Thirty

My husband is a great guy. He’s smart, funny, a terrific father, and a great life partner. He is not, however, particularly romantic. Before we became engaged I, like many young women, dreamed of a thoughtful, memorable, write-a-book-about-it kind of proposal, but when I suggested that such a thing would be nice, Bill was clear that he thought elaborate proposals were stupid. He thought things like talking to my father (“getting permission”) and proposing while on bended knee were old-fashioned and sexist, and told me that such gestures would not be forthcoming. So the moment that we agreed to marry could most accurately be described as a non-event, but I said yes anyway.

We picked out a nice ring and started making plans, even though we were both fresh out of college and unemployed. Nothing about our future was clear or firm. We picked a date and planned a wedding on a fairly modest budget. We took a few risks in our arrangements (like planning an outdoor reception with no back-up plan in case of rain) and added a few personal touches, like a carriage ride to the reception. Everything else was lovely but fairly standard: four attendants each but no flower girls or ring bearer,  beautiful flowers, an organist but no vocalist. Great hors d’ oeuvres and a beautiful cake, but no sit-down dinner, no dance hall, and no DJ.

I’d like to say that the wedding went off without a hitch, but actually the hitches are the things I remember best.  I woke up on my wedding day still a little drunk from the rehearsal dinner the night before. As the day unfolded, I sobered up and managed to get everyone and everything in the right places. Except I didn’t have a check for the florist, and I had to make a quick trip to buy shoes for my going-away outfit…but when the time for the wedding arrived, I was dressed and ready to walk down the aisle.

About five minutes before the ceremony, the minister found me to inform me that Bill had forgotten to bring my wedding ring. Just plain forgot it. So I took off my engagement ring and handed it off to the minister, who gave it to Bill, who placed it on my finger right after the vows….which Bill also forgot. The minister helped Bill—poor nervous guy—to stumble through. And then we were married, and were off in our carriage to enjoy our outdoor reception.

That was thirty years ago this week. While I am sure that even then there were weddings far more elaborate than ours, these were the days before Pinterest and shows like “Say Yes to the Dress” turned weddings into the elaborate, insanely-detailed events that they are now. I’ll admit that part of me wishes that we could redo some things—there are some very cute and creative ideas out there!—but in truth we were more focused on our marriage and the life we would live together after the wedding than we were on the wedding itself.  And that I wouldn’t change.

When we got married, people didn’t talk about “soul mates.” Love and compatibility are important, of course, but even the most perfectly matched couples learn that love doesn’t actually conquer all. In every marriage there will be struggles over money and family and any number of issues, large and small. At the end of the day (or week, depending on your standards), someone still has to do the dishes, and you may not always agree on who that should be.

Thirty years ago, I don’t think I could have defined what a soul mate is, but I think I can now. It’s someone with whom you’ve shared a lifetime of everyday memories and some great adventures. It’s someone who supports you through cancer and job loss, and someone who trusts you enough to be willing to lean on you during his or her tough times. It’s someone with whom you have a million inside jokes and shared secrets. It’s someone who encourages you and supports you; someone who loves you exactly as you are and yet still challenges you to be better. It’s someone with whom you share a past, the present, and the future.

Love is a choice, and marriage is the commitment of two people willing to work it all out: for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish. It’s not particularly romantic, but who needs romance when you can have a genuine soul mate.

One Year

I wrote this piece nearly a year ago. Kelsey was fighting some pretty powerful demons at that time. Today, on the anniversary of what was her darkest day, I'm so happy to see her continue to emerge as the amazing person she is and is becoming. 

For Kelsey, as she turns 19

Since your birth, we’ve shared a love for Disney films. We know all the characters, all of the lines, and of course all of the songs. I know some people blame these movies for their own distorted notions about life and love, but to these people I want to say, “You do realize that animals don’t talk or do the dishes, and fairy godmothers and enchantresses and pixies and flying carpets—you do realize they’re not real, right? Grow up!” These movies are fantasies, to be sure, but I think the stories and the characters are often more complex than we give them credit for.  As we get older, it’s up to us to find the deeper lessons and find ways to apply them to our lives.

