Maternal Dementia

I woke up every hour, on the hour, all night long. It was the quintessential night-before-a-voyage restlessness, a low-grade worry that you’ll oversleep – that somehow the alarm you checked three times already won’t go off or else won’t wake you. Or just nerves, the kind that come before you’re about to do something you thought you wanted to do, until it was upon you and you wondered, what was I thinking? It could have been bit of residual jet-lag from last week’s trip to a different time zone. Excitement about the journey ahead. Or possibly it was the supermoon wreaking havoc with my sleep cycle.

I’d finished preparing my backpack – and weighing in at 7.3 kilos – at about 12:30 am. I shut off the lights and the glow from the moon flooded the living room like daylight. I tiptoed upstairs to check on the girls one last time. I’d heard Short-pants stirring earlier, I sensed she was still awake.

“Come, look at the moon!”

She popped up in bed – she’d been reading and probably had just turned off her light – and positioned herself to look out the skylight. The moon hung heavy above the rooftops of the city, any clouds that had covered it spread apart like a curtain on a stage. The official full moon is actually tonight, but last night’s dress-rehearsal was a good indication of its beauty and power.

We marveled at the big white disc, side-by-side, until the tiredness pulled her back to her pillow. I sat beside the bed and brushed her hair off her forehead. Her baby cheeks are gone, a young woman’s features are emerging. In the moonlight I could glimpse the face of her future.

We whispered back and forth – not that Buddy-roo, solidly asleep in the adjacent room, could have heard us. It’s just how you talk, in a whisper, when you’re up talking in the dark, in the middle of the night.

I thanked her for being my daughter. I thanked her for being so sweet and so lovely. I told her I appreciated her being so supportive of me going off to hike the Camino, how much that meant to me.

“You’ll have a good walk,” she said.

Later I slipped into my own bed, spooned myself around De-facto, putting my breathing in step with his. I tried to sleep but I could not still my thoughts. We’d talked about the possibility of him joining me on these first days of the camino. Why hadn’t we organized this? I’m not in the mood to be apart from him right now. What was I thinking?

Maybe it was that moon. Short-pants couldn’t sleep either. Or she came down to comfort me, sensing that I, too, wasn’t asleep. She crawled in to our bed and reached her long thin arm around me. Sandwiched between her and De-facto, I finally dozed, but only in short spurts. Her snoring didn’t help, but I didn’t want to escort her back to her room. I half hoped that Buddy-roo would come join us, too. I’ve never been an advocate of the family bed, but this once, I wouldn’t have minded.

This morning I stowed my heeled, fashion boots in the closet and laced up my sturdy, hopefully-broken-in-by-now hiking boots, hoisted my pack up on my back, but not before sneaking a peek at the sleeping bodies I was leaving behind and planting light kisses on dreaming foreheads. Why does it feel harder than usual, this time, to leave them?

I write this from a train, the TGV, slicing through the green landscape toward St. Jean Pied de Port, the gateway of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I will hike over a mountain into Navarra and my adventure will begin. Or maybe it already has.

Not sure how technically present I’ll be, probably not so much. But if the spirit moves me, I’ll send an occasional tweet from the #camino or I’ll post a few words or an image along the way. It’s only a week, this first leg, a chance to taste the route before I must go back to Paris for some family duties for a few days, and then I’ll return to the trail. It’ll be a bit more back-and-forth than I’d like, possibly interrupting the flow of my walking experience. But maybe it’s not such a bad thing, to be able to touch base with my people. It’s not the usual way to do the camino, or even the ideal way, but apparently it’s my way.

What was I thinking?

I remember my first calendar. I must have been younger than Buddy-roo because I remember how a shiny gold star sticker was ceremoniously affixed on each day that I did not suck my thumb. The calendar hung on the wall beside the twin bed that was mine, in a bedroom that would go through many transitions. A big double bed with a mod black-and-white spiral patterned bedspread was moved in when my teenaged brother took it over and when he left I reclaimed it as my high-school suite. When we were all grown my mother stowed our accumulated paraphernalia – high-school folders, rock-n-roll posters and sentimental stuffed-animals-won-at-the-Fireman’s-carnival – into the closet and made it the room for visiting grandchildren, with two twin beds once again placed exactly as they had been when it was my childhood bedroom so many years before.

The page for the month of January was all pink. February’s had an apple green shade. March was powder blue. April yellow. I can recount for you the colors of each month of that calendar. On the last page there was an image of all the months, connected start-to-finish, their colors adjacent and cascading around in an oval shape, joining December to January.

I do not remember who gave me this calendar as a gift, but it shaped my notion of time for the rest of my life. In my mind, that colorful oval still repeats itself year-after-year. January is to the left, winding around in a patchwork of pastels. If it is August, I imagine the butterscotch color wedged on the southeast part of the oval, rounding the corner from summer to autumn.

How does time pass so fast? This is the clichéd remark about motherhood that I find the most patronizing. “But it goes by so fast.” Like a woman can’t express any exasperation about a her children’s impact on her life simply because it’s happening quickly?

Except one day you look in the mirror and you realize you’re not the Young Turk you used to be. One day things look and feel different, more distant. One day, kids come up to your chin and you say the thing you swore you’d never say, “It goes by so fast.”

~ ~ ~

Last week I took a creative time out in Italy – a place that has its own notion of time – at CREA, the European creativity conference. In the proverbial fashion of teach what we most need to learn, the program I facilitated was about slowing down in a hurry-up world to deliberately make time for and prioritize your creativity. The work I did with my colleagues to prepare served to raise my own awareness about what’s necessary to make peace with time. Spending four days with the group, immersed in the examination of our relationship with time, inspires me to think about making different choices that might better synchronize with the clocks and calendars – and the demands they represent – that seem to engineer my life.

This was the 10th CREA conference, which means we’ve been attending for nine years. I remember the first time, with Buddy-roo in my belly and Short-pants holding court in the dining room from her high chair. They’ve grown up at CREA, shot up from their meaty, miniature-selves into the tall pea pods that they are now. Along with a rat-pack handful of CREA heirs, other kids who’ve been coming to the conference for years, the girls are stars in their own right, with a hundred aunties and uncles all marveling at how they’ve bloomed, year after year.

