselves that that are authorities, because verdicts or millions are at stake, know what they are doing only about two thirds of the time. I know this now, especially after having been married to one for a couple of decades. Not only that, I now understand that this is true of just about everybody. People can only do the best they can, and sometime they are doping it through like everyone else. (Except for blockheads who insist on things they know nothing about instead of actually opening up their minds and taking in information. Those jackasses only know what they are doing about a quarter of the time, if that.)

But back to my immersion in the larger adult world at the age of 25. In this toxic soup of competition, insecurity and posing, I floated. In a new city, far away from family and friends, I began the process of trying to swim, to find my authentic center all over again. Only this time, I didn’t make it anywhere near as far. Let’s just say I entered a prolonged period where I carried the fear of how I was coming across like a block of stone on my back. A fretful monitor in my brain carefully edited my choice of words in the nanoseconds before they came out of my mouth. It scrupulously screened my gestures and manners for anything remotely coarse, naïve, unworthy, insecure. I was consumed by insecurity over seeming insecure! I went over things that happened or that I said after the fact and shrank with mortification over how I could have been such a dolt. I met and married someone floating in that same toxic stew, and we moved to an affluent suburb of carefully practiced gentility, where we felt even more like poseurs. Where parents boasted about their genius children, and tried to appear nonchalant entering or living in huge country versions of mansions with extensive grounds. Where it was so easy to believe that everyone but you always remains assured, elegant and graceful, self-possessed in their movements and tone of voice, even behind closed doors.

What was it that freed me finally and irrevocably from all the dread and self-editing? Well, I do still edit myself somewhat, but these days my only filter is a desire to be kind. It took me until I was 52 to really, really understand that pretty much all of those overly self-assured people are full of shit, and that the truly, truly cool genuinely don’t care if they seem clueless, awkward, or temporarily needful. They are unembarrassed to seek approval or support. They know that everyone is unsure some of the time and it’s no big deal to admit it. I can’t be sure what it was that suddenly led me to open my eyes. To see and even hear the uncertainty and false bravado in so many people around me. To thrust off the expectations or standards of acquaintances and even friends who themselves are worried about the whispers and opinions of others. Maybe it was my utter exhaustion. Maybe it was the journey I went on to find out what it was I really cared about. Maybe it was watching my own children struggle with these same issues. I want them to know that the truly cool, ironically, are the very people who think nothing of proclaiming in moments of absolute joy and relief and gratitude, “You like me! And I’m so glad!!”

The final irony here is that once I was completely free from the worry of whether I was poised and likeable, whether I blended, I started putting others at ease. I started cracking more jokes, and making more honest or personal remarks. I started expressing my uncertainty about something in the most forthright way, and to my astonishment people responded with relief! With gratitude that I expressed something they also felt but didn’t want to admit! With unsolicited compliments about how natural, genuine and comfortable in my own skin I was! In short, they gave me awards, and in my mind I happily accepted them. You like me! You really like me! It was so freeing. So easy! I could be myself. And I wish I could tell her. I wish I could say, “Sally, you are my hero! You deserve an award! Not because you risked being so naked, but because you didn’t hesitate to consider it a risk at all.” If only I had understood way back then.

August 15, 2015
When I Jumped Over

found on sltrib.com

It all happened in miraculous, slow motion, where I could see everything unfold in real time. Before I took the leap, I could see her very clearly on the other side: a young adult of 21, making judgments I questioned, displaying behaviors I thought were needlessly risky or abrasive or impatient, or whatever it was that I thought needed adjusting, and most definitely irritated by her ever gently lecturing mother. We were at a celebratory function, where alcohol flowed freely, and spirits were high, and in the moments before my leap, it actually slipped out, “Oh honey, no, don’t you think you’ve had enough?” Rosy and free-spirited as she was feeling, eyes twinkling, she laughed me off and said something like “I know my limits, Ma. I drink when you’re not around, you know,” and she graciously let my fretting pass. That was the moment when I saw it all. I understood fully and for the first time that I could indeed consciously choose to jump over the divide, that gulf growing between my daughter and me, which I had formerly identified but felt helpless to prevent. I was actually in a somewhat altered state myself, so it truly was a miracle that I was capable of the clarity, but there it was. My daughter was an adult, albeit a young one, at a party, and I was a drag, tagging after her, fussing about her choices. And in that slow instant, I imagined myself, back at college, at some frat party, drinking freely, as and when I wanted, dancing to the band and alighting from one cluster of acquaintances to another, all with my own mother following me around and hoarsely whispering in my ear, “Oh no, honey, don’t drink that. You’ve had enough. Sweetheart, don’t puff on that joint. You don’t know if it’s laced. Don’t you think you should stay away from that guy? He’s looking at you like some piece of meat.” Of course that never actually happened, but what if it had? It would have been unbearable. A wet blanket. A block of cement. My own shoulders sagged at the weight. I was mortified. What was I doing? How had I become this, and what would happen if I persisted?

