Alchemy

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Like a lot of people, I’ve been baking a lot lately. I call it “procrasti-baking,” because it feels like I should be doing something else more productive. Like clearing out my home office of the unfiled paper, old magazines, and various piles of crap I put in there when I had to move it off the dining room table. I could be cleaning or exercising or weeding. I have a lot of weeds — if you drove by my house, you might think I planted dandelions as a farm crop.

But I’m baking again today. I bake many dozens of Christmas cookies every year, and now I’ve baking like Christmas in June. The 25-pound flour container is sitting on a chair at the kitchen table again, with the vanilla and baking soda on top like a little hat. And as I slip — again — on the sifted sugar on the kitchen floor, I’m thinking about alchemy.

I remember as a child learning about alchemy from some book. I don’t remember the book, but I remember the moment of understanding what the work meant:
. . . a form of chemistry and speculative philosophy practiced in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and concerned principally with discovering methods for transmuting baser metals into gold and with finding a universal solvent and an elixir of life.-
. . . any magical power or process of transmuting a common substance, usually of little value, into a substance of great value.-
Origin: 1325–1375; earlier alchimie < OF alquemie < ML alchymia < Ar al the + kīmiyā’ < Gk kēmeía transmutation; r. ME alconomye, equiv. to alk(imie) + (astr)onomye astronomy

I remember the wonder of the idea. The notion that anyone who’d lived in the Middle Ages, when everyone believed the world was flat and monsters lived in the sea, would dare to look around and to say, “This world doesn’t work the way everyone thinks it does.” People brave enough to think, “I, a mere mortal, one single person with my own five senses and my own hands, can prove to you that what you believe about the way this world works, the way the sun shines and the birds fly, is not the way it is.” People crazy enough to say, “I can show you that the world is different — is better — than the way you believe it is.”

And the achemists right there among the Galileos and Newtons and the explorers. As Hemmingway observed centuries later about an equally insane world, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?”

This morning, as I contemplate my dandelions, I’m thinking about the alchemists. About the airy ordinariness of flour and sugar becoming shatteringly crisp cookies in the blue flame of my oven. About butter and sugar boiling like a witches cauldron into toffee. About cocoa from places I’ve never heard of.

The alchemists believed that you could turn iron into gold. I believe in the alchemy of butter and sugar. I believe that you can look at the world around you and believe it can be different. I believe that you can use your own hands to turn ordinary things into precious things.

Catholic

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I have been Catholic my whole life. Growing up, we went to church every Sunday and every feast day. We got ashes on Ash Wednesday. I was married in the Catholic Church, and my children were baptized and confirmed.

Disgusted as I was by the institutional failures of the Church – and even in the face of growing knowledge about the criminal conduct of the Church hierarchy in the widespread sexual abuse of minors (and seminarians and women) – I was able to comfort myself with the notion that, while the broader institution was corrupt, my own church – a small, diverse, not very wealthy parish – had supported and sustained me and my family over the years. I taught CCD and I served on the Parish Council, as did my son. My kids were both alter servers. I worked on fund-raisers; I went on retreats with our pastor.

My children and I sat in the front pew at Sunday Mass, gazed upon fondly by choir, priest and parishioners no matter how fidgety, mutter-y, or giggly they got. When I had a biopsy for breast cancer and sat crying silently in the same pew, people stopped to hug me. When the planes hit the Twin Towers and the entire tri-state area reeled, our church was open every day to those of us who wanted to sit somewhere – anywhere – and try to find peace. The deacon dressed up as Santa Claus and passed out gifts, and at the annual Christmas pageant, I watched generations of small children kneel next to stuffed sheep and gaze in wonder at someone’s swaddled baby doll lying in a manager. I left many a Mass with a sense of joy and a renewed commitment to be stronger, more patient, and kinder — to look harder into every human face to find the face of God.

Until the new archbishop of our local diocese released the names of priests who had been “credibly accused of the abuse of minors.” Our local newspaper published a list of 188 names, which I scanned in smug certainty that I would not recognize any of them.

But I did. Not one but two. Both are dead, and my son and my daughter assured me they were not themselves subject to any inappropriate behavior or aware others in our parish who were.

