Fifty One.

Fifty one is impatiently awaiting the arrival of spring’s hellebores, hostas and hydrangeas. No, really: it’s sitting on my back porch every single morning, coffee in hand, monitoring the garden as the plants inch their way through the fertile soil. It’s planning dinners with portions meant for giants, filling plates all the way to the rim for a pair of teenage boys and a husband who somehow continues to eat that way, too. It’s Taco Tuesdays at home, with smoky margaritas and teenage-worthy mocktails. It’s making, from scratch, a smoked paprika-rubbed spatchcocked chicken with a side of blistered green beans, smothered in green romesco sauce. It’s Taylor Swift, sure, but it’s also an occasional unabashed blasting of the Indigo Girls from every Alexa in the house. It’s Book Club with the girls, and it’s also giving myself permission to fail to finish: books, home improvement projects, listening to my mother and husband and children and so on. (And so forth.)

Fifty one is spending every single day figuring out how to simultaneously be three things: wife, mother and daughter. It’s squeezing in moments to myself which usually involve either chocolate, jogging at a leisurely middle-aged pace through the forest, or watching middle-of-the-day romcoms that not a single member of my family would agree to watch, with the obvious exception of my best golden girl, Zoe. It’s so many trips to doctors with my mom: gerontologists, neurologists, cardiologists, physical therapists, and surely more “ists” that I’ve yet to meet. (God help us all.) It’s powers of attorney and medical directives and a whole lot of things I naively never imagined having to consider. But it’s also a beautiful and leisurely drive to the Skagit Valley to see daffodils and snow geese with my mom, watching her wield her cane like a boss as she navigates a new normal. It’s a whole lot of bittersweet. It’s keeping up with four different calendars and by grace or a miracle, managing to show up for my thirteen year old’s Ultimate Frisbee games. It’s the constant work of witnessing the fifteen year old navigate teen angst and five paragraph essays. The truth is this: it’s absolutely exhausting.

Fifty one is weddings–nephews getting married, eventually having babies, I suppose. It’s funerals, too, some only in my head as I mourn the loss of people I never thought would die. It’s a pair of fluorescent pink flamboyant backyard flamingos I’ve named Lester and Clyde. It’s also growing a four and a half foot tall avocado tree in my sunroom, sprouted from an avocado seed rescued from the compost bin circa global pandemic onset, 2020. It’s naming every plant in our house, and then, thanks to a middle-aged brain, promptly forgetting 65% of those names. It’s hot flashes. It’s teenage boys filling up every inch of the space in our small house, surrounding us with a cacophony of deafening sounds including but not limited to Maroon 5, guitar chords strummed from behind closed doors, and truly terrible, mind-numbing Youtube content that only a parent of a teenager can understand. 

Fifty one is figuring out how to live in a body that sometimes creaks in places that were, once upon a time, well-oiled joints with nary a squeak. It’s a dreaded squishiness in the body, but also a very welcome softness in the heart. It’s understanding with absolute clarity that life is an awfully short journey. It is therefore booking the plane tickets and taking the leaps of faith. It’s spontaneity and carpe-the-dieming at every opportunity presented. There’s a definitive element of late-blooming brewing within the cauldron of middle age. Fifty one is seeing the end on the distant horizon through the windshield, and wanting to soak up every drop of goodness before both I and my beloveds depart. 

Fifty one is undeniably the middle of it all. It’s the embodiment of Janus, god of beginnings and endings. Fifty one is looking forward and looking back simultaneously. It’s filled with insight, perspective, sadness, and delight. It’s a wonderful, awful (and awe-filled) destination, and if I’m being 100% grateful, it’s a rather fortunate place to be. May we all be so lucky to make it this far. Here’s to another fifty years.

On Father’s Day.

My golden girl Zoe is zippering at high speed around the backyard, a rare Juneuary blue sky day with cumulus clouds spreading across the sky and simultaneously, a big sheet of stratus clouds ensconcing my heart. What I am not feeling is regret, and it’s not remorse either, but instead simply a visceral sadness at the passing of my father this weekend. Today, on Father’s Day, you’ll find me mostly alone with my dog and my tears, processing this cascade of feelings.

Every human has her own hand drawn map of childhood. It is rife with flaws and missteps, filled with roads traveled, sights seen and remembered along the way–colored in the way she personally viewed the world as she moved through it, her family right there with her in life’s classroom, drawing their own little life maps. I know this to be true, because I have my own children now, and we so often reflect upon our shared experiences in entirely different shades of the same color. It’s kind of remarkable, actually. Being separated from my dad all these years, I realize now that my own map is so very different from those belonging to my three brothers. My map stops at adolescence, when my dad stopped suggesting destinations and handing me colored pencils and instead, became a shadow behind my eyes.

