by advicefrommarta | Aug 26, 2020 | Family Life, Random Stories
There was a storm the other day, just a little thunder, wind, and rain here, but farther to the north, it was a storm. When I went outside the next morning it smelled like creosote. More precisely, it smelled like waking up at the hotel I used to manage in Desert Hot Springs, where creosote grew outside my floor-length window. In the desert I never pulled the shade on my window. I liked to fall asleep looking at the lights in the distant city and wake up to the very beginning of the sun.
The other morning, the air smelled like taking my coffee outside and watching the sunrise with a whole desert day ahead of me to fill. A day with a hike to take and laps to swim in a pool I would clean, and rooms to turn over, and strangers to check in and talk to and maybe a drink with the group of women I’d become close to, or a visit from my hush-hush secret lover that even my friends didn’t know about until I was ready to leave. My friends in Desert Hot Springs were a group of women about 10 years older than me. Two of them were married to each other and the other two were single and we drank wine and I tried to figure out if I was like them, if I could make my own life, with no husband or kids, without a “regular” job. If I could live in a strange place and take in the smell of creosote every morning.
I’m sure the smell in Chicago had less to do with the storm and more to do with the destructive fires in California. A force of destruction blowing a little bit of peace for me. I am sad about the fires, but I took my hot water and lemon outside and breathed in as much as I could. By the time I was ready for tea and working, the smell had dissipated. I tried all day to get it back, but couldn’t.
I have lived in a lot of places, but Malawi and Desert Hot Springs, neither of which I lived in for long, remain fixed in my imagination. They are places where I found myself, at least for a time. I lost myself again recently. Maybe it was last year when I lost my breast to cancer, maybe it was years before when my life became consumed by the day to day of kids, husband, dogs, and work. All things I want and love. I’m not sure when I disappeared, but I spend a lot of time trying to find little bits of myself, grasping at them like a half-forgotten smell in the wind.
Online high school started for us last week. It is my son’s freshman year. He has always thought of himself as “a sports guy,” but now, starting high school at 5’2″ and 95 pounds, in a year where the intramurals aren’t happening and only the best of the best are playing any sport, in a town that asks kids to specialize early, he is realizing that maybe he is not a sports guy. He wants to be taller and bigger and be able to be on a team. He knows he is not those things, but he is unsure what he is. He does not want me to tell him that he is smart, funny, and loving, that the debate team would be perfect for him, or that he would get a role if he auditioned for a play. He does not want me to tell him that he is possibly a comedian or a writer.
So I do not. Instead I try to tell him that I know how it feels to not know who you are. I know that feeling of being someone with a missing piece. I felt complete when I gave birth to his sister and to him. Sometimes, when I am talking to one of my kids or helping with homework, I feel complete again. Once, in pre-Covid times, his sister was out for the evening with friends. I had washed her sheets earlier in the day and told her to make her bed. But, it was getting later and so I decided to make the bed for her. He followed me into her room and asked if I liked doing stuff like that. “Yeah,” I answered. “I like knowing that she’ll come in thinking that she has to make her bed but instead it will be all made with nice cold sheets and she can go right to sleep.” “Yeah,” he said. “I get that. I’d like doing that and thinking about that, too.” I felt complete again that night.
But, most of the time, I too wonder what kind of person I am, and what piece of me is missing. I wonder if there is a team for me or if maybe I was meant to be one of those women alone in the desert.
The day after the creosote smell I woke up at 5:00 AM to thunder and lightening, but no rain, and no creosote smell. I will need to keep trying to find my missing pieces.
by advicefrommarta | Aug 20, 2020 | Family Life
We have always been a kitchen table kind of family. We’re lucky, we have both an eat-in kitchen and a formal dining room. We use them both. We love them both. The kitchen table was the table in my husband’s house growing up. The ability to pull out an extra leaf from underneath and slide it into the very place you pulled it from is a never-ending source of amazement (well, to me). After 40 years or so of use, it was frankly kind of gross and hard to clean, or hard to make look clean. But still, we ate most meals around it.