The first years weren’t the easiest. I’d be running a core program, full-on days with the extra effort required in the pre- and post- workshop hours, while desperately drawing pictures, symbols and clocks to convey to the Italian-only-speaking babysitter how to feed and nap and care for our babies. De-facto and I would juggle the early mornings and the meals and the bedtime routine. That left only the late night hours – stretching into the wee early ones – to catch up with friends and colleagues whom we only see each year at CREA. I didn’t want to miss anything, so I’d burn the candle at both ends and in the middle. I’d finish the week totally knackered.

I realize this is a little bit my problem with time. It’s not that I don’t have enough time. I have been allocated the same 168 hours as everyone else. It’s not that I don’t use my time well; I can be extremely productive – if that’s how your measure using it well – and I accomplish much in a day. My problem isn’t time. My problem is choices. I am too greedy. It’s not that I’m obliged to say yes to everything, I want to do all those projects, to have my fingers in all those creative pots, to say yes to every friend who wants to meet for coffee or a drink, to make time for every visitor who wants to visit.

But for this greed I have suffered the consequences: the churning sensation of never getting to all my commitments or the undercurrent of angst about what I’m not doing when I do myself the indulgent favor of taking time to do nothing. What I am convinced of now, after last week’s reflection on how I might choose (from now on) to spend my time: less is more.

~ ~ ~

The number of spins around my oblong pastel wheel of time is approaching a number that ends-in-a-zero, a fairly significant one at that. Each year this cycle through the seasons appears to quicken – it goes by so fast – a sharp contrast to the first year when that indelible calendar actually hung on the wall by my bed, when the time between consecutive birthdays seemed like an eternity.

De-facto and the girls are giving me an especially generous gift this year. It is a gift of time. Time out. Time away. Not just time away to work, but time away to think. Not just a weekend. Many weeks. Enough time to walk a good portion of the Route Frances of the Camino Santiago de Compostela, a month-long (slightly more) pilgrimage across the north of Spain. I cannot walk it from start to finish in one go; there are still work and family commitments that I must keep. I will hike for a week, return to Paris for Short-pants’ orchestra concert and to be with the girls while De-facto takes a short business trip. Then I return to exactly where I left off and keep walking. A week later, a little birthday bash is scheduled in my favorite Basque village with a few good friends in attendance, and then I return to the route again, to walk some more.

Given the time I can take, I expect I might finish about half of the Camino this spring. The rest, perhaps a few days in July with the whole family in tow, or in September or May of next year. It’s not a race. It’s an active meditation, a chance to remove myself from the distractions of the day-to-day, and, with the backdrop of breathtaking scenery and the constant rhythm of one foot in front of the other, think about how to make more of – or less of – the however-many pastel-tinted calendar turns I have left.

I sliced the eggplant into medium-thin slices, slimmer than the recipe suggested, but more to my bite-sized liking. De-facto would appreciate the efficiency of it; I’d only used one of the eggplants he brought home from the market. Not that our budget is so tight but rather he appreciates an intelligent economy of things.

The recipe called for baking the slices after they’d been breaded. After ten minutes in the oven they looked dull, melancholy. I quickly pulled out a frying pan and lined the bottom with olive oil. When it was hot, I dropped each of the austere eggplant slices in, smiling at the percussion of popping oil. I could sense the vegetable’s heavy sigh of relief, almost stunned at how close it had come to giving up its life to be a flavorless, mediocre meal. The infusion of fats would satisfy its desire to come to a tasty end, and frying made the house smell heartier. Now I was cooking.

Lately, though, I haven’t. The string of extended voyages placed De-facto as the primary care-giver for long stretches of time last fall and winter, and even though I always returned ready to roll up my sleeves, somehow the wooden spoon had been handed off like a relay baton. He’d gotten used to cooking dinner. In the absence of me taking the reins – or one of the reins as we’ve always shared this household task – he kept hold of them. Six o’clock would roll around and I’d ask not, “what do you want for dinner?” but instead, “what do you want to do for dinner?” A distinctly different question. If he’d answered with, “what I want to do is for you to cook,” I’d have complied without complaint. But since he seemed to be on a streak in the kitchen, I didn’t mind one less responsibility.

Except I missed cooking. He’d be at the stove braising a whole chicken before stuffing it and besieging it with potatoes and onions and vegetables. Short-pants would be standing on a small stool on the other side of the kitchen island, slicing mushrooms. I’d want to elbow my way back into that world of salt and butter and herbs, to cover my hands with flour and wince at the just-chopped onions on the cutting board. I didn’t complain, it’s a lovely thing to be cooked for and De-facto’s food fills the belly well. But I missed conjuring up my own culinary creative juices.

Reading Blood, Bones & Butter, by Gabrielle Hamilton, is what stirred the pot. A sweet friend who also happens to be a pâtissière and chocolatier – I’m sure she could cook anything but those are her current specialties – loaned me the book last fall. As a chef, she loved the story of this woman’s kitchen history, and the detailed tales of meals well conceived and prepared on the route to opening the restaurant Prune in New York city. As an avid reader, she loved the wordsmithing and thought that I might appreciate the writing, too. Having now finished the book I can attest – it’s a delicious read.

It took me months to get into it, though. Not that the first words and chapters aren’t appetizing. But I think many mothers might appreciate this syndrome: little or no time to read for pleasure during the day when the brain is actually alert. Once the kids are in bed and the dishes are done, the laundry folded, and I’ve slipped between the taut white sheets of my bed, it’s pure pleasure to switch on that reading light and open one of the books on the pile. But not even two pages later, my eyes droop and I’m startled awake as the book falls open on my chest. I’m always disappointed not to be able to read further, but the intoxicating serenity of sleep descending makes me smile with my eyes half open as I lean over to shut off the light.

It means I’ll go months before finishing a book, although at any given time I’m in the middle of five or six. And when weekends are too busy, the books gather dust. Until this weekend; I sat in bed for hours devouring the pages of Hamilton’s memoir. Short-pants, who’s reading the junior version of Three Cups of Tea for the tenth time – she’s an avid re-reader – climbed in next to me and we turned pages in tandem, wordless side-by-side as we consumed voraciously the words of our novels.