Suspended in that moment, I could see the choice laid out before me: remain or leap. On the one had, if I remained, I’d forever have my little girl. The one who nodded in everything I said with wide, accepting eyes, who unquestioningly gobbled up my care and my wisdom and felt safe with me.

found on browneesorchids.hubpages.com

If I jumped over, wouldn’t I lose her forever? But if I stayed where I was, the adult she had become would move father away, wouldn’t she? The fissure that had widened from crack to sizable crevice would keep spreading, to a chasm, with the terrain on the other side becoming ever more strange, alien, even. I’d be that mother, that all too common figure, of familiarity and comfort, yes, but a fossil one liked to hold briefly now and then and returned to her place. Someone with no actual relevance in her daughter’s daily life. Someone who offered unsolicited and pointless advice while her grown child silently and internally groaned. Who was relegated to small talk or obligatory, condensed nuggets of news, because the relating of genuine emotional or social events or interactions would inevitably lead to “helpful” suggestions and moralizing, instead of the commiseration or comfort being sought. It was not enough that I had already begun to occasionally share my inner thoughts and feelings with my daughter. That I threw across a rope bridge, a welcoming beacon to see me as a woman, a friend, a confidante, capable of doubt and insecurity, hurt and confusion. In that slow moment, in that protracted dilation of my pupils, I understood that so long as I continued to use whatever opportunities came my way to get in that extra bit of guidance, that last bit of shaping before my chances ran out, I would remain on one side and she on the other. I’d turn into a fixture she’d come back to visit now and again, and not an organic, dynamic contribution to her life. Indeed, I could see that I had already been retired from my position as guru, only without my knowledge or assent, and was merely being treated like a teacher emeritus, except not even as that, not even good-naturedly humored, but begrudgingly and half-heartedly respected. Why this all struck me like a mallet in that one moment is beyond me. Was it because instead of rolling her eyes my daughter laughed me off? Because her ease in not even engaging me served to highlight how redundant I had become?

But, I wondered, in a last little bit of desperation, didn’t she need me to be her barometer, the voice of reason in her head? Wouldn’t she go off the edge, make a dreadful mistake, ruin her life? I had to answer, had to come up with a defensible rationale in that crazy slow moment of reflection and grace I was offered. And my answer was no. She would not. I did not, when I was at those frat parties, my mother nowhere in sight. I had my own voice of reason, my own measure of what felt comfortable and right, some of it derived from the common sense I developed under my mother’s watchful eye, and some of it wholly new, a considered rejection of her philosophies and fears. My grown daughter had no doubt similarly rejected large swaths of my reasoning as wrong-headed, hysterical, obsolete. Right then and there I made up not to interfere in her behavior or act to protect her unless the following threshold was met: would I say something if I were in the exact circumstances with her at her age, as one of her peers. If I were at this social event with her as a 21 year old, would I suggest that she’d had enough to drink? No, I would not. I’d just be her companion, and laugh with her at her somewhat drunken behavior. As a 21 year old, I’d only state concern or interfere if she became incapacitated, and needed looking after. I’d be that trusted friend who’d lead her outside for some air, or to the ladies room for some prayer at the porcelain throne. That’s what she’d welcome. Not a tut-tut-tutter but someone with whom she could be an unedited version of herself.

So I leapt. I kept my mouth shut and simply laughed with her through the course of the evening. I’m so glad I did. I noticed that I started hearing more about her evenings out with friends or, a mistake she’d made but had worked out on her own, or something that came back to bite her or hurt her feelings. And, it turns out, my little girl is intact, in my memories, our sweet and lopsided relationship unblemished by the sighing and eye-rolling and frustration that threatened it in the recent past. Sometimes I glance back at her lovingly, before accepting my adult daughter’s invitation to stroll with her in new territory, as equals.

mother and daughter by Claudia Tremblay, found on etsy.com

August 2, 2015
Close Shave

My father and I had a secret ritual, which began before I can remember, and finally came to an end, as was right and necessary, when I was about 11 or 12. I stumbled upon the ritual; it was of my making, but my father was complicit, and I like to believe he valued it as much as I did. It was how he told me he loved me, other than his occasional grabbing of my upper arms and saying through clenched teeth “Flesh of my flesh! Blood of my blood! BONE OF MY BONE!” while shaking me with just enough force and with his eyes gleaming to let me know it was a game. It was indeed better than his parentally crazed shaking, because it also showed me that he trusted me to see his limitations. His vulnerabilities. His steady and sure plodding. His humanity. And it was how I told him that I adored him more than I feared him, which was plenty.

