4:33

My first-born child arrived at 4:33 on Wednesday, November 19, 1986--fifteen days after his due date.  After all those months of waiting and after twenty-four hours of labor, he was finally here.  It was well worth the wait: the minutes, hours, and days that followed were some of the happiest of my life.  I will always remember the short drive home from the hospital.  We were driving down Central Avenue in our little white Toyota, a street I'd been on hundreds of times, but I felt completely disoriented.  It seemed as though the world had changed while I was in the hospital.  As it turned out, it was my world that had changed. Every year on Ben's birthday, I'd pause at 4:33 and savor the memory of the moment he was born.  I think some years we even toasted the time with sparkling grape juice.  In recent years, due partly to the emergence of digital clocks and cell phones, a strange thing has happened.  At least two or three times a week, I happen to glance at the clock on the microwave or at the front screen of my phone right at 4:33, not at 4:32 or 4:34 but exactly at 4:33.  It happened just yesterday.  Although I've been a parent now for more than twenty-six years, I still feel a little shiver of awe every time I see 4:33.  I marvel at the way my world changed forever in just that moment, and I breathe up a prayer for my sweet boy.

Mother's Day

"Anything, any loss of sleep, any loss of ease, was worth the sweet, and too, too brief time of holding little ones until they burst out of your arms and into the world." --Rafael Yglesias in Only Children

Last year on Mother's Day, I wrote a post honoring my mom; this year I want to honor my kids. As any parent will attest, having children changes you forever. But what I've been realizing lately is that having kids keeps changing you. Like most children, I learned a lot from my parents as I was growing up; much of who I am was shaped by who they were.  It wasn't until I had kids of my own that I realized the current runs both ways--children shape parents just as much as parents shape children.  When our kids are young, we teach them how the world works.  We share our favorite foods, places, and hobbies with them.  We try our best to help them develop good manners, strong faith, and healthy habits. But then, somewhere around the time our kids hit middle school, the balance shifts and we start learning from them.  As their worlds expand, so does ours. They start to share their favorite music and movies with us; we follow their team buses to places we've never been before; we learn about backpacking, guild auditions, and cross-country running. When they get to high school, our kids bring the world to us--they show us pictures and tell us stories of their trips to France, Italy, Greece, Puerto Rico, and Australia.  They help us see and feel and understand things we never even imagined.  Then they go off to college, and they begin to live the lives we tried to prepare them for as they were growing up in our homes. When they come home on breaks, we are surprised by the changes: the new maturity, outlooks, attitudes. In some ways, they are the children they've always been, but in other ways, they are young adults who feel more like friends.  All of a sudden we realize they are showing us how the world works (especially the world of technology!). We admire and learn from their generosity, their fearlessness, their stamina and self-discipline. They remind us that it's important to have fun, to take risks, and to dream big.  On this Mother's Day weekend, I want to thank my kids--not just for all the breakfasts in bed and Mother's Day gifts over the years, but for the many ways they've changed me, and for all the things I continue to learn from them.

"I would like them to be the happy end of my story."
--Margaret Atwood

The Art of Ironing

I have this memory of lying on the floor near or even part way under the ironing board on afternoons when my mom was ironing.  She was watching Guiding Light, and I was playing with my Pepper dolls.  The air was filled with the scent of clean, hot cotton, and although the TV was on, I mostly remember the thump of the iron on the ironing board and the hiss of the water from the sprinkler bottle dissolving into steam as it hit the surface of my mom's trusty iron.  Occasionally, a freshly ironed sleeve would brush against my cheek as my mom shifted the shirt she was working on.  We didn't talk, at least not that I remember, but it was calm and peaceful there under the ironing board.  With a family of six, in the days when permanent press fabrics were just beginning to hit the market, my mom had a lot of ironing to do.  I remember she used to keep a plastic bag full of damp clothes in the bottom of our fridge between washing days and ironing days, and I loved watching as piece by piece that mound of crinkled up cotton was transformed.  After an hour or two, there were pants and shirts with sharp creases hanging on door knobs and neat stacks of crisp pillowcases, handkerchiefs, and napkins on the couch.  Although my mom probably had a hundred things to do when she finished, she never seemed to be in a hurry when she ironed.  As with so many things, she took her time and did it right.  I think about that as I hurry through my days, running an iron over the skirt I'm about to put on, quickly pressing away the worst of the wrinkles.  During the years raising three kids and working full time, I got into the habit of rushing through housekeeping chores, giving them "a lick and promise, " as my mom would say.  As a matter of fact, it wasn't just housekeeping chores that I hurried through, I got into the habit of rushing through life.  I doubt I will ever have the patience or desire to become an expert in the art of ironing like my mom is, but I would like to start living more deliberately.  I want to take my time and do things right.  I want calm and peaceful afternoons even in the midst of a busy life.

Growing Up

Seventeen years ago we were in Florida for spring break, and our youngest child was about to turn four.  But instead of getting ready for a sunny Florida birthday, we found ourselves in the midst of an emotional storm. The problem? Em didn't want to celebrate her birthday. She didn't want a cake, she didn't want presents, and most of all, she didn't want to be four.  One of the books she liked at the time was I Like to Be Little by Charlotte Zolotow, which begins,

"Once there was a little girl.
"What do you want to be when you grow up? her mother asked.
"I just want to stay little right now," she said.
"Why?" said her mother. "It's nice to be grown up. Why do you want to be little?"
"Because I am," said the little girl, "and because when you are little you can do things you can't when you grow up."

