Jenga for the Cottage

For Christmas this year, my partner and I bought each other jewelry and silly putty, a framed photo of Kentucky bourbon barrels (the one my honey sent me on her Droid from the Bourbon Trail this fall), tickets for a studio theatre production set in the late 1960’s in Greenwich Village, and a cottage two hours from home on a little no-wake lake.

You heard me.

For Christmas this year, my honey and I bought each other a cottage, a weekend getaway, a little 2-bedroom lake house.

WHAT?!?  She’s in real estate and I work for a non-profit.  What were we thinking?

It’s seven o’clock in the morning.  My coffee travel mug is full and I am pulling the kayak into the water at my sister-in-law’s cottage.  There are two loons on this lake.  We followed them last night – slowly, quietly.  They are beautiful.  It is August and the air is crisp but not cold.  We paddle towards the middle of the lake, and we drift… like we did in Vermont, like we’ve done in the Chicago River, the Des Plaines River, like we did one night years ago at sunset in Door County.  We are in northern Wisconsin paddling, drifting, sipping coffee, leaning back, and now and again glancing at our daughter and her cousins on the dock, this dock where my daughter – who refuses to go down a water slide, who resists riding her bike around the block, who is glued to my side at every park we’ve ever been to – leaps into the air again and again and again to splash into the water, giggling, and it doesn’t matter if we’re watching or not.  THAT dock.

“I get it,” I say to my partner for the very first time.  “I get why you want to own a cottage.”

“You do?”  She has been lobbying me for a full five years.

We talk for a long, long time, drifting through the weeds, paddling along the shore, appraising the houses – not for their monetary value, but for the way in which a person might live in the space.

Must have a swimming raft.

Sunlight. Many windows.

Should be right on the water (though not in a flood plain). We don’t want to cross any roads to swim. Or to kayak.

We are cutting our teeth and sharpening our preferences with houses along the shore.

Two bedrooms. Maybe three. Something with doors – not those tension rods with Holly Hobby cloth like one place we stayed a few years ago, where I have pictures of our daughter and her friend in the gravel driveway sipping pretend lattes made of stones, sticks and grass.

Someplace with a bit of land – to play Frisbee or football, to build forts and snowpeople, to hunt for sticks to put in the fire.

Fire. Fireplace. Firepit. Cozy.

This isn’t a linear explanation. Life is a series of impressions. This is one.

My daughter is being raised in the city.  She has friends, teachers and aunties of multiple ethnicities. She can learn ballet, soccer, djembe or tai chi nearly any day of the week.  She can walk to school instead of taking a bus. She can play outside in front of our house up to the alley on one side and three houses down on the other, if she’s with at least one other kid and if she asks permission first.  She may not cross the street by herself.  We go to the library, the aquarium, the Art Institute of Chicago… she is a lucky, lucky girl. We are lucky, too, raising her.

But at her cousin’s cottage, the kids put on their swimsuits at six in the morning and walk out the front door. We know where they are. We’re at the cottage; they’re outside in the lake. Where else would they be? No stress. No muss. No fuss. They hang their swimsuits on the line outside when they’re done, and dunk their feet in a bucket outside the front door.

So my partner and I leapt off our own dock this winter. We bought our family a cottage.

“It’s a real commitment,” my friends tell me.

“I’m so jealous!”

“When can I come?”

“You have to send me pictures!”

“Are you crazy? Why would you go and do that?”

“Now you can’t go on any trips. Every trip you take will be to the cottage.  Is that really what you want?  Won’t that get boring after awhile?”

“If my parents sold their house on the southside, okay, but if they tried to sell the cottage…?  No.  I couldn’t let that happen.  None of us could.”

“All the best memories growing up are from the cottage.  Strapping our duffel bags to the roof, heading out of town…”

We’ll see.  This is just the beginning.

For Christmas this year, my honey and I bought ourselves a cottage.  For the cottage, we bought Jenga.  And jacks. Classic jacks. Metal jacks.

