Excavating Secrets

I’m grateful for every person who responded thoughtfully after my last post, many with their own stories of depression.  I was surprised when some used the word “courage” to describe my willingness to put my experience out there for public consumption.  Working in a profession where depression and anxiety disorders are, sadly, commonplace among clients and colleagues (many of whom come to the profession because of their own experience with various disorders, or those of family and friends), it didn’t seem unusual for me to claim ownership of that. In addition, I live in a city full of psychotherapy training institutes which creates an environment where being “in therapy” is almost an expectable event, even a rite of passage. So – not brave – and not courageous.

One communication from an old friend, however, caused my stomach to lurch and my breath to catch. For in a few sentences, I was thrust backward in time to an emotional space I’ve struggled mightily to negate.  She wrote, “I vividly recall my uncertainty as an adolescent when you experienced episodes of depression. Although, we had no ‘term’ for the feelings that engulfed your life, it significantly impacted me as your friend. Frankly, it scared the hell out of me! I held onto the belief that if I could be the best friend possible and let you know how much I loved and cared for you that you would survive. And you did, very well.”

My post set my first experience of depression at 19, perhaps because that was the first time of “official” diagnosis, perhaps because I didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to document a murky and dark time. But my old friend is right.  I was depressed and sad long before 19 even though we never discussed it and we never named it. “J” slipped into my life when we were freshmen in high school. We’d lived probably a half mile away from each other our whole lives, but we attended different schools up to the 9^th grade.

Now in high school, we rode the same school bus. Somehow she and I ended up getting our ears pierced together and from that moment became inseparable. “J” is one of the few happy memories I have of the time between 14 and almost 18. Every day after school, we’d get off the school bus at our respective homes, change our clothes, and head down the graveled shoulder of the highway that ran past our houses, meeting in the middle. From there, we’d walk down to Pic-a-deli, a corner store in the middle of nowhere, stock up on ice cream, potato chips, candy, and pop and settled in on the couch in my living room where we’d watch Dark Shadows together. We walked around in the rain, burned candles and let the wax run all over our hands, cut each other’s split ends, made cream puffs in my mother’s kitchen, went bowling and to the movies on weekends, and cheered in the bleachers at basketball games on Friday nights. We planted a garden, buried “pet” butterflies that didn’t make it, and got drunk together for the first time at her brother’s graduation party. Well, at least I got drunk. I shouldn’t claim to be fully aware of her condition.  She was the most important person in my life.  And she definitely was the best friend she could possibly be.        

So what could have scared the hell out of my best friend? I knew what she was talking about the minute I read her words even though for a nanosecond, I tried to not know. For it involved razor blades and my forearms…. not the side where I might have accidentally severed an artery and bled to death but the side where I could feel just enough sting to assure myself that I could, in fact, feel something. I did not realize I had scared her, lost in my narcissistic fugue, believing that my activity might be invisible, as I often felt I was. I don’t think I wanted to die, although I definitely didn’t want to live my life.  It’s probably the one time my chronic ambivalence operated in my favor.  I don’t remember how long this phase lasted. But it was long enough to be noticed by my boss at the restaurant where I washed dishes on Sundays. I lied and said it was due to my cat even though I didn’t own a cat.  I wore long sleeves at home to cover the evidence although I do not remember if long sleeves were appropriate weather-wise. I spent most of my time in my bedroom with the door closed anyway, so it was easy enough to escape notice. My best friend must have told her mother though because I do remember what made me stop. She told me that her mother said she had to stop being my friend if I kept on cutting myself. Her friendship was more important to me than my need to draw blood or feel something real. I stopped.

But what was I thinking? Was I thinking? Obviously, not clearly. My diaries and journals from those days are long gone – tossed decades ago in a flurry of embarrassed “I’ll die if anybody ever reads this” chain reactions. The only written words that survived that era are page after page of “remember this” and “never forget that” lists that “J” wrote to me in my senior year book. I sat and re-read every word she wrote one recent evening to see what was there, hunting through the pages forward, then backward, in an effort to follow her whimsical and circuitous route through my year book. There was, of course, no mention of the cutting. No need to bring up a negative period that, hopefully, was over forever.

Her final year book words to me were, “Our friendship is one of those in a million, something everyone wishes for and only few have. You are the most important thing that has happened in my youth.” I’m not sure that sunk in back in 1971, I was so numb.  After graduation, “J” and I grew apart. I’m positive my depression had a lot to do with that because I withdrew from everything and everyone.

I closed the book and turned back to her recent note, rereading to absorb it.  After the part about scaring her, she wrote, “The caring and love of friends do not extinguish. Know that I and others truly care. You will survive. Very well.” 

She’s right about that too. I did – and I will.  Thank you, “J”.

The Hand That Cannot Write

“So, have you abandoned the blogosphere,” my best friend asked me this morning during a rare telephone conversation (I hate telephones).  She is not the first to inquire after my sudden silence after more than a year of weekly posts.  I consider her question and give her the only response I can summon. “I’m so depressed,” I say. “I can’t seem to focus to write.” That’s partly accurate. “I am afraid that anything I write is going to just sound depressed and angry.” I don’t want to drag readers into my morass.  That’s also partly accurate.

I’ve been here before. The first time was when I was just nineteen. After a few months of crying that seemed to surge from the depths of nowhere, someone in my circle of adult friends read an article about the levels of estrogen in birth control pills being a culprit in depression. I had been prescribed those very pills to manage debilitating cramps that had flattened me every month for my entire adolescence.   The solution was simple. Stop the pills. I did, and the depression loosened its grip.

The next time was in my early thirties. I’d fled to New York City. A guy I was crazy madly in love with wasn’t crazy madly in love with me.  I was failing at parenting, confused – no, paralyzed about what to do with my life, broke, stuck inside my personality which at its core is terrified.  I remember standing in a grocery store in Queens, leaning on the cart trying to shop for food for my daughter and me. My limbs, my body, everything was so heavy, I was not sure that I could continue to put one foot in front of the other.  I didn’t want to put one foot in front of the other. I simply wanted to stop. Right there in the store.  Not move. Sink into the floor.

I was lucky.  A woman I call my heart mother picked me up and cradled me for a long while, whispered in my ear when I didn’t know what to do or say, and helped me figure things out. “Say everything,” she’d cajole.  I resisted. She was patient. And slowly the anger that had been lying dormant far beneath my very thin skin came bursting out projectile style. I wallowed in that while she was the epitome of forbearance and after a time, my depression departed.

Two decades passed. I marveled periodically at my depression-less life, grateful for my freedom from those tenacious tentacles.  Of course there were (and are) ups and downs. Jobs end. Children grow up. Parents die. Terrorists attack.  Humans disappoint. But none of this sent me into a tailspin.

So what has derailed me this time?  Many things – it’s sort of the perfect storm of factors.  There is the cumulative effect of a demoralizing professional situation about which I am not free to write, blogs being the public forum that they are. There are difficult relationships with narcissistic people who lack self-awareness, which moves me to rage.  Can’t write about that either.  There are existential dilemmas of loss and abandonment that arise from numerous sources to be wrestled to the ground yet again.  Stir in exhaustion, the afore-mentioned thin skin, a touch of paranoia, and there you have it. Days spent struggling to suppress tears that threaten to leak out at the slightest provocation (real or imagined), creative energy stuck by unexpressed anger, a hand that cannot write because its owner doesn’t have the energy to be diplomatic.    

It will pass.  Most things do. Perhaps writing this will help.

Transcending 17: A Reunion Post-Mortem

When some former high school classmates started ‘friending’ me on Facebook last spring and talking about a 40^th class reunion, I was up for it although I was slightly disconcerted by this activity. Some of these new ‘friends’ hadn’t been my friends at all in high school. I would have sworn that some of them hadn’t even known I existed. I swallowed my inclination to cyber-scream this fact, and clicked ‘accept.’  After all, I argued with myself, it was high time I transcended 17.

