Screaming from the Bleachers

Summertime Slowdown

2010-06-11T23:32:00.006-05:00

Mentally, Adele, Steve and I checked out of Adele's sixth-grade year about two weeks before it ended. From August to May, tests and projects came at a fast pace. Because Adele learns best verbally, we supported her workload by reading aloud and reviewing material orally nearly every night. Social studies and science were particularly grueling, requiring several nights of intense study before each test. The first of fifty items on one social studies review guide read, "Be able to identify on a map all the countries, major cities and landforms of Africa." Talk about daunting.

Sometimes Adele became outraged by the academic demands on her. After a late night spent studying plot elements for a quiz on the structure of the short story, she came home from school the next day and slammed down her backpack, ranting, "Since when do quizzes have essay questions!?" That seemed a fair question.

Other times, I felt indignant about her unnecessarily heavy workload. I thought back to my own sixth-grade year, when we spent many slow weeks learning how to organize various levels of information into outlines. This was accomplished entirely during the school day, and it has proven useful my entire life.

A simple question Adele asked me one winter afternoon crystallized my experience of her sixth-grade year. Around three o'clock on a Sunday, she paused from playing with her neighbor friend to come into the kitchen and ask, "How long do you think it would take a person to write ten typed pages?"

I looked at her suspiciously. "Who needs to write ten typed pages?"

"Um, we have ten typed pages of imaginary journal entries due tomorrow," she said.

I tried to remain calm in front of her friend. "Okay, then," I said in an unusually high-pitched voice. "You need to say goodbye now."

To my surprise, Adele was able to sit at her laptop all that afternoon until bedtime crafting ten typed pages about an imaginary two-week trip to Europe, complete with real references and points of interest she'd researched on the internet. In the end, it was a fantastic assignment requiring her to focus, synthesize and create at a level that stretched and stimulated her.

Before social studies and science tests, Steve was a great help, genuinely enjoying the subject matter and oral reviews. But then there'd come an evening, after he'd weathered a long day teaching, when his response to the mention of a test the next day was to shut his eyes, drop his chin to his chest and say, "I can't." He'd look up at me across the dinner table, pleading, "You've got to do this one."

Then Adele would collect her messy reams of handouts, and we'd sit on the couch going over in detail the makeup of the planets in the inner solar system versus the makeup of the planets in the outer solar system, until we could stand it not longer. A perfectionist by nature, I sometimes found myself saying, "Let's just go to bed. You don't have to get an A. Go for a B."

When May arrived, we all felt like the hard work should be behind us, and it was difficult to muster up our drive much longer. Steve and I pooped out, silently rationalizing that Adele needed to finish up the school year on her own. But she also pooped out, forgetting to bring home her textbooks and instead devising her own fashion magazines and videos, planning slumber parties, baking and decorating cakes and playing out on the sidewalk until dark. We let her.

Adele's brain was stuffed full of information over the course of the school year. For the most part, this souped-up learning was energizing. She may forget the names of the presidents of the African countries, but she is sure to benefit from the lasting glimpses into distant worlds. She came to know that the things we can learn about and explore are limitless.

The beauty of the way Adele learns is that we often end up learning along with her--about continents, countries, landforms, politics and economics; about space, planets, stars, religions, world views, short stories, laws of motion, prepositions, sentence fragments, comma use, the colonization of Africa and the deforestation of Brazil. All the pockets of fascinating information that we delved into inspire me to learn more and to stay open to the richness of our world.

But still, I'm glad summer is here. Adele has both an artistic and entrepreneurial spirit, and I want her to have this unstructured time to allow the unplanned to take shape. Her school year was packed with learning. That knowledge needs to settle so that one day she can transform it, applying it in some personal, meaningful way.

Into what beautiful mosaic will she piece together the elements of her mind, spirit and imagination? A process of alchemy needs to occur. I'm eager to see over time just what exquisite creations she will be able to bring into life.

Change of Life

2010-05-13T17:33:00.011-05:00

In her response to the tearful week I spent after Colette's prom, the therapist, who usually aims to restructure my thinking, surprised me: "You'll have to embrace your sadness," she said, "in order to go through this transformation." I left the office with the understanding that some significant process of change must occur within me over the coming year, in order that I may be able to let go of Colette, to release her to the wider world.

In the meantime, our town flooded. Life changed. For two long days, water poured down over the ground in great torrents, turning streets into rivers and yards into lakes. Whole neighborhoods were swallowed, leaving houses under water and families jumping out of top-floor windows into boats there to rescue them.

In parts of town, the flooding was catastrophic. Everything familiar was suddenly altered. The terrain was no longer the one we knew; the signs that made sense before lost meaning. For several days, our town lost its bearings. For those who lost their homes, the displacement was traumatic and continues. Each of us, as we've assessed the damage through photos and videos, firsthand experience and conversations with friends, has been pushed to regroup and to reach out to one another in new ways.

The water is drying up, and recovery efforts are in progress. Wet carpet has been ripped up and lugged to the sidewalks, and all across town industrial-size fans are airing out basements. Many of us are fortunate enough to be back to our normal routines, sharing a renewed sense of the fortitude of our community and the power of experience to transform people.

Today I can barely keep my eyes open and my head up simply because of a night spent tossing in my bed with hot flashes and insomnia. I seem to be entering pre-menopause in earnest now, and I wonder about this change too. How will I fare through this natural, but protracted and unpredictable, process?

I am letting go of my child-bearing years, seeing the end of my biological fertility, and I intend to emerge in the next stage of life as a strong and changed being. I have borne my children, and soon they will leave to explore the world outside our home. I will transform as I release them. Not only they, but I too will come into a new orientation with the world.

As I enter this bumpy phase, there are moments when I see clearly the perfect beauty of things around me just as they are now. There exists a wisdom outside and within me, amidst the topsy-turvy signposts, if I can pause and locate it. The poem Adele wrote to me for Mother's Day gives me exactly what I need: "Just take a breath," it says, "I love you to death."

Stupid without You

2010-04-28T08:49:00.005-05:00

To my surprise, the theme they chose was the hundred-year-old children's book, The Secret Garden. With this as their inspiration, the junior class officers, led by my daughter Colette, hosted a prom for the upperclassmen this month that was breathtaking in its gorgeousness. Their year-long efforts of fundraising and planning culminated in a transformation of the school's beautiful, old auditorium into an English garden at night.

A month before the event, the juniors presented antique keys on ribbons and dusk-colored calla lilies to the seniors with their invitations. On prom night, when the guests arrived in the foyer, couples passed through a wrought iron arch wrapped in tiny lights and ivy, past a tinkling fountain, classic concrete garden benches and an abundance of flowers.

The view of the interior garden was deliberately and cleverly concealed by a tall, constructed garden hedge covered in verdant moss and flanked with urns of flowers. Around that hedge, in the secret garden, meticulously crafted balustrades, low moss-covered hedges and greenery surrounded pretty tables, and low twinkling lights hung over the dance floor. Along with projected shadows of vines, real ivy crept up the walls.