With a little red ball.

Christmas is a Season of Moments

Christmas is a season of moments, magical and memorable, the stuff from which stories are sewn.

We so often think of Christmas as a single moment –

* Christ’s birth in a stable when there is no room in the inn; the discovery of an overfull stocking hanging from a mantle (a book shelf, a staircase);

* the lighting of one final candle glowing brightly under your chin as the entire congregation leaves the church singing carols;

* ripped paper, squeals of glee;

* your son’s (your daughter’s) mounting frustration with a well-taped gift, its promise locked inside;

* the doorbell ringing again and again and again as more and more and more relatives (friends, strangers, relatives of friends and “friends” of relatives) arrive; or

* the quietest hour, late Christmas Eve night when the tree glows with presents piled high underneath, when all but you have gone to bed and you can actually hear (feel, sense) the buzz of anticipation emanating from each room;

* the furtive phone call you make from the guest bedroom while family is busy with the football game (the Wii, the newest Guitar-Hero-like-game) so no one will notice you have stepped away; or maybe

* it’s that sip of coffee touching your lips in a room surrounded by the people you love most in the world, just before gifts are opened and all mysteries are revealed.

You have your moments, and I have mine, but what I try to tell myself each year is this: Christmas is a season of moments.

There is no one single moment we will all look back on years from now and say – THAT Christmas, THAT moment – not usually, not always, there is never just one moment, or… hardly ever.

Sometimes there are things that happen, and these things are the moment – your moment, my moment – and you DON’T want this moment, you want a different one.  Or you want the same one, the same moment you look back on from 1987 (1976, 2010) and it will never be THAT moment and so you would rather sleep in.  Or you want the moment – THAT moment, the good one you remember – for your kids (your partner, your parents, your nephew, your niece) – but they will have their own moments this year, and you will be there with them to share it.

Or you will share it but you will not be with them.

Christmas is a season of moments and by now, two days before the blessed day, so much of it is out of our hands.

I choose to take the long view.  It helps relieve the pressure I’m prone to feel as a parent on Christmas morning.

We’ve been to see the holiday zoo lights.  I’ve swapped stories with some of my closest friends.  In other words…

Christmas is a season of moments which has already begun.

The Fit

This week, my daughter threw a fit.  She threw several, actually, but here’s the one I’ll share:

It’s seven o’clock.  My partner, my daughter and I are leaving a party hosted by a close family friend.  My daughter has a skip in her step as the front door closes.  She has spent hours playing with cousins, running around, making up skits and developing costumes, learning new jokes, braiding hair, and practicing a solstice ritual in a large circle with candles and wind and earth and water.  She scans the street for one of our cars and suddenly turns on us both fiercely, accusingly, both eyebrows tilted sternly down.  “We’re walking?!?” she asks, clearly disgusted by the idea.

“Yes,” I say brightly.

“I Don’t Want To!”  She growls at me.

“It’s two blocks away,” I say to her, trying to tease her out of the fit she’s about to throw.  I hear her blood boil.

“You’re mean!” Is it because she knows what I’m up to?  Does she know I’m trying to keep her from getting mad?  I see red splotches on her cheeks, even in the dark.

Suddenly, she hurls her doll to the sidewalk – the 18″ not-quite-American-Girl-Doll who she tucks under blankets every night by her bed and who she must dress each day in an outfit appropriate for the weather.  She hurls this doll to the sidewalk.  Head-first.

My partner says the first thing that comes to mind.  “I hope she doesn’t have a permanent dent in her head.”

“What?!???!!!!”  Our seven-year-old runs forward as if to catch her mom by the arm, and then stops.  She refuses to move any further.  I glance at the doll.

“You might want to pick her up,” I recommend.  She scowls at me, makes some kind of guttural noise and picks her up. Now is when the real games begin.