I understood from about the age of 4 or 5 that my father was a cop. Not one of those college educated officers who now fill the ranks of New York’s Finest and put in just enough time to earn a pension and become a genuine part of the fraternity. He was a cop for 31 years, and saw all his peers disappear into the safety of department administration, building construction, or shop ownership, while he continued to walk his beat and the neighborhood around him continued to break down a little more each day. But as I had no real understanding until I was much older of what he did day in and day out, or that being a cop in the South Bronx required being some kind of always, thought just barely, restrained powerful force, I wasn’t afraid of my father because he was a tough cop. No, I was afraid of my father because, cop or no, he was indeed, for some reason I could not comprehend, a barely but always restrained powerful force, and that force was rage. He was a man of few words, and most of those were explosive, passionate, impatient, menacing, or, suddenly, unpredictably and almost unnervingly jolly. He was a man who took things in quietly, but let things out noisily. He was someone I had to watch closely to know whether he would be receptive to my approach, my question, my hand on his knee. He was someone, I learned early, who tolerated no inconvenience or any conversation that lasted more than a few sentences. I vaguely understood the way a 5 year old can that my father was in constant battle for his soul. His overbearing and vulgar parents, the streets, the dangers of his job, required him to be hard boiled. But he didn’t want to be hard boiled. He was Ferdinand the Bull. He wanted to sit under the cork tree and smell the flowers, or, in his case, read a book and smoke his pipe. He wanted to dance a rhumba with his wife or play his violin by ear, laugh at something silly or recite lines from Cyrano de Bergerac. And more than anything else, he wanted not to have to steel himself everyday for the bullfight.

My earliest memories of watching my father shave consisted of me standing quietly by the door of our small bathroom, knowing not to say a word or else risk banishment. I was able to pretend that I was simply waiting for my turn to use the bathroom, the cub ceding to the protector of the pride. I watched with my big eyes, as my father moistened his shaving brush and whipped it around deftly in the yellow-white mug until I could see a creamy foam form on the bristles. I watched as he rubbed the foam all over his face, and then took a single-edged razor to his face. My father shaved up, against the grain of his stubble, causing that scraping sound which to my young mind only proved how tough and brave he really was. And when he was done, had rinsed whatever thin strips of soap remained, had patted his face with a towel, he poured some strange green liquid from a bottle into his hands, slapped it on his face (the sounds of the slaps further proof he could take it, take it all), and grimaced from what I surmised was the same sting I felt when my mother daubed my cuts with alcohol. I knew I was watching something ancient. Private. Sacred, even. He was our warrior putting on his game face. Risking cuts, and stings and sometimes having to paste on little pieces of tissue to stem the bleeding, all so he could go out to do what he had to do. I could feel the dread, wincing internally before I could even hear the scrape, scrape, scrape and the inevitable slapping, and smell the stinging green mystery tonic, whose only purpose seemed to signal the end of the ceremony. A sharp punctuation mark, accompanied on occasion by the intake of air through his clenched teeth, or, rarer still, offered for my benefit, to allay the solemn concern in my big eyes, the big and worried eyes of his most sensitive and soft-boiled daughter, a robust exhalation “Ahhh!”

When I was seven, we moved to a house in the suburbs. My parents suddenly had their own bathroom, and my sisters and I had ours. So, for a little while, no longer having a reason to invade the bathroom he was using or any excuse to stand and wait at the door, I forgot about my father’s shaving. But one day, seeking him out for some purpose, perhaps sent on an errand of information for my mother, I found him in his bathroom shaving, wearing his preferred sleeveless undershirt. And this is where our true ritual began. For though I had no pretext to remain, I did. I took my place sitting atop the closed toilet seat behind him and a little to one side, and silently began watching him once again. And my father looked at me in the mirror only long enough to catch my eye, to tell me without words that it was okay for me to remain in his bathroom, the place of his most private ablutions, grooming and thoughts, so that I could watch him shave. I was allowed into that private space. Because I was silent. Because I would know when it was time to leave. Because in my mute presence I commiserated with him about the unending source of stubble rising out of his face. Because I studied and took vicarious pride in his technique and acknowldeged how he persevered in his unflagging duty to shave, and, more than that, shave well. Because it reassured me. Because I left him alone in his thoughts.