One name was that of a retired priest who came a few Sundays a month to say Mass. We didn’t know him well, but we loved him. He was funny, which my children appreciated; they also liked the fact that he said Mass quickly, which we attributed to his service as a chaplain on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. I found his sermons not just pithy, but resonant. The other name belonged to the long-time and much-revered pastor at our church. A man I had liked and admired and respected for his compassion for the less fortunate, for his commitment to social justice and for his gentle wisdom about human failings.

My Catholicism has been one of my oldest touchstones in the face of constant change, something I knew – something I would always know, no matter what or where I was. Now I feel like an American tourist in 1970s Berlin, looking into every face and wondering, “How were you complicit in the evil?”

I know my faith endures. I know my faith community is larger than any single priest or deacon. My church, however, no longer sheds any light on my struggle to see the face of God in this vastly imperfect world.

My Village. And for B., Who Knows This is For Her Too

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I recently had drinks with a group of women to celebrate a friend’s birthday. The honoree’s son and mine, both 22 now, have been friends since they were in second grade. And almost all the other women were also friends from my “I’m [someone’s] mom” era – people I’d grown close to over a shared schedule of school pickups, sports practices, and PTA fundraisers.

It was not a significant birthday, but the occasion did have something of an “end of era” feeling for me. Us elementary school PTA powerhouses at that stage where your kids go off to college and you sell your house in the ‘burbs and more somewhere. The birthday honoree had, in fact, just traded her house for a waterfront condo in Jersey City.

That air of nostalgia has put me in mind of the “it takes a village” notion from the 1990s. I had not yet entered into the real muscle of child-rearing when Hillary Clinton’s book, about the influence individuals and institutions outside the nuclear family have on a child, was published in 1996. My first child was born in 1996, and I was still working full time and sharing a truly marvelous nanny with a close friend.

I didn’t know yet about the isolation a new mom can feel, home alone with only a tiny unintelligible lump of humanity who is totally and completely reliant on her for its very life. I had no idea about how hard it would be to love and support and encourage a growing person for whom you are completely responsible but whose wildest dreams and deepest desires and inchoate imagination are completely opaque not just to you but often to himself as well.

My husband and I muddled through, as all parents do. We did the best we could, and comforted ourselves with the notion that eventually everyone needs some unfortunate incident in their childhood to talk to their therapist about.

And, to my blessed relief, it turned out that we did in fact live in a village and that there are people who will love your child as much as – and on some days, more than – you do. My son spent the better part of his adolescence playing middle school baseball, video games and mysterious Japanese card games with the birthday woman’s son. She thought he was smart and funny and articulate, and she was able to tell him that in ways, spoken and unspoken, that I could not. I loved him in the wild and primitive way a mother loves her child, but she loved him when his articulate intelligence drove me nuts, when his passions and ambitions left me baffled, when his energy exhausted and frustrated me.

Both boys went off to college, and we lost the routines that had brought us together. Now she lives in another town and not in the house with the basement that had housed our son on countless days and nights. But I brought him to the party, and she declared him “the best birthday present” she could have had.

I may be good with words, but unfortunately I’m not usually quick with them. If I were, I would have told her then how grateful I am for the love she gave my son and how lucky I am in her friendship. Any honest parent will tell you that children are a sublimely joyful and supremely heavy responsibility. If I’d been quicker, I would have told her how often she lightened my load and grew my joy.

If I’d been quicker, I would have told my friend B., who loves my daughter in the same way that the birthday person loves my son, the very same thing. If I’d been quicker, maybe I’d have told them both it takes a village and just hoped they’d understand.

Grief

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This post is for Amy and Denise and Laurie and Jane and for my mother.

Lately I have been rocked by the return of the kind of savage grief I thought I left behind in my wildly emotive and medication-less youth — the kind of grief that kicks you in the stomach, leaves you blind with pain, slaps shut your mouth and your mind.

Over the past year or so, several good friends have experienced the loss of a son.  Not a baby, which is unforgiving in its own way, but of a fully grown adult.  For me, the mother of a deeply beloved son, the shock of a new reality without one’s child is like staring into the sun.  Unimaginable.