“Let’s have it at the Rose Garden,” someone suggested, “for old time’s sake.” The Rose Garden is a bowling alley/bar/restaurant/party house in a small town a few miles from my old high school. “What old times?” I wondered, since I never experienced an ‘old time’ there. I knew it was their old time, but I said, “Sure, why not?”

This would be my first reunion. I lost track of how many there’d been – I only know that I’d never elected to go to one although on at least one occasion I was actually in town when it occurred. There was no one I really wanted to see.  And I felt sure there was no one who really wanted to see me either. I had tried hard to make myself invisible especially the last four years, and my fantasy was that I had succeeded in this endeavor.

As the months became weeks became days, my feet began to get cold. I wondered if the other three J’s would be there. There had been four of us in our neighborhood whose first names began with “J” – we rode the bus together, had pajama parties at my house, and three of the four lusted after the same guy. They had been the girls I considered my friends in high school…. someone to sit with at basketball games and in the cafeteria. Then two of them announced that, for various reasons, they were not attending. I doubted then that the third one would.  Maybe I shouldn’t go either. What was the purpose?

Everyone said I shouldn’t feel the way I felt. “You’ll see,” one friend lectured, “people are no longer who they were at 17. They’ve grown up. All those barriers that were there? Gone.” I listened but I doubted. Years of analysis have taught me that character is character.

I went out to my storage bin and scrounged around until I found the box containing my yearbooks. I plucked the one from senior year from its resting place and took it inside. My graduating class had 84 people in it. I leafed through the front pages that featured our senior pictures. I studied the faces.  There were people I had forgotten were in my class, several I remembered benignly, a few I remembered warmly, and some I preferred to forget.       

“Let’s analyze this,” I thought to myself.  What was making me think twice about going to this event? What was I afraid of? Some of the faces I had started kindergarten with, been in first grade with …. Susan, Sheila, Nancy, two Davids, Cheryl, Brian, Joyce, Ann, Christine, George, two Beverlys, Joanne, Karen, Debra, Richard, Robert, Dennis, Scott. Although I hadn’t ever been close friends with any of them, I felt in my heart that none of them harbored any animosity toward me, nor did I toward them. We all had the same kindergarten teacher, whether morning or afternoon. We ate in the same cafeteria, played on the same playground, shared the same stage during school performances up to the fifth grade. There were no fights, no gossip. But wait….. one of them had been called “flea bags” – had that been by one of those classmates, or was it one of the ‘big kids’ on the school bus? I wondered if she would be there, if she remembered that, if she had transcended that. 

Some of the faces in the yearbook I had not met until sixth grade when students from two rural schools came together, meeting for the first time in our combo junior/senior high school.  Sixth grade had been a tough year for me. I had been dealt into one of four sixth grade classes but there were only 3 of us from my old school in my class. Everyone else was a stranger to me, I did not make friends easily, and I was miserable. And to top it off, one day, as I walked by Frances’ desk, I heard him mutter “Queer” under his breath. I had just learned what that meant, sort of, and I was mortified. The stupidest boy in my class was calling me that name. I don’t think he ever said another word to me from that moment in sixth grade through graduation day, nor I to him. I wondered if he remembered that moment. Would he be there?

And then there was Nelson and his sidekick Fran. I spent junior high and senior high trying to stay under their radar. That was not easy since we shared math, science, history, and English classes together throughout. Nelson and Fran emotionally tortured two of my classmates, Bruce and Cindy, starting in junior high, making them the butt of every joke, the target of thrown objects, and the objects of ridicule. I lived in fear that they would turn their negative attention toward me. In the pecking order of the classroom, I calculated that I was only a couple of rungs up from Bruce and Cindy.  Nelson had given me a taste of his derision when I went to school one day in 7^th grade, wearing new eye glasses. “You’re not going to wear THOSE in the play, are you?” he challenged. I had been chosen as one of the four leads in the 7^th grade play, he was to play my husband. Clearly he found my new glasses singularly unattractive. Every nerve ending in my body snapped to attention. “Of course not,” I spit back at him. Though in retrospect, spitting on him might have been a more satisfying choice.

The morning of the reunion came and I sat in the chair at my hairdresser’s salon for a routine color and cut. My stomach was busy doing gymnastics. My hair dresser listened to my nervous ramblings. I told her about Nelson. “You’ll be surprised,” she counseled, “at how people have changed.” I wanted to believe her.  “You’ll have fun,” she predicted. I was dubious. Walking alone into a place full of people I didn’t know has never been my idea of a good time.

I pull into the parking lot of the Rose Garden at 6:28 p.m.  I meet the girl who’d been called “flea bags” in the parking lot. She greets me by name and smiles. We hug hello. There is Jim at the door – a welcome relief. I did not know Jim in school but we have become genuine Facebook friends and I sense he is glad to see me too. We go inside. A popular cheerleader, a member of what my friends and I called “the in crowd” hugs me long and hard at the door. I start to feel really disconnected. My fantasy world is colliding with the here and now. Thank god(dess) for Facebook, which helps me to recognize several people I might otherwise have not. I study their faces as we murmer niceties to each other, and try to discern facial elements from the past that mark them as themselves. Someone re-introduces me to Robin. I blurt out, “You grew up!” Everybody laughs.  Another person makes a joke that he grew up in height but not in behavior. I cringe inside at my faux pas.  Robin had been a very small (but mighty) guy who played a mean game of basketball. Robin is now a respectably statured and very handsome man, who later actually acts interested in whether I like living in NYC. I don’t think we ever spoke once in high school.

I spend three minutes talking to an unknown man who calls me by name. I am embraced by another woman I do not recognize but know that I should. Later, over dinner, as she references some shared experience, her name comes to me in a flash.  I find Jim and ask him who he was friends with back then. Jim is hard-pressed to come up with an answer, although as he thinks about it, he manages to cite two or three guys he was friendly with. Obviously, none of them are in his life now. I can’t imagine that he is any more comfortable in this noisy environment than I am. Over dinner, I sit beside Nancy, a friend who reads my blog and shares some of my sensibilities. I am comfortable with her. We followed similar paths, although mine’s been filled with detours. We catch up on pieces of our lives and I ask her over and over again, “Who’s that?” She has seen many of these people at prior reunions. She tells me about traveling across country with Nelson and George after high school. My heartbeat quickens as Nelson’s name rolls off her tongue.  I wonder if he is here. I don’t have to wait long to find out, as I see a man who is unmistakably Nelson stride across the room. He seems taller – he’s definitely heavier – and he’s bald. (Forgive me while I say “tee hee.”) He sweeps over to Nancy who rises and embraces him behind me.  I am still flying under his radar as he hasn’t even noticed – or recognized me as I sit beside her.

“This is bizarre,” I say to Nancy. “I feel like I landed on another planet.” I think she knows what I mean. The speeches begin. There are references to music we listened to, things that were going on in the world in 1971. The others allude to parties at George’s house and laugh about what happened on the senior trip to New York City. I do not share in any of these memories or inside jokes. Close to the end of the speeches, I notice that a slender man has taken a place by himself at the table next to ours. It’s Bruce, one of Nelson’s targets. When the formalities end, I make my way over to him and say hello, ask him what he’s been doing for the past forty years. He seems very nervous. Somewhere in my memory bank, I know that this is how he was back then. Has he been this way for 40 years, or has walking into this place done that to him? He tells me about his work, the travel he’s done. His wife sits down at the table and he introduces me. I ask if he has children and he brightens, tells me he has one of each, a boy and a girl. I tell him that I’ve thought of him many times over the years and hoped that he’d had a good life. That I remembered seventh grade, eighth grade. Bruce shrugs philosophically. He never fought back, never defended himself, just took what Nelson (and Fran) handed out as if it was his cross to bear. His father had been a minister. Maybe he’d taken seriously the “turn the other cheek” adage.  Still, I am angry on his behalf.  I remember sitting in Mr. A’s 7^th grade social studies class and wanting to scream at Nelson, “Cut it out already. Just stop!” Back then, I didn’t have the courage. Now I do.  I wonder briefly if Nelson has ever apologized. I doubt it. Character is character.