Our relationship (well mostly the lack thereof over the past thirty years) is complicated, to say the least. I needn’t go into that today. But the hardest truth probably is that we never actually said goodbye, even though we parted ways eons ago. And so the sadness in my heart is likely rooted in that, which is both undeniable and a little surprising to myself and all who know me. I’m trying to figure out how to make peace with that, knowing full well that this may take a while.

Today has just been a series of moments and memories; of tears welling up in my eyes over the loss of a father I once knew; of hugging one of my best friends for a little too long this morning because that’s when the tears finally hit. (Thank you, amiga. I love you. Also, grief is so weird.) Of, at my very core, being 100% human and feeling the sadness over the loss of a soul I once loved. 

My tears are over our shared love of dogs, all shapes and sizes but especially retrievers and dogs named Holly. It’s remembering my dad confidently throwing me into right field with a baseball team full of boys, knowing I could field a grounder and throw the ball to first base just like a boy. It’s his constant hustle, the beads of sweat accumulating across his brow, the Schlitz beer that he would, on occasion, generously share with our black lab. It’s keeping him awake on road trips from the front middle seat of his old truck, fishing from an endless stream of irrelevant questions about state capitals and roadside flowers. It’s the insufferable sense of nostalgia that he imparted to every one of his children, myself included. It’s campouts and campfires and Dutch oven beef stew, it’s walkie talkies in the desert and Yahtzee at the table in the 5th wheel RV. It’s old-school sleeping bags and a huge canvas tent in 100 degree heat on the beach in San Felipe, Mexico. It’s the constant storytelling. (Oh dad, enough already.) It’s fishing at Lake Tahoe and learning to water ski, and believe it or not, it’s also a little bit about a fiery red-headed sprite of a second wife named Marlene. (May she, too, Rest In Peace.) 

These are the shiny and bright things I have lost with the passing of my father, though in reality, I lost them long ago. These are the happy moments I mourn. The grief isn’t new, but newly revisited with the passing of my father, the one whose DNA teased my hair into curls, gave me disproportionately short legs, and instilled in my body the impetus to never stop moving. I guess if you were still here, I would say thank you for those joyful moments and memories, dad.

Me, Kenny, and probably Holly.

Today, there is only forward. There is always just that one inevitable direction, whether moving through the unexpected loss of your father or the protracted loss of your beloved family dog, Toulouse. The feelings soften over time. I know this to be true. I’ve lost before and the one true thing about life is that we are all, every single soul, barreling down the road of this experience at lightning speed toward the inevitable end. May we all make the journey worth the ride. 

Peace out, dad. If the Rainbow Bridge is real, please share some love to every single dog we have ever loved. I can almost see you smiling.

Ted, circa my childhood.

Raising Kids in Second Amendment ‘Merica

It’s uncanny—my heart can no longer absorb the news; I cannot read today’s developments. I refuse to learn about the gunman’s history, and this time around, I find that all I can do is turn my eyes away from the stories of the dead children, all of whom I will never, ever have the privilege of knowing. 

Instead, I listen to Haim’s Hallelujah on repeat on every speaker in the house. “Why me, how’d I get this hallelujah?” (I don’t know. Perhaps it’s dumb luck. Perhaps it’s that Washington state has stricter gun laws than Texas.) I sit with my golden retriever on the couch, my tears drying on her coat, her big brown eyes absorbing this collective grief the world is feeling. It’s no wonder she always looks so melancholy. I try so very hard to turn my face away from reality. And yet, I am still bombarded from every angle: friends sending articles, clips of enraged parents and politicians, Instagram stories and reels and memes sharing anger and disbelief on repeat. I’m just trying to find that feeling of numbness I had just two days ago. Because numbness is far superior to the unbearable ache in my heart for those lost babies and the families they left behind. 

Those children, just babies, they are all of our children. They are Oliver’s twinkling eyes, his laughter, his outlandish and ridiculous joy at being alive. They are his long messy locks, his mustard stained hoody, his endless creativity and shine. They are Malcolm’s sense of wonder, his constant wandering, his innocence, his freedom. They are his reverence for nature and his soft, sweet smile. They are your child, whatever wonder of your creation she may be. Imagine, just for a moment, having that all taken away in the blink of an eye. Imagine trying to move forward with your life in the wake of that madness. 

