The Four O'Clock Stare

Here is Bisou, giving me the four o'clock stare, which often begins at 3:45 and continues unabated until 4:23, when I can't stand it any longer and give in and feed her (her official dinner time is 5:00).

As parents, my spouse and I believed that consistency was important, and that giving in to unjustified demands that contradicted standing rules was misguided. We applied this same principle to our many dogs in the course of fifty years, with excellent results. Until Bisou came along.

With all my dogs before her, mostly Shepherds and Setters, I had to work hard on eye contact. It became almost a reflex, before letting a dog out the door, or feeding it, or inviting it into the car, to stop and ask for a sit, and eye contact. The sit came easily enough, but the eye contact often took years to achieve. So I was charmed and amazed when Bisou, at nine weeks, came to us with perfect built-in eye contact.

I must have showered her with praise--it's always good to praise a puppy, right?--because she kept up the eye contact, and eventually honed it into a fearsome weapon that none of us can resist. Here is an example. My spouse is a benevolent but mostly uninvolved dog owner. The dogs have always been my delight and my responsibility, but he is glad to help out when I ask. Recently, getting ready to leave for the afternoon, I prepared Bisou's dinner, stowed it in the microwave, and asked my husband to feed her around 4:30. But my plans were cut short and I got home at 2:00--and found Bisou's empty bowl on the kitchen floor.

I ran into the living room, brandishing the bowl. "What is this?" I asked my husband. "You didn't feed her already, did you?"

"Well," he answered, "she stared at me and stared at me, and I figured that you must have made a mistake when you said not to feed her until 4:30."

That lesson, among others, was not lost on Bisou, who is now in her eleventh year of polishing the power of the stare. Did I mention that she's also going a bit deaf? This means that if she's busy sniffing outside and I call and she doesn't come right away, I can't get mad at her because, poor thing, she may not have heard me. So I call again, and again (exactly what I'm NOT supposed to do) until she looks up, all innocence, and says "Oh, it's you!" and trots over and fixes me with her lustrous carnelian orbs. And I praise her for finally coming, and for making eye contact...and she stores it all in her excellent dog memory for future use.

The Miracle

“And please, God, send me a little brother or sister”: this was the coda that, as a child, I appended to my nightly prayers for years, with no luck. I prayed as I would have prayed for a dog or a kitten--something or someone that I could relate to on my own level, who would stand with me inside the circle of ever-watchful, concerned, loving adults. Someone, especially, who would distract my mother from her intense focus on me. A fellow soldier in the battle for a separate self.

My parents prayed too, but I'm not sure they did anything besides praying and exercising their “conjugal rights,” like consulting a specialist. Or did the fact that I slept in their room until I was in school keep that longed-for second child at bay?

Although openly affectionate with each other, my parents adhered to a Victorian standard of modesty. Until his final illness, I never saw my father even in his robe. When I was still sleeping in their room and he got up in the morning, he would say “Don’t look! I’m going to get dressed now.” By using the plural form of the verb, he was ensuring that I believed that my mother wasn’t allowed to see him naked either. At night, in the dark, I would sometimes hear them whispering, and for a joke I would make whispering noises back at them. But I don’t recall ever hearing anything remotely sexual.

Years passed, and I was exiled to the Murphy bed in my own bedroom down the hall, but still nothing happened sibling-wise. After a while I stopped asking my mother why my prayers went unanswered, but I never stopped praying—not through our four years in Ecuador or our move to Birmingham after that. Then, when we least expected it, my mother got pregnant.

We marveled and rejoiced and gave thanks, but, at four months, my mother miscarried. I remember my father, as he walked out the door to rush her to the hospital, turning to tell me not to look in the bucket that was left in the bathroom, which he had hurriedly covered with the lid of the old-fashioned washing machine tub. I obeyed, and while I was in school the next morning, he buried the baby, a boy, in the backyard.

We all gave up hope then. What, after all, were the chances of another pregnancy after fifteen years of sterility and a miscarriage? Apparently they were excellent because, the year after that, at age forty-two, my mother got pregnant again. We held our breath and prayed hard for nine months, and this time my sister, the long-awaited miracle, was born, and all was well.