There are several passages in Blood, Bones & Butter that made me close the cover and hold the book close to my heart, like I had to savor it before I could read on. I’d open the book again, re-reading the paragraphs, admiring the combination of words that blended together, comma after comma, phrases pieced together to convey what happened to her and how she felt about it in perfect measure.

My sister gave me a cookbook for Christmas,
The Family Meal by Ferran Adrià, celebrated chef of El Bulli. I’d thumbed through its pages, treasuring the images of the ingredients, and the pragmatic rationale behind each menu. But it went on the shelf, with the other volumes of recipes, because as I said, I haven’t been cooking. That is until I was in the heat of Blood, Bones & Butter, when I pulled that new cookbook off the shelf, determined to use it. “I’ll make dinner tonight,” I told De-facto, stretching open the binding of the unexplored book. I flipped through its pages, again admiring the artistry of these simple meals – or so they were designated: the menus weren’t for Adrià’s Michelin-starred cuisine, but for the meals served to the restaurant staff prior to the dinner service.

And here it happened, what always happens. Inspired by a cookbook dish – in this case a menu – I realize too late that my kitchen is not properly stocked to prepare the recipe. I lack too many key ingredients even to fudge it. Cooking at this caliber requires advance planning, and my spontaneous return to the fold of kitchen service hadn’t include such a plan.

The most creative cooking is probably conceived when we must work with the limitation of what’s left in the pantry. The box of more-than-a-year-old lasagna noodles deserved some attention. There were two eggplants and just enough tomatoes to make a sauce. I called De-facto, who’d run out to do an errand, pleading with him to pick up some mozzarella and parmesan. I turned the oven on and pulled out that wrinkled apron.

The systematic chopping and dicing, the attention needed to carmelize something perfectly, the on-the-spot decisions to follow a recipe or improvise, it’s like an active meditation. Even when things go wrong and the pan is too hot or the croutons don’t transform into breadcrumbs as easily as you’d hoped, the problem solving required forces a mood of concentration and creativity that can be terribly satisfying. It’s nourishing for the soul.

At the table De-facto raved about the aroma and celebrated the novelty of something different to eat. The girls weren’t as inspired. Buddy-roo pushed the large noodle around her plate, eating the steamed broccoli that accompanied it, but laying her fork down on the rest.

“It’s just a big pasta,” said De-facto, “you love pasta.” She scrunched up her nose at the eggplant. It made me think of something my father used to say, when I refused his favorite delicacies, Welsh rarebit and pig’s feet. “You don’t know what’s good,” he’d say.

My lasagna wasn’t by the book, but it was good. It was a tasty change of pace from our habitual menus. It was good to be in the kitchen again. It was also good to finish a good book and return it to a good friend. Now if I could just open that new cookbook again, before I make the next shopping list, maybe there are a few good meals ahead.

I’m sorry,” said the judge, ringing the bell, “the correct spelling of the word is S-U-C-C-O-T-A-S-H.”

Short-pants turned to the audience of parents and siblings with a look of utter shock. The disbelief lingered on her face as she walked down the center aisle to where we were seated.

“I did better last year!” she whispered to me, near tears.

We’d been over the list so many times, and she’d always spelled succotash correctly. But it’s one thing to confidently rip through the words in the comfort of your own living room or on the familiar walk to school. Standing in front of 19 other students and their families and a table of judges is a different ballgame. Unlike the other words she’d spelled correctly before: etch, born, slave, bongo, naval, tragic, effect, flaunt, noticeable, I had a bad feeling about this one as soon as the pronouncer pronounced it.

Sure enough, she’d fallen prey to the same error that nailed her father and me in our childhood spelling contests – the a-for-an-o syndrome. Crocodile and alcohol, two words we’ve gotten wrong only once in our lives.

She sat on my lap and I folded my arms around her. There were a dozen things to say – it’s okay, you still did well, look how long you lasted, everybody really knew the words – but since the spelling bee was continuing, our good manners would save those consolations for later. Nothing I could have said would have helped anyway. The feelings of disappointment and failure won’t be swept way in one reassuring sentence. You can’t go around these are feelings, you have to pass through them.

Such a range of emotions accompanies a competition like this. For a month prior to the spelling bee, Short-pants was enthusiastic, though occasionally bored, with the task of learning the 350 words on the list. The day before the event she was nervous, which we agreed was normal. The morning of, her nervousness lingered but was accompanied by excitement.

I was so busy thinking about how to help her prepare, that I myself was unprepared. My adrenalin surged on the way there, as I flagged a cab after encountering a locked gate at the metro entrance with no buses in sight. We ended up arriving early as a result, and walked around the neighborhood, which helped calm me down and gave us a chance to go over the (very) short-list of problem words she’d missed on the run-throughs the day before.

Once she’d registered and her number was pinned to her shirt, I realized I was probably more nervous than she was. We didn’t really feel like mingling, so we hovered around the snack table, not sure quite what to do. Look at the list some more? Practice more words? Relax? Even Buddy-roo seemed on edge.

Short-pants had been invited by the organizers of the bee to do a short reading at the opening of the competition. It was an abridged excerpt from Akeelah and the Bee, by Marianne Williamson, which is often erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandela:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and famous?” Actually, who are you not to be? … Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you… And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

She’d practiced the reading a few times the day before, and when she was called up to the microphone to read it, I was prouder than any parent in the room. She enunciated, emphasized and let her poise shine through. That’s when I realized that the honor of reading it meant she was no longer an anonymous number amongst the twenty children, in a way she was bringing the quotation to life. The stakes felt a bit higher.

I was on the edge of my chair. Each round, when she approached the mike, I held my breath to hear what word she’d be given to spell. I sighed with relief when she repeated the word to close her turn, having spelled it correctly. Round after round, she stood up, spoke clearly, spelled well and sat down. Then I’d relax for a few moments, until it was her turn again.