With money they raised themselves, Colette and her committee created all of this beauty, and then gave it to their friends, in celebration of high school.

The prom was a big accomplishment for my daughter. It was something I played only a miniscule part in, but in the end I was thoroughly caught up in her excitement. What a thrilling time, in the balmy spring weather, constructing a real secret garden! Her date, her dress, her dinner and limousine plans: Colette's happiness became my happiness.

Because of her heavy responsibilities for the event itself, she let down her usual guard with me and allowed me to help with her personal affairs, even permitting a mini facial. Blissfully, the week before prom, I laid a warm washcloth over her young, radiant skin and then with my fingertips rubbed in special potions and creams.

I began to want the experience to be perfect for her. In the final days of preparation, when I was enlisted to dash around town picking up boxes of fresh moss from the florist, the heady magic of prom carried me away. I became, in a word, over-involved.

The morning after her prom, as Steve and I lay in our bed, he said to me, "You love this stuff. I wish you could have been my prom date."

I couldn't take in the sweetness of his words over the sadness of what I was feeling. Colette's presence expands my life. Her experience enriches mine. For the first time, I sobbed about her growing up. "I'm going to miss her so much!"

Steve stroked my hair. "It's okay. We'll find new things to do."

"I don't want to find new things!" I cried. Everything seemed trivial in comparison to my connection to my firstborn. What came to mind as Steve tried to console me was a saying I'd seen on some whimsical German stationery: "Ohne Dich ist alles doof," translated, Without you, everything is stupid. With Colette gone, I thought, everything would be stupid. Flowers, ladybugs, butterflies--all stupid.

Colette conked out after the prom, sleeping through until the following evening. The house was dark and still. I tried to move on with my day, my life. But for a full week after prom, I was uncharacteristically and hopelessly weepy.

Forget the image of a mother bird forcibly shoving her baby birds out of the nest. No, I'd been soaring in a hot air balloon with Colette, and suddenly I'd flipped over the side of the basket and landed smack, splat, on the pavement below. It was not my glorious adventure. It was hers.

How I would love to stay up there with her, but it isn't my place. My responsibility is to stay down here on my street--grocery shopping, raising my sprightly secondborn, tutoring students, feeding the dogs, taking care of and engaging in the full life we've created. With a mixture of sadness, excitement and love, I watch Colette, floating aloft in her beautiful balloon, so full of promise, and I'm eager to see in which direction she's headed.

On the radio, I hear my favorite new song, "Nothin' on You," and I think only of Colette. The song seems to be about her, how I feel about her and what I want to express to her: "Beautiful girls, all over the world...They got nothin' on you, baby, nothin' on you, baby...." The combination of B.o.B.'s hip-hop lyrics with the loveliness of Bruno Mars's singing moves me, conveying everything I want Colette to know--that there is no one on earth more beautiful and amazing than she; that I have felt this way since the day she was born; that I will always feel this way; and that I want her to carry this with her wherever she goes. This is how I want you to be treated, I will tell her; don't ever settle for less. I weep in the car over the song's power to connect me with my huge love for her. Does she know how loved and lovable she is, and will I be able to find ways to joyfully participate in her life as she moves toward independence?

While driving out to an adult friend's birthday gathering, Steve gently advises me, "So, you got pretty caught up in Colette's prom. You need to step back a little now and give her some space."

I think about how it all transpired and how I really tried to keep my emotional boundaries in tact during the week leading up to the prom. "I think I did pretty well," I respond with uncertainty. "Was there a specific point when you thought I didn't have good boundaries?"

He looks over at me with raised eyebrows. "How about when I had to pull you out of the trunk of the limo?"

"Ooh. Yeah. That."

We both laugh, and it strikes me that this was a big experience for all of us, a powerful passage into her senior year--one I'm so glad we shared.

Coming Around to Spring

2010-04-14T10:02:00.004-05:00

The spot on my eye is a comet, a small blur of particles speeding through space and time. We here on earth are careening around the sun at 70,000 miles per hour. I put down the science book I am reading aloud to Adele in order to grasp this crazy fact. It is unfathomable. Our hair should be blown off our heads, our heads ripped off our bodies, at the speed we are traveling. I call up the stairs to Steve: "Did you know this?!" I cry.

I had thought the earth was inching slowly around the sun, but no--we are flying. Even with the pull of gravity, is it any wonder we don't always feel grounded?

As the gray winter days wore on throughout March of this year, I struggled with a bout of obsessive thinking that is a recurrent problem for me. I wondered whether my anxiety, which seemed to have been borne of a small brown spot, might also be tied to my firstborn's formally beginning the college search process, and thus the process of leaving and change. The school year was at its most demanding, and it was hard to resist the feeling that life was all work and pressure, trials and tests. Each day was cold and rainy, and for a time it seemed nothing came easily.

Something needed to shift.

And it did. As the earth flew along its orbit, axis tilted, the light began to shift in the hemispheres. A boy threw pebbles at Colette's window, and when she went to the door, he presented her with a bunch of fresh yellow tulips and a blue plastic Easter egg with a note inside that read, "Prom?"

This unexpected gesture toward my daughter broke winter's spell at our house. My vision is clearing: This is why we are here, to create radiant sparks with and for one another as we fly along our orbital paths.

Yes, the future is always uncertain, but with the return of warm sunshine, I feel calmer. I needed spring to come, bringing its inherent hopefulness and promise. It came on its own as a result of our passage around the sun. We are on course, and I am enjoying the season's colorful blooms and participating in the new growth around me.

Seeing Spots

2010-03-24T21:48:00.009-05:00

A spot of brown pigment the size of a small kernel of corn sits in the white of my eye. I take myself to an eye doctor, who examines it and says, "Come back in four months." I begin to obsess on it. Figuratively, it limits my vision. Obsessing on a spot is like proofreading, and I'm a genius at it. Detail-oriented is an understatement.

This is not the first spot I've obsessed on. There was the premature skin cancer on my temple. The mysterious mole on my palm. The dark spot on the sole of Adele's foot. The white spot on my mammogram.

Each one has stopped me cold for weeks. In each instance, my life has suddenly become small, like a rain poncho that folds up into its own tiny sack. The spot becomes all that I am.

How are you?

I am a spot, thank you.

For a time, I live inside its small circle, confined by fear.

How can I push through the anxious thoughts and view this as a circle to look through, a lens on my life? If I look through it, what can I see? The future is unclear, unknown. What will I do when my fast-growing girls leave home? Teach? Write? What will life be like without the anchor and structure of raising them? How will I face my own aging and my parents' inevitable passing?

I want my girls to go forth in the world strong and resilient, and I try to prepare them for all that lies ahead. It's an impossible task. Even without major trauma or illness, our lives will unfold into new shapes entirely, and I wonder whether we'll be able to absorb and adapt to the changes. It's scary to look through this lens--maybe easier to stay focused on the spot itself.

Using a cognitive behavioral strategy to curb my anxiety, I ask the eye doctor, "What is the realistic probability that this spot will turn out to be a problem?"

