Don’t Tell Me I’ll Miss This

Posted on March 28, 2017 by CNF • Posted in Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged imperfect mother, memories, opinion piece, toddlers • Leave a comment

By Stephanie Portell

“Cherish this time when they’re little.” I hear this all the time. I hear it from family, and I hear it from strangers. But no matter whom I hear it from, for me, it’s bullshit. How am I supposed to stop and live in the moment when my toddler is screaming his head off because I gave him the wrong color bowl? How am I supposed to find preciousness in my toddler screaming even louder in public when I tell him to be quiet? All I want to do in these moments is run away, shave my head and wear dark sunglasses so my kids can never find me. If you never want to run, and have found a way to seize the day, please let me in on the secret.

I have two children and I can speak with certainty when I say I am not going to miss this. With my first baby, who is seven now, I would try so hard to be present and to soak up the moments I was supposed to be soaking up. Even though there were likely only five or six times in my oldest son’s first two years I actually wanted to soak it up.

Now with my three-year-old, there is probably one moment a year on average I want to soak up (he is my wild child) and I find myself less inclined to do so. I don’t want to remember the times I wanted to run away as fast as I could. I want to remember him climbing in my lap and laying his head on my shoulder. I don’t want to remember him kicking and swatting at me as I’m struggling to put him in time out for clocking his big brother. Instead, I want to remember him saying “you my best friend mommy.”

Let’s face it: In the first few years the blissful moments can be far and few between. I spent much of my time with my toddlers fantasizing about when they’d be teens. Thinking that if I had three wishes I would ask the genie to fast forward to when my children acted less like whirling dervishes and more like little adults. In my most shameful moments, I ask myself why did I decide to do this in the first place?

***

Note to reader – I had put down my pen for a few weeks after writing this first part of my essay and now, weeks later, return to the writing anew. I have to tell you something important.

I want you to imagine a life of silence. Imagine a life where you don’t have to make a detailed plan just to go to the grocery store with your baby, your toddler, and your tween. Ah– freedom.

In the middle of my not-savor-the-moment thinking between starting and now finishing this piece, I watched a story that Oprah did once on her show. It was about a mom, and her three children who had an ordinary day going to the mall.

I don’t know this mom. I didn’t know her kids.

I don’t know if the youngest threw a fit when they left the mall that day because it was nap time, or if the oldest whined when she couldn’t get the shirt she wanted.

But I know that on their way home when a truck rear-ended them, and killed all three of her children, that mother would have given anything to hear a tantrum again. To hear her children complain, or bicker.

She would give anything to have to explain for the millionth time why her daughter can’t just buy whatever she wants at the mall, and to not be a chauffeur for soccer games and dance recitals without so much as a “thanks mom.”

Hearing this family’s story made me realize even though it’s perfectly OK for us to complain about our everyday challenges with the kiddos, it is also much needed to be present as best as we can. It doesn’t have to be the challenging moments when we want to pull the hair from our head in frustration. It can mean just making sure you are checked in mentally when you are having a genuine good time with your kids instead of only being there physically. It can mean not taking advantage of that time to do work or to just do something without them. Bathroom anyone?

I can’t be present 100 percent of the time or even 50 percent, if I told you otherwise I would be lying.

I am just saying I am going to live in as many moments as I can, because those moments are going to turn into my child’s own memories one day.

I remind myself, and you should too perhaps, that the mom’s kids in the Oprah story are gone, along with all of those moments she thought she would never miss.

Stephanie Portell is the mother of two little boys. She works full time in the medical field while working on her dream of writing any chance she gets.

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Remembering The Rotating Elephant

Posted on July 20, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Brain, Child, Featured Blog Posts, Slider Content • Tagged father daughter, fathers, growing up, Kim Oâ€™Connell, memories • Leave a comment

By Kim O’Connell

On a bright afternoon not too long ago, I took my kids to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., a city that I’ve lived in or near my entire life. Although we’ve been there many times, the dinosaur bones and butterfly garden and mammal exhibits always draw us back. We especially enjoy seeing the giant African elephant that has been displayed in the museum’s rotunda for decades. As we gazed up at its famous uplifted trunk, I told the kids, “When I was little, the elephant turned on a rotating platform.”

They looked at me with raised eyebrows. “When did it stop spinning?” my son asked. Unsure of the answer, I went over to the information kiosk, staffed by a white-haired gentleman who looked seasoned enough to know.

“Excuse me,” I said, “when did the elephant stop rotating?”

The man looked at me quizzically. “This elephant has never rotated.”

“No,” I countered, “I distinctly remember it rotating when I was a child.”

“Nope. Don’t think so.”

I was annoyed that a docent could be so ill-informed. You see, it’s not just that I have a vague recollection that the elephant rotated; I have vivid, specific memories. All of them, I realize, involve my father. My parents split up when I was 7 years old, a moment that forever cleaved away the early part of my childhood. In the way of the newly divorced, my father compensated by frequently taking me to special places on his court-ordered every-other-weekends—the circus, the ballet, the zoo, and the natural history museum. With my small hand in his, I remember standing at the base of the Smithsonian elephant and watching it slowly move, almost imperceptibly, like the shadow of a sundial. I remember it facing a different direction every time I walked back into the rotunda. I remember the way the elephant seemed to spot me out of the corner of its eye as it came around again. There was no way I could be wrong.

When the kids and I got home from the museum, I crowdsourced a query on Facebook: Did anyone else remember the Smithsonian elephant rotating? The answers poured in: No spinning elephant. (However, some people remembered the creature as a woolly mammoth, so I’m not alone in my delusions.) Still unconvinced, I finally tweeted the question to the Smithsonian itself, which responded unequivocally: @kim_oconnell We’ve checked…and the elephant never rotated.

I was, frankly, crushed. I began to wonder whether all my other childhood memories were suspect, too. Had I really almost drowned in a motel pool in Beach Haven, New Jersey, until my father swam up and saved me? Did we really keep a box turtle in our kitchen for a week after my dad found it on a bike trail? Had my third grade teacher really taken me out for cherry ice cream after she testified in my parents’ custody trial? Or was it all like the rotating elephant, a figment of my imagination?

I may never know the answer. Among other things, my father is now gone, so I can’t ask him, and even if I could, chances are his memory would be just as faulty as mine. Scientists have studied the phenomenon of false memories for years, and the unreliability of memory has come up in countless cases involving eyewitness testimony. Apparently, our memories are malleable because our brains are taking in so much information all the time, and our thoughts about our memories, as well as our hopes and dreams and other input, inform what we are filing away for future retrieval. Psychologists have asserted that some false childhood memories can even be useful to us, if they help to construct a positive narrative of one’s past.

This is how I’ve come to view the rotating elephant. Because my time with my father was so precious in those early days, my experiences with him were seared into my memory bank—or some version of them. Many times I have told the story about how a group of camera-toting tourists accosted my father and me outside the Kennedy Center in the 1970s, convinced that I was presidential daughter Amy Carter and my dad was a Secret Service agent. Did it really happen? Maybe. Or maybe just being there with my dad made me feel like we were something more special, together, than we ever were apart.

I hope that someday my kids will feel that way about me, even though our nuclear family—in contrast to the one I grew up in—is so stable, so easily taken for granted, that they aren’t likely to consider our outings all that precious. Still, like my father did before me, I like to take my kids to places like the Natural History museum, where they are forming their own memories of the elephant, fixed as it is on the museum floor. Maybe they find enough magic in its broad shoulders, its wide ears, and its sad eyes. Yet I can’t help but feel grateful to my younger self for conjuring up something even more enchanting—a gigantic elephant spinning, almost dancing, almost alive—to carry with me to adulthood, along with all the other real and manufactured memories that make up my life story. I’m not sure I’m ready to let it go, even now. And in my mind’s eye, at least, I don’t have to.

