New Slice of Mid-Life

I've moved this blog over to Word Press, where it can be found at  http://www.sliceofmidlife.com.

Hope to see you there!

The Age of Innocence

This story was written shortly after 9/11.  I decided to share it with my daughters, now 12 and 10, as our family discusses the anniversary.

In a toddlers' music class, a circle of mothers sings a song about the stars -- a spiritual, with a haunting melody. As we sing, our children take turns carefully placing felt stars just so on a black felt sky.  They smile with surprise and delight as the stars take their rightful place in the universe.  The children are aware of nothing but their sense of accomplishment and wonder.  And during this sweet interlude we, their parents, can briefly forget that terrorists attacked the United States only hours before.

When something horrible happens, the primordial instinct to protect your children kicks in with vigor.  I want to shield mine from frightening television images of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; keep them away from conversations about the evil forces that caused these things to happen.  So we spend September 11 in strange oblivion, driving out to the suburbs to shop for school clothes, sharing a chocolate covered graham cracker before heading home.  My daughters don't know that I am trying to avoid driving on freeways and bridges that might be targets of future attacks.  In the car, instead of taking turns listening to kids' music or mine, I bargain for brief snatches of the news, explaining that "something happened."  Weeks later I will be surprised when my older daughter Melanie begins using this expression as a catch-all excuse for her mercurial behavior.

After the kids go to bed, I am finally able to digest the horrific details of the day.  I wonder aloud to Jeff whether we should send Melanie to her first day of pre-school the next morning.  Though I expect no threat to our little corner of America, the thought of having her out of my sight -- even for a few hours -- is unnerving.  At school orientation the week before, I'd gotten unexpectedly emotional when asked to sign forms releasing the school from liability should anything happen during field trips.  Now that the unthinkable has occurred, I wonder why I was in such a hurry to send Melanie out from under my protective wing.

We decide to avoid disruption.  Life is topsy-turvy enough and we don't know how to deal with the recent changes in Melanie.  A summer trip to Maine to visit family has left her raw and clingy, prone to violent temper tantrums, refusing to sleep alone.  She has decided to move from her crib to a bed, is potty training herself and is dealing with powerful feelings of jealousy, as her baby sister Maya becomes more active.  And she is also starting pre-school.  In terms of the stress they produce, for a 2 1/2-year-old these changes are akin to the adult concerns of death, divorce, moving and job change.  Also, I read in my parenting books, this is the age when children begin to experience fear.

Fear.  We try talking about it.

  "Are you afraid to sleep alone in your room?" we ask, half hoping she will identify a monster under the bed that we can chase away.

  Melanie professes no fear, but runs into our room crying each night, comforted only if one of us sleeps with her.  During the day she begins to use the concept of fear freely, more to reflect a 2-year-old's inner turmoil over impending independence and the power of choice than to express real terror.

  "Do you want a bagel for breakfast?" we ask.

  "No, I'm afraid of bagels!" she responds.

The nighttime sleep disruption continues.  So does her erratic behavior during the day.  I feel suffocated by her neediness, exhausted by her emotional outbursts and my own emotional response to them.   Finally, in desperation I call her pediatrician.

 "Melanie is suffering from anxiety and needs you now more than ever," she tells me.  "Make a nest on the floor of your room so she can be near you when she is upset at night."

Jeff rises to the occasion and lays out a double futon with soft yellow blankets.  He adorns it with Melanie's favorite stuffed cats and an array of brightly colored picture books.  I am not pleased.

  "You've made too nice a nest!" I wail.  "Now she'll NEVER sleep in her own room!"

 Each night Melanie comes to our room and I begrudgingly go to sleep with her in the nest.  Each day she demands bear hug after bear hug, usually when I am occupied with her baby sister.  Sleep deprived and frustrated, feeling that I have nothing more to give, I wonder when her anxiety would be alleviated.  When will things return to normal? 

In the meantime, the country struggles to make sense of jets crashing into towers, bodies falling from the sky, huge numbers of missing people.   I remain strangely numb.  People want to speculate on the political motivation for the attacks but I, a former diplomat with experience in the Islamic world, don't want to talk about it.   The newspapers are filled with the extraordinary details of how the plots were masterminded.  I want to find answers in parenting books instead.  As the days pass and a shocked country grieves, I shut out the turmoil in the world and become more and more consumed by the turmoil in my own home.

Finally one morning I cry as I listen to a radio story about a hero of Flight 93, who left behind a wife and 3-month old daughter.  Later, I speak with a friend in New York, the mother of two daughters roughly the same ages as mine.  Then I realize why I have deliberately turned inward. My kids still have the luxury of innocence.  Theirs don't, and neither do any of the thousands of children left without a parent as a result of these attacks.  One day I will have to explain about murder and guns and evil and disease and divorce and the countless senseless human tragedies that can't be fixed.  But not now.  Not yet.  I still have some time.   