I had just turned sixteen, and far from being embarrassed, as teenagers are said to be, by this scandalous evidence of sex among the elderly, I was thrilled. Even though she wasn’t the companion I had prayed for, I loved the strangeness of this new creature, and the disruption she created in the household. I peered at my sister with the same intense curiosity as I had watched the chickens and rabbits of my grandparents’ farm—why did she cry every evening when the sun went down? Were her early smiles the real thing? What made her clench her fists and pull up her knees when she cried?

I threw myself fervently into the diaper-changing and bottle-washing routines. I longed to feed the baby, but my mother jealously guarded that function.  I wondered at her anxiety that my sister, born at a vigorous seven pounds, would starve to death if she didn’t finish her bottle at every feeding. I was aghast when she pinched her tiny nose to force open her mouth so she could insert the nipple. Surely a baby knew when she’d had enough? It was my first consciously critical look at my mother’s parenting style.

“Weren’t you jealous?” people ask me when they hear the story. Alas, no. Jealousy would have implied a shift in my mother’s attention away from me. But my mother was perfectly capable of continuing to scrutinize my face, my posture, my dress, my sleep habits, my tone of voice, and the state of my soul while she held my sister in her arms. My sister and I were, in fact, two only children, and although my prayers had been answered in the literal sense—I now had a sibling—I was still without the fellow soldier I had longed for in the guerrilla wars against my mother.

But if I didn’t gain a comrade, I did reap other benefits from my sister’s late arrival. All the diaper-changing, bottle-washing, and babysitting I did from ages sixteen until my parents finally loosened their grip and let me leave for graduate school at twenty-one stood me in excellent stead when I had my own children in my mid-twenties.

For one thing, despite the prevailing ethos, I was determined to breast feed them, having had enough of washing and sterilizing bottles and mixing formula during my teenage years. For another, having carried a baby on my hip while I myself was still growing, I had somehow learned to trust that a healthy infant is a sturdy creature, not likely to keel over and expire without warning. Although I had my share of maternal anxieties, compared to the perennial jitters of the other young mothers around me, I felt relaxed and free to enjoy my babies.

My sister is closer in age to my daughters than to me. She and I grew up not only in different eras but in different countries and with different languages. But despite all those differences, when we speak she often shocks me by saying something that could only have come from the lips of one of my mother’s daughters.

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Let's Clean Our Plates

Here is what Pope Francis, or Pope Frank, as the Nuns on the Bus call him, said last week:  "Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry."

Does that sound familiar?  It's something my  mother could have said, and probably yours too.  I remember sitting numbly before a congealing omelette, being told to think of the starving children of Africa, or China, or some other far away place, and not waste a single mouthful.  And I remember wondering how forcing down that last scrap of food on my plate was going to make any difference to hungry orphans, since I couldn't actually ship my leftovers to them.

Later, when the age of dieting was upon me, I read that the old compulsion to clean our plates instead of listening to our bodies was largely responsible for weight problems among adults.  Some diet gurus even advised purposely leaving some food on the plate at every meal.

At about that same time my husband and I were facing the dilemma of how to handle our children's reluctance to eat almost any food other than cheese, crackers, and dessert.  Both of us had been brought up according to the clean-plate philosophy, but we had come away from the experience with opposite attitudes:  my husband was for hewing to the family tradition, whereas I was loath to turn the dinner table into a battleground.  I  had great faith in Dr. Spock's statement that babies (and children too, I surmised) would, if presented with a variety of wholesome foods, over time choose to eat a balanced diet.  

We finally hit on a compromise:  the girls had to serve themselves at least a taste of every dish on the table--and this might mean a single green bean--but they had to clean their plates.  We thought this was brilliant:  it exposed the kids to a variety of foods, gave them a sense of control over what they ate, eliminated waste, and, at least in theory, made for amicable mealtimes.

Food plays a mysterious but powerful part in the parent-child dynamic that has nothing to do with flavor or nutrition, so often times even that single green bean became the pretext for a power struggle.  But on the whole our mealtimes were reasonably civilized, and free of waste.