Over the years, I would return frequently to my perch on the toilet, gliding in without a word, and gliding out again once the tonic was slapped on and the brush rinsed, squeezed and reshaped. Sometimes, very, very occasionally, I’d move closer to get a better vantage point, but only when I sensed he’d allow it. Regardless of my exact positioning, we both knew that his letting me watch was his way of saying he loved me, trusted me in this private space, this private occasion. Appreciated my solemnity and my softness. Would never intentionally try to toughen me up or pressure me to be hard boiled. And we both knew that my watching him was my way of saying that in those moments I was not afraid. I could see the man behind the rage. I could see and love my father. I never asked him if my sisters came to watch him. And I never talked with them about it or mentioned it to my mother. I wanted it to be something that belonged to my father and me alone. I wanted to be the only one he allowed in. The only one who knew how to be silent and appreciative of his daily commitment.

Eventually, of course, I stopped coming to watch him shave. I started growing into a woman, and could no longer be the adoring young girl. There was no one seminal event, no ceremonial last occasion. It just stopped somehow, and I didn’t actively think of it again for many years. I didn’t think of it again until almost 40 years later, when I had the opportunity to once again watch a grown man shave. You see, my husband of over 20 years kept a beard. Interestingly enough, his primary motivation for having one was so that he wouldn’t have to deal with the unrelenting tedium of shaving. I never had the opportunity to watch him shave, and I never even really thought about what I once so treasured… Except that having come across a display of men’s shaving items some years ago, I bought myself a bristle shaving brush on impulse, and told myself it would be great for my legs… And except that when I use my brush and get a head of lather, I feel a tinge of pride and silently think about how foolish all women are and most men, not to use one.

So, my husband and I no longer together, I fairly recently watched a new man shave. This man shaved down, with the grain, and he used cream out of a tube. But he also bragged with obvious relish about how he once let a barber of dubious reputation in a foreign country shave him with an old fashioned long-handled straight razor, so I sensed a true shaving enthusiast might lie within. And despite the cream out of the tube, which would require the far less elegant rubbing on with fingers, I felt the stirring of my delight and keen interest. I couldn’t tell if this was due to the fond memories I had of my father, or proof that here too, I was sharing in an exchange. Different, yes, but still admiring. Still loving and still unspoken.

I bought him a shaving brush.

July 18, 2015
My Friend Iris

I had a friend Iris. I say “had” because I ended the friendship definitively and incontrovertibly, about 18 years ago. I said, “Have a nice life,” and hung up on her. You can’t get any more final than that. This was in the old days, when there was an actual receiver to hang up, which somehow made the gesture all the more powerful. But really, all I did was sweep away the spectral traces, the very contorted and disturbing ghost, of a friendship which in truth had disappeared years before that. What led me to such an abrupt and uncouth snipping of any remaining thread? Well, perhaps it was a case of a slow boil finally and suddenly erupting and spilling over. For years, it seemed, Iris had not really cared about our friendship and had done a number of things to show me that. Either that, or she was so self-absorbed that she hadn’t even realized how shabbily she had treated me.

Found on images.search.yahoo.com

We had been close for years in college. The way we met would forever go down in history. I had dated a boy named Gil my sophomore year, but by the end of the summer we had broken up for various reasons. I still loved him, however, and he and I and kept finding our way back to each other on and off for the next 5 years. During one of our “off” spells, he got himself into a spot of trouble, when he mentioned to a girl he had met that he wanted to see the filming of Pinocchio being shown on campus later that week. That girl was none other than Iris. According to Gil, who came to my door on the night of the movie in a panic, Iris was like a steamroller, jumping on Gil’s remark as though he were asking her on a date, and accepting his offer before he could even understand what hit him. Young and inexperienced as he was, and completely lacking in fortitude and finesse, Gil gulped and accepted this turn of events. Except that he didn’t. He spent the next couple of days trying to round up a group to join them, and when that failed, he showed up at my door, an hour before he was supposed to “pick up” Iris, pleading with me to accompany him right then and there so that the “date” wouldn’t be a date. He must have really been desperate to ask me of all people, since we had a confusing and somewhat painful history ourselves, and, indeed, his showing up at the last minute, making me his last resort, attested to that. Still, on some level he knew that our friendship, whatever the rockiness of our romance, was of strong enough stuff to withstand his turning to me for help that he knew I’d give. That’s what I like to think, because the alternative would mean that not only was he inept with Iris, but he cared more about getting my help than wondering if he was causing me any discomfort or heartache by reminding me that he was dating (although apparently not dating Iris).

