The view from the passenger seat

I am not fond of driving. Not at all. I’ve often said that the singular drawback to living in Carlisle is all the time we spend driving places. Whether it’s for work, school, socializing, recreation, dining, or culture, we seem to be forever taking up a position behind the wheel.

Still, I never expected I’d have my own driver. I don’t even have regular cleaning help; the idea of someone to drive me around on errands or appointments was well beyond my imagining.

And yet that’s just the situation I’m in right now. My son Tim is in that narrow six-month time frame between receiving his learner’s permit and earning his driver’s license, an interlude in which the rules stipulate both that he must gain as much driving experience as possible and that he must do so under the watchful eye of a licensed and experienced driver.

So these days, Tim drives. He drives me to the supermarket and the drugstore, the post office and the library. He drives when we visit my parents. He drives when we drop off or pick up his younger sister from school or playdates. After three full decades of driving myself around, I now have someone whose assignment, and indeed whose pleasure, it is to drive me places.

This is not a developmental phase of childhood that I foresaw. I assumed Tim would want to learn to drive eventually, but as that benchmark loomed, I saw it mostly as a source of anxiety. How would I teach him the rules of the road? How would I explain how much room to give a car when passing, or what the perfect angle was for parallel parking?

But rather than being anxious, as I expected, I’m enjoying Tim’s company along with his chauffeuring services. He stopped wanting to join me for grocery shopping or other random errands at least ten years ago; given the choice, he would always opt to stay home. It’s fun spending more time together again. Moreover, it’s fun merely to see his enthusiastic response when I ask if he wants to go somewhere with me, even if I know that in truth his enthusiasm is more about the driving practice than about my company.

It’s not a time for intense mother-son dialogue. I don’t bring up college choices, or current events, or the moral and ethical dilemmas that teenagers typically face. He’s supposed to be concentrating on the road. But in a way, that’s what makes it so peaceful. It’s just the two of us, spending time close together without an agenda to cover or decisions to contemplate. It reminds me a little bit of the hours I spent roaming the neighborhood with him in a jog stroller or baby backpack when he was an infant. I was never one of those mothers who chatters nonstop to her small children. On those long, quiet walks or runs, it was all about the proximity, not the discourse.

So many developmental phases with children and teens are about growing apart, letting them finding their independence, allowing them to forge their own way. This period of driving together is one milestone that brings us closer together, even if more by regulation than by Tim’s choice. It’s a brief, tightly circumscribed interlude: only six months altogether, if he earns his license on the first try, and half of that time is already gone.

So I’ll just enjoy my chauffeur until the day he turns sixteen and a half. It’s nice to be driven around, and knowing it won’t last much longer, I’ll savor it all the more. He’ll eventually get his license, and then he’ll drive on his own, just as someday he will probably live on his own and spend even less time with me. For now, I’ll take all the time together that I can get. To me, it’s quality time, even if as far is Tim is concerned, all we’re doing is following the rules of the road.

Learner's permit

My son Tim turned sixteen yesterday, and like at least two generations of suburban American kids before him, he celebrated the day with a trip to the Registry of Motor Vehicles for his learner's permit.

For the most part, I was pleased by his sense of urgency. Childhood, and even more so the teen years, have far too few rites of passage these days. With all the material goods and all the travel opportunities that so many privileged young people have access to, sometimes it's not clear to me what they have left to anticipate. I look at the teens I know locally who live in McMansions with swimming pools, billiards rooms, in-house movie theaters and vacation houses at the beach and wonder if they have any incentive at all to grow up and leave home. Do you yearn for your own little bachelor pad if your parents’ place has an in-house gym with a full basketball court?

So it feels right to me that there's something special and rare about turning sixteen, something cool and exciting that you get to do merely by reaching a birthday. But it’s not the de facto milestone that it once was. Articles I've read recently have supported what I've personally observed; when my generation were teens, we all wanted to drive, but now, with their overscheduled lives and their helicopter parents who are accustomed to driving them to every activity, some kids don't really care all that much about getting a license.

