Bye bye braces

When I was in my twenties, I used to write in cafes and coffee shops and pubs and parks: sometimes stateside, sometimes by the sea, sometimes in the capitals of Europe. Today I’m writing in the waiting room of a suburban orthodontic practice.

But perhaps for the last time. It’s a long appointment today because Tim is getting his braces removed, two years almost to the day after they were put on.

In general, I’m one of the few parents who does not remark on how rapidly my children’s childhoods have passed by. While other parents are prone to saying “How did it happen so fast!” and “Where did the years go?”, I tend to feel like the past fifteen years or so have happened pretty much in real time. I don’t think this suggests that I’ve enjoyed my kids’ childhoods any less than other parents have enjoyed theirs. I think it’s just that as an essayist, blogger and journal-keeper, I spend so much time examining the minutiae of everyday life that it sort of expands for me in a way it doesn’t for everyone. Very little goes unremarked upon; this somehow keeps it from hurrying past. Socrates may have said “The unexamined life is not worth living,” but he probably could not have known just how meticulously I would examine every aspect of my life and my children’s lives.

So I almost never say that babyhood or the toddler years or grade school has gone by quickly. But orthodontia seems to be an exception. I feel like it was just weeks ago that I was sitting here waiting for Tim to emerge from the examining room, new brackets and wires sparkling just like the tears welling in his eyes. This was a kid who couldn’t stand tags or buttons in his clothing; it hadn’t occurred to us that his sensory sensitivity would extend to his teeth, but he hated the bulkiness of the wires in his mouth for at least the first several days.

But that passed, and the braces became normal, and yet suddenly they’re gone again.

I’m not sure why this was the one milestone that seemed to come and go so quickly. Maybe because I thought it would all be a lot more work for me. Other than struggling to boost Tim’s spirits in those first few days, though, he didn’t need much from me. He figured out how to keep his teeth clean and what he could safely eat, and his appointments were straightforward twenty-minute events at eight-week intervals. It was a surprisingly simple process.

So as silly as it seems with eighth grade graduation, presumably a much more significant milestone, looming just five weeks away, this one feels big to me. For years before Tim got braces, we stressed about the affordability of it, but already it’s paid for and the braces are off. Tim walks out of the examining room beaming, and the change in his smile seems to accentuate all the other changes he’s gone through in twenty-four months’ time: now fourteen and a half, he’s about six inches taller, broader through the chest and shoulders, his voice deeper, his straight shiny hair gone curly.

It’s not quite enough to make me tearfully sentimental. That will probably come in five weeks’ time with graduation. But it’s one of many tangible changes he’ll undergo in the upcoming months and years. And I’m happy today to be here bearing witness.

The wisdom of peer parents

It was just a passing comment, somewhat transparently intended to remind the assembled journalists and the listening public of the president's humanity, but I loved him for it. Though ostensibly in the Rose Garden during yesterday's press conference with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to talk about Syria and other international issues, the comment that stayed with me was when President Obama said to the Turkish Prime Minister, “As always, among the topics where I appreciate your advice is close to our hearts, and that’s how to raise our daughters well. You're a little ahead of me in terms of their ages.”

I already have great admiration for President Obama, but this made me like him even more: a parent who recognizes that your best resource as a parent is other parents.

I've been looking to other parents for guidance and mentorship ever since Tim was two weeks old and I joined a new baby group. The oldest babies in that group were about four months old, and yet I still looked to their mothers as founts of wisdom and experience. They lay their babies on quilts on the floor during our group gatherings. They knew how to breastfeed without removing any clothing. They could change a diaper without looking. They could even leave the room for a moment to use the bathroom themselves without taking their babies along, entrusting them instead to the other mothers in the group. Just two weeks in, I thought these skills were magical, and over the course of the next three months, I practiced everything I saw them doing.

And that was only the beginning. Shortly after Tim turned two, we joined a playgroup in which a lot of the mothers had older kids. Already thinking about what lay ahead, I pumped them for information: What kindergarten teachers? What afterschool activities? Soccer or t-ball? Walk to school or take the bus?

When Tim started kindergarten, I met even more parents with older kids. Now that my two children are 10 and 14, it amuses me to think that a mother with a third grader once seemed to me like the height of experience, but clearly these women knew something I didn't: they had their children in organized school routines, packing lunches, doing homework. And I wanted to know everything they knew.