As to the latter, it helped that we had a compost pile and chickens.  We still do.  Nevertheless, just the other day I threw out a couple of moldy onions (chickens don't eat onions).  I should have bunged them in the compost, but before I knew it they were in the trash and on their way to the landfill.  Tonight, after a belated Mother's Day dinner out, I watched the waiter put the little container of butter, still three-quarters full, on the dirty plates he was carrying away.  There went a considerable number of calories that somebody could have used.

The same day I read the Pope's words about waste I learned that, according to the United Nations, one third of the food produced on the planet goes to waste.  How is that for an appalling statistic, a statistic that needs to change?

In future posts I plan to explore this topic further, and with your help I hope that we can come up with some things that we can all do, right now, not only to stop stealing from the table of the poor, but to put some food on it.

Good-Enough Parenting--Her Story

As a baby, I never crawled.  I was held in someone's arms--my mother's, my grandmother's, my various aunts'--from birth until the day when I struggled out of that constant embrace and tottered across the room.

Our apartment in  Barcelona was large, which meant that I could gallop top-speed down the hallway that ran from one end to the other.  That was the only place where I could run.  Outdoors, on the street, I was always holding somebody's hand.  It was a big city, after all.  I could have run out into traffic, or gotten lost in the crowds.  I can still feel my mother's convulsive grip whenever we stepped off the curb.

While my five-year-old future husband was in the kitchen making pancakes for his lunch (see http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/2013/05/good-enough-parenting-his-story.html ), I hardly ever entered our kitchen.  There was always water boiling, or hot oil spattering, not to mention the bottle of lye lurking under the sink.  And I don't think I ever helped myself to a piece of food until I was a teenager and living in the U.S.  Food was handed to me at regular intervals by a responsible adult, like Communion, and I ate it obediently, whether or not I was hungry.

I was never out of sight of an adult.  Although I had my own bedroom in the apartment, I did not sleep there until I was in second grade.  Before that, I slept next to my parents' bed.  (This may be why it took them sixteen years to have another child.)

I spent my early years going places with my mother.  On Sundays I would walk with her to Mass, where I entertained myself by looking at the statues of the Virgin Mary and, as a last resort, at the Stations of the Cross.  Then we would take the metro to hear my father's orchestra play their weekly concert.  I sat as quietly as I could through endless Brahms, Beethoven, Mahler.  I stared at the extravagant Art Nouveau decorations of the hall, and tried to catch a glimpse of the only woman in the orchestra, the harpist, who was always stuck way in the back. 

On weekdays I went to the fish market with my mother, or out on the wide avenues to look at the windows of fancy shops that sold exquisite leather purses and silk scarves, or to dusty fabric stores that I hated almost as much as the Mahler symphonies.  All too often we would go to visit people, usually frail elderly ones who had to be kissed and who expected me to sit quietly for the whole endless afternoon.

My bodily safety was of great concern to the adults around me.  I was told when to put on a sweater, button my coat, take off my gloves.  I was advised to breathe through my nose and not run too fast lest I should fall.  When we moved to Ecuador our house was on a two-way street, and my mother would send the maid to take me across to meet the school bus, much to my embarrassment.  I was twelve years old.

The only physically adventurous thing that happened to me as a child took place one summer on my grandparents' farm.  My uncle, who was barely out of his teens, was leading the cart horse back to the barn and he let me ride, warning me to hold on to the collar.  He was walking alongside, singing Oh, Susanna! (Con mi banjo y mi caballo, a Alabama me marche!), forgot himself and slapped the horse on the rump.  The horse broke into a trot and I let go of the collar and for a delicious moment flew through the air until my uncle caught me.  He made me swear not to tell anybody, and in September I returned to my life of buttoned sweaters, symphony concerts, and apartment life.

Thanks to an accident of fate--I was the only child of an intense mother in a close-knit family--I didn't just have a pair of helicopter parents but two full sets of grandparents, a great-aunt and -uncle, four single aunts and a young uncle rotating above my head at all times, offering cautions and advice.