And it makes sense, in a way. Being able to drive yourself to SAT preparation class, math tutoring, or mandatory community service hours doesn't have quite the same allure as being able to take the wheel and go cruising with your friends on the strip. Moreover, new regulations that restrict whom teen drivers can take as passengers mean any possibility of cruising the strip -- wherever that strip may be, in our quiet semi-rural town -- still feels years away to a sixteen-year-old.

Tim returned from the RMV triumphant, permit in hand. It's definitely a rite of passage, and one he was delighted to undergo. I greeted his news with a little bit of ambivalence. First and foremost, there are the obvious worries about safety -- his own and those of other people with he could potentially collide -- but there's also the subtler sense that if he can drive, he's taking his first steps into not only the excitement and independence of adulthood but ultimately the drudgery as well. Welcome to errands. And having to be places on time. And dealing with car maintenance. And paying for gas.

But he's looking forward to it. He’s had plenty of opportunities to pilot various vehicles while working on his grandparents' farm; during the summer months he drove cars, trucks and tractors all over the fields and private byways on the farm. He knows the excitement of powering a large piece of machinery. Moreover, he's been driving a motorboat since he was about ten, and like a lot of kids, he just likes engines and speed and what happens when you get the chance to combine the two.

So I wish him all the best as he ventures behind the wheel. And I wish my husband all the best as well, because that's who will be overseeing Tim's driving instruction in these early days. I'll wait until he's a little more capable. Then I'll give him some errands to do. Because with freedom comes responsibility, and I'll be more than happy to pass on a few of my weekly trips to the town dump. Maybe that can be considered a rite of passage as well.

Off to high school

I started worrying about this day almost exactly two years ago. Tim was starting seventh grade. He was entrenched in middle school: one year down, one under way, and one more to complete. There was no question by that time that high school lay dead ahead.

And the mere thought of that sparked dozens of questions in my mind: questions with which I peppered my many friends who have older children for the two years that followed. "How will I know if Tim is registered for high school?" "Who decides what classes he should take?" "What time does the bus come?" "How does he sign up for afterschool sports?" "What's the dress code?" "What will he need for school supplies?" And so on, and so on -- throughout the past 23 months and well into this past August.

The problem was that I found myself at an unexpected disadvantage when it came to sending Tim off to high school. Since my children are growing up in the same town in which I was raised, ever since kindergarten, Tim has attended the same school I attended. This year, ninth grade, will be the first time I've ever sent him off to a school where I don’t already know the smell of the hallways, the sound of the between-class shuffle, the feel of the humid food-tinged air in the lunchroom, the location of every lavatory. Since he's going to the public high school and I attended a private school, I know almost nothing about the institution he's about to enter. In fact, after two weeks of pre-season football training, he's already spent more time on the high school campus than I have in my entire lifetime thus far.

But ironically, looking back now to when he started kindergarten, I realize the sense of familiarity I had back then was actually somewhat falsely rooted. My belief that I knew the school inside and out turned out to be misguided. I would discover in the course of the weeks and months that followed that the kindergarten classrooms had moved. The cafeteria had been rebuilt. The schoolday schedule was different. Recess was held on a different part of the campus. Even the buses used a different entrance from when I was in school. So for all my complacency, believing I knew the place inside and out, it turned out there was plenty I didn't know about my old school by the time Tim arrived.

Somehow, even without my ersatz expertise, over the past year Tim has managed to get registered for high school classes, to gather the school supplies he thinks he'll need, even to navigate his way through two weeks of freshman football training already. And I know that tomorrow, he'll start learning his way around campus with no help or input from me. Because it turns out not to really matter whether I feel ready for this particular milestone or not. Freshman orientation starts tomorrow, and Tim feels ready. If I'm not so sure I'm ready, that's my problem, not his.

I like to think it's because of his nine happy years at our local K-8 school that he's able to make this transition so confidently. I'm the one who is filled with uncertainty. But no one is particularly concerned with how I feel. Unlike kindergarten walk-through, parents are not invited to freshman orientation at Concord-Carlisle High School. Tim will make his own way, and even if it's all unfamiliar to me, it will all be familiar to him within a matter of weeks. He'll do this transition without me. And hard as that may be for me to accept or envision, some part of me knows -- and celebrates -- that it's exactly as it should be.