I still do it even now. Tim will go off to high school next year; I've spent the past several months asking questions of parents with kids in high school. For almost every phase my children approach, I draw on the wisdom of more experienced parents. What's the right length of time for Tim's first trip to sleepaway camp? Should I urge him to go to school dances? Should I let Holly drop out of the school band? Is the cross-country team good exercise, or too competitive?

One year when Holly was still in preschool, I held the volunteer position of town playgroup coordinator. I was surprised when a mother called and said she wanted to start a playgroup but only include kids with no older siblings. I suppose she sought the support and empathy of other first-time parents, but I wanted to tell her she was depriving herself of vital learning opportunities.  I wanted to tell her that practically everything worthwhile that I know about parenting, I learned from more experienced parents.

So I appreciate the fact that the president gets this too. I realize his comment was meant to win over his audience; I don't suppose he and the Turkish prime minister really had time to discuss whether 13-year-olds should be allowed Facebook accounts or what was the right age to stop imposing bedtimes on weekends. But it's the thought that counts, and I only hope the mother who once said she wanted only first-borns in her playgroup learned at some point along the way how much she would miss out on by not exposing herself to other parents who were a few steps ahead.

Mother's Day

I’ve never felt particularly attached to Mother’s Day. I ‘m not overtly opposed to it as a “Hallmark holiday,” the way some people are, but I just never take it very seriously. When I was growing up, my parents paid very little attention to holidays like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day; my earliest memories of celebrating either of those holidays was one year when June was a particularly hot month and my older sister decided the best way to honor Dad was for the three daughters to choreograph a swim show in his honor. This became yearly tradition, both the part in which the three of us planned out and performed our water ballet and the part in which my father said “The best Father’s Day gift would be not to have to watch a swim show.” To this day, my sister calls me a few days before Father’s Day from wherever she happens to be – an academic retreat in Italy, this particular year – to ask if I’m done choreographing our show yet. (My sister also reminds me periodically of her expectation that I will help her choreograph a swim show for Independence Day, Labor Day, and the occasional unseasonably warm Columbus Day.)

This past Sunday, there were no swim shows, but we did have a simple brunch with my parents in their new screen house, which is just about the right size to hold the four of us, the two of them, and the dog. (Admittedly, we all would have fit even better without the dog, but I didn’t want to spend the remainder of Mother’s Day searching for her in the woods. Or removing ticks from her fur.)

And somehow it just felt festive in unusual ways, far different from the usual bouquets-and-breakfast-in-bed (neither of which have I ever actually experienced on Mother’s Day, but that’s what I’ve seen on TV commercials). From Rick, I received the gift I most wanted on that particular day: he did a spring tune-up on all four of our bikes, didn’t complain about the task, didn’t ask me for any help, and cleaned the whole project up when he was done. From Holly, a homemade necklace in a homemade jewelry box. From Tim, plenty of good cheer and affection.

At Tim’s afternoon baseball game, all the mothers wished each other a happy Mother’s Day, and all the fathers who were present wished us one as well. At the restaurant where we ate with my in-laws after the game, there were complimentary chocolate-dipped strawberries served after dinner “in honor of mothers.” There was even a balloon sculpture artist at the restaurant who was specifically targeting the mothers in the room for his patter and antics; mercifully, some very swift bill-paying by Rick enabled us to escape before he reached our table.

Mother’s Day still isn’t high on my list of important holidays, but this year it was more fun than I remembered, with baseball and strawberries and bike tune-ups done without asking. Too cold for swim shows this year, I’m afraid. But I suppose with the current rate of global warming, it’s not out of the question for next.

Fitting in fun

A glance at the calendar as the week began made it seem as if I had about three times as much work as usual. Deadlines for assigned articles; research for upcoming assignments; tasks to complete for the eighth grade graduation planning committee; more tasks to complete in preparation for the annual meeting at church. Plus the house to keep up, dinners to make, and the afternoon office job that takes me away from every other responsibility for twenty hours a week.

So I did something that seemed a little bit illogical: planned a bunch of weekday get-togethers with friends.

