"Did you feed the dog?"

This, according to a 13-year-old girl giving a speech to an entire congregation, is one of the most frequent things her Mother has asked her over the years. “Did you feed the dog?” and then, not much later, the same question. The next day, “Did you feed the dog?” And on and on it went. The soundtrack of her time at home is variations of the theme, “Did you feed the dog?”

Only in hindsight was the girl able to appreciate what she surely, certainly, must have experienced with dread, eye-rolling and slumped-shouldered retreat to the chore as required. The pull from playing, from reading, from doing something, anything, that the girl had started to do, back to the realm of what she was supposed to do. The interruption of her own thoughts, her own plans, subsumed to those of her parents.

Only in hindsight did the girl realize that she was being taught how to care for something other than herself. That the nagging wasn’t for the (sole!) purpose of driving her crazy, but was to instill the ever-present sense that others have needs, too. That there is only one way to learn how to tend to another creature, and how to tend to ourselves, and that’s to have it modeled and then required of us, day in, day out.

Perhaps she’ll also come to see that she was being taught the very nature of love. We learn to brush our teeth daily, to put on fresh clothes, to clean our dishes, to take out the trash and recycling (and, if you’re in my area, the food waste), to do the most mundane of daily tasks, and that this forms the basis of how we love. We do things for our loved ones whether we want to or are in the mood for it; whether it is a grand statement of adoration or a lowly chore to help make home life more livable. Love, as I tell the people I work with, is not a noun or a vague feeling; it’s a verb. Love is the set of constant, relentless actions we take to meet another’s needs. Love is the keeping another in mind even as we unwind, or want to escape for a few minutes, or read a book, or play with our (grown-up) friends. We love ourselves through relentless self-care. We love others the same way. We are kind when we’d rather be rude and snippy; we forgive when we’d prefer to punish with grudges; we accept weakness but focus on the strength. We remember to feed the dog.

Only when this girl is a mother in her own right will she understand that the constant reminding is exactly the way she was loved by her parents. That when she’s too tired to cook, she’ll still feed her child. When she’s too tired to read a bedtime story, she’ll probably read a few pages anyway. That when she doesn’t have much of anything left over to give, she’ll give it. She will worry and ask and wonder if she’s done all she can that day, then go to sleep and wake up and do it all over again.

What will my son’s soundtrack be? Some combination of “Did you brush your teeth?” and “If you finish putting things away completely the first time, you wouldn’t have to go back and do it again.” I hope his soundtrack is also filled with my laughter, my “Thank you, honey” for when he follows through on things, my “I love you” and “Thanks for a great day” and “I will take you anywhere” in response to his adaptability and good humor when we go someplace new. But this is just self-serving, as there’s no reason to believe that the 13-year-old girl’s mother didn’t pepper her daily barrage of chore reminders with love reminders. She ended her speech by thanking her parents, telling them how much she loved them.

John Gottman, a psychologist who has studied what makes couples successful (by actually studying couples in a research lab, set up like an apartment, so he can monitor their heart rates and galvanic skin responses and correlate their physical well-being to the audio-tape and videotape of every utterance, every embrace, every eye-roll, every dismissive glance, every smile, every grimace ...), has noticed that couples who stay together have a 5:1 ratio of supportive/ loving statements to complaints. Complaints are so difficult to hear that they require an overwhelming counterbalance of acceptance, respect and love.

There are days when I surely fall short of the 5-to-1 ratio. I can see it in my son’s eye-rolling, slumped-shouldered sense of being burdened by yet another chore reminder. He doesn’t experience this as a life-long lesson in how to demonstrate and express love. He doesn’t even know he has to learn how to love. He thinks he will go on forever being loved in the way parents love children, and being able to love others the way children love their parents. If he’s too tired to express love, he doesn’t. He just falls asleep. He doesn’t really have to do much yet (other than take out the trash, put his laundry away, brush his teeth, do his homework, set and clear the table, help unload groceries from the car...). Hmmm. He is doing a lot already.

So here’s to making a soundtrack with 5 strains of love, warmth, acceptance, reminders of just how much we value him, and one nagging musical overlay reminder to do the mundane, boring, sometimes unpleasant tasks that build the foundation of sustainable love. A soundtrack to accompany acts of love that he performs not only when he feels like it, but when he’d rather not.