The dining room table is huge and heavy. I bought it from an antique store in my late 20s, one of my first real furniture purchases. The table had come in the day before and needed refinishing, the chairs needed re-upholstering and so I got table and chairs for $200, delivered to my 3rd floor city apartment, which had it’s own dining room. I had wanted a Formica covered 1950’s diner-style table and chairs, but I did not have an eat in kitchen and I knew the table I wanted wouldn’t match my dining room. I had the chairs re-upholstered and left the table as is, assuming I would fix it one day. Spoiler alert, I have never fixed the dining room table.
We eat most meals at the kitchen table. The dining room is for company and Friday night dinner. Shabbat dinner is a holdover from the kids going to Jewish preschool and insisting on “special Shabbat dinner.” On Friday nights, we set the table with a tablecloth and our wedding china, we do the prayers, we always have dessert. For many years, Friday night dinner was always cheese tortellini, broccoli, and challah. It was the only meal everyone would reliably eat. Two of us are currently dairy free and so we’ve had to branch out and accept that not everyone will always love what we eat on Friday nights.
But most meals are in the kitchen. In the “before times,” the time before Covid-19, we usually managed to eat dinner together as a family 3-5 times a week. Sometimes there were evening classes, sometimes there was hockey, sometimes there were plays. Sometimes the dinners ended in one child or another storming out of the room. Sometimes (often), the kids loudly rejected my cooking and made their own PB&J. Sometimes after an hour or so of cooking and 15 minutes of eating I was left alone to spend 45 minutes cleaning, and it pissed me off. But when we could, we had dinner together.
When Covid came (to the country, not our house luckily), we had some rough spots with meals. One kid began to have stress-related stomach aches that left them barely able to eat, let alone eat with others. My husband began doing puzzles and there was a constant jigsaw puzzle on the dining room table. Being together 24/7 left us with less urge to come together for meals. There was a lot of eating snacks at the counter instead of meals. Friday night dinners were held in the kitchen, with no tablecloth, no china and sometimes even, most shockingly, no dessert.
When my husband finished his jigsaw puzzles, he took on a new project. He started refinishing the kitchen table. He moved the table to the basement and began work. Dinner, when it was held, was now held on a plastic table on the back porch. We felt surprisingly adrift without a kitchen table. We brought a folding table up to the kitchen simply to have a center. Refinishing the table didn’t take as long as a 2,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, but it took awhile. There were 72 hour waits in between steps. The basement smelled of turpentine.
Then, it was done. Yesterday, my husband finished the table and brought it up the same day the kids began online high school. The table shines. I imagine it looks much like it did when my in-laws first brought it home, eager for a place to have their own family dinners. It’s surrounded by two squeaky thrift store chairs my husband bought in his 20s and two squeaky chairs we bought together at IKEA. Last year, when my husband was out of town I attempted to glue all the chairs back together to stop the squeaking. It was only moderately successful. Already on its second day as a newly done table the table is holding today’s newspaper, and a set of napkins, and a pen, and my downstairs glasses, and maybe my purse, I’ll have to check where I left it. No matter how clean and fresh a kitchen table is, it should still hold a little chaos. That is after all the purpose of a kitchen table, to contain the chaos of the family.
Our chairs and are lives are highly imperfect. But we have a kitchen table to hold the chaos and a dining room table for tradition and sometimes, with a little elbow grease, everything can look fresh and new.
by advicefrommarta | May 24, 2015 | Family Life
On Thursday night my friend Sandy’s father died. I was feeling sad for her and sad for myself, for being at the stage of life where your friends’ parents die. My friends Vince and Miller called. They are also friends of Sandy’s and for them the news of her father’s death had sparked one of those arguments that only a couple who has been together since high school can have.
They called me to settle the question of whether Miller had dated a certain boy (the answer, yes). The conversation spun off in to trying to put together a timeline of our young lives and romances, memories of stupid things we did, and for reasons best left unsaid, an unquenchable desire to watch the movie Camelot. I went to bed still sad for Sandy, but also laughing and grateful to have so many people who share my memories.