Those children were hope, they were learning. They were our future. And now, those babies are just dead. Lights out, but not in that gently annoying manner so often heard from down the hall at 10:39pm from my room to my boys’ room. Their parents will never experience that privilege of parenting again. Like countless children before them, and shadows of the next generation of babies whose lives will end in terror in front of the barrel of a gun. Meanwhile somehow, our country is grossly focused on passing laws to ban abortion (as if that is what we need to preserve innocent lives), while simultaneously protecting the rights of violent men to bear arms and kill children. In classrooms. At gunpoint. I wonder if a lawmaker lost his own baby in a school shooting, would he suddenly stand in a different light? Would his heart soften? Would he resolve to be the change we all, every goddamn parent in this country, wish to see?

Meanwhile today, as I said goodbye to my boys this morning as they headed out separately to catch buses and trains to school, I did not pause to hug them more tightly than yesterday. What’s the point? Because for this generation of children growing up in today’s version of second amendment America, school shootings are the norm. They happen on the daily. In their eyes, there’s nothing novel about it. This is their childhood, and my heart is broken.

Middle Aged Bad Assery

Memory, as it turns out, is a bit of the devil in disguise. My recollection of the Kalalau trail at 24 years old unfolds thusly: hiking in a red and white polka dot bikini paired with circa 1995 nylon soccer shorts; naively filling my water bottle from the fast-flowing streams, no filter in sight (leptospirosis soon followed, of course); dancing naked on Kalalau beach with my Marine acquaintances and diving joyously into crashing waves under a night sky illuminated by a veritable snowstorm of stars, eventually falling asleep on a warm sandy beach, blanketed only by my beach towel. Day two, homeward bound: hiking back out over the eleven miles, trailing my Australian crush, Greg. I recall only endless laughter and a stop or two for trailside pour over coffee, because he was unapologetically cool before hipster was a thing. And that’s it: no rising at 3am to secure camping permits, no endless packing lists, no imminent peril along the trail, no fatigue, no interminable ascents and descents, no hardship, no blisters, and exactly zero forethought or planning–just pure, unadulterated, spontaneous 20-something bliss.

You’d think that at 50, I’d have moved beyond the impulsive recklessness of youth. But to be honest, the call of adventure is my jam, clouding all semblance of rational thought and vision. Thus, when Amy invited me to tag along on a trip with her parents to Kauai last month, I eagerly suggested we take on the Kalalau trail so that I could share with her my number one hiking memory of all time. The emerald cliffs with razor-sharp ridges towering high above the wild Pacific Ocean! The desolate beauty of a wild coastline! The melodic cacophony of songbirds along the way! The trailside coffee, Amy! I assured her that it would be one of the most epic experiences of our lives. Which, as it turns out, wasn’t far from the truth.

What I didn’t mention or acknowledge until perhaps a month prior to the trip was the fact that this trail is over 22 miles long with a cumulative elevation gain of around 12,000 feet. With a cursory google search, you’ll quickly discover it listed amongst the top ten most dangerous hikes on the planet. The trail is frequently narrow, crazy steep and rocky, littered with hazards ranging from steep drop-offs into the ocean below, dangerous currents, and falling rocks. You guys, what were we thinking? Amy and I are middle aged athletes, loosely defined of course: she hikes her usual 4ish miles per week, and I lift a few weights here and there and religiously run 3 miles, twice a week, with a cumulative elevation gain of zero feet. I threw in a few training hikes up Mt. Si for good measure and Amy, well, let’s just say that she was relying on her innate athletic abilities to come to the forefront and shine a light on our adventure. By all measures, the two of us were woefully underprepared for this endeavor.

But, whatever. As with most adventures, we threw caution to the wind. We secured a couple of backpacks, neither of us having backpacked since (cough) pre-kids (14+ years). We packed some almonds and mediocre-looking freeze dried dinners, threw together the ten essentials with extra moleskin for good measure, borrowed a water filter from the hubby, stuffed our cutest bikinis into the bottom of our bags, and hit the trail like a couple of middle aged, semi-foolish badass mamas.

Partners in crime, day one, ascent #2 of 6,854,935.