And yet, I made it.  I did not grow into a recluse or an idiot or a particularly fragile flower.  My pancake-making husband and I could hardly been brought up more differently from each other. But we were both, in our parents' respectively quirky ways, truly loved.  And it appears that, with that as a given, kids will prosper no matter what.

Good-Enough Parenting--His Story

We were at table with some friends recently, talking about the foods we used to like as children, when my husband said, "I made pancakes for lunch one day when I was in kindergarten."

"How nice," we said.  "Did your mother help you?"

"No," he said.  "The day I made pancakes I was alone in the house."

We put down our forks and, bit by bit, got the story out of him.  It seems that, arriving home for lunch and finding the house empty, he decided to take matters into his own hands.  He found the box of pancake mix, measured some into a bowl and poured in the milk.  Then, having lubricated the griddle with Crisco, he set it on the stove and turned on the gas.

While the griddle was preheating, he went into the next room and dialed his girlfriend's phone number.  The girl's mother answered and wanted to chat, but he was worried that the griddle would overheat.  He finally got rid of the lady, ran back into the kitchen, climbed up on a chair next to the stove, and started ladling batter onto the sizzling griddle.

We stared at him with our mouths open.  "What?" he said.  "I knew how to make pancakes.  My grandfather had taught me.  Besides, that was nothing.  I was babysitting my brother and sister when I was eight."

"You were?" we chorused, the food now cold on our plates.

"Sure.  When my parents went out they would put my brother and sister to bed.  I got to stay up and watch TV."

"But," I said, putting aside scenarios such as fires, gas leaks, and sudden fevers that might deter parents from leaving an eight-year-old in charge, "weren't you scared that a robber might come?"

"No, no," he said.  "I knew where the .22 was kept, in my parents' bedroom closet.  I knew perfectly well how to handle a gun.  I'd done lots of target practice with it in the woods."

This was childhood in the 1950s, not in a sharecropper's cabin in West Virginia but in suburban New Jersey, in a household of caring, college-educated if possibly over-optimistic young parents.

There is a lot of criticism today of fathers and mothers who overprotect their children. Helicopter parents, I know how you feel!  I refused to go to a Rolling Stones concert with my once gun-wielding, pancake-making spouse because my baby had developed a couple of funny-looking spots on her forehead.  To you I dedicate this story of pancakes and guns, not as an example but as reassurance.  Kids, mostly, can survive anything.

(For a completely different story of childhood survival, check tomorrow's post.)

What I Wish I'd Said To My Mother

My ninety-five-year-old mother is deeply demented, and there's not much I can do for her on Mother's Day.  She nevertheless still likes to eat, so I'm sending her a soul-food sweet from Spain:  chocolate-covered orange slices.  She won't know who they're from or why she's eating them.  All I'm hoping is to give her taste buds a momentary thrill.

As recently as three years ago, however, I could have given her a much bigger thrill, one that would have stayed with her for a long time.  I could have recounted some of the ways in which she had been a good mother to me.

I could have said, "Remember how you used to read over my high school term papers and make suggestions on how to improve them? You taught me how to think."

I could have said, "You used to make fantastic sauces.  No two were ever alike and none could be repeated because you invented them on the spur of the moment.  But they were terrific."

I could have said, "You made me feel loved every minute of my life, which created an expectation in me that others would love me too, and that helped me to find and keep love."

But instead of saying these things, I would go out and buy a gift, making sure that it arrived on time, and write "Happy Mother's Day" on the card.  Not bad, but I could have done better.  Unfortunately, at the time I lacked the imagination to realize that parents need to hear from their adult children that they did in fact do a good job of parenting.  Or at least that they got some things right.

I did once years ago, quite by chance, say to my mother that her relationship with my father had taught me how to be married.  I was surprised when she burst into tears.  Now I know how she felt.

"How sharper that a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child," poor sad King Lear complained.  I can think of a corollary to his words:  how sweeter even than chocolate-covered orange slices it is to have a child who is grateful, and tells you so.

Chickens And Bullies

One of my hens was being bullied last week, and I had to take action.  She was showing all the outward signs of hen misery, standing hunched with her feathers fluffed in a corner of the shed.  I kept an eye on her for a couple of days and then realized that the other hens were pecking at her.

