Nov 15, 2013
Mike Chielens died last Saturday. The many online comments on his obituary noted his love of baseball, beer, and rock and roll. Chielens was director of Legal Aid of Western Michigan, and the comments also spoke of his kindness, his fight for the underdog, his respect for everyone. But I knew Chielens when he was a brand-new legal aid lawyer at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid – JALA. He was a laughing elf of a man, a tiny guy with a huge heart, round face, red hair, freckles.
ROCKING AND ROLLING
Chielens loved to flirt. Though he looked like Howdy Doody, with a little boy’s physique, his charm and intensity could bowl women over. But he was loyal to his fiancée in Michigan, and whenever Van Morrison sang Brown Eyed Girl, Chielens talked about Jan, a warning to us to keep a safe distance.
Mike Chielens and Mike Milito shared an apartment. They were fun-loving wild men, smart, determined, and fierce for justice. I knew them when we were young, when all of us were young, a gang of northerners with law degrees who descended on Jacksonville to be turned into lawyers under the leadership of two slightly older Harvard Law graduates.
SOME OF THE GANG IN 1975
Jacksonville was a blue-collar city, with a large poor black population, a large poor white population, some uppercrust southerners and a whole lot of insurance executives. Lefty lawyers had trouble finding friends outside legal aid, so we became a close-knit group, living in little bungalows in Riverside, near downtown. Some of us lived at Jacksonville Beach, and kept open house on weekends.
RIVERSIDE BUNGALOWS
LAWYERS AT THE BEACH: SUE, SARA, LIZ
When we first came to Jacksonville, my five-year-old son Eric and I stayed with Sara until I found a place, an upstairs apartment with no air-conditioning, but well shaded by thick pine trees. Later, when I was no longer a VISTA volunteer making three thousand a year but a staff attorney making ten, I moved to a house, and new arrivals would stay with us.
On Saturday mornings I’d start my laundry in the laundromat on King Street and Eric and I would walk to visit one friend or another while the clothes dried. Julie and Graddy kept M&M’s on the back of their toilet to encourage their toddler to get up in the night to pee. Sue and Max always had coffee aging in a percolator.
MAX, SUE, AND EMILY – ALWAYS READY TO REHEAT THE COFFEE
In the evenings we often gathered at my house so I wouldn’t need a babysitter. I cooked dinner, Jim brought his guitar, and we sang harmony. I had serial crushes on most of the guys, but generally avoided fishing off the company pier, and instead paired up with quite unsuitable men whom I found elsewhere.
UNSUITABLE MEN
My family came down for Thanksgiving, and legal aid friends joined us. My father was impressed that fourteen people could be so jolly on only two bottles of wine. He didn’t notice some of us sneaking off to the back of the house to smoke dope.
THANKSGIVING FUN
One day our program director came into my office and found me crying. I had discovered that Eric’s after school care was atrocious, and didn’t know where to turn. That night, Paul’s wife Shirley called and said Eric could come to her house after school – she had four daughters from elementary to high school. They lived two blocks from me, and two blocks from Eric’s school.
Shirley and I decided to train for the first Jacksonville River Run, so every morning she knocked on my door at 6:30, and we ran through Riverside and Avondale, on past the huge oaks and houses of Ortega. After the River Run, I drove to the beach and joined a party that lasted well into the night.
LIZ AND SHIRLEY IN THE FIRST JACKSONVILLE RIVER RUN
JALA LIKED TO PARTY
I stayed at Jacksonville five years before I moved to Gainesville. One by one, my friends left JALA for Atlanta, Grand Rapids, Providence, DC, Los Angeles. Most of us stayed connected to poverty law in one way or another.
At every time and place of my life, except one desperately lonely year in Montreal, I have had a group of friends. Happily, in every group there is always one who keeps us all connected after we move on. For the JALA gang it’s Marie, who writes long, chatty Christmas letters, who organized two reunions in Florida, who made an email list of old JALA comrades and told us when first Mike Milito, and then Mike Chielens got terrible cancers.