Without going into excessive gruesome detail, suffice it to say that this was 100% the most challenging thing Amy and I have collectively ever done. The trail starts off steeply, gaining I don’t know how many feet just to reach the acme and subsequently descend the same unknown number of feet. At the bottom of that first descent, ford a stream. Wash, rinse, repeat the same ascent/descent torture along the perimeter of the Na Pali coastline. Scatter in an assortment of harrowing cliffs (one aptly named “Crawler’s Ledge”), blustery winds, harsh sun, incredibly narrow trails, and loose footing along the way. Sneak in a detour or two through the most majestic, magical, magenta forest I’d never before imagined. (And thank Gaia GPS for getting us back on track.) Pass countless outcroppings of wild lantana, black jacks and other tropical flowers too exotic to name. Completely sweat through every inch of your clothing. Cross paths, many times over, with miniature herds of incredibly agile non-mountain goats. Throw in the mind-boggling, non-remote/backcountry experience of tourist helicopters blazing over our heads every thirty minutes or so. Lean into your trusty hiking poles on every descent, paying close attention to each footfall in some areas, lest you fall off a cliff. (I wish I was kidding.) We both bit the dust a couple of times, laughing it off but also thanking our lucky stars that our momentum didn’t tumble us off a cliff.

Hiking over the Hawaiian mountain apple stamens. Elusive, addictive, and fantastical.

We eventually reached Kalalau beach, where we erected our borrowed tent like a couple of seasoned pros, after dancing in the waves at the beach. Well, not exactly: those waves were crashing in every direction threatening to rip a girl’s soul out to sea if she dared enter. The sand at the beach swallowed our legs nearly up to our knees. There was no naked dancing, no joyous splashing in the waves. Worth mentioning again: memory is the devil. That said, the lonely beach was divine in other ways: the warm sand cradled our aching, stiff middle aged mama bodies as we watched the sun fall off the horizon. The mighty Pacific Ocean stood sentinel over our camp, keeping us company with the lullaby of her crashing waves as the night lit up with innumerable stars. The chorus of songbirds burst to life at the break of dawn, waking us from our light slumber. (Very light, in my case, thanks to the world’s most uncomfortable “ultralight” camping gear, once again, borrowed from my husband. Thanks, Dave.)

Camp. Clearly a seasoned pro.

The legendary Kalalau Beach.

Day two: back on the trail we went, after an underwhelming cup of camp coffee and rehydrated watery eggs and sausage. Approximately 8 hours later, we arrived where we had started our journey just 36 hours earlier. We were muddied, blistered, bruised, stiff, sore and woefully under-caffeinated. But the bit that we didn’t plan on: Amy and I earned our goddamn badass merit badges. We were probably two of the oldest people on the trail, with the exception of a group of 60-somethings who were doing the trek over the course of several days instead of two. We passed kids who were half our age, doing their twenty-something tomfoolery in Tevas and tank tops. We owned that trail like a couple of bosses, and I’m sure in twenty years when we’re sitting around the Solo Stove drinking our margaritas by the sea, we will fondly recall this adventure as life-affirming, life-changing and soul-charging. I’m so grateful for my magical friend, and for our adventurous spirits that never cease to disappoint. Here’s to the next fifty years. May we all be so lucky–life is such a privilege.

The entrance to Crawler’s Ledge.

Amy owning the ledge. She’s my hero.

Day two: headed back out. When you’re an ultralight pro like me, you wear the same clothes every day. (Not my finest idea.)

There it is! Our final descent across the red cliffs to the legendary and remote Kalalau Beach.

The Hybrid In-Between Life

It was autumn when I stopped the daily fight, and sort of began to accept this new normal. At the front door is a stack of bandanas, five of which spark joy because they are the same beautiful teal as my glorious Bianchi road bike, which incidentally sits neglected in the basement with completely deflated tires. Each morning, I tie a bandana around my neck, and there it sits until I go to bed, doing its job off and on throughout the day: rising and falling, covering my mouth and nose around loved ones and strangers, both.

I find my heart at a crossroads, confused by the emotions of hope and dread twining through its chambers, sometimes tangling wildy. Everything feels halfway there, semi-complete, partially hopeful. Schools call this pretending-to-be-normal model “hybrid”, which confuses my scientist self, who formerly applied that noun to heterogeneous species. There are so many rules: wash your hands, stand six feet apart, do this, don’t do that, and definitely don’t forget to judge the choices of your neighbors and friends on repeat. The now is very confusing, in which we are lining up for vaccines and debating our choices as if we actually have a choice to make.

Our family is approaching a state of being half-vaxxed, and if I’m truthful, I’ll admit to being half-happy about that achievement. We are half in school and half absent from the joyous, cacophonous halls. We are dreaming of gathering but never quite arriving. Sometimes we make travel plans and our hearts fill with that sort of glee whose existence had long since been forgotten, but when it comes time to put the plane ticket in the cart for October, we hesitate, unable to find confidence in what the now will look like in just six short months. What is this foreign land we now must navigate?