Kim O’Connell is a writer whose work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ladies Home Journal, Babble, PsychologyToday.com, National Geographic News, and Little Patuxent Review, among others. In 2015, she was chosen to be the first-ever writer in residence at Shenandoah National Park. She lives in Arlington, Va., with her husband, son, and daughter.

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The End of Toys

Posted on June 14, 2016 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Brain, Child, Featured Blog Posts, Slider Content • Tagged boys, Legos, memories, mother son, Sharon Holbrook, toys • Leave a comment

By Sharon Holbrook

We bought my son’s dresser when I was pregnant with him, my eldest. The blond-wood dresser matched the crib, and it used to have a changing pad attached to its top. My son does not know this, nor do I plan to tell him, because 10-year-old tweens do not want to think about their diapered past. But I remember. Not so very long ago, the dresser’s six drawers used to hold tiny onesies, diapers, and piles of carefully folded receiving blankets.

On his 4^th birthday, my son entered his Lego phase headlong, catapulted by a construction vehicle Lego set from Grandpa. He insisted on keeping that first instruction booklet, and every one of many that came after, and I relented. We found a place in the dresser that had been vacated by the diapers and blankets that my big preschool boy no longer needed, and that became the Lego instruction drawer. His t-shirts and shorts and socks, still tiny, did not require the use of every drawer.

Now my son is almost as tall as I am. We wear the same size shoe. Sometimes, I do a double-take at the laundry basket – is it my husband’s, or my son’s? His clothing, like him, is getting bigger and bulkier. It spills out of his drawers or sits on the top of his dresser, where I place the folded clothes for him to (eventually, hopefully) put away.

He needs that dresser drawer now. Now and then I’d ask, “Can you let these Lego instruction booklets go? You never use them.” Invariably, the answer had always been an adamant “No!” Until now.

His room, to my eyes, is a mess. It’s a different sort of mess than it used to be. There’s that dresser that barely closes. There are books haphazardly spilled on the floor near his bed, and lone socks are always sprinkled around the room. Rainbow Loom bracelet and art supplies are scattered and piled this way and that. Earbuds peek out from under the bed. But where there used to be Bey Blades and cars and light sabers, there are now no toys.

Every week, it’s the same dance. “Clear your floor, buddy. We have to vacuum.” He has dust allergies, and I use this to bolster my fight for sanitation. “But Mom. I don’t have room on my bookshelves. I need a bigger bookshelf.” Maybe, I say. But first we need to stand the books up straight and perhaps let some of those books move on to someone else. Then we’ll decide. To my surprise, he says yes. He wants my help going through them, too, which I am happy to give.

We pull out the A to Z Mysteries and Magic Treehouse to pass on to his second-grade sister. The tundra and desert and all the other biome books that he loved when he was 5 (and that I still love) get set aside for his kindergartner sister. My packrat is suddenly ruthless. “I just don’t like that one.” And, “that science book is outdated.” He should know better than me, I guess, since he now reads about the periodic table for fun. Into the out pile they go. On the bottom shelf lies a big colorful hardcover, The Lego Ideas Book. It was a Christmas gift when he was 6, and he pored over it for many hours over the years. “I’m done with that, Mom,” my 10-year-old says. “I’m think I’m done with Legos.”

Just like that. “OK.” We’re done with the bookshelf now, and I stack the castaways neatly. “What do you think you want to do with them?” He shrugged noncommittally, with a bit of melancholy about him. Or was that me with the melancholy? I had guessed my 10-year-old was heading this way. Years of single-minded devotion had gradually faded into increasing detachment. The giant bin of Lego in the playroom had been gathering dust like a lonely, outgrown lovey. Sometimes I catch a whiff of restlessness about my son. He’s abandoned the kind of all-in imaginative play that his sisters still adore, and longs to replace it with the things of teens – screens, social media, video games, freedom. He is only 10, I think. I am almost 11, he thinks. I try to hold him in this middle zone, and he strains against me.

I tread carefully. “Do you want to let the Lego instructions go? Should I get a recycling bag?” He surprises me with his certainty. We begin. The recent ones are on top. They are less familiar to me, because for the last few years of Lego, my son assembled them on his own. “Oh, I loved this one!” I barely remember the Star Wars set he’s talking about. He’d tear open the box and work doggedly at the dining room table from start to finish with a kind of focus that is now reserved for Minecraft.

We get a little deeper in the dresser drawer, a few years back, and I become part of the journey. “Mom, do you remember this castle?” he asks me, and I do. “Didn’t we build this one in the basement in the old house?” I answer, and the memory of that place and time floods back, right down to the annoyingly dim lighting in the corner where we’d set up a plastic folding table so my Lego-obsessed boy could have a place of his own to build.

Now he’s found a Lego Atlantis booklet. “Oh, Nana got me this one! I wanted it so much that Christmas!” I remember building it side by side. It was a big one, and it took a long time. We had great fun doing it.

My 8-year-old pops into her brother’s room now, and seeing what we are doing, chirps, “Aw! Old memories are the best!” Before I can savor the truth of that, or the charm of her young wisdom, my son has answered quickly and evenly. “But they have to go.” They do, right? I’ve been suggesting it for years, after all. But emptying the drawer is going fast, like a fast-forwarded reel of film through the last six years, and suddenly my son seems more ready than I am. I swallow this, though, and I echo his readiness. “Yup, I guess it’s time.”

“And, oh, this fire truck! You had to superglue the ladder on, Mom, because it wouldn’t stay on.” I remember this, too. “You were so frustrated that it kept falling off! Remember,” I reminisce with him, “we were in the dining room at the old house, and Grandma was there, because Daddy and I were leaving the next day for our anniversary trip?” He does. That was when he was 4 ½. We are almost to the bottom of the pile, and he is unmoved by the fattening Trader Joe’s bag of recycling. I cannot say the same for me.

At last, on the bottom, is the very first booklet. It’s that 4^th birthday construction vehicle set, the one that started it all. We both gasp with excitement. We really did it together back then, my early-30s mama hands showing his chubby preschool fingers how to snap together the bricks for the first time. “Oh, Mom, I loved this set! Can I keep just this one for the memories?”

Oh, yes. Yes, you can, my boy. And when you outgrow even that, because you will in the finger-snap of a few years, I’ll take it and I’ll tuck it away.

I’ll keep it for the memories, too.

Sharon Holbrook is a contributing blogger for Brain, Child. Her work also appears in The New York Times Motherlode blog, Washington Post, and other publications, as well as in the forthcoming HerStories anthology, So Glad They Told Me. You can find her at sharonholbrook.com and on Twitter @sharon_holbrook. Sharon lives with her family in Cleveland, Ohio.

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The Christmas Birthday Conundrum

Posted on December 21, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged Barbara Brockway, birthday, children and childhood, Christmas, family, holidays, memories, motherhood, parenting, presents • Leave a comment

By Barbara Brockway

After the initial joy of finding out I was expecting my first baby, a dark thought crossed my mind. This was in addition to all the concerns first-time parents have; will my baby be healthy, will I make a good mom, will I survive labor?

“I’m worried about the baby’s birthday being so close to Christmas,” I said to my husband, Matt. The December 19th due date was determined after an early sonogram, and declared to be extremely accurate by our doctor.

“Honey, I know how you feel about your birthday being right after the holidays,” Matt said, wrapping me up in a hug. “We’ll do things differently than your parents.”

“We have to always make a big deal out of the baby’s birthday, to not let it be overshadowed by Christmas” I said, thinking about a young me feeling hurt that my special day was treated as an afterthought.

“I promise,” Matt said, smiling a goofy expectant-father smile.

I secretly vowed to hold him to that, more importantly, to hold myself to that.