He hesitates, looking serious. "Twenty percent," he answers.

My strategy backfires. Twenty percent feels like a big number. The remaining eighty percent is for the moment blotted out by anxiety, eclipsed.

On the girls' spring break, we visit with friends, staying for two days at a hotel with a special water feature--a pool with a current, in the shape of a circular river. Guests float around and around the water track in clear vinyl, doughnut-shaped innertubes. My old college friend and I get in, jostled by other vacationers. If viewed from above, we would look silly, crowded creatures bumping into each other, drifting in circles. Why do we do this? Does it soothe our souls to travel in circles, passing by the same reference points over and over, without need of volition?

From my innertube, I ask my friend what she thinks about my obsessing on the spot in my eye. "How do I break out of it? Is this normal?"

She consoles me as we float along together. "It sounds perfectly natural." Any new spot, she suggests, is a subtle reminder of our mortality. "Aging, mortality--they're hard to accept."

I relax in the sun with her words, perfectly natural.

Back at home, I want it gone. I'm mad. Out, vile jelly! I tell my eye.

Then again, I'm attached to it, to its sharpness of vision.

I want to shake out the little sack that is this spot so that my life opens up again and is expansive--a warm, infinitely wide bed sheet from the dryer, floating down to where I can smooth out its flowers and curl up on it with my dogs, my family and our community, with a cup of tea and a magazine, a breeze at the window, and the sounds of birds and lawn mowers ushering in a new spring. I want to experience and share with others the beauty and fullness of life all around me. This will require a softness of vision and compassion. I don't cause spots. What I can do is to do what the doctor tells me while gently training my eye back to bigger things, like supporting and connecting with all those I love.

A Winning Season

2010-03-11T13:52:00.009-06:00

I was not as vocal at Colette's basketball games this year. Maybe the many pressures of her junior year of high school have affected me, like second- hand smoke. She got through the season with some good rebounds and a few good steals and post moves, and I was fine with that.

That's not how it used to be. When Colette was in sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth grades, I was 100% engaged in the game from the bleachers, my shrill, piercing voice carrying to every player on the floor, supporting the mastery of their skills and the pursuit of mastery itself. I cheered loudly for each pass, block and basket. I took Colette to every camp, clinic and practice, so she could build her skill set and become a competent, contributing member of the high school team.

This year, the team finished with a record of 15 wins, 10 losses--a winning season overall. Colette's own performance was strong in practice and decent in games. I felt more detached. It's her game now and her team. For the first time, I missed over half the games because I worked Tuesday nights. I picked her up when the games were over.

She's not the rising-star post player I fantasized about when she was in ninth grade, but she's no slouch either. More importantly, her team became her world this season. The coaches and players kindled laughter and happiness in Colette every day from October to March, as she did in them. On the court and off the court, they learned to rely on one another.

Over a glass of wine at Christmas, I asked my sister-in-law, who played Division III basketball in college, whether she thought Colette should consider trying to walk on to a DIII team even if she's couldn't get playing time, for the sake of being part of a team, since she's loved it so much.

No, my sister-in-law said, she didn't think so, not unless basketball was Colette's first love. She described all the traveling that college basketball requires and how she'd often felt she was missing out on experiences on campus with friends. Then she became wistful, noting, "But I did love scoring." Turning to Colette, she asked, "Don't you just love that feeling of scoring, of putting the ball through the net?"

Colette hesitated, but I knew the answer. My broad-minded, deep-thinking, culturally-oriented daughter told her sacrilegious truth. "Not really," she said. "It's not that great."

As Colette's season ended, the college search process formally began for the juniors. A questionnaire from the college counselor asked, "What experiences have had the greatest impact on making you who you are?" One of her answers was playing varsity basketball. I think I understand that contradiction in her of not being driven by stats and scoring, but of being motivated and shaped by the team and the experience.

Basketball is where she pushed herself to perform in front of the school and to find her own strength going up against big, powerful opponents. It is where she confronted her fears and limitations. And it is this team of girls who accepted her as one of them, enabling her to forge close, new friendships and to feel and expand the shape of her own identity.

As the locker room door closes for the season and Colette begins to explore her other interests and to think about colleges and new possibilities, I sometimes wonder, What's the point of a post move? Does it make any difference anyway?

Maybe one day when she's writing a college paper or applying for her first job, she'll hear a voice in her head reminding her to hold her ground, box out, take care of the ball, or--my favorite--go up strong. Or maybe she'll forget the words and moves entirely, but will remember the feeling of working together, supporting each other through wins and losses--of caring deeply for one another, serving as family.

Ode to the Flying Tomato

2010-02-24T19:01:00.003-06:00

My red hair glows, a flaming copper mane, and I laugh. I pull on my helmet, stoked to lay down my best tricks this time and every time. I drop in.

I swoosh down over the smooth snow of the half-pipe, picking up speed. I am a daredevil, thrilled by the challenge. I fly up over the lip of the wall to perform in the wide open sky. My body twists, spins, flips and rotates. One after the other, I throw down my tricks with style and power. I am the flying tomato, a symbol of relaxed freedom in a fiery marriage with excellence, individuality and the creative spirit. With perfect balance, I stick the landings.

I am not sluggish and inward-looking, wondering what I should do with my day. I do not spend time on repetitive domestic tasks like unloading the dishwasher. Nor do I waste time looking for a lost sock or re-folding clothes in a drawer. No. I do not follow a mundane schedule or walk in a rut, and I am not constantly straightening things up.

Instead, I drop down by helicopter into the Alaskan wilderness, where I speed over the rugged terrain on my board--outracing avalanches and flying over gorges. I cut a path, smooth and fast, down the mountain's face. I know how to dig a body from the snow, and I am unafraid, riding fearlessly through time.

I do not hem myself in, and I am not limited by body or mind. I don't stroll to the bakery, questioning my life's purpose, feeling uncertain and alone. I don't focus on commas and semicolons and rules--or on what others think--to give me legitimacy.

I am the one who comes up with the tricks while lying in my bed at night, the particular flips and rotations. I create them, and friends participate in the joy and applaud. I go big. A double McTwist, back-to-back double corks. I throw down my run. I stomp it.

Glamour-Puss

2010-02-17T21:12:00.010-06:00

I hear her in her bedroom making a video tutorial: "I'm going to show you how to get a pretty and fast 'smoky eye.' I know some people only use gray, but I think brown makes it look really pretty--it pops!"

Like a bright child pursuing an exhaustive knowledge of dinosaurs, twelve-year-old Adele studies makeup with passion and intensity. When she's not doing homework, practicing sports or playing with her neighbor friend, she's busy experimenting with a wide assortment of brushes and powders.

My basic rule for her is "No makeup at school." Plus, lately, I've added a few specific restrictions, such as, "No liquid foundation."

No liquid foundation? I wouldn't have guessed I'd need to set this particular limit with a sixth grader.

"Why not?" she protests at the drugstore. "Colette used to have some."