I was rooting for Short-pants, of course, but I started to develop a fondness for the other spellers as well. A little girl with a permanently terrified expression, a little guy with straight-up posture, a pair of red-headed sisters, a tall student who’s deliberate elongation of each letter, and the space between each one, made her delivery dramatic. Whenever one of the contestants misspelled a word, I was glad for a narrowing of the field which would bring us closer to a finish (it did start to feel interminable) but my heart sank for every one of them, every time. I wanted them all to win.

Short-pants’ slim little body – sitting on my lap – started to grow warm and I could feel her chest heaving. Tears of disappointment were close to the surface, and would quickly be uncontainable. I took her hand and we maneuvered through the audience to the outer reception room, where she let the tears stream down her face.

“I thought I knew that word,” she said, “I wanted to do better this year. I wanted to take home a trophy.” She started to sob.

Here’s another hard part of parenting, when you wish you could make it better, but you can’t. This was her defeat; she had to bear it. Nothing I could say would repair it, so I just held her hand.

One of the lovely red heads – she’d gone out of the competition just before, or just after, Short-pants – was visiting the snack table, and came over to console her. “Don’t feel bad,” she said, “You did so well.”

Now I was ready to cry, tears of sad and glad. Sad for Short-pants and her disappointment. Glad for kindness of this little girl, a thoughtful stranger. Her gesture was appreciated, and Short-pants managed to say so, between sobs and sniffles. But disappointment doesn’t vanish so easily, even with such sweet and thoughtful words.

“It’s okay to be disappointed,” I told her, “but I want you to know I’m proud of you.”

I told her I was proud of her initiative to even sign up for the spelling bee, proud of the perfect score that got her past the first round, proud of how diligently she’d studied her list, her willingness to practice the words (almost) every time we asked her to. Proud at how poised she’d been, reading the opening quotation. Proud of how carefully she’d spelled every word she’d been given. Proud that she’d made it to the tenth round. Proud that she could be honest about her feelings, instead of swallowing them. Proud that it really meant something to her, this spelling bee, that she cared.

“And if you’d won, of course I’d have been proud,” I said, “but I’ll be even prouder if you can lose with grace and be a good sport toward the winners.”

That wasn’t me speaking, by the way. That was me channeling my father. He used to say those kinds of things all the time, putting things in the larger perspective.

A little bit of time, a glass of water, a bite-sized muffin, and Short-pants was ready to return to watch the rest of the spelling bee. Just like last year, they’d had to go off the main list in order to bring the competition to a close. Soon the field was down to just a few students, and then to two, and then to one winner – a steady speller who deserved her trophy and smiled triumphantly as she held it in the air for her family to photograph. I know that Short-pants wanted to hold that trophy, but she found a way to smile and clap her hands. The consolation gift bag for all the participants had plenty of goodies to distract her, not to mention a medal for even making the finals.

Her enthusiasm and nervousness and excitement had given way to disappointment and then to the range of sad and angry hues that color the experience of failure. But she’d risen to the occasion, and her buoyant optimism returned. I was never really worried – I knew she’d come through it – but I felt better when she was skipping down the street on our way to lunch, laughing with her little sister. She didn’t get to taste – at least this time – the thrill of victory, but at least she’d let go of the agony of defeat.

It happens unfortunately rather often these days, a lone gunman goes postal, sending a battery of bullets into a crowd full of innocent people. It’s horrible; a dreaded disbelief grips me when I hear this kind of news. There’s an extra groan when it happens at a school or involves small children. Then there’s proximity, when it’s closer to home it’s a real wake up call. Bad things can and do happen. It could have happened right next door.

On Monday De-facto made lunch and turned on the television – his ritual moment for absorbing local news – and we learned of the fatal shooting of four people, including three students, at a Jewish school in Toulouse.

Given that we live in one of the Jewish sections of Paris, it’s easy for me to imagine this happening. Almost every school in our neighborhood has a plaque posted near the door, often adorned with flowers and tri-color ribbons, commemorating the young students who were deported to the Nazi concentration camps. The maternelle school just behind our apartment building, where Short-pants and Buddy-roo both started, is often selected to host the somber ceremonies of remembrance for government dignitaries. The school our children attend now has a Catholic flavor – though in typical French style you can opt out of the religion part – but I could imagine them being at the wrong place and the wrong time here in our very own neighborhood and being caught in the crossfire.

We didn’t mention anything to the girls. That wasn’t a deliberate decision. De-facto left for a business trip shortly after lunch that day, and I was busy preparing to leave for my own voyage d’affaires the next morning. I still had to prepare my valise, and with De-facto already gone it also meant attempting to get Buddy-roo ahead on her homework, leaving notes for babysitters and organizing the next day’s wardrobe and backpacks for an early-morning-drop-off at a neighbor’s house so I could make a train that left Paris before school started. In the flurry of activity, I didn’t bring it up.

In my hotel room on Tuesday night, I read and watched the news, with poignant images of the vigil in Paris and mention of a minute of silence in the schools across France. I was only in Luxembourg, a short trip on a fast train, but all this made me feel too far away. I do appreciate the break from my children, except when something happens that makes you want – need – to put your hands on them and hold them close.

Last night I dropped my small suitcase – my mother’s old little rollaway gets a lot of use – in the foyer and was rewarded with the stampede of bare, just-bathed feet down the stairs and young girls pummeling themselves against me. That welcome home hug is worth every travel hassle you have to endure, and it felt especially comforting this time.

I beckoned them to sit on the couch with me, one on each side, and I turned back and forth, asking about the two days of their lives I missed – how the geography test went (Buddy-roo had to map out the mountain ranges of France), how was the spelling coming (Short-pants has nearly memorized 12 pages of spelling words), and then my big question.

“Did you have a minute of silence at school?”

Lots of nodding yes.

“Did they tell you what it was for?”

Lots of nodding no. Then the two of them talking at me at the same time with different stories. After settling the debate about who would go first, here’s what I learned: One teacher simply said that this was something being observed at all the schools in France, so Short-pants had no idea she why she was participating in a minute of silence. Though Buddy-roo’s teacher referred to the event in Toulouse, it was obvious that she still didn’t really understand what had happened. One of her classmates was cited as a source of additional information; you can imagine the facts were jumbled, though reported to me with enthusiastic certainty.