Now I want to make it very clear that my hen house is a Peck-Free Zone.  That doesn't mean that there isn't a pecking order, in which the top hen delivers mostly symbolic pecks in the direction of lesser hens who are showing too much interest in a certain worm or apple core.  But because I keep just a few hens in a large space my flock is not prey to the stresses that cause bullying.

Bullying among chickens (and here the delicately nurtured might wish to skip the next couple of sentences) can be a serious problem.  Once a bird gets hurt or appears weak the others will peck at it, plucking off not just feathers but bits of flesh, until it dies, at which point they will eat it.  Chicken bullying is such a horrible thing that every spring when the batches of fluffy, super-adorable baby chicks arrive in the feed store, the thought of the dangers of overcrowding prevents me from swooping up half a dozen of the little darlings and adding them to my flock.

Given the near-idyllic environment that my hens live in, I couldn't figure out what had prompted the abuse until I picked up the victim and saw that she had a partially frostbitten comb (this sometimes happens to chickens in winter) and somehow it had bled a drop or two, and the scent of blood had turned her sisters into ravening wolves.

I fenced off a corner of the shed and put her in it, along with food, some warm water laced with apple cider vinegar, and a heat lamp.  I had to prop a piece of cardboard against the fence because her bloodthirsty sisters were reaching in to peck her, and she was too stunned to move away.  But the warmth and the isolation and the vinegar all did their work, and in less than 48 hours she was healed and eager to rejoin the flock, who welcomed her back with open arms (hens have short memories).

There is no question that without intervention my bullied hen would have slowly succumbed to the attacks.  Likewise, it is a good thing that parents and schools have become aware of the effects of bullying on its victims, and are paying attention and taking action where necessary.  But sometimes I wonder if the definition of bullying has become so broad that it covers unpleasant but essentially harmless, sporadic interactions among children.  I worry that if well-intentioned parents overreact their actions may result in making the child feel even more vulnerable and helpless.

When I was in second grade, I had to wear an eye patch for a year to combat "lazy eye."  This ultimately saved my eyesight, but its short-term side effects were unfortunate.  One of the most popular girls in my class, a red-headed tomboy with a talent for making trouble, announced in the playground that the patch meant I had a contagious disease, and people should stay away from me. 

To say that I found this upsetting is to put it mildly.  I wept and wailed and railed at my parents and said that I never ever wanted to set foot in that school again.  Today, many people would classify this episode as bullying and would feel justified in speaking to the teacher or principal about it.  My parents, on the other hand, while they commiserated  and assured me that my nemesis was wrong in what she had done, did not interfere.  They must have figured that an occasional lesson in the school of hard knocks would not damage me, would in fact help me to acquire a thicker skin and enlarge my knowledge of human nature.

As it happened, the episode had a happy ending.  The errant girl mentioned what she had done to her father, who happened to be a doctor and who instructed her to apologize to me and to tell the other girls that my condition was not contagious. Shortly afterwards the redhead and I became friends.

I don't mean to minimize the damage that can be caused by prolonged, serious bullying.  In these cases, intervention is the responsible, the only thing to do.  But I do worry that sometimes we overprotect children--from germs, from falls, from unfair grades and unpleasant people.  But the world, unfortunately, is full of germs, falls, unfairness and unpleasantness.  And reasonable amounts of exposure to these evils is a kind of vaccination of which I would not want my own child to be  deprived.

Of Carrots, Socks, And An Anniversary

I think about this every year on our wedding anniversary, but this year, on the 45th, I thought about it a lot:  one spring long ago I planted carrots in my vegetable garden, and was late in thinning them.  When I got around to it, I pulled up a pair of carrots that had sprouted too close and had grown around each other in a spiral.  They were still tender and flexible, and I unwound them carefully.  But when I laid them side by side on the ground they still retained the imprint of each other's bodies, protruding where the other had receded,  receding where the other had protruded.

