It Never Ends

“Don’t make any plans today,” my husband warned me.  “There’s are two Yankee games and one Giants game on this afternoon.”  I’d actually thought we might do something adventurous, or at least entertaining, today — a drive in the country, lunch and a movie, a trip into the city — but I was secretly relieved.  What I really wanted to do was work in the garden, and John’s sports schedule gave me permission to do just that, without the guilty sense that, really, I could be using my time more creatively.

Our front lawn is a nightmare, at least if your ambition is to actually have a lawn.  The maple tree that sits between our property and our neighbors’ has rendered both yards desert ecosystems in miniature.  Growing grass is possible, but requires the kind of dedication most people reserve for battling a life-threatening disease: The tree’s roots are shallow but so dense that, when you dig them up, they seem like knitted steel.  For years, I’ve put down seed in the fall and gotten a lavish flush of green, which, every summer that follows — no matter what the weather — has turned to pale matting by the middle of September.

This year, I was going to turn over the whole mess with a pitchfork, dig three trenches, plant tulips, grape hyacinths, and white daffodils, and top it all with vinca, a groundcover that, so the garden catalogs promise, “loves dry shade.”

I was about two thirds of the way through this endeavor — having about as much fun as a Guantanamo detainee — when a woman who looked to be about 70 walked by with what I guessed were her two grandchildren.  I smiled at her and she smiled back and said, “It never ends.”

“I know,” I said.

“Do you?” she asked.

I didn’t know whether she was referring to the endless work that a garden necessitated, or the fact that having children was frequently followed by having grandchildren, but either way, I sensed that she had something.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, sticking my pitchfork into a mess of roots that might have been concrete spaghetti.  Maybe her words were a warning, but to me, they sounded more like a promise.

“It never ends.”

What a lovely thought.  That whatever stage of life you find yourself in, you’re always going to be needed, whether by your grown children, or your grandchildren, or the projects that need completing, or the dreams that tug at you in those rare moments when you give them rein.

I thought of my daughter, starting her own life, and of the bulbs I’d just planted — 110 of them, which, if things went as I’d hoped, would startle me next spring long after the pulled muscles and achy joints that went into their planting had long ago repaired themselves — and thought, with a sense of gratitutde, “It never ends.”

Could any of us ask for anyting more?

Some Practical Advice

For the most part, my posts have been personal, philosophical, reflective, but not terribly practical.  If you’re new to the empty nest and looking for some advice on how to deal with it, you might find something of use in an article I wrote (“Surviving the Empty Nest”) for the October issue of New Jersey Life Health & Beauty.  If you have advice of your own, or questions, or insight to share, please comment.  I’d love to have a conversation.

Cooking for Two

We drove Flora up to school yesterday and drove back home this morning without her.  It was the same drive I’d wept through last September, but this time my eyes were dry — at least until we reached the New York State Thruway and John brought up the week’s menu.  We’d planned burgers for this evening’s dinner, grilled chicken breasts for the night after, and a salad using the leftover chicken for the night after that.  “Let’s have pasta tonight,” he said.  “I just don’t feel like grilling.”  That was fine by me, and would’ve been fine with Flora as well.  We joke that those of us in the family with Italian blood could happily eat pasta seven nights a week.  And that’s what got me to the Sad Math: After a summer of cooking for three, I was now back to cooking for two.

Cooking for two is, in many ways, very similar to cooking for three.  If you’re roasting a chicken, you still roast a chicken.  If you’re making soup, you still make a big pot and save what’s left over for another night.  I haven’t altered my rotating menu much: We still have pasta at least once a week (twice if I can sneak it past John), eat too much grilled or sauteed chicken, and try to go vegan or vegetarian as much as is reasonable when one of us is the son of a butcher (not naming names here).  But when Flora was home — unless she was out with friends — dinner was the one time I knew I could do something with, and for, her.  When she asked, “What are we having?” I could make her smile by answering “chicken breasts with capers and tomatoes” or “pasta puttanesca” or, simply, “steak.”  Flora loves food, loves to eat, thrills at a new recipe, and cooking for her must be similar to what Renee Fleming feels like when she sings at the Met.  In the realm of eating, Flora is the world’s most appreciative audience.