I don’t want to conjure up unnecessary fear in their young minds about a lack of security at school or in the neighborhood. I don’t want to impose the weight of a terrorist act on them. To speak to children of such atrocities feels unfair, like I’m robbing them too soon of their innocence, tarnishing their sheer belief in the goodness of people and the world. But to shield them from what happened seems equally unfair, especially if it means they hear snippets from someone else, someone ill-informed or ill-equipped to inform them with the age-appropriate sensitivity.

I asked them if they wanted to know the reason that there was a minute of silence in school the day before. They’ve said no to questions like this before, for instance when I was explaining the birds and bees to Short-pants and at some point I said, “Is this enough, or do you want to know more?” With just a few seconds of reflection she said, “That’s enough for now. You can tell me more later.”

They did want to know why, so I told them about how a really crazy guy, someone not right in the head, had taken out a gun and shot at the people in front of a school, how the moment of silence was to honor the four people who were killed, to think of their families who were grieving. Of course I was bombarded with whys, and I did my best to explain in simple terms the idiocy of religious and racial violence.

“But it’s all the same God,” said Short-pants, “what does it matter?”

Then a barrage of questions about guns. “Why do people have guns? Why were guns even invented? Why would someone take a gun to a school, and shoot children?”

I couldn’t come up with a good answer, at least not one I believed myself. “That’s another reason to have a minute of silence,” I told her, “so that maybe people will ask themselves just those kinds of questions.”

This morning after dropping the girls off at school, I stopped at the nearby café where parents who don’t have to rush to work gather every morning and catch up over coffee. I brought up the minute of silence, which met with mixed reactions about how the school and the teachers had handled it. One parent referenced interviews with French psychologists saying that there’s no reason to burden young children with this news event. But how can you avoid the inevitability that they’ll hear about it and be terrorized more by what they don’t know than by what they do know?

For a minute, I wondered if I did the right thing, explaining it to the girls? I guess I made a choice to respect my kids rather than protect them. There’s probably no single right answer to that question. I just wish it was one we didn’t have to ask.

The sun slipped up over the horizon as we pulled away from the country house. We were up before dawn and quickly in the car, dressed in full ski gear. Our drive to the mountains was three hours, a little more, moving from Autoroute to Route Nationale to mountain roads, gray ribbons weaving through steep fields of snow. The Massif Central is not France’s most chic ski destination, but it is the right terrain for our little skiiers to get their legs. They’re in training for a full-on-week-long-rent-a-chalet-ski vacation in the French and Swiss Alps, hopefully next year.

On the mountain, the continuous hum of the ski lifts became our soundtrack. Blue sky arcing over us meant uninterrupted sunshine and perfect temperatures. Little feet tucked into tiny boots snapped into bindings on short skis, midget-sized poles at their sides. They looked ready to ski.

Short-pants shuffled across the snow, one ski at a time, especially awkward in all her gear. It was more like walking than skiing. Encouragement was required.

“Look at you! That’s it! You’re doing great! You’re skiing!”

She inched along. Her spirits seemed fragile – she was at once thrilled to be so equipped and engaged in the snowy sport we’d been previewing for days, and at the same time terrified of the burden upon her to turn down the mountain on two such narrow boards.

Buddy-roo was already essing from side-to-side on the slope, slowly but steadily reacquainting herself with the actions required to steer and stop on skis. The four of us made a long – though slow – parade of snow plows down the slope. It was a start. But now we had the real challenge: the lift.

Last year, the girls debuted on skis and we ramped them up to use the big chair lift, though not without a bit of stress and scurrying at the last minute to be sure everyone was in place to be scooped up by the giant mechanical chair. They had some experience with other ski lifts, T-bars and J-bars, too, but never with a poma-bar. But that was the only kind of lift at this resort. Sometimes the lift lines could stretch out across the bottom of the slope, not because the resort was so terribly crowded – it wasn’t – but because of the succession of little kids or beginner skiers falling of the lift and needing several tries to get situated on the bar.

Even as an experienced skier, I’m always a bit nervous the first time I use a ski lift. Especially the ones that drag you up the hill. The moment it jerks forward can catch you by surprise. Or it can move so smoothly that you get lazy and forget you’re not supposed to sit. Next thing you know, your ski tips are crossing and you’re horizontal in the snow.

Our foray into the land of the poma lift was not without a few errors, but quickly both girls mastered the art, and moving them back up the mountain was the least of our issues.

After one run, Short-pants wanted to take a break. She’d adapted to the skis with more difficulty than her sister and it was apparent she was enjoying it less. She looked adorable, her little legs not much thicker than the ski poles in her hands. But you could see she was miserable, which was maddening because we’d driven three hours and invested in ski rentals and hotel reservations and we’d toted all the gear from the car to the lodge – that in itself a production – and we just wanted her to try it a bit longer.

The earlier enthusiastic encouragement, more like coddling, took a different tone: cajoling.

“Oh, come on.” I said. “We’re out here, the sun is out and the sky is blue. It’s a gorgeous, perfect day to do just what we came here to do: ski! You can’t give up now.”

She could. Give up now. But she didn’t. She’s an obedient child so she suffered another series of snowplow turns down the gentle slope of the bunny hill. But she spent more time on the hill than on her skis. Halfway through the run, she headed the direction of the lodge, situated at the mid-point of the hill.

“Can I take a break?” she said, sniffling. She was on the mend, or so we thought, from a cold and she’d been sniffling for days.

I cajoled some more: uplifting, you-can-do-it logic and don’t-give-up-yet appeals to keep her at it. Just one or two more runs before we stop, to cement the muscle memory, to get her skiing with a bit more confidence before she stops to rest.

“I want to stop.” She was on the verge of tears.

I didn’t know which way to go on the scale. Tone it back down to coddle, stay steady at cajole, or ratchet it up to command. We’d only started. She couldn’t be tired. It wasn’t cold out – if anything the sun made it too warm for her ski-coat. We’d just had lunch. There was no good reason to stop.

“No,” I said, more firmly. “You’re going to ski. That’s what we came to do and there’s no reason to give up after only one run.”

Now she was fully in tears.