So I decide to embrace my ability to make Melanie's world a safe haven and concentrate on the things I can make better.  Each night at bedtime I take her outside.  We look up at the sky, identify the stars and I sing her the star song.  When she cries in the middle of the night, I willingly snuggle up in the nest with her.  During the day I am freer with bear hugs.  I want to do all in my power to dispel any anxiety she feels and to forestall the inevitable -- the wiping away of innocence as she learns to be afraid of bigger things, things I can't protect her from.  It'll happen soon enough.

About a week after the attacks, when we go outside to sing the star song, there is a lone airplane in the evening sky -- the first I have seen since September 11.  For me it signifies so much -- the horror that has occurred, the need for life to continue as normal.  I wonder if I will ever look at an airplane the same way again.  But for Melanie these are just magical, twinkling lights.  It is still too light to see any stars so I point at the airplane lights and sing:

Star shining, number, number one, number two, number three

Oh my, my, my, my

Oh my, my, my, my, my

 As she burrows her head against my shoulder, Melanie doesn't realize that the stars are not out tonight.  I am glad.  And I wish I could believe in magic again too.

                                            

The Bread Head Comes Late to the Party

I've become obsessed with baking bread, or to be honest, reading about baking bread.

A fulfilled Christmas request for a pizza stone got me interested in finding the perfect pizza recipe and method. I discovered Peter Reinhart's American Pie, with its fabulous recipe for Neopolitan pizza. That successful undertaking got me thinking about bread, which got me reading about bread and vowing to bake a loaf of bread every week.

I ordered books from the library and Amazon and revisited forgotten bread bibles from my ever-growing collection of cookbooks, becoming a late night grain anthropologist. This of course is nothing compared to author William Alexander, who in his new book 52 Loaves describes becoming so obsessed with making the perfect loaf of bread that he grew (and threshed) his own wheat.

But I'm not obsessed, I've always been an inveterate recipe tester and now I'm curious about how different breads fit different moods. And so followed Oatmeal Buttermilk Bread, Oatmeal Maple Bread, Simple Crusty Bread, a garden variety whole wheat bread, a break from bread baking for a while when we went to Hawaii for my mother's funeral and then caught up on life once we returned, Julia Child's baguette recipe and tonight, the basic whole wheat bread from the Tassajara Bread Book, published in 1970.

Everything old is new again. To be honest, the bread tastes kind of 1970ish, whole grain and a bit bland in a good for you sort of way, though with good butter and apricot jam it modernizes very nicely. I'm calling it Zen Bread (in honor of the Tassajara Monastery where it was born) and have decided that it is stripped of all pretense, just bread plain and simple and who could ask for anything more, especially when the house smells so good. Anyway, I'm kind of nostalgic for the innocence of the '70s sometimes and just the other day we were reminiscing about avocado and cheese sandwiches with alfalfa sprouts.

The best part of cooking is sharing the bounty. One of the four loaves I baked tonight will go to our neighbors as a peace offering for overrunning their yard during a boisterous Ocho de Mayo party. Another will go to a dear friend who is about to under chemotherapy and who will probably appreciate a little Zen. And two loaves will remain with us, so my home can feel wholesome and there will be something special to offer the kids, one of whom seems to be starving all the time.

But is it hot in here or is it me? I can't tell if suddenly everyone is obsessed with baking bread or if I'm just more attuned to other bread heads now. When I started writing mommy essays eleven years ago, it seemed as if everyone was doing it. Ditto memoirs with food, stories about caring for aging parents and memoirs about spending a year doing something. Blogs? By the time I convinced myself (a few months ago) that blogs can actually be a good thing because they bypass the publishing gatekeepers and allow writing to be read, I discovered that blogs are passe. If it can't be said within Twitter's 140 characters then...

You reach a point in mid-life where you have to come to grips with the things you won't accomplish, the places you will never visit, the experiences you may never have outside of your armchair.

But, as Oprah would say, this I know for sure: There are levains and bigas and poolish in my future as I get ready to leave the world of simple sponge behind and make and feed my own bread starter. It won't make me famous, it might make me fat, but it will give me a sense of accomplishment within the four walls of my kitchen. It might even make a few other people happy too.

And if I get too caught up in the fact that everyone else is already making ciabatta and Turkish flat bread and somebody probably has a book deal about the year they spent making these and 50 other breads, then I guess I'll always have my good old dependable Zen bread to keep me grounded.