I like your new mantra, “I’m the hero of this story.” It’s thoughtful, it’s to the point, and it’s true. You play the most important role in your own life, and that includes taking responsibility for getting yourself out of difficult spots. It means taking initiative and not placing blame, and sometimes it means taking your lumps. Sometimes that means fighting demons and darkness. But I have no doubt that you can win the fight. You are your own hero.

But you’re more than the hero. You’re also the princess: beautiful, kindhearted, spunky, with a great voice (and a tendency to burst into song for no reason). You’ve got big dreams, and with your talent and some hard work, there’s no reason to believe that those dreams can’t come true. You have a lot to offer to the world, and to your own story.

And some days you’re the villain: witty, a little snarky, a little dark. Disney villains in particular are interesting characters and can be a source of comic relief, but inevitably they become obsessed with some long-ago hurt, real or imagined. For them, living in the past is the road to madness. So be careful not to sabotage yourself by dwelling on what was, or what might have been. Learn from the past, but focus on the future.

Also remember that, while you are the center of your own life, you play an important supporting role in many, many other lives. You enrich our stories in innumerable ways, some that are obvious, and some that you may never know. You have so much value to so many, and that value will only increase as you mature. By the same token, there are many who play supporting roles in your life. Even when you’re alone in the spotlight, remember that all of us are only a breath away, and while the scene is yours to carry, we’ll be there to support you when you need it.

Unlike the plays you auditioned for in high school, in real life you’re not assigned a part, but you get to choose the part you want to play in any given scene. You don’t need to be the same person all the time, and each part can be interesting and valuable, but there’s one part you need to avoid playing: the victim. You’re definitely not this. Self-pity does not look good on you, and it has no place in this story.

So you’re the hero, but you’re not some two-dimensional romantic lead who sweeps in at the last minute, but a hero more like Indiana Jones: genuine, complex, and slightly flawed, someone who confesses to making it up as you go. You can’t control everything that happens, but you can control how you respond to events. Learn to respond with grace and courage. You’ve got a great life ahead of you. 

Struggle

It is my nature to worry, and I do it well. When my kids were really young, I used to stress about things like childcare and cloth-versus-disposable diapers. As a working mom, I wondered if I was spending enough time with them and if the time we spent together was of sufficient quality. I worried about keeping them safe and whether we had done enough reading with them so that they would be able to keep up in school.

My dad, an experienced parent, had no appreciation for the depth of my concern. When I would vent to him about my worries, he would smile a little smile and shake his head ever so slightly. “Little children, little problems. Big children, big problems,” he’d say.

I may have been frustrated that he was a little dismissive of my bundle of worries, but I understood what he was saying. Sort of. I also imagined that if I did my work well when my kids were little, that would carry them through to adulthood, and our big kids would not provide me with big problems to worry about.

And it has worked out that way. Sort of. Not a day goes by when one of my kids doesn’t astound me with a profound bit of wisdom, an achievement, or an act of deep compassion that makes my maternal heart swell with joy. They are learning, growing, becoming.

It is just as true that on any given day my kids will say or do something that astounds me with the depth of their stupidity, immaturity, and selfishness. As painful as these things are, I hope, and I pray, and I try to believe that they are learning, growing, becoming through these experiences. But I have my doubts.

In a really old episode of Law and Order (my favorite show), Detectives Curtis and Brisco were investigating the murder of a young woman. Raised by loving parents, she got into modeling as a teen, which led to a world of money, celebrities, and drugs. Curtis, who had young daughters, was bewildered and judgmental: he figured if he raised his girls right, they would avoid any kind of problems.

We all know loving, close-knit families where the kids have been raised right but still make mistakes—lots of mistakes, huge mistakes, stupid mistakes that can’t be ignored. It is the nature of young adults to test limits, and sometimes kids get caught. Others, for whatever reason, are able to avoid the dire consequences of their recklessness. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with parenting, but more with dumb luck.