Everyday Math

My son’s math curriculum is called Everyday Math – the idea is to use math concepts in everyday situations we encounter, rather than keep math separate, a subject during the school day that has no tie to real life. Thus, he can figure out fractions when we need only 2 of a dozen eggs, or find the perimeter of a Lego base, or do fraction and percentage equivalents on things like what percentage of his teeth got brushed (we haven’t actually done that one, but it sounds like something I just might do tonight). As the homework checker, I’m frequently required to check long division, perimeter estimates, areas of geometric figures I’ve forgotten the names of (“rhombus” just doesn’t seem to have a permanent place in my neural network). I have to follow the many manipulations of numbers to find out if there was a small error at any point in the calculations that would have led to a wrong answer. Did he do the addition correctly? Put the number in the right column? Did he carry the right number over if he is subtracting and regrouping (the politically correct, updated name for what I was taught was “borrowing” – but I guess there might be too many problems with borrowed numbers and who they really belong to, so now children must “regroup”).

Recently, my Mom turned 75. Neither she nor I can quite believe this. My husband and I spent most of our pillow talk the other night reflecting on the necessity for the math to be in error. We can’t have 75-year-old mothers (both our Moms are the same age, even though he’s 7 years older than me). There is no skill within the Everyday Math curriculum that we seem to be able to bring to bear that can solve this problem. We keep getting it wrong. The answer keeps being 75.

The narcissistic injury of being old enough to have old parents is so particularly painful that I think I’ve glossed over my Mom’s own difficulty – it is, after all, she who just turned 75. I know she doesn’t feel 75, as if any age has an actual feel. I remember my ”golden birthday” - turning 7 on the 7th of the my birthday month – and waiting, watching the clock for the numbers to turn to 7 am, absolutely expecting to feel different, but the second-hand passed the 12, and there I was, 7 years old, but I didn’t feel any different. I also thought 13 would have a feel, and then 18 (I always assumed the “little” birthdays wouldn’t feel different). And you’d think if any birthday could have made me feel like a different person it would have been my 20th, spent in Paris – Paris! Me, a Midwestern girl doing the oh-so-sophisticated study abroad thing, and here I was, turning 20, spending the night out with two new best friends who I’d met just a day or so prior to the trip, and we came back late to the youth hostel we were to stay at and were locked out. Locked out! So we took turns sleeping on a bench, one person always awake, until the hostel doors opened in the morning. And when they did, I was a full-fledged 20-year-old, and I felt worldly and grown up. I was full up with what I now know was the power of youth, but at the time I thought it was the magical power of adulthood.

But for most of my years since 20, I’ve felt that I’ve remained in my twenties. This is almost embarrassing, as I’m middle aged, but I don’t feel it. So my Mom’s math must be wrong, and maybe, maybe, if we re-worked the problem I’d end up 30-something, but certainly not 40-something. If I get surprised looking in the mirror and seeing the age, or simply looking at my hands as I type and seeing dry skin that has not a hint of youthfulness in it, imagine my Mom’s surprise. She blinked one day, got married, had some kids, raised them to adulthood, had some grandkids, sure, you can’t really deny that grandkids are gonna add some numbers to the equation, but there’s no way it should all add to 75.

75 is the age of old-age homes and prosthetic devices and dentures and things I associate with my own grandparents’ aging process. Of course, 75 is the new . . . give me a break, it’s not a new anything, even if 50 is the new 30 – but this can only be asserted by other people who are basically my age on the outside but haven’t matured a day past their inner age which is decades younger. But my Mom has her hair, her teeth, her sense of humor, and she’s able-bodied. She doesn’t color her hair, and hasn’t had a thing “done” – she’s the template for me as I grow older (again, it’s all about me) - if I ever stop coloring my hair.

In the short time since her birthday, she’s noticed a change in her energy level, a way in which pain stays just a bit longer than before. Psychological or real? After 75 years of walking upright, you’d think our bodies would groan, sag, buckle at time. We’re made out of flesh and bone and muscle tissue – not the strongest building materials around. My own body, so much younger than my Mom’s, groans, creaks, pops, a percussion section protesting moments when my mind announces imminent action. My husband has titanium and ceramic hips, but the rest of him is pure human, so it’s possible his hips will outlast the entire rest of his body. There’s a visual – all the rest of him gone except expertly crafted replacement hips.

