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.

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.

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.

The Therapeutic Benefits of…Ironing?

“Vacuuming can be therapeutic,” the middle-aged woman told my 22-year-old self.

We were standing in the bedroom that I would occupy for the next year, located in a wing of her Greenwich, Connecticut compound. I was a recent college graduate, working as a classroom teaching assistant in a tony private girls’ school by day and taking graduate classes at night. Until recently I’d been living with two other young teachers in a dingy apartment in Stamford, but when this woman, whose three daughters attended the school at which I taught, invited me to move in with them, it was like manna from heaven. I’d pay no rent, eat meals cooked by the household chefs, live minutes away from work, and have access to the compound’s gym, pool, and tennis courts. In exchange, I would serve as an additional “responsible adult,” with some occasional duties driving the children to school and activities.

I’d also be responsible for my own cleaning.

“You don’t mind vacuuming your own room, do you?” the woman of the house asked apologetically, before adding, “I find that vacuuming can be therapeutic.”

It struck me as an absurd statement from this woman with perfectly highlighted and coiffed blonde hair, her toned body clad in spandex as if headed to a workout (with a personal trainer, of course.) In addition to my humble presence, this household was kept going by a staff of cooks, cleaners, gardeners, trainers, and tutors. Right next to my bedroom was the office of madam’s personal secretary — although she did not work outside the home, she somehow still required a secretary. Her husband was employed as a high-level investment banker at a Manhattan firm; he disappeared in the predawn hours each morning into a chauffeured Town Car.

Of course I didn’t mind cleaning my own space – I’d spent the past six months cleaning up after two housemates (and their boyfriends.) But when was the last time this woman had actually vacuumed? For her to suggest that she occasionally practiced vacuum therapy smacked of Marie Antionette skipping around on her tidy personal farm.

That was over twenty years ago, and I can honestly say that in the decades that have passed I have never once found vacuuming – or any household cleaning, for that matter – to be at all therapeutic. I complete my household chores with resignation because I want my home to be comfortable, welcoming, and attractive. (Also, if I’m honest, because I’m driven by the voices of my Puritan ancestors whispering that other people will judge me as slothful if my home is messy.)

But there is one chore that I have refused to do on principle, except when absolutely necessary, and that is ironing.

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

Letting Go Of Balloons

On Valentine’s Day, my parents hosted all five of my children and me to a lovely after-school dessert party at their house. We left with two shiny red heart-shaped helium balloons.

The balloons were of greatest interest to our three-year-old son, who delighted in bringing them carefully home in the minivan, releasing them into the living room, and making his sisters retrieve them for him all evening.

The following day was warm and blustery – for a Vermont February, at least. Two of my daughters went outdoors after lunch, and my son, in a classic little brother move, wanted to follow them. The only problem: He wanted to take one of the balloons with him.

This is not my first rodeo. I am well aware of the expected result when a child takes a helium balloon outside: One way or another, that balloon is likely to float away, leaving potentially harmful environmental impacts and a hysterical child in its wake.

Try explaining that to a determined three-year-old.

“You shouldn’t take the balloon outside, because it might fly away and get lost,” I reasoned.

“No! I’ll hold on tight!” he countered.

“Okay, how about I tie it to your wrist? Then you don’t have to worry about it flying away and your hands will be free.” See what a professional parent I am?

“NO! I will HOLD ON TIGHT!” he persisted. Just like that, I was launched into a perennial parenting dilemma: Do I double down, insisting on the rightness of my way (and likely spending the next 30 minutes dealing with a child in full-on tantrum mode), or do I let him have his way, lose the balloon, and learn from his own mistakes?

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

A Story of Marriage in Three Beds

“You spend 1/3 of your life in bed,” my husband, Erick, tells me.

Our beds are where we sleep, of course, and we need sleep: Sleep is when our bodies repair and recharge. Bed also tends to be where we lie awake, tossing and turning during difficult times through the watches of the night. We take to our beds when we’re sick. And the most intimate and vulnerable moments of a marriage happen in bed; moments that can lead to the creation of new life.

Our beds, then, are pretty important.

When Erick and I got married, we had almost no furniture. I spent the three years before our marriage in a studio apartment on East 91^st Street in Manhattan. It was the size of a large walk-in closet, and my furniture consisted of a futon, a bookcase, a steamer trunk that served as a coffee table, and a large and uncomfortable wicker chair (which, for some reason, we still have.)

Erick spent those same three years sharing a rental house in Cos Cob, Connecticut with three colleagues from the hedge fund where he worked. His belongings consisted of several large plastic bins and a mattress.

So we were in trouble when, just prior to our wedding, we purchased an apartment in Manhattan complete with a large living/dining space and two bedrooms. (Granted, the second “bedroom” could fit nothing larger than a crib, but still, it was a huge step up.)

Thankfully, gifts are a part of getting married – and thankfully, cash is the gift of choice if you’re marrying into a Chinese-American family. Clutching our wad of wedding cash, Erick and I quickly bought what we needed to furnish our first apartment. “Quickly” is the operative word: Neither one of us particularly enjoyed furniture shopping, I just wanted to get our home decorated as soon as possible, and Erick didn’t have strong opinions. Except when it came to beds.

“I’ve heard that it’s important for married couples to get a king-sized bed,” Erick said, with authority. “That way, they each have their own space.”

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

How to be an Undertaker

Our family said goodbye to two remarkable women this past December: My grandmother and my aunt died within two weeks of each other.

Although the proximity of these events, along with their timing – just before Christmas – felt particularly unfair, it was, perhaps, statistically unsurprising. It turns out that the death rate spikes during