Some days I really, really want to return my kids to the bubble of childhood, where I could control them and protect them and attempt to bend them to my will. I want my kids to avoid mistakes and heartache and pain. When I’m honest, see that part of the reason for this is because I believe that their bad choices, bad behavior, and mistakes reflect poorly on me and my parenting.

I miss those days when my biggest concerns were their bizarre clothing combinations, bad table manners, or failed spelling tests. I hope that when I scolded them for these things, they understood that I was trying to teach them about bigger things: about being polite, getting along with others, diligence and hard work, and that small things matter. I hope that these are the lessons that will carry them forward in life.

They say that, during childbirth, it’s important for the child to struggle through the birth canal; it’s a healthy thing for the baby, and part of nature’s design. Perhaps it is the same as these kids become birthed as adults; struggle is healthier for the adult in the long run, but it sure is painful for the mother.

Advice columnist Ann Landers said, “It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings.”  Even now, when the law says three of my kids are adults, the jury is still out on what I’ve taught them, or rather, what they’ve learned from me. Whatever it is, there’s still a whole bunch of stuff they will have to learn for themselves.  May God give them, and me, strength and wisdom for the journey.  

2014

Ah, the new year. A time of fresh starts and starting over. My resolutions, unoriginal and predictable, are the same each year, and every publication knows what they are. At the checkout at Target, magazine covers implore: Get Organized NOW! They promise: Lose 20 Pounds FAST! These two “resolutions” have been on my list for every year I can remember. And although I start each year with good intentions, my craft room is a perennial disaster area, and my weight is, too.

As I look forward to 2014, I will try, once more, to get all the photos into albums and my body back to the gym. I certainly will accomplish some things, but it never feels like it’s enough. There is always more to be done or that can be done. It’s not that I’m standing still. My life is rich and full and complicated, with unexpected twists that consume my time and my energy. I have reasons, and I have excuses, for not getting everything done, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the two.

I am glad that my life is full, even if I don’t always love being on call for the kids or cleaning the bathroom. When I start to feel sorry for myself, I remind myself that I’m privileged to have kids to shuttle and a home to clean. They aren’t burdens; they are blessings. And if I’m feeling pressed for time, I remember that I spend far more time playing Candy Crush and watching Law and Order reruns than I should.  That’s among the reasons I “don’t have time” to get more done.

For years I’ve thought about writing a book, and when I lost my full-time job, I thought that maybe I would have a month or two between jobs to pound something out. Four years later, I’m still looking for full-time work, and still haven’t “found the time” to write that novel. I have, however, filled my time with lots of other things: caring for the kids in a million ways; sewing and crafting; working part-time at a couple of jobs; and writing for hire, through which I have learned a lot and helped to put food on the table.  

Writing for hire has also led me to my current project. I’m ghost writing a book. Since I’ve signed a nondisclosure agreement, that’s probably all I can say about it. My name won’t appear on the finished product, and no matter how well it sells, I will never receive a dime in royalties. And I am totally fine with all of that, because, hey, I’m finally writing a book! Even if no one else knows, I’ll know.

Now that it looks like there’s a real possibility for this dream to come true, it gives me hope for so many other great things to happen in 2014. It feels as if anything is possible! I could actually get organized or be a size 8 (okay, a size 10). But if those things don’t happen, that’s okay, too.

Because I know that the 365 days ahead will be full of wonderful things: accomplishments great and small, unexpected joys, new people and places and adventures. And I know there will be pain and sorrow and disappointments. It will be a year like every other, and like no other.

It’s going to be a great year. Welcome 2014!

Therapy

It started about six months ago, an occasional spasm of pain in my left armpit. Unpredictable and fleeting, the pain is severe enough to be noticeable but not so much that it was debilitating.