Saturday I got to see Sheila and Kate, friends I haven’t seen in years. Sheila’s father also recently died. She and I, both mothers, talked about how much we missed lazy Saturdays spent wandering in and out of stores and meeting people for coffee. Kate is a real-life Hollywood writer. Sheila and I wanted dirt on that most nostalgic of shows, Mad Men, which Kate used to work on. We had questions such as, “Is Jon Hamm really that good looking?” (ok, that was my question and apparently, yes). But we also just wanted to talk about the characters.
I mentioned that in watching reruns recently I noticed how much more fun Joan used to be and used to have. Kate agreed, “I think she did used to have more fun when she was younger, she hadn’t been worn down, she hadn’t had a kid, she hadn’t been raped.” The three of us spent a long, effortless time talking about our careers and our declining eyesight.
That night my husband Danny and I went out for our anniversary. We went to our old neighborhood and ate a delicious dinner in what used to be a hang-out bar with no menu. We went to a play at a theater where we had both seen a lot of plays, and also where I used to take resist-a-ball class, because of course.
My friend Phil co-wrote and stars in the play and at one point, standing very near us, he begins a monologue. As the monologue progresses Danny and I realize that the story he is telling involves Danny’s oldest friend Eric, who committed suicide five years ago. The story is not about Eric, or his death, but about an old apartment of Phil’s. Eric and Phil were neighbors.
Later, over dessert, Danny and I try to joke about it. “Well, it’s not every day that a play brings up your best friend’s suicide, and not even thematically, but literally.” But all these memories are too close to the surface in this neighborhood where we used to live. The jokes fall flat and we bring home our uneaten desserts.
On Sunday, Danny and I take our son Joey to the forest preserve to learn how to ride a bike. This is not an unloaded situation. It starts with a fight between Danny and Joey on whether or not today is the day, which leads in to a more general fight and tears. I can not ride a bike, and have tried to stay as far away from my kids learning how to ride a bike as possible. I don’t want to put my childhood on them. But Joey wants the dog and me to come along.
I take the dog for a walk and fifteen minutes later I get a phone call. “Mommy, I can do it, come back.”
When I come back I see him, my beautiful son. He is pedaling quickly but effortlessly, a wide smile on his face, he looks as though he’s been riding for years. His father watches from behind, an equally wide smile on his face.
When we were in college Miller told me that I was the only person he knew who looked forward to nostalgia. It’s true, sometimes I live too much in the past. I hold grudges and memories close to my heart. Maybe it is because I’m a writer, or maybe I’m a writer because I am always reworking something that is already past. There is an undeniable joy and comfort for me in reliving the past, even the painful parts, and in reconnecting with those who were there with me.
But sometimes the trip down memory lane is too bumpy even for me. At those times even I know that the best thing you can do is pedal quickly in to the future.
by advicefrommarta | Feb 4, 2014 | Family Life
If you know me, you’ve probably heard this story before:
When I was in first grade I rode the bus home from school. At least some days of the week my older sister must have done something else after school because I came home from school alone. I was five and either couldn’t work the lock, or wasn’t tall enough to reach it, for whatever reason I didn’t have a key. My mother was usually home just as I got home, but sometimes she wasn’t. She must have taught a class that got out around the same time I came home, and sometimes the timing didn’t work out. If she wasn’t home I was supposed to wait in the backyard for her.
I was five and I had to pee and I would wander over to the neighbors’ house. They were an older couple and would give me cookies and keep me there until my mother came. This drove my mother insane. I think she thought it made her look like a bad mother. She would yell at me and tell me that I should have just held it.
One day, I decided to listen to her, I peed in my pants while waiting for her to come home. Her response, “Why didn’t you go over to the neighbors?”
You see why this is one of my favorite childhood stories.