MARIE (far right) ORGANIZED REUNIONS
Milito and his wife Judy went on Caring Bridge, where we could read the step by step horrors of his treatment, and finally, thank God, his slow recovery. Chielens didn’t use Caring Bridge, but Jan sent emails and Marie forwarded them to us.
MILITO, CHIELENS AND JAN IN HAPPIER DAYS
Mike and Jan put themselves through torture, with the hope that they would have many years on the other side They didn’t; his condition grew worse and worse and after about a year of hell, Chielens died. I got the news from Marie, and cried and cried. It was Marie who sent flowers in all our names, with Dylan lyrics – ‘May you stay forever young.’ And Marie who said, ‘don’t pay me for the flowers,’ and organized a group contribution to Western Michigan Legal Aid.
I hadn’t seen Chielens in over thirty years, and only kept up with him second-hand. But I grieve for him, and for that time, for that community of young people happily misspending our youths together. We played hard, but we also worked hard, certain that our cause was just, hopeful that we could change at least one little corner of the world.
I have reached an age where my friends and famiy will be dying, unless I go first. Many of my friends have survived cancer, some are battling it now. I write this in Miami Beach, where we have come for the unveiling of my late brother-in-law’s tombstone. Adam died suddenly, a few weeks after his fiftieth birthday celebration.
ADAM, JOE, AND FRIEND
Thinking of my own death doesn’t dismay me much, though I hope to hang around long enough to launch Amanda and see her land on her feet, and it would be nice to see my books published and acclaimed before I go. But losing my family, losing my friends – that’s very hard.
SHE’LL LAND ON HER FEET
Young people see old age as boring, or at best, peaceful. They think all the excitement and adventures are theirs. But facing all this loss, facing my own mortality, this is a profound, if difficult, adventure.
Here’s to Chielens. Here’s to all the friends I have lost touch with, and all the friends I will someday lose.
Sep 20, 2013
Breakfast is one of my favorite meals. (The others are lunch, dinner, and snacks.) I get up pretty early, sometime between 4:30 and 6:00, and drink my coffee, free-writing if I’m on a roll, reading the newspaper if I’m in a slump. I wait a while for breakfast.
source: debwire at nowpublic.com
I like the variety of breakfast. It might be a chunk of cheese with grapes and a piece of bread. Peanut butter and jelly melting on hot toast. All the scraps and bits left on the chicken carcass I had planned to save for soup. Leftovers from the night before: broccoli and mashed potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs,stew. I like more conventional breakfasts too: I never get tired of Cheerios, Grapenuts, Miniwheats, cornflakes. In the winter I love oatmeal, which tastes so much better when you call it porridge. Winter is also the time for Orlando tangelos or marsh grapefruit from Henderson and Daughter at the farmers’ market.
sources:browneyedbaker.com, healthland.time.com
sources: doctorgrandmas.com, today.agrilife.org
Because I believe breakfast is important after the long night fast, I search for ways to be sure Amanda eats it. In third grade she wanted to eat breakfast at school. I knew it was sugary junk, but I didn't argue. My maternal battle cry is choose your battles.
source:wweapons.blogspot.com
Like many adolescents (yes, she’s not quite eleven, but decidedly adolescent) Amanda now resists breakfast, as she resists every other suggestion, request, or demand. To make the morning a little more pleasant, I’ve revived and revised the menu from Grandma’s Café, which used to be open in the afternoon after preschool.
I wake her at 6:30, and she chooses from the menu or suggests something else. I speak as little as possible in this encounter – she needs time to float up out of sleep. I go into the kitchen and fix her breakfast and my own, call back to her “It’s ready,” and then, depending on my own mood and my sense of hers, I retreat with my breakfast to my chair, or settle at the kitchen table. I put her plate on top of the refigerator to keep it from Trisket, who has stolen many omelets, tuna melts, and bowls of porridge over the years. click
Trisket
Amanda almost always shows up within fifteen minutes, mostly dressed, mostly ready for school, and she almost always eats what she has chosen.