The Unimaginable Grief, imagined

There was me

before there was you.

 

But always

there was the leaving –

first you breathed in

me

and then out,

the breast and then the weaning.

 

You walked

and then away

out of the dailyness of our lives

to your own life

 

not here.

 

But always

here

under my heart

which beat for you

and

my lungs

when I breathed for you

 

but

 

when you no longer breathe,

then

what is my heart beating for?

 

 

What Democracy Is

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It’s almost 2pm on a Thursday afternoon and I’m still in my pajamas (flannel with Peanuts characters, if you’re wondering).  There are dishes in the sink, laundry to be folded, unopened bills to be sorted and paid, all along with the hundreds of miscellaneous things in my too-big house that need to be put away or at least put somewhere else.  I have not exercised today, which you could probably infer from the PJ fact above and also tells you all you need to know about my 2018 resolution to exercise JUST A LITTLE BIT, EVEN every day.  I have errands to run — if I don’t refill my trazadone prescription today, I will definitely be able to add”crappy night” to tomorrow’s list of things undone. And I think the pilot light on our heater is out, a not inconsequential thing in the deep freeze of the northeastern United States where it is currently 29 degrees but, per The Weather Channel, “feels like 19.”

On the plus side, I have fed the cats and cleaned the litter boxes, breakfasted, had my coffee, and read the paper.

Let’s face it:  it could be worse.  All in all, I think 2018 is going OK so far.

It’s not 2017, for one thing.  As you probably noticed from my radio silence, when you see the black dogs of your depression loosed upon the entire country . . . it’s daunting.  I’m pretty well medicated, but the drugs just adjust your brain chemicals so that they don’t screw up your ability to constructively figure out what you’re doing here on this earth.  They don’t actually figure it out for you.  Unfortunately.

I spent a lot of time last year not doing the work — sleeping late, reading formulaic spy novels (kind of like peanut M&Ms for your brain), playing Spider Solitaire on my phone (I’m still holding that against you, Isabel W.!), leafing through catalogs, and watching HGTV and QVC.  I’m sad about the state of American democracy, my last child going off to college, and the incivility of our national discourse.  I’m worried about my health, the repairs the we should be doing on our 100+-year-old house, global warming and the loss of bats and bees.

Several years ago, back when we thought that the worst thing that could happen to us was the re-election of George W. Bush, my friend Liz gave me a book called,  “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear.”  It’s a collection of essays edited by Paul Rogat Loeb.  (Just as relevant today as it was in 2004. Check it out for yourself.) I’ve been re-reading one by Jim Hightower, a former Texas state official and currently “America’s #1 Populist” (Self proclaimed, I believe) called “Rebellion is What Built America.”

Hightower writes:  “Of course it’s hard to battle the bastards! So what’s new?  History — and certainly the history of our country — is the story of people struggling, always going uphill against the powerful to seek a little more democracy, a tad more justice, a slightly wider sliver of the economic pie. . . . The Man, The Machine — by whatever name, the establishment is not in the giveaway business.  Striving for democracy is bone-wearying, agonizing, frustrating, cruel, bloody, and often deadly work.”  He quotes Ibsen ” ‘You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth’,” pointing out that he didn’t mean “we should stay home and press our trousers, rather that we should gird up accordingly and go forth into the fray.”

Hightower reminds us, “Those who came before us risked all of their property, their reputations, their freedom, and their lives to push the boundaries of democracy for us,” citing Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays of Shays’s Rebellion in 1780, suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, the Grimke sisters and others, American labor leaders like Big Bill Haywood, A. Philip Randolph, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and the struggle for civil rights which “started when the first slave was put on a boat to America.”  Few, if any, of these movement leaders, Hightower emphasizes, lived to see the successes they hoped for and envisioned.

But, he says, “Inhale a bit of our country’s pungent, brawling, inspiring history of grassroots rebels, then tell me that battling the bastards today is too hard, too uphill, or takes too long. What else are you doing that is more worthy of your efforts than trying to establish the moral principles of fairness, justice, and equality for all in our America?”