My Grandmother's Thighs

We are saying goodbye, sharing stories, making sense of things and creating a legacy. So, in my mother's honor, here's the only poem I've ever written as an adult. I wrote it shortly after the birth of my first daughter and have it adapted it slightly to include my second daughter.

MY GRANDMOTHER'S THIGHS

One day, while sitting on the toilet
I looked down and was shocked to see
my grandmother's thighs.
Not just my grandmother's thighs,
but those of my great-grandmother,
my aunts and great aunts and my mother
(once she'd given up chain-smoking and
began to fill out).

I remember those thighs best
during summers at Beacon Beach,
spilling strongly and unashamedly
out of sturdy one-piece bathing suits
varicose veins glowing in the sun.
No beach cover-ups for these thighs!
They existed proudly alongside
aesthetically more pleasing specimens,
tanned, smooth, shapely thighs
that stuck unsubstantially out of bikinis
The contrast was like that of stiletto heels
and sturdy winter boots.

From a child's height the thighs
were what you saw first
as you peered trustingly up
at grandma or auntie or mommy,
waiting for them to dispense juice from the cooler,
provide money for ice cream,
or give you the go-ahead to return to the ocean,
your thirty minute waiting period after eating
finally at an end.

They were like buoys on the sand,
attached to the ever-vigilant woman
who watched you swim,
and you knew that they would propel her to rescue you,
should you be trapped
in the jaws of the angry, churning Atlantic Ocean.

At the end of the day
they peeked out from under
the shower stall and later the locker,
before being covered up again by flowered dresses,
encasing the women who led us to the car
carrying piles of blankets and coolers and bags,
the thighs supporting them and their bundles
like trustworthy yaks on a Himalayan trek.

I will never love my thighs
and will continue to run, bike and tone them into submission.
I will resent my genes for passing on to me such beasts
and will always cover them up at the beach
with exotic sarongs that say "No! I am not like those women.
I am different. I have traveled. I have done things!"

But I will also hope
that once in a while my daughters will get a glimpse of them
and experience the same sense of trust that I had.
I want them to know that I will always be there.
I want them to be aware of the strength
of the women from whom they are descended.
But mostly I want them to be blessed with
their father's thighs.

Just a Little of That Human Touch?

I am lying on an emergency room gurney the morning of the day I am supposed to fly to Florida, my guts churned up and spilling out of me in a blood red rage.

It's been a stressful three weeks since my mother was diagnosed with cancer, most of it spent on the phone - arranging treatment, trying to figure out Medicare and Medicaid and figuring out where and how my mother will live once she begins chemotherapy.

Three weeks and now the house of cards is threatening to tumble down. We are caught in a Kafka-esque situation. A bureaucrat has yet to enter essential information into my mother's Medicare account that is required before the Cancer Care Alliance will honor her Feb. 8 appointment. I spend hours groveling on the phone with all the relevant parties, to no avail. I have a momentary feeling of hope when I speak to a Medicare supervisor named Charisma, but when I arrange a conference call between Medicare and the Cancer Care Alliance, I am at the mercy of a bland peon who cannot help me. Charisma cannot be reached.

So I try Aetna, my mother's new drug plan provider (if you are under 65, just for kicks, ask your parents to explain their Medicare Part D coverage. Want to really have fun? Ask them to explain the "doughnut hole.")
I find a helpful woman named Stephanie and I appeal to her sense of humanity. She rises to the challenge, enters emergency notes into various and sundry computer screens and takes the gutsy step of GIVING ME HER LAST NAME AND HER EMPLOYEE ID NUMBER and tells me to call back on Thursday and all should be rectified.

So once I manage to get my guts back into my body, I take the plane to Florida and wake up Thursday morning ready to hear the good news
from Aetna. Alas, no one can find records of my call. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH STEPHANIE I want to scream, convinced she has
been vaporized for revealing too much. Finally, I am referred to The Center of Excellence (I am not making this up) where I am told that excellence entails initiating a status request to the Customer Advocacy Center, which, if I am lucky, will call me with an update, while I am on the plane to Seattle. Did you really think they would give me the phone number for the people who are supposed to be my advocates? There is no number, I was told ominously.

I've heard a lot of concerns that healthcare reform would go to the dogs if it's put in the hands of the government. But I have to believe that, as far as Medicare goes, the current public-private mix is the worst of all options, leaving the elderly at the mercy of one or more unnavigable bureaucracies. And when the people who work for those bureacracies are not empowered to deviate beyond "the systems" what we are left with is a cold, unresponsive, ineffective health care delivery system. Call me a socialist, but surely we can do better.

