Open Doors

The forecast calls for rain today in our part of Vermont, which is causing some consternation among our daughters. Whether or not we get to trick-or-treat outdoors, we’ll be in costume and eating candy. The theme this year is apparently “wings;” the Gong girls will be dressed as a ladybug, a pegasus, a bumblebee, and a chicken. Here’s a little reflection I published last Halloween in The Addison Independent. Happy Halloween!

It’s Halloween again, the holiday our daughters have been anticipating for the past nine months.

Halloween is generally acknowledged to be a “fun” holiday — nothing too deep involved, a brief diversion — particularly if you have children under the age of 10. But it’s come under attack in recent decades, what with its pagan origins and rampant sugar-consumption. At the very best, it’s meaningless entertainment for children; at the worst, it’s something evil to which an alternative distraction must be found.

Last Halloween, we took our three daughters trick-or-treating, with the rest of Addison County, along Middlebury’s South Street and into Chipman Park. This was the first time our two-year-old had been trick-or-treating outside of a stroller, and in her mind it was a race to the finish. It was like somebody wound her up and let her go: The minute her feet hit the sidewalk, she barreled ahead of the rest of us, sparkly shoes and Cinderella dress blurring in the twilight. It took her a while to grasp that we had to stop at each house for the ultimate goal: candy. When we got to the first house and managed to head her off toward the door, she burst right through the open door, past the baffled teenager holding the candy bowl, into the living room, where she finally skidded to a stop and looked around with confusion. Where was that candy?

My daughter’s faux pas, her lack of understanding that Halloween etiquette requires stopping at each open door, got me thinking about a deeper meaning to Halloween, apart from the costumes and the candy and the pagan undertones. The really remarkable thing about Halloween, it seems to me, is that it’s a night when we open our doors.

It’s so rare that we open our doors to each other, even to those we know and love. Usually, when passing our neighbors’ houses, we see closed doors, few signs of life. But on Halloween, when the colder weather is beginning to drive us further behind closed doors, we open our doors not just to those we know and love, but to total strangers. Not only that, but we give them treats and receive very little in exchange. Sure, the occasional cute kid or clever costume make us smile, but having been on the candy-giving end, I know that often the best one can expect is a mumbled “Thanks.” Still, we keep the treats coming. It’s so seldom that we practice this kind of grace in life.

And for those who are on the receiving end, it’s not just about the candy. Each open door on Halloween offers a chance for connection, with neighbors we know and neighbors we don’t. Through every doorway, we see snippets of lives a lot like ours, with pictures on the walls and the smells of food in the oven and over-stimulated children running wild. Sometimes there’s a party going on inside. Sometimes it’s quiet save for the television. Two years ago, trick-or-treating in Northern California during Game 4 of the last World Series in which the San Francisco Giants were playing, each house we visited provided us with score updates. In a world of closed doors and computer screens, the open doors of Halloween allow us to reconnect with our community, our humanity.

Of course, the doors will open wider and the grace will be given even more freely during the holidays that follow Halloween. But from now on, I’m going to consider the open doors of Halloween as the official start of the holiday season.

– See more at: http://www.addisonindependent.com/201210faith-vermont-halloweens-open-doors#sthash.enFEdU2b.dpuf

A Table of One’s Own

Last Christmas: Everyone scrunched around the old dining table.

Now that I’m at home with four children in a climate that sometimes keeps us housebound, I’m grateful every day for our house. When Erick and I worked with Habitat for Humanity in Tanzania, their motto was: “Nyuma ni Mama,” which is Swahili for “A house is a mother.” I never really thought about what that meant until I became a mother and bought a house in Vermont; now I realize that our house performs much the same functions for our family as I do: it shelters us, and by its very layout it guides our activities and helps shape our family culture.

If a house is a mother, I think that the beating heart of that house is the dining table.

All of which is a wordy and roundabout way of getting to this point: We have a new dining table!!