I had first hand knowledge of the disappointment that comes with having a birthday so close to the holidays. Raised in a small, midwestern town with no diversity, Christmas was my end-all, be-all of holidays, followed by runner-up New Year’s Eve. My birthday, coming on January 2nd, was at the tail end of this bacchanalia. After all the rich food, expense, and parties of the holiday season, who wanted to celebrate a birthday–my birthday?

As a kid, my presents were always wrapped in leftover Christmas paper, my birthday cake eaten begrudgingly by my parents on what should have been the second day of their New Year’s resolutions. My friends were no better. Amidst the excitement of returning to school after the long break and exchanging stories about what Santa had brought, they rarely remembered to wish me happy birthday. What should have been my special day was celebrated as a half-hearted afterthought or forgotten altogether.

I pledged to do things differently for my child.

The weeks leading up to my due date flew by, filled with an ambitious home remodel, gearing up to turn over my job to a co-worker, and frenetic nesting. I stopped working on December 18th and picked my mom up from the airport on my due date.

“Any signs this baby is coming?” she asked as she happily clutched my big belly.

“The doctor says it could be anytime,” I replied. I unfurled a big list from my purse.

“In the meantime, let’s do some last minute shopping,” I said.

I dragged my mom around Atlanta the next few days, running Christmas errands and buying last minute things for the baby’s room. I delighted when someone asked me when I was due.

“Last Tuesday,” I’d say with a big grin. My mom and I loved the shocked responses. Inside, my worry grew. Each passing day meant future birthdays would be that much closer to the “big” day.

I took to walking around our neighborhood for hours, as walking was supposed to induce labor. Not one contraction. I ate spicy foods. Nada. On December 22nd the three of us walked up and down Stone Mountain. The baby didn’t budge. On December 23rd, Matt and I dined at Indigo, requesting the locally famous “labor table.” I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all during dessert. I woke up the next morning feeling no different.

With each passing day I worried not only about the baby’s birthday being one day closer to Christmas, but about the health of my overdue child. The doctor started to talk about inducing labor.

On Christmas Eve, the three of us went to see the Live Nativity at East Rock Springs Presbyterian. Matt grabbed my gloved hand and held it in both of his. “You know, honey, at this point, I’m almost hoping the baby is born on Christmas,” he whispered.

My heart swelled as the tinny first notes of “Silent Night” strained through the outdoor speakers. “Me, too,” I confessed. “If it’s this close anyway, it might be better if it’s actually on the same day.”

We stared into each other’s eyes, grinning like two fools who didn’t know what was about to hit them.

At about 3am on Christmas morning, I woke with a start. Was that a contraction? I waited a few minutes. It was definitely a contraction. My heart pounding, I woke Matt.

He flipped on the light and started timing them. At about 6am, we took a two-hour walk around the neighborhood, reveling in the perfect quiet that is Christmas morning. I spent the day alternating rest with walking, squeezing in Christmas dinner, present opening and It’s A Wonderful Life.

At about 10pm we headed for Northside Hospital. Sweet baby Nicholas was born at 2am on December 26th, missing Christmas by two hours. And no, he’s not named after that Nicholas. My husband is Italian; it’s practically a requirement that every Padula family has a Nick.

Was I disappointed that our baby was born the day after Christmas? In retrospect it seems so silly. Once I locked eyes with my trusting, precious little soul all else seemed insignificant. I understood the meaning of unconditional love, and, as a faithful person, felt closer to God. I understood the fuller meaning of Christmas for the first time in my life.

Have Matt and I kept our promise of always making a big deal out of Nick’s birthday? We’ve tried to, although as the years have ticked on, we might be slipping a bit. Last year, we gave him the dreaded combined birthday and Christmas gift, an expensive GoPro camera that seemed too extravagant to be given for just one special day. Did Nick think he’d been ripped off? I’d like to think not, but I can’t really be sure.

One thing I am sure of is that my perspective on having a holiday birthday has changed. Gifts and celebrations aren’t meaningful, no matter what time of year, unless you’re spending them with loved ones. My favorite birthday memories now revolve around special times: ice skating, playing board games, or just watching a movie. No need for cake or decorations, just togetherness. Maybe keeping the focus on that should have been my objective for my son, instead of trying to create space and distinction between the two events.

As for me, If I’m ever asked about a favorite Christmas, how could I say anything but the day I spent laboring with my firstborn, and how could I say my favorite present was anything but my son?

Not a cherished family tradition or a perfectly wrapped gift, my favorite Christmas memory involves sweat, panting, excruciating pain, and, of course, a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Barbara Brockway’s work has appeared in The Maine Review, The Southern Tablet, Torrid Literature Journal, and elsewhere. She’s received writing awards from WOW-Women On Writing, the Chattahoochee Valley Writers, and the Atlanta Writers Club. Read more on her website: barbarabrockway.com.

Photo: gettyimages.com

The Things We Keep

Posted on October 12, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged everyday motherhood, family, Marie Kondo, memories, motherhood, parenting, Sharon Holbrook, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up • Leave a comment

By Sharon Holbrook

I remember the children being small, but my love for them today is so present and busy and large that it swallows the shrinking past into itself.

I sat on the living room rug last week, surrounded by messy stacks of DVDs and CDs, almost all of which we have ignored for years. I had pulled them all out at once to decide what to toss and what to save. I blame Marie Kondo for this attack on my belongings, of course. Fresh off reading the Japanese organizing guru’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” I was fired up (again) about getting rid of the excess junk.

I’m a serial declutterer, but it’s not because I’m naturally neat and organized. It’s quite the opposite. My head and hands and house are always full to overbrimming, and I desperately try to throw enough overboard to keep peaceful clarity afloat.

Why is that so hard? Right now, it is almost 10pm on a Monday night. On my computer, I have open tabs for my kid’s birthday Evite, the sign-up link for the school picnic I am supposed to be running, a flyer for a race I might run with my son if we decide to train, and, of course, email. Each tab represents a long sub-list of items to do. That’s not enough for me, I guess, so I also have a tab open for an article about why punch is the best drink to serve at a party, because apparently I might throw a punchy party soon — even though I’m not terribly fond of hosting parties. My paper calendar, cell phone, several bills, a health plan reimbursement form, and notes and lists for my nonprofit work cover the desk next to me. I am overstuffed with the bureaucracy of life.

It’s no wonder I can’t think straight, but somehow I feel donating the outgrown Curious George DVDs and reuniting CDs with their lost cases will confer serenity upon me. Maybe it will also magically clean my kitchen and inspire the children to hang their jackets up. And so I sort on. I grab a stack of unlabeled CDs (or are they DVDs?) and mull whether to just toss them or pop them in the computer.

I’m too curious; I must know what they are. The first one is my son’s, a montage of photos from his second-grade year compiled by a thoughtful teacher. Nice, let’s keep that. Next, a mix CD of songs I don’t even like. Easy toss. I catch my breath as the next one whirs to life on my screen. It is a DVD, chock-full of family videos from the year the youngest of my three was born. I didn’t even know this DVD existed.

I ignore Marie Kondo’s tidying-up orders to set aside sentimental items for last. (She warns that they will trap us into relentless reminiscing. She is correct.) I watch.

There we are on Christmas morning, at the zoo, and at the dining room table. I click on another, and there I am in a hospital gown. I had had a c-section that morning. My voice is dry and cracked, and I wear no makeup. My husband is taking the video, and I hear his and my parents’ voices floating in the background. My older children are there too, with their impossibly high voices and impossibly round cheeks. They have come to the hospital to meet their new sister. The 4-year-old gazes at the baby, beams, and pronounces her “good!” The 2-year-old stares at her, serious and silent. Now they want me, and my mother offers chairs, but I don’t seem to hear her, and I eagerly make cozy little nests in the bed on each side of me to snuggle my big kids.