Even though I'd only been married a decade or so at the time, I realized that my reciprocally-spiralled carrots were a perfect metaphor for what happens in long coupledom.  You swell to fill the other's vaccums;  you shrink to accommodate the other's expansion.  In theory this is good, especially if there are children, who get the benefit of a nest made soft by complementary parental feathers.  But once the nestlings have fledged and if (God forbid, but actually, when) one of the spiraled carrots disappears, what becomes of the one that's left with all its weird little bumps and hollows?

Taken as a whole, my spouse and I have for the last forty-five years made an acceptably substantial and well-shaped carrot.  But alone, each of us has atrophied in certain areas where the other one feels at ease:  he deals with the income tax returns;  I do the talking at parties. In stormy weather, I light the candles while he fires up the generator.

This began immediately after our wedding, when (much to his relief) I took over the writing of letters to his parents and he dealt (with admirable ease, I thought) with our homeowner's insurance.  It continued through our parenting years:  he taught the girls to ride bikes;  I made them write a couple of sentences every night.  Now, after almost half a century of efficient division of labor, I can barely find the fuse-box, and he cannot tell swiss chard (is that the curly stuff?) from kale.

On this recent anniversary, I went to a yoga class--something I like--and then we drove to the top of Mount Equinox, to see the view--something he likes, having seen Disney's Bambi at an impressionable age.  Once there we took an impromptu little hike, something that after forty-five years I should have anticipated, but hadn't.  As we walked, my short lycra socks kept creeping down under my heel and I kept stopping to pull them up.  There's nothing worse than sock-creep when you're hiking.

We walked on in silence for a while and then he said, "put your foot on that rock, please, and let me try something."  He rolled my sock tightly down towards my ankle.  Then he rotated it sideways as far as it would go.  He did the same with the other sock.  We walked on.  No more sock-creep. 

I was grateful.  And then I started thinking, for the umpteen-millionth time since I got married on a hot Alabama August day at the tender age of twenty-two, about what to fix for supper.

Orchestra Tales, Part The Second: Why I Hate Die Meistersinger

At the final rehearsal before one of our concerts, things were not going well.  We were playing the overture to Wagner's Die Meistersinger, and something we were doing was bothering the conductor.  He kept stopping and explaining--it seemed to have to do with us first violins--making us repeat, beating his baton on the lectern, and explaining some more.

Way in the back of the section, I as usual had no idea what he was saying.  I was counting the minutes until time to go home.  I wasn't even watching the concertmaster, the blue- and brown-eyed boy, very much.  "Let's try it again," said the conductor.  "And this time..." but again, I didn't understand him.

We played a few measures, the ones where the strings go up and up a series of intervals.  "Stop!" he yelled, at the top of his voice.  "You!!  Back there!"  and he jumped off the podium and walked to where I sat with my violin under my chin.  He stood over me in a fury, yelling and jabbing his finger at my music and waving his baton until his breath ran out.

If there is one thing worse than being yelled at in front of an orchestra of teenagers (and I had never been yelled at by anyone before, except my mother), it is not understanding the content of the yells, because then the tone and the body language and the grimacing face convey rage at a much scarier, primordial, animal level.

The rehearsal over, I wept in the car all the way home.  I'd had it with the Youth Orchestra.  I'd had it with sitting all week in school not understanding what anybody said;  trying to keep up and do my homework on weeknights; helping my mother with housework on Saturday; and then spending Sunday morning at Mass and the afternoon in rehearsal, being yelled at.

Miraculously, for once, my parents relented.  My father spoke to the conductor, who played violin in the Birmingham Symphony, and explained that I hadn't understood him.  He, the conductor, in turn apologized to me.  But even then I disliked people who yelled and later apologized, and didn't really forgive him.

Maybe my father got tired of driving me to and from rehearsals on Sunday afternoons.  Maybe he and my mother decided that I had enough on my plate.  In the end, I didn't have to go to rehearsals anymore.

To this day, in a persistent Pavlovian reflex, when Die Meistersinger overture comes on our local public radio station, I turn it off.  I hate the bombast of the opening measures, despise the strings' endless climbing scales.

