Other Essays (click here to go to Boston Globe essays)
Personally
Speaking:
For Mothers, September is about Learning to Let Go
Cell Phone Abuse
“Junk Phone” Brings Out This Mother’s Not Nice Side
'Tis the Season
Mourning
Taking a Moment to Care
Young Mouse’s Life Demonstrates Natural Instincts
"Chicken Soup for the
Soul" stories:
Running Role Model
Don't Worry, Be Happy
For Mothers, September is about Learning to Let Go
When the bus drove off carting my kindergartner to her first day of school four Septembers ago, an assortment of faces decorated the bus stop: my daughter’s beaming one, a second grader’s bored one, a neighbor’s sleepy one, and a few serious ones peering out the back of the bus as it drove away.
My face was the startled one that demonstrated I was unprepared for the extent of feeling that overcomes a mother the day her little one leaves the nest for the first real time. It was a moment that those who don’t know the difference between August and September, other than that the leaves begin their fall, can’t understand. Nor did I, until that day. continued
Okay, I admit it, it was fun when my husband took me through the airport security gizmo in my pj's at 6:40 a.m. the other morning. But, overall, I’m still outraged at the abuse.
There he was in Buffalo, NY, and here I was in Bedford, MA, peacefully drinking my morning coffee when he called in a panic.
“My flight’s been cancelled. I’m trying to…..” Steve began.
And that’s when I heard muffled voices, a few electronic beeps, more strange sounds, then his voice again.
“You still there?” He asked. “I had to hand the phone to the security guy. I’m back.”
“Cool,” I said. “Did I just get metal detected?” (He had no sense of humor, as few stuck in Buffalo do.) continued
I started writing this article weeks ago, then destroyed it when my opening line, “I’m not always a nice person anymore,” confused my six-year-old.
Melissa had found it on my desk and began to read--eager to demonstrate her growing reading prowess. But she immediately lowered the paper and peered at me with squinted eyes, tilted head, and down-curled lips.
“Mommy, what do you mean you’re not always a nice person anymore?” She demanded to know why the woman who teaches her right from wrong was admitting to Cruella De Vil-like qualities. I tried to explain, then realized it was an ominous task. Instead, I ripped up the article, and we laughed.
However, today, when the same phenomenon that caused me to write that piece struck my home again, I decided even six year olds need to understand what’s happening to make sweet, innocent mommies no longer nice. continued
I’ve been feeling sorry for myself during most of this season of thanks and celebration. As I’ve struggled with a bronchial condition for six weeks, I’ve become more involved with medicines and sleep than with humans.
Even at night, my husband, Steve, stays cuddled and warm in our bed while I wrap myself in a blanket on the couch and drink hot tea until sleep finally wins out over my cough. Needless to say, daytimes I feel utterly wiped out and, often, I’m less than pleasant.
Grateful I work at home, I’ll occasionally sit at my computer, but never for long. I’ll leave home for brief stints to attend a meeting at a child’s school, an important event, and even an occasional tennis match on my better days. But inevitably the sneaky respiratory thief returns, and I, in turn, crawl back under the covers. continued
I carry my cat into the bathroom and place him on the counter despite his meowing protests. With one hand on his back, I use the other to click the “on” switch of my tape recorder, where I have captured my daughter Melissa playing a Pachebel Canon duet with her piano teacher.
The sweet music begins to play, and I try to relax. Gently, just as Dr. Carlson’s veterinary assistants have taught me, I pull up an inch of Tuba’s subcutaneous skin and form a tent. To avoid hurting him more than I must, I quickly stick the needle into the lower part of the “tent.” He meows. I pet his fur with one hand and flip the switch on the tubing attached to this saline drink I give him every other day.