Letters from camp (that are brief and inscrutable)

Months ago, when I signed up both kids for camp programs during this last week of July, I started thinking of it as "the West family All-Star break," because it reminded me of that brief interlude halfway through the Major League Baseball season when all the players get a break.

From that early vantage point, this particular week seemed to hold the potential to be a unique midsummer interlude for me. With Tim away at baseball camp in the Berkshires, it would mean significantly less cooking, less cleaning, less grocery shopping, less laundry -- and no evening baseball games to attend. And even though Holly’s program is at a local day camp, it still means no Disney TV shows yammering away in the background when I'm drafting articles, and no responsibility for me to plan her day's activities. I envisioned a stretch of five consecutive days when I had nothing to think about except my own tasks, errands, and work assignments.

But I didn't count on the fact that with it being Tim's first time at overnight camp, I'd be too anxious about his well-being to enjoy my All-Star Break Week Off at all.

Now that the week is under way, I'm trying hard to appreciate it for what it is: a week that provides a break from the busy jobs I juggle all summer long, typically an amalgam of meeting deadlines, keeping the house clean, and keeping the kids busy enough to be happy and social but unscheduled enough that they can relax and be resourceful about how to enjoy themselves.

But instead, I'm mostly just spending the time fretting about whether Tim is okay.

It's not that we have no way to be in touch with him. Though cell phone use isn’t allowed during the day, the camp allows the kids to text-message their parents for a few minutes before bed every night. But the texts we've received from Tim are not exactly what I would consider updates on his well-being; in fact, they require translation from Rick.

"What did he say?" I asked Rick excitedly when I heard Rick's text-message notification buzz at 9:03 last night.

Rick handed over his phone so that I could read their five-minute text-dialogue myself. "At SS, started off a 6-4-3," Tim wrote. "1st at-bat grounded to second off 80+ mph pitch; 2nd time walked."

"Why is he writing in code?" I asked Rick. "More importantly, how is he? Has he made friends? How's the food? Has he been sleeping well? Does he miss us very much?"

"He initiated a double-play from shortstop," Rick replied. "And he hit a grounder to second."

"But how is he?" I demanded again.

"He broke out of a season-long hitting slump and led a double-play!" Rick answered. "So he's doing great!"

I'm not sure I believe him. "Doing great," to my mind, would include phrases like "Camp has been fantastic!" and "I'm having a wonderful time!" and "The counselors are fun and the other kids are nice to me!" That's what a mother yearns to hear the first time her son goes to overnight camp. After all, he waited almost 15 years to ascend this milestone; now that we're here, I'd like a little information.

But very little more is forthcoming. The campers are allotted five minutes per evening for texting, and Tim apparently wishes to use those five minutes for telling his father his fielding and hitting stats rather than for allaying his mother's primal anxieties about his well-being.

Going to camp for the first time is a milestone for him, but I have to concede that it's one for me as well. As a kid, and well into my teen years -- okay, pretty much until my second attempt at college -- I had a terrible time leaving home. And my separation anxiety was, hands-down, the flaw I least wanted to see my children inherit.

Tim may not have much to say when it comes to communicating with me this week, but this much I can deduce: he's at camp and he's doing okay. And I'm doing okay too. He's learning to get by while away from home; I'm learning that he is his own person and may not choose to communicate his thoughts, feelings and experiences exactly as I might wish. I'm learning that this rite of passage for me as a mother means accepting that I simply won't know what he's doing and how he's feeling every moment of the day.

So I'll have to be content with the news that he executed a 6-4-3 from SS. It's not exactly the information I would wish to have, given that it tells me nothing about whether he's eating or sleeping well or even remembering to take regular showers, but for now, for this first week away, that's what he’s chosen to impart. I'll have to trust him to eat, sleep, wash, and be reasonably happy. And I'll have to trust Rick that a 6-4-3, whatever that might mean, is evidence enough of his well-being.

Next stop: Graduation

This coming week I'll help finish the preparations for my son Tim’s eighth grade graduation. I'm one of three event co-chairs, which seems fittingly symbolic: I'm executing tangible tasks -- overseeing programs and flowers, scheduling the graduation dance, renting the folding chairs -- to symbolize the end of his nine years at our local school.

