Beautiful Things: Change

My 10-year-old daughter developed a love for gymnastics this year: She has spent the past six months taking back-to-back sessions of the gymnastics classes taught by the unfailingly patient Terri Phelps at the Middlebury Rec Center.

Last month I sat down at my laptop to register my daughter for her spring gymnastics class. I logged in to our family’s Middlebury Parks and Rec account 15 minutes after the registration had opened. Much to my surprise, the class I’d planned to register for was full already, but thankfully there was another option. With the click of a few buttons, my daughter was all signed up.

This rather unremarkable experience sent me spinning back in time to the way gymnastics registration used to be, when we moved to Vermont 13 years ago.

My three older children also took gymnastics at various points during their youth. Back in the “good ol’ days,” Middlebury sports registration happened in person. As I recall, it was always around 5 pm on a weeknight — a totally inconvenient time for any parent getting off work/wrangling children/preparing for dinner. Registration took place at the old gym and town offices, which were housed in a crumbling brick building that had been the first floor of the old Middlebury High School: When the top floor of the high school burned in the 1950s, a new high school was built across town and the town administration settled into the remnants.

A line began forming at least 30 minutes before registration opened, beginning at the folding table where the arbiters of our fates would sit and snaking down the dim tiled hallway. There was a lovely community aspect to this system: You’d see everybody you knew. On the other hand, everybody you knew was under extreme stress: We were all attempting to keep our tired, hungry children under control while haunted by the question, What if we reached the folding table only to find that there were NO SPOTS LEFT for our child in their desired activity? The disappointment of our children and our failure as parents would be on public display.

I don’t recall ever failing to sign my children up for gymnastics under the old, in-person registration system. Nor do I recall exactly when the system changed, although I suspect it was around 2016, when the old town offices and gym were torn down.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Basketball: A Love Story

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, a holiday that originated as the feast day of St. Valentinus, who was beaten and beheaded in Rome on February 14, 269 for refusing to renounce his faith. How this brutal event became a celebration of romantic love involves some tenuous associations and dubious legends: Valentinus performed secret marriages for Roman soldiers when the emperor forbid marriage, Valentinus wrote a letter to a girl he’d healed of blindness signed “your Valentine,” birds begin to couple up around February 14. Valentinus is also the patron saint of epilepsy and beekeepers, neither of which are often associated with romantic love. I suspect a more likely explanation is that by February 14, in the middle of chill grey winter, most of us in the Northern Hemisphere are so starved for a little romance and color that we’ll jump on any excuse for eating chocolate, donning pink and red, and sending cards and flowers to loved ones.

On the other hand, if St. Valentinus was so devoted to his faith and God that he was wiling to undergo imprisonment, torture, and death, maybe he’s not such a bad exemplar of love – not the lovey-dovey smitten-ness we elevate on Valentine’s Day, but a long and deeply rooted devotion.

Like the love my son has for basketball.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Driver’s License

I’m not the type of mother who typically makes a big deal out of my children’s major life milestones.

With five children, my brain simply lacks the capacity to keep track of when everyone first walked, talked, and lost their first tooth. This makes for some awkward conversations when my children come to me looking to fill in the gaps of their developmental histories: To the question, “When did I take my first steps?” my answer is, “Uhhh, I can’t remember exactly…. Around the usual time?” And somehow, I have absolutely no memory of my fourth child’s first word.

While everyone else plasters social media with “first day of the new school year” photos featuring all their beaming children lined up on the front steps in matching outfits, holding little printouts of the grades they’re entering…I routinely forget to take a first day of school photo. During the years when I homeschooled my children, it was hard to muster much enthusiasm for a photo-op when at most they were walking up a flight of stairs (often still in their pajamas.) Now the majority of my offspring leave the house for school: different schools, with different start times and different first days. How do I work with that?!?

I think we do a nice job as a family celebrating birthdays and holidays, but we certainly don’t do anything flashy or extravagant. Presents, cards, a cake, the option of a little party with friends or family – what more could you want?

I love my children fiercely, I just don’t like to put all my celebratory energy into a single event, and over time I’ve learned that it’s better that way. The bigger the buildup of expectations, the harder the letdown afterwards – not to mention the increased stress during the event itself.