In Chinese culture, it’s typical to get generous amounts of cash as wedding gifts. After Erick and I were married, we took our wedding cash over to Macy’s and used it to buy two things: an oversized armchair and a dining set. Both purchases were made quickly; we just needed a place to sit and a place to eat in our new apartment. We had no vision of a future in which we’d live in a house and have children, so we took neither scenario into account when making our selections.

The dining table we chose seemed absurdly large: It came with six upholstered chairs. It wasn’t exactly “real” wood, but had a dark cherry finish. Eleven years later, the seat cushions bore crusty stains from our girls’ daily spills, the dark finish showed every fork gouge, and six chairs were only enough to seat our immediate family.

Remember that oversized armchair that we bought at the same time as the dining table? Eleven years later it, too, wasn’t looking its best. I even wrote about it here. The cat we’d had when we were first married had scratched up its base, Gracie the dog lay across its top whenever we left the house, our children had contributed numerous food and marker stains, and both arms were ripped and spilling stuffing.

That was liveable. Then I cut Gracie’s nails.

(Okay, clearly this whole post is going to be kind of wordy and roundabout. Brace yourselves.)

I cut Gracie’s nails because they had gotten so long that whenever she walked within six inches of one of our girls, they’d collapse on the floor wailing, “Gracie scratched me!” (We raise ’em tough around here). I don’t cut her nails often (obviously), so I failed to realize that cutting a dog’s nails is very different from cutting a cat’s nails. When we had a cat, I’d pin her down and chop away. Dogs’ nails have capillaries running through all but the very tip. So I cut Gracie’s nails — not too short, in my opinion — and she seemed fine and went about her business. But then I noticed pools of blood on the floor.

I’d cut one of her nails too short, and it was bleeding profusely. (Almost like when I cut baby Georgia’s fingernails and took a little skin from the tip of her finger, too. Apparently I’m the Sweeney Todd of manicurists).

I mopped up the floor and Gracie, and then rushed off to pick up one of the girls from school. Another failure: I should have also bandaged Gracie’s paw. When we returned home, it looked like somebody had been murdered in our armchair: blood everywhere. Gracie had laid across the top, as is her habit, and licked at her cut nail until it opened up again.

Thankfully, my mother was visiting that weekend. If you know my mother, then you know that she can clean anything. (If she’d been alive back in MacBeth’s day, that play would have had a very different ending because Lady MacBeth wouldn’t have gotten all hung up over any “damn’d spot.”)

So, my mother worked her magic and got the blood out of the upholstery. Then she said, in her tactful Mom way, “Isn’t there somewhere we could go to look for a new armchair?”

In most places in the U.S., that would be a simple question to answer. But remember, we live in Vermont. There are no Ikeas or Crate & Barrels in this state. (And the few times I’ve attempted to order Ikea furniture online, the shipping costs exceeded the price of the furniture). There are furniture stores in Vermont, but to reach most of them I’d have to drive at least 45 minutes, at which point I’d just have to sit down and feed the baby. And even if I found a replacement armchair, I’d probably have to spend a lot of money to buy it and have it delivered 45 minutes away.

But then I remembered that a friend had told me about a used furniture store the next town over. I looked it up on Google, searching under “Vermont used furniture.” I was not at all hopeful, but there it was. Turns out its name is “Vermont Used Furniture,” it was a 15 minute drive away, and it was open right then.

Still not particularly hopeful, I agreed to check out Vermont Used Furniture, mostly because I love my mom.

We pulled up at the “store,” which is more like a hangar in the front yard of the couple that owns and operates it. We walked in, and there was the armchair — the same dimensions as our old armchair, but a little fancier and without the rips and dog blood — priced at approximately 1/4 of what we spend on groceries each week.