In any event, we arrived at her door, Gil having talked nervously the whole way there, breathlessly thanking me for saving him, and when the door opened, there she stood. Shorter than us by one third, with very long, thick and wavy auburn hair, a face full of freckles and large brown eyes. Eyes that looked very confused at that moment to see me standing there. Gil mumbled some kind of incongruous, scrambled, and possibly intentionally incoherent introduction, and off we walked toward the hall where the film would be shown. As we shambled awkwardly across the quad in the dark, the proverbial big elephant lumbering right beside us, I considered. Why did I agree to this? Why did I agree to help this boy who still had strings to my heart, who was being a clod? And why couldn’t he have gone to the movie with Iris, and then afterward simply not follow up? She seemed friendly. Spunky and with a strong essence, but certainly not scary. I reached a conclusion. Iris didn’t deserve any of this, and I was going to rescue her. So I addressed myself to Iris, and almost exclusively to Iris, with genuine interest about her background, what she was studying and where she grew up. The dialogue flourished, and poor Gil was as much of a third wheel as he was confounded. It seemed that Iris, having swiftly concluded that Gil was not worthy of her attention after showing up unexpectedly with another girl, was thankful for somewhere else to direct it. We found that we had an easy rapport, and a mutual desire for friendship.

At the the end of the night, which included a stop for a late snack during which Iris and I never stopped gabbing while Gil just sat there like a stone, we made plans to get together later that week. In any event, we went on from there to be good friends. She was direct and assertive, yes, but she was warm, kind, unguarded. She was the most emotionally brave person I had met up till then. Her friendship meant enough to me to keep it away from Gil when he and I inevitably reconnected. He almost certainly thought I was respecting his very clear preference to have as little exposure to Iris as possible, but in truth I was shielding Iris from Gil’s contempt. I cared for her too much to subject her to it, especially when there was a part of me that believed that he just didn’t “get her.” There was a part of me that felt his inability to be straightforward with her or even spend one evening alone in her company was tied to his inability to connect with me. For after all, Iris and I shared emotionally honesty and intensity. We were brave, while Gil was not. When we talked, it was with trust and comfort. I cared for her enough to listen to her tell the story again and again that we met because a boy had asked both of us out for the same date, even though it gave me a pang each time.   It gave me a pang because it pulled up my disappointment with Gil for turning to me for help when what I wanted instead was his love, and it pulled up my disappointment with my dear friend Iris, since she knew that Gil was my great, unrequited love.

Later on that year, when Gil and I had another attempt at romance that ended badly, at least for me, I went over to Iris’s. It didn’t seem ironic at all. She did something that I will never forget. She read me a story. I was sitting on her bed crying, and without explanation, she brought a picture book over to the bed and began reading it to me. Like a mother to a child. By the end of the book, I felt soothed, calmer, safer. It remains one of the sweetest, gentlest things a friend has ever done for me. Another thing that I will never forget was how, after I had graduated but came back to visit Iris who was then a senior, we spent the day walking and talking around Providence. At one point, I took her hand like I did with my friends when I was 8. We held and swung hands for a good block and a half. She was the only girlfriend I would have ever felt safe enough to do that with, and I was trying to tell her that she was dear to me. I couldn’t say it aloud, but it seems that she understood and accepted it with her usual wholeheartedness.

We both lived in New York City at the same time for two years and kept up, but once Iris entered the world of high-powered public relations she began to morph from the unguarded, warm, down to earth friend I had known into a competitor. A shined up, stylish and businesslike associate headed for higher things. Her ambition seemed to take over, and she hardened. I moved away and married, and she met and married Todd, a junior law associate who seemed just as enamored with being a young professional as she did. On the rare occasion when we saw them, their interactions with us and with each other seemed to be one witty, acerbic remark after another looking for an audience.

I guess those years apart really sealed the deal. For when my husband and I moved back to the New York area after 7 years in Boston, Iris and I just never got anywhere near where we once had been. Where, in truth, we had not been for almost a decade. Whatever plans we made that involved she and Todd coming to Westchester for the afternoon seemed always to have conditional status, cancelled at the last minute due to their deciding they were too tired, or wanted to spend the beautiful day going for an ambling country drive. When it was our turn to go into the city to meet Iris and Todd for dinner, we always did. And Iris always seemed to welcome my coming into the city with my two year old, in stroller, for a play date with her one year old at her apartment.

The incident that finally stung me into understanding that I no longer meant anything to Iris occurred when she and Todd took a week’s vacation at Lake Mahopac. She actually was the one to make the call, to tell me about their planned trip. About how, since they’d only be about 30 minutes away, they could use the opportunity to come by for a visit. I had just given birth to my son, and told her that of course, of course, I’d really love for them to come and meet our new family member. And I meant it. I meant it when I said it. Because I wanted my friend Iris to look with me, down at my little boy.

We arranged that she would call me when they got to Lake Mahopac, or maybe she just said, “Let’s you and I talk when Todd and I get there.” She also gave me their telephone number there. After not hearing from her, I called on the third day of a seven day vacation, and asked when they’d like to come. Iris’s answer: “We’re waiting for a rainy day, so we won’t feel like we’re missing out on any of our vacation.”

