by bsquared5@aol.com | Nov 26, 2018 | Thoughts
If you’re lucky, despite your lack of merit or any earned grace, you may be fortunate enough a handful of times for a kindred spirit to come alongside you and walk a ways. Over three decades ago, due to the single-handed determination and strong will of her mother, one of those unlikely blessings knitted herself to me at the fragile and tenuous age of fifteen.
Today marks her fiftieth birthday. At the entrance to yet another decade we are lucky to face together, it strikes me that one of the things that most binds us is that we knew each other when. Should time clasp its stingy fingers around one of us, which inevitably it someday will, the other will remain to testify to our children. I knew her when.
What a different portrait we can paint than what our children know of us. To them, our moniker is simply “mom,” our presence a given in their universes. Everyone needs a person like this to keep them humble and grounded, to remind them of past innocence and the effort it took to get from there to here. She and I know each other differently, deeply, because we linked arms to weather puberty and periods, chemistry and college, self 
discovery and the social minefield of high school and beyond. We’d go out on the weekends with friends, me perched on the lid of the toilet while she did her hair and curled her eyelashes. There were braces and boys, angst, acne, and anxieties. Maybe our collective offspring would find it amusing to hear of our exploits, the episodic stories of our coming of age perhaps quaint or provincial to such sophisticated and worldly young adults of 2018. But maybe there’d be a little shock and awe thrown in for good measure at what we each have overcome.
One of my sisters dubbed her “four o’clock Michelle,” because every afternoon after school, our phone would ring and I’d tie up the line for a couple of hours as we downloaded the events of each day. Weekends, we swapped time at each other’s houses, our mothers in the background doing whatever it was mothers did. 
She taught me how to make excellent snicker doodle cookies, coached me through calculus and chemistry, and exponentially upped my ping pong game in her family’s basement.
Together, we were “not from around here,” having moved in to start high school from out of state–she from Ohio, me from Florida. We shared a lack of southern accents, lots of siblings, and a love of Abba. If that doesn’t say soul sister, I’m not sure what does. We danced to Bananarama and Madonna in the 80’s, were each other’s maids of honor in the 90’s, and compared experiences with marriage and raising children in the 00’s and beyond. I learned to two-step at her wedding when she married that boy from Texas, and, years later, it was her mom I turned to for parenting advice in the absence of my own mother.
Even twenty-five years after my mother’s funeral, she calls or texts on that anniversary to remember and say she’s thinking of me. I follow her parents’ and siblings’ lives, cheer for their successes, and worried over her dad’s recent heart issues. When I saw her standing with her family while we took pictures after my daughter’s wedding, my eyes stung as the emotions welled up. She’s always present for the stuff that matters.
Once, for a month, we were roommates on a college campus. Although we spent almost every moment together in regular life, we didn’t do so well as live-in roomies. Too much of a good thing. But the summer her family camped across the West for a month, I almost died from loneliness. It was before cell phones, and waiting four whole weeks for our reunion was the worst kind of torture. We got used to separation, attending different colleges, for instance, in different states. For years, I visited her in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Texas, while I stayed put with a family business in Tennessee.
For now, she’s only a short drive from here, and we’ve been able to visit more often, each time picking up where we left off, falling into real conversations and the ease and comfort of each other’s company. In construction circles, there’s a thing carpenters use to aid a weak or sagging joint. Apparently, the easiest way to repair a compromised joist is to attach another board of equal or larger size alongside. This board is called–wait for it—a sister board, and the process is known as “sistering.” How brilliant is that? It’s the perfect illustration for life-long friendship, for the person who steps in and holds you up when you’re sagging, who knows just where you need help and just where you’re strong. Who knew you when, knows you now, and loves you anyway. Happy 50th birthday, sister! 
by bsquared5@aol.com | Oct 4, 2018 | Thoughts
In the primitive playgrounds of my childhood, my father pushed the hot metal merry-go-round at breakneck speeds, my brother and I shrieking and holding on for dear life. We learned to hold tight to the nearest pole, arms and legs wrapped like baby monkeys around our feeble anchor. Had we let go, we would’ve been flung into the whirling scenery, small human projectiles. When the spinning stopped, the background kept going, and we staggered like diminutive drunks, our arms akimbo attempting to balance.