Despite his failing kidneys, Tuba still acts very much like a cat, although the mice appreciate his slower reactions. I have decided that as long as he is more cat than sickness, I will help him live. When I first began these shots a few months back, I thought mostly about getting the shot over with. Instead, I now use this special time with him to reflect on our nearly 16 years together spanning two marriages and two homes, a childless life and one filled with two children, a sometimes “dogged” and sometimes dogless life and now one with two dogs that Tuba navigates around in his slower-moving but still ready-to-hiss day.
I am also quite aware that, love him as I do, he is just a cat. continued
In Memory of K.S.P.
“How does one start the day the morning of her daughter’s funeral?” I asked myself last weekend as I emerged from a shower before the memorial service for my dear friend’s 32-year-old daughter.
Myself the mother of two daughters, I continued to question this while I brushed my teeth, dried my hair, dressed. All the usual morning rituals.
Had I asked myself this same question 22 years ago, on the morning of my best friend’s funeral--an even younger daughter to lose her life? Probably I did not, because I wasn’t a mother then--I only focused on the intensity of the pain of losing my friend.
That friend, Shelley, one month before she died, had said something I will never forget. While a bunch of us recent college grads danced and drank at the Newton Marriott lounge, she looked around the packed room and said, “There are hundreds of strangers here, and we know nothing about their lives and probably never will.”
Shelley’s comment smacked me in the face 30 days later when her photo blared on the front page of The Boston Herald, killed by a former boyfriend. That day, strangers learned lots about her short life. continued
The day I watched our pet mouse retrieve her newborn from a food dish and return it to where its eight siblings slept, I was in awe of Mother Nature and natural instincts. The mother of these one-inch pink hairless creatures was just a baby herself; nonetheless, two weeks after we bought her from a pet shop, I realized that her six-week-old, pear-shaped body wasn’t just the result of a hearty diet!
In preparation for childbirth, this young mother instinctively burrowed under her cedar-chip bedding to seek safety and warmth. After the delivery, she created a cedar-chip well for her newborns, placed them in it, and then covered the babies with the only blanket available--a toilet paper roll. Next, she lay on her babies and nursed them--until a visiting four-year-old’s shrill voice startled Mother, and she fled--one still-suckling baby landing in the food dish. Moments later, she carried her displaced baby back to the others.
Motherhood came to this mouse without instructions, without a mother’s advice, without the LaLeche League or a toll-free number for support. Just maternal instinct. continued
"Chicken Soup for the Mother and Daughter Soul"
Running Role Model
I admit it—I did it purely for myself. Well, at first I did it because I’d lost a bet. After my best friend completed her ninth Tufts 10K, I bet her that if she would run the Boston Marathon, I, a non-runner, would run Tufts next time. I posed this idle bet because I never thought she’d really do it. Guess what? She did it!
Preparing to make good on my wager, I began my training in earnest, and I quickly fell in love with the solitude, the fresh air and sunshine, the singing birds, and the capabilities of my thirty-eight-year-old body. During those first few runs, however, I couldn’t shake feelings of guilt about pursuing self-gratification. Wasn’t I supposed to be home taking care of my family?
After one particularly long run, my guilt crescendoed when I returned home to soak sore muscles in a leisurely hot bath and left my “off-duty” sign posted a while longer. Lying in my Epsom salts, I heard Melissa, my three-year-old, whimper, “Where’s Mommy?” My husband distracted her—while I gritted my teeth and grasped the sides of the tub, torn between the desire for time by myself and the urge to comfort my child. In that moment, I understood that with each run, I needed to train not only my body, but my mind—to allow myself this private time to seek the selfhood I was entitled to! Besides, if I were reenergized, I’d be better able to handle the demands of motherhood.
Indeed, my two daughters quickly adjusted to my long weekend runs. They’d casually acknowledge that I was leaving. “Going running, Mom?” Gina, my eight-year-old, would ask as she watched me lace up my running shoes. “Have a nice run,” Melissa would add.
I’d kiss them and leave, and they’d be all smiles, knowing this was a chance for them to be alone in the house, while Dad worked in the garden, one ear on them. (Mother Nature programmed men with far fewer guilt genes, and women are finally taking heed.) Moreover, I think they recognized that I came back from my runs nicer than when I left!