Sometimes I think I've changed more than he has in these nine years. I was so starry-eyed as we registered for kindergarten. This is one of the most desirable school systems in the country; I felt so lucky to be able to live here and send my child here, and I was sure everything would be perfect. He'd have perfect teachers, make perfect friends, do all the right activities: soccer, band, middle school dances, Student Council. This was, after all, the same school I attended myself for grades kindergarten through eight, and almost all my memories of it were happy ones. 

But of course, public school isn't Disney World, no matter how highly rated the school system. Parents spar with the administration and gripe among themselves about teachers. Even the most exclusive suburbs, with parents who lavish every possible benefit on their children, produce kids who are occasionally unkind. And it turned out my kid didn't like soccer. Or band. Or Student Council. The middle school dances were fine -- until he went through his first break-up and didn’t want to go anymore for a while. That was one milestone I most definitely was not anticipating back at kindergarten orientation.

So Tim and I will both spend next week preparing for our departure, both emotionally and in practical ways as we finalize the graduation preparations. Next fall, he heads off for the first time in his life to a school that I did not attend and cannot picture. Since I went to private school and he'll go to public, I don't know the smell of the hallways or the color of the auditorium seats or where the buses load at the end of the day. This time Tim will learn it all for himself.

But really, he did last time, too. My notion that I knew all about our local school was an illusion. it was a good nine years, but things are more complicated than I anticipated. There were good parts and bad parts, and next week, as the other graduation volunteers and I confirm with the photographer, proofread the programs, and watch the kids head off on their daylong beach trip, Tim will be saying goodbye to teachers and acknowledging that there are friends he will hardly ever see next year. Eighth grade graduation is hardly a notable accomplishment. The truth is pretty much anyone can pull it off. But it's a milestone nonetheless.

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.

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.

Taller than Mom (or pretending to be, anyway)

Holly has become fascinated as of late with trying to imagine what it might be like to be taller than me.

Whenever she finds me standing next to a chair, she scrambles up to stand on the chair so that she can tower over me. If we’re outside, she angles to get me near a stone wall or bench upon which she can stand to look down on me. Her favorite opportunity is when we’re both in her bedroom, from which she can not only stand on her bed to gain a couple of feet on me but can also see both of us in the large mirror over her bureau while she does it.

I’m enjoying her fascination even though I’m not really sure of its source. I think it began earlier this fall when Tim, now fourteen years old, reached a height that unmistakably topped my five-foot stature. At first he and I were eye to eye, but it seemed within days he was discernibly an inch taller than me, and then two inches. Initially hard to believe, it’s now a fact of our domestic life that he can see the top of my head – and that I routinely ask him to reach for serving plates and glasses stored higher than I can reach.

Holly, just ten years old and small for her age, is still a very long way from reaching my height, and yet the fact that Tim has done so seems to have opened up a door in her imagination. It’s as if she realizes for the first time that this is probably going to happen to her someday. She’s correct in seeing that the odds are in her favor – at exactly five feet, I am one of the shortest adults I know. It’s very unlikely that she – or, in fact, anyone else we know – will be shorter than I am when full-grown. Pretty much everyone can look forward to the prospect of peering down on me at some point in the future.

I’m not sure why she gets such a kick out of climbing to higher elevations simply for the experience of standing next to me and looking down, but it amuses me nonetheless. It seems like such a simple pleasure, and yet there must be more to it, in her imagination. She has never been interested in dressing up or trying on high heels or applying lipstick; this may be her first inkling that occupying an adult body is a novelty yet to be experienced.

And I’m glad if the thought pleases her. Of course, by the time she really does surpass me in height, it will no longer seem like the thrill it does now. By then, there will be more important markers to the growing-up process, milestones that may please her or may dismay her but either way will surely seem more significant than achieving a height greater than her mother’s.

But in a way, it’s like pulling back the curtain and watching her mind at work. As she “practices” being taller than me by standing on chairs or park benches, she’s starting to think about what it will mean to grow up: to be a full-grown woman, an adult, maybe even a mother herself someday. Clearly she’s having fun with the idea, and because of that, so am I.