The next one is shaky, a sure sign that one of the children is taking the video. It’s an ordinary day, and the images flash by, blurry, sideways, and now and again clear. There are shoes on the floor, pairs I’d forgotten. The cat wanders by, and toys are sprinkled across the rug. I am wearing my glasses and slippers, and not all the children all fully clothed, so I take it we are parked at home for the duration. It is no day in particular, and it is every day.

I have decluttered, I realize now. I see the evidence there in the videos, the toys and outfits and baby gear that are now gone. Outgrown, and jettisoned. Even that old house is gone — our family grew and moved on, quite literally.

We are encouraged, always, to look forward and keep discarding. Don’t look back. Don’t keep items you never use. Don’t hold onto old, outdated things that don’t suit you anymore. Ask yourself who you are now. And, yes, watching those videos, I didn’t wish for one material thing back. We have changed, after all, as we should.

But — that change that has happened — that is exactly why I find myself wanting to grasp and hold on to those people, those moments. I remember the children being small, but my love for them today is so present and busy and large that it swallows the shrinking past into itself. Looking at them from afar, like a shadowy time traveler, I am surprised by the pure fullness of their past selves, their golden, glistening kernels of individuality, ready to pop into who I know they are today.

The real stranger in the videos is me. I do not recognize this young mother — not really. She is very sweet, and a tender mother to all three children. Somehow, I have let myself forget this part of me, or maybe I never knew her. Those years were at once full and fierce and lovely, and I gave myself over. I truly saw the children during that time, yes, but I was in too deep to see myself as a mother, unless it was in my failures.

I remember yelling. I remember the winter mornings when I struggled to get out of bed, and the evenings when I counted the minutes until Daddy would get home. I remember thinking I thought I would be better at this mothering thing — more patient, more joyful. But now, seeing this woman in the sum of small moments and with the distance of years, I see that she — no, I — was a good mother.

When you’re on a mountain, the climb is rocky, exhausting, treacherous. Once you’re past it, you turn around and it’s lovely, magnificent, breathtaking. How could you have missed it, you wonder?

I’ll continue to declutter the old clothes and toys and almost all of that never-ending stream of youthful artwork. But I won’t let go of all of the past. I’m clinging to the parts that let me turn around and take in that scenic view after the climb, the things that let me fill in the pieces of the pictures of ourselves I was too close to see the first time.

There’s something else, too. Every present day somehow twists and flips into the past, even if messes of bills and to-do lists and homework and calendars don’t seem like the stuff of memories. If someone took a video of me at my desk today, and I watch it in ten years, what will I think? Maybe how young she is, so smooth-faced, and only 40! How dedicated she was, showing up every day for the minutiae of life, simply because it had to get done. (And, hey, look at that old computer!) If my children were in frame, I’d see a warm closeness with those small people, and I’d long for it, perhaps with tears in my eyes. For they will not be small people in ten years.

Just tonight, my ten-year-old hugged me at bedtime, proclaiming, “I want to hug you for ever and ever and ever!” In a decade he will probably be gone, far away at college, and he won’t be saying that anymore — not to me, anyway. I’ll be left to hold on to that moment any way I can.

Sharon Holbrook is a contributing blogger for Brain, Child. Her work also appears in The New York TimesMotherlode blog, Washington Post, and other publications, as well as in the forthcoming HerStories anthology, So Glad They Told Me. You can find her at sharonholbrook.com and on Twitter @sharon_holbrook. Sharon lives with her family in Cleveland, Ohio.

Photo by Scott Boruchov

Clam Chowder Memories

Posted on August 30, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged clam chowder, food, memories, mother son, mothering, summer, Vanessa Wamsley • Leave a comment

By Vanessa Wamsley

I perched on a porous boulder at the edge of California’s Monterey Bay with my three-year-old son, Brad. The September sun warmed our backs – local’s weather, as it is fondly called, when the summer rain and mist lift after the tourist season quiets down. A huge Styrofoam cup balanced on the rock between Brad and me. We took turns spooning out thick, creamy clam chowder, blowing to cool each bite.

Clam chowder was my son’s favorite food back then, and we visited the Monterey Fisherman’s Wharf every Monday morning for a year to share a cup of chowder, our weekly ritual while his dad was at work. Just my son and I on the rocks. But we were a nomadic military family. We would be leaving Monterey and its chowder soon for the East Coast. And like every other move, home would be where the Army sent us.

From our rocky seat near the wharf, we stared down at some sea lions floating together in the shallow water. Their sleek rich coats shone in the sunshine. Pelagic cormorants, black and shiny as patent leather, preened in the sparkling water before suddenly turning tail-up to dive after a darting fish. Brad pointed out a slick sea otter floating on its back under the pier, hacking a clam open with a small rock.

I lifted another spoonful to my lips. The salty, bacon-laden chowder tasted of sunshine, seawater, and tender clams. I would miss that chowder when we moved. Brad and I belonged in that place with our soup and the salt air and the marine wildlife. Would we belong in our new home, too?

Our family moved six months after that day on the rocks. But that would be just one in a series of moves since I met and married my husband Jake in 2004 while he was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. In the last ten years, we’ve lived in Texas, Alabama, Illinois, California, Maryland, and Virginia, where we live now – that is, until we move to Alabama again this summer. All of these moves have addled my sense of where I belong in this world, even though I have roots like a cottonwood tree reaching deep into the small Nebraska town where I grew up. But I wonder where Brad belongs. His roots might be shallow after all our transplants, and I am afraid they are too weak to support him as he goes through life.

***

Three years and two moves after Monterey, in October of 2014, I took Brad, then six years old, camping at Assateague Island National Seashore off the coast of Maryland, a mother-son camping trip. While I was preparing for the trip, Brad overheard me tell his dad that we could find clams right off the island.

“We have to go clamming, Mama! Please, please, please, please!” he begged, hopping from one leg to the other.

“I’ll look into it,” I promised.

“And we’ll make chowder, right?” he asked.

“Um, sure,” I answered.

I didn’t know what I was promising since I had never been clamming. But I wanted to give Brad good chowder again. In the three years since we left Monterey, I had tried to make his favorite dish a few times. But my chowder never reminded me of the sea on a sunny day. It tasted more like a muddled lake in the rain, a poor imitation of the chowder my son and I ate on those rocks next to Fisherman’s Wharf. I suspected that canned clams had ruined my previous attempts to recreate the Fisherman’s Wharf chowder. Fresh clams could be the answer.

Two months after promising my son clam chowder, we went clamming on Assateague Island. We rented equipment and got basic clamming instructions from a man at the rental shed on the beach. The rental man handed me a clam rake and a basket.

He told me to look for a spot with a nice mix of plants and sand covering the bottom. Too many plants would tangle up the rake. Too much sand meant the nutrient mixture in that area wasn’t right for clams. He stepped out onto the beach to demonstrate how to drag the rake behind us.

“When you hear a clink,” he said, “you’ve hit a clam.”

I imagined us shuffling around in the cold October water for an hour, struggling with the long, heavy clam rake. I pictured opening the canned clams I’d brought so we could make chowder even if we failed at clamming. This chowder might taste like disappointment, I thought.

We carried our equipment to the edge of the marsh about 100 yards from our campsite on the western side of the island. Rake and basket in tow, we waded into knee-deep cold water – almost waist-deep for my son.

Assateague Island is a 37-mile long barrier island between Sinepuxent Bay and the Atlantic, one in a chain of islands draped along the East Coast like a long string of beads from Maine to Texas. As wind, waves and storms constantly buffet the chain, the sand on one beach slides to the next island, a process called longshore drift. Each island constantly moves south, its sand no more a part of any one place than Brad or I was. We visited, we drifted along the island’s surface, and we moved on.