That’s the best feeling I can conjure for what it’s been like for the past few months. In the space of one summer, we had two graduations (one from college, one from high school), a wedding, an out-of-state move, and finally, packed our last fledgling off to college. When that merry-go-round stopped spinning and the busyness subsided, we blinked at each other in the quiet, clutching hands for stability. Our nest of four had suddenly become a party of two.
The old spots I used to rely on to prevent dizziness in the spin of parenthood were missing, and for several weeks a sense of disorientation and unease was unshakable. We knew the house would be quieter, but we didn’t anticipate the other changes that made us feel shifty and uncomfortable, like wearing a sweater a few sizes too big.
The contents of the pantry and fridge changed. No one drank the milk each morning (or early afternoon) with cereal, so we no longer keep the familiar half-gallon on hand. In fact, entire aisles at the grocery store are now obsolete. Obviously the diapers and baby products were abandoned long ago, but off the list went the requisite teenage boy snacks. We notched up the a/c upstairs, the bedrooms uninhabited. We only need to climb the steps when we need a suitcase from the bonus closet, so might as well save on the electric bill. It takes longer to amass a full load of laundry, and the dog needs extra walks because the boy who could always be counted on to play tug-of-war or chase isn’t blowing off steam in the afternoons after school.
We still liked each other, the spouse and I. We had to say that out loud every now and then as we renegotiated and adjusted our routines and rhythms. Our dance steps were a little off–we stepped on each other’s toes as our expectations of ourselves and each other shifted. Our conga line had become a tango, and the tempo had changed. Admittedly, there was a bit of tip-toeing around, eyeing each other sideways and trying to gauge moods and emotional availability. This is the same thing that happened when they were newborns. Children up-end your life both coming and going, it seems.
After twenty plus years of mentally juggling four lives, my attention was my own once more, and it was strangely unsettling. “Give me a week,” I announced. “Of sitting in this before you need me for anything.” I wanted to feel the house’s stillness, mull things over in my mind about our next chapter, and yes, be sad over losing the way things had been for so long. So I did, and I was. But my curiosity about what lay around the corner and my pride and excitement for the paths our kids were on burned away the fog of melancholy soon enough. They’d launched, and the two of us back at headquarters were still full of pluck and vinegar.
A Scrabble tile rack with a handful of letters sits on our bookshelf. I use it to spell out one-word attitude reminders like “joy,” “kindness,” and “love.” For the longest time, I’d place a word for the week and come back to find it had been rearranged into some garbled nonsense or, more often, an “alternate” word choice. Kindness became “dinkness,” for example. This, of course, was my son’s doing: his idea of subversive hilarity. What even IS that? I’d cry in mock outrage. We’d go back and forth at it, each of us changing the word and seeing how long it would take for the other to discover the sabotage.
When we moved this eager sapling boy into his dorm earlier this year, he got the last word. I was too busy checking off lists as we packed to notice the Scrabble defacement. It was days later, when my eyes wandered to the shelf as I waited for my coffee to brew, that I had to laugh. He came home briefly the other day and I caught him smirking in the kitchen.
“What?”
“You’re not very observant, mom.” He glanced at the shelf. I smiled up into his triumphant blue eyes.
“Oh, I noticed it. I just thought I should leave it there.” I got a rare hug. Perhaps he felt, too, how the familiar house had changed in his absence, how the buzz of activity had lulled to a low hum.
In the days to come, as we enjoy our new routine and menus and discover this new rhythm in our roomier nest, that tile rack will remain unchanged. It’s a good reminder to us to keep laughing, even when it stings a little, and to treat one another gently. No matter how strong we are, there are times when we can all use a little human dinkness.
by bsquared5@aol.com | Aug 13, 2018 | Thoughts
Nine hundred and forty marbles. On the day your child is born, if you fill a jar with 940 marbles, you’d have in your hands the number of weeks between that child’s birth and his 18th birthday. That’s a hefty jar, maybe too heavy to hold with only one hand. All shiny and colorful, they clink against each other when you give the jar a shake. Deceptively small, they represent potential, time, milestones, birthdays.
By her fifth birthday, 260 of them are gone, spent over weeks that pass in a blur of diapers, feedings, Goodnight Moon, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Marbles disappeared from the jar in a haze of sleepless nights, the whir of the humidifier too soft to cover the sound of a croupy cough, frosty Christmas mornings, visits to grandparents, and post-nap cuddles in front of Dora the Explorer.