A few years ago Luli gave me a big electric griddle, and sometimes Amanda makes Sunday pancakes from a mix for the three of us. She has become very adept. She doesn’t need to measure, but judges the batter by its consistency. She knows I like mine small and dark, and she always gives me the little crispy drops that fall on the griddle.
When Amanda was in kindergarten and living with her mother, I used to pick her up to drive her to school. As I drove I would gauge her mood, and ask whether Angel’s Café was open. It usually was, and it was the best breakfast spot in town. The service was faster than any McDonalds – I asked for coffee and almost before the words were out of my mouth she was handing me a cup of black coffee, brewed in the big pot with the wooden spoon that had somehow ended up in the back seat. The only item on the menu was whatever you want. Sometimes pancakes with eggs and bacon, sometimes black beans and rice, spaghetti and meatballs, or best of all, chicken soup. The recipe is obvious to any five- year-old. “What did you put in the soup?” I asked. “Chicken.” “And what else?” “Soup!” indignant at my ignorance.
Angel's cafe closed years ago, but I still love going out for breakfast. Then I eat things I don’t cook at home: biscuits with sausage gravy, bacon, stir-fried veggies and tofu, salmon cakes, breakfast burritos.
I know many of our breakfasts don’t fit one diet theory or another: too many simple carbs, or eggs, or Lord preserve us, SUGAR. Feel free to go through the list of what I eat for breakfast and shake your finger at all the food sins: sugar, fat, eggs, potatoes, pesticides on the banana peel, caffeine in the coffee.
Food has powerful emotional resonance. I feel safe when my freezer is full of homemade soups, stews, beans, casseroles. I feel safe when Amanda goes off to school with a full stomach.
Lots of dinners (and an ice-pack) in my messy freezer
I have doubts about so many parts of parenting: the rules, the lessons, the consequences, when to be strict and when to loosen up. I’m not crazy about all the junk food in our lives, but I get in as many vegetables, fruits, whole grains and legumes as I can, and I don’t have any doubt that eating homemade meals together is good for our souls, and good for our family.
Sep 6, 2013
Have you ever taken the Meyers Briggs test? If you do, you’ll end up categorized along four different scales, including introvert/extrovert. This doesn’t have much to do with the usual idea that an introvert is shy and retiring while an extrovert is a party animal.
Party animals. Image from sugarbutterbaby.com
Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, made a discreet splash last year. I can’t bring myself to read it. I’m sure it’s full of important data, amusing anecdotes, and helpful advice, but it sounds too earnest for me.
The concept I remember from Meyers Briggs is that an extrovert gets her energy from being with other people, while an introvert charges her battery with solitude. No one would think it, since I can be pretty lively in company, but I am an introvert. I need huge doses of solitude to keep me going.
Charging my batteries
Once when Amanda was four and sitting quietly, I said something to her and she complained, “I was thinking, and now I’ve lost my think.” That’s how I feel. I like my thinks, and want to be left alone to wander around with them.
When I get home and see Joe’s car in the driveway I am likely to feel, “Oh good, Joe’s home.” When there is no car in the driveway I feel, “Oh boy, I’m alone.”
Oh good, he’s home!
Once we were spending the evening with Mary Anne and Larry. I’ve known them over thirty years, and the four of us are as close to family as friends can get; among other things, we share late-in-life parenthood. I said to them, “Being with you is almost as good as being alone.” They understood that I was expressing profound affection.
These blessings came late in our lives
Since I retired I have had lots of solitude. Amanda goes off to her school, Joe goes off to his. My day stretches out in front of me, available for puttering, reading, writing and thinking. I love that.
Still, I have discovered that you can get too much of a good thing. Recently I had minor surgery on my foot. I have a walking cast, but mostly I have to sit with my foot elevated. The pain comes and goes, and if I’m willing to sleep for hours, I can control it with drugs. With all this solitude and enforced leisure, you’d think I would write and write, read and read. Instead I’ve bought streaming Netflix, and I’m watching many movies, as well as multiple episodes of Parks and Recreation.