I walked a little farther into the hangar, and there was the dining table. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was our table. It was a slab of solid pine, and it glowed. It was large enough to easily seat 8 (possibly 10), which meant it could accommodate our whole family, plus a couple of guests. I wasn’t even looking for a dining table, but it was priced so that, together with the armchair and a set of (uncushioned!) dining chairs, it cost us less than a new slipcover for the old armchair. The guy from Vermont Used Furniture delivered them both to our house for free, and even bought our old dining table off of us.

So, we have a new dining table, and it’s made both Erick and me happier than you might imagine. Remember what I wrote way back, about a dining table being a house’s beating heart? That’s because we all sit at the dining table together at least twice a day. It’s the only space in our house that seats all of us, and it forces us to look at each other. We share food and conversation at this table, both of which keep our family healthy. During non-mealtimes, Erick and I often work at the table, the girls have snack at the table, Fiona does her “homework” at the table, we read books around the table.

I look at this dining table, and I see what I want our family to be. Sometimes (okay, MOST times) it’s still a struggle to keep all the girls seated for an entire meal, or to keep conversations from devolving into potty talk. But I look at our new table and imagine all of the life that will happen around it; it’s solid enough to be our table for the rest of our family’s time together. It’s not perfect; the wood has some knotholes and cracks, and pine is soft enough to show the inevitable marks that we’ll put in it. All of which is fine by me, because that’s also how I want our family to be: solid, but not perfect.

Shortly after we installed our wonderful new table, I sat across from the girls during dinner and said, “Girls, here’s a little advice for you: Someday you’ll probably settle down with families of your own. And when you do, the most important thing is to invest in a dining table that you LOVE.”

My daughters stared at me for a moment, and then they said:

“I need a tissue!”

“More milk, please!”

“My toe hurts!”

Which is why I write a blog.

The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Smartphones.

You know those people who seem to always have a finger on the pulse of the times? I am not one of those people.

I’m always a little behind when it comes to what’s going on in the world, be it geopolitical events, entertainment news, or new technology. This is probably due to a combination of living in rural Vermont, not having a television, and parenting four small children.

So it might not be factually accurate to say that this is The Year of Social Media Backlash; I’ll stick with saying that this is the year I noticed a lot of social media backlash.

A sampling of some things that made me take notice: Last May, the commencement speaker at the college where my husband teaches was the brilliant author Jonathan Safran Foer. He devoted his commencement address — later excerpted on the New York Times Op-Ed page — to a critique of modern communication technologies. Then there was comedian Louis C.K.’s viral rant against smartphones on Conan O’Brien’s television show. Even the popular Momastery blog got in on the action, with a post lambasting the comparisons engendered by social media.

For my own opinion, click here to continue reading over at On the Willows.

Things We Don’t Like to Talk About

The October 14 print issue of this newspaper featured the headline, “Transitional apartments offered in Vergennes,” about a shelter that’s helping the homeless to become independent. Directly beneath it was a story about the Charter House Coalition’s Community Supper. The sidebar directed readers to articles about local weddings, and a rubber ducky race fundraiser for Mt. Abraham High School’s fall musical.

At the very bottom of the front page, below the fold, under an enormous photo of a tractor crossing a field amidst glorious fall foliage, was the headline that many of us were really thinking about that week: “Mt. Abe rocked by student suicide.”

Click here to continue reading my latest “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent.

While You Were Sleeping…

I love my bed.

It wasn’t always this way. Growing up, I equated sleep with struggle. I was never a napper, and I remember some fierce bedtime battles with my parents. Even after I stopped throwing tantrums at bedtime (probably at a much later age than most children!), I found that I could function pretty well on less than eight hours of sleep. Sleep, in my opinion, was wasted time.

But these days, it often feels like the best part of the day is when I lay my head down on my pillow and pull up the comforter. And the worst part of the day is when the alarm wakes me at 5:30 in the morning, and I stumble out into the cold darkness to fix breakfast and lunches, and contemplate how little rest I got the night before.

These days, I’m exhausted.