And every time, as I switch off, I am touched that my parents gave in to me, stopped forcing me to do something I hated and was scared of--that they were soft.  They probably felt guilty at not insisting that I do what was "good for me," little knowing that, many decades later, that single instance of parental indulgence would become one of my most cherished memories.

My TV Show, Part The First

When I was twenty, I had my own TV show. This was many many years ago, practically the 18th century, but TV had already been invented. It was live; it was black and white; and I was on it.

This was just before PBS came on the scene, when states had their own educational channels. My mother, a Catalan housewife with a university education, fresh from four years in the jungles of Ecuador, had been recruited to teach Spanish to the school children of Alabama, on the educational TV channel. She was forty-two at the time, had never owned a TV set before coming to the U.S., and had just had her second child. At sixteen, I saw nothing unusual in any of this. She was a mother, after all, and supposed to cope with stuff.

My turn came four years later, when I was in college. My mother's school-year programs were such a success that the TV station wanted to add something different--a summer course in Conversational Spanish for a general audience. But there was a problem: in the summer, my father was on the faculty of a music camp in North Carolina, and my mother and my baby sister went with him.

Forty years later, it still rankles with me that, while my buddies where whooping it up in the dorms, discussing Sartre and listening to Bob Dylan, I had to go back to my parents' house every afternoon, to babysit, hang diapers on the line, wash dishes, and make myself generally useful. When I begged to live on campus my father said "What is wrong with this family that you want to live away from us?"

One afternoon I came back from campus to find my mother reclining on her bed. "I have some important news for you," she said solemnly.

"You're not...pregnant again, are you?" I asked.

"No. But you have a job this summer."

I had been looking forward to summer with all my heart. With my parents in North Carolina, there was no choice but for me to live in the dorm while I took a full load of summer school courses. Contemporary Philosophy at 7 a.m.? I was all for it, as long as I was able to live on campus. So now I had a job. How bad could that be?

"What is this job you have found me?"

"You will teach a television program." My mother went on to explain that this would be a new course, and that I was to write the textbook for it--more of a large pamphlet, actually, but still....

"But I can't!" I gasped. " You know I can't. I'll be taking Contemporary Philosophy and Algebra, and there's no time to prepare. I have spring finals next week..."

"You have no choice. I have told them at the station that you will do it. Get to work on the textbook right away."

You know how it is. Sometimes you want to kill your parents. Sometimes I still do....

(To be continued.)

Bedtime Stories

For many years, I slept in my parents' bedroom. I don't know whether this was because I was an only child, or whether I was an only child because of this. I remember hearing my parents whispering in the dark, and making whispering noises—bsss, bsss, bsss—to let them know I was awake. I remember my father saying, in the morning, “Don't look. I'm getting dressed.” He used the second person plural, lest I suspect that my mother was exempt.

In those years, one of the highlights of my life was sleeping with my mother. This happened for a few nights in the summer, when my father stayed behind to work in Barcelona and my mother and I went to my grandparents' house in the country. I remember the delicious feeling of falling asleep, knowing that my mother would come in the night and sleep next to me. To this day, when my husband, who stays up later than I do, comes to bed, that same feeling of joy and security washes over me.

I was in elementary school when I was exiled into my own bedroom, a long, long way down the hallway from my parents' room. I had looked forward to spending my first night in my room. But when the lights were turned off and the footsteps grew faint along the hallway, I was in such anguish that I was given a reprieve.

I eventually got used to sleeping alone, and then we moved to Ecuador. We shared a house with the cellist, the second violinist, and the violist of my father's string quartet. They were all unmarried men in their forties. My hyper-vigilant mother decided that until she knew what was what, I had better sleep near the conjugal bed again. I was ten and didn't much mind, but began to find the “don't look. I'm getting dressed” routine tedious. During that time in Ecuador we did a lot of traveling and staying in weird hotels. And once again, for safety's sake, I slept with my parents.

A mere fifteen-or-so years later I brought home my first-born daughter from the hospital, and set up the crib next to our bed. But her snufflings and garglings kept me up all night, and soon she was sleeping in the hallway—close enough that I could hear her when she woke, but far enough so I could get some sleep. This was long before co-sleeping, which makes a lot of sense in an evolutionary kind of way, became popular.