This experience confirms my belief that watching TV is depressing and addictive. And when I’m confined to a chair, solitude is no fun at all.
So while Sartre had a point when he said that Hell is other people, Milton also got it right. “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” I’ve got my dog, my cat, my ice pack, good books, good drugs, but if I can’t emerge when I want to, my little solitary heaven becomes a bleak and gloomy place.
Jun 21, 2013
Note: The Feminist Grandma is taking a long vacation. She will return the Friday after Labor Day. Here is a post filled with pictures to tide you over.
The week after school lets out, with Amanda happily attending a three-week program at the Hippodrome Theater, I fly to Chapel Hill to visit my sister Luli for four days. I rent a car at the airport, and in twenty minutes I am parked in front of her notorious garden and her bright pink front door.
Luli is eager to show me the changes inside. She has replaced ancient carpet with gleaming laminate, and painted her kitchen in shades of Mexico, one of her favorite countries and cuisines. For many years Luli has avoided acquiring any more tchotchkes, but this attack of Mexican fever has overcome her resistance.
Shades of Mexico: cayenne, yellow, pink, cobalt blue
I carry my day pack upstairs, where my room and private bath, complete with coffeemaker, welcome me.
On the door: a cheerful greeting for a writer
Flowers for Lizzy
A welcoming bed
Plenty of duckies
When I come downstairs, Luli tells me her tentative plans for our visit. She’s emerging from a depression and has pulled a muscle in her hip, and I’m still battling a terrible cold, so we don’t plan too much. For my cold she has made her famous garlic soup. The first day I drink it my sense of smell returns. The next morning when I brew my coffee I can smell it – a small but important pleasure.
My visits to Luli are a combination of vacation and writer’s retreat. Though it is delightfully familiar, her house is not a home away from home. At home I have Amanda, the dog and cat, weeds and watering, laundry, and mountains of stuff waiting for clutter-busting. Here I have nothing to remember or take care of.
Delightfully familiar:
Women who live alone need a gun for protection, and everyone needs a rubber chicken
Family pictures
Our mother
When I visit Luli I’m only responsible for me. As I do at home, I get up ridiculously early each morning, but here my time is not limited by the alarm which starts my day with Amanda. I sit up in bed and write until I run out of courage or steam, and then push myself further. In four mornings I write the first draft of this blog post, several practice poems, four pages of my novel, the skeleton of a goofy proposal to raise money for Girls Place with my writing, and some free-writing.
Luli has never had children and can’t understand why anyone does. Though she often says of this or that child, ‘she’s so funny,’ ‘he’s so sweet,’ she’s so bright and helpful,’ she always follows it with ‘and you know how I feel about children.’ She says we should have stopped with Adam and Eve. I don’t point out the obvious, that in that case there would be no Luli or Lizzy or garlic soup. Her reiteration of this idea whenever the topic of children comes up is probably no more irksome than my constant anecdotes about Amanda.
Luli’s house is a condominium. For several years she has planted a small garden – lettuce, tomatoes, herbs and flowers in pots and raised beds. Her garden became raggedy over the winter, and early this spring the condominium board notified her via a note in her door that they had received complaints, and she must dig up her garden.
Though bylaws of the condominium association forbid any gardening beyond pots on the back deck (well-shaded by woods) and the tiny front steps, gardens flourish all over the complex. Someone complained last year about someone else’s garden, but the board chair at that time was growing corn, and the complaint never went anywhere.
Luli was distraught. Her garden is one part of her multi-part plan to stave off depression. When depression nonetheless strikes, Luli’s courage and strength astound me. Though it is a lifelong struggle with a disease that saps all will, she has never given up.
Luli asked that the matter be put on the board’s agenda for the April meeting, and took three neighbors with her. Condominium boards, like all committees, have their stock characters: the tight-ass, the touchy, the ditherer, the bloviator. They have their intra-committee feuds and scars, and many more mouths than ears. Often their members are retirees eager for the opportunity to exercise power once again.