Of course the rainy day never came. Either that, or I might have said, out of some sense of self-protection, “Oh, that’s all right. Let’s forget it and do it another time.” I can’t remember.

I got off the phone profoundly hurt. I went to my husband and told him what transpired. “She doesn’t care about you,” he said bluntly. I spent the next several months coming to terms with that and realizing that she had been putting no real effort into the friendship for years. It was all just half-hearted rote. Phone calls every so often and broken plans to get together, and no real connection anymore. Certainly there was nothing left that would make either Iris or I want to make the effort, let alone compel us, to be there for each other, wholly and firmly there: on site, at the scene of the action, in sadness or joy. The difference between Iris and me, I sadly realized, was that I didn’t want that to be true. It seemed she didn’t care whether it was true or not. Had she understood well before I did what we had become? Had she intentionally put distance between us for some thoughtlessness of mine of which I was clueless? Had she been consciously or unconsciously viewing our relationship the way one does a spent houseplant, which one tends without much enthusiasm and secretly wishes would die already so you wouldn’t have to water it?

So I was completely unprepared when Iris called me six months later. I listened in stunned silence, my neck and head getting hot and my heart beating like crazy, as she asked me if I’d like to come to her apartment (which would have entailed travel for over an hour into the city, with my now 3 year old and my 6 months old infant) for a play date with her 2 year old and to meet her new baby.

Somehow, this call was an even greater insult that the last one. Did she not know how badly hurt I was to realize I was now no longer one of those would-be-a-delightful-addition-to-a- vacation-for a-few-hours friends, and instead, over the years, I had somehow become merely a perfectly-adequate-activity-that-could-fill-some-time-only-if-other-options-were-rained-out friend?   Didn’t she know that I had been grieving this newly ascertained truth that we were no longer close? Hadn’t she blown off my invitation for her to meet my new baby? Yet she was inviting me to undertake the difficulty of bringing my 3 year old and infant to her apartment, complete with all the equipment and accessories that would require . Didn’t she know that for her, for all those years, I had swallowed my pang and smiled every time she seized the opportunity to tell people that we met when a boy asked us both out for the same date? Maybe she did that because, to her, that’s all she and I had been reduced to: a funny, not so funny story. “Iris,” I croaked, in a voice choked with emotion, “you treated me so badly last summer that I thought you wanted to end the friendship. So no, I won’t be coming into the city. Have a nice life.” Click.

Did I handle it well? No.  Of course, I know that. I didn’t say, “Iris, what you said and did last summer hurt me terribly, and here’s why.” I just blurted a whole bunch of stuff. Then I hung up on her. No question, I was temporarily insane, overwhelmed by a flood of emotions that I only vaguely understood. I pulled a “nutty,” as they say. I even purposefully tied up the phone for about 15 minutes afterward, rambling on to my husband, seeking his consolation. But as I stared at the now silent phone, still quaking, I couldn’t help but wonder what would I have done, if an old friend angrily told me I had treated her so badly that she wished me a nice life and hung up on me. And it occurred to me that I would have called back repeatedly till I got her, and pleaded to know what I could have possibly done to upset her so. If she were someone I really cared about, that is.   I was therefore left to consider two possibilities. One was that Iris felt so angry that I was, to her mind, hostile and outrageous for no fathomable reason, that her anger trumped any caring or interests she had in finding out why I would say such a thing and trying to make things right regardless. In that scenario, she was the mistreated friend and I therefore wasn’t worth one more minute of her time. The other possibility was that my husband was right. She didn’t care. Either way, it meant there was no friendship to save. And so I stood up, put away the phone, took a deep breath and picked up my bereavement where I left off, now with a fresh stab of grief.

Still, 18 years later, I sometimes think of her. I think of how she read me a story and how we swung hands. Those were two gifts I will always treasure. I think of them last…. and first. First, the memories come to me.  Then, I wonder how she and her family might be doing. Next, I feel the grief for a lost friend and especially that honest vulnerability and emotional bravery that once were, and maybe still are, the wonderful truths behind her brash façade. Then, last, always, always last, I return, with gratitude and affection, to those moments of true exchange and friendship when we were young.

June 18, 2015
The Loveys

From my kitchen table I can see that lamp. That floor lamp I finally came up with an excuse to get rid of (it really is far too puny for our oversized family room, and I had no other place to use it) and temporarily replaced with a bigger, more me kind of a lamp. Before the day went out, my son asked, with his panic barely contained, “What did you do with that lamp?”

“What lamp?” I innocently asked, without any actual innocence.

“That lamp that was in the family room? Did you get rid of it??”