"No. She only used it as a spot concealer. And we threw it out."

"Then how about tinted moisturizer?" Adele bargains.

"No. You have beautiful natural skin."

"Fine," she harrumphs, heading to the loose mineral powders, weekly allowance in hand.

For Christmas, Adele asked for makeup lessons, so I scheduled a floor appointment for her at MAC and bought her Bobbi Brown's Makeup Manual. At bedtime, I read to her from Bobbi Brown: "I used to experiment with concealer on lips to make a pale lip color statement while doing Brigitte Bardot-inspired, dark, smoky eyes...." Adele listens with rapt attention. It's getting late, and I yawn.

"Keep reading," she says.

"The best artists continually want to learn," I read. "Artists who think they know everything don't grow."

When Adele was a baby, I said she was my little Sophia Loren. A fine-featured beauty with a glamorous look, her dark eyes sparkled. Her appeal was magnetic.

When she was two, still toddling about the house sucking a pacifier, her big sister said to me, "When Adele grows up, she's going to be the kind of person everybody knows. I'll ask people, 'Do you know my sister?' and they'll say, 'Adele? Of course!'"

Adele's small dresser now holds a large basket of brushes, mascaras, eyeliners, eyeshadow palettes, blushes and lip glosses, each organized in separate cups and cosmetic bags. The looks she creates are frequently stunning. "Wow!" I can't help but say. "Nice cat eyes! How did you do that?"

Steve and I live in a world populated by academics and vegetarians, so we were at first nonplussed by this developing interest and expertise. Sometimes I fret about it--about the effect of the beauty industry on young girls, about sex roles and stereotypes, about the related focus on appearance. A friend who teaches middle school and whose children are grown reassures me, "It's okay. We all need something to outgrow."

I imagine there's a high likelihood that our pre-teen daughter will outgrow this current focus. But I intend to leave room for the chance that she won't. In the meantime, we're involved in it with her, honoring her flair and spirit, giving her the tools she needs to grow, in this case a round contour brush with dense bristles. I pick up a few tips for myself in the process. I buy eyeshadow primer--something Adele taught me about--and I ask the woman at the Lancome counter to show me a couple of eyeliners, something with a little zing, something that pops.

Go Speed Racer, Go!

2010-02-10T14:26:00.009-06:00

"You take Adele sledding," I told Steve last Saturday morning, the day after the girls had stayed home from school due to snow. "I need some time to myself."

Like tastebuds that dull over time, my inner drive for excitement and stimulation has dwindled some. For example, I no longer want to spend hours tumbling in the surf when I go to the beach. I'm happy enough to sit on a towel in the warm sand and keep an eye on the girls while they experience firsthand the roiling, cold and mighty ocean.

That is why I chose to drink tea by the fire and fill in a crossword puzzle while Steve took Adele sledding. When they returned, wet and snowy, he showed me the pictures he'd taken. As I stuffed their ice-caked socks, gloves and coats in the dryer, I realized I'd made a mistake. In my resistance to the cold and my desire to be free of their needs, I'd missed out on the experience entirely.

So I invited Steve and the girls to go back out sledding with me in the afternoon. On a steep, snow-covered street busy with sledders, I found an old wooden Flexible Flyer, the kind I'd used when I was a girl, propped against a tree and waiting for a rider. I pulled it up the hill, lay down on it and pushed off. Then I flew down the long street on its thin metal rails. Exhilarated, laughing loudly, I felt the ground whistling beneath my body as I sped down the hill. At the bottom, I rolled into the snow, got up and brushed myself off for another run.

"How is it?" Steve called, taking pictures.

"Fantastic!" I yelled. "Dangerously fast! These old sleds are insane! Do you want to go down on it?"

"No way," he said.

On one ride, I barreled down the street so fast I had to deliberately ditch myself in a front yard to avoid running into the intersection at the bottom of the hill. The sled hit a snow-hidden curb, and I shot forward as if from a cannon, landing face first in the snow. I did not attempt the jump that the neighbor kids had set up, wisely determining that my spine might not be as flexible as theirs. When it was time to go home, I returned the sled to its tree, thrilled.

I spent the following day, Sunday, sore from wiping out, hobbling around the house taking Advil. One afternoon had been enough for me, but Adele went back out with friends. Happy and invigorated by my experience, I made a mental note to continue to push myself to directly partake in life's pleasures and possibilities.

On Monday, Becki, who is just my age and who comes every other week to help clean our house, let herself in with the key. I heard an uncharacteristic, lumbering limp as she made her way up the stairs to our study. When she reached the landing, I saw the raw and scabby wound covering the length of her nose.

"Oh, no! What happened?"

"Don't ever go sledding at night," she warned, "and especially not after two margaritas." She described how she'd run off the road into a concrete drainage trench and was lucky her head hadn't hit the culvert wall.

I couldn't help chuckling at her deadpan admonition, but it was a serious matter and solid advice, so I made another mental note, knowing that two margaritas could still have the power to stir in me a foolhardy desire to do just such a thing.

Road to Homecoming

2010-01-28T22:43:00.010-06:00

Friday night's homecoming basketball games have just been canceled due to a winter storm warning calling for snow, sleet and ice. Colette yells from her room, "The games are canceled. My life has no meaning!" So far, plans for the homecoming dance on Saturday still stand. If they fall, teen disappointment could be catastrophic.

I have felt a quiet tension about the homecoming dance building throughout January. A few weeks ago, sixth-grade Adele turned to Colette to ask in the car, "So, do you know who you're going to homecoming with?"

"No."

"Are you going to ask someone?" she followed up in a bright tone.

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't feel like talking!" Colette snapped.

I tried to ease the situation by explaining to Adele why this year might feel different to her sister: "I think in ninth grade," I said, "it's fun to go with your friends. Then in tenth grade, it's exciting to have a date. Maybe eleventh grade is different. Maybe they're stressed out, or--"

"I'm jaded," Colette cut me off, glum and firm.

A week later she mentioned friendship tensions at school, and I suggested that maybe they were related to homecoming.

"You're obsessed with homecoming," she accused me over her burrito.

"No. I'm just saying that it might be causing tension. Think about if you were a guy--you'd either have to get up the guts this week to ask someone, or you'd know you were letting the opportunity pass you by. And for girls, you either have to wait for someone to ask you--someone you might not even like--or you have to decide to ask someone yourself. It's stressful."

She got quiet. "Yeah, maybe," she said.

My own formal dances in high school caused tremendous feelings of dread, embarrassment and loneliness. At an all-girls school, I barely knew any boys. I lay on the twin bed in my room, dreaming of being loved and accepted by some boyfriend, but whom? When dances approached, I could think of no one to ask. I'd cry until my parents suggested I ask a friend of my little brother, three years my junior, and then I'd cry harder from the insult of their suggestion. It took all my bravery to invite any boy at all, let alone a boy I liked. At seventeen, the development of my self was in progress. Looking back, I didn't actually need a full-fledged boyfriend or a serious relationship at that time. Yet I pined, wondering, who would love me? It was too early to know.