Luli and her allies sat through the two-hour discussion of her garden. She explained the importance of her garden, and her neighbor the geologist demolished the allegations about drainage. Afterwards Luli wrote a brilliant follow-up letter reiterating her arguments and addressing the board’s concerns. She received an email from the chair saying that he personally found her arguments very persuasive, and the board was considering amending the bylaws.
They continued to discuss gardens at length at the May and June meetings. They still have reached no decision, though in the minutes of the June meeting they advised residents not to begin new gardens until the matter is resolved. April was planting time, and Luli had not waited. Her garden thrives as it awaits the verdict.
My time with Luli is filled with visits, projects, expeditions, great meals, and talk. The first visit is with her neighbor Margaret. Both of them are in their sixties, and live alone. They take turns calling each other early every morning to make sure they are both still breathing. Last summer the three of us did an all-day expedition to the North Carolina Zoo, and we had such a good time that we resolved to do a Margaret expedition every time I visit. click Unfortunately, Margaret had a conference this week, so we make do with dinner together Tuesday night. Delicious Malaysian food: baby bok choy in a smoky sauce, crisp, oily roti with a cup of chicken curry, and a cold glass of wine.
Wednesday morning Luli and I go to the PTA thrift shop, where Luli continues her quest for Mexican tchotchkes. I sit on a comfortable couch with a bad book while she shops. Along with the tchotchkes, she finds the vegetarian cookbook she had hoped to get next Christmas, several coffee mugs, and a National Geographic filled with ancient Mayan paintings.
Wednesday afternoon the garlic soup begins to kick in. At her request, I have taken many pictures of her garden. I download them to her computer, and we cull them from 28 down to 4. Like me, Luli is decisive, and it was a pleasure working together. I show her how to compress the files for emailing, and she sends them to friends, her psychiatrist, and Joe, together with a poem. She resisted the temptation to send them to the condominium board.
Thursday there’s a new friend for me to meet – Stevie, whom Luli picked up at the gym. Luli makes one or two new friendships a year, as well as friendly acquaintanceships with neighbors, bus drivers and store clerks. She has a constantly growing circle of support for those times when she needs it, such as the terrible time when she almost died from a pulmonary embolism.
Stevie comes over in the morning and we paddle in the pool for a couple of hours, treading water and talking. We go to lunch at a deli down the road that has excellent matzoh ball soup. They call themselves a New York deli, but they don’t have chopped liver, so I don’t know.
After Stevie goes home I nap for over an hour. At Luli’s Retreat I sleep longer and better than anywhere else. When I wake up, Luli brings out her files of greeting cards. Her income has always been considerably smaller than her talent, so she looks for ways to supplement her Social Security. A few years ago she decided to sell her wonderful drawings as greeting cards. A gift shop agreed to sell them, and she produced about thirty different designs. Unfortunately, the project was not a success – her $500 investment yielded $400 in sales, and accordian files full of neatly organized cards. I like to keep a stash of greeting cards for all occasions, so I bought a bunch.
Three of Luli's cards
Luli's wonderful cards inspire the next project: my own Father’s Day card for Joe. I draw dainty hearts and tiny flowers on the front of a blank card, with six lines of heartfelt bad verse inside, while Luli makes dinner – lampchops, pureed cauliflower, and broccoli.
On Friday the temperature descends to a respectable 85 degrees, and we both have a lot of energy, so we go to Duke University’s Nasher Museum. Their special exhibit is works by Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan woman living in Brooklyn: huge collages, installations, and sketchbooks. Her work is disturbing and exciting, like a mix of Hieronymous Bosch and science fiction: humanoid creatures pasted together from images of animals, human parts, serpents, machinery. click
Expeditions, projects, and friends are great fun, our meals are delicious, and undistracted writing time is a blessing. But the best part of my visits with Luli is the talk. We talk while we eat, while we’re driving, after breakfast in the morning, and after dinner at night, reclining on couches with our feet up. We talk about our lives: childhood, flaming youth, middle age and now. We talk about our parents, our brothers, books, gardens, and cooking, We laugh and grumble at climate change, disgusting politics, and the strange behavior of high-tech, low-manners people.
