A Thanksgiving Post

We’ve hosted Thanksgiving Dinner the past four years at our house, with my cousins and close friends. Grace’s baked mac ‘n’ cheese. Cornbread. Turkey. Not-turkey.  Casseroles and pie.  Delicious aromas all day long. Wine. Snacks. The slow accumulation of people, cooking and relaxing in our living room, our kitchen, our home.  Eventually, we pull the chairs out and begin together to express thanks and eat.

What are you thankful for?  We ask each other.

Conversation. Flavor.

Simple. Slow. Strong.

We have been weaving our own traditions.

Before that, I hosted anti-Thanksgiving parties for years on this day, not wanting to celebrate the invasion and near-decimation of a people, a culture.  “Who’s the illegal alien?” asks a friend’s Facebook photo this morning, an antiqued brown line drawing of a Native American with a cursive caption. Yes. Who? A question close to my heart.

This year, I decide to honor my country’s messy history with love and a fresh commitment to speaking truth.

Will you hold me to it?

I begin the morning with my partner’s family – my family now, too, over time – in Wisconsin.  A morning of chit-chat among the girls, a scarf-in-progress, crochet needles clicking, cherry popovers, strong coffee, grapes.  A long shower, quick trip to the store. Chili. Football on television as our youngest child wakes up across town, giddy from her sleepover with cousins.

Soon, we’ll pile into the car for a family party at Cousin Debbie’s.  Warm. Cozy. Countertops full of food.  The games and love and banter of family.

Messy – never all one thing or another – but full with love.

Do you celebrate Thanksgiving? What are your traditions?  

Summer Countdown

“How many days of school do I have, Mami?”

You mean this year? Before the end of second grade?  Are you finishing second grade already?!?  “Four days, Sweetheart.  Just four.”  I’m eager for summer, but this year’s teacher will be hard to lose.

“What’s after that?”

“Camp Grandma.”  I smile.  “Grandpa got the pool ready for you.”  They have a pool right in their backyard.

“Yay!”  She sits up in bed, clapping her hands together giddily.  I want to tickle her, jump up and dance around the room with her.  Summer fever is contagious.  I can feel the sun on my face at the public pool, hear each squeal as she chases friends around the park, kicks a ball, straddles her bicycle.  “Do you think I’ll be able to touch the bottom?”  Her cousin was six when she touched the bottom. “… and now I’m eight!  I think I’ll touch.  Last year, I almost could.  Almost.  I think I’ll touch this year.  I know I’ll touch.  What else will I do there?”

“You’re going on a field trip with your cousin.”

“Oh, right!”  She is beyond thrilled. She is elated.  She’s going to the zoo with her cousin, her cousin’s class, and Grandma.

She shifts gears.  “I know I probably can’t have a whole pack anymore, but… will you make me a card, Mami?  Maybe a couple of cards?”  It has become a tradition.

“You’ll have your cards, Cutie Pie.  One card for each day.  Don’t worry.”

“Oh, good!”  She sounds relieved, and I realize her shoulders were up tight by her ears and they’ve dropped now.  “I like Pokèmon cards, too.  Remember when you put those in?  Will you…?  I liked that.”

“You’d like me to get you Pokèmon cards?”

“Yes!  And I’ll make you cards, too, Mami.  We can have a writing day.  We can write each other cards… in separate rooms,” she decides.  She has always enjoyed an element of surprise.

Cards.  Treasures.  Summer.  Growing older.  Going away on a trip.  Leaving each other and coming together again.

The pure glee of each discovery, each reunion, each… new… thing.

“I would like that, Sweetheart, very much.”

* * *

What I know about Camp Grandma is this:

There are outings and puzzles and playtime and parks and ice cream every day, sometimes twice.  Ice cream is a rule.  At Grandma’s, there’s also a pool.

Mama and I are not there to wake her or nag her, hug her or guide her.  Grandma and Grandpa handle what needs handling in that regard.  Sometimes, their style is just like ours.  More often, it’s not.  And all of this is good.

Every weekday morning, Grandpa heads to “the office” – their nickname for the local McDonald’s, where he gets one cup of coffee and chats for an hour or so with friends about local news, the state of the economy, nearby real estate, the grandkids and recent golf games. My daughter goes with him at least once, so he can show her off.  She gets a treat, some coloring pages, a book, and intermittent but rapt attention from all the grown-ups.  Plus, she gets to eavesdrop on all the grown-up conversation.  This may be the pinnacle of her annual summer trip – or close to it.