The essay ends with this: “The important thing to know is that you are wanted.  You are needed.  You are important.  You are not only what democracy counts on, you are what democracy is.”  [Emphasis mine.]

I think I should go get dressed.

 

 

#GrabYourWallet

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I am, I swear, a serious person.  I read two newspapers every day; I read at least some of  Foreign Affairs every quarter; and I read literary fiction (meaning that I do not only read Janet Evanovich and Lee Child thrillers) and nonfiction (right now, a book about how the US developed into a global power in the aftermath of WWI).  In this jaw-droppingly weird election year, I watched, God help me, every day of both major party conventions and every single Presidential debate.  Although to be completely honest I did skip the VP debate. 

That said, I’m kind of sucker for People magazine.  I love the photos of celebrity weddings and the stories about who’s getting voted off Dancing with the Stars and I really love to read about all the royals:  William’s kind of boring but Kate’s clothes are always worth checking out and their kids are killer cute.  Plus Prince Harry is, simply put, hot.

I feel especially fond of People these days, when much of our public discourse is reckless, angry, and just plain mean.  In the People magazine world, people are pretty or they’re ordinary heroes or inspiring in the face of misfortune.  Sometimes things are sad, but mostly people are smiling or goofing off or gazing adoringly into someone’s eyes.  I know it’s not real, but sometimes reading about the Brangelina divorce is better than reading about the rigged election, which US cities will fare best in climate change, and children in Aleppo.

So this morning I click on my reliable People magazine icon and scroll through stories about who Jennifer Lawrence is dating, a blind cat that has adoption offers from around the world, and why Tyler Farr doesn’t have a pre-nup.  I don’t even know who Tyler Farr is, so the scrolling is easy.  Until I get to “22 Photos of Ivanka Trump and Her Family that Are Way Too Cute.”  And now I’m really pissed off.

God knows I love celebrity babies.  But Ivanka Trump is not any old celebrity mom — she’s a working woman and mother who supports her father’s Presidential candidacy despite his racist, misogynist, and anti-democratic views.  I certainly understand that as a daughter, she wants to support her father and that as a Republican, she wants to support her party.  But I also understand that as a business woman, she wants to avoid damage to her brand.  And it seems as if the 22 way too cute photos in People magazine are part of her effort to do just that.  

Ivanka says she’s a daughter, not a surrogate.  According to The New Yorker, “My brand was launched far before the Presidential cycle commenced and will continue long afterwards,” she said.  “I’ve always tried to maintain complete separation between that and the campaign.”Ivanka Trump Fights to Save Her Brand 

Seriously?  How do you have an eponymous brand and disconnect it from your name?  

How do you claim to be a role model for working women and young mothers, and not separate yourself from the guy who boasts that he “[j]ust [starts] kissing them. I don’t even wait.” Don’t even wait for what? Something trivial like permission?  I’ve been kissed in elevators by powerful men who didn’t even wait.  I’ve been groped on a public bus.  I’ve been complimented on my great ass by clients and law firm partners.  

Maybe Ivanka never has.  Maybe she doesn’t believe anyone who isn’t “asking for it” gets assaulted.  Maybe she doesn’t really care whether women face sexual harassment and assault in their workplace as long as they’re wearing one of her sheath dresses.

Publishing pictures of her and her children is both cynical and sad.  Showing off her children isn’t going to make anyone who cares about children and families and working women any more likely to buy her line of clothing and accessories, or stay in her father’s hotels. We know what she really stands for.  And using her children to distract us is, in my view, exploitive.  

Too bad about People magazine, though.  #GrabYourWallet — I won’t be picking it up at my grocery store any more. 

Don’t . . . Give That Girl a Gun

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I grew up in a house with guns, and in a neighborhood where families went hunting in the fall in order to have meat in their freezers for the winter.  I’ve handled guns, and shot them and I’ll tell you something that liberals like me don’t often say:   I like shooting.  It’s satisfying to hold a pistol in your two hands, plant yourself, and fire at a target.  (It’s even more satisfying if you actually hit the target, of course.)  It’s a powerful feeling to shoot a gun, and the power is thrilling.