By 10, over half are missing from the once full jar. Hold it up to the light with one hand, and recall the ER visit for the broken arm, the sports equipment scattered in the foyer, and the too-big teeth in a rakish smile as he grins proudly, having scaled a tree to free a frisbee lodged between the branches. It’s not useful to pile guilt on a young mom, telling her to savor the moments, how she’ll miss all this some day. I believe in intentional parenting, but trying to live each second that way will drive you mad and eliminate all the best moments. Some good lessons come from spontaneity and stumbling your way through. To be honest, there are many bygone moments I don’t miss in the least.
Sometimes, most times, the jar is easy to dismiss. The noise of friends, flurry of school projects, and need to check the calendar constantly are more urgent matters than the number of little spheres in the jar on the desk. It’s a challenge to organize life with a teen, and siblings add to the chaos. There’s a loud chorus of voices and laughter as they raid the refrigerator, bang out tunes on the piano, and toss car keys on the counter as they come and go. By 16, only 108 marbles rattle around in the base of the jar. There are moments, sometimes whole series of them, where with gritted teeth I silently wished a few of the marbles gone, so great is the emotional toll of teenagers wrestling with independence. If they’d had a say, they might have tipped the jar themselves, willing the time to pass quickly, hungering for some imagined life of total freedom and self-sufficiency.
Mostly, as we hurtled through 17 towards 18, a sense of urgency gripped me. As their schedules became their own and we saw them less, I craved their feet on the coffee table, tousled bed heads at breakfast–or lunch. My eyes memorized their features as they did long ago when we rocked in the twilight singing “Baby Mine,” that song from Dumbo that the mama elephant croons. A remake is coming out in a few months, and we saw a preview in the theater recently. “Why are you crying?” my son asked through a mouthful of popcorn. “Don’t you remember this song?” I say. Stricken, I exchange glances with his dad, as he shakes his head. Some memories will belong only to me, made too early, before he started storing his own.
“Mom. What?” In the final weeks of their last summer, they would catch me staring and I’d look away, unable to explain, avoiding their impatience. How could they fathom the pride I felt, my wonder at their confidence, humor, and the fact that no matter how much stubble grew on his face or how smart she looked in a fitted jacket, I would always see them at 3, 8 and 16, their younger faces wavering in and out like holographic images? A curious emotional cauldron bubbled within, a witch’s brew of joy and excitement for their futures, and a deep and marrow-filling sorrow at their departure.
How did we arrive here? The supply seemed endless. Graduation parties, one last family vacation, and, this past week, a final pat on the dog’s head before climbing into the car destined for a new address, a new bed. I palm the last marble from the jar and grip it tightly. So many times when they were toddlers and teens I thought I might go nuts in the chaos and, as they say, lose my marbles. Last week, it turns out, I did just that.
by bsquared5@aol.com | Apr 25, 2018 | Thoughts
I’ve never seen a fat honey bee. This, despite their diet of some of the sweetest stuff out there. Those ladies are going 90 miles an hour round-the-clock, though, so that could have something to do with their trim figures.
As a kid, I ate whatever I could get my hands on in our family of five siblings, which amounted to whatever my mother served, like it or not. She was no short-order cook. On Saturdays, my brother and I had a few hours of cartoons before the house came alive, and I’d make us a breakfast of what I liked to call cinnamon toast. The recipe was easy: toasted bread slathered with butter and a sparse sprinkle of cinnamon, each slice coated with no less than a solid 1/4 cup of sugar. This was a Saturday morning given for months until my older sister discovered our sly concoction and told on us. My non-rotten teeth are begrudgingly grateful to her for the staged intervention.
But it didn’t matter. I was a knobby-kneed skinny kid, all elbows and hip bones. Even my hair was thin and fine, able to hold limitless static electricity but not a single barrette. My father used to pretend he’d lost sight of me in the living room. “There you are! You must have turned sideways and disappeared,” he’d say. “You must have to move around in the shower just to get wet.” Hardy-har-har. “I need an after-dinner toothpick–c’mere, Bon!”
A few(ish) years ago, I slammed into the proverbial metabolism wall called Welcome to Your Forties. After two kids and a love of carbs, my metabolism waved its white flag. Once, a friend’s precocious four-year-old, who’d clearly watched too many drug commercials, saw me take an aspirin and said, “Are those the purple pills? Because you’re not supposed to take the purple ones if you’re nursing or pregnant, and you look like you could be pregnant.” My youngest was six at the time. Years, not months.