Well, it wasn’t quite that direct a connection. It wasn’t like I said, “Forget the deadlines; I’m just going to have fun!” It was just that when anyone suggested coffee, I accepted. And I didn’t cancel a longstanding lunch date with my friend Lisa. And when my friend Cindy and I needed to plan ticket distribution for graduation, I invited her over to the house, knowing it would take longer and be more sociable than if we just exchanged information on the phone.

When I get really busy like this, my attitude toward spending time with friends echoes Mahatman Gandhi’s quote about meditation: “I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one.” When the logical thing seems to be to cut back on socializing, to cloister myself off and get writing done and pursue article leads and focus on the endless administrative tasks that typify all my volunteer work, I remember that I’ll get irritable and frustrated if I focus exclusively on the tasks at hand, and especially if I make myself spend time alone. Finding time to be with friends, on the other hand, will have an energizing effect and will nourish my spirit.

So I followed intuition rather than what seemed like common sense. I squeezed in coffee with Patti before I interviewed the selectmen; I took a walk with Jane after a morning meeting; I brought sandwiches over to Lisa’s house. I even spent two hours last Saturday enjoying an Indian buffet with my friend Anjali, though it was two hours I could have spent finishing an almost-overdue assignment.

Life gets busy, but it doesn’t need to be austere. Making time to be with my friends didn’t actually make it harder to meet deadlines; it made that part easier, because I felt rejuvenated after having a good talk or a brisk walk.

As always, it’s a matter of moderation. If I make too many plans, I’ll start missing deadlines and falling behind in all my work (and drinking too much coffee and eating too many lunches out). Most of us learn at some point in college that having too much fun is a bad idea for many reasons. But fitting in a little bit of socializing every day isn’t counterproductive. To the contrary, it’s the best way to ensure that I get back to work.

Dialogues with other species

In an interview on NPR last week to promote his new book, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”, Michael Pollan discussed the process of fermentation and then described how his newfound understanding of fermentation enabled him to make his own starter for bread rather than using yeast.

But what Pollan said next about baking was what really caught my attention. “At a certain point, I was able to throw away my recipe books and trust my senses in what dough should smell and taste and feel like, and realizing when it was ready,” he said. “It's just alive, you know? It's sort of like gardening for me. You're in this dialogue with these other species.”

I love the way he phrased it: being in a dialogue with another species. It made me think about the various things I do that could be construed that way. Walking in the woods.Taking care of pets and farm animals. Helping to mow the fields and turn the cut grass into hay bales at my parents’ farm. Listening to an owl. Planting herbs. All of these are activities that I consciously find rewarding, but the thought that it’s not just a diversion but a dialogue of sorts with another living species cast an interesting new perspective on it.

Dialoguing with humans, after all, is such a big part of my everyday life. My job as a journalist relies on my asking people the right questions and understanding their answers. It’s my passion as well as my occupation, but it can also be exhausting. Years ago, when I had an office job in the city, I confessed to my sister that at lunchtime I often bought a ready-made sandwich from the refrigerator compartment at the corner convenience store rather than ordering from the gourmet deli across the street simply because I needed a break from conversation, and would rather buy a sandwich of lesser quality than have to discuss my preferences with a deli worker. It’s nothing against deli workers; it’s just that I spend the work day crafting conversations and sometimes need a break from it.

A while ago, on a cooking show, I heard a Spanish chef explaining how to make a vegetarian stew. “Once you have the garlic talking to the chick peas….” he said. The host of the show laughed and said she didn’t speak fluent chick pea. I think she interpreted the funny turn of phrase as evidence of his faulty English. But cooks understand what this chef meant: ingredients have dialogues with each other, and with the person preparing them.

I can’t get away from human dialogue, nor would I want to. Both my personal life and my professional life depend on openness to verbal communication. But Michael Pollan’s unexpected turn of phrase served as a reminder that dialogue exists in other places too. How I talk to the dog, the daffodils, the stink bug on the kitchen floor, the chives growing in the window box….How I dialogue with other species. I suspect that once I start listening more closely, it may turn out to be just as interesting as the human dialogue that fills my day.

Spring springs slowly

It took a long time for spring to arrive this year.