Having said that, I also have to say that my father was an absolute gun safety freak.  He never kept a loaded gun in our home.  We were not a hunting family, but the rifles he and my brothers used for target shooting were kept in locked cases in the bedroom he shared with my mom  — which, unlike my children, we never, ever entered without permission — and the ammunition was in another locked case in the second floor crawl space.  Guns and ammo went into the car in their separate locked cases; after shooting, the guns were cleaned and locked away again for the trip home.

My father’s rule was that you never raised a weapon at someone or something unless you intended to fire at it, and he took it very seriously:  No one could point so much as a water gun at a non-combatant in our house.  When we played cops and robbers, you did not point your toy pistol at people who weren’t participating, like my little sister (or heaven forfend, my dad).

We laughed at my father’s gun rules back then, albeit behind his back.  But today, in the midst of the outrage and sadness of yet another senseless shooting, it occurs to me that my father, a veteran of WWII, understood something profound about guns.  He appreciated their power and their allure, and he had, and insisted that we have, appropriate respect for that power.

My father’s been dead for over 20 years, so I don’t have the chance to argue with him about gun safety.  But while my family will disagree with me, I think he would have supported some of the current gun regulation proposals.  A guy  who insisted that nine-year-olds carry plastic toy cowboy shotguns broken over their arms inside his house would surely  oppose selling military-grade weapons to people on the terrorist watch list or people with mental illness.

Even if those one of those people was his daughter.  I understand the civil liberties issues with these kinds of restrictions.  But I’ve suffered from depression for most of my life.  I am older and wiser now, properly medicated and living a healthy life with people I love and who love me.  But I knew the sadness and hopelessness and the energy it took to keep the ruthless rage I felt — about my helplessness, my inadequacies, my shortcomings and stupidity –in check.  That rage drove me to screaming arguments, to dish throwing, and to a serious suicide attempt.

And here’s the plain and simple and shocking fact:  Had I a gun — God forbid, a gun with a trigger I could hold to fire an endless stream of bullets — on one of the bad days where the rage overtook me and all I wanted was destruction, I would certainly have killed myself with it.  And I would certainly have killed any other innocent within range.

I have worked hard, learned a lot, and have the great good fortune of loving family, good friends, and decent health insurance.  I have tamed my black dog of depression and he lies docile at my feet.  But like my father and his guns, I understand the dog’s power.  And I respect it.

“Don’t Give That Girl A Gun” is the title of an Indigo Girls song.  But really, don’t.  For heaven’s sake, Congress, do your damn job and pass some real gun control.

 

 

 

June 9-12, 2016

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Or, What I Learned About Having a Wedding in My Backyard This Weekend

When I said last year to two young people that I love, “Of course you can have your wedding at our house!,” I didn’t know that I would develop a new affinity for  farmers and ski resort owners.  Because by the end of April, my fate would rise and fall on the whims of meteorologists as unseen and capricious as any ancient god.  (I spent the last five weeks checking three weather websites daily.  Sometimes twice a day.  OK.  Sometimes more than twice a day.)

I didn’t know that even in the heart of suburban New Jersey, you could marry a man from Southern India in a ceremony of spice and sound, color and color upon saturated color, spirit profound, primal, and familiar, and the beauty of love made so stunningly visible.  Plus Indian food so good I almost cried.

I learned I could be a wedding planner, but only for a bride and groom of such kindness.  I learned that I could lead a wedding rehearsal, but to be honest I already knew I was pretty good at telling people what to do.  I learned that I could be a wedding officiant — who knew how easy it is to get ordained online?

I learned how much fun it is to have a big white tent in your yard.  It makes it easy for people to find your house and it’s cool and shady the morning after for coffee and bagels and lingering with family on their way home.

This Monday morning I still see the bride in her red and gold sari, her henna-ed hands, the priest’s orange robes and his palms yellow with turmeric, the groom’s magnificent turban, his mother s eyes huge with love and pride, yellow and orange and read and white flower garlands, rice cascading off their heads . . .