But just yesterday my eldest daughter got her driver’s license, and to my shock it feels like a really big deal.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Looking for the Light

At the close of my last column, in September 2023, I announced that I’d be taking a brief sabbatical and expressed my hope that I’d return to writing early in 2024. Well, here I am!

In that column, I explained my need for a fall sabbatical: Of our five children, three were entering new schools. We’d have one child up in Burlington (one hour to the north), two in Ripton (30 minutes to the southeast), one in preschool (a blessed 10 minutes away), and one child still being homeschooled. There were assorted fall sports, music lessons, and a driver’s ed class. We’d gained a puppy over the summer. And my husband was returning to teaching after a year’s sabbatical.

Those are just the facts.

Here is what the facts don’t tell you:

The facts don’t tell you that, between 2016 and 2019, I homeschooled all my children. One of them told me that they consider those years “The Golden Days” – and they were. We read wonderful literature, wrote, and learned together in the mornings. The afternoons stretched long; I remember them as seen through the window above our kitchen sink: my four oldest children dressed in various costumes, romping in the amber light with the boy next door or assorted friends – there was always a spare child or two around in those days.

The facts don’t tell you what our particular experience of COVID was like, with a baby still recovering from a stint in the ICU for respiratory distress, and isolation from our beloved friends and homeschool community. How our eldest child turned 13 alone in her bedroom, celebrating with the faces of friends arrayed on a laptop screen, and how she spent much of the next year behind her closed door.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Things We Don’t Talk About: Parenting Teenagers

I had a dream the other night.

In my dream, I was hiking a trail high up in the Green Mountains. I was with a group of other parents who have children at my children’s middle school — other parents of teenagers. We weren’t walking the way one normally does with a group on a trail, with everyone spaced out comfortably; instead, we shuffled along in one huddled mass. There was no conversation, only murmurs of concern. I recognized this path: I’d walked it before, and I knew it wound its way in hairpin turns along a steep ridge, so that one misstep could send you right off the mountain. But this time I was walking along the trail from the opposite direction, and in the dark. All I could do was put out one tentative foot at a time and feel my way along. “It would be really helpful if we had a flashlight,” I thought to myself.

Upon awakening, I realized that I’d dreamed about what it’s like to be the parent of teenagers.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

My Daughter, the Lifeguard

I’m writing this at Lake Dunmore, where our family is spending a hot, humid July afternoon on the water. (Although I’m sitting in the stuffy minivan while our three-year-old, who fell asleep on the drive, naps in the backseat.)

As we were preparing to leave the house – sorting through swimsuits, gathering our children, loading the minivan trunk with beach toys, and filling up water bottles (which we forgot to bring), I felt…safer, more confident about releasing five children in water. You see, a member of our family is now a Red Cross-certified lifeguard.

That’s right: My 15-year-old daughter just completed lifeguard training and will soon be looking down upon the splashing masses at our town pool from atop the official lifeguard chair.

I can hardly believe it. This daughter took swim lessons and spent one summer on the town swim team, but in the nine years since then she’s shown no interest in swimming other than as a social activity. She is slight of build and not particularly athletic: Her passions run more to writing, music, and – if we’re being honest – shopping, grooming, and giggling with friends.

It’s precisely because she likes to shop and go out with friends that it’s important for her to have a job. During the school year, she spent one hour a week shelving books at our town library, but summer afforded the opportunity to expand her work horizons. The trouble was that her summer would be subdivided by two family trips, a week at camp, and a 10-day stint at the Governor’s Institute of Vermont for Global Issues and Youth Action. This ruled out many teenage-appropriate summer jobs that require a regular commitment, like retail, waitressing, or camp counseling.

My husband and I cornered her in late spring to review her job prospects. She sat across from us and, with calm determination, announced, “I want to be a lifeguard.”

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Things We Don’t Talk About: Work, Family, and Mortality

I recently finished reading Kristin Lavransdatter, an 1,100-page, three-volume novel written in 1920 by Norwegian author Sigrid Undset. It won the Nobel Prize in Literature for its epic depiction of the life – the whole life — of a woman in 14^th-century Norway.

What surprised me was how contemporary much of the book felt. The title character may be managing her ancestral estate in medieval Norway, but for most of the book she’s frustrated with her husband for not pulling his weight, worried about her children, second-guessing her life choices, and feeling judged by her neighbors.