I was teasing a friend of mine with this story after she reported that her nine-year-old had been locked out of the house. In response, she sent me this article about a five-year-old who accidentally got left at the wrong house by a bus driver. The mother is stunned that the bus driver would take the child to her house, where he was supposed to take her, and leave her without ensuring that there was a parent home.
When I was sixteen, I took a plane from Malawi to Louisville, KY by myself. Two unfortunate things happened on this trip. The first is that a man asked me if I wanted to change seats so I could see better during the movie. I went and sat by him. He started kissing me and when he stuck his hand up my shirt, I told him to cut it out and I returned to my own seat.
The second was that my aunt met me at LaGuardia. She took me out to lunch and then returned me to the terminal, where I promptly fell asleep and missed my connecting flight. I had to take a cab to Kennedy and catch a new flight home. The cab driver was virulently racist and had many choice words about my parents leaving me to travel from a god-deserted place like Africa by myself.
When we got to Kennedy he refused my money (which is good since I didn’t have enough to pay for the cab ride) and gave me his card with his daughter the police officer’s name and number written on the back. He told me to call either of them if anything else happened and that he would come get me. It was an amazing and disturbing experience that greatly influenced my understanding of people and politics.
Should my parents have left a five year old alone after school? Should they have allowed a sixteen year old to travel across the world by herself? Probably not. In both of those cases a parent’s almost-worst fears came true. A child wandered off, a child felt abandoned, a child was molested, a child was left alone in New York with no money.
I know that compared to a lot of people, I’m on the “free range” side of parenting, but I parent very differently from my parents. I can not imagine making many of the choices my parents made. Still I have to admit that not only did I survive those choices, the sense of independence and capability I developed from those experiences has allowed me to go on and do more independent things (at more appropriate ages).
It’s natural to want to protect your children. I do not believe you have to actively put your child in harm’s way in order to foster independence. But sometimes your kid gets on the wrong bus, sometimes your kid loses a key, sometimes an adult fails to follow through. It’s important to remember that not only are those missteps very rarely fatal, they’re frequently just a little bit helpful.
by advicefrommarta | May 29, 2013 | Education, Family Life
Tonight is an optional third grade science fair.
In the past at our school the science fair was held in second grade. It was, in my opinion, ridiculous. It was mandatory and few if any second graders really had the ability to create a science fair project on their own. So, what you got was two “competitions.”
One competition was for those parents who felt compelled to “help” their children create a science fair project. Those displays rocked and the competition was about which display and projects were the best.
The other competition was for parents who felt compelled to stick to their guns and not help their children, even though what had been asked of their children was not developmentally appropriate. Those displays did not rock, so this competition was more about which parent had the best smug “I read parenting articles” look.
There were also those of us in the middle. Knowing we shouldn’t help too much but also baffled as to how our seven year old who can’t cut straight could prepare a display board. We stood around with mediocre presentations and only slightly smug looks on our faces.
When my son was in second grade, the science fair disappeared, and I rejoiced. Now that he’s in third grade it’s been re-introduced, but as a voluntary activity. I assumed that given the choice, he would not want to do the work or participate. I was wrong, sort of.
He wanted to participate, but did not want to do the work. He chose a project that he liked, and then ignored it. Over several weeks including winter break and snow days, he refused to work on it. Not once, but twice he had households full of people willing to be test subjects, and he was uninterested in testing them.
So what is my victory? My victory is that tonight he will go to the science fair with this project. This project that completely and utterly sucks.
I know via Facebook that a friend of his has created a project involving testing the effects of carbs on blood sugar. Also thanks to Facebook I know that another friend has been working on his project during his chemotherapy treatments. My son was not even willing to work on his project during episodes of Jessie.
My victory is that this project sucks. In the conclusion statement (which yes, I helped him write) my son acknowledges that basically, he didn’t do enough work to yield any info if any use to anyone.
But we will go to the science fair tonight. Maybe he will look around and think “Huh, guess maybe I could have done some work.” Or, maybe he’ll go and spend the hour or so running around the gym not caring what anyone thinks. It doesn’t matter.