We'll get on the plane for Seattle tomorrow and when we land, I'll pick up the phone and keep fighting in the hopes that I don"t have to ask my cancer-ridden mother to wait a little longer for relief.

Born to Run

Bruce Springsteen is 60. I am almost 50. Yet it feels like 1975 all over again.

They say as part of life's continuum there comes a time when the children parent the parents. I am, not surprisingly, there. To steel myself for the challenges ahead, I have been running, 2010-style, iPhone in hand, ear buds in place, iPod shuffle mode on, and only a phone call or email away from anyone who needs me at a moment's notice.

Sometimes these runs are Rage Against the Machine stress burners and sometimes they are Grateful for Seattle Sunshine and All That I've Got leisurely jogs. Even when I don't have the Genius feature turned on, my iPod somehow selects the appropriate soundtrack to fit or shake me out of my mood.

How did it know that Yesterday, Blue and Trouble would match my feelings of self-pity or that Hard Rain, Walking on Sunshine Shiny Happy People and Born in the USA wouldn't allow me to wallow for too long? I don't remember feeling so connected to music and its ability to soothe my savage breast since I was a teenager.

And in some ways I've reverted to that time. A kaleidoscopic parade of people from the past has emerged to help, like characters from a Springsteen song. Unbeknownst to her strict stepfather Fred, my friend Chris and I used to sneak out of the house, pile into our friend Elaine's tan VW bug and drive all over the Jersey Shore to watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Elaine's Jimmy Carter peanut roach clip at the ready. Now Fred, who I haven't seen since I left for college, sends us daily email affirmations because his family has been touched by cancer. Chris, who I saw last year for the first time in 27 years, will spend a day in Florida with my mother and me, helping us sort through her lifetime of papers.

My mother's friends call me and their voices are shaky with age now. Old friends of mine are in touch and they tell stories of caring for their own aging parents. We look at each other's Facebook profile photos and laugh at how much we all resemble our mothers.

I saw Bruce on Elvis Costello's Spectacle, talking about his struggles with his teenage son. Last year, he was on the cover of AARP magazine.

The last leg of my 4-mile run grazes a bluff overlooking Puget Sound. There is a steep stairwell with 78 steps and at the top, because this is Seattle, there is a coffee shop. When I was a mother of young children, yearning for escape, I would run and when I reached the stairwell, just above me, there would be an old man handing out peppermints and three middle-aged women talking. When I reached the top of the stairs, I would head to my car and emerge with two sippy cups, which I would fill with cocoa from the coffee shop, balanced atop lattes for my husband and me. It seemed like such a precarious balance, yet the middle-aged women, emerging with their single containers of coffee, would smile at me nostalgically.

I haven't seen the old man for a long time and I worry that he is gone. And now when I run, I look down and see young women with dogs and babies in jogging strollers struggling to navigate the stairs. Maybe they are looking up at me and think that I am unencumbered. But we're all just in different places on the stairwell of life, and as Bruce would say, sometimes life takes you one step up and two steps back.

Up in the Air

I have a game plan, though it has as many questions as answers.

Some time in the next week, I will fly to Florida and bring my mother to Seattle for treatment at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. She is suffering so much pain and discomfort already that I am trying to arrange a medical mercy flight, but barring that, we will have to fly first class. I don't think the bigger seats, complimentary drinks and better food will be enough to anesthetize us during the five-hour flight. I'm not counting on the movie either.

In ever other aspect we are also flying blind. What will the doctors tell her about her prognosis? How will she manage the rigorous chemotherapy? I've read that chemo can make you so bone-crushingly tired that you can't even get up to wash your face. Not to mention the possible, nausea, diarrhea, mouth sores, dry eyes, itchy hands and feet and compromised immune system that makes you vulnerable to infection.

We will apply for Medicaid in the hopes that it will help cover the cost of an assisted living facility, where I had to laugh when I noticed that one of the residents is named Mick Jaeger. In Seattle my mother knows no one but me. What will it be like for her to be isolated and ill in such a place? Even on her good days, it's hard to imagine my independent, younger-than-she-seems 75 year-old mother enjoying group meals or the bingo games and weekly outings to the drug store that I was told are the highlight of the residents' lives.

So my germ-ridden family and I will be her portals to the outside world. Over the past week I've begun adjusting to the fact that I will soon become a care-giver and will have to give up some control over my life. It's been hard so far to deal with all the logistics, but I've been able to take a break from cancer whenever I wanted, taking a run, hosting a birthday party, drinking wine with friends.

Now for me, every day will bring new, unavoidable responsibilities. And for my mother, unavoidable struggles.

We will truly be up in the air, hoping for a safe landing.