It’s 9:30 and I have had enough. I know I could just slip out the door and no one would notice I’ve gone. But I decide to say goodbye to Nancy and Jim. I know that Nancy and I will stay in touch with each other. And Jim and I have a tentative plan to meet for coffee next time I’m in town.  On my way out, I run into Kathy, a girl who made sucking noises with her teeth in disgust all the time in high school – primarily against adults. She smiles at me, engages in some brief banter, and doesn’t suck her teeth at me. Outside, there’s David smoking a cigarette. I say hi and ask him about his life. He tells me he is managing a Pizza Hut in Rochester.  We talk briefly about the lack of a work ethic among younger people these days. He seems disgusted. I turn to leave and pass Jerry (I think), who says hello to me. Another first.  

I reach my car, settle inside, draw a deep breath, turn on the ignition. My thoughts turn toward tomorrow and the long drive back home. I back up carefully in the crowded parking lot, then turn my car on to the dark rural road, and as I drive away, I fast forward forty years back into my life.      

When the Power Fails

She was always a powerful woman. No matter that she was short and tiny – or as she often sputtered to people who referred to her that way – small and slender.  She packed a wallop despite her diminutive size.

I met Jean when I was a few days over 15 years old. She hired me, with reservations I later learned, to wash dishes in the restaurant she and her husband owned. She was always quick to point out she was the actual owner – SHE had purchased the restaurant to give her husband something to do.  He did most of the cooking; she did most of the arguing. And she kept the books.

For a long time, months, I just tried to stay out of her way and do my job perfectly. Perfectly meant never letting the kitchen run out of plates or the dining room run out of silverware.  Perfectly meant watching with my third eye for the waitresses to set empty coffee pots up on the shelf above the serving window and run quickly to empty the grounds and clean them out, replacing them before the waitresses reached up for them again. Perfectly meant keeping the long chrome shelf where waitresses dumped their dirty dishes as empty as possible, so there would always be room for another load, so there wouldn’t be a thunderous crash of a precarious pile of china.  She scrutinized my work, and I hurried to do what I was supposed to do before she could open her mouth to tell me to do it.

A year later, I was rewarded for my perfection with a 25 cent/hour raise and an increase in the interest she showed in me personally. I ramped up my drive toward perfection.   One Friday night, she suggested that someone else “close” in my place – maybe I would like to go home with her and her husband, swim in their pool.  Would I like to go home with them and swim in their in-ground pool? Did I just die and fly to heaven?  From then on,  I became one of the “golden” few who stopped working Friday nights at 7:30 when the rush was over, sat in the back room together eating dinner and watching All in the Family and then climbed into their blue Volkswagen station wagon’s back seat for the drive to their country home and a late night swim.  Jean and I would sit up into the wee hours, talking in her room. She and her husband lived at different ends of the house.  We shared an interest in psychology, in philosophy, in reading. She’d recommend books and I’d devour them. She talked to me as if I were an adult.  I wished fervently at the time that she could have been my mother  -- my own mother was not interested in any of those things.  In fact, in all the time I knew my mother, I don’t think I ever saw her read a single book. I suspect Jean may also have wished I was her daughter. Her own daughter, a few years old than I, had married a man Jean hated, had a child by him, and was now divorced.

When it was time to apply for college, she urged me to consider an elite private university in the area over the state universities that I could afford and had a better chance of getting in. The carrot she dangled in front of me was an offer to live with her while I was in school – the private university was not more than a few miles from their home.  Her own daughter had not gone to college at all. When I did not get accepted to the university, my devastation was more about my lost opportunity to live in the extra bedroom and pretend I was Jean’s child than anything else.

As much as I idolized Jean, I was also afraid of her.  She was a legend among the regulars who lined the counter every morning for the ease with which she took them on if they said anything that even slightly offended her in the areas of politics, religion, business, and especially “women’s lib”.   She was ready and waiting for anybody – customers, delivery persons, employees – who dared to disagree with her or question her in any way. In addition, she and her husband often fought bitterly in the kitchen, sometimes loudly enough for customers to hear them.  Most of the fights were pretty much nonsense but they were intense and the experience taught me that she was ready to bite with little provocation.   

And bite me she did. The first chomp came when I announced that I was going to marry a man I hadn’t dated for very long…. a man she didn’t think was good enough for me…. a man who was much older than I, a customer who had shown up one day working across the street and took an interest in me. Jean had been in favor of the dates he’d asked me on. I hadn’t displayed much interest in meeting guys since I’d broken it off with my high school boyfriend. My self-esteem was non-existent, so she probably saw his interest as a necessary ego boost for me. She didn’t believe our relationship was going to go anywhere. Surely I was smarter than that.

She was furious when I showed off my engagement ring, given to me after barely six months of dating. The kitchen of the restaurant, which had been so warm and friendly, became frigid.  She barely spoke to me. When I announced a few weeks later that I was resigning with two weeks’ notice, I was officially a persona non grata. Dead in her eyes and banished from her heart.

But that was not the end of it. Our relationship was resurrected once I was divorced from the man she hadn’t wanted me to marry. I was excommunicated again when I went away to film school, and rebirthed one final time a few years later. The details of those banishments and restorations are clear in my memory but not quite ready for public consumption.  They may never be.

Jean is 91 years old now. She lives in an assisted living facility. She no longer drives, plays tennis, or goes to the Atheneum. She’s as feisty as she ever was, and I suspect she tortures her peers and probably some staff.  I’ve spent a lot of time avoiding her over the past 20 years although a perverse sense of loyalty and some fond memories of old times drive me to see her every year or so.  My avoidance is more about my admitted inability to maintain a solid sense of myself in her presence than anything, an inability to stand up to her and say, “I do not agree with you.”   

I saw her recently. It was bizarre. We had set up the time in May. She had forgotten my birthday for the first time in over 40 years, calling me a week after the fact. The conversation had been benign. I felt magnanimous – after all, I told myself, she’s 91 years old. I told her I’d be up her way in July when I had a long weekend; perhaps we could have lunch together. She put down the phone to get her calendar. She acted like she wrote it all down. She repeated it to me -  the month, the day,  the date, the time.  She was looking forward to it. The week arrived. I kept intending to call to make sure we were still “on.” But it was a busy week, and suddenly it was Thursday night. I called, no answer. I left a message on the answering machine reminding her I’d be there the next day for lunch and to call me if she got in at a reasonable hour. She didn’t call. I was on the road at 6 a.m. the next morning, and called her from the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts  just after 9. She acted surprised. She hadn’t listened to my message from the night before, had no recollection that I was coming, even accused me of having made the date with someone else.  Once she settled down, she was pleased to hear from me and yes, she was going to be home around lunchtime, and she’d love to have me join her in the dining room.

By the time I arrived, she’d started a ruckus about not having received my call the night before. She’d decided that another person with the same last name as her had taken my call and had not had the decency to pass along the message. The fact that I’d dialed her number from my contacts list made no difference.  She was irate and self-righteous. I felt like I’d landed on another planet. A few minutes into my time with her, she referred to our phone conversation of the night before. “It was this morning that we spoke,” I reminded her, “not last night.” She looked at me confused. “It was?” Now she did not believe we had spoken earlier that morning.  She repeatedly told me I’d made the lunch date with someone else.  She told me twice the story of how her daughter and son-in-law’s beloved pet had recently died.  She reminisced fondly (and mostly accurately) about old restaurant days. She told me twice that she’d always been proud of me.  After two hours, we embraced, said goodbye and I left, wondering if she would remember that I had been there.  I drove away in a sort of shock, reeling from what I’d seen and heard, not quite believing that this was the same woman I’d acquiesced to for years, the same woman whose opinions had so controlled me.   