My Mom is 75, and she has no idea how she got there. Sure, if pressed, she could recreate the narrative, a whole timeline of what she did and when, but that’s not the same as having the emotional sense that one has lived such a long time. How is it that lived moments seem so short, especially when some of them - such as the painful ones - last for an excruciatingly long time? I, too, can create a timeline and plot exactly what would account for my years and my life to date, but in general I just walk around assuming my life has always been this way and then getting surprised to (re)learn how much it has changed.

There is nothing original to say about the existential yearning for youth, for power, for the gift of more time; if we’re honest, what we want is time coupled with the strength and vitality of bodies we no longer have and wisdom we haven’t yet achieved. I have the luxury of being a generation behind my parents, and can continue to be foolish enough to think I’ll have a few more decades of time, and that I can still accomplish things, be the person I want to be, get closer and closer to . . . something. I wonder what my parents yearn for. Time well-spent before death? Time in a healthy body? Does my Mom still think about making a mark or leaving a legacy or things she’s hoped to accomplish in her lifetime? Does her life make sense to her? Is it the one she wanted? I sure hope the answers are “yes.”

I am in the midst of middle age, and my Mom is square into her old age. I feel more powerful now than I ever have – partly physical, since I’ve taken to exercising in a way I didn’t when I was younger, but not wholly physical, as I get that there are bits and parts of me that just don’t have the benefit of youthful resilience. And, my hearing is intact, so I hear every audible sound of protest my body now makes. I’m more resilient, more able to stand up for myself, more able to realize that certain things are just gonna work themselves out so I don’t need to do much except get out of the way and let the process continue. Not a strength of my youth, where I inserted my will, opinions, and any other control option available to me to try to force outcomes. Again, I thought I was being powerful and that it was the essence of my grown-up-ness that led me to be such a participant in my life; now I see the desire to control that which we can’t as something between youthful folly and the wistful tragedy of the human experience.

Happy Birthday, Mom. May you come to find – even at 75 – a feeling that your life makes sense to you. This is the only gift I can imagine being of any true value (other than the bonsai tree I had sent, which apparently died an early and unceremonious death, and a package of 75 Hershey’s kisses mixed with 75 little love notes, requiring my son to use Everyday Math to count out 75 of each), even though I can’t be the one who gives it to you. It’s the only gift that’s ever mattered to me, and it’s a crime it took me this long to receive it. But I did, and I think I’ve gotten it in time to bring with me as I step, year by year, right in your footprints, headlong into my own old age. It’s just a matter of adding more years to my current age – the most basic of everyday mathematics.

Florence and George

“Write this down, take a little note
To remind you in case you didn’t know
Tell yourself I love you and I don’t want you to go
Write this down.”
-George Strait, 1999

I heard this George Strait song on the radio, and it brought my Grandma Florence back to me. I could almost feel her with me, in the passenger seat, singing along. I was lost in a rare moment of unselfconsciousness, singing at the top of my lungs, not caring that I was at a stoplight where someone could have looked in to my car and seen me looking like a howling lunatic. Then I realized that my Grandma had never gotten a chance to hear this song; she died well before George Strait recorded it. He’s got tons of music, in fact, that she hasn’t heard (unless there’s a good country music station in Heaven, which I know I’m too old to believe in, but where else can you imagine your Grandma being?).

Grandma Florence loved George Strait. She preferred his fast-tempo songs to the ballads, in fact preferred dance tunes to ballads from anyone. Her philosophy: why listen to sad songs? There’s enough sadness already. She listened to the happy, danceable music, tapped her fingers on the newspaper on the table, and got lost in the joy of “Angel, Angelina” “Oh me, oh my sweet baby” and “Adelida.”

One year, for her birthday, I signed Florence up the George Strait Fan Club. She was ecstatic to receive their introductory packet – a signed photograph, information about his life. Her face lit up like the schoolgirl she still held deep inside her. She thought he was handsome, strong, and oh, could he sing. And she loved that he was a family man. That he married his high school sweetheart and they were still together. One love for a lifetime. Florence was that for my Grandpa Joe – she outlived Joe, as did most in her generation, but until his death he was a one-woman man who never stopped loving her.