When I look it up on Web MD, which is usually pretty fatalistic in its diagnoses, nothing comes up, but because it is on my “cancer side,” I mention it when I go in for my annual mammogram a few weeks later. The nurse checks me out pretty thoroughly, the films are clear, and she suggests it is probably a muscle spasm.

The pain persists, so a month later I mention it to my sister, who is a nurse practitioner. She thinks it sounds like a muscle spasm and gives me a few tips to address the symptoms, none of which I do. I figure that anything muscular can take care of itself.

Months later, the pain has not abated, so I make an appointment with my doctor, or rather, the nurse practitioner at my doctor’s office.  Like everyone else, she asks me questions, feels me up, and has no answers, but since the pain is in proximity to the place where lymph nodes had been removed 15 years earlier, she suggests I make an appointment to see my oncologist.

By now I have already invested about a million times more time and energy into this than merited, but I dutifully call the oncologist, with whom I have had no contact in ten years. I am booked to see the nurse practitioner, who—like all the nurse practitioners I have consulted up to now—is absolutely wonderful.  She recommends physical therapy, an ultrasound, and an MRI to try to figure out what’s up in my pit. She also asks if I would be interested in genetic testing, something we had considered years ago but I put off.

In addition to the annoyance of all the cost and time involved, I’m increasingly aware that I am being sucked back to cancer world, a place that I thought I left behind long ago but that is in fact always thisclose. No matter how far you move forward, once you’ve been to cancer world, it’s intertwined in the fiber of who you are, and it doesn’t take much to pull you back to a dark place of fear and helplessness and endless nausea.

Although it’s fear the drives me to pursue the additional tests, I book the physical therapy to prove that I am fine. My physical therapist, Amy, works exclusively with women at risk for lymphedema which, apparently, includes me. (Seriously, I didn’t know that.) Amy assesses the range of motion in my arm and concludes that there is plenty of room for improvement. As I lay on her table, her fingers find tight knots of scar tissue that I didn’t know were there. The pain makes me cry, but I can tell it is helping. And as she presses deeper, I know that the tears come because she is touching emotional scars as well.

Amy talks to distract me. By our third session, she begins to tell me her own cancer story, which makes my story look like a day at the beach. At age 38 she is a three-time survivor. She’s undergone genetic testing and had her young children tested as well. They all have the gene, and are doing all they can to be on guard. She lives with cancer every day; it’s not just a bad memory tied up in a knot under her skin.

I want to live my life looking forward, not backward, but sometimes there is no moving forward until you deal with the past. My cancer story is only a small part of who I am, but it was a significant turning point.  I don’t want to live in that world, but sometimes it’s necessary to revisit it and to continue to learn from it.

I might be ready to pursue genetic testing. Whatever the results, it can’t be as painful as physical therapy! And it might be helpful to my kids and other family members. So, deep breath…and one step at a time.

And the spasm in my arm? Yeah, we’ve still got no answers on that. But I’m learning to live with it. 

Pebbles

I’m old enough to remember the television show Colombo, where the cigar-smoking detective with no first name seemed to know from the instant he arrived on the scene who committed the murder. Over the course of the two-hour episode he would wear the suspect down, conversation by conversation. The murderers, without exception wealthy and brilliant, were often victims of their own hubris, imagining that this bumbling little man in a rumpled raincoat wasn’t up to the task of uncovering their crimes. But the amiable detective would conduct an interview, start to leave, and then turn around with one more question. His catch phrase, “Oh, and one more thing…” was the signal that he was on to something, and in these questions—these after thoughts—were the points at which he gleaned the most information.

I am living in a season of “one more thing,” a time when the small irritations are mounting and wearing me down. As mother, I have claimed the spot as the emotional hub of the family, so compelling me to feel the feels of everyone in my circle. I might even feel them more intently than the original feeler. Someone I love will get hit with some minor disaster, and just when I’ve kind of moved on from that, another small but painful thing will occur. It feels as if, due to our own mistakes or just the nature of the world, we try and fail, try and fail, try and fail. We’re a little short on good news lately, and without a few upward ticks to balance things out, I feel weighed down with the accumulation of “one more thing.”