Our pandemic circle is small, but also somewhat mighty. I have a third son by accident–the ten year old neighbor kid who shows up on our doorstep every afternoon and knows how to lock the door on his way out at dinnertime. Perhaps soon he will be sitting down with us at the table, complaining about asparagus and cauliflower alongside my own two boys. Our dog, Zoe, expects three meals a day instead of two now, because she witnesses the humans eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner so why shouldn’t she? Her waist is growing wider. Mine grew too, at first, thanks to buttered toast, copious cups of sweetened coffee with homemade cookies and fudge from Grandma Rita (because why not), and then shrank during these past twelve months, and I’m back where I started in body. What I wouldn’t give to be back where I started in my heart and head.

The crew of Saturday dudes gather now at the ball court to play cricket, just as they have since I first noticed them in the fall, but now with not a mask in sight. Hope-dread fills my heart once again. I wonder when I’ll be able to witness life as just…life. I wonder when we will stop feeling judgment at people’s pursuit of happiness. I wonder, is this actually a new reality or a re-imagination of something that always lived within us, anyway?

In Seattle, when I walk the sidewalks in my neighborhood, people step six feet aside, masked, eyes averting one another. It is a new breed of the legendary Seattle Freeze, one which I find even more discomforting than the last version. My nearly 13 year old son has taken to smiling under his mask, saying “good morning” in that awkward young man loud voice of his, to every passerby on our morning walks. It astounds me how few people return his kindness. It seems we are walking around in a numb shock still, ready to move forward but not trusting in the light seeping through the cracks and beckoning us in. We all crave normalcy, which is supposedly around the corner, but I wonder: will we actually be able to step back into that life when it finally arrives?

And yet, here we are in mid-April: it is springtime and everything is in bloom, reminding me that no matter how much we might sometimes rebel against it, life always continues to move forward. There is no turning back now.

Writing in the Margins of Life

I found that which follows on my phone, tucked away in my notes app, dated April 12, 2019. It is from the before times, as we call our pre-pandemic life. It was when we did not hibernate in our homes; a time when we could cross the border freely and lick our fingers without fear of a virus. It was a time when being together constantly was not the norm, but something we very much looked forward to and called “vacation.” It was a different kind of happiness, but a joy I can still feel deep in my bones. I trust this joy is tucked away in the upper left corner of my heart.

****************************

I hear songbirds outside our sliding glass door, which feels a bit like an anomaly, given that on top of Whistler mountain, it’s 20 degrees and 100 percent winter. Down here at the mountain’s base, spring, with great effort and minimal complaint, finds herself emerging from the grey.

I miss Zoe, which feels self-indulgent. She’s just a dog, a refrain that runs on repeat through my head. I try to make up for her absence in front of the local Starbucks, lavishing attention on any four-legged friend I can find. Today I met a fat yellow retriever, age 13, and a wiggly young black lab. I forgot to ask their names, but my sleeves are covered in bits of golden dog hair. My heart overfloweth. 

Cartoon Network is on repeat at our mountain home, but we remind ourselves that vacation time is a different sort of time, entirely. A time where husbands forget about meetings and agendas; where “the cloud” of which we speak isn’t some abstract term for a technology I will never quite understand, but rather a word that makes sense to a nine year old boy: cumulus, cirrus, stratus, stormy. These are the clouds we talk about on vacation. I sit here drinking tequila laced fizzy juice and eating Canadian salt and vinegar potato chips without remorse on the eve of my 47th birthday. We imagine, if just for a brief moment, life thusly: skiing all day, winding down into evening with the only possible answer to the question, “What time is it?” being “Vacation time, silly.”

It’s a weird space, this in between. There is a void where school and work normally fit in, but it’s also so easy to imagine this alternate reality as the everyday. Sort of.

When I was 24, I tried on vacation as a lifestyle. It was a moment of undeniable privilege (autocorrected to provolone, which made me smile. I love cheese). I tried to surf (fail), I rollerbladed every day around the Lanikai loop, I developed a crush on a hot Australian Marine, I ran each day at first morning light, I slept at night with the windward breeze cooling my dreadfully hot bedroom, and I’m fairly certain that I read every book in the fiction section of the Oahu library. And then, unexpectedly, I got bored. It took three months, but eventually I craved purpose, which I guess is to say that margaritas and fiction and exercise-induced endorphins are not exactly fuel for driving a soul toward her life’s purpose. 