I told my son that I still had it. “But see how much better this lamp is for the space?” I sweetly suggested. He was not fooled. “Can you put it back?” he pleaded. He then dropped the cement. The fixative that would tie that fuggin’ lamp to me for all time. “I love that lamp. It’s been in every home we’ve ever lived in. I remember that lamp from forever.” And then the coup de grâce: “…It’s my childhood.” Just like that, I was doomed. Doomed to keep that lamp for all time, till I die.

I understood the power of the lamp for my son. For I too had THE item, a small mass produced print, purchased at some such place like Alexander’s (in the Bronx) or Woolworth’s, of a Paris night scene by Maurille Prévost. This cheap replica, printed on swirl-embossed paper to suggest actual brushstrokes, and set in a common, 1960’s ready-to-hang frame of the sort found everywhere in tasteful or striving middle class homes across the country, was so dear to me that my eye would scan the wall for it virtually every time I was in our kitchen in Rockland County. Before that, when we lived in an apartment in the Bronx, I’d look up from my spot on the smooth-tiled foyer floor (the small sofa seemed reserved for my Dad or visiting adults) and find my familiar friend reassuringly in its place, my proof that I was in the right home. When my parents were preparing for a garage sale prior to moving from their Rockland home to a more suitable dwelling for retirement years, I quickly grabbed the print off the wall and held it close. “Were you thinking of getting rid of this? Cause I’d want it,” I whimpered. And moments later I was the happy owner of my childhood companion, which I promptly hung up in my home, to the confusion of my husband.

So I knew that lamp, that damned lamp, was not just a lamp to my son. My 18 year old son, skilled in never appearing to break cool when it served him, actually voiced a plea for this unoriginal, this unremarkable, this you-should-be-ashamed-of-yourself-sorry-excuse-for-a-lamp lamp, with bond paper dyed and embossed to look like a genuine tanned-leather shade and dark-brown bronze pole complete with matching, hammered base which no lamp should ever have, ever again. He was desperate. Believe me, I knew this from recognizing that same imploring expression of poorly disguised anguish my mind’s eye recalled from my very own face. Worse, I was 35 at the time! But, I wasn’t going to let on just how well I knew. “Okay, sweetie,” I said with my inner Oscar winning actor’s most benevolent patience. “For you, I’ll switch them back.” And as I turned to go, when my face was safely “out of scene,” and out of sight, my inner actor, who is, actually, me, dropped the act and celebrated my coup in grasping the truth: “That’s his lovey.”

Of course, I’m a smug dope cause my lovey is that dumb, cheap, embossed paper print with the cook arriving for work via bicycle and with his chef’s hat on already, while he’s still straddling the bike, at an establishment simply and humbly called “Restaurant.” And I remember the love I had, have, for my lovey. The joy that filled me as though I were a child again when my mother, in the manner of a carnival barker awarding a small kid a prize that was worth absolute crap all the while making the kid feel like she was getting gold, told me “It’s yours!” And I couldn’t bring myself to ruin my son’s not-so-secret, young child’s stab of joy and relief. So I said nothing to him. Nothing to let him know I was on to him. Knew his secret. And even more importantly, nothing to let him know that that very same lamp had been a prick at my heart every single time I looked at it.

I had purchased that lamp during a New England style colonial antique furniture-browsing day with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, about 4 years into my marriage. Why I was even in that particular browsing experience was a source of mystery to me, since I despise New England colonial antiques, and deep down always did, but my apparent inability to say, “no thanks, Mom, I hate the kind of antiques you love” when she brought up the idea to go browsing for the new home in the “country” that her son and I recently acquired (and so What better place for “country furniture” right?) had something to do with it. I suppose it was tied to the very impulse that later led me to suggest out loud that I might buy the lamp. It was an obligatory outing with “the matrons.” Not that my mother-in-law or sister-in-law were particularly matronly or even were aware they were serving that function. We poor females don’t always know when we morph into a member of the matrons, those women who, among so many other stultifying suggestions and comments, imply to you that furniture shopping is something “the women” do to feather their family nests. And furthermore know how to do primly, and respectably, and for not too much cost because we want to be responsible in our spending after all. And being with the matrons, I didn’t say, couldn’t say, couldn’t admit, “I hate furniture shopping. I couldn’t give a shit about what my furniture looks like, really,” or say “Guys, I’ll shop for my furniture when I good and feel like it, and it won’t be this New England, stripped of all ornamentation or frivolity, and painted or stained only in muted shades that suitably convey puritan plainness, humility and purity shit. It’ll be something positively vulgar, like florid and overly carved Victorian pieces or something out of the 50’s version of the future,” or even “There’s really something messed up about the fact that women do this in groups, to help each other, right? Where are the men? I mean, HELLO! Don’t you realize that we are still doing the same shit our very hairy hundreds of thousands of years ago predecessors did?”