There were many people along the way who thought I was better off without Jean’s influence, including my mom, bless her, and others who are likely reading these words and thinking, “Yup, that would be me.”  Before my mom passed away, one afternoon as we sat talking at her bedside in our living room, I told her that every time I saw Jean I had an urge to tell her how wrong I had been in wishing even for a short time that she had been my mother.  My mom looked at me seriously. I could tell she was pleased. “Really?” she asked. “Absolutely, “ I assured her. “I had the best mother all along. Jean doesn’t hold a candle to you.” “That’s really nice to hear.” She seemed surprised. “Thank you for telling me,” mom whispered. I hugged her tightly. “I had to,” I said. “It’s the truth.”

The Commitment Revisited

Come Friday morning, my sweet daughter and I will load up my car and head north and slightly east for our eagerly anticipated yearly sojourn to Maine where we will enjoy a four-day weekend. It was during last year’s trip that we made a commitment to each other that we would cease and desist our compulsive clothing-shoes-bags-cosmetics buying for one year.  I had been thinking about it for several weeks before I unveiled my plan to her. It took her less than 24 hours to come willingly on board.

Neither of us can believe the year is over already.  I thought that I would spend more time writing about it as I grappled with urges and impulses. Strangely enough, there weren’t that many.  Yes, there were a few times when I came close to cheating.  As winter dragged on, seeming never to end in the northeast or anywhere else, I lusted after spring clothes in the few catalogs I hadn’t cancelled.  After months of moving them directly from mailbox to garbage can, I started browsing again. I began to get emails from my favorite stores with subject lines,  “We’ve missed you”,  along with “Just for you” coupons in the mail if I’d only return to the fold. But I didn’t succumb to the enticements and the urges went away once I was able to wash those sweaters one last time and unearth another season’s clothing from storage.

A trip into a Kohl’s in early May where I stopped to look for slim chinos for my skinny brother almost got me into trouble.  I was in a hurry, since I was en route home from seeing him and still had 4-1/2 hours to go. As an infrequent visitor to Kohl’s,  I didn’t know where to find the pants  so I just turned right as I burst into the store, figuring I’d run into them sooner or later.  At the end of the first aisle, displayed on a model was a turquoise and navy striped casual top, the colors heather-like. I stopped. Anyone who knows me well knows I like any color as long as it’s blue or purple. Anyone who knows me well would have stopped at this display and thought, “That top looks just like Jan.” My sister or my daughter or my best friend, had they been the ones stopping at this display might actually have bought it, thinking it would be a great gift.  I looked at it closely, found my size, thought, “No, keep going.” I kept going, found the pants, bought the pants, and went back to the top.  I argued with myself  -- “That’s so cute. You don’t have anything like it. It would go with so many things.” “Yes, it’s cute, but there will be other cute things. You don’t need it.” “But I WANT it.” “But you will feel terrible if you cheat. “ So I wrote down the brand and all the identifying information I could locate and got out of Kohl’s, integrity intact.

But it was not the end of it. I REALLY coveted that top. I looked it up on line, toyed with putting it in my shopping cart, and went through the same argument with myself all over again. “You don’t need it.” “But I WANT it.”  Two weeks’ later, pulled by a magnet into the same Kohl’s store, it was still there.  I picked it up, thought about trying it on, put it down.  My heart knew that I really would feel worse cheating than leaving it behind. I resolved to stop torturing myself.

Then I went to Paris in June with my best friend. Wherever we go, we shop. Before leaving, I formulated a plan. My daughter had been to Paris several years ago and came back with “stuff” for me – a small replica of the Eiffel Tower, a print of Degas’ sculpture of the 14-year-old Dancer, a trendy bag, a magnet.  I promised myself that I would be selective – perhaps if I found a small piece of inexpensive art in Montmarte, or another Degas print from Musee D’Orsay, I would buy them. But this would not be a trip of accumulation. Since I already had some things from Paris, I didn’t need to overdo it.  I did well and wasn’t tempted by too much. Things were frightfully expensive anyway, always a deterrent. I got vicarious pleasure from watching my friend shop.  I had fun buying some things for my daughter. And then I saw “The Dress.” It was in a corner store, displayed on a mannequin in the window -- a blue and white sun dress.  Just the type of dress one might wear to a polo match (not that I’ve ever been to one).  Feminine, pretty…… and blue.  We saw it one evening after dark – the store was closed. It was drizzling slightly outside. We were tired and eager to get back to our hotel. But afterwards, I could not get the dress out of my mind.  We spent time during the subsequent two evenings looking for the store again – we had failed to note its location the first time around, and only knew the general neighborhood.  The night before we left to come home, we finally found it --  open this time.  The dress on the mannequin was the only one left in that color. I checked the price tag – 150 Euros. Gasp. There were other dresses in the same style, different patterns on the racks, so rather than undress the mannequin, I tried on one of those.  I gazed at myself in the dressing room mirror, not really enamored with how the dress looked on me. Maybe I would have liked it better ten years ago. I was disappointed and also relieved.  150 Euros.  I’m not a math whiz but I knew that was about $215. I left the dressing room and put the dress back on the rack. “How’d you like it?” my friend asked. “Nah,” I said. “Not quite right.” Leaving the store, I peeked at the size tag on the mannequin model’s dress. It was not my size.  More relief.  As we walked down the street, I thanked my friend for her patience in helping me find the store again. She wanted to know what I would have done had I liked the dress on me AND had the blue one been the right size.  I told her that I hoped the fact that I wouldn’t spend over $200 on a dress in the United States would have deterred me ultimately from spending that amount on a dress in another country.

Two near misses.  One solid year without shopping for clothes I did not need.  This is notwithstanding the underwear and shirt my brother’s and my little side trip to Cody necessitated (see You Forgot My Suitcase, 7/17/11).   

My daughter and I have considered what the end of this commitment means. We’ve both been cleaning out our closets, getting rid of things we don’t/won’t wear, things we shouldn’t have bought in the past but did. She assesses she needs a new black bag for work. I need new sneakers. I actually noticed a hole in mine early this week. I know that I still, even a year later, do not need anything more. I can easily go another fall, winter, spring and summer on what I have. Am I bored with some of my things? Perhaps a little. Can I manage that boredom? Absolutely. Does this mean I’m signing on for another year of a no-shopping-commitment? You bet.

You Forgot My Suitcase

It had not been part of the plan to stay overnight in Cody.  After all, I had already paid for seven nights at our motel in Jackson.  We started out earlier than usual for the long drive because everything that involves going through Yellowstone Park takes longer than you think it should.  Getting to Cody requires a right angle drive into and out of the park – there is simply no hypotenuse way to get there, unless mountain climbing is your forte. And it’s not ours.   

By myself, I would not have been particularly drawn to Cody but because of my brother’s interest in Buffalo Bill, it was pretty high on the must-do list. We pull into town about 1 p.m. after navigating hairpin turns and curly-q roads for five hours. I have already made up my mind – no way will I be driving back on that road tonight. We have plans to see a musical variety show that will not begin until 8 p.m. If we get out at 10 p.m. and it took us over 5 hours to get here in daylight – well, you can do the math.  Like I said, no way, no how.