Josie misses Luli's undivided attention
Friendship is wonderful – what would I do without my friends? But Luli and I have known and mostly loved each other for more than 65 years. As children we battled, as teenagers we plotted, and now, as adults, we support, advise, commiserate and nurture. Sisterhood is powerful.
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Next post: September 6
May 23, 2013
In December my friend Iris went to New York for six months to be nanny to her newborn (and first) grandbaby, Amelia Jane. She would stay with her son Jordan, his partner Danielle and the baby in their two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment.
This plan evoked various responses from the Muumuu Mamas: ‘WHAT!?!’ ‘Omigod,’ ‘Isn’t it amazing that they asked you?’ ‘It will be an adventure.’ We ended up enthusiastic and supportive, but also convinced that Iris was going to need a break. We resolved to go to New York one weekend and kidnap her.
HAPPY IN BROOKLYN, BUT NEEDED A BREAK
With money issues and schedule issues, only five of the Mamas ended up making the trip in April. We took the first flight out of Gainesville. The others were exhilarated, but Joe and I had run out of coffee, so I was uncaffeinated and subdued. I bought a cup the minute we reached the airport, and then realized I couldn’t take it through security. So they went ahead and I sat, happy alone with my coffee, until I heard Michelle’s laugh like rippling water, and my vacation began.
As we waited at the gate, a man overheard Michelle describing a report she had seen on TV about high-intensity cardio exercise, and he entered the conversation. Fully caffeinated, I felt the Muumuu rising, and offered to demonstrate the intense cardio I do when I have no machines. This entails a super-rapid bouncing on my feet while flailing my arms in the air. I heard the man say “I didn’t see it,” so I did it again. It turned out he was talking about part of the TV show, but I’m sure he benefitted from my thorough demonstration.
In Newark we took public transport – airtrain, New Jersey transit, subway. When I was little I would follow my parents through train stations and subways without a clue, and when in my fifties I finally negotiated the system alone, I felt like a grown-up. This time too, I felt able and free, competent in New York City. I’m too old to worry about looking like a tourist, since that’s what I am, and we asked directions of many smiling people. I think people like to see a gang of women “of a certain age” having a good time together – if they think that we’re ‘cute’, so be it.
WAITING FOR THE TRAIN IN NEWARK – MARCIE, MICHELLE, JULIE, LIZ, PEGGY
The six of us (including Iris) had two rooms at a midtown hotel. Some guidebook had said midtown was a desert, but we found plenty there to enjoy. And I loved looking up and up, to the angles and curves, glass and blue and copper.
VIEW FROM OUR HOTEL PHOTO:MARCIE
We all had wondered about six women sharing two rooms – that’s a lot of togetherness. But it went beautifully – it was like a slumber party, except that we fell asleep by 10. Michelle, a member of the Gainesville band Other Voices, wrote a song in the shower and sang it to us. Julie read us a poem by Billie Collins about beginnings, middles, and endings, and cried as she read. click We talked about our parents, our children, ourselves.
TIRED IRIS
We did as much as we could, and ate as much as we could, in our four days. Our first night we met Iris’ son Jordan for drinks before dinner. I lived with Jordan when he was three – it’s a treat to see him grown. Only after he left to catch his train did we realize he had picked up the check.
Our dinner reservations were across the street at Basso 56. We were warmly welcomed though we were half an hour early, we sat long over our meal and the waiters never rushed us, and the food was unpretentious and perfectly prepared.click
After dinner we walked, enjoying the buildings and store windows. Picture six middle-aged women in their sensible walking shoes looking into a store window at pumps with five-inch heels curved like a scimitar. Picture them breaking into song. Do your best to picture the smallest of them demonstrating her Irish jig in front of a huge sculpture of a rat. I tried embedding the video but alas, the technology defeated me.