I expected to be exhausted right after Abigail was born this summer; those every-two-hour-round-the-clock newborn feedings warp time in a way I never understood until I had children. I look back on the months following the births of each of our daughters like I’m seeing them through a glass of water; they’re all blurred and I can’t remember much of what I said or did.

But I wasn’t expecting to be this crushingly exhausted four months after Abigail’s birth. Abigail’s a pretty easy baby and a good sleeper, logging in two solid naps during the day and roughly 11 hours of sleep overnight. The problem is that she’s still waking up to nurse several times a night. And sleep deprivation, I’m coming to find, is cumulative. Other factors may be that I have three other children to take care of, and I’m getting older. Whatever the reason, when Abigail wakes up twice a night to eat — as she usually does — I feel wrecked in the morning. When Abigail wakes up THREE TIMES a night to eat — as she occasionally does — I lose the will to live.

I know we’ll get through this; we have before. I know some people have it much worse. I know that my exhaustion is partly my own fault; if I could just NAP during the day, that might make things better, but I’m still a terrible napper.

So right now I’m like a dehydrated person who can only think about water; sleep is my obsession. For instance, I’ve noticed that every member of our family has their own “sleep profile,” just as they each have their own personality and role in the family.

First, there’s Erick. Historically, Erick has been the sleep yin to my yang: He needs sleep, at least eight hours. If Erick had his own way, he would go to bed early and sleep late, and then throw in a couple of naps during the day. He can fall asleep anytime, anywhere. He’ll drop into a deep slumber while in a plane that’s taking off (How is that possible?!? I’m always gripping the armrests in an effort to keep the plane aloft). He always falls asleep during bedtime stories with the girls (“Daddy, wake UP!”). He once fell asleep at the table in the middle of dessert with friends at a crowded NYC restaurant (he’ll tell you that it was a late dessert, which is true but beside the point).

Fiona is the most like me, sleep-wise; she doesn’t need much sleep in order to function. She hasn’t napped in years, and it used to be a battle to put her to bed each night. We’d give babysitters instructions like they were Jason about to face the sirens: “Stuff your ears with cotton, lash yourself to the couch, and no matter what she says or how loud she screams, do NOT let her out of that room!” Things got much better once she had sisters sharing her room, and have only improved since she started school full-time. Now she’s pretty easy-breezy at bedtime: she’ll look at a few books and then drop off to sleep. A little slow in the mornings, but not a beast.

Campbell is the most like Erick as a sleeper; she needs a lot of it. She’s still a great napper, she regularly konks out in the car, and she falls asleep almost immediately at bedtime. One key difference between her and her dad: Campbell is our morning person. She’s the first sister awake in the morning (often we’ll hear her crowing like a rooster in an attempt to wake her sisters), and she bounces out of bed cheerful and ready to go.

Then there’s Georgia. Georgia equates sleep with party time. She never complains about naptime or bedtime — but neither does she sleep. Instead, we hear her thumping around upstairs, talking and singing to herself. I never know where I’ll find Georgia when I go in to get her from a nap: sometimes she’s on top of the changing table (where she may have changed her own diaper several times), sometimes she’s in a sister’s bed, sometimes she’s collapsed on the floor in a pile of blankets and stuffed animals. And because she stays up so late partying, Georgia is NOT a morning person. Usually we have to carry her downstairs, rumpled and half-asleep. We prop her up at the breakfast table, where she’ll sit and sob for the next ten minutes.

I find it interesting that members of the same family, who’ve been raised with roughly the same schedule, can have such vastly different sleep habits. When it comes to sleep, I’m definitely a believer in nature over nurture. Another interesting thing is that all three of these girls share a bedroom, and all six of us (including Abigail, whose sleep patterns are still too newborn to be determined) have to share a house. So, that’s fun.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s miles to go before I sleep.