So suddenly, we were crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge with the Hudson spread out and sparkling all around us, and I was crying again.  All those meals for two rolled out before me in my mind, hundreds of them laid down on a pair of cotton placemats, night after night, as my daughter found sustenance, alone or with friends, in RISD’s dining halls, until next May when I could start cooking for three again.

As we pulled into the driveway on a day that felt more like early August than mid September, I found myself thinking about Thanksgiving.

 

 

 

In Which Summer Is a Watermelon, and Motherhood Is the Pits

I had my first watermelon slice of the summer last week, and while I was savoring its liquidy sweetness I realized, with a sense of delight, that there was something new — or, more accurately put, old — about this particular melon: seeds.  When Flora was small, we’d sit on the porch steps with our watermelon slices and have pit-spitting contests.  The aim of the contest was, of course, to see how far you could jettison each pit along the front walk (and sometimes, if you were really energetic in your spitting, down the steps to the sidewalk), but the real point of the game was to entertain an antsy two-year-old.  And then the game became a tradition, and for I don’t know how many summers we sat on the porch together, slurping watermelon and sending the pits flying.

And then suddenly the seeds were gone.  Every watermelon, even the organic ones from the farmers market, were “seedless” — that is to say, dotted with those anemic, translucent pips that you couldn’t have sent flying in a hurricane of expectoration.  I suppose it didn’t matter, because by then Flora was beyond pit-spitting contests.  And yet I felt that a little bit of summer had been lost in the interest of ease of consumption.

You can’t really blame human beings for wanting to make things easy.  Life is hard, and it’s our natural inclination to try to soften the inevitable blows, even if they come in the shape of watermelon pits.  A few summers ago, the watermelon news was all about the Japanese, who had started growing their melons in boxes so they’d end up square, which made them more convenient to store on refrigerator shelves.  When it comes to summer fruit, watermelons pose some pretty significant challenges: They’re big and bulky.  Uncut, they may not fit in your average Japanese refrigertor (or even your average, yawning American fridge); sliced in half or quartered, they manage to leak through plastic wrap and even ziploc bags to make a sticky, drippy mess of the shelves they’re stored on.  And the pits make eating a challenge, creating a sort of oral obstacle course that gets in the way of arriving quickly at that cool, toothsome melon-flesh.  And yet, it seems to me, that without the pits, the watermelon doesn’t taste quite as sweet; something subtle is lost when the obstacles are removed.

For the past week, Flora has had a friend staying over, and when they’re not sightseeing in New York, they’re huddled in her room over their respective laptops.  Sometimes I’ll hear their laughter, drifting through the bedroom door, or the muffled sound of a YouTube video.  This seems so unfair to me — that I’ve waited all year for my daughter to return, and now that she’s here, she really isn’t here at all.  I’d imagined a summer in which we’d drive to the beach together on weekends and snuggle on the sofa at night catching up on all the great old movies Flora has never seen.  Instead, I’m relegated to the role of chauffeur (Flora having not yet gotten around to getting her license — but that’s another post) and chef and, occasionally, travel agent, as I suggest the best routes to and from Chinatown, Central Park, the Museum of Natural History.

I’d like to say that this new phase of motherhood is a little like eating a watermelon with seeds: The harder it is to get at the good stuff, the better the good stuff is in the end.  I’ll let you know if that’s really so when Flora gets back from Seattle — where she’s bound with her friend in a few days — at the end of July.  I’m looking forward to at least one trip to the beach and a few movie nights before school starts again in the fall.  And if fate and agribusiness happily conspire, maybe a pit-spitting contest or two.

Freshman Year

How do you compress a freshman year into a single blog post?  That’s the challenge I find myself facing today, after bailing on the blog so many months ago when I wanted to spare my daughter — who was reading DFTN faithfully at the time — the agony of my own agonies.  I think you give up any hope of being complete and simply focus on the essence of the experience: the sense of throwing your first (and only) born off a cliff and then realizing that it’s you who are rocketing into the abyss, arms flailing for purchase, while she stands on terra firma and gets on with her life.  And then realizing that your job for the year is scrambling your way back to where you were, only to find yourself on a different continent overlooking a foreign sea.  The challenge for all of us in this position, I think, is to become joyful travelers, to suspend our fear of the unknown and our suspicion of what might be lurking there and trek on.