“I hate you,” she tells me for the first time ever in our lives together.  I am a person whose feelings show like a movie on my face but I am trying desperately to keep still.  “I hate you, I hate you, I HATE YOU,” she continues, growing louder.  “I don’t ever want to touch you again.  You disgust me.”  I say nothing, not wanting to fuel the fire, not knowing what to say.  Where is this coming from?

I glance at her and continue walking, slowing my pace briefly so she will catch up to me at the crosswalk.  She turns away from me haughtily to check for oncoming traffic, and steps off the curb.  I am proud of her checking for cars in the middle of a blood-boiling fit, but I am hurt and angry, too.  “Don’t talk to me.  I don’t want to be with you ever again.  Never.  I hate you!”  Still, I am still silent.  She goes on and on and on, jerking her arms around as if to either make a point or fly away.

“Stop,” my partner finally commands.  ”I don’t want you to say something more that you’ll regret later, when you’re feeling better.”  Really?  Our daughter mumbles something under her breath which neither of us can understand.

A minute passes and we are nearly home.  I put my hand on my daughter’s shoulder, thinking the storm has passed. She recoils immediately and runs ahead. “What are you doing?” she asks, mad but no longer out-of-control.

“I’m loving you,” I tell her quietly.

“You’re not supposed to love me.  You’re supposed to hate me.”  I see.

“Honey, I never hate you.  I love you all the time.”

“Don’t.”  That’s been the trouble all along, hasn’t it?  But why?

“I do, though, Honey.  I always love you.”  I am not pleading.  I am simply stating a fact.  I really want to know why she’s hurting, but I don’t ask.  I did earlier, and she told me it was because I was mean. I’ll ask again later, when she’s calm.

The rest of our evening is up and down, but eventually I tuck her into bed and we utter the same quiet loving phrases we utter every night with the lights out and quiet all around.  My partner, her Mama, comes in and gives her a kiss.  Eventually, she falls asleep and so do we.  It is just one evening.

And one long walk home.

Hot Buttons

We all have hot parenting buttons.  I don’t mean those buttons our kids push when they want to get their own way.  I mean those buttons our parenting friends push when they change the rules, when they extend bedtime another half hour, offer candy before school, raise their kids’ allowance, or suddenly allow toy guns in the house.

And if the rule-changer – that parenting ally whose philosophies have aligned with ours on every topic under the sun for two solid decades – trips one of our hot buttons as they’re changing the rules, we may ask ourselves quietly, “Am I wrong?” or we may ask them in a heated way, ”How can you be so wrong?!?”  And then what?  Do you stay friends?  Can your children still have playdates with theirs?  Are there buttons which must never be pushed?

Here are some of my hot parenting buttons:

• Sweets

Long before I was a mom, I decided never to allow my child sweets between meals.  In my house growing up, candy came at Halloween and Valentine’s Day, was doled out over a couple weeks, and then disappeared.  After dinner, I had ice cream for dessert.  Every night.  This was a very big deal.

As a teenager, I would test my willpower by sitting on the couch with homework while no one was home, putting my hand inside a bag of cookies to prove I could leave it alone.  My mom binged on sweets.  She hid them all over the house.

I didn’t want to raise a child with a sweet tooth.  Neither did my friends.  We discussed it incessantly before our children had teeth.

My daughter’s first sweet was birthday cake.  On her first birthday, she took a curious, almost cautious, bite and then eagerly began shoving fistful after fistful into her mouth.  As cute as she was in that moment, I thought I would die.  Now she knew what cake was.  It was my job to set boundaries around that enthusiasm.

At seven, she has dessert twice a week, candy at lunch after Halloween, sweet prizes from her teacher at school, a daily chocolate advent calendar from her grandparents, and anything friends share with her at recess.  We talk with her about nutrition, and energy, and eating the good stuff (the healthy stuff) first, to build her muscles.  She sometimes exercises self-restraint.

And I am beginning to understand there are worse evils.