These days, when Bisou wakes me at 3 a.m., I often take her into the guest room and put her in bed with me. I don't get much sleep, but I keep doing it for some reason, and I know she enjoys it. Man or beast, sleeping arrangements are powerful things.

School For Mothers

The year I turned sixteen I could be found after school washing diapers, scrubbing bottles, and mixing formula. I wasn't a teenage mother. My parents, after sixteen years of vain attempts, had miraculously produced a second child.

Nine years later I could again be found after (graduate) school washing diapers, but with my own infant on my hip.

In comparison with my friends who were also new mothers, I was remarkably relaxed. I knew how to hold a baby. I knew about burping. I knew about the fontanel. I knew to put my fingers between skin and diaper when fastening a diaper pin. I wasn't haunted by fears that the baby would sicken and die because I had neglected to do something. And even though in the South in the 70s breastfeeding was still considered exotic, after sterilizing and warming all those bottles for my sister, I fought the establishment and breastfed.

Partly due to blind luck, but partly, I suspect, because of my confidence, my daughters were easy-going babies. They slept through the night at four weeks*. They didn't have colic. They didn't catch colds. There was the occasional unexplained crying jag, but on the whole they were responsive and I would even say responsible infants.

Looking back, I now see that in caring for my sister had gone through a training for parenthood that is common in many mammals. Adolescent wolves stay home and watch the new litter when the parents go hunting. Teenage marmosets carry their little brothers and sisters around and take them back to the mother for feeding. That is how they learn the art of parenting. Deprived of that opportunity, they neglect their own offspring.

In the large families of earlier times it was usual for girls to help care for infant siblings. But people have far fewer children now (and a good thing, too) and closely spaced, and the daily opportunity for teenagers to practice parenting is gone.

This is not to say that the experience was all roses for me. Although I enjoyed my sister, I resented the changes that her presence brought into my life, such as having to live at home while attending college so I could help take care of her. None of my friends had to wash diapers or sterilize bottles. I wanted to stay up nights discussing Sartre in the dorm, not home taking care of a baby.

In the end, it all paid off. I'm glad my life was enriched by something that, in their wisdom, many animals practice, and I was lucky to launch into parenthood with more than good intentions and a copy of Dr. Spock.

I'm wondering how many of you had the “mammalian” experience of taking care of much younger siblings, and how you felt about it.

*Part of that willingness to sleep through the night was due to the spoonful of cereal that, in those barbarous times, pediatricians advised giving babies starting at age one month.

September 12, 2008 “The Last Time...”

The Last Time

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The last time one of my daughters sat on my lap. The last time my father gave me a violin lesson. The last time I ran five miles. I think about these occasions but cannot remember them, because I didn't know when the child jumped off my lap (for my sins, I may have even asked her to get up) that she would never climb on again. I didn't know when I wiped the rosin off my bow that I would never again hear my father interrupt my playing with “that's very nice. However...”--something that never failed to annoy me when he said it. And I didn't know, as I panted and stretched my sore legs, that I was experiencing my final runner's high.

Now, as the years gently coax me to give up one thing here, another there (no more planting trees single-handedly, no more partying until dawn), I wonder about these milestones too, as well as the ones to come. When will I hear my 90-year-old mother tell me on the phone for the last time that she's just brought 25 flower pots indoors (all by herself!) to save them from the coming frost? When will I fix my husband dinner (something that, after 40 years, has lost some of its luster) for the last time? When will my ten-year-old arthritic dog Lexi go for her last walk? Will I look back and regret that I was annoyed during the walk because it was drizzling, distracted during the cooking because I wanted to read a book instead, impatient with my mother because I wanted to get supper going?

Thinking about these things can, I admit, be depressing. But this kind of reflection also lends my days a bitter-sweet flavor, and allows me to approach activities that seem burdensome in a gentler frame of mind. I'm developing a kind of nostalgia for the present, simultaneously tasting its sweetness and its fleetingness. I try to walk the fine line between enjoyment of the moment and despair at its impermanence. I do the best I can.