And what aboutFlora?  What did she learn in this incredible year of learning?  That you can like your roommates even if you end  up having very little in common with them.  That there are friends waiting to be discovered beneath the facades of strangers.  That doing things on your own can be terrifying and exhilarating, often at the same time.  That you are stronger than you ever imagined, and occasionally weaker as well.  That you are a work in progress.  That your mother will pretend to be awake when you text her at one in the morning.  That she will pretend not to be concerned when you send her anxious emails, but that she can no longer fool you when she does.  That you will continue to amaze your parents, sometimes in ways that they don’t appreciate.  That sharing a bathroom with two dozen other people is, in general, an experience that you don’t care to repeat, ever.  That you can overcome your shyness to critique your classmates’ work in a way that earns you praise from your professors.  That you can be critiqued without being blasted into a pile of dust.  That you always wanted to live an interesting life and damned if that isn’t exactly what you’re in the middle of doing.

You go, girl.

Things I’ve Learned in Sending My Daughter off to College, Part 1

1) When you set out to write a blog about sending your child off to college, you shouldn’t invite your child to read said blog.  In sensitive children, learning online about one’s mother’s anxieties tend to replicate those anxieties.  So much so that said mother either has to start lying, fast, or take a long vacation from blogging.  I chose the latter.

2) There is nothing more agonizing than an orchestrated farewell.  Because parents these days are highly invested in their children, many find it almost unbearable to bid them goodbye at the college gate.  University administrators have found parents wandering around campus, dazed and teary-eyed, days after Orientation.  One mother was living in her daughter’s dorm-room closet for more than a week before she was discovered by a sharp-eyed resident assistant.  So a growing number of schools, RISD included, have instituted the group farewell, wherein parents and students gather together and, in RISD’s case at least, an upperclassman with a bullhorn counts down to the Final Farewell.  (“Ten, nine, eight — OK, parents, give your students a big hug now — seven, six, five — Come on, I want to see those hugs — four, three, two, one — OK, parents, follow the young man with the staff, goodbyes are over now, follow that good-looking young man to the chapel to meet the president, that’s right, that’s right . . . “)

3) Never give your child your entire pack of tissues during the orchestrated farewell.  This will leave you with one sad, soggy kleenex that you will punish with repeated nose-blowings until you don’t know whether you’re crying because you’ve just been forced to leave your beloved child with people insensitive enough to institute orchestrated farewells or because you’re sitting in a chapel with other weeping parents, essentially wiping your nose with your own fingers.

4) Things change.  Yes, you will cry on the drive home all the way to the Merritt Parkway and, yes, you will sob when you first spot your child’s empty bedroom.  And yes, you will grieve for the loss of your child, her childhood, your role as Mother and Protector, and the Only Life You’ve Known for the Past 18 Years.  But in a week’s time, you’ll be crying because your daughter is texting you that she misses you and her father, she misses her high school friends, and she feels so lame because everyone in college has made friends except for her.  And then, a month later, when she tells you she’s happy and has friends and is right where she’s supposed to be, you won’t cry at all.  Until she comes home for Christmas break and then you have to let her go all over again, in, of all places, the Newark Amtrak station.  This time, though, you’ve got an entire box of tissues with you.  Proving that the learning process does, indeed, continue over a lifetime.  And then, when you’ve finally adjusted to your child’s absence again, she will call to say she hasn’t adjusted to Winter Session, and she’s feeling lonely, and having problems with her roommates, and you’re crying again, dammit, which is really wreaking havoc with your sinuses, not to mention those blasted undereye bags that seem to have increased exponentially in bagginess since September.  And then you gently remind yourself the one thing you’ve learned over the past five months: Things change.

The Light in Her Eyes

“I’m nervous.”  Flora smiles as she says it, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes.