• Guns

Guns are simple.  No guns.  My daughter has known from an early age that violent toys are not allowed.  No weapons.  I explain to her that guns – real guns – hurt people, sometimes kill them, and are never okay.  She seems to understand.  “Guns can make your child dead,” she informed me when she was four, sitting high in her booster in the backseat of the car.  It wasn’t something I told her. I had never used those words exactly, but it was something she knew.  Maybe she pieced it together from things I said.

All my parenting friends shared this rule.  I had plenty of support.  Until one day, I walked into the house of one of my closest friends while her son was constructing elaborate guns out of paper and Scotch tape.  I felt the sound of an iron gong reverberate in my chest.  For weeks, I waffled about what to allow and not allow my daughter to do in her house.  I’d never had to set a special boundary for my daughter before, not in this house, and I wasn’t sure what it would mean to any of us if suddenly I did.

Instead, I changed the rule: No guns in my house.  That was something I could control, and it wouldn’t interfere with the delicious sense of belonging we all felt with these friends, the feeling that while we were together, all was right with the world.  Besides, my daughter was playing cops and robbers, superheroes and bad guys with the boys at school, shooting people with her pretend robotic arm.  I wasn’t going to walk out onto the playground at recess and hand that robotic arm a book or a ball now, was I?

When do you make the kid follow the rule, and when do you change the rule to follow the kid?  It’s messy stuff, this rule-setting, and I’m not saying I have it down.  I’m just saying this is how it is for me.

• American Girl Dolls

I didn’t have a stance on American Girl Dolls before becoming a mom.  I was mystified by them.  I observed girls with their moms on Michigan Avenue every summer with American Girl Dolls (AGDs) cradled lovingly in their arms.  The dolls and their girls – the girls and their dolls – often looked alike, and the girls were nearly always light-stepping with glee, gazing into the eyes of their dolls while crossing streets, eating candy, or entering another store.  I found it strange, and expensive, and believed they were all tourists.

For years, this phenomenon didn’t touch me personally.  Then one day, my daughter announced, “I want an American Girl Doll!”  Within weeks, it seemed her best friend had acquired three.  To hear her tell it, every kid in her class had one sitting in a little AGD chair with a tiny AGD book propped up on a delightfully wooden AGD table in a bedroom at home.

My partner and I, for more than a year, said “No” to the AGD.  During this time, I even popped my head into the store, intrigued with their tremendous appeal.  I found dolls who looked like my daughter, sort of, who had glasses and milk chocolate skin, shiny black hair and $112 matching dress sets – one for the girl and one for the doll – beds, closets and ponies all just the right size.  Unlike her response to other boundaries we’d set, my daughter’s pleas for an AGD grew stronger, not weaker, with our repetitive, unwavering “No’s.”

We began to take notice.  She was, after all, getting older and more capable of deciding so many things for herself. What were our real fears?

The AGD was better than Barbie.  Yes, and I begged and begged and begged my mom for a Barbie townhouse when I was her age.  But would owning an AGD pre-dispose her to need Gucci glasses and a Prada purse in later life?  Apple Bottom jeans and Nike footwear?  I discovered Dollie and Me and The Springfield Collection, whose prices were much friendlier than “the real thing.”  But even after she bought a look-alike doll from The Springfield Collection with her own money, which she had saved carefully for six weeks, my daughter still wanted an AGD.  Nothing else in her little heart of desires even came close.  Now what?

I mentioned on Facebook that our resolve had wavered.  “I think I need a moment to process this,” my friend – who has a daughter one year older – wrote back.  They have been saying “No,” too.

“It takes a village to raise a child.”  It really does.  And I want mine raised by the village, but when someone in the village steps back and the rules change or the boundaries blur, well then I have choices to make.  Step up or step back?  Stand up or give in to preserve the peace?  How do we make that choice each time?  It isn’t easy, and yet as parents, we do it every day.