Last week, Colette decided to ask a date to the homecoming dance. Now, everything is in place: the dress, the date, the dinner plans with friends from her team. She's excited and happy--not jaded after all. The world hasn't even opened up to her yet. Her small high school here at home is not the place where she's likely to meet an Othello.

But it is where she's bonded and grown with the girls on her team. Homecoming, I remind myself, is a celebration on a cold January night of the basketball team and their season. It's a chance for the girls to dress up together, go out to dinner and meet up at school to link arms and take pictures. The whole school is invited to the celebration. With or without dates, they have no need for dread or loneliness. They have each other, and it's quite enough to be young and strong, laughing raucously and dancing with classmates and teammates. At this point, the roads just need to remain clear enough to get there.

Xtreme Girls' Weekend

2010-01-20T16:01:00.007-06:00

I'm scheduled to fly to Texas this weekend to meet a friend from California for a so-called girls' weekend. By my count, this will be my ninth short solo trip since I gave birth to my first child seventeen years ago. That makes roughly one weekend on my own every other year.

Occasionally I point my finger at Steve, but the truth is that this low number is no one's fault but my own. It's been overly hard for me to leave my offspring. For one thing, it's hard to extricate myself logistically. But more than that, leaving them triggers in me acute maternal anxiety. I want to be their home base, the nucleus around which the electrons continually orbit.

As the day of a solo trip approaches, I find myself psychically squirming, trying to find a way out of the plan. I don't want to ask anybody else to take over my responsibilities. I don't want to miss basketball games--or rides, plans, meals. Making arrangements to leave, I feel how critical my role is in the family, and my anxiety skyrockets. What if something happens to me? What if I don't make it back? I don't want to leave my life. The girls need their mother!

Just over a year ago, I met this same California friend in Arizona for our first girls' weekend. There was nothing particularly risky about that long weekend away. During our seventy-two hours together, she and I talked and talked, wrinkling in a bubbling hot tub much of the time.

We visited a desert garden where I saw things I'd never seen before in a weird lunar landscape. I left my world and was awed by another. I saw an expanse of open sky and dry earth from which sprouted monstrous octopus cacti, their many thick tentacles reaching and writhing. The crucifixion thorn was forbidding, its long woody barbs jutting sharply from each branch. In contrast, whimsical, Dr. Seuss-like Boojum trees stood tall, their skinny, spiky trunks topped with frilly hairdos.

I entered the set of a science fiction movie in which a creeping devil cactus slithered up and among the branches of the Palo Brea, looping and draping itself, an unending fat snake. I saw the ocotillo, whose slender, friendly stems waved upward like an inverted cheerleader's pompom, and the prickly pear, whose plum-colored fruit sat perched atop cartoon-shaped paddles.

At the Mexican market, we washed down our visions with cool watermelon concoctions while taking in the sight of papayas and jicamas, and mounds of richly colored peppers.

It was a short trip to the moon, a chance to break away from the laundry basket to be reminded of what a wide world it is--how rich and varied, how strange and beautiful.

Planet Breast Milk

2010-01-14T17:50:00.006-06:00

In the recovery room after the C-section, a nurse carried calm newborn Colette to me, and right away she latched on to my breast and began to suck, naturally and easily. In those early minutes with her, I memorized her small face, her fine silvery hair and her rich sweet smell. I had worried about everything in the days leading up to her birth. Now, here she was, healthy and alert, and the fears cleared gently like fog, leaving in their absence a lovely baby girl, nursing peacefully.

I have had the good fortune to nurse two beautiful babies, five years apart, and, in the arc of my life so far, these have been the sweetest times, like falling in love. I nursed each of them every two to three hours from their birth, a process I'm grateful to have experienced. I surrendered completely, and for many surreal months nursing is all I accomplished.

Through nursing, I learned of their temperaments. Colette was a slurper, relaxed and perceptive. For her, my milk was as fattening as milkshakes, and she conked out drunk after nursing, milk dribbling down her chin. Serene and fast-growing, she seemed to have an inner agenda to grow, to mature as quickly as possible so she could explore the interesting world around her.

Adele, on the other hand, was dark red from screaming when she first nursed, and she latched on to my breast instinctively to soothe herself. High-strung, she nursed around the clock, rarely sleeping for more than two hours. For her, my milk changed inexplicably to the nonfat variety. She was smaller--chipper and birdlike--and also jumpy and distractible, unable to nurse with people or noises in the room. During her first year, she and I spent hundreds of hours together in my quiet bedroom, the nursing relaxing her.

During these months of nursing each child, I felt no existential angst or worries about my purpose or place in the universe. My only concerns were to eat, sleep, feed the baby and keep the milk ducts free of clogs. I was in a Zen-like state of oneness with the cosmos, and my purpose was clear. There was at those junctures just one small infant, a beauty with a perfect soft head gazing up at me. I lost myself in each of them. Their tiny faces were maps of the world, their moving, growing bodies complex planets, endlessly fascinating. I rested, produced milk, gazed and beheld.

Since those days, my role as a mother has shifted, requiring that I nurture their separate, developing identities and, in the process, continue to reshape my own. Now we have four distinct selves in our house and a fair amount of existential angst. We are four celestial bodies trying to find our places in the universe. Even as the girls grow and are weaned from their dependence on me, I want to be there for them, tethered loosely and in connection. Together we are a moving constellation, four bright stars, like the outline of Orion's strong form in the sky, creating a reliable pattern of happiness for one another and reference points for love.

Snow Dance

2010-01-06T19:40:00.004-06:00

At 46, I'm beginning to understand the term midlife crisis. I've been at this a long time--this childrearing, grocery shopping and running of a household--and I'm beginning to fantasize about a long stay in Martinique, strolling in my sarong beside the Caribbean, drenching myself in Creole, African and French cultures, perhaps learning banana farming. I'd like to escape for a time the endless responsibilities of raising a family, a relentlessness that sometimes clouds my vision and my sense of possibility.

At the very least, I could use a major snow storm this winter. The last time we had significant snow accumulation in our Tennessee town was on Steve's fortieth birthday in January, 2003. The week prior, Steve had mentioned that he wanted a dog, and so five-year-old Adele and I drove to the downtown library on his birthday to research dogs and to borrow a stack of books on breeds and their personalities. Adele, my constant companion, so affectionate and expressive, was eager to help with the mission.

At the library, we studied in the stacks, checked out our books and then headed to the French bakery adjacent to the library. With a coffee, hot chocolate and croissants, we sat at a little round table for two. Outside, it had started to snow, big fluffy flakes already sticking to the sidewalk and street. There by the window, we could feel the chilly air just beyond the glass. As we sipped our frothy drinks, the snow began to fall more heavily, and our view of the somewhat dingy downtown changed magically before our eyes. Everything became elegant, beautifully draped in snow. Big flakes, falling thickly, transported us to another time and place. Our outing was now in Paris. It was 1900, and our carriage driver was to meet us outside, our horses ready to clippity clop home across the snowy thoroughfares.