At my feet, the deep blue bay flowed into vivid green cordgrass. Salt marsh stretched back into the island for about fifty yards before hitting a bank that rose up into a forest. Loblolly pine trees reached gnarled branches over a thicket of wax myrtle and bayberry.

We dragged our rented rake and floating basket behind us with the edge of the marsh on our right.

When we stopped and the water cleared, we could see our toes wiggling. My toes looked just like they did under the clear sapphire-blue water in Monterey Bay when Brad and I used to wade in the surf. But Brad’s toes seemed to have doubled in size in three years. He wasn’t a toddler running from the waves anymore. He had grown into an inquisitive boy.

Around our feet under the brackish water off Assateague Island, small patches of plants clung to the sand around us, just like the rental man had described. My son pointed out little holes on the bay floor. He claimed the holes meant crabs were filter feeding under the sand.

“It’s the perfect spot!” Brad said.

We crisscrossed the area, the rake leaving ridges behind us in the sand like those Zen sand boxes some people groom in their offices. Clink! Brad and I sank our fingers into the sand, feeling blindly for pay dirt. Or pay clam. My fingers curled around something flat and hard, a clam the size of my palm, almost two inches thick. We leapt in the water, nearly soaking ourselves in our enthusiasm. A pair of kayakers decked out in jackets, paddling gloves, and thick hats stopped at the mouth of an inlet in the marsh to watch us, the lone clammers wading through 65-degree water on a chilly fall day.

“It’s our first clam!” I shouted to them, sharing our exultation. “Ever!” They laughed and saluted with their paddles.

Excited by our success, we covered the area in rake tracks. We found a couple more clams but threw them back because they were too small. A keeper has to be at least one inch thick. We decided to try another method the rental shack man told us about: searching with our bare feet. Removing our shoes, we threw them into the clam bucket and ground our heels into the muddy sand, twisting like Chubby Checker.

“Feel for a rock with your toes,” I told Brad. We added a couple more clams to the bucket and returned a couple more to their sandy bed.

After nearly an hour of dragging the rake and squishing our feet around in the sand, nine good-sized clams, each a triumphant treasure, lay in the bottom of the clam basket.

We waded back to the shore. I could taste the chowder already.

Back at the campsite, I scrubbed the ridged shells and laid them gently in my cast iron Dutch oven on our camp stove. After pouring in a little water, I lit the gas flame to steam open the clams. Remembering the sea otters in Monterey Bay smashing their shellfish open with a rock, I was glad I wouldn’t have to resort to their technique.

While the clams steamed, Brad and I put on dry clothes. Then I chopped an onion, a leek, and three potatoes.

I checked the clams. All were yawning wide, revealing tender white meat the shell once protected. I transferred them with their liquid into a pitcher to cool and tossed butter into the now-empty kettle. When the butter sizzled, the onions and leeks went into the pot.

I chose a cooled clam from the pitcher, its delicate morsel still clinging to the pearly inner surface of the shell. I had never cleaned fresh clams before, and their tenderness surprised me even as their slipperiness made them difficult to handle.

With pride and hope, I chopped my nine clammy trophies and slid them into the pot along with the broth left from steaming open the clams.

My potatoes went in next. The clam broth barely covered the white cubes. I left the chowder to bubble.

While the potatoes cooked, I built up our campfire. The coals had been smoldering all day, so a few dry twigs under a pyramid of logs started a blaze. Our campsite filled with the scent of our chowder mixed with the salty air blowing in from the bay and the wood smoke wafting from the campfire.

Another camper walked by our site.

“You from Texas?” he asked, eyeing the license plate on our pickup.

“No,” I answered. “We live in Reston, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. We just moved there.”

The man sauntered on, satisfied.

But the real answer was more complicated.

I grew up in an agricultural town – population 244, depending on who is home on any given day – in rural southwestern Nebraska. I changed bedrooms once, but lived in the same house for eighteen years before I graduated from high school and moved away to college. As a child, I knew I belonged to Hayes Center, Nebraska. No matter where we live now, rural Nebraskan culture still shapes how I move in the world. At thirty-two years old, I haven’t lived in Hayes Center for fourteen years. But I drink pop instead of soda and cheer for my home state’s Cornhuskers. I clip my words when I speak, and I still gawk at tall buildings and marvel at public transportation. I breathe more easily under a clear blue open sky. Hayseed grows in my heart.

Since marrying a man in the Army, I haven’t stopped moving. But I am from Nebraska.

Brad was born in a hospital in Iowa, so even though we never lived there, he often tells people he is from Iowa. What else is he supposed to say? He has lived many places. He doesn’t really belong to any one of them the way I belong to Nebraska.

I want what every mother wants for her son: I want him to grow into a happy, healthy, well-adjusted, productive man. But I worry that Brad cannot be any of those things unless I give him more time to live in one place, letting the rhythms of its people and landscape sink into him.

***

Back at our campsite, I checked a potato in my chowder pot, and it nearly dissolved under my fork. Perfect. I turned off the camp stove burner and added the final touch to the pot: heavy cream.

While I worked, a small group of Assateague’s famous horses with their shaggy coats, stocky stature, and bloated bellies wandered toward our campsite. As the horses drew closer, my son became nervous and hid in the pickup cab. A park ranger had told him that in the summer during high tourist season, a horse bites at least one visitor every week. The feral animals protect their territory and their food.

Clicking my tongue and banging an empty cup against a plate, I tried to shoo the horses away from our site. They eyed me warily and moved on.

I ladled chowder into two blue enamel bowls while Brad hovered near my elbow, excited for his favorite meal. We perched on our camp chairs next to the fire and savored a moment of anticipation before tasting the chowder.

“Cheers!” I said, raising my bowl.

“Cheers!” he echoed, touching his bowl against mine.

I grinned at him, my spoon to my lips.

Salty clams and broth mingled in my mouth with velvety potatoes melting into rich cream. Savory onions and leeks lingered at the edges of my tongue. The simple ingredients melded like ripples merging to form waves.

I’ll never cook with a can of rubbery, watery clams again as long as I live.

“How’s your chowder?” I asked Brad.

“It’s the best I ever had! The best chowder anyone ever made ever!” He was as enthusiastic as I felt.

We ate in silence. Finally, I leaned back in my camp chair, having eaten more creamy clammy goodness than my stomach could bear. The fire snapped and crackled. I sipped a beer.

Brad groaned. “I’m so full, Mama,” he told me. “I can’t move.”

He threw his head back and closed his eyes. I let a lazy, satisfied sleepiness creep into my body.

Soon I would have to clean up our dishes. The fire needed another log. Our wet, sandy clamming clothes lay in a pile next to our tent. Always little chores at a campsite. But for a few comfortable moments, I just sat by the fire next to my son with a belly full of clam chowder.

My mind drifted back to another clam chowder day, the two of us balanced on a boulder next to the bay savoring a shared cup of chowder. What makes us belong to a place even when we live a rootless, nomadic existence, like the sand that blows across Assateague Island? In that moment by our campfire, smoky, creamy clam chowder memories anchored us to both the East Coast and the West Coast. My young son’s adventures bring a perspective to his life that my small-town upbringing could never have encompassed. Brad’s roots may be shallow, but they already stretch from coast to coast, held to the earth by the breadth of his experience rather than the amount of time he has lived in any one place.

Tucking the fireside chowder memory away next to the seaside one, I pulled myself out of my camp chair. I arranged our empty clamshells on a log next to the fire like someone else might display awards on a shelf.

We caught them. We cooked them. And they were good.

Author’s Note: I pass my children pieces of my childhood by experiencing the world with them, just like my mom and dad did for me

Vanessa Wamsley writes science, nature and education stories in northern Alabama where she lives with her husband, Jake; son, Brad; and daughter, Nora. Her recent work has appeared in Slate, Modern Notion, and The Atlantic.