This is one of those parental dilemmas. How hard do you press your kids to go beyond their initial limits? When do our gentle and respectful requests get put aside because the situation requires a firmer tone? And when is the right time to scale it up to the strongest command?

I remember my early skiing career, being miserable and freezing cold, standing in a line in a group lesson, making-a-pie with my skis ad nauseam until my little thighs were burning, and wanting to do nothing but klunk through the lodge and have my mother unlace my boots and let me sit by the fire. But my parents commanded me to gut it out, despite the wet snow and cold toes. It’s true that I came to love skiing. In high school I adored the ski club’s Thursday-night excursions. Later I spent most winter weekends skiing in Vermont. In my thirties, I even took a winter off to be a ski-bum in Switzerland. If they hadn’t pushed me, I’d have missed out on all the fun.

Short-pants turned her skis down the mountain and pressed on, falling often and finding it harder and harder to get back up. De-facto took over the coaching, but her heart wasn’t in it. At the bottom of the slope we promised that she could ski right to the lodge on the next run.

Which she did. And sat at a table on the terrace and watched us tour up and down the wide trail with her sister, who was now getting confident enough to obtain speeds that merited her new nickname: the Bomber.

I’d ski over and visit Short-pants every other run, notching down to cajole as command obviously hadn’t worked. What became apparent, at each visit, is that she wasn’t so against the idea of skiing as she was truly feeling ill. Her cold was not on the mend, and she was slightly feverish and even a bit dizzy. No wonder she couldn’t get excited to ski. She was permitted spectator status the rest of the afternoon.

Later, at the hotel, she went horizontal immediately while De-facto cooked up a dinner in our kitchenette. She was truly sick, and I was feeling horrible about how I’d commanded her to ski earlier.

“It’s okay, mama,” she consoled me. “I’ll ski tomorrow.”

“We’ll see,” I coddled, “only if you feel like it.”

We took it easy the next day, but she rallied. Her skiing grew steady and she spent more time upright than on the ground. We let her sit on the terrace whenever she wanted. She counted the skylights on the building and read the signs outside the shops and restaurants.

On the third and final ski day, it was Short-pants who didn’t want to stop.

“One more run!” she said, wearing a wide grin. This provoked a long groan from the Bomber who was tired of skiing and ready to stop. I guess it paid off, this time, to scale things down.

Getting out of Paris was brutal. With only one day on the ground after a trans-Atlantic overnight flight, kicking into get-the-car-packed-high-gear took a tremendous effort. Loading the car took the right blend of brute force and spatial strategy. Buddy-roo’s old bureau, now replaced by a new grown-up chest of drawers, had been earmarked for the country house. We had to wind it down the stairwell and cram it into the trunk of the car. De-facto secured it with our collection of orphan bungee cords. We were one of those cars on the highway, stuffed to the gills and precariously secured.

Dusk was about to turn dark as we pulled in front of the stone house, the car headlights catching the little eyes of some creature in the grass. I crawled out of the front passenger seat, stepping over my computer case, handbag and another bag of something that wouldn’t fit in the trunk – crowding my feet for the entire drive – and stretched my stiff body before starting the ritual of opening the house. Electricity on. Close the refrigerator door and plug it in. Start the fire. I set about breaking the kindling while De-facto ventured out to the side yard with a flashlight to turn on the water. Short-pants and Buddy-roo paced around the cold room, not unbearably freezing like it was earlier this winter, but still too chilly to remove their coats, while I crushed up pieces of newspaper and piled the broken sticks on top.

When the water flow is restored – we drain the whole system whenever we leave during the winter – there is always a surge and sound of water forcing its way again through the pipes and you have to make a tour to every tap in the bathrooms and kitchen to shut off the faucets which were left open to avoid a freeze. De-facto had done the tour, and went out to finish unloading the car and I was swearing at the kindling that wouldn’t catch. The girls were walking circles around the kitchen table singing “I’ve Got a Golden Ticket” (this year’s school theater production, but that’s another post) when a rush of water spewed out of one of the pipes leading to the kitchen sink. A connection had split. The water sprayed out in two directions, at full force, gushing out on to the floor.

“Turn it off!” I shouted to De-facto, unable in that split second to recall the most critical words of this command: the water. I dropped the iron fire poker to the ground and ran toward the sink. Several plastic buckets, used to collect water when we closed the house at the end of our last visit, were stacked in the corner of the room. I grabbed them and ran to the broken pipe, holding one under each jet of water. I was stunned at how quickly they filled up.

“Turn it off! The water! The pipe is broken!” I managed to inject more information into this second appeal. De-facto sprinted out to the yard while I filled and dumped the buckets, not without spilling more on the already flooded floor, until the spewing water trickled into a slow stream and finally stopped.

I turned around to see the girls frozen in place, standing exactly where they’d been the moment it started. Short-pants was all deer-in-the-headlights. Buddy-roo was on the verge of tears, “This is the most horrible country house in the world!”

“It’s okay,” I said, “it’s not something that can’t be fixed.”

“We have to toughen them up,” I said. (Not out loud, though.)

The real crisis, I determined, was that while attending to the water surge, the kindling had burned and cooled before any larger logs could be added to their flames. The fire was dead. We were 0 for 2 on the way to any kind of dinner.

While De-facto traced the origin of the broken pipe to figure how to shut off the right valves so that at least some of our taps functioned, I phoned the plumber, his name preserved on a post-it in a moldy notebook in a dusty drawer. We had no expectation that he would come immediately – this he was relieved to learn – but I wanted to alert him to our situation and plead for a visit the next morning.

What followed next: a new wheelbarrow full of wood and a second go at the fire, this time with more kindling and more success. Potatoes and onions and carrots chopped and in the pot. Cheese grated. A smug self-satisfaction at the ample wine supply acquired during our last visit, the sound of a cork popping which eases any country house catastrophe.

“So,” I said at dinner, “what if I hadn’t been in the room when the pipe burst. What would you have done?”

“I don’t know.”

“Call Papa.”

It makes me wonder: how and when do you learn how to react in an emergency? At what age does the hop-to kick in? Maybe they need to go to Girl Scouts. Something. Our children stood there absolutely paralyzed, unable to move or think of a response. This shouldn’t surprise me: a cup of milk (or juice or water) gets knocked over on table at home, and they freeze up and scream for me.