There's no one I would have rather spent that afternoon with than Adele, the girl who reflects back to me so much love and joy, who serves as a magic mirror to my better self. For a long time, we watched the snow come down. We skimmed dog encyclopedias and pulled apart flaky croissants until the lampposts and park benches in the scene outside were iced with a thick white frosting.

We didn't want to leave, but to stay in the beauty of that moment, to enjoy the day, my husband's fortieth birthday, and the dog we dreamed of choosing with him, the hour of snowfall and the elegant curves of the backs of our chairs.

New Year's Ruminations

2009-12-30T14:55:00.002-06:00

Pregnant with my firstborn, I felt the universal fears described in childbirth books: Would I feel immediate love for the baby? Would the baby be healthy? I harbored another fear, too, more unique to our marriage, about whether it was safe to bring a biracial child into our imperfect world. This was 1992, the year of the Rodney King trial and the L.A. race riots, and I was aware of the tensions between blacks and whites in this country--a rumbling, potentially explosive dynamic that felt at times like it was playing itself out within my own body.

Just last month, Keith Bardwell, former Louisiana justice of the peace, resigned after refusing to marry an interracial couple. Unapologetic about his stance, he said, "I think those children suffer, and I won't help put them through it" (AP). Bardwell's discriminatory action is now illegal. But he leaves us to wonder whether biracial people--a group that includes our president--are ostracized or suffer emotionally.

* * *
When they placed newborn Colette on my chest, seventeen years ago, she was so perfect, my beautiful biracial baby. I had not imagined her flesh-and-blood beauty--skin light at first, like a pistachio shell, hair silvery and soft, mouth wide, lips red.

At her one-week checkup, the pediatrician remarked while examining her, "She'll darken up," a straightforward, objective pronouncement that nonetheless surprised me. I guess I expected him to note the thing that was truly remarkable, that there was a new human being among us--a small, perfect infant on the threshold of an unimagined life, right there in his office. Instead, he thought to advise me, "When one parent is white and the other is black, they tend to darken up."

Just how dark? I did wonder. Would she look like my child at all? How out of place would she feel at my white family's reunions? To my mind, dark skin is lustrous and attractive. But I was unsure of my own act of creation. I had lived through a drawn-out emotional battle with my parents over my interracial relationship; I'd listened to countless cautionary tales and odd insinuations from acquaintances; and, together with Steve, I'd experienced things I had not experienced before: glares, disrespect and the pointed unfriendliness of strangers, not to mention several racially-tinged and otherwise inexplicable incidents with police.

How would my own child adjust, and would her adjustment depend on her coloration? I relied mostly on one data point--Steve--whose complex identity I had fallen in love with and whose own complicated inner life was at once cause for concern and reassurance.

Our daughter Colette is growing into a lovely and intelligent young woman. She's been raised in a world of good, Sesame-Street-inspired values, a world largely of our own choosing and creation, in which her multi-ethnic background is celebrated. She has the benefit of attending one of the most progressive and diverse schools in town--another intentional choice--and of having one parent who shares her experience of being biracial. She loves people of all kinds, and they genuinely seem to love her back. I'm not afraid for her anymore.

In 1997, her younger sister joined her as one of the approximately seven million multiracial Americans counted on the 2000 census. It's a new, growing population that barely existed when my husband Steve was a little biracial boy, moving with his military family between Europe and the United States in the early 1960s.

These days, I'm happy and grateful--grateful especially that our family continues to thrive and that our community and extended families embrace us. I'm delighted by the changes I witness in the world around me, and at the same time I carry within me old strains and emotions from a complicated journey, as well as a sense of mission to know and support this new generation of multiracial Americans.

Black Santa?

2009-12-20T15:44:00.018-06:00

As a young girl, wrestling with anxious thoughts at bedtime, I discovered I could soothe my mind by closing my eyes and concentrating on an image of Santa Claus, no matter the time of year. I now know that people often meditate on an image of a candle flame; I chose instead a jolly, pink-faced, white-bearded Santa.

I've always loved Santa. When Colette turned four, we hosted a Santa-themed December birthday party for her, and I asked Steve to play the role of Santa.

"Me?" He raised the eyebrows of his young, clean-shaven, brown face. "I don't look like Santa," he said.

"C'mon. You're the best we've got. They'll love it!"

Wearing a red sweater, he snuck out of the room toward the end of the party to stuff a pillow under his sweater, put on a Santa hat and grab a burlap sack of wrapped party favors. In he strode, bellowing, "Ho, Ho, Ho!" Thrilled and spellbound, the preschoolers received their small gifts.

No beard, makeup or fake wig was involved--not even a belt, red pants or boots. It was just Steve in a sweater and hat. One little girl boldly approached him, clamoring, "Are you Colette's dad? I think you're really Colette's dad!"

He stuck to his script, saying, "Ho, Ho, Ho!" and "Merry Christmas!" before ducking out to ditch the pillow, hat and sack.

When he returned, slim again in his sweater, a couple of kids poked him shyly, saying, "Were you Santa? I think it was you."

Steve looked at them with great surprise. "What?! Did Santa Claus come in here?!" and the kids were delighted--ecstatic--at this response.

Later that evening, he and I chuckled together. We were fascinated that so many in this diverse group of bright four-year-olds hadn't been able to identify Steve and had readily accepted a black Santa.

* * *

A few years later, friends brought us a present in a gift bag decorated with an African-American Santa flying through the night sky with reindeer and sleigh. They handed the present to Steve, saying they thought he'd appreciate the bag.

Our families feasted together, played games and stayed up late. After they'd left, Steve thought to remark while getting ready for bed, "That gift bag really warmed the cockles of my heart."

Around Christmas each year, I think about what he said. I keep an eye out for black Santas. I've purchased two ornaments from a short-lived series of African-American Santas. I've bought wrapping paper with tan-skinned Santas who could pass for light-skinned black Santas.

One Christmas, I drove with Adele to a big mall where I hoped to find any black Santa to give to Steve with his Christmas presents. We searched and searched and to my dismay found nothing. We bought hot chocolates and sat on a bench in the mall to rest. I suddenly felt alienated from our culture and conscious of all the black families shopping around me. They looked happy enough. Didn't they also want some wrapping paper with black Santas? Didn't they want ornaments of black Santas? The cockles of my heart grew cold.

Little Adele tried to understand my quest and my disappointment. "Why do you like black Santas so much, Mama?" she asked, her little hands cupped around her hot chocolate.

I tried to explain. "Well, sweetie, nobody really knows what Santa Claus looks like. There are no photographs. Every time an artist draws Santa, the artist has to decide what Santa looks like. And I just think there's a pretty good chance that Santa's skin is brown."

For twenty-eight years, my life and loves have been wrapped up with a man with brown skin. He's the person I talk with across the table every night. Together, we raise daughters whose skin tone is none other than brown. When I look around the table, I see brown. My image of Santa has morphed over time. I now picture in my mind's eye a heavy-set man with a deep voice, twinkly eyes and a kind smile; he is distinguished, and he has creamy brown skin a lot like my husband's.