The leaves all blew off the trees during Hurricane Sandy late last October, and the branches have been bare ever since. Bare enough to disappear under the two feet of snow that fell during Snowstorm Nemo, and the many inches that fell before and after that February storm.

And then the snow finally melted, and the branches stayed bare for weeks longer. The air was chilly and the ground hard and brown. I didn’t think about it much until we traveled south to Washington, D.C. in mid-April. There, in the warm sunshine, with freshly sprouted grass and blossoming trees all around us, the kids seemed to open up just like the blossoms, playing and exulting in the warm air they’d missed out on for so many months.

When we returned home, though, our lawn was still brown, our trees still bare, our shrubbery gray. There had even been a little bit of sleet in our absence.

So we waited. And then finally in the past week or so, our world turned green, the vibrant green of spring. Tiny leaves appeared on the trees and bushes. The grass on our lawn grew in bright green as well. Sunlight warmed the air. The kids and I started playing badminton nightly after dinner in the fading sunlight, something we never do when it’s below about 60 degrees. Yesterday at her painting class, Holly sat on a mat in the grass and painted a patch of yellow and purple flowers, so now we have a painting in the dining room with colors as vivid as those outside, where the daffodils that were planted long before we moved here are blooming once again.

Yet when I went for a walk after dinner last night, I noticed how many branches still didn’t have any leaves, how many patches of lawn have yet to grow in, how many buds on our neighbors’ apple trees haven’t opened yet. And somehow that was comforting too. It reminded me that this doesn’t all happen at once: spring has been magnificent these past several days, but there’s still more of it to come. Seasons in New England tend to unfold slowly, and it was good realize that we’ll keep discovering new blossoms and fresh greenery for weeks to come.

It would be a mistake to rush through this phase of slow blossoming. Summer, with its holidays and vacations and trips, carries with it more overt excitement and celebration than spring. Spring has a quieter splendor, and this week I’m reminding myself to stop counting the days until summer vacation and enjoy every moment of May.

Facebook days: Real life in concentrated form

“Because I don’t care what people had for lunch,” said an acquaintance recently in telling me why he hadn’t joined Facebook.

I had not asked. The people I know who avoid Facebook have my full admiration. I myself once said I wouldn’t join it until I was managing the feat of keeping up with the New York Times seven days a week, but I caved long before reaching that goal. Most days, Facebook is like my virtual water cooler. My work life consists of hours sitting by myself in an empty house writing; Facebook provides the same kind of escapist chit-chat that I used to find from my co-workers when I worked in a regular office full-time.

But sometimes Facebook is weighty, and then too it can be like a day at the office. People do bring their milestone events and news to work, after all, and now the same is true of Facebook. Yesterday, my Facebook news feed covered the gamut in terms of what my friends had to share. One had just bought her first house, a pictureseque little bungalow in Burlington, Vermont. Another had been invited to speak at a prestigious writers’ conference where she once studied as an aspiring novelist; now, with two successful books to her name, she’s invited back to share her expertise. Another was watching her 8-year-old daughter play the first softball game of the season. And another friend posted a photo of her late husband. Yesterday would have been his 44^th birthday, and the photo showed him a few years ago with a birthday cake in front of him and both daughters in his lap. I’d seen this same snapshot of a joyful dad with his two adorable children once before: it was part of a slide show montage shown at his wake.

It was one of those days when Facebook felt like real life being run in fast-motion. Ordinary things were going on but with overwhelming speed: accomplishments, losses, celebrations, anxieties. It was upsetting. And yet it was also authentic. By dinnertime, sixty-eight people had clicked “Like” on the photo of my friend’s late husband. Some of them were close enough to her that they would have known it was his birthday even without Facebook, but most of us would not have, including me. This was our chance to acknowledge her loss once again, and I hoped that felt reassuring to her and not invasive.

By the end of the day I felt a little bit overwhelmed by so many people’s different kinds of news, so much more information than I would have been privy to on an ordinary day in the pre-Facebook era. But for those of us who have opted in to this particular virtual universe, this is part of life now. We all share in each other’s news in a kind of super-accelerated realtime. And yes, occasionally there are posts about who’s eating what for lunch. But given the invitation to share people’s news, both good and bad, I’ll accept. We’re all here for each other. We always have been, but this makes it all the more evident, at those very times in life when it’s most important to realize it.