As we roll into town, the first mission is to find a motel for the night. I have no idea how much in demand rooms are in early July but I am not going to take a chance of being without one. We drive up and then down the Main Street, locating the theater where the show will be, perusing restaurants and shops. On the way, I fill my brother in on my thoughts. “I don’t think I want to drive all the way back to our motel in Jackson tonight, Dave. It took so long to get here, and it would be very, very late if we wait until after the show tonight.” I let this sink in. “Besides, “ I say. “I don’t want to take the chance of hitting a moose in the dark.” His face gets all serious, “Oh no,” he breathes.  He knows I hit a deer once and totaled my car. Then he brightens.  Staying here appeals to him. “Is ok, Dee,” he says agreeably. Choosing convenience (a place in town, in walking distance of our later destinations) over cost (Super 8 outside of town), we book our room and go to dump our stuff—oh, we don’t have any stuff.

For now it’s time to concentrate on what my brother wants to do – all of which involve the town’s tourist destinations. But late in the afternoon,  I suggest a trip to Walmart. I explain that we are going to need some things in order to stay overnight.  He considers the idea. “You forgot the suitcases,” he scowls slightly. “No,” I correct him. “I didn’t forget them, I just didn’t plan on staying here tonight. So we need to get some toothbrushes and stuff like that.”  “My pjs,” he says.

Inside Walmart, I grab a cart, tell him to stay with me, and head off toward the “health and beauty” section.  Toothbrushes. What color do you want, Dave? Blue. Guy after my own heart. Two blue, slightly varied, toothbrushes, check. Travel size toothpaste. Check. Travel size deodorant, Secret. Check. Travel size deodorant, Degree. Ch…. My brother objects, “Sport” he says.  “Oh Dave, they don’t have Sport kind in these small sizes. This will be ok for tonight. It all works the same.”  He doesn’t put up a fuss. Check.  I zip around the corner to hair care products. We need something to run through our hair in the morning. “Do you like long combs or short combs, Dave?” Give him a choice when he has a choice. Long comb, check.  It will work for both of us. Shower cap, check. I need this anyway, the  elastic is shot on mine at home. 

“We aren’t going to get a razor,” I tell my brother. I hope he isn’t going to argue about this.  He uses an electric one. “You’ll have to skip shaving in the morning and do it when we get back to Jackson tomorrow.” He laughs and rubs his chin, “I be Santa Claus,” he says. “Yes, you will,” I agree and keep moving.  I do a u-turn and head toward the clothing department. “Whoa,” my brother says – he’s not one to move too quickly. “Come on,” I say, “we’re in a hurry.” “Yes, Captain,” my smart-ass brother responds to my order – and adds a salute for emphasis.  I roll my eyes.

In the men’s department, I dart from display to display, very indecisive. I don’t want to spend much money here – my brother, like me, has way more clothes than he actually needs. New things are not on the agenda. I decide that we need a shirt for him to sleep in, a shirt for tomorrow, socks, and underwear. The shorts he is wearing, which are not yet dirty, will have to do.  I hold up a few t-shirts, different colors. “You like this? You like this? You like this?” He shakes his head at each one and says no. I sigh. “Back there,” he points. “Where?”  He retraces our steps and I follow. Stopping at a display, he picks up a black Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt. It has a huge eagle and an American flag in the middle, and Lynyrd Skynyrd emblazoned underneath. “Oh no,” I say. I imagine my mother rolling over in her grave if he were to venture out in that. “We are not buying Lynyrd Skynyrd.”  He sighs loudly, I’m such a pain in his neck. Now, my brother doesn’t even know who Lynyrd Skynyrd is, I know that. It is the eagle and the flag that have caught his eye. He has probably six at home with similar decoration, minus the band.

I pull him back over to the more conservative displays but I am still vacillating like crazy. Maybe I even look a little crazy, careening from display to display, picking the same things up over and over again, and rejecting them.  I pick up a polo shirt – cheap - $5. “What about this?” I beg my brother. “Look, they have it in light blue;  it will look nice with your shorts.” I hold my breath. “OK,” he says, “I pick that.”  We head toward the boys’ section to choose sneaker socks – my brother has really small feet so I grab a pair of plain white ones from the display before he has a chance to notice and tell me they are for “kids.”  Now we need something to sleep in. I look at the sea of colorful displays and do not want to wade back into the maze. I feel I am losing patience and I don’t want my brother to bear the brunt of that.   I glance at him. “OK,” I capitulate, “I will get you that eagle t-shirt if you promise to wear it only to sleep in.” “Oh, I do,” my brother says in all sincerity though  I’m sure he’s thinking what I don’t know won’t hurt me.  He fetches the t-shirt and carries it like a treasure.

I grab a pair of underwear, some sneaker socks, and a $5 t-shirt for myself. It’s blue, and I know I will wear it again. I feel badly about this as it violates my no-shopping policy. However, I decide that this doesn’t really count as “cheating” and congratulate myself that I have expended minimal funds on this unintended adventure.  Except for the motel, that is.  Before we head to the cash registers, we veer back to the pharmacy section to grab some nexium, which my brother will need in the morning.  The vitamins and calcium will wait until we return later in the day.  

Now we have something to put in the motel. My brother lays out the Lynyrd Skynyrd  t-shirt and smooths away imagined wrinkles. I remind him, “That’s to sleep in tonight, David.” He gives me a dramatic sigh.  “You forgot my suitcase,” he says again. I glare at him but laugh too.  I can’t win.

Shopping behind us, we head out for dinner and our show at 8, pausing along the way to look in stores and admire all the souvenirs and hand-made items. When we finally return to the motel later that night, my brother seems confused. “My medicine,” he says. “We bought you the nexium, which is really what you need,” I said. “You can take the rest of the stuff when we get back to the motel. You’ll be fine,”  I reassure him. “Oh, ok,” he says. Then he laughs. “My pjs,” he says. “No suitcase.” I remind him of the eagle t-shirt he can wear to sleep in tonight with his underwear. I tell him that I don’t have all my regular things either, including my nightgown. And I will sleep in the t-shirt I have on. “Ok,” he says again. He’s not really one to go with the flow – he likes his routine.  “Isn’t this an adventure?” I say to him as I climb under the sheets.  Mmmm hmmm, he says while flipping through the channels with the remote. He doesn’t sound convinced.

“Don’t stay up too late,” I tell him as I plump my pillow and settle down.  I can sleep through anything, including the SciFi channel he’s stopped on. “Yes, captain,” he teases.  “Smarty,” I answer back. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” he says. I turn over. “You forgot my suitcase.”

On the Road Again Though I Missed Alien Creek

    

We sit side by side in a former movie theater in Cody, Wyoming, which is now used for what has been billed as a “Branson-style” variety show. As we wait for the show to begin, I broach the subject with my brother. “You know,” I say, “Tomorrow is our last day of vacation.” I hesitate an instant and he  actually growls at me. I tease him, “You’re the first bear I’ve seen on this trip.” He scowls. “You missed dat,” he says accusingly. “I missed what,” I say, bracing myself. My brother is really good at pointing out things that I forgot, although mostly it’s things that he wanted for his birthday or Christmas that I couldn’t find or drew the line at. “Alien Creek,” he sputters. I am truly puzzled. “Alien Creek?” “No!” he sounds indignant, “ALIEN Creek.” I take a deep breath. “Dave, I am sorry but I don’t understand what you are trying to tell me.” My brother puts his flat hand over the front of his mouth and makes a monotone noise as he pumps his hand in and out. Ah-wa-wa-wa-wa, comes out. I get it. “Indian Creek,” I exclaim. “Yes,” he says, again indignant, as if I am a moron. “Alien Creek.”

I can feel my blood pressure rising. “There’s no Indian Creek.” I am feeling mad myself. I have just spent six days and a lot of money doing everything on this vacation to please him that I can think of….. a float trip on the Snake River, a chuck wagon dinner with western show, a chair lift up a mountain and an alpine slide down the same mountain, miniature golf, finding a 4^th of July parade, sitting for 3 hours listening to bluegrass and patriotic music, fireworks, and at least six hours of driving for several of those days in Yellowstone National Park stopping at almost every overlook, waterfall, and geyser so he can take photographs. I don’t want to hear about Indian Creek.