For the rest of this story, go to your local library or bookstore, or to www.amazon.com and order “Chicken Soup for the Mother and Daughter Soul,” published in 2002. My story appears on page 200. Or contact me and I’ll send you the rest of this story and add you to my mailing list that alerts readers to new works posted on this site or published in book form.
"Chicken Soup for the Unsinkable Soul"
Don't Worry, Be Happy
“How old are you?" a stranger asked my daughter, Melissa, at a party six years ago.
“Two,” she answered.
“And are you married?” the woman teased.
“No!” Melissa answered, smiling. Then she dropped her smile, and in a serious tone added, “But my mommy was, and my daddy was.”
I eavesdropped from a safe distance, wondering what might follow. Would Melissa, with her advanced vocabulary, tell this stranger that her parents were divorced? Even worse, would my toddler act out and hit the woman, or start crying?
To my surprise, Melissa grinned and added, “My mommy was married to my daddy.” She then toddled off.
I, meanwhile, was like a leaky faucet. A steady stream of happy tears trickled down my face as I realized my daughter seemed well adjusted despite the divorce. Her mother was the one who obviously still needed to heal.
Twenty months earlier, when Melissa was six months old, my husband discarded me like a well-worn pair of shoes and replaced me with his high school crush. No explanation. Just a silent, seeping withdrawal that culminated in an abrupt exit from what had seemed on the surface a happy marriage.
I would wake each dawn to Melissa’s cries and find myself curled up in a corner of the huge mattress, clutching a pillow that, for six years, had belonged to someone else. I would drag myself out of bed, throw on some sweatpants—grateful that I worked at home—then feed and dress my baby.
Just before driving Melissa to day care and burying my grief in my work for eight hours, I would dab on some makeup in a feeble attempt to cover the bags under my eyes. Somehow, I found an automatic-pilot switch to get me through the day.
Yet by nighttime, after I had tucked her into the crib in a bedroom filled with rainbows and sunshine, I would crawl next door to my lifeless room and cling to the phone, calling everyone I knew just to keep from feeling so alone.
One long day evolved into two, then two into three, and slowly, through the haze, I recognized that even though my marriage had died, I was still alive. Eventually, I propelled myself out the door and joined a divorce support group, a new mothers’ network, a local social club and, eventually, dating services.
Like most new mothers, I also worked out to shed the extra pounds; but, unlike the average new mom, I had been thrust back into the dating scene with a post-childbirth body, so I ran that treadmill with urgency!
Meanwhile, Melissa grew from a crawler to a walker to a toddler to a talker. Despite knowing life with her parents as a series of goodbyes and hellos, she was emerging as a precocious, happy, well-adjusted little girl.
These traits may have been planted in her genes, or they may have derived from the one-on-one attention she received from each parent.
From early on, my daughter had an extensive vocabulary and uncanny perception. When she was twenty-two months old, she saw her father and me arguing and instructed us, with finger pointing: “Don’t be so angry so much, be happy.” At two, she heard me complain about something and told me “not to worry.”
Yet I did. I worried about competing for her affections with the woman in her father’s life. I worried about whether I could ever provide us with a loving man and stepfather so she could learn about love and commitment differently than her father and I had taught her. I worried she’d forever be an only child, or, worse, that one day she would have step or—horrors—half-siblings who would be the children of the woman my husband chose instead of me.
Could I stand the emotional pain? Could I nurture my daughter in a healthy way that would teach her that not all relationships end in suffering? Could I back off enough to permit her acceptance of her father’s new life, when it tore me apart?
For the rest of this
story, go to your local library or bookstore, or to
www.amazon.com
and order “Chicken Soup for the Unsinkable Soul,” published in 1999. My
story appears on page 260. Or contact me and I’ll send you the rest of
this story and add you to my mailing list that alerts readers to new
works posted on this site or published in book form.
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