My husband sits stretched out on a sofa before me, honing his expertise on the elusive Whistler Sasquatch. It’s different from his daily, and I’m smiling just thinking about it. My teeth are a tiny bit drunk after one margarita. Sushi beckons from down the street, and life’s purpose is nonexistent. 

Vacation time is a slice of this between period: of living entirely in the now; of seeing your children and husband without expectation. The in between moments so often turn out to be the moments we remember: your almost 11 year old decides to make a “secret” birthday card for your impending celebration, which I’m expecting to consist of a slice of happiness in the form of a peppermint frosted brownie, and hopefully a bluebird day on the mountain. I’m just hoping that I don’t fall down.

Expectations:  low, contentment:  high. We eventually reach the bottom of the bag of chips, licking our fingers to attract the last crumbs of tangy, salty goodness.

Every single thing ends. Entropy, I suppose. All of these moments too will end, but I’m elated to find the joy in the right now. It’s funny how it takes being away to arrive in the present moment.

Today, mid-pandemic, on my Sunday run at Green Lake.
Change is constant, they say, but this piece of my life is everlasting.

Pandemic Grief

Let’s talk about grief, shall we? Because what I’m experiencing in this brief moment in humanity’s history is an acute sense of grief, a subject I stumbled into over three years ago when I felt certain that my best friend was going to die. By some goddamned miracle, cancer did not take her from me, but my grief journey, as it turns out, was well worth the ride.

My rock solid, emotionally stable, why-don’t-you-ever-freak-out Midas of a husband recently put a name to my current journey: grief. And yes. Duh. Now I see clearly why I have not been handily weathering this pandemic-sized storm. It’s not just a personal grief over the loss of what was, but rather a collective grief shared by the whole of humanity. It’s the loss of special moments at school for the kids; the loss of dinners with my mom and weddings that probably will not be. It is plans thrown to the wind, replaced by sleeping in every day like a teenager and waking up drenched in the heaviness of dread. It’s FaceTime with friends, and feeling profoundly empty the second you disconnect. It’s every single proverbial cup half empty and never, ever half full.

It’s watching the world as you thought you understood it collapsing around you, relentless waves crashing upon your shore, never letting up. One after the other they come, and all you can do some days is gasp for breath before the next one’s arrival. It’s keeping your eyes solidly focused on your family, your hands wrapped around your cup of coffee, golden retriever at your side, because the alternative is inconceivably dark for your soul.

And this grief shit is heavy, a heaviness that cannot be shared in the usual way, with your proverbial sisterhood, side by side in laps around the lake together, trying to make sense of it all. Denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance. It’s grief, you guys, and I’m working my way, albeit haphazardly, through each and every stage.

Green Lake park, off limits y’all.

 

With each new day, you wake up to discover another loss, until you think nothing more can be taken. Today, they took the parks from Seattle, and you wonder, will it ever end? Yes, I suppose it eventually will. But when it does finally conclude, humanity will have transformed in an irreversible way. Maybe we will be more compassionate, perhaps slower, more intentional, introspective and kind. Maybe our trips will be next door to eat with our neighbors instead of across international borders, finding friendship and kindness where we never before thought to look.

And perhaps this is the acceptance phase of my grief journey: finding normal in the new, learning to look for the joy in places I couldn’t clearly see before. But also knowing that, like grief, you don’t get over the loss. I will mourn all the change without question, but I will also work on moving forward. Remember that saying, the only way forward is through? And here we are, heading through the pandemic, blanketed with grief and maybe a ray or two of hope, eyeing a future we can’t yet actually see.

Summer’s Light.

 

We lead an unscheduled summer by design and by choice. Days start slowly, with a warm golden retriever nose nudging me awake as the sun rises slowly over some horizon I cannot see from my house in the city. The boys laze around in boxer shorts and blankets, eating half-stale cereal from boxes, assembling a breakfast of champions, littering Luna Bar wrappers across the island counter so diligently tidied the night before. Long days stretch into the shadows of our memories, and without warning or invitation, the end of August has arrived.

Summer’s light is fading, something we notice nightly on our evening walk. The morning rainbows arising from the faceted crystal hanging from our south-facing bank of windows have come out for their end of season encore, slowly dancing across the walls. It is quiet, with the exception of the sound of the freeway’s ocean waves crashing in the not-so-faraway. My children are not alone in their dread for school to begin: a life with clocks and deadlines, packed lunches, shoes lined up near the front door, a dog left behind, forlorn, peering out at us driving away from her cozy perch on the couch.