“You know what do to,” I’ve told them. “Run to the kitchen, grab a towel and a sponge, run back before it spills off the table and onto the carpet.

I know they’re good kids, bright kids, doing their best, learning how to live in the world. But next time, if I can possibly turn off my own hop-to I’m going to stand there with them and gawk whatever’s spilling over the edge of the table. Then I’ll ask, “What are you going to do?” And wait.

On the bright side, it’s one way to get a new carpet.

A travel day can be a lost day, or a found one. When the job ends too late to make it to the airport, I am occasionally afforded an extra overnight in the hotel, and a quiet morning to myself without anything pressing to do. The meeting organizers and participants – who will sleep in their own homes that night – offer me sympathy, which I receive graciously. It’s not that I wouldn’t want to zap myself home and curl up next to De-facto and wake up to giggling girls in the morning, but the alternative isn’t a severe punishment. It is rare, once you have a family, to sleep alone and to wake alone, and there’s something delicious about the chance to do so.

Oh but I had plans. Several writing projects that have been on the back burner, a bit of research I’ve been meaning to do for another assignment. Big things I’d do with those extra hours. I’d gotten up early for an hour-long Skype call with my trainer, but otherwise I let the lazy morning stretch toward noon. I lounged around my hotel room doing a whole lot of nothing in particular: browsing, surfing, cleaning out my email inbox, catching up on non-urgent correspondence. It was supremely satisfying, handling all those little rocks.

I don’t remember where I heard the theory of big rocks and little rocks, but it’s a metaphor that’s stayed with me. The large rocks represent the important purpose-giving activities that one hopes to accomplish in any given day or week or period of time. The little rocks are the administrative and logistical tasks of life, those to-do lists I often rant about, all the minor tasks that take up time. Not that these little rocks are necessarily unimportant. Paying bills might be one of those pebbles, but if it doesn’t happen on time, the havoc created can further delay attention to the big rocks, and leads to additional smaller rocks just to get things back in order.

The theory goes that if you have a large glass vase and you fill it up with all the little rocks first, there won’t be enough room for the big rocks to fit in on top. But if you place the large rocks in first, and let the little rocks slip into the crevasses between them, then every rock will fit in the container.

Do the meaningful agenda items first, then the minutia.

This makes mountains of sense to me, but it doesn’t mean I can execute it consistently. It’s partially related to my medium-level of discipline, but also a natural by-product, I think, of the distractions – all those little tasks – that our children create for us. Then, of course, there’s the thrill of the Internet: the latest link to breaking news, three new emails announce themselves with a cheerful red dot in the dock of my desktop. (This isn’t so modern: as a child I used to wait and watch for the mailman to drive by every day, hoping for a letter from some summer-camp friend.) These incoming attacks of data and information all call for my attention, even if I’ve shut down the pipeline, which I often do.

Yet those lovely and surprising distractions take me on such serendipitous excursions each day. An article that provokes new thinking, a data point that’s amusing or interesting that could be used in my work. A soulful blog post that makes me laugh or even produces a gentle tear or two. It would be a shame to cut those little side-turns out of my experience entirely.

After my lazy morning, but before I left the hotel for the airport, I took a walk to stretch my legs. I’d been penned up in a windowless hotel meeting room for nearly three days, and the fresh air and sunshine were a relief. I did a full circuit around four long city blocks, walking briskly, breathing apace with my strides. It was just a 20-minute stroll, but it felt like a big rock, like something I needed to do, to keep my sanity.

I left my phone in the room – I wasn’t expecting a call and I didn’t intend to make one – yet almost every person I passed on the street wasn’t really on the street with me. They were on their portable phones, talking at full volume, waving their arms to make their point. Nobody was just walking and thinking. Nobody was just looking around. Even the people walking in pairs. They appeared to be conducting their own business, side-by-side but on their own devices, with other people in other places. Nobody was simply present.

At the airport, I felt like a fish swimming upstream, walking against the tide of people talking with their earphones on, or with noses buried in their smart phones, thumbs tapping away. The night before, in a restaurant, the diners seated on both sides of me felt it necessary to keep their phones on their tables, right next to their plates. I purposely put mine away. Partly because while I’m in the U.S. my roaming charges are onerous. Partly in defiance to the plugged-in, linked-in connected world that is eating us all up.

I love my gadgets and my connectivity. I really do. But I have to ask myself, just to stay honest: Which rocks does technology put in my hands? The big ones, or the little ones?

I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about the big rocks in my life. The manuscript that languishes on my hard-drive. That relocation project that I’ve been dreaming about for too long, and I’ve done little to prepare myself to make it happen. The children. They are my biggest rocks, though sometimes I forget this. I get so caught up in the little rocks – many of which have to do with them and their logistics – that I forget the biggest rock thing I can do is simply pay attention and engage with their lives. Find things to do together. Cultivate a rapport with them that they will cherish when I am gone. Appreciate them. Learn from them. (Until the eventual moment – and it’s not far off – when all they’ll want to do is talk on the phone and use their computers. But we’re not there yet.)

I suppose it takes a few days away, and maybe a long walk in the sun, to remember. Or else it’s just a string of hours to myself, to get lost in the thoughts of an uninterrupted morning to get my rocks in order, so I can find my way back to the precious stones that they are.

(Courtyard photo taken last summer by Betsy Riley)

I waited until Short-pants and Buddy-roo were dressed and downstairs, fully involved in their breakfast. Chances were good, once they’d reached that point in the morning, they wouldn’t return to their bedrooms until after school, when I’d be long gone. I tip-toed upstairs and slipped the Valentine stickers under their pillows, each with a little heart-shaped message. I straightened the bedding thinking maybe they wouldn’t see the little gifts until it was actually time to crawl under those covers, prolonging their surprise. I’d also addressed and stamped a couple of pink and red envelopes. They were in my bag, ready to be put in the postbox at the airport, hopefully to arrive in our mailbox at home, on Valentine’s Day.