I repeat, “There is no Indian Creek.” “Yes there is,” he accuses. “Is in the book.” Oh for heaven’s sake, I think. “The book” could be any one of a number of slick, glossy travel enticements and brochures that he’s been picking up along the way all week. He loves them and delights in showing me what he wants to do. So I am used to saying, “Yes, of course we can do that.” Or “No, that’s across the state, we can’t go there this time.”  But Alien Creek, I mean Indian Creek is news to me. And since my brother is very concrete, I also surmise what else he’s thinking as he accuses me of missing dat.

I take another deep breath. “There may very well be an Indian Creek, David,” I say slowly because I am trying to control my irritation. “But we don’t have time to find it, AND there-are-no-Indians-in-Indian-Creek.” I emphasize this last clause. My brother is a western movie fanatic. Cowboys, Indians, horses, guns, bows and arrows. He loves it all.

“Yes there are,” he shoots back at me. Now I feel like growling. Another deep breath leaks out of me. It’s hard to argue with someone who’s concrete. So I say what comes to mind, “There are no Indians in Indian Creek just like there were no snakes in the Snake River, and no yellow stones in the Yellowstone River.” We have been in a raft on the Snake River together so I feel safe drawing this analogy and I add the part about yellow stones for good measure.  

For once, he doesn’t argue. He puts his head on the back of the padded burgundy seat and stares up at the ceiling, ignoring me. I stifle a giggle. Let him be mad, I think. He’ll get over it. After a couple of interminable moments, he puts his head up and gives in, “OK, Dee,” he says (that’s what he’s always called me, go figure), “no aliens in Alien Creek.”  “Good,” I say, “I’m glad you see it my way, you old bear, you.” He giggles and then goes serious. “I love Yellowstone,” he says. “I do too,” I assure him. “And we’ve had a lot of fun, haven’t we?” “Yes, Dee,” he says. I tell him that we do still have tomorrow and we’ll drive slowly back through the park from Cody to where we are staying in Jackson and stop at every place we didn’t have time to stop earlier that day.

  

This is an annual event, this vacation we’re on, the sixth one since our mom passed away. It is his time to ride shot-gun in the front seat beside me, his time to be the partner in any conversation that takes place in the car, waiting in line, sitting in a restaurant, or relaxing in the motel. Our time is planned around things I know he’d like to do and experiences I want him to have. Yes, there are occasional frustrations – he can’t read a map so everything has to be planned out carefully ahead of time (though this year I carted my GPS on the plane with me); the conversation isn’t always particularly stimulating and sometimes feels like playing charades (see above), and I always have to be on my toes, thinking for two, but I relish this bonding time on the road with my brother. And maybe next year, we will find Indian Creek.      

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses or Why I Missed a Week

I’ve been writing this blog for almost ten months. Amidst numerous competing responsibilities and pressing “must-do’s” I have managed to crank something out on a more-or-less weekly basis. But last weekend was different. I got bogged down. Overwhelmed. I couldn’t focus. 

It wasn’t a particularly unusual weekend. 

I was on the road at 2:30 a.m. last Saturday driving across the state to my brother. This is my thinking time, my life-planning, blog-composing, blissfully alone time. I do not mind doing this. I have my routines. I stop in Binghamton, mid-way, at 5:30 a.m. at a Dunkin Donuts for a cup of coffee and yes, a donut. Boston crème. Then I stop at a 24-hour Wegman’s to wander about the aisles for a few minutes. I look at their flower section, the expansive magazine display, the children’s books, the gluten-free items. I don’t buy anything, I just look.

I pull into the driveway of my brother’s group home at precisely 8:50 a.m., chat with staff, then head to breakfast at Miss Batavia Diner. Fifty years ago, my dad often took my sister and me to dinner there when our mother was pregnant with our brother and suffering 24 hour morning sickness. After my mom died and most of my weekends were spent cleaning out her house, the diner became my kitchen away from home, its owner and the staff welcoming and friendly. We get to ignore the “please wait to be seated” sign and head for “our” booth at the front where Lisa, the owner, appears with the coffee pot, a hug, and the hazelnut creamer she knows I like.

In the car I have given my brother an article about Randy “Macho Man” Savage dying in a car crash. I had promised I would print it the evening before after he’d told me this terrible news over the phone. He studies the article seriously, picking out words he knows. Macho Man, car, crash, Florida, Miss Elizabeth, WWE.

Over breakfast, he asks me to read it and I do, scanning ahead for the gist, then summarizing convoluted sentences with briefer, more understandable ones. He listens intently. I read the part about his wife being injured. “She die too?” he asks. “No, she’s just hurt, not badly,” I add. “Whew, close one,” he says.

After we eat, we drop a time-sensitive package off at UPS. I’ve been trying to do that all week in New York without success. We pick up my brother’s suit jacket from the cleaners that I left there two weeks prior. Am I the only one who notices sleeves that are spotted with gravy?  Next stop is the Salvation Army store to drop off old books I have carted all the way from NYC. Then to the bank to cash a check. My aunt calls in the midst of this wondering if I would stop at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription for her.

A half hour later, we are heading to our favorite nursery/greenhouse outside of Rochester. My elderly aunt and uncle are along for the ride. This field trip, which could be accomplished in 30 minutes were it just me, stretches to 90 as they ponder their selections, move slowly, occasionally lose each other. My aunt hints, “Gosh, those hot dogs smell good.” This is a full-service nursery. It is 12:10 p.m. “How about a hot dog?” I say to my brother, knowing full well how he’s going to respond. He looks at his watch and frowns, “Not 12:30,” he says like I’m an idiot. “No, but it will be in 20 minutes,” I say. “I’m getting you one.” I direct the three of them to an unoccupied picnic table and stand in line for the hot dogs, sweating in the humid Rochester air. I hate hot dogs. After delivering them, with mustard, I head off in search of the vending machine for drinks. When I return, my brother hasn’t touched his food. He frowns again.  “Miss Batavia,” he says. “No,” I say, “We aren’t going back to the diner for lunch this time. Look, it’s 12:25, you’ll be hungry in five minutes,” I cajole.   “Oh all right,” he says, resigned. “Me eat.”  Thank you god(dess).

Back at home base, we unload my aunt and uncle and the trunk full of flowers. My brother and I head to the other end of town to Home Depot for dirt.  En route, he produces a booklet of coupons for McDonalds and points to a picture of a fruit smoothie. “Mmmm good,” he says and smacks his lips with gusto. I sigh at this second hint of the day. The coupons expire in a week. He’s not likely to get there unless I take him. “OK,” I agree, pulling into McDonald’s for his free smoothie.

Back at his house, we need to relocate his winter clothes to the basement and bring his summer things upstairs. But his room is an utter disaster. I remember hearing the strain in my mother’s voice telling me she was in a bad mood because she’d cleaned his room. Now, I totally get it. All over the place are little pieces of paper with the same sentences written obsessively on them. Videos and DVDs not in their cases lay strewn about in random places. He has several plastic bags hanging from drawer and door knobs, each with little collections of similarly themed DVDs in them. This one has an Elvis theme; that one has a Godzilla theme, still another with John Wayne movies. Bottle caps on the desk top, on the floor, behind furniture. Empty water bottles. Half-filled (and moldy) juice bottles. I open a desk drawer to find a pair of underwear sitting on top of papers. There are 3 layers of coats, sweaters, and shirts over the back of the desk chair. There are straw papers on the floor, old paper plates under his bed. A Christmas card with $20 in it, missing since January is unearthed under the desk. Behind the headboard of his bed, there is a pajama top on the floor, 3 or 4 mismatched socks, and a belt. There are gobs and gobs of dust everywhere. I unearth three toothbrushes from various hiding spots, and five or six old cleaning rags (unused). I am livid. The AC isn’t on yet in the house so I am also sweating profusely and I can feel my hair frizzing. After two hours of cleaning and tossing and telling him this is intolerable, we are ready to make the clothing swap. I carefully examine everything we are folding to take down to storage in the basement. “Is this clean?” I ask more than a dozen times. “When was the last time you washed this?” I explain for probably the hundredth time that just because he didn’t spill something visible on that white shirt doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be washed before it is put away for the summer. He just doesn’t get the concept of body oil. Save your breath, girl.   