“Of course, you’re nervous,” I tell her.  “If you weren’t nervous, you wouldn’t be human.  This is a big transition.”

Maybe I’ve made it sound too ominous.  I edit myself:  “A great transition.”

Tomorrow, we’ll be heading up to Providence, and on Saturday, we’ll leave her in the care of her roommates and RISD, hoping that, after the months of preparation — emotional, financial, practical — everything will go as planned.  Today, though, we’re making our final rounds — drugstore; Target; Bed, Bath & Beyond; the supermarket for Peanut Butter Puffins, her favorite cereal — and I’m using this time in the car to get a feel for what she’s feeling.

Flora is the last of her friends — and the children of my friends — to leave for college.  We’ve heard stories of homesickness and anxiety, which leave Flora wary and make me feel as if I’ve swallowed a blender.  “Sometimes it helps to break down your anxiety — to try to pinpoint exactly what’s making you anxious, so you can deal with it,” I say.

We’ve had this conversation before, and sometimes the results have been less than satisfying, with Flora insisting that she doesn’t know exactly why she’s anxious and me responding that she does, really, even if she doesn’t realize it, and Flora riposting that she just doesn’t want to talk about it right now, okay?

But instead she says, “I know this sounds stupid, but I’m anxious about feeling anxious.  I’m afraid that I’ll end up feeling undone by anxiety the way I was a few months ago.”

I reassure her that she’s a different person now, that she’s worked out a lot of the things that were making her feel that way, that she’s spent the summer learning strategies to help her relax and put things in perspective.  I think, at least in part, she believes me.

And then I tell her what I think she needs to hear: that she’s got so many people who love and support her, that we’re here whenever she needs us, a phone call or a text away, that she can come home whenever she needs to, that we can come to her whenever she summons us.  “That’s good,” she says, and a little of her smile reaches her eyes, kindling a tiny spark of light.

I’ve spent so much time in the past few weeks thinking about my own place in this transition that I haven’t allowed myself to consider Flora’s.  But suddenly I realize that, as confused as I am about who I’ll be when she’s no longer here 24/7, and as sad as I feel about her leaving, I also desperately want this to be good for her.  Since I first let go of her hand and watched her stagger across the carpet on her own steam, we’ve both been preparing for this time, though neither of us was aware of that then. 

“You know, this is really exciting,” I say.

She smiles, an enigmatic Mona Lisa with auburn hair and freckles.  I check her eyes and I’m not sure, but I think there’s a flicker of light there.  It hovers like a hummingbird, then darts and disappears.  I check my mirrors, put the car in drive, and step on the gas.  We’re on our way.

Sunday, Asbury Park

There’s no better place to confront both the past and the future than Asbury Park’s crumbling casino.  Open to the elements, its tiled floor has been scuffed by the feet of thousands of visitors and eroded by the wind-blown sand of a generation of winters.  Time and renovation have chiseled away its architectural flourishes, but local artists have stepped in and added flourishes of their own, in the form of street art and poetry.  When you emerge from the dark tunnel of the casino at its northern end, the boardwalk dazzles you with sunlight and a host of new beachfront cafes that look as if they’ve been lifted from Miami’s South Beach and dropped whole, along with their tanned clientele, onto the Jersey shore.

This Sunday, Flora and I found ourselves at the casino, after walking the beach from Ocean Grove.  Deep into a conversation about our shared love of serendipity and urban ruins, we looked up and saw the casino and couldn’t resist trekking up the blistering sand to investigate.  And for a second, we were transported to a universe where the rules of time were suspended and the only thing that mattered was that particular moment.

That’s how it is with exploration, whether you’re forging paths through a virgin wilderness or following a path that diverges from a suburban road.  When I was eight, we moved from Brooklyn to a New Jersey suburb that was still in the process of being carved out of a wooded cliff.  All the streets and houses were sparkling and new, but the woods were dark and deep, ancient thickets of oak and poplar.  My friends and I made them our playground, and every day a new discovery beckoned.  Once, after a January ice storm, I was walking through those woods alone and came upon a grove of fruit trees.  Each trunk and branch was sleekly etched in silver and, because the trees had taken root in slightly sunken ground, the forest floor itself was a glittering pool.  At that moment, time fell away and I stood there, entranced, for who knows how long.