Writing Memories

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Lauren Apfel • Posted in Blog • Tagged children and childhood, emotions, family, journal, Lauren Apfel, memories, motherhood, notebook • 6 Comments

For years, I have kept a notebook by the side of my bed, the pages filled with my children’s milestones. With teeth cut, with words uttered, with laces tied, with pedals pushed. When my first son was born, I wanted to catch every last detail, to snare them all, like the slippery fish they are, in the net of permanence language casts so well. I wanted future access to the moments I knew would slip, inevitably at some point, through the cracks of my mind. What I wanted, I see now, was nothing less than to be able to hold his childhood in my hands, once it was gone, and to say, yes, I remember it, I remember it intimately, each fleeting drop.

The notebook was an insurance policy that I would remember who my son was at 16 months old and then again at 36 months old, that I would remember the difference between those incarnations of him and how he got from one to the other. From the toddler who would sleep 15 hours a day to the boy who is still thumping around in his bed gone 10 pm. From the three- year-old with the clipped English accent, performing brain surgery on me with a stethoscope, to the eight-year-old bearer of broad Glaswegian vowels, between whose feet everything becomes a football.

When my second child was born, I bought another notebook. And when the twins came along, I bought yet another two. There were lapses in the entries, of course there were lapses. In between the task of chronicling life is the business of living it. But no major milestone went unrecorded. The when and the how were just as telling to me as the what. Taken together, I felt, these details were evidence somehow of the most important evolutions I would ever witness. I can’t put my finger on why exactly I needed to pin down my children’s development in this way, to preserve these moments like so many butterflies on a collection board, except to say that I sensed, from the beginning, a responsibility.

Before I had children, I was a classicist. An education spent tracing the lines of historical inheritance had shown me that the events of the past only reside with us in the present through the careful transmission of words, because somebody had the foresight to realize this, this is significant, this is worth putting on paper. If I wasn’t that person for my children, who would be? If I didn’t keep custody of the facts of their early existence, there was a good chance those footprints would fade away altogether.

Oblivion was a risk I was not willing to take. And I deemed memory too wily a creature to trust on her own, not with an enemy so powerful as the passage of time. The ancient Greek word for oblivion is lethe, which means “forgetfulness.” The word for “truth” is aletheia, which means, literally, an un-forgetting, because forgetting, the Greeks believed, is the way you lose your grip on the truth. From the night I became a mother and began charting feed times by moonlight, it was clear that, in the battle against oblivion, writing would be my weapon of choice. It was words, I was convinced, that would allow me to hold tightest to the “truth” of this almost indescribable thing that was happening to me.

My pen has not failed me. The written documentation I have compiled over the past eight years has helped me to remember my children as babies, to remember them as toddlers, to remember them in a way that photographs alone, for example, have not. There are reams and reams of pictures saved on my computer, but an image of my daughter at two and a half cannot tell me that that was the age she asked her first “why” question. Nor can it tell me what it was that she asked.

Recently, however, I have noticed a change. While the notebook still sits by the side of my bed, the pages are emptier than they used to be. One of my kids will say something or do something and I will think, aha, a breakthrough in logic! A new feat of independence! But time will pass and I won’t have written it down. My twins, my last children, have just celebrated their third birthday and this can’t be a coincidence. At three, they have pushed through the door which marks the end of the truly formative period, into a room where development is not so fast and furious, where age is no longer measured in days or weeks or months.

Quite suddenly, it seems, we have begun the long march of years. As our family life becomes more about the broad strokes and less about the fine points, so does the way I find myself accounting for it. The details and dates I once obsessed over have given way to bigger-picture essays, essays like this one, that attempt to pin down a different kind of truth. A truth that will, in turn, leave me with a different kind of memory. In Greek mythology, the goddess Memory, Mnemosyne, is the antidote to oblivion. She is also the mother of the muses. Whatever I remember about them in the future, however I write about them from hereon in, the one thing I know for certain is that my children will always be my muses.

“Most sweet, vigilant, she reminds us of all the thoughts that each one of us is for ever storing in our hearts, overlooking nothing, rousing everyone to consciousness.”

-Orphic Hymn to Memory

Read more essays on ages 1 – 10 in This is Childhood, a book about the first years of childhood and motherhood.

The Insistence of Memory

Posted on July 15, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Blog • Tagged children and childhood, emotions, memories, parenting • 9 Comments

By Claudia Gresham

Since my son has been small enough to fit in a good-sized pocket, I have gone to bed at night and glared at the ceiling, furious with myself for not wringing more out of the day. I need a “life juicer,” to salvage more of the essence and less of the pith of life. I should have hoarded his wicked, full-body baby chortles, or even now, his deeper laugh that sneaks out of his cautious guard and spills over me like the smell of freshly cut grass. I must have missed so many opportunities to let him know how much I love him or how amazing and special he is. Why would I not play foosball with him? How much would it have hurt my productivity to stop and play hide and seek for just a few turns? Why is the minutia of life so pressing? How many times have I said, “Just five more minutes” as I plunked away on my keyboard, continued with the laundry or talked on the phone? Of course, I looked away for just a few moments, and now he is starting middle school. He’s totally outgrown any pocket I have.

I wonder what he will insist on remembering. I worry that he will remember only my lectures on standing closer to the toilet: “HOLD IT DOWN!” I’ve screeched. “DON’T PEE ON THE WALL!” I’m hoping he won’t recall my epic, drama queen moments when he’s pushed my last button with his sassy ass and sent me into bug-eyed, psycho-mommy mode. I’m hoping he’ll forget the time I burned his arm with Compound W, thinking those warts were actually warts (having no idea they were the start of a nasty, body-wide virus). I could only make a “very bad dog” face when the dermatologist looked at me curiously and said, “Let’s not do that to him again.” I hope he won’t remember the time I squawked, “You won’t leave the table until you finish your salmon and your milk.” (Note to parents: Never utter those words. You will regret them, most assuredly. Also, you will mop.)

Instead, I want him to remember the hours I’ve spent rocking him when he was sick. Maybe he’ll smile at the memory of my sitting patiently outside his guitar lessons, privately wondering if my money would be better spent if I simply heated the house by burning $20 bills. I want him to remember me there on field trips, following doggedly behind him at a strictly non-embarrassing distance, watching him grow into himself; screaming when he scored his only basket all season, even if the score wasn’t even close; pulling him outside, away from the flat, insincerity of video games, making him tell me all about his day in the sunshine; showing him how snakes really are beautiful smooth poetry; nurturing his embryonic passions for creating and science; holding him close in a thunderstorm; reading a thousand books in an old, battered recliner that squeaked peacefully.

We don’t get to pick our children’s memories, sadly. My parents probably wouldn’t have chosen for me to remember a miserable camping trip that poured rain, tested short tempers, and forced us to scoot in a hostile clot towards the middle of the tent, away from the canvas walls that seeped. I remember it in minute, soggy detail, and in fact, refuse to camp to this day. I told my young boy scout that I would give him an organ, any organ, or all of my blood, but I wouldn’t camp with him. Ever. I expect my parents wish I didn’t remember my vomit-strewn trip to Williamsburg when I was 10. I’m certain I didn’t barf the entire vacation, but my memory, ever the drama queen, still languishes and cramps on that Holiday Inn’s cold tile floor. I know my persistent, bitchy memory defeats my parents who tried to give me more than just grainy, sullen Polaroids and a bad attitude towards family vacations.

Recently, I watched a silently weeping father, chin to his chest, praying, remembering, waiting for word of his son lost amid the rubble after the Oklahoma tornado raged. This made me remember the dazed Newtown parents and the unopened Christmas gifts under their trees. I think of the countless who drive home from the hospital, stunned, with no one making happy messes in the back seat. Their memories must poke holes with their sharp edges. I gather my memories close, thankful that they are still smooth and easy to handle.