Autumn Leaves Are Falling Down…

This year, signs of fall started appearing in our part of Vermont around early September: splashes of colored leaves in the trees, the apple orchard open for business, the grocery store’s Back-to-School display gradually giving way to Halloween. The sunlight turned a deeper gold, and the nights became crisp enough to sleep under the comforter. As the month wore on, squirrels and chipmunks got busy in our yard laying aside acorns for the winter – and driving our dog to fits of frenzied barking at the windows. Channeling my own inner chipmunk, I started baking like a maniac.

The last week of September was glorious: the mountaintops were red-orange, and driving home each afternoon I felt like I was living inside a scenic Vermont calendar. Tour buses full of “leaf peepers” pulled into town; tour groups of fluorescent-spandexed bikers made driving backcountry roads an exercise in caution. The foliage wasn’t quite at its peak, but clearly we were in for some spectacular color over the next couple of weeks.

On October 2, I woke up and noticed that there were leaves covering the ground.

[Cue sound effect: brakes squealing as my fall euphoria turned to realism]. Oh, right…RAKING.

Click here to continue reading about the complexities of leaf removal in my latest “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent.

The Clothing Situation

Shortly after the birth of our fourth daughter, with a brain grown mushy from sleep deprivation and a newspaper column deadline looming, I posted a plea on Facebook asking people to send me their questions, particularly questions about life in Vermont. I received a variety of responses, which I answered in the subsequent column.

But one astute reader sent this comment: Four little girls so close in age made me think about hand-me-downs.

Clearly this person understands. Because a major, daily facet of life with “four little girls so close in age” is The Clothing Situation.

You may assume that I’m talking about laundry.

Although laundry has now become something I do daily without thinking, like brushing my teeth, I am not talking about laundry.

There are two components of The Clothing Situation: Input and Storage.

INPUT

Let’s say you have a baby. Chances are that you get a large, up-front influx of clothes for that baby. These clothes come from friends and family as baby shower and “Welcome, Baby!” gifts. Some may also be hand-me-downs. All of this is great; you need baby clothes, and the apparel flood usually slows after a month or two.

But the grandparents keep going. If you’re lucky, you have some loving and generous grandparents who continue buying clothes for your child on a regular basis. This is helpful, because 1) your child keeps growing and needs new clothes long after the baby clothes are in storage, and 2) clothes are expensive.

So far, so good. But complications arise when you have the next baby. And the next. And the next.

Because with the birth of each new baby, you will again receive an influx of clothes (though fewer each time, it’s true) from well-wishers who say, “Thought it’d be nice for baby to have some clothes that aren’t hand-me-downs!” The grandparents will continue to buy clothes for Child #1, but they’ll also buy clothes for Children #2, 3, and 4, despite the fact that these children are all receiving hand-me-downs from the ones who came before. You can try telling the grandparents that Child #1 — the oldest — is the only one who needs new clothes, but they’ll ignore you and buy new clothes for everyone, “because otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.”

Now let’s assume that all of your children turn out to be of the same gender. Good news! That means they can all wear the clothes you’ve been receiving since Child #1 was born. You see where this is leading? By the time Child #4 comes along, she has four babies’ worth of clothing in her wardrobe!

Around this time, people with slightly older children of the same gender as your children will start to take notice. Hey, Faith and Erick have four girls, they’ll think. That means they’ll be able to use our hand-me-downs FOUR TIMES! Because you offer such good bang-for-the-buck, bags full of fantastic, gently-used clothing will begin arriving on your doorstep. (**We love these friends, and we’re genuinely grateful for these clothes!)

You may be thinking: But surely, by the time clothes trickle down to Child #4, a good many of them can be discarded due to wear and tear. It’s true that some of the baby clothes — particularly those worn around the time solid foods are introduced — become irreparably stained and have to be tossed. But if your children are anything like mine, each child tends to rotate through only four or five favorite outfits, and those favorite outfits are different for each child. So despite the clothing needs of four children, there are plenty of clothes in every size that have never, ever been worn.