We all walked out together, De-facto carrying my suitcase down the stairs. It’s rare that the four of us are out the door at the same time in the mornings, typically only one of us (usually De-facto) accompanies the girls to school. This time, they accompanied me to the taxi-stand and issued hugs and kisses and nearly-tearful goodbyes while the driver hoisted my suitcase into his trunk. They stood there, waving, while he waited for the light to change and allow us to plunge into the traffic.

This is the custom in our family – and don’t ask how it started, it’s just what we do – when you see someone off, it’s required to stand steady and continue waving until the car that’s whisking them away is no longer visible. I think it’s a lovely way of saying we don’t want you to go, but we do want you to go. You’ll be missed, but we’re excited for you and your adventures ahead.

The light took a long time to change. The traffic was heavy and slow and unwelcoming to a new vehicle. De-facto and the girls kept standing there, waving at me. I studied them, from a distance, as they were obliged to wait and wave from the other side of a green construction barrier that framed the repair work on the sidewalk between us. There they were, those people, their lives intricately interwoven into mine, everything mixed up together: our DNA, our dirty laundry, the pile of shoes by the door. That tall guy and those two bean-sprouting girls. That’s my family. And I love them.

Hope you’ve all got good people to love. Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

Two years ago today, my mother took her last breath and I began the process of putting my knowledge of her, and my love for her, into the folds of my memory. Ramping up to this anniversary, I’ve been thinking a lot about her last days, and how remarkably courageous she was, opening and closing that last door.

She was too pragmatic a woman to stir up any drama, and opted instead to put her life in order so that task wouldn’t be left to us. She marched stoically to her grave, much to the bewilderment of the undertaker, who confided in her when she insisted upon an appointment to discuss the details of her own funeral, that he “wasn’t accustomed to speaking with the deceased.”

Last night an email in my inbox, titled only Goodbye, linked me to Toddler Planet, a blog by Susan Niebur, astrophysicist and mother (among many other things, I’m sure) and cancer survivor – until yesterday, when her husband posted the news of her death. I never met Susan, but I read her blog, the posts of which elicited small gasps, sighs, and tears. You may have noticed the No Princess Fights Alone badge in my sidebar, placed there as gesture of quiet support, but also as a reminder of how life dishes out surprises, good and bad, and there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I and other such reality-checking sentiments.

I’m sad to learn that she’s gone. I wonder, where has she gone? And when she gets there, wherever it is she’s going, will she run into my mother? My college roommate’s father died within a few days of Freddie Mercury, and she had this fantasy about their encounter in purgatory’s green room, the two of them making small talk while waiting to be called in to meet their maker. She held a position of some influence in the music industry and imagined her father, upon learning of Mercury’s occupation, launching into a proud fatherly pitch, as he was prone to do. “Oh, you’re a rock star? You must have known my daughter, she works at MTV!”

I think we’ve all imagined – whether we believe or not – what an afterlife might look like. My heaven has the same dark-blue-and-pink-flowered wallpaper that hung my parent’s dining room. In fact, my ancestors are seated around the dining table; my mother is in her customary place and my father at the other end of the table with all my grandparents seated between them. There are a few empty chairs, waiting for my siblings and me, I presume, but sometimes they are taken by other friends who’ve passed on and who occasionally pass through my vision of the afterlife. Timmy, a childhood sweetheart who died in his mid-twenties, his silver-capped tooth in the center of his grin. Dilts, who died of a brain tumor six months before my daughter didn’t die of one, carries his old Smith Corona typewriter and offers a mischievous shrug to beg their pardon for placing it on the table. Even De-facto’s father makes an appearance from time to time, lamenting to my father that they never got to meet Short-pants and Buddy-roo.

My mother didn’t believe in an afterlife. I asked her point blank, “what do you think will happen to you when you die?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Life will just end.” Then, probably in response to the display of dismay on my face – because maybe I wanted her to believe in something – she’d rattle off all the good and interesting things that happened to her. “I’ve had a such a beautiful life. It doesn’t owe me anything.”

The renown atheist Christopher Hitchins wrote a number of essays on this subject, and gave interviews that were especially poignant when he was dying of cancer. He said that the hardest part, for him, was being told he had to leave the party knowing that it would go on without him. He also wondered – and I paraphrase, because I can’t find the link where I read or heard this during the flood of articles about him after he died – if heaven wouldn’t be someplace awfully dull, that the sustained condition of bliss over such a long time as eternity might be terribly tiresome.

It’s a valid point. Literature isn’t any good if there isn’t some tension. Wouldn’t it be the same for the afterlife?

As a devout pluralist, I’m open to any eventuality: a monotheistic-ruled paradise or an eternal dial tone. Or reincarnation. Do we come back in order to learn new lessons so our souls can evolve? Then we’d get a vacation from the boredom of a blissful heaven. But if you were an American, is your reincarnation shorter? Do the French demand a lifespan that’s the equivalent of all-of-August? Do you have to earn your vacation? Can you opt out?

I’d like to believe in something like a blissful afterlife. But I don’t know what happens to us after we die, and in the absence of knowledge, I feel that any guesses I make are fictional. But I’m not disturbed by believers. I respect their faith, and might even admit to envying it.

Maybe we need heaven because it’s hard to imagine that someone you love could simply cease to exist. Maybe there isn’t one heaven. Maybe each one of us has our very own heaven, mine with its ornate wallpaper, someone else’s rests on a cloud or it’s a long stretch of sand with waves lapping against the shore. Maybe heaven is for the living, a place for us to keep alive the memory of people that we don’t want to stop loving.

If that were the case, there’d be hundreds of heavens – or more – for Susan Niebur. It’d be like looking up at the night sky, every heaven like a star in her beloved universe, a twinkling remembrance of her and her courage. And there’d be just as many heavens for my roommate’s father, and for Freddie Mercury, too. And for my mother, yes, hundreds of heavens, each one fashioned in the faithful imagination of every friend and colleague, and everyone in her family, all the people who adored and admired her, and who still miss her so much. Thank heavens, we have a place to keep her.

~ ~ ~

Susan Niebur spent five years battling inflammatory breast cancer, a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer that presents without a lump. I’m making a donation in her memory. If you’re inspired to do the same, you can donate here.