PHOTO: MARCIE
On a rainy morning we took the subway to the Tenement Museum on the lower east side. click There we toured the tiny apartment of the Moores, Irish immigrants who moved into the higher-status German immigrant neighborhood. The tour was very well-done, packed with ideas and information, and it helped us imagine their lives.
GRANDAUGHTERS OF IMMIGRANTS CROSS DELANCEY PHOTO: MICHELLE
Afterwards we walked to Chinatown in the rain for lunch – the Muumuus tolerated my crankiness, though they were as hungry and tired and wet as I. The restaurant was almost empty, but the remaining diners were Chinese, which seemed a good sign. We couldn’t understand the waiter, and our happiness and enthusiasm had no effect on him, but he took our picture impassively, and brought dishes until the lazy susan was loaded.
While I took a nap, the others visited Grand Central Station. While I visited my niece and her family in Washington Heights – quite a transit adventure, as the subway was being repaired – the others walked on the High Line and ate a French lunch in the Village. One afternoon we went to the theater: Marcie, Peggy and Michelle to Once, a musical, and Iris, Julie and I to Old Hats, a clown revue by Bill Irwin, David Shiner and Nellie McKay. We were worn out, and ate in our room that night – the company was terrific, the food so-so.
Sunday was our day for walking around Brooklyn; we wanted to see Iris’ habitat, and of course, meet the baby. We decided to visit Ground Zero first; we took the subway, and saw the construction fences stretched around the site, the new World Trade Center rising in all its American hubris. Young men were peddling books of photographs. They pointed out the huge neighboring building that remains, and then pictures of the vanished towers, dwarfing it.
WORLD TRADE CENTER PHOTO:MICHELLE
We walked down to City Hall and across the Brooklyn Bridge., The weather was warm and clear, the water sparkling.
At the end of the bridge we walked down and around to a neighborhood called Dumbo (down under the Manhattan bridge), to an outdoor weekend market of food vendors. We shared spring rolls, Ethiopian vegetables, fried fish, pecan pie made with bourbon, a huge black and white cookie, a salad.
FOODIE MARKET IN DUMBO
Jordan, Danielle and Amelia Jane met us there. Danielle was instantly at ease, gracious and friendly, she and Jordan both besotted with their adorable baby, in a zebra-striped onesie and a blue denim hat. All the Mamas oohed and cooed and took turns holding the baby.
We walked the rest of the day, first along the water with a fine view of the Statue of Liberty, and then through Brooklyn Heights with a stop for shoe shopping.
THE STATUE OF JULIE PHOTO:MARCIE
Our subway ride to Bay Ridge was creepy: one of the tracks was blocked off for asbestos removal, and dust was flying. In Bay Ridge we sat out in the sun while Jordan served us grilled vegetables and wine.
MORE BABY-HOLDING (WITH WINE) PHOTO:MARCIE
Then we walked and walked and WALKED past beautiful fancy houses to a middle eastern restaurant, where we ordered too much food.
PHOTO:MICHELLE
We walked home to Jordan and Danielle’s, and bless him, Jordan drove us back to the city.
THE OFFICIAL KIDNAPPERS’ PORTRAIT PHOTO: DANIELLE
My favorite parts of the trip? The food, of course. Theater. The wonderful streets of New York and Brooklyn. Meeting the baby and Danielle, checking out Iris’ temporary life, and seeing Jordan thriving. But the best part was being together on this adventure. Six women who care about each other, ages 55 to 67, all with children, many with grandchildren. We are quick to inquire, to comfort, to rejoice and grieve together, with tears ready to spring, but laughter the dominant note. Whatever would I do without the Muumuu Mamas?
PHOTO: MARCIE
Note: There are probably far too many pictures of Muumuus. But it makes me so happy to look at them that I can’t resist.