Life is ripe. Now. It is so fragrant and intoxicating, we should juice it, squeeze the rind dry, and bottle this everyday magic. I want all those “five minutes” back. I want to run to catch up with my beautiful boy who is already racing away from me, hold him until he protests, put him in my pocket and keep him safely there; I will feed him beautiful, sustaining memories, inhale deeply, and listen to the steady, peaceful squeak of a rocker.

Claudia Gresham is an English and Zumba instructor at Stanly Community College in Albemarle, NC. She has published in Encore Magazine, Lonzie’s Fried Chicken Southern Literary Magazine and the Charlotte Observer. She is the single mom of 11-year-old Robert who embodies the spirited karma she had coming to her.

Art: Salvador DalÃ, The Persistence of Memory, 1931

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Seasons

Posted on January 11, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged cancer, death, Lindsey Mead, loss, memories, mother and daughter, seasons • Leave a comment

A short story by Lindsey Mead

The sky is at its most intense, deep blue, before it fades to blackness; autumn’s leaves are stunning in their doomed shades of red and orange and yellow, before they crumple to uniform brown and fall to the frozen ground. So many things are at their most beautiful just before they die: the last gasp of beauty.

I thought about this a lot as I witnessed my mother’s fleeting, ethereal beauty leading up to her death in the last weeks of winter. She was so gentle, so strong, so prepared; she took me away from my terror, my loneliness, my despair. It was as if the entirety of her fierce spirit surfaced during her last days; her fragile skin was so transparent it seemed to reveal not only her deep blue veins but also the fullness of her heart.

Driving through Harvard Square, the muddy tired snow reminds me of those long days, two winters ago, in the room with the medicine-saturated air, lit by the clear winter light that poured into the room only during the coldest season, when the tall trees surrounding our Victorian house were barren and skeletal. I reach down to change gears but the stick shift is stuck; this car is so old, dammit. I have to take both hands off the wheel and use my full weight to shift to fourth gear.

****

“Lizzie, come on, you can do it! Relax and ease the pedals past each other. It’s really easy; it’s just the balance you have to get right.” In my memory, my mother smiles calmly at me, acknowledging the tears of frustration in my eyes. I take a deep breath, wipe a summer-browned arm across my forehead, turn the key in the ignition again. I can’t get the damn thing into first gear. I keep on stalling and jumping forward. It feels like my mother and I are riding a bucking rodeo horse. I know she doesn’t want to be here, teaching me to drive. This is her vacation, too, and she would rather be on the beach with her best friend than in a beat-up Jeep that smells like mold in a deserted high school parking lot. I feel so American and so teenaged, learning how to drive. It is such a clichéd rite of passage, yet I am angry and impatient, annoyed that I cannot figure this stupid thing out.

My mother is patient, but she cannot quite describe what I’m doing wrong. It reminds me of when she used to try to help me with basic French grammar. Her fluency removed her from the introductory stuff just as her instinctive comfort at the wheel is difficult to break down into steps I can actually practice and follow.

****

Mum died two years ago; everything reminds me of her. I cannot go through an hour without being drenched by a waterfall of memories. I am waiting for that moment, that day, when I can be happy with my memories and smile about them; I know that is what Mum wanted (wants?). She always told me she wanted to be remembered with laughter, during our many long late-night talks, over big mugs of herbal tea (she’d choose ginger tea – I hated it, it made my tongue numb), or, in the summer, over tall glasses of iced tea. Mum had a million friends; she was the most popular person I have ever known. But in the family, it was just the two of us. Dad left us when I was five years old, and I never really remembered him. He traveled a lot. His final departure wasn’t that much different from the others, except that he never came back, sweaty and cranky and demanding. Mum’s parents have been dead for a long time, I never knew them, and she didn’t have any siblings. Luckily for both of us there was enough money in the Chase family that Mum could work with the political activist groups she loved so much without worrying about putting me through college. We lived comfortably. We had a summer house by Buzzards Bay where I learned to sail, and an old Victorian house in Cambridge.

******

Mum was a national sailing champion in college. She also played bridge for money, earning her train fare for weekends visiting her brother at Amherst , where they would drink bourbon at his fraternity. Mum was a huge person contained in a regular-sized body. Of her many passions, sailing was the most essential. She instilled it in me. When I was very little she and I would go out into Buzzards Bay in the Laser or the Sunfish or, for longer sails, the J24. By the time I was eight I was sailing by myself. I understood the balance between boat and sail, wind and water. Mum taught me racing strategy, explaining what it was to steal someone else’s wind during a race. She told me that I should try to do it as infrequently as possible because it wasn’t “nice,” though she knew full well that I would eventually have to steal wind in order to win races.

And I did win, early and often. My trophies – silver bowls that Mum liked to use for fruit, engraved cups, and models of sailboats – began to crowd hers on the mahogany mantelpiece in our living room in Cambridge. I didn’t understand why Mum always had tears in her eyes when I raced up the dock to her after a race, ripping off my sailing gloves, untying the harness that helped me hike out over the edge of the boat, holding my blue first-place pennant and bubbling over with questions about the race, how I did, how I could have done better, gone faster.

Adolescence brought me to a more profound understanding of sailing and what it meant to my mother. When I sailed by myself (one of my favorite things to do during the long sunny days of summer) I would feel my mother’s hands in my grip on the mainsheet and look through her eyes as I gauged the wind direction. When my toes squeaked against the centerboard case I remembered how I’d giggle when hers made the same noise so many years ago, when I sat in the bottom of the cockpit of the boat and played with the bailer as she sailed. I would lean back and trail my long red hair, so much like my mother’s, in the dark green ocean just as she had taught me to do.

********

When I was fifteen, about five years ago, Mum mentioned to me that, in the distant future, when she died, she wanted to be cremated. She told me that she wanted me to sprinkle her ashes in the ocean and read “Sea Fever” by John Masefield (“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky…”) as I did it. I laughed, but her face was serious, and she told me solemnly that she really meant it. It was early in April two years ago that I drove to Buzzards Bay with the ornate urn buckled into the seat next to me. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much my mother would have hated the fussy, formal urn – I had picked the plainest, simplest one the funeral home offered, and it was still far too gaudy. I almost laughed through my tears when I thought about how she still had her seatbelt on while I drove: even in death she wasn’t confident of my driving. I realized these were our last moments of CQT, as we used to call our Car Quality Time, the intimate, meandering talks we’d have during long rides.

*******

“Mum? Um … may I have some more tea?” I am hedging, indicating the black and white cow-shaped teapot that my mother loves. She also has a pitcher that looks like it’s made out of stalks of asparagus that she adores. Random stuff clutters the kitchen. We never had a neatly matching set of plates or any policy for what was used when. The family silver came out for everyday breakfast and was most often used with the chipped earthenware plates that she had brought back from a trip to Paris years ago. Mum reaches out to the pot and pours more tea.

“Yes, yes, everything is fine. I don’t know, Mum, here’s something I want to tell you,” I chew on my thumbnail and then catch myself, pull my hand out of my mouth and start to toy with the handle of my mug instead.

“What, Liz?” Mum is distracted, looking out of the kitchen window into the night. She does that a lot; I always wonder what she looks at and I asked her once. She told me she just liked to see how black it got outside and to ponder how complete a blanket night could be.

“Well, it’s about Chris. Something that happened …” I look down and concentrate on my bitten fingernails, feeling my face flame with redness.

“Mm-hmm?” Mum isn’t really paying attention to me.