To put it succinctly: We have a lot of clothes. And that’s where the storage problem comes in.

STORAGE

When Fiona was born, we bought a small bureau with a changing table on top. Simple and efficient: we stored her clothes in the drawers below, and changed her diapers above.

Then Campbell was born, and it made sense to store her clothes in the bureau, since we’d be changing her diapers on top. What to do with Fiona’s clothes? There wasn’t space in their small, shared room for another bureau. Also, Fiona was beginning to select her own clothes, which I wanted to encourage without having to deal with bureau drawers left open or pinching little fingers. My solution: I went to Target and bought some cloth bins — one each for tops, bottoms, pajamas, socks, and underwear. The bins fit perfectly into the bottom shelf of a bookcase, where Fiona could easily pull them out to grab her clothes.

When we moved to Vermont, the clothing storage problem followed us. Because our girls all share a room, they got the largest room in our new house — the former master bedroom. Because our girls all share a room, however, there still wasn’t space for additional bureaus. No matter: this room included one of the biggest closets I’d ever seen. I decided to continue my strategy of baby’s clothes in the bureau/changing table, big girls’ clothes in cloth bins.

So now we have one child’s clothing in the bureau, and three children’s clothing in bins on the floor. Which is why their closet looks like this:

Mind you, those are just the clothes they’re wearing right now. What you don’t see are the storage bags filled with clothes that don’t fit anybody at this moment, or the garbage bags stuffed with hand-me-downs that are waiting for Fiona to grow into them.

There is no bigger point here; The Clothing Situation isn’t a metaphor for anything more meaningful. I freely admit that this is a very minor first-world problem. It’s just one of those things that I never anticipated when I signed up for parenthood; who knew that closet organizing would be such an important life skill?

I do have hope that things will improve. After all, we’re finished having children — and to make sure of that, I’ve already started donating all of our maternity and newborn clothes. As the girls get older, they’ll be able to stay in each clothing size a little longer. Before too long, all four of them will probably be able to share the same clothes, and then we’ll just have to deal with screaming clothing battles every morning….

In closing, a warning to any local friends who recently had/will have baby girls: I will be dropping garbage bags full of clothes on your doorsteps in the near future. Be prepared.

My Way

Last month, I went to the dentist for my semi-annual cleaning and check-up. I always feel a little smug about going to the dentist, because I have great teeth. I’m not bragging, that’s just the truth. Much to my disappointment back in middle school when everybody else was getting braces, I never needed any orthodontia. I also take good care of my teeth. Not as good as Erick, who is a total tooth nerd (he brings his toothbrush to work with him, and the first thing he does when he gets home at night is rush upstairs and use his water pick), but I brush at least twice a day, floss every night, and visit the dentist twice a year. In my entire life, I’ve only had two cavities, both of which were of the minor, “we’ll just fill it before it becomes a problem” variety. So visiting the dentist is usually an ego boost for me, because everybody makes a big deal about what great teeth I have.

This time, I had six cavities.

You read that right: SIX CAVITIES.

I don’t even know how it’s possible to get six cavities in the six months since I last saw the dentist. I didn’t slack off during those six months: I used a Sonicare electric toothbrush daily and continued to floss every night before bed. Yet somehow I ended up with SIX cavities. I’m now a cautionary tale for dental health in our house. “Brush your teeth,” Erick tells the girls, “You don’t want to end up like your mother with SIX CAVITIES!”

Six is so many cavities, I couldn’t even have them filled all at once. Instead, I had to make two separate appointments, each of which was longer than an entire episode of “Today with Kathie Lee and Hoda.” But as much as I’d usually consider laying in a dentist’s chair watching “Kathie Lee and Hoda” a mini-vacation, I couldn’t hear Kathie Lee OR Hoda because I had a drill vibrating in my head. That, and my dentist tends to hum the entire time he’s working. When I finally made out what he was humming, it turned out to be “My Way.” Which seems like it must have some significance.