So there I was, along on this activity. For some reason, probably just because it was along our path, we walked into a furniture store that was not filled with colonial antiques or reproductions, but with newer, somewhat everyday, tasteful furnishings. Maybe, understanding what felt like my only way out, I scanned around for something, anything that I could live with. Or maybe the selection just seemed so much better than it was because it appeared after a sea of items I couldn’t ever imagine owning, that I really thought I liked what was in the store. But for whatever reason, that’s when it happened. “What do you think of this lamp for our living room?” I asked. BOOM. There it was. My surrender to the matrons. And one moment later, the fog cleared, and I understood that I had selected something that I really didn’t love or even want, but I held steady. I must have figured, better to get it over with, offer up the sacrifice, and then never have to go through this ceremonial joint furniture shopping ever again. Only I couldn’t have known then that it was the beginning of a long line of offerings that became second nature to me, and led me so far away from myself that I mourned my absence.

To be fair, neither my in-laws, nor anyone else, required my offerings. Indeed, over the years my mother-in-law developed a love affair with expressionist and folk art, which she indulged in freely by altering many of her colonial pieces with paint and decals of bursting blooms, or wildly colored finishes, and by transforming her walls into galleries for some of her own very vivid, unabashed and often quite thrilling expressions of color, form and movement. She was feeling free to be herself. Why wasn’t I? Maybe, once you suspect deep down that you have entered a life that isn’t quite working for you, you do whatever you can to disguise your true impulses and desires. Maybe you do whatever you can to prevent yourself and others from knowing the truth: you do not feel yourself. You do not feel alive.

And so I loathed that lamp. For 19 years I secretly loathed that lamp. But now, well past 50, I finally decided I could simply get rid of it. I no longer felt tied by some inexplicable, self-imposed obligation to temper everything in my style, my home, words that leave my mouth. Yet, here is my son. To him the lamp is his childhood, and he loves it. The strange thing is, that somehow rehabilitates the lamp for me. I can look at it and it no longer pulls up an unpleasant association just outside my conscious language. It is my son’s lovey, … and that is… so cute. I love that lamp! That is the lamp my son looked up at and felt reassured by! How could I ever get rid of it? What was I thinking?! And so, that lamp is now among my favorite items in the house. The house we will be listing on the market this spring, now that my husband and I have separated. I will be sure to keep that lamp in every home I live in, so that my son will know he’s in the right place, or one of two right places of course.

Back to here, from my seat at the kitchen table, I see the lamp. And shifting my eyes I see that I am also in perfect line with that print. THE print, my lovey. Suddenly the thought occurs to me, what if my mother or father had an unpleasant association with that print? What if it was an awful association? I call my mother immediately.

“You remember that little print of the cook outside the restaurant on his bicycle?”

“No.” That puts me on notice right there that I am probably on safe ground.

“The one that used to hang in our foyer at Bronx Boulevard and then in our kitchen in Rockland?”

“No, honey, I don’t remember it? Why?”

At first, my lovey not having an anguished past that my mother would instantly recall and convey to me disappoints me. It made my lovey a bit more… prosaic. The possibilities had been endless. It could have been something that my mother’s wandering and ultimately abandoning father gave her that she couldn’t quite bring herself to throw out. Or it could have been an imposition by her mother-in-law, who firmly declared that it was fitting and expected to see it hanging there in the foyer every time she visited our apartment that was so much smaller and less glamorous than hers. I try to inject some drama.

“Well, you gave it to me because I remembered it so dearly from my childhood, but I was wondering if it turned out that it had actually been a source of emotion for you. You know, like, maybe Grandma Gussie gave it to you and you secretly hated it?”

My mother chuckles kindly as one does at a child with a wild imagination. “No, dear, I probably just picked it up somewhere. I would do that. I’d see something that would strike me, that I’d like, and I’d get it.”

Touché.

Well, it turns out that my lovey is really quite a layered symbol after all. Far from prosaic, it now serves not only as totem of my youth, but also the ability to allow unabashed expression of myself that I once wielded and now wield again. And on top of that, while the materials used for the print and frame were inexpensive and unimaginative at the time of manufacture, they are “vintage” now, and the content, the lovely little scene by Prévost, is quite striking. I rise to wipe layers of dust and grime from the unprotected surface, it occurring to me that the dark colors I always assumed were part of the print might actually be forty years of accumulated film. As the brighter colors burst from under the damp dusting cloth, I realize that the scene has always been a window into my mother’s tastes that I had not really ever looked through.

April 12, 2015