Maybe that’s why, like Flora, I love the idea of exploring.  It strips away the everyday and replaces it, if only for a while, with a sense of timeless wonder.  That’s how it was last Sunday in Asbury, and Flora and I wanted so much to walk down that boardwalk to see where it would take us.  But the day was waning, John was waiting for us, and our bare feet were searing on the boards.  We walked back through the casino, our voices echoing as we talked about adventure and exploration, until we emerged once again into the blinding sun and that place where daughters head off into the future and mothers are left to forge a new path of their own.

Honoring America

According to parenting expert Dr. Michele Borba, one of the best things you can do for your child is put a name to the values that are most important to you.  By doing that — by saying, “Okay, the values that I most want to pass along  are compassion and tolerance” (feel free to substitute your own most cherished values here) — you can then go on to consciously cultivate them in your child.  Of course, by the time a child is on her way to college, you’ve either missed that boat or taken an 18-year cruise.  I’m hopeful that, by the things I’ve said and done, I’ve communicated to Flora what I value most, and that she values these things, too.

Which brings me, by a rather winding road, to the notion of patriotism.  It’s not my favorite value, since it implies an unquestioning love of country that doesn’t sit quite right with me.  I didn’t raise Flora to be patriotic, though I did bring her up, I hope, to understand and cherish what’s right with America, including a Constitution that, though it was crafted more than two centuries ago, still embodies the most noble ideals I can think of: equality, tolerance, liberty.

Next week, Glenn Beck is leading a rally at the Lincoln Memorial to “restore honor to America.”  I’m no fan of Beck, but I’m certainly not averse to honoring what’s best about my country.  And what’s best, in my opinion, is that extraordinary document sitting in the National Archives, in a part of town that Tea Party groups have warned rallyers to avoid.  If we want to honor America, we can do it easily, without grandstanding or electioneering: We can simply work to uphold those values embodied in the Constitution, and pass them along to our children so that, to paraphrase the man who’ll be observing Saturday’s proceedings, they won’t pass forever from this earth.

A Letter to Flora

Since my daughter, Flora, reads these posts on a regular basis, I thought I’d write her a letter here to help her understand what must seem like a bout of temporary insanity on my part.  With luck, it may also offer her some insight into her own feelings, which are likely, at times, to be as turbulent as my own.

Dear Flora:

I hope you haven’t been alarmed by my expressions of grief at your impending departure for college.  This is a hard transition for mothers, who have to deal with the battling desires to raise confident, independent human beings and to freeze-dry their children before they ripen into adulthood.  This makes many of us a little bit nuts, as you’ve no doubt discerned.

For those of us, parents and children, who find comfort in routine, all transitions are tough.  So it’s important to remember that we’re always in the process of forging new routines.  Whether they involve biweekly care packages, teaching your mother to text, or skyping with the cats, eventually they’ll take on a feeling of familiarity and, yes, comfort.

Over the next few months, we’ll both be finding and redefining ourselves, and that’s a good thing.  Just think of the conversations we’ll have about your new friends, preoccupations, and artistic discoveries, and my new causes, writing projects, and pets.  I don’t know who I’ll meet when you return home again, but I know she’ll be someone worth knowing.

If you find yourself in need of support or laundry advice, you’ll always know how, and where, to find me.  And if you decide you need a little space, I promise not to panic, or to appear at your door with a container of rigatoni and a lopsided smile.

If your first few weeks at school are unsettling, remember that you’re in good company: Most people take a little time adjusting to what is usually the biggest change in their life to date.  One day, you’ll find yourself walking uphill and spying your dorm, and you’ll think, “Oh, good, I’m home.”  And at that point, you’ll have something incomparably wonderful: not one home to return to, but two.

When I left my home in Manhattan, at the age of 18, to live in Colorado — something I looked forward to with incredible excitement, and a little anxiety — my father said to me: “You know, they don’t lock the Lincoln Tunnel once you go through it.”  The same is true, I hear, of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Love always,

Mom