* * *

Later this week, in the early morning, she asks, “Remember when you came to my concert in first grade?  I was sad because I had to go back to my class and I couldn’t come home with you?”

“Yes.”

“I won’t be sad today.”

“No?”  Our day begins with her second grade awards ceremony.  Then her Mama and I go to work.

“No.  When you came on the field trip and left and then came back to pick me up, I wasn’t sad.”

I see we’re also preparing for next week, and while I’ve usually led this conversation, she’s handling it beautifully today on her own.

“Good!”  I push a lock of hair behind her ears.  “I’m glad.”

“I hope I get an award for reading.”

She gets an award as “Most Improved Student in Math.”  My partner and I beam with pride.

Here is the true beginning of summer.  And we are all ready for the first time.

Sirens

When I was growing up, my family lived across the street from a fire station.  Firetrucks pulled out of the station at all hours.  If I was on the phone (and as I got older, I often was), I’d stop talking a moment, and then continue as if nothing had happened.  This used to freak out my friends, who would of course hear sirens in the background, hear me pause and then continue, and often ask me in a panicked voice, “What’s that? What happened?!”  Most of the time, I hadn’t even registered the sound – and I’d have to ask, “What do you mean?”  “Why are there sirens at your HOUSE?!?” they’d practically scream in my ear.  “Ohhhhhh…”

My daughter for awhile was the same way.  While she was tiny, taking little cat naps a million times a day, she would often fall asleep on the long stroller ride home from Gymboree.  We would pass the emergency entrance of our neighborhood hospital and sometimes the sirens were deafening to me, but always, without fail, she slept through them.  If I parked her stroller in the shadows, if I began chatting nearby with a friend, if the dogs in our apartment barked, if someone came through our front door while she was napping in the crib, she would wake – but as long as her stroller moved steadily along while the sirens screamed, my daughter remained fast asleep.

It’s astounding what we can get used to ~ and what we can’t ~ each of us with our own rituals, our own attachments to what steadies us, what sets us off, what must be kept “just so.”

With age, my relationship to sirens has shifted.  That is to say: Most of the time now, I hear them.

Just last week, I woke up to the sound of sirens.  They woke me, in fact, from a deep sleep, growing  louder and louder as they approached our street – and then falling suddenly silent.  Again the crescendo, and again the abrupt end. And again.  Two ambulances and a police car.  Soon after, helicopters.  I then heard opening and closing doors in my house – my daughter and her cousin out of bed and curious, although strangely, wonderfully, falling asleep again on the blankets spread out on her bedroom floor.  Up and down, up and down like the sirens, and then out.

It was spring break in our little village.  My partner and I, and our niece’s moms, had stayed out late for a vegan dinner beer pairing at Revolution Brewery while the girls zipped around our house with a babysitter – their favorite babysitter.  And when she climbed the stairs to check on them, to give them a little time for reading before lights out, they were already sitting up in the makeshift bed of blankets on the floor – teeth brushed and books in hand.  A little bit of magic entered our house that night, I think, and stayed through morning.  They’ve never been so cooperative in all their lives.  Or… mine hasn’t been, anyway.

I did not go back to sleep.  I laid awake trying to separate sounds – trying to understand what was happening in my neighborhood less than a block away.

It isn’t that we never hear sirens where I live.  We hear them every day.  And it isn’t that we never hear them at night.  We do.  I do. But since becoming a mom, I hear sirens differently.  That night, I feared for the safety of my niece’s moms down the street.  For our back alley neighbor, classmates of my daughter whose family lives were mucky, rocky, troubling.  My worry rippled out to our other daughter in Madison, to my father in California, to my mother, landing finally on the fragility of life.

Eventually, sunlight broke through our bedroom window.  I let the dachshund outside.  I turned on the shower to start my day while the house was eerily quiet, both girls still sleeping soundly on the bedroom floor.  My partner quietly snored, which was rare for her.  (I blame the beer.  It was so good.)

My sister-friend – my niece’s mom – sent a text message two hours later, and relief washed over me.  The ambulance missed their house last night.  And ours.  The sirens were not for us today.