When this ordeal was over, I asked my dentist (out of the side of my mouth that still had sensation) how I could have possibly ended up with six cavities. He dismissed all of my theories (pregnancy, non-fluoridated water, UFOs), and said it probably boiled down to this: I’ve been pregnant so much that they haven’t been able to take dental X-rays for over a year, which is how they ultimately found the cavities. Also: AGE.

Yes, age. Despite all of my efforts, my dental health is crumbling because I am getting old.

That’s not a bid for flattery, it’s a statement of fact: I am actually getting old. Last month, I turned 38.

[exhale]

I am 38. That’s very hard for me to admit. I never expected to be embarrassed about my age, but somewhere after 30 I started hiding how old I was. I don’t include my birth year on anything unless required, never volunteer which birthday I’m celebrating. I’m sharing the truth now because I believe in honesty, and because I need to get over this. I try to be confident in who I am as an example for my daughters, and that includes throwing off my vanity about age.

Now, 38 may not exactly qualify as OLD; not unless you’re ready to start calling Angelina Jolie old (Yup, me and Ang, hanging out at the shuffleboard court). But it is objectively middle aged. It’s very, very close to 40, which is a big number.

I’ve hidden my age because I don’t feel 38. I’m not quite sure what it means to “feel 38,” but I suppose I expected to be a little further along by now; to be “together,” to have a better grasp on who I am and where I’m going. And I’m afraid that if I share my age with others, they’ll be disappointed when they find out how confused and insecure I still am.

I remember sitting in my childhood bedroom as a 17-year-old, listening to Stevie Nicks sing “Landslide” on the radio, and feeling time start to speed up. Before too long, I thought, I’ll be where the person in this song is, and I’ll really KNOW what she’s singing about. That was half a lifetime ago; I just heard “Landslide” again, and I feel exactly NO different from that 17-year-old.

Time makes you bolder, children get older, I’m getting older, too.

I think this new year of my life is about accepting my real age, and accepting my real age involves embracing this truth: You can be good and take all the precautions in the world, but everything’s going to break down anyway.

That applies to my teeth, obviously. Also to my body as a whole; barring a major act of God, Abigail will be our last child. That’s not only because four children is a lot (although it is!), but also because this pregnancy was rough on me; my body has let me know that I’m done. And this year, suddenly friends my age are getting sick, really sick. They’re too young, and I’m praying that they all make it through. But it’s a fact that illness and infirmity are going to strike more of our friends — and us, too — in the years ahead.

This might seem depressing. I won’t deny that there are things that make me sad about being 38: knowing that I won’t have another baby, knowing that I’ll start losing family and friends, knowing that I’ll probably log more hours in the dentist’s chair. Then again, there are things that stink about any age; I wouldn’t want to return to the self-centered anxiety of my 20s, for instance.

So I’m choosing to embrace middle age as a new normal: to accept the limitations of aging, and to continue to grab the joys that are always present at every stage of life. That’s what I’ll be trying to do this year, and in the years to come.

I may even be humming “My Way” as I go.

Remembering to Breathe

I wish you could sit with me on the couch in our sunroom, looking out at the woods. That way I wouldn’t have to use words to describe what I see: the tapestry of leaves, most still the dark green of late summer, but with patches of early fall color bursting out — new colors appearing each morning. The golden afternoon sunlight that filters down between the trees, making the ground look like the ocean floor every time the wind blows. The shadows moving over the rocks.

I live with this view every day, but of course it’s only occasionally that I see it. Today was one of those moments, with two girls napping upstairs and two girls running errands in town with their father. I sat on the couch for twenty minutes of uninterrupted quiet. It was so quiet, and so still; the only action was what was happening between the leaves and the wind. Do you know how rare that is, in this house?