For awhile I went to a gym semi-regularly but wound up so sore I could hardly lift my arms to steer the car. Then I threw my back out and decided to love me anyway, extra belt notches and all. I never played sports. I used to dread the annual presidential fitness test in gym class. Sit ups? Arm hang? Running? Ugh. Growing up, I rode horses, which does involve exertion, but truth be told–who’s really doing all the heavy lifting in that sport? The one with two extra legs and a penchant for carrots.
A few years ago we helped chaperone our son’s Spanish trip to Peru, where we visited Machu Picchu. Climbing hundreds of feet into the clouds at high altitude didn’t actually kill me, but there were points in the hike when I thought it might. At the gym, I’d met an amazing lady in her mid 70’s who was a master swimmer in her younger years. She had just hiked Machu Picchu herself, on a three-day climb, so how hard could it be? Pretty darn difficult, it turns out, for a panda-shaped person such as myself. The lithe teens in the group scampered up the trail like minks, while we parents eyed each other in solidarity, wheezing in the thin air.
Just last year we visited our daughter in Florence when she was studying abroad. Being the resident expert, she planned some of our itinerary, which is how we wound up booked to climb 436 steps to the top of the Duomo. “Are our children trying to kill us?” we asked each other. If we were on the African savanna, the lions would have painted bright red targets on our backs as the easy weed-outs.
So this year, just shy of a new decade, I started a new venture. No sugar, caffeine, gluten, or processed foods. It’s like 365 days of Lent. I’m “eating clean.” This begs the question of what “eating dirty” might look like. I have my own ideas about that. 
It isn’t terrible. It’s no “cinnamon toast,” either, but it’s sustainable and I think I can actually keep it up. It comes with a new vocabulary and some forays into new foods. I’ve actually eaten (and liked!) spiraled beets, hummus, hemp hearts, and chia seeds. It started with a detox, where every day began with a cup of hot water, lemon, and a teaspoon of ACV (apple cider vinegar), or what I like to call the vomit of Satan. Couldn’t do it, not even while slamming it and holding my nose. Also, I’m naturally suspicious of ingesting anything that has a “living mother” in it. In the same vein, the only kefir I can tolerate is Jack Bauer from 24. 
Each day the goal is to drink a gallon of water. Do you know how much a gallon of water is? It is approximately this much: 
This means I’m right back to sixteen years ago when I had a toddler in tow and had to stop at EVERY SINGLE public bathroom on my errand route. Sometimes twice. Only now I’ve had two kids and “things” have shifted, so there is no such thing as holding it. Jumpsuits or rompers are never, ever in my future.
Slowly, I started easy workouts at home with my new, fancy yoga mat. Body, mind, spirit, right? Exercise has never been my best friend, or let’s be honest, even a semi-close acquaintance. I will never run a whole or half anything, but to climb the Duomo without paramedics standing by would require practice. I kept at it, progressing nicely, until one day I caught my cat looking at me with an expression both sarcastic and bewildered…
I don’t need that much ridicule in my life. Now I go to a nearby gym that I love. I’ve learned several new words there. For instance, burpees are not what you coax from your infant after a good feeding, apparently. Suicides are not tragic endings (well, except in my case sometimes they are), and plank position is not that weird lying-flat fad from about 10 years ago.
As long as I’m intentional and deliberate, this new path is walk-able. I don’t know why we so fiercely resist doing things that are good for us. We’re like toddlers fighting naps. We’d rather sit and scream and rail using all manner of energy and emotion than just do it already for goodness’ sake. This goes for not just eating better or taking a walk, but also unplugging, reading, making progress towards goals, flossing. Women make this a professional gig, nurturing friends, family, children, even the bagger at the grocery store, leaving crumbs for ourselves. It is not good for us to exist on hurry, excuses, fear, depression, sugar, coffee, and wine. It will not end well.
A good-for-you life is an abundant one, one where we indulge in the good stuff so it overflows like the loaves and fishes. The really good stuff, not the fake, pretend mock-ups. Instead of posing the question “is this (behavior, activity, direction) bad enough I should stop?” ask instead “is this good enough to stay this way?” Lets in a whole different light, doesn’t it?
My conveyor belt at the grocery store yesterday contained spinach, celery, peppers, and blueberries. At the end I hefted a 25 pound bag of sugar onto it, and the cashier raised an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of sugar,” she said. Sheesh. Had she known my nark sister when I was little?
“It’s for feeding the bees,” I replied, “Not me. All the rest of this is for me.”