I see her uncle on a ladder hanging white tulle and giant white paper flowers, the threat of rain sliced away by the sun as the groom’s brother arrives in a rush, beautiful wife and two-month old twins in tow, I see red rose petals on my driveway, her mother’s tears, chocolate cake on her Vera Wang dress . . .

I see them on Sunday morning, husband now and wife, ordinary people again but still shiny with love and with hope.  And I keep that love and that hope with me after they go with their gifts and the leftover cake and her bouquet of white roses still fresh . . .

I keep it with me that afternoon when I toast pine nuts and slice oranges to put in a salad to bring to a memorial service for my friend Cyd — a woman much too young to die –whose calm and generous spirit soothed me and whose wide smile cheered me during a hard time.  I keep it with me when I cry for her husband and daughters and family and friends and for myself, all of whose lives will be less bright without her.

I keep it with me when I read about the 50 victims in Orlando, whose light and love and beauty were butchered by madness, ignorance and hate.  I keep it with me when I think about their families, whose grief for their brothers and sisters and husbands and sons and daughters gone too soon like Cyd must surely be sharper for the horror.

What I learned from having a wedding in my backyard this weekend is that you can do everything in your power to do and rain can always come and love can be a shelter no matter how bad the storm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

#StandwithPP Again

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I stand with Planned Parenthood.  I’ve been pregnant.

My husband and I have managed to raise two smart, perceptive and compassionate young people.   But giving birth to them was an ordeal that I would just as soon have forgone.

I hated being pregnant.  I am well aware of my great good fortune in being able to get pregnant at the advanced age at which I did — I was 38 when my son was born, and 41 when my daughter was born.  I am well aware of the whole “miracle of birth” thing — how amazing is it that my body was able to create a whole new person from a couple of cell scraps?  I know how fortunate I was to have ordinary pregnancies, vaginal births, and health full-term babies.

During both of my pregnancies, I was sick every single day for the first four and a half months — as in, so sick that I couldn’t even drink water without vomiting.  Every single thing I put in my mouth made me nauseous.  I ate saltine crackers or dry white bread toast and weak ginger tea until I stopped throwing them up.

When I was pregnant with my son, my hands swelled so much that they went numb for the last six weeks before he was born.  They stayed numb for six weeks after he was born.  My (male) doctor told me that it was fine and that “the discomfort” would probably go away in another six weeks or so.  I couldn’t pick up a pencil for three months. That’s not “discomfort.” That’s a serious blow to your quality of life.

My feet grew an entire size.  Nobody tells you that before you get pregnant.  It’s not that I minded buying new shoes — even pregnant, one has one’s pleasures — but I waddled around on swollen feet in shoes that were too small for months before some kind woman informed me that my feet were never again going to fit in my size 8 shoes.  Not just while I was pregnant, but never again.

If I wasn’t vomiting while I was pregnant, I was peeing and if I wasn’t peeing, I was crying, and if I wasn’t crying, I was either trying to go to sleep or falling asleep somewhere I shouldn’t be.  As for birth itself, suffice it to say that husband and I both come from families with large heads.  Really large heads. As do both my children.  Do you know that a women’s cervix dilates 10 centimeters when she gives birth?  I don’t know how big 10 centimeters is but I can tell you from personal experience that when one’s children’s heads are larger than that, your body rips open.  Yes, indeedy people, they call it an episiotomy only if they can cut your vagina open before your baby tears it open.

Now.  I am — obviously — a spoiled overprivileged woman.  But bear in mind that these were absolutely normal, utterly uncomplicated pregnancies.

I felt utterly invaded by my pregnancies.  I felt as if the body I had lived in so very well for over three decades had turned on me.  I felt betrayed by my physiology, and I felt trapped in my gender.  I felt, for the first time in my life, the way women 50 or 60 or 100 years older than me must have felt every damn day of their entire lives — at the mercy of forces over which you have absolutely no control.

I am simply flabbergasted that anyone, male or female, would be so unbelievably arrogant or so wantonly disrespectful of another person’s physical integrity as to deprive them of the medical care they need to remain healthy and sane.  So to those who would defund Planned Parenthood, I say:  how about I make you give me a kidney?