It'll Transform Ya

2009-12-10T15:58:00.004-06:00

What the girls on the team love is imitating the YouTube video of Bon Qui Qui taking orders at King Burger, yelling, "Don't interrupt! Rude. Suhh-curr-ity!" Or reenacting the MADtv sketch of Lorraine at the buffet, where Lorraine tries to pay with nickels from a Vegas slot machine: "Last time I checked, nickel was legal tender!"

The best part of Colette's day nearly always happens between 3:15 and 6:15, during basketball. Being with her team puts her in a good mood, despite the fact that practice is hard work. Before or after practice, she and her teammates dance to their favorite hip hop songs, singing loudly, "I can trans-, I can trans-, I can trans-form ya. I can transform ya, like a transformer!" From what I understand, they have serious conversations in the sanctum of the locker room, and they also fine tune their dance moves and their inside jokes.

When they're in the gym, there are no cell phones, no parents, no boys, no facebook, no textbooks, no grades and no worries about the future. Each player puts aside her own concerns for three hours and joins in fully. It's a concentrated immersion experience, the team. For Colette, practice seems to release her soul from the considerable social and academic pressures of junior year of high school.

The coach cultivates their dedication by valuing each player and making the team a safe place emotionally. "What happens in the team," Coach tells them, "stays in the team." She shows them she cares about them and about how they're doing, checking in with them personally and checking in with their teachers. She's fair. For my teenager and the others, she's creating a safe, alternate family--something that, developmentally, Colette needs right now.

In a rigorous academic prep school where 27% of students are students of color, the girls' basketball team this season happens to consist of 90% students and staff of color. It's a different grouping, and maybe the overlapping experience of race for the majority of the team intensifies their bond. These girls share a fierce love for one another. After riding the bus home from a game in Memphis a couple of weeks ago, Colette reported that she and six other girls crammed into two seats for the three-hour drive. "It was such a blast," she told us repeatedly. When eleventh-grade girls choose to squeeze themselves into a seat with ninth-grade girls, something out of the ordinary is happening. The players are coming together over a physically demanding game that challenges them on many levels. They join in with something larger than themselves and seem to find themselves in the process.

At the grocery store one Sunday recently, Colette stopped the cart and exclaimed, "Oh, crap!" She checked her cell phone. "Phew! I thought I forgot Coach's birthday!" Without me, she headed to the baking aisle and picked out ingredients for a cake. At home, she put aside her research paper, made the cake and spent an hour meticulously decorating it with colored frosting. Then, she drove out to buy flowers with her own money and came home to create a handmade card for the team to sign. I watched and smiled to myself. Her love doesn't need to be directed toward me or this family, I thought; I'm so glad she feels it.

Colette announced during pre-season, back in October, that she wanted to see a movie and sleep over at a friend's house because, she said, "when basketball starts, I won't have a life."

I corrected her: "When basketball starts, you'll have more of a life."

Holy Basketball

2009-12-04T14:53:00.016-06:00

"Basketball is not my life!" Colette told her assistant coach last year when pushed to stay after practice for more skills work. Already, she was spending ten to fifteen hours a week at regular practice, two nights a week playing home and away games, two weeks of every summer at basketball camps and clinics, and a number of weekends and holiday breaks playing tournaments.

Colette knows what she doesn't want. She doesn't want to give up her limited free time to watch game videos. She doesn't want to stand under the basket, repeatedly executing post moves with a trainer in the gym. She doesn't want to use her study breaks to practice shooting in the driveway.

For better or worse, what she wants is more time to read books, watch movies, bake brownies and lounge around with friends in pajamas. She wants to learn languages.

I've had to adjust to this harsh reality. When Colette was named most improved player after her first high-school varsity season, I admit I had visions. She could be good! If only she'd dedicate herself fully, give it everything she's got--commit to the holy basketball--she could do it. Play college even!

My husband did not share my vision. "Her classes are a lot more important," he told me. "We should be standing outside her science classroom cheering."

Once I told my therapist that I wished Colette had more drive in basketball. If I could convince the therapist that my daughter's stagnating numbers in blocks and rebounds were evidence of a more global problem of ambition, then maybe I could get some support for my expectation that Colette continue to improve on the court. The therapist's response: "It sounds like she knows what she's doing. The likelihood of her having a future in basketball is almost nil."

I've backed off considerably. Colette gives to her team, and her team gives to her. In so many ways, she's an active contributor. It isn't about her achievement with an orange, round basketball, really, but about something less concrete, bigger.

Look Alive

2009-11-18T12:39:00.016-06:00

I'm not a gardener: you won't read here about crocuses poking up through the thawing earth or about my desire to get my hands in the dirt to plant pansies. More likely, you'll hear about the unwrapping of tasty cheeses and the uncorking of wine to aid in my study of the brackets for women's March Madness.

Generally speaking, six inches of snow must suddenly cloak the entire landscape, or big hailstones hit me on the head, for nature to get my attention.

But the leaves on the trees surprised me this fall. Driving to Adele's soccer games, I was pulled out of my everyday life, transported to some magical reality, just by the leaves on the trees around me.

It was a big, unforgettable farm feast in the sky. Great swaths of glittering color lined the roads: towering stained-glass windows of candy-apple coating; flaming orange tissue-paper persimmons; a giant pomegranate forest; humongous baked-sunset meringues, moving and alive.

It was as if the trees themselves were daring me: Just try to proceed with business as usual! Maples and oaks screamed from the bleachers, This is an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime moment! Pay attention! Look alive!

Sensitive to stimuli, the trees prepared to shut down as the light changed and the days became shorter. They didn't go dormant quietly. They became a stadium of fans all cheering for life and change and beauty, wildly waving their glowing handkerchiefs.

They put on their show, a veritable circus full of shimmering costumes. Fantastically, they rode in on elephants and swung from trapezes. Stand up and take notice! they cried to the onlookers.

This is how I want to be. Just when I become so familiar to all that the pharmacist knows my prescription, the neighbors know where and when I walk, and my family knows what's for dinner, I want to surprise them--POW!--with some unexpected and generous act of beauty.

Size Large, and Holding

2009-11-08T16:52:00.005-06:00

While Steve and Adele and I were walking our dogs one morning recently, an acquaintance called to me from far across the street:

"Every time I see you, you get smaller!"

"What?" I yelled back, thinking I hadn't heard right.

"Every time I see you," she yelled again cheerfully across the four-lane thoroughfare, "you get smaller!"

"Oh," I yelled back, stupefied, thinking, No I don't. I don't get smaller.

For the record, the nice woman was incorrect. I am still nearly six feet tall, and for the past ten years my weight has vacillated only a few pounds. But more importantly, my goal is not to be small. I have come to believe that it's a misuse of a woman's energy to try to be small. My goal is to be the strongest woman I can be in this body. I want to feel my power. I want to bring some muscle to all of the things that I do.