George might be more handsome than my Grandpa Joe – just slightly - and he’s got a smoothness to his moves that Joe didn’t (unless he had them in his younger years and I was just not around to see it), but as far as I can tell, George and my Grandpa Joe were cut from the same cloth. After Joe died, Florence kept his name. She was Mrs. Joseph ________ until the end, no matter how many times my feminist strivings tried to argue that she was her own person so she could go by her own name. She lived and died in one community, the one wife of a man recognized widely throughout that community as a good, honest, generous man. Traits that George is known for, too.

If you’re reading this, Grandma, you’ll be happy to know George and Norma are still together – it’s been 39 years now. They’ve made it, somehow, through the tragic death of their daughter when she was 13, and no amount of George’s increasing stardom has threatened their relationship. Florence, at age 74, wept for George and Norma Strait’s loss. She’d wept for her own losses, too, but didn’t dwell on them. She wasn’t a dweller – no one who prefers up-tempo can linger long in melancholy or tragedy.

No one else in my family likes country music, so it was an absolutely private thing my Grandma and I shared. She favored George Strait, but back then, I was all over Alan Jackson. Black hat, dark hair for Florence; white hat and blond hair for me (I’d had a thing for shaggy-haired blonds, who I knew on some level were not for me, but that only strengthened their pull over me). Now, all these years later, it’s George who seeps into my musical pores; Alan Jackson’s music is great, don’t get me wrong. But it’s George’s voice that washes over me, and I sing along as loudly as I can and feel the bright, broad presence of a grandmother who seemed to see me in a way that others didn’t, knowing things I didn’t dare show others, and cherishing me just the same.

Florence has been gone over 15 years, which is hard to imagine but numbers make it so. I miss her, miss that she never got to meet her great-grandson who is named after her. I miss that she’s not around my table when I celebrate holidays. I miss her scolding me in the way she would, when my humor edged too close to sarcasm. I miss talking with her about my Mom, as we had such different perspectives on the same person. I miss that I can’t play Rummikub or cribbage with her or go swimming at the pool in her condo complex. I miss her gravelly, scratchy, hoarse deep voice which still seemed musical when she called for me, with a pet name that no one before or since has ever used.

When I hear George’s songs that Florence has never heard, I wonder: can she hear them? Does George know what a big fan he had in her – of course not, he has millions. But maybe George knows her anyway. Maybe he knows the essence of a strong, capable, loyal, loving woman who came up from hardship to live a life of honor and love and hard work, a woman who was quick to laugh and wanted to dance when she heard him play.

So thanks, George, for being a good man whose music gave such pleasure to a good woman. And thanks for sending me that little bit of Florence the other day.

Here’s a link to one of Florence’s favorite George Strait songs, Adelida: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf1aTVlc4SU

And here’s a link one of his recent songs that’s a favorite of mine, Troubadour, which she didn’t get a chance to hear. Or maybe she has: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo-tSAtM9ZQ

Over the river and through the woods . . .

My husband’s 96-year-old grandmother died this week. She had been relatively healthy and well for most of her years, but 95 ushered in the beginning of a slow yet relentless decline – hearing, vision, cognition, weight and muscle tone, her interests and pleasures, her memories and ability to stay present in interactions - all systems weakening until this once strong woman became a shadow of herself. I didn’t see her at the very end, but I envisioned her as a baby bird, fuzzy haired, toothless, and more bony than a living thing ought to be.

Her funeral will fall right smack dab in the middle of Spring Break – and we will have to postpone or cancel a trip to an indoor water park that we were set to take my son and two of his good friends. Nothing but water, pools, more water, water slides, pools, a hot tub for adults, some treasure hunt activities throughout the Lodge, and, of course, food. But mostly a family getaway time, with buddies for our only child, in a fantasy world. Not that unlike Disneyland – without the lines or rides - just pools for splashing, cavorting and playing. A place so unreal, so impossible to incorporate into everyday life that you happily agree to pay exorbitantly for the opportunity to feel completely removed from your every-day.

I don’t want to miss our Spring Break adventure – I took off of work to be with my son – vacation time is not that abundant. I don’t much want to attend a funeral – who does – but it’s a lifecycle event, as I see it, and if I show up for the happy occasions I’d better show up for the difficult ones. And I have to show my son how to do this, without resentment or bitterness. That life goes on even if certain pleasures get postponed. There’s no joy in a waterpark adventure if we haven’t supported and sustained the essential framework on which we live – our family. Our deepest joys will come from nurturing family and honoring the living as well as the dead. I’ve married into another person’s family and my place is with them, rather than in an 80-degree weather-controlled water playground. I’ll add my farewell and blessings and gratitude for getting to share ever-so-slightly in this woman’s life to the people who knew her so much better than I.