“Well, we slept together, Mum, and I, ahhhh—I guess I just wanted you to know, okay?” I stutter while talking, and finally, I force myself to look up into her eyes. She is looking at me at last. I am nervous about her reaction and also having a weird, vivid flashback to the day I told her I got my period. I’d been similarly nervous, and she had thrown her arms around me and started to cry, whispering, “Welcome!” Her reaction had touched and embarrassed me at the same time. I waited to see what she would say now. I have wanted to tell her since it happened last weekend, but we haven’t really had a chance. She’s been so busy at work.

“Liz, you know what? I know. I could just tell. I do know you pretty well. I know that you love him. And I think that he loves you. And I think that’s wonderful! What was it like?” Her final question kind of creeps me out, but I feel I have no choice but to answer it. “Well, it was okay… I mean, it hurt and all, but I’m glad. I mean I just feel really close to him and we talk about it all the time, which is good, I guess, and I am really happy about it because I do really love him…” I stop myself because I know I am babbling. I am so relieved to have finally told her.

“I’m not going to give you a lot of stuff about being careful because I know you’re a big girl, Lizzie.” Mum has always talked to me like a grownup. I think it’s a result of it being just the two of us for so long. “But if you do have questions, feel free to ask them, I’m here. And I’ve been there.” She smiles at me, and when she does, all her wisdom and love and understanding seem to flow across the table from her brown eyes, the same shade as mine, directly to me. I am moved, but I stare hard into the bottom of my cup and concentrate on the brownish murky swirls at the bottom of the tea, holding back tears.

********

About three weeks after that talk Mum went to the doctor because she found a lump in her breast in the shower. She was swept into a whirlwind of mammograms and biopsies, and it was quickly confirmed that she had Stage IV breast cancer. It had spread to her lungs.

My mother went haywire. She had never been sick a day in her life. She had walked around for 10 days with a fractured tibia before finally conceding to an x-ray. The day she was given the final diagnosis, she had gone to the appointment alone, refusing to let me skip school to join her. I think she was guided by some impulse to shield me from what she intuitively knew would be bad news. When she got home she marched through the front door of our house, threw her pocketbook into the corner of the entrance hall, and walked directly to the liquor cabinet. I was sitting in the big rickety rocking chair, studying SAT words, and I looked up when I heard the door slam. Mum poured herself a big glass of scotch and downed it fast. I was nervous: Mum never drank.

“Lizzie. I’m dying. I have cancer. Why didn’t I do that stupid self-exam more often? I have cancer. This kind of thing doesn’t happen to me, I just read about it. I have cancer. I have cancer. Do you think I’m going to get used to saying that?” She sat down heavily and began to cry. I was stunned; I shut my thick book with a thump, feeling irrational irritation at its laminated, brightly colored cover. I stood up slowly and walked awkwardly over to my mother’s heaving shoulders.

“What did Dr. Goldman say? What happened?”

“Yeah, it’s cancer. So much for that ‘one in ten lumps is malignant’ crap. So much for ‘you’re still young.’ I guess 42 isn’t that young anymore. Oh, Lizzie, why? Why? What did I do?” She started to wail and got up and poured herself another scotch; her hand shook as she sloshed the brown liquid into her glass and some spilled onto the dark wood table.

From this point my memories blur; the following months are hazy and ragged at the edges, in distinct contrast to that afternoon whose details will always be crystalline in my memory. I could draw the cover of that SAT book in perfect detail. After that, I remember Mum started to drink more. She withdrew from her friends and her work and from me and simply sat around all day, staring out of the window at the fall. It was a spectacular fall, I do remember that, and Mum seemed to spend all day long looking out of the bay windows of our house at the trees as their leaves changed. I recall wondering if she ever actually saw them. She never said anything. The house was choked with silence.

I kept going to school, going through my days with mechanical motions. Chris and I broke up because I was so distracted, so preoccupied. I didn’t even notice that he was gone from my life. For a while Mum stopped talking to me at all; she was completely silent for three weeks. I spent a lot of time at the houses of a couple of close friends. I became really angry. In fact, my anger sort of excited me; I thought if I could synthesize enough anger, then I could cancel out and erase my grief and terror. I fed on my anger, making myself madder and madder until I was so angry that I didn’t think I cared about Mum at all. That she was dying became some kind of twisted relief. In my fury I told myself I was looking forward to the day she was gone. To the day the silence and anger would finally dissipate. October and November passed in a monochromatic, echoing quiet blur.

*****

This has become a familiar scene: I open the fridge door, pull out two chicken breasts, cream, and mushrooms, slam the door. Our fridge is old, and the door doesn’t shut without a lot of force, so there’s a lot of slamming in the kitchen. I find a wooden chopping board and start to slice the mushrooms with precision, concentrating. Slice, chop, wipe off the blade. Slice, chop, wipe off the blade. The sensation of steel slicing through the soft firmness of the mushrooms is oddly soothing. The gray-brown spade-shaped slivers form reassuringly regular rows on the edge of the chopping board. Mum wanders into the room, glass in hand, and sits down at the kitchen table, watching me. I put a pan on the stove and melt some butter into it; I watch the bubbles and hear them sizzling before tossing the chicken and mushrooms into the pan. I wait for them to brown in the heat. When I add the cream I stir it around and it turns from thick white to thinner brown-gold. I turn off the stove with the same soft click I’ve heard every day since birth and slop the chicken breasts onto two plates. Balancing the plates on my right arm like a waiter I pull open a drawer and grab two knives and two forks. I sit across from Mum and slide her plate and silverware across the wooden surface.

“Lizzie…” Mum whispers, keeping her head bowed, focusing down as she toys with the prongs of her fork. She is gripping the thing so tightly that her knuckles are going white around the edges. I notice her cuticles are ragged and bloody; she has always bitten her nails, preferring them short to “those tacky talons,” but they have never looked so destroyed. I refuse to answer her and look instead directly at her forehead, my gaze so full of resentment and anger I feel as though I could burn a hole through her dry papery skin.

She pulls her head up slowly, as though it’s heavy, and meets my gaze tentatively. Immediately her eyes drop again when she sees the expression on my face, my clenched jaw and pursed lips. “I’m sorry. I don’t know…” her voice is so quiet, like the rustle of dried leaves. My mind flies wildly to a memory of us raking leaves when I was a child, of jumping into a pile of them, of being surprised by the damp sogginess under the crispy brown top layer.

My feelings threaten to overflow my body. The last months have been so controlled as I deliberately constructed fences around my fear. These barricades come bursting open now, and my pain is alive, terrifying in its immediacy and power. I feel like a woman suddenly. I feel like my mother’s peer for the first time. Looking into her eyes I see how scared she is, how sad, how much she needs me. I am overwhelmed with these revelations, by the crushing, instant knowledge that my mother is a person, too, with needs and fears. I push my chair back roughly and run around the table to her side. I kneel on the floor beside her chair and throw my arms around her neck, sobbing into her chest, between her diseased breasts, the breasts that kept me alive in the first months of my life and that are killing my mother in the last months of hers.

Author’s Note: I wrote the first draft of this story before I had children at all. When I revisited it a few years later I was frankly astonished by the themes I had touched on, perhaps subconsciously. I am fortunate to live a mile away from my mother, and to regularly watch her interact with my 10-year old daughter. The way the generations ripple and echo fascinates me. My mother’s closest friend, who was a kind of second mother to me, passed away when she was 49, and her death is very present in this story also.

About the Author: Lindsey Mead is a mother, writer, and headhunter who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, daughter, and son. A childhood spent moving around the world left her with a contradictory combination of restlessness and a deep craving for stability. She graduated from Princeton with a degree in English and has an MBA from Harvard, and is currently eschewing her peripatetic childhood by having lived in the same house for 11 years. Her writing has been anthologized and published in a variety of print and on-line sources including Torn: True Stories of Kids, Careers, and the Conflict of Modern Motherhood, So Long: Short Narratives of Loss and Remembrance, the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Literary Mama, and others. She writes daily at A Design So Vast.

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