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.
4/28/10
4/14/10
Coming Around to Spring
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.
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.
3/24/10
Seeing Spots
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.
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.
3/11/10
A Winning Season
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.
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.
2/24/10
Ode to the Flying Tomato
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.
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.
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