When I get together with other middle-aged mothers, we often end up discussing those exact things.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Things We Don’t Talk About: Being the Anti-Hero

I have an uneasy relationship in my head with singer/songwriter/cultural icon Taylor Swift. On the one hand, I appreciate her catchy tunes and sharply intelligent lyrics. After watching the 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana with my children, I was deeply impressed with Swift’s creative process, and grateful for the thoughtful messages she conveyed about the dark side of fame and her struggles with body image.

On the other hand, I can’t help but feel a little resentful that so much of Swift’s oeuvre has become the soundtrack of my life – a soundtrack that I didn’t choose, but that’s been thrust upon me by my children. Taylor Swift’s voice accompanies us everywhere: driving in the car, doing dishes, doing homework. I’m also less-than-thrilled that she seduced our whole family – including our pre-teen children – with her early, wholesome, country-to-pop crossover albums, and then released a trio of albums over the past three years in which 1/3 of the songs are marked “E” for “explicit lyrics.” It’s made for plenty of exciting, dive-for-the-mute-button family car rides.

Still, on Taylor Swift’s latest album, Midnights, there’s a song that’s become a sort of anthem for me. When I first listened to “Anti-Hero,” I recognized the chorus for how it beat in time with my own subconscious: “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”

This year, I started seeing a counselor. While my Puritan ancestors would never sign up for therapy — let alone admit to it — I teach my children that therapy is smart, not shameful. Indeed, over half of our family has seen counselors at any given time over the past couple of years. I have an amazing spouse, dear friends, and a church community, but there’s nothing quite like meeting regularly with someone whose job is to reflect your thought and behavior patterns back to you in all their dysfunctional glory.

I started therapy because I was starting to be haunted by this dysfunctional thought: Everybody would be better off if I weren’t around. All I do is ruin things and create more stress for people.

It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

This thought pattern came to light when my counselor asked, “What are you most afraid of?”

How would you answer that question?

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

A Mother’s Day Reflection on “The Giving Tree”

“You know that book, The Giving Tree?” my daughter asked the other day. We were on our way home from her two-day class camping trip – a 9^th grade tradition at her school.

“Yes….” I replied, warily. I do know The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein’s bestselling 1964 picture book about a boy and the tree who loves him. We’d been given the book early on in our life as a young family, but I’d gradually become so disturbed at the type of relationship The Giving Tree modeled for my children that I’d expelled it from our bookshelves.

“Lil read it to us on the trip,” my daughter continued, “and I was crying so hard. It’s so sad; it’s like a metaphor for everything.”

“What touched you most about the book?” I asked.

“Well, at the end, the boy and the tree both have nothing left to give, but they’re just together….”

“That’s true,” I acknowledged. “What do you think that’s a metaphor for?”

“A lot of things. Parenthood.”

“Parenthood?!?” I yelped. “Do you plan to strip me of everything and then sit on my dead body?”

“Well you wrote once about how you should die slowly for the people you love!” she countered.

Not for the first time, I had mixed feelings about intelligent children who read my columns.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Parenting Teens in Middle Age: Here Be Dragons

My fourth child turns ten in June, which means that I have been writing this column for over a decade; this is my 299^th column.

Back when I first pitched this column to John McCright, my patient and kind editor, I envisioned writing from the perspective of a mother with young children who had recently moved to Vermont and was experiencing all the quirky joys of this unique state for the first time. That’s what I was back in 2012. That’s not what I am anymore.

My husband and I are no longer particularly young; we’re middle-aged, closer to 50 than to 40. Our five children still live at home, and since our son was born in 2019 we do have one child who qualifies as young — but we also have two teenagers and a tween. And while there are definitely still new Vermont experiences to be had, we tend to stick to the same familiar, comfortable, large-family-friendly activities.

I’ve noticed lately that it’s more challenging to decide what to write about. The seasons come and go. The garden is planted, grows, and dies. Chicks and ducklings arrive, and sometimes they die. We go to the lake, to the apple orchard, to the Christmas tree farm, to the ski slopes. We drive the kids to school and activities; we cheer at their games and performances. Every so often the cycle is disrupted by a tornado, a pandemic, a seriously ill child. Then the machine creaks back into motion. I’ve written about all these things.

It’s not that there aren’t soaring joys and crushing tragedies. Life hasn’t become dull and predictable. Rather, at this stage of life, I’m discovering that there are more and more things that we don’t talk about. That we can’t talk about. That we won’t talk about.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.