This pace is a privilege. Most of the world is at work or at day camp, or possibly (the lucky few, depending on one’s level of extroversion) at summer camp in the woods on a gorgeous island, making fires and friends and flashy pottery in the art barn. The boys and I, we have not done these things.

Our accomplishments this summer are not noteworthy: Malcolm completed the Summer Reading Challenge not once, but twice, assembling an army of trinkets and coupons from the local bookstore. Oliver and our neighbor kid, Theo, presided over one chickadee funeral in our front yard. We have walked our girl, Zoe, through Ravenna Park no fewer than 79 times–evening, midday, morning, twilight, dawn’s light, midnight. We have gone swimming in faraway lakes, managing to not quite drown. We have seen cousins and aunts and uncles, not long lost but always stoked to be found. We have hiked on the flanks of Mt. Rainier and deep into the Cascades. We have spent time with grandma, and spent too many hours in the backseats of cars and front seats of trains. We have played Marco Polo in a mediocre pool at a mediocre motel in Klamath Falls, Oregon. We have planted pumpkin seeds and witnessed three tiny pumpkins emerge, veritable fruits of our labors. Currently, the boys are out in the alley, hot on the trail of the elusive Ravenna Park coyote family. We have done a lot of sighing, a lot of toe-tapping, and a lot of figuring out what the other end of the statement, “I’m bored” might be.

There are LEGO bricks littered across both levels of our house. The hot glue gun mostly sits unattended and switched on, pipe cleaners and googly eyes and golden thread twisted into tiny characters making up a small army of “Bobs.” (Don’t ask; I don’t get it either.) There are remnants of comic books, half illustrated and abandoned, sitting on the dining table week after week. Malcolm caught (and of course released) his first fish ever. Oliver clandestinely collected obsidian, breaking all sorts of national park laws, I’m certain. Malcolm perfected a Nirvana riff on his guitar, and in so doing, intimately introduced me to Nirvana in a way I never would have chosen. We saw a whistling marmot, one hundred thousand wildflowers, and cumulous clouds most folks in the pacific northwest get to experience for perhaps twelve days each year.

Skyline trail, Mt. Rainier.

I have not yet mentioned that we went to Scotland and England at the start of summer. I’m not sure why this is…does it pale in comparison to the innate beauty of boredom that comes with long sunny days spent stateside in the summer? Not exactly. But I am left wondering which memories will seat themselves firmly into the backseats of our memories of a childhood I can only define as mostly magical. Will it be the Edinburgh castle, the highland cows, mom and dad stopping for yet another shot of espresso, riverboats meandering down the Thames, seven story toy stores, Picadilly Circus, the much anticipated crown jewels, the glorious, chaotic, tumultuously loud rides on the Underground? The overrated changing of the guards, the world’s cutest one-eyed pug perched outside the Tesco market?

 

Edinburgh tunnels, Scotland.

 

Or will it be staring at summer skies, seeing animals in the clouds, eating blueberries straight from the bush, still warm from the summer sun? I do not know where memory begins and alternately, where memory ends, but I do believe that memory is one of the ways in which we figure out what is important to us. We cannot predict where the seeds of memory will germinate and root, but we can only hope that some do. I suppose my only truth is this: my heart is already mourning the end of summer.

Walking through wildflower meadows in Mammoth, California. Constant companion: his imagination.

 

 

On Friendship, Both True and Blue.

She is simultaneously a thick slice of Portland sunshine and Portland rain, the likes of which produce double rainbows dancing in the sky.

Like a song forever in my heart, she waltzed herself into my life more than a decade ago with tales of faraway lands: Copacabana, but not the one that you think you know.

Standing together in our white lab coats, Spanish floated between us with a curious ease. She taught me to fearlessly draw blood into a needle from a tiny vein. From her, I also learned to love a friend most uncommonly, and without surrender.

Her beauty is immeasurable, the glow seated in her soul. You would miss its depth entirely if you were not to dig deeply.

She is the tranquil eye of the storm, endlessly and without pretense showing us all of the pretty and sometimes most peculiar things.

She speaks in harmonious metaphor, mostly in lowercase i, if that is a thing.

Her eyes see things ordinary folk do not see. She captures the world through her camera lens: barbershops and brand new babies, bougainvillea and true blue love on the shores of Mexican beaches. She finds the soul in nonliving things. It is both extraordinary and beautiful.

She is a mama-bear to two gorgeous children, and you can feel the burning heat of her love if you stand too close.

She is a light so bright. She is gleaming turquoise in the hot desert sun. She is tide pool starfish, fourth of July sparklers. She is street tacos and black tea, organic milk and backyard bee honey.