“Good for you!” she enthused. Yes, yes it is.
by bsquared5@aol.com | Nov 8, 2017 | Thoughts
A friend of mine ends each hectic day by soaking in a hot bath, a time of uninterrupted luxury that I’ve heard of but never actually experienced, like those TV ads for all-inclusive resorts full of super-model couples getting tandem massages. Now that the kids are *mostly* grown, I get my share of uninterrupted time, which admittedly is half the battle in this scenario. But there’s no way I’ll ever experience bubble baths with scented candles and dim lights.
It’s not because we don’t have a tub. When we bought our house 13 years ago, we were impressed by the garden tub in the master bath. It was the first time in our marriage we’d actually been able to share a bathroom, period. Before that, we had cubicle apartments or tiny bathrooms with no counters, and we’d split the difference, mostly with one of us storing our stuff down the hall. When we bought the house, the kids were small. Occasionally they’d get a bath in our big tub, the jets stirring the bubble bath until they’d become buried beneath the suds. By the time the tub got cleared of the foam and their 57 bath toys, I was no longer in the mood for a private soak, and the second I’d start to think about it, some catastrophe on the other side of the door would arise to squelch the impulse.
It was convenient for bathing dogs. Also it was great for scrubbing a child’s muddy feet without having to fully submerge said child. When we had a house full of visitors, we lined it with blankets and let our kids sleep in it. Once, when we had to move our 55-gallon aquarium, it made a superb way-station for buckets of briny rocks and stressed out fish.
I had intentions. The tub surround was laid with expectant candles and nicely rolled towels that would have made a nice neck pillow amid the suds. I readied a good book and some background music and tried to settle in. You know how when you look out the window of an airplane when you’re in a cloud bank and the clouds are so thick and white you can convince yourself they’d surely be able to hold you like a soft billowy pillow? That’s what cats imagine when they see a tub full of magical white bubbles. It is a mind-blowing scientific fact that clouds can’t hold you; you fall right through. Same with bubbles and cats.
Except beneath the bubbles is water, which most cats dislike almost as much as they dislike being forced to wear clothing. Also there is a person, who until the moment of the surprise bubble collapse had been unsuspectingly engrossed in a novel, under the illusion that the next 30 minutes would bring bliss and relaxation instead of splashing and claws scrabbling for purchase on naked flesh like a Kraken had just been released. Candles were extinguished, neck towel lay in a soggy lump at the bottom of the tub, and the pages of the novel were fused together by copious amounts of water. An enthusiastically unhappy cat meowed loudly in humiliation.
After the terror from the deep, our big tub is now neither garden, nor tub. I explain to people that no, the scar I wear is not, in fact, from a Cesarean gone horribly awry. When the young optimistic couples on House Hunters exclaim over the spacious jacuzzi tubs in the “en suite” bathrooms, I see my past self in their starry eyes. But years of reality have set in. The tub has not held actual water or bubble bath in years. It is now, especially in the later months of the year, a repository for future events. Currently, for example, it holds bags of holiday and birthday presents, Christmas crafts, Boy Scout paraphernalia, signage for an upcoming wedding. These are layered, like an archaeological dig, in order of which comes first. Also it houses a giant yellow exercise ball that hasn’t been paroled in several years. I no longer question its existence. It simply glows like a small yellow sun from beneath the stockpile. 
Gone are the dreams of a spa-like serenity in the master bath. They have vanished like bubbles deflated by a flailing cat. A small sign hangs above the tub, a dim beacon of days 
past, when the struggle was real, before I succumbed to the avalanche of futility that is my bathtub. Maybe this is thinking out of the box–or tub. This is what creative types do, isn’t it? It’s trendy to “repurpose” things now. Thrifty and all-American. #chipandjojo
We all have that junk drawer, the place we don’t have time for, the one we’ll get to later. My tub is a magnified junk drawer, the junk drawer you wish you had. It’s a harried attempt at organization in the face of the holiday onslaught and, if we’re being honest, a place I can hide presents at this point in life and not forget about them. What good are stocking stuffers in mid-February?
Maybe someday I’ll reclaim the tub and eventually take that stress-dissolving soak. Maybe when the calendar clears, when the holidays are someone else’s responsibility, and we do away with occasions like birthdays and graduations. By then, I’ll be too old to get in and out of the thing, and I’ll just use it to plant tomatoes. Garden tub, indeed.