It bothered me, too, when Adele scolded me after this interaction.

"Why did you say 'What?' You knew what she said," she accused me. "You just wanted to hear it again."

"No, I didn't," I said, indignant. "It was weird! I didn't know what she said."

"It wasn't weird. You knew what she meant. You knew it was a compliment."

The fact that my younger daughter, not even a teenager yet, understood this odd exclamation to be a compliment instead of the mystifying utterance that it was means that her thinking about women's bodies is already being molded by our culture. Why else would she consider it a compliment when her tall, sturdy mother of stable weight, whom she counts on to meet all of her needs, whom she depends on to be strong and alive, is told she is shrinking on every encounter?

C, as in "Capable"

2009-11-03T12:04:00.007-06:00

I was shocked in high school to learn that the women's tennis team my mom played on was called the C team. For years and years, she'd played tennis, and I couldn't understand how she could hold her head high if she couldn't make it beyond grade C.

My pre-teen, Adele, now plays on a C team in club soccer, the next step up from youth recreational leagues. From what I observe, A teams (premier) boast prodigies, the best trained, most athletic players in the state. B teams (elite) claim on their rosters extraordinary young athletes whose speed and skill with the ball are rare. And C teams (select) are not to be sneezed at either. The kids on these teams love the game and are developing into competitive players with impressive skill sets.

I see so much growth in the girls on the C team. Each one brings her own strengths to the group as a whole. One player can run down any opponent and cut her off; one can blast through the defense, booting the ball powerfully to the goal. Another can consistently clear the ball and send it up to the forwards; my own daughter can outwit her opponent with footwork and complete a smooth pass to her teammate.

I see the girls pushing themselves for the sake of the team, for something bigger than themselves. I see them cheering on each other's successes. Sometimes, I see them crushed and defeated. Occasionally, a game is awful, and they can't accomplish much of anything. After some games, they're convinced the referees were against them, or the other team cheated.

But other days, in the crisp fall air, they seem to rise up together, in a swell of skill and self-confidence and teamwork. They play important roles in a game that exists outside their everyday life, and they're temporarily removed from the constraints and requirements of being twelve-year-old girls. There are new rules--the game has its own logic and structure and beauty--and they rise up to the challenges and express all their potential. For one hour, they lay it all out on the grassy field for themselves and all the world to see.

Two Points

2009-10-28T14:31:00.010-05:00

During our twenties in the San Francisco Bay Area, Steve and I noticed a slow proliferation of interracial couples. We developed a shorthand, private descriptor--IRCA, which stood for "interracial couple alert"--that we'd say aloud whenever we saw one.

At first, when we started dating twenty-seven years ago, there were hardly any. Since then, there are ever more IRCAs all throughout America, so many now that we often don't bother to mention a sighting anymore. In recent years, we've even spotted a few IRCAs in magazine ads and brochures, something we never thought we'd see.

Some of the couples we saw years ago appeared to be in the lowest socioeconomic class; they looked down and out--ill-kempt, sometimes obese or driving rusted out cars, swearing at kids in the back seat. I feared we might become like them--social outcasts--and I didn't want my life or my children's lives to be drastically limited by interracial marriage.

But, eventually, finally, I committed--not only to Steve, but to an interracial marriage and family, and to being defined by it, whatever it might mean.

* * * *

At dinner, Colette says she really likes the new freshmen on her basketball team this year.

I nod and observe out loud, "Almost all the girls on the team will be black this year." She knows I'm happy for her that she's such an integral part of this select group of girls within her diverse school. She knows I even envy her insider status with these varsity basketball players. Gently, I tease her, knowing I'm pushing the boundaries of what I should say: "You think you're so black," slips out of my smiling mouth.

She harrumphs. "Uh...yeah...blacker than you."

"But," I counter, "it counts to marry a black man and have biracial children."

"Not as much as being black," she says, in the dry manner we use to humor each other.

"I know," I acknowledge, "but you have to admit, it does count for something."

Trainable

2009-10-19T11:59:00.009-05:00

Over a glass of wine Saturday evening, a volleyball mom told me she doesn't know what she'll do when the season ends this month. "The screaming is so cathartic!" she said. Our high school daughter doesn’t play volleyball, but we were invited to dine with team parents because of friendships forged on the bleachers during basketball season.

I come from a family of sports fans. Growing up, I didn’t count myself among them. The noise of the TV during football games irritated me, and I sequestered myself in my room to color, play or read books. Even as a teenager, I preferred to study or talk on the phone while the family roared in the den over each touchdown, each interception.

I happily married Steve, who had little interest in football.

Only in the past ten years have I become a rabid sports fan, screaming like a wild woman at my daughters’ soccer and basketball games. I started out slowly--quietly observing my big, non-competitive firstborn move from dance into soccer. But, within a year, I was overshooting all parental boundaries, calling out critical instructions to Colette from the sidelines.

The season of my distasteful yelling culminated in an embarrassing Sunday afternoon when I walked purposefully down the sideline toward the goal my daughter was protecting and screamed for the entire soccer complex to hear, “IF YOU DON’T WANT TO PLAY GOALIE, THEN TELL THE COACH AND GET OUT OF THERE!”

Eventually, Colette taught me that the only thing she wanted to hear out of my mouth while she was playing a game was “YAY!” or “Go team!”

Both of my daughters have impressed upon me that since I can’t dribble well and I can’t do a decent lay-up, I have no business calling out advice to them. I’m still loud, but I keep what I yell entirely positive. If I really need to curse their performance, I do it quietly, to whoever’s standing next to me.

It's True

2009-10-13T14:01:00.011-05:00

Like our new president, my longtime husband is brown-skinned and biracial--a black man for all practical purposes--and I am approximately the same age and height as our new first lady. We also have two lovely daughters, but ours are older, almost seventeen and twelve now. The similarities end there for the most part. I'm white; I wear tee-shirts and jeans; I'm treated for anxiety; and I tutor part-time in a college writing center.

Last February, we pulled up to a motel on the outskirts of Memphis, on a weekend trip to watch our older daughter's varsity basketball team play in the sub-state tournament. Second-born Adele asked, "So there's an indoor pool?"

"I think so."

"Awesome!"

"True dat!" I said, for fun.

"Stop it, Mama."

"What? I can say that."

"No. You can't."

"Why can't I? There's nothing wrong with that."

My husband answered for her. "It's not something you say when you're a middle-aged white woman."

"That is so mean!" I said in disbelief. "I can't believe you just called me that."

"What? That's what you are," he said as we got out of the car. "What do you think you are? A hip, young black woman?"

"Um. Yes!" I shut my door assertively. "Don't ever call me that other thing again."

He shook his head, chuckling. Since then, Steve and the girls regularly refer to me as a hip, young black woman, which I do appreciate. I want to be whoever I want to be, and I don't want anyone to put me in a stifling box where I'm expected to talk and act and dress a certain way. I want to be free to imagine the whole world, to try to understand and laugh with everyone in it.