In the rest of the book the little girl describes things she can do because she's little that grown-ups don't do (skipping when she's glad, making a house under the dining room table, going barefoot in summertime, eating snow when it first falls). Em had taken all that to heart and had decided she didn't want to get any older.  Another one of her favorite books at the time was The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister, and what finally calmed the storm and eased Em through the transition from three to four was the promise of a rainbow fish birthday cake. Before long she discovered being older meant she could do more tricks on the playground and keep up better with her brothers, and she sailed through the rest of being four, and five, and six . . . and really all the way through being nineteen. Last year around this time, there were echoes of that long ago birthday. Whenever I started to mention her upcoming birthday, she stopped me and said, "I don't want to talk about it."  Once again she was struggling with getting older; she wasn't one bit excited about turning twenty and leaving her teen years behind.  There were no tears or tantrums this time, but there was a bit of sadness in her eyes as her birthday approached.  So now here we are on the eve of her twenty-first birthday; tomorrow my daughter will officially be an adult, a grown-up. I don't really know how she's feeling about it; she's been through a tough week, so her mind has been on other things. But I've been watching her over the past year, and I can see that she's ready. What the little girl in the book didn't yet know is that there are a lot of great things waiting for you when you grow up that you can't do when you're little. And I think that even though Em liked being little, she's going to love being grown up.  Happy 21st birthday, Em!

Advice from Alcatraz

In one of my classes, we're reading Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko right now.  The story takes place in 1935 on Alcatraz Island, where Matthew "Moose" Flanagan and his family have recently moved.  Moose's dad has taken a job at the prison, so Moose's sister can attend a special school in nearby San Francisco.  Moose is unhappy about the move and wants to return to his old life in Santa Monica.  Early in the book he is talking to his dad about it and says, "I want to know for certain this is going to work out." Mr. Flanagan's response has been echoing in my head all weekend.  This is what he tells his son: "Nobody knows how things will turn out, that’s why they go ahead and play the game, Moose. You give it your all and sometimes amazing things happen, but it’s hardly ever what you expect.” One thing I've learned in my twenty-six years of parenting is how very true that is. Each one of my kids is different from the other two; what I learned in parenting one of them has helped very little in parenting the other two.  Their paths through life have been as different as they are, even though they came from the same gene pool, grew up in the same house and the same town, and two of them even went to the same college.  In each of their lives, amazing things have happened, but just like Mr. Flanagan said, it has hardly ever been what I was expecting.  This unpredictability keeps you humble as a parent; it also keeps you on your knees if you're a praying person.  You give life your all and encourage your kids to do the same, then you hold on tight, keep your eyes wide open, and wait to see how it all turns out.

Good Friday

When I was growing up, we went to church at noon on Good Friday.  It was a somber service for a somber day, but afterwards we went out for pie at The Landmark, a local restaurant.  We spent Saturday coloring Easter eggs in coffee mugs filled with vinegary-smelling dyes.  On the years the weather cooperated, we got up in the pre-dawn darkness for sunrise services.  When we got home, we hunted for our cellophane-wrapped Easter baskets and searched for the jelly beans my mom had hidden all over the living room.  Then we put on our best clothes and our freshly polished shoes and headed off to church where the sanctuary smelled of lilies as we sang "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" and "Up from the Grave He Arose."  We came home to Easter dinner, followed by an Easter egg hunt with the real hard-boiled eggs we had dyed the day before.  For many days after Easter we took the cracked, colorful eggs in our school lunches with little salt and pepper shakers and ate deviled eggs and pickled eggs for supper.  It was the same year after year.  Here's the strange thing: I re-created very few of these Easter traditions with my own kids.  Our church didn't have a Good Friday service, and most years classes were in session at the college, so I was teaching anyway.  My kids didn't like hard-boiled eggs, and it seemed wasteful to color eggs we were going to throw away, so some years we dipped white wax eggs in colored wax instead.  I hid my kids' Easter baskets, but I just used the twiggy baskets we had around the house and didn't wrap them in colorful cellophane.  Our church had Easter morning services and lilies, but we sang contemporary worship songs rather than "Christ the Lord is Risen Today." Some years, thanks to New York's long spring breaks, we drove to Florida to visit Steve's parents--those years we colored eggs on the patio in the tropical, eighty-degree heat, I packed Easter bags instead of baskets, we wore swimsuits instead of Easter finery and went the beach instead of to church on Easter Sunday.  I've spent a good bit of time worrying about this over the years.  I'm pretty big on traditions, and yet on this holiest of holidays, somehow I never could quite replicate the Easters of my childhood.  It's not the colorful cellophane-wrapped baskets or the Easter egg hunts I'm talking about, it's the Good Friday services, the sunrise services, and the reverence with which my parents approached Easter--those are the things that formed in me an unwavering, unshakeable faith in a loving God.  I hope and pray on this Good Friday that despite the piecemeal approach to Easter my kids have experienced over the years, they know, beyond a shadow of a doubt how precious they are to God. And regardless of how they mark these holy days in the years ahead, I hope every Good Friday and every Easter Sunday is a solid reminder of God's amazing grace and love.

Closing Night

Tonight is closing night of the high school musical, scores of people have put in hundreds of hours over the past five months.  My son Ben has been working on it since last summer when he chose the show.  And in a few hours it will all be over, living on only in the hearts and minds of all the kids and adults who worked on the show and of audience members who came to watch and cheer.  I am feeling sad and wistful about that, even though I am just one of those audience members.  As I've said before, I have a hard time with endings.  I know things can't go on forever; I know some things must end in order for other things to begin.  But still it's hard when musicals end, when friends move away, when your kids graduate from college and can no longer come home for breaks and holidays.  It's harder still when lives end, and widows like my mom and Steve's mom are left to carry on alone and when grown-up kids like me can't call their dads on Saturday mornings.  Yet all we can do is hold on to the sweet memories, while we forge ahead, thinking about what we're going to do next . . .