I sat there thinking about how, almost exactly one year ago, I learned that I was pregnant with our fourth child. And how I spent that year wishing to be where I was right now: When I’m through the first trimester….When the baby is born….When Erick gets back from Africa….When the oldest girls start school again…. It was a crazy, crazy year, a year I felt had to be endured, gotten through, in order to reach a place of — what? Peace, I suppose. A place where I could sit on the couch in quiet, and breathe deeply, and think to myself, Well, we got through that, and it’s all okay now. No more babies, no more puppies, half of the kids in school. From here on out, it’s just smooth sailing.

I probably don’t have to tell you that “smooth sailing” is not what I was feeling on the couch.

I’m gradually coming to accept what I already know to be true: that there IS no final peace in this life, no point at which you’ve gotten through everything there is to be gotten through, no smooth seas from here to the horizon. I don’t exactly understand why that is. Why are we allowed so few moments of unadulterated joy? It seems like even the happiest moments are marred by troubles, like a gorgeous cake with a fly stuck in the buttercream frosting. Maybe there’s a law of spiritual gravity: there always has to be some bitter mixed with the sweet, or we’d just float away with the joy of it all.

So, for all the challenges of the past year, and for all the joys that have been given to our family, I’m still firmly tethered to the ground. Down here there are postpartum hormones to contend with, and daily screaming sister fights under our roof, and friends and family in pain, and permission forms to sign, and contractors to call.

I sat there on the couch mourning the peace and joy that I’d assumed the universe owed me.

Then I remembered to breathe.

About a decade ago, I started taking yoga. And what really made an impact on me after my very first yoga class was the feeling that I’d never actually breathed before. I mean, of course I’d breathed, because I’d been alive. But yoga made me pay attention to the action of breathing: taking in as much air as I could and then releasing it fully, and continuing this mindful breathing while moving through various poses. The contrast between yogic breathing and my everyday, utilitarian breathing was dramatic. I realized that I’d lived most of my life holding my breath, stomach clenched with stress, taking in only the minimum amount of air needed to sustain life.

It’s impossible to feel stressed or rushed if you breathe the way they teach you in yoga class. If I could REALLY BREATHE like this for the rest of my life, everything would be okay, I thought.

Of course, I don’t breathe like that for most of my life, but every once in a while I remember. Sitting on the couch was one of those times.

So I sat, and I breathed, and I looked at the leaves and the sunlight, and for that one moment, in the middle of life’s drudgery and heartbreak, I felt grateful just to be alive: to be breathing, to be witnessing the dappled beauty of those woods. It wasn’t the ultimate peace I’d expected a year ago: In another few minutes the girls would wake from their naps and start bashing each other over the heads with My Little Ponies, the dog would bark hysterically at a passing car, and I still had to have six cavities filled the next week (SIX cavities! More on that later….).

I suppose we never get to stop enduring; life rarely awards us the long stretches of unadulterated joy that we think we deserve. But there are these moments when we remember to breathe — like spaces in the forest where the sun breaks through.

One Evening in Late September

Our family rarely goes out to eat these days. It’s not so much a matter of expense (although that’s certainly a factor with six mouths to feed); the expense of eating out is counterbalanced by the benefit of having a break from cooking. My economist husband would put it in terms of “opportunity cost:” a few extra dollars may be worth it if it saves you the time, energy and stress of preparing a meal.

No, we eat at home because taking four young children to a restaurant sounds something like this: “Okay, we’re leaving in TWO minutes! Get on your shoes, everyone. Get on your shoes! Where are your shoes?!? Into the car! C’mon, we’re leaving! Into the car!!! NO, you can’t have your sister’s car seat if she wants to sit in it! NO, you can’t have a snack, because we’re going to dinner! Sit DOWN!”

And that’s all before we’ve left the driveway. In terms of opportunity cost, by the time the evening is over I may as well have cooked a banquet.

But one Friday night in late September, our family went out for dinner at Sama’s Café in Middlebury. Click here to continue reading this latest “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.