She is all of these things to those fortunate enough to land in her circle,

and I am blessed to have spent time in her orbit.

She was there for both a reason and a season, but I will adore her all of my life. I miss my dear and true blue friend. Perhaps distance makes the heart grow fonder, but I sure do wish she and I lived next door to one another.

Thief of Joy

 

It’s middle school season for my eldest and his peers: applications to private schools submitted, decisions made, and futures solidified. These are admittedly privileges of Seattle wealth, opportunity, test preparation classes, and IQ. I am the first to acknowledge that fact, as a woman who paved her own way through public school in this city, and self-funded her college education through hard work and a few academic scholarships. These choices of privilege were not part of my childhood. My destiny was in my middle-class hands, and it was entirely my job to erect my own damned ladder and rise.

Bear with me for a moment as I veer off in a seemingly disparate direction. I recently heard this parenting analogy and it’s all I can think of lately. In a nutshell, we prepare for parenting our children the same way in which we prepare for a trip to Italy. We buy the guidebooks, we study the maps and memorize all the inner workings of public transportation. We book our hotels and secure our well-qualified guide for the leaning tower of Pisa, who surely will have some novel, never-before-heard explanation about the four-degree lean. We have our entire itinerary planned out to the very last detail. We board the plane, lean our seat back into the knees of the poor woman behind us, and close our eyes with the secure knowledge that we have crossed every last “t” in preparation for this adventure. The plane’s wheels hit the tarmac twelve hours later, and the pilot announces, “Welcome to Peru. We hope you enjoy your trip.” Wait, what?

Many of my friends have landed in Italy this spring with their middle school acceptance letters. They are basking in the glow, because their children have landed in the country for which they have been preparing for the past eleven years. I am the first to wholeheartedly admit that it is a little bit hard for me to join in celebration. If I am to be a truth-teller, I recognize  that these feelings are a mainly a reflection of my own history of being a competitor, an achiever, and a goal-accomplisher. I have always been a round peg, and it’s hard not to want the same for my son, but he is wired differently and let’s be honest: he doesn’t even care. (Which is so very beautiful.) Yet still, having my son follow the unscripted path is hard for this mama who, despite my very best intentions, cannot help but succumb to comparison with my girlfriends and their children.

Here’s the thing, though: parenting Malcolm has been a journey of absolute immersion into the unexpected and unplanned. With him, we have been exploring the countryside of Peru for the past eleven years. There is no Colosseum here, but have you ever been to Machu Picchu? I have, and it’s beyond explantation and it makes no sense that it even exists, but it will take your breath away the first time you experience it. There are terraced potato fields here, a type of superstructure you never even knew existed from your extensive research on Roman architecture. The language is a different one than I had studied in my phrase books, but it is beautiful and I’m learning vocabulary I would not have otherwise needed to know. Also, what I’ve come to realize here in Peru is that I soak up the sun at a different latitude with my boy, but at its essence, it is the exact same sun as the one that bathes Italy in a warm summer glow.

Traveling in Peru without the guidebooks, one must come to the realization that in order to survive, you have to throw out all your expectations and instead just bask in the fire of the experience as it burns before you. Sometimes it is so beautiful that my heart nearly bursts: witnessing my boy’s intrinsic empathy, compassion, independence, self-sufficiency, encyclopedic knowledge of world history, and true-blue love of our planet and every last inhabitant (including fire ants), for example. But that beauty is tempered with the frustration and challenge that accompanies trying to understand and correct things that are seen as deficiencies in the round-peg world. For Malcolm, writing does not come easily, math facts bounce around but rarely stick, test taking is akin to putting him in front of a firing squad, and social connection is never a guarantee. These are all formidable obstacles to fitting into that box of privilege that is the straight arrow path to some private schools. I’m pretty sure it’s not quite like this in the parenting world that is Italy. (Actually, I’m 100% sure, because our second born son has taken us on a predictable and perfectly-executed, nine-year-long guided tour of Italy, including jaunts into sunflower filled fields in the countryside and weeklong stays at formerly undiscovered beaches on the Mediterranean Sea.)

At the end of the day, more often than I wish were true, I must take a moment to remind myself that comparison is the thief of joy. Imagine a life without having ever explored Peru, without having experienced the heartfelt joy of discovering its existence. Peru was never meant to be compared to Italy. The color and culture of this journey is beautiful all on its own. We are lucky parents for having the opportunity to explore this wondrous world.

***** Eleven years of Malcolm *****