By 5 p.m., I’ve had quite enough of him and I’m sure he’s eager to get me out of his room, so we hug goodbye until morning. I leave with 15 summer polo shirts, horribly wrinkled after their long winter’s nap, to iron back at my aunt’s. I know they will never get ironed unless I do it.  

The day is far from over though. First, there are the 15 polos to iron. In addition, my aunt/uncle will soon be celebrating 70 years of marriage. I can not imagine being married to anyone for 70 years. This is a big deal, and I have made reservations to take them for dinner at one of their favorite places.

We are home by 8 and it’s still light enough for me to drag my potting soil out of the trunk and plant three kettles full of geraniums for the cemetery.  Then we sit out by the garage, watching the rest of the daylight fade, the hummingbirds draw the last drop of red sugar water from their feeder, the row of solar lamps in the garden burst to life one by one. This is the one peaceful moment of the day. I’m trying to be in it, not thinking about the final papers I should be reading for one class, the grades I should be calculating for the other, the laundry that won’t get washed, the food shopping for myself that won’t get done. I consider a week of eating oatmeal, hummus and carrots, and popcorn for dinner. It is nearly 10 p.m. and since I have been up since 2 a.m., my eyes are slowly crossing and my brain is closing up shop. Go to bed, girl.

Sunday morning, we go back to the diner for breakfast, then off to another town to deliver one crock of geraniums to my grandmother’s grave. We stop at the grocery store for snacks for my brother. Then Walmart for film for his camera. I remember that we need to shop for his gift for our brother-in-law, whose birthday will come before I will be back in town. Finally, with all missions accomplished, we head through town back to his home. I glance at him in the seat next to me. He has his glasses off and is rubbing his right eye. “What’s wrong with your eye?” I say. “Do you have something in it?”

“No,” he says. “I sad.”  

“What are you sad about?”

“Macho Man Randy Savage,” he says.

“Oh, yes,” I say, trying to summon up patience and empathy. “It’s too bad, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he whimpers.

“But,” I say, “think of it this way. “He’s probably up in heaven already hugging Miss Elizabeth.” I learned from the article that she had been his first wife, and she had died of an overdose many years ago. 

“Oh,” he says, looking brighter. He ponders that for a minute. “That’s good,” he agrees, finally. He puts his glasses back on and looks out the window up at the sky. “You be fine,” he says presumably to Macho Man. Deluge averted.

We drop off his snacks at his house, but everything has to be first marked with his name. We stop at another cemetery to deliver mom and dad’s geraniums. Then back to my aunt’s house. I start to pack up my car for the drive home. I give my brother the card we bought for our brother-in-law. “Here,” I say. “Sign this.”  He laboriously – and very neatly –  pens his name, then waits patiently for me to spell the address for him as I pass back and forth carrying my stuff to the car. 

Finally, after hugs all around, I pull out of the driveway. Next to me on the seat is a wicker basket containing a raspberry turnover my aunt has baked that morning, 2 sticky buns loaded with walnuts, and 2 pieces of cake that she has saved for me in the freezer. This is not good.

I drive. I stop for coffee. I eat the turnover. I stop for gas. I stop at Staples for some supplies I need. I stop at Kohl’s to look for slim chinos for my skinny brother. I eat a sticky bun. And drink more coffee. I stop again at Wegman’s, buy some cards, buy some gluten-free items for my daughter. I stop at a Best Buy to look at computers because mine is driving me nuts. While there I decide I could be convinced that I need a new camera, a flat-screen television, and a wireless router. This is not good. Get out of Best Buy, girl.

Back on the road, I approach the Tioga exit for the casino. I am thinking about stopping. I need soothing and I have the idea that sitting alone at a slot machine might help. The loss of $70 on my last trip to a casino, however, is still painfully fresh in my mind. I step firmly on the gas and drive resolutely by the exit. Stopping is not a good idea.

It is 9 p.m. by the time I pull into my driveway. In 11-1/2 hours I will be back at work, racing against time. The laundry is unwashed, the refrigerator barren, 25 papers remain unread, 26 grades are uncalculated, the blog is unwritten. I.just.can’t.

A Private Holiday Between Mother and Child

I expected to miss my mom the most during the winter holidays. After all, holidays were a BIG DEAL, not only when I was growing up but after I became an adult. In all my 53 years before she died, I never missed a single Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday with my mom. My daughter and I and my sister and her family always, always made the trek west and north to our hometown where delicious smells, fireplace warmth, and mother-spoiling awaited us.

What I didn’t expect was the emotional wallop I felt when my birthday came after she passed away. Certainly as a child, my birthday was treated as a special event. In western New York, where spring takes its sweet time arriving, my mid-May birthday often coincided with our first real taste of spring-like weather. The lilacs were opening, sweetly scenting the air, the big trees that dotted our yard were bright green with new leaves, and my favorite lilies of the valley were bursting in the space between the concrete steps leading to our front door. Each morning as I left the house to catch the school bus, I checked the progress of the lilies’ growth, crossing my fingers that by the time May 16 dawned, they would blossom.

Beyond the flowers, what I liked most about my childhood birthdays was the food because I got to pick exactly what I wanted to eat. For as long as I can remember, birthday breakfast was always Canadian bacon and Pillsbury frosted cinnamon rolls. As I’d watch mom pop them out of their cylinder and arrange the raw dough swirls on a cookie sheet, I would practically wriggle in delight at the prospect of their melt-in-my-mouth goodness a mere 18 minutes away. Twenty perhaps if you counted the time it would take to frost them.  My cake request at night was always angel food with mom’s homemade chocolate frosting. I don’t remember the main course – ever – but the day started and ended with sweet joy.

But once I moved away from home to the other side of the state, my birthday became just another work day. I celebrated with my daughter, usually still inviting the Pillsbury Dough Boy to breakfast. We’d go out for dinner, just we two, riding the bus and then the subway from our Queens’ apartment to the West Village and a little Italian basement restaurant called Carmella’s. We almost always chose the simmering and delectable manicotti while dessert was a fruit tart pastry, artfully topped with my favorite raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries. I could hardly wait for it to be placed in front of me. And if I had a weekend birthday, we’d plan to do something fun like shopping, riding roller coasters at Great Adventure Amusement Park, seeing a movie, or in later years, attending a Broadway show.

Sure, mom was always the first to call me in the morning to wish me a happy birthday, her voice full of love 350 miles away. She always sent a box of presents in the mail that arrived at least two days ahead of time, usually at work because she knew I’d be there to collect them. One year in the late 1990’s, she picked a bouquet of lilies of the valley from between her front steps, carefully placed them in water-filled plastic tubes florists use to keep roses fresh, and then carefully placed the plastic tubes upright in a wide-mouthed jar. Somehow she rigged her packaging so the lilies were protected on all sides from being crushed; everything was tripled padded so no apparent water leakage would occur and she expressed mailed them to me at work. I will never forget my complete surprise – no, shock – and gratitude as the heavenly smell of lilies of the valley wafted out of her highly creative packaging. I picked up the phone immediately – “You are amazing,” I laughed, delighted as I imagined her executing her plan.