Feb 15, 2013
I’ve become accustomed to having a partner parent. But, as I explained in my previous post, Joe went to Capetown for two weeks just before Christmas. With him gone, I fretted and fumed. Amanda was too much for me, and it felt as though all the tough parts of parenting were mine.
prodigalthought.net
I brooded and sulked, and thought about our lives together, and finally I decided that I wanted Joe to take over supervising homework, the job I hate most. Amanda hates homework too, and she puts a lot more effort into avoiding it than doing it. Every week, her teacher and I would email back and forth, looking for strategies to make it work. School problems were taking all my creative energy. They caused tension between me and Amanda. And I never knew what I ought to be doing, how much I should be involved. I never got it right. Even in a rare session when she tried to be amiable, I couldn’t explain math to her. “Grandma, I don’t want to be rude, and I’m really listening, but I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”
After Joe returned, the house was full of holiday and guests, and I couldn’t find a time to bring it up. He was grading papers when he could fit it in, not a good time to ask him to take over more work. For days I silently argued with him, and rehearsed different ways of presenting the proposal. ‘It’s making me miserable.’ ‘I’ve been in charge since 2nd grade – won’t you do it for the rest of 4th grade and see if things improve?’ ‘I’m not doing it anymore, you’re in charge.’ I expected him to refuse; I prepared for a fight.
gloryofmarriage.com
Our guests went out to dinner; we sat by the fire. He told me his troubles, most of them due to me. I listened the best I could, and finally told him what I’d been thinking. Without a pause, before I could give reasons and explanations, he said, “I’ll take over homework.” I was flabbergasted.
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Amanda went back to school January 7. Joe met with her teacher, and told her he’s taking over. Now he picks Amanda up every evening at Girls Place and she does her half hour of reading while I get dinner ready. After dinner she does math and other assignments, while he keeps her company. He is exceptionally patient, and a great explainer. Sometimes she balks. Sometimes he yells. But they both stick with it, and homework time is half as stormy and twice as productive as it was when I was doing it.
Joe is gradually overcoming her resistance. The other night while I did her hair she demanded that he write math problems for her on her whiteboard. After she did about six, he wrote an A+ on her whiteboard, with a nicely-drawn medal.
The change has affected her schoolwork, and her school behavior, but it’s done much more. The nightly work together has brought them closer. He’s taking over more – I sit back and bite my tongue as he tells her not to take more food than she can eat, to get her jacket, to wait for instructions before she tries to fix something. He’s much better at this than I am; he doesn’t take it personally when she misbehaves, just calmly corrects her, imposes the consequences, and moves on.
Amanda and I are getting along much better too. I have fewer things to bug her about. Watching Joe as a father is making me a better mother – I try to ease up on her, and don’t let indignation interfere with problem-solving.
A tiny piece of me is jealous of Joe’s skill and success. A huge piece of me is teary-eyed grateful. All my other family chores are lighter because they’re not weighed down by resentment. I’m the cook, and Joe has long been in charge of doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen. But when our usual routine of Joe and Amanda cleaning up after dinner was interfering with homework, I told him I’d take it over.
I was surprised by how much tension this relieved. I used to have sour thoughts: Why doesn’t ‘dishes’ include iron skillets? Is he ever going to empty the dishwasher? Now I get the kitchen as clean as I want it, when I want it. Apparently he hated cleaning the kitchen every night almost as much as I hated homework. So he is equally grateful to me.
School is going better, Joe and Amanda are closer, Amanda and I have more sunshine, and the house is bubbling with love. But for me, the best is what this has done for my writer-self. My creator, problem-solver, ruminator are now free for my writing. I’ve had an explosion of energy in my work. In three weeks I’ve come up with nine topics for the blog and written two posts. I’ve researched and submitted queries to two agents. Most exciting, the novel I’ve wrestled with for four fucking years suddenly came clear; I intend to finish a plan by the end of April, and a first draft by January 2014.
I am elated, exhilirated, and endlessly grateful to Joe. Sometimes after Amanda goes to bed we lie on the couch and listen to music. Last night I looked at him and thought, “It’s amazing that I’m married to this man.” We will have our private celebrations, but I think he deserves a public hooray from the heart. Happy Valentine’s Day to my dear husband Joe.
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