I’ve no doubt we’ll miss the water park, and I hope we can reschedule it rather than miss out completely. Yet part of me knows that it’s not the trips to Disneyland (or Disneyworld or a Disney Cruise) that make for a good life. It’s how we choose our everyday moments in the mundane reality of household chores, laundry, tables to set and clear, homework to be checked. There’s no room service at home, no treasure hunt for hidden gems and mysteries, and I don’t count a bathtub or shower as a water feature, although my son, who sings and dances nightly in the shower, might disagree. We make a good life every day, and if we’re lucky, we occasionally take ourselves and our good life with us on an adventure somewhere else. We don’t have to pay admission fees to enter “The Happiest Place on Earth” – we’re already there.

Spring Break this year now will have us go over the mountains, through the tumbleweeds,and actually over a river to Grandmother’s house at the Redeemer Lutheran Church. Once there, we’ll find loved ones waiting for us, to share the grief and sadness of the loss. We’ll provide whatever comfort we can and shed our own tears. We’ll build memories and talk and play cards and laugh and cry and eat – just like we were going to do at the waterpark (maybe without the tears, true) – a family vacation regardless of the change in destination.

Rest in peace, Grandma G.G.
May your memory be for a blessing.

More pie, please

The other night I was waxing nostalgic about lemon meringue pies. I had made some cookies and for the first time used lemon curd as a filling rather than jam, and the flavor sent me right back to family road trips for lemon meringue pie. Fried perch and then lemon meringue pie, to be exact. A template modified only slightly my junior year in London, where I had many a late night snack of French fries and chocolate cake.

Anyway, in the midst of my nostalgia, both for the flavor and the youth it takes to be able to polish off meals with this particular combination of food types, my husband announced, “Grandma B. used to make lemon meringue pie.” It was his turn for nostalgia.

I stalled for a few moments,then inquired if it was his mother or his grandmother who made the pies.

“My Mom. I’m sure she’d give you the recipe. All you have to do is call.”

More silence on my end. All I could envision was whipping egg whites into a frenzy but missing the essential capacity to whip them correctly, and having a soggy, flat-topped pie. When all I really want is one good slice, which could last me ‘til the end of the decade, because even though I adore this pie, I rarely eat it.

“Aren’t you a little behind on that project? I thought you were going to make pies.”

By this time, my son was totally on board with the idea that his mother should make another pie. Not, it turns out, because he’s a big pie fan – not so much – but because he’s the odd kid who prefers lemon and lime to chocolate and the thought of a lemon pie goes straight to his culinary soft spot. Plus, he got that I was being needled to do something, got that I was hedging and hesitating, and it was his turn to push me in the direction of doing something hard even when it seems daunting.

Something felt truly done for me when my first-ever pie came out so darned beautiful [even though I later learned that the bottom crust could have been flakier and the top was a bit unevenly browned]. But by our household standards, that pie was magnificent, and apparently I’ve been resting on the laurels that singular peach pie, followed by the success of our tulips, which have burst forth with purple glee and allow all three of us to walk slowly back and forth past them, marveling at the open buds, the not-yet-open ones, reveling in our success.

Parenting lessons can come back to haunt us in the oddest ways. It’s time for me to step up and put into action what I claim to be teaching my son: Do something hard even if your instinct is to back away – take the fear of failure with you as you plow headfirst into a new endeavor. Follow each success with further effort, as it’s only through real accomplishment that we have a sense of pride.

I did say I wanted to make pies. I guess I can’t stop after only making one. I have now promised to make this pie for my guys. My challenge, now that I’ve accepted it, is clear: I’ll be making my childhood favorite food, which I almost never eat now, from my mother-in-law’s recipe, which was one of my husband’s favorite foods that she made.

Oh my, the ways this pie might disappoint! What if my husband doesn’t like it? Or my son, who might take one bite and smile only politely? What if I don’t like it?

Here’s hoping this endeavor does all it might: evoke warm, happy, tasty sensations that will satisfy two grown-ups with very different childhood pie memories, and create a new experience for our own family. If I can pull it off, it will hold the tangy-sweet lemony taste of familial delight, topped with a light airy meringue whipped tall and proud by my own hand, unbowed in the face of attempting something difficult.