There was one more birthday I would be in her company.  The spring mom had surgery for ovarian cancer, I spent my birthday with her in a chemotherapy suite. It was her second ever chemo session and it was an all-day affair. We packed our lunch at home in the morning and ate sandwiches together as she sat tethered to an IV, poison pulsing through her bloodstream. I joked with her urging that she visualize the poison munching on the errant cancer cells that remained in her body.  She kept saying that it was a terrible way for me to spend my birthday. I considered it an honor and said so.

I had three more birthdays before she passed away. Because I would have seen her for Mother’s Day the week before, travelled to her again at Memorial Day, and joined her for her June birthday, I stayed home for my own, resuming my usual celebratory activity with my daughter.  

So I was unprepared for the wave of melancholia that crashed over me my first birthday without mom. Except for the chemo year, I’d had probably thirty birthdays without her. Why did I feel like pulling the shades, crawling in my bed, and sobbing?  I had plans with my daughter for dinner and a show. It was a Tuesday. This was the norm. I wasn’t supposed to feel this way until Thanksgiving. But I was bereft. 

It was the same the following year and the next and the next. I’d wake up morose and it would linger all day. The days were pleasant enough – often lunch out with a beloved colleague, dinner out with my sweet daughter, a couple of great shopping blitzes, and Broadway plays every single year. The calendars I save as a record of my life document all that. Still forlorn lingered.

I was cleaning out a cupboard of books this year, part of my effort to de-stuff myself, when I came across my baby book. My mother documented my birth, noting that her labor began at 4:45 p.m. on May 16. She went to the hospital at 5:45 p.m., and I was delivered at 11:47 p.m. that same night. I laughed to myself thinking of her short labor – even then it seems I didn’t want to be too much of a bother. She wrote that she had a pudendal block as an anesthetic and that my birth was by axis-traction. Basically that means the doctor used forceps to drag me out into the world. We went home from the hospital six days later or so the baby book reports.

I pondered this in the days approaching my birthday. I listened to the tape I made of my mom talking to me the fall before she died. On the tape, she reiterated, as she had many times throughout my life, how much she wanted to have me. I was her fourth pregnancy over a ten-year period after marrying my father. She’d miscarried three times before a miracle drug of the times helped her to carry to term. I thought about how emotionally and physically intimate giving birth is. A birth is an event that is ultimately experienced only between a mother and her child. Others are there, maybe even in the room, cheering, supporting, and celebrating the big moment. But in the end, a birth day is a private holiday. I have one of those “a-ha” moments when the intellectual and visceral collide in understanding. I understand why I have felt so unfinished on the day of my birth. My sole (and soul) partner in our profound holiday dance is gone.    

Mother's Day Reflections from an Orphan

I wanted to write about my mom this Mother’s Day. I loved her dearly. She gave so much to me and I miss her incredibly. But as I have repeatedly stalled out over the words the past few days, I finally accepted that perhaps I was just not ready to do so. 

I have never put much emphasis on Mother’s Day, at least not as far as me being the mother is concerned. I’ve always considered it to be one of those Hallmark holidays that obligate people to spend money or feel guilty if they don’t. It’s filled with imperatives. I do not want to be feted out of duty. I’d rather be treated to lunch in the middle of March “just because” than to be paraded into a restaurant on Mother’s Day with the rest of the throngs because the calendar and big business dictates it. This position, however, has never stopped me from trying to meet other people’s needs on Mother’s Day.

Then

My first memory of trying to make my mother happy on Mother’s Day was when I was about 8. I decided that my sister and I should pool our allowances (saved faithfully week after week in our homemade Tupperware banks) and convince our father to take mom to Lake Placid for a weekend. Lake Placid, I knew, had been their honeymoon destination, so I figured it had to be a nice place. The reason for this particular gift was to give her a break from my sister and me because we fought constantly. Mom just hated that. “I can stand noise,” she always said, “but I can’t stand fighting.”  Dad was only too happy to agree to the plan especially since it involved a road trip, although I’m sure it cost him a bundle more than what we had to offer up as payment.  However, since affordability was never a barrier to his good time, he willingly complied and whisked her away.

My last memory of trying to bring my mother happiness on Mother’s Day was the spring before she passed away. It had become my practice to fly her and my brother to New York City for Mother’s Day, but that year she was much too weak to tolerate airports and hassles. So, my daughter and I trekked across the state to spend the day with her, my brother, and our aunt and uncle. Photos taken of her that day provide evidence that she was already beginning to fade away from us.

The following year, she was gone. My brother, having lost his mother and his home as a result, had been moved into a group home; my aunt, mom’s older sister, wept much of the time, in disbelief and grief.  So my attention turned to their needs. I felt driven to show up, to “be there” for them, and to try to make the day as easy as possible. Mother’s Day now included a visit to the cemetery, bouquets of roses, mom’s favorite, lovingly placed at her grave, and dinner out with the survivors. Mom had already abandoned them – I couldn’t do the same.  My daughter understood and urged me to do what I needed to do.  She understands internal conflict.

And now

This year was to be my sixth Mother’s Day as an orphan. I decided to stay home. Well, not so much stay home as come home because I was actually across the state with my brother as the weekend began. My sweet daughter had announced weeks before as we compared schedules her intention to block Mother’s Day off to spend with me. Although we connect most days by text or email, we don’t get to see each other as often as we’d like. It’s rare that we end up with the same day free. So this was an offer not to be refused and with her, obligation is not even a consideration. I drove home Saturday night to be with her.

Sunday unfolds into sunshine. I pick her up at her apartment in the city early – 7:30 a.m. which means I am up at 6.  She could have taken the train but fetching her means more time together so I am totally up for the trip no matter what the hour or how little sleep I’ve had. The conversation begins the minute she climbs in the car, and it doesn’t stop. At home, we make breakfast together, fresh blueberry pancakes, gluten-free, and we laugh over the chai lattes we bought on the way here. The day morphs into stunningly gorgeous. We leave the house and walk on a nearby winding parkway that closes to motorized traffic for eight glorious Sundays in the spring. I have always wanted to do this, but weather and my constant cross-state trips have conspired against it until today. We share the pavement with bikes, joggers, strollers, and other walkers.  The trees are in full bloom and often shade the road; the river for which the parkway is named, is swollen and rushes over the rocks creating music in the background. We talk non-stop about our jobs, what we want for the future, vacation plans, current events, men in her life, how our shopping ban is going, and our observations about how people we encounter with children are interacting with them. Five-and-a-half miles later, in only slight pain, we leave the parkway, stop at a yuppie deli in my village, order sandwiches and eat outside on sidewalk tables. We top it off with gelato and refuse to feel guilty.  We are comfortable in our jeans (me) and yoga pants (her) and we are together. No reservations necessary.

As we sit on the sidewalk, she suddenly asks, “So how are you doing today?”  This is not a random or rhetorical question. She means, “Are you ok since this is Mother’s Day and grammie is dead?” She’s probably been wondering when and how to fit this in during our conversation which has now spanned several hours. A part of her truly wants an open and authentic relationship with me and by definition, this must include both the good and the not-so-good. The other part of her hopes I’m still the mom who can handle everything, including my emotions with aplomb.    

Knowing my daughter, I should have expected it, but I admit the question catches me off-guard. I hesitate, not quite knowing what to say. I go for the truth. “Well,” I say carefully. “I know it is Mother’s Day, and I am aware that my own mom is not here. But did I wake up this morning and have my first thought be about what I don’t have? No, I did not.  I confess it wasn’t even my second thought. What I did think was I’m so happy I’m going to see my kid today. My mind was on what I do have.”  I hasten to add that I do miss Grammie, almost every day. But this year I am at peace. I am home with my own precious child.  And it is a perfect day.