Loving Doris

Stepparenting: Full with the delight of new discovery and fraught with invisible frustration. For me, anyway. Like a quiet dance with a trip wire. I love my stepdaughter, and I know she loves me. We lived together for years in a smallish house, folding into one another’s rituals and rhythms (or sometimes not), sharing powerful opinions (both verbally and not), and uncovering in the process a host of unspoken hopes which we are now (both) slowly learning to speak aloud.

She is away at college and I miss her fiercely — trip wires, vampire hours and all. I appreciate the small bursts of time we now cobble together for our family. It is rarely easy, but always rich.

I landed in the life of my own stepmom at the ripe age of 21, when I knew everything and nothing, needed no one and everyone, living half a continent away from my family of origin with my feet firmly planted on the west coast and my head in the Midwestern clouds. My stepmom folded me into her life, even from a distance, left me room to grow and demanded to be let into my life, too, over time. When she passed away last year after battling mesothelioma, I was left – am left – lonely for her. I cannot say I lost a parent, and yet I cannot say I did not. She is mine – was mine – as much as anyone else in this world of ours.

Her birthday is less than a week away. Later this month is Christmas, followed by the first anniversary of her death.

In an attempt to make visible this relationship which defies real definition, but which provided a shape for my own choices, my own growth, my own coming out and coming into myself, falling in love and trusting the fall, I scribbled some thoughts to share at her memorial last year.  Because I was unable to fly back the fifth time in a year to attend, my brother-in-law read these thoughts aloud during the service – for which I will forever be truly deeply grateful.  Here is what I said…

Twenty years ago, Doris married my father. Her son and I worried.  They had dated so briefly – were they rushing into this? Did they know what they were doing?  But they did; they were wiser than we thought.  They were soulmates. I know this now.  But at the time, I didn’t know soulmates were real, or possible.   They lived their lives with space between them, with fierce commitment and loyalty, with a respect for one another’s independence, intersecting in all the right spots, encouraging and supporting one another to follow their dreams – even when it meant they had to live in different places for a time.

There was an afternoon I came visiting, maybe three years into Dad and Doris’s marriage, and I’d been staying with them for a few days.  I hadn’t yet been to Santa Clara to see my mom.  Doris came downstairs to tell me it was time to call my mother – however much I was enjoying my time with them (and I was), she was still my mother and I needed to call her, to make a plan to visit.  I was furious.  Of all the people in the universe who could bawl me out for not calling my mother – it’s my stepmother who comes downstairs and actually delivers the message.  And she was not to be contradicted, let me tell you.  It took me hours to speak to her again, I was so angry.  But she was right.  I called my mother.  This is the only fight we ever had, Doris and I.  I finally understood what she meant about family.  Family is family. Nothing is more important than family. We don’t choose our family, but they’re ours – no matter what.

Later when she moved to Texas and built her office from scratch, after the carpet was down and her team was assembled, I remember she introduced me to everyone as her daughter.  They were confused, because they knew she had a son and a daughter and they’d met them already, or at least seen pictures.  Or maybe they were confused because they couldn’t quite see the family resemblance.  But she let them live with their confusion.  She had claimed me, and didn’t feel the need to explain further.  Our family is full of contradictions and potential for confusion, with its layers of “step” and multiple ethnicities.  Some of us chose one another, some of us came along for the ride, and some of us were born into it.  But we all belong to one another now.  Because Doris and Dad made it so.

I know that she has been a mentor to so many people – that her wisdom, and her commitment to justice, and the way she stands tall and takes space on this planet are the things she’ll be remembered for today – and I remember her for these, too, and hope to help impart some of this to my daughters – but for me, personally, it’s the sense of belonging I’ll remember her for – because of all the people in my life, she’s the first one who made that feel real, and possible – something we create for each other and for ourselves.

I love you, Doris, and I always will.  You have helped me become who I am.

Your courage and your grace: Helping so many young women and men find their place on this planet, and hold it, and fill it with all they have and all they are.

Thank you, and Happy Birthday.

 

 

[photo borrowed from http://takecareblog.com/category/holidays/]