Sometimes a crisis of faith comes after a major blow from which there is no coming back: a death, a tragedy, an injustice. But more often, it’s the pebble in the shoe that pulls us off the path of hope. We gimp along, or maybe we stop to remove the pebble, but a few steps later the stone is replaced by another small pain, so we stop again. These small stops and small wounds accumulate until finally it feels that no progress is being made at all, and it becomes tempting to give up altogether. We lose faith that anything can be gained by attempting to move forward. There will only be more blisters and bleeding, and no reward for perseverance.

Sometimes it’s okay—even necessary—to sit and think and wallow (just a little) and maybe even cry. But then, even if there are still tears in my eyes, I have to stop focusing on my feet and lift my gaze a little, and I start to move. Maybe I will notice that I’m on the wrong path and decide to change direction. Or I will see something promising just around the next bend, and I know I’ll never get there if I don’t go forward.

If it is the small things that can bring me down, the small things can also lift me up: a brilliant oak tree dressed in the rich gold of autumn, the unexpected kindness of a stranger, an email from a friend, a bowl of warm soup and homemade bread.  There truly is good in each day. Even on the days when “one more thing” is heaped onto the pile, even on those days when I feel stuck on the side of the road, my life is blessed beyond measure.

It’s time to empty my shoes and be on my way. The journey, even when it’s difficult, is beautiful when we remember that there is always reason to hope.

The Table

Shortly after Kelsey was born, we moved into a four-bedroom home that was everything we thought we could ever want in house (except it lacked a fireplace). Of course it didn’t take long to figure out that even this new palace had some limitations. The kitchen, although a step up from the kitchen in our former home, was long and thin, not quite big enough to be considered an eat-in kitchen, but we found a table that would work. It, too, was long and thin, with drop leaves on the sides. When we weren’t eating we could put the sides down and slide the table against the wall, creating a small enough footprint that we could still move about the kitchen.

The table came as a kit—unfinished, precut pine and hardware. I would have preferred to stain it before assembly, but the timing didn’t work out, and one day when I came home from work, my husband and my dad had it ready and waiting for me. Eager to get the project done, I purchase a combination stain and varnish that I imagined would save time, and I applied two hasty, uneven coats. Not my finest work by a long shot, but we had a table.

Pine is a soft wood, so it didn’t take long for our family to make its mark on the table’s surface. Lots of it was just the wear and tear of daily use: the accumulated marks of dozens of practice spelling tests, glitter glue that refused to come off, wear marks from placing plates in the same places for hundreds of meals. The table was well used and well loved; day by day we built our family around its edges.

When we moved into our current home, I almost immediately began to think about getting a round dining table, since it would have worked so well in the space, but other priorities emerged, and we continued to create memories over meals and projects. More marks and grooves found their way into the surface, and more family members took their places around the table’s weathered plane, and they, too, have left their mark.

When we adopted, we kept Lewi’s name but not Lily’s. It was a difficult decision, but we were concerned that her birth name would not be well received in the US, so we made it her middle name and dubbed her Lily instead. But in the early days, when she was first learning to write, she would ask how to spell her Ethiopian name, and she would practice with a slow, deliberate hand, her handwriting so strong that she engraving DORKA through the paper and into the tabletop. It endures, as proud and defiant as her spirit—a symbol of who she was and in many ways still is.

We recently acquired a small round table for the kitchen. I would have liked something a little bigger, but the price was right, and it fit into my Prius. With the leaf in it, it’s just about perfect for the four of us who are still living here full time.

With a replacement in the kitchen, I moved the old table to the garage so I could do a little maintenance. The finish had gotten sticky, so I sanded down the top so I could re-varnish it. I didn’t even try to sand out the imperfections; even my sloppy finishing work is still visible. All of these things are a testament to the family, to the story of our lives. We have grown and changed much around these pine planks. It is our flaws that make us who we are.