20 years wed

Because I write my blog the day before I post it, I’m doing something that my superstitious nature normally resists. I’m making a presumptive statement about an event that hasn’t occurred yet. Today, as I post this entry – May 23rd , 2012 – it’s my 20th wedding anniversary. Anticipating neither the end of the world nor the demise of my marriage within the next 24 hours, I’m assuming it will be okay to go out on that limb, just this once, and write that on Tuesday, even though it’s still a day away.

Normally, Rick and I don’t make a big deal about anniversaries. We’re always up for a small celebration, but the idea of measuring the years as milestones has never really made sense to me. In for a penny, in for a pound, I like to say; if you expect to stay married, two years, ten years and twenty become indistinguishable.

And I still feel that way. It seems to me the most challenging years of marriage are the first year of sharing a household and the first year of parenthood. Once you’ve made it past both of those watermarks – whether they happen in the course of the legal institution or separate from it -- everything else seems equally challenging and equally triumphant to me. Last fall, my family and I attended the wedding of a couple who had lived together for several years and had a two-year-old son. Even though we don’t know them very well, I felt reassured as I listened to them exchange vows, thinking that they’ve already gone through the hardest parts.

I suppose it would be fitting to take out our wedding album and browse through it, were the album not packed away in a storage box in the garage of our rental home right now. Even without it, though, I can remember an abundance of details from that unseasonably warm late-May day in the middle of Memorial Day weekend: seeing my high school and college and workplace friends gathered together; the three grandparents on my side and two on my husband’s who are now gone; the tiny pearl buttons on the back of the same lacy dress that my mother had worn thirty years earlier; the chocolate hazelnut cake my sister made.

I’m not sure what the 25-year-old who posed for that wedding album would think of the person who write about her two decades later. The future seldom unfolds quite the way you imagine it will, and yet I’ve never spent a lot of time or imagination projecting ahead. I don’t think I had any particular expectations for what my life would look like 20 years hence, and I don’t think anything about it would surprise me too much.

A quick Google search informs me that the traditional 20th anniversary gift is china, but I don’t plan to give Rick any fragile collectibles today and I doubt he’ll do so for me, either. For the past several years, we’ve chosen to celebrate our anniversary by doing something special with our kids, figuring they’re the best and most tangible by-product of the 20-year union. This year we’ll once again take them on a weekend getaway, once the weather is a little warmer.

“How’s married life?” wrote an unmarried friend to me recently.

“Oh, I can think of about 200 different adjectives for it, and my guess is so can my husband and so can almost anyone else who’s been married for 20 years,” I responded.

Yes, truth be told, I probably can think of 200 different adjectives. Marriage is a lot of different things, especially two decades in. But most of my adjectives are complimentary, at least today. And I’d like to think as of this date I can add a 201st adjective for my own union: long-lasting. It’s been a fine 20 years, and I hope we celebrate plenty more milestone years yet to come.

Holly turns nine

Holly turns nine years old today, which makes it what I call a “mom-birthday” for me. Even nearly thirteen years after the birth of my first child, I still bask in a feeling of triumph as well as gratitude each year on my children’s birthdays.

I congratulate my friends when it’s their “mom-birthdays” as well, even though they often don’t see it as the same kind of personal holiday I do. True, the focus should be (and always is) on the child celebrating the birthday, but I still think a kid’s birthday is a big deal for the mom as well. “Look, I transported her safely through another year!” I always want to proclaim on my child’s birthday.

It’s more than an accomplishment, of course. It’s a blessing. Holly has had another wonderfully healthy and happy and safe year, and beyond being triumphant, I should be tremendously grateful. And I am. Reaching nine years old free of serious illness, injury, or other catastrophe is something many children are not fortunate enough to experience. I feel gratitude every day that mine have been so fortunate.

But I also marvel at the fact that we’ve both reached another yearly marker. When my children were infants, I was somewhat surprised by every day we successfully survived together. Now it’s a lot easier, of course. They don’t need so much from me anymore. Not compared to when they were infants, anyway. And it’s a lot more fun now than it was back then. A successful feeding and a fifteen-minute nap was the measure of a good day during Holly’s first few months. Now she can do so much that I consider wonderful: ride a bike, write a story, compose a song, comfort a friend, recount an anecdote, tease her father.