My stepmom once gave me a statue of a woman curling her knees against her chest in a pose of concentration.  “Write,” she told me after I unwrapped it.  Simple.  Just like she told me, “Be her mom.  Parent her.  Don’t think too much about it.”  Just like she said, when I told her I was gay, “I know.”

We lost her last year.  There were no sirens.  No calls of alarm.

And yet now when the sirens come, I pay attention.  Because she would, maybe.  Because I must.  Because they are somehow more piercing than they were before.  Because I am awake.  Because I understand finally what’s at stake.

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.

On Cousins and Quetzals

Photograph by Steve Winter, National Geographic

Children need a sense of community.  They need to feel a part of something far beyond themselves.   So do I really, if I’m being honest.  I’ve known this forever.  It’s why I work in non-profits, and it’s why I write.

My partner and I and our closest friends have been very intentional about building community for our children.  They have a web of cousins and aunties we celebrate holidays with, schedule play dates with and trips, people we call with the biggest news in our lives.

Just this past week, we celebrated the first birthday of Mr. One-derful, the newest addition to our little enclave.  He was born last year while the rest of us were picking apples.  At his birthday party, he ate cake for the first time. He didn’t seem certain at first it was real, it was his, it was for eating, he could have  more.  Amazing!  Cake?  Cake.  For me?  Cake!  How lucky we were to witness this moment, this First Sweet. So many cameras flashed.  Dazzling.  Delicious.  Our boy is one!  I felt a sense of pride.  He is, of course, his mothers’ son – but he is ours, too, and this is amazing, when you consider all four of his grandparents, and an uncle, an aunt, numerous aunties and cousins were all in the room feeling proud.

Family pride comes in all shapes and sizes.

A friend of my daughter’s approached me last week after school, to ask if my daughter and her schoolmate were cousins.  He knows they both have lesbian moms and this has never caused him concern, but he’s pretty sure none of the grownups are sisters, so the cousin thing didn’t make any sense.  While I empathized with his predicament, I had my girls to look out for, too.  “Yes, they are cousins,” I told him. My niece grinned at him broadly, triumphantly perhaps, and my daughter lifted her head briefly to meet her cousin’s eyes, then smiled into the blacktop beneath her feet.

Being cousins is important to our kids, and we’ve never differentiated between these cousins and the cousins in our lives through families defined by our parents  and siblings.  “It’s complicated,” I said to the girls when their friend had stepped away, “explaining how we define family.”  “It is,” my young niece agreed,  but it didn’t seem to bother her. She knows what is and what is not.

But this isn’t the only community our kids need – this community we have created for them, and for ourselves.  They need family.  They need history.  They need ancestors.  They need to see where they belong.

I know for my daughter, what we’ve created is only part of what she needs.

Lately, she has expressed a deep sadness that she doesn’t look like anyone else in her life – not only anyone in her family, but also in her classroom, in  our neighborhood, or in her school.  It isn’t that she doesn’t interact with brown people – she has aunties and peers of many shades – but none of them share her ancestry, or her particular shade of brown, her beautiful bold eyes, her full lips.  She read a bedtime story tonight by Leslea Newman, about a girl born in Guatemala adopted by lesbian moms in the U.S.  She read it over and over again.  “I have black silky hair,” she said, after these words in the book were used to describe the young girl, “and I have big brown eyes!”

Then she asks, “Why do we have to spell my name the Spanish way?”

“Because you’ve had it since you were born and we wanted you to keep it forever,” I tell her.

I have conversations in my head with her, sometimes for years, where I work out what I want to say on complicated topics.  Adoption.  Queer families.   Same-sex marriage.  World peace.  Guatemala.   Birthparents.  Poverty.  Some of it sticks, and I get to say in the real world the words I’ve carefully chosen.  Some of it does not, and I’m left fumbling.

We are planning a trip to Guatemala next summer.  Some of the grandparents may come.  It isn’t enough, but it’s a start.  This may give her what she needs.  Or maybe it won’t.  I don’t know.  I can’t know.  But we have to go.  At the very least, we will witness together a beautiful land, a homeland I’m confident she’ll someday be proud of.

I’ve already begun practicing what I might say.  Something about cousins, I think.  Something about poverty and impossible choices.  Something about quetzals.  Maybe I’ll start with quetzals.