She’s nine, and she’s very pleased with that fact. I am too. I’m grateful and happy for the past nine years we’ve spent together, and I look forward to the one just beginning. I’m curious what milestones it will disclose. I’m appreciative of those that unfolded over the past twelve months. I’m thankful to be here with Holly today, wishing her a happy birthday. And savoring my own mom-birthday as well.

Another year's holiday concert reminds me of how much music matters to the holidays

I hadn’t thought much before yesterday about the role of music in the holidays, but at some point during last night’s holiday concert at church, or maybe earlier in the day when I was listening to liturgical Christmas choral music on the radio while driving, I thought about how music was once considered one of the holiest ways to mark the presence of the spiritual and the belief in the Divine. The early Christian choral music I heard on the radio was written out of a sense of profound celebration. Music isn’t merely an element of entertainment marking holiday gatherings, I then remembered; it is in fact considered a means of expressing witness to the Divine.

The church concert last night included some elements of early Christian music and some elements of the more popular forms of holiday music: standard carols, jazz arrangements, a run-through of Jingle Bells that included all the children in the audience shaking various forms of percussives. It was a wonderful program, just as it is every year, and as I sat there I was conscious of the ways in which the concert carries its own set of milestones and markers of the passage of time. Two 13-year-old girls sang a duet beautifully, and as I listened, I could remember one of them singing in the family choir back when she was a kindergartner, and her earlier solo performances when she was 7 or 8, but I could also remember the very same duet she sang with a friend last night being sung years ago by a young woman who now attends a performing arts college program in New York. I remembered choir members and instrumentalists from years past who have died or left town, and sitting next to our minister reminded me of her predecessor, who loved holiday observances including this annual concert and died prematurely soon after leaving our parish.

But I also remembered how my own family has changed in the years I’ve been attending this annual concert. When we first moved back to town, I took Tim to the holiday concert with me; he was just three years old and a little too restless for my comfort. Holly came with me for the first time when she was two; something about the candles and the music had the effect of putting her into a sound sleep on my lap for the duration of the concert that year. The year after that, she and I had to sneak in and out of the Sanctuary at least three times during the one-hour program because she was at the peak of toilet-training, and it wasn’t going all that well.

Last night, there were other babies and toddlers whose parents were like I once was: far too preoccupied with keeping their small children quiet and calm to enjoy the program much at all. I knew how they felt, though: in those early years it seems so important to expose children to the special spectacle of live holiday music that you try hard to make it happen even when all evidence points to the fact that they probably just aren’t ready yet to sit through a program not specifically geared toward preschoolers.

But I’m at a different stage now. Tim opted not to come at all; at 12, his own interest in watching football overrules the novelty of being out at night, not to mention any priority on having time with Mom. Holly did come with me, but shortly after we sat down she moved to sit with four friends of hers. Suspecting that five 8-year-olds sharing a pew during a performance might not be such a good idea, I issued some stern words about behaving well; but I need not have worried; the girls all behaved beautifully, listening with rapt absorption except during the audience-participatory Jingle Bells, when they shook their maracas and bells along with all the other kids.

Some things haven’t changed; Holly still needed to leave halfway through to use the bathroom. But unlike during the memorable season of toilet-training, she slipped out on her own, after whispering to me where she was going; and upon returning to the Sanctuary three minutes later gave me a cheerful thumbs-up.

The experience reminded me that holiday significance doesn’t always appear where you most expect it. I would have expected to be most reminded of the passage of time when choosing our Christmas card picture, perhaps, or in selecting gifts for my kids, or maybe even in what we chose to do on Christmas Eve. (Do we still have to leave out beer and cookies for Santa? Really? Even though it’s just more dishes for me to wash?) I wouldn’t have expected being an audience member at a concert to have so much meaning to me. But the concert was wonderful as always, and meaningful as always. And I will try to remember in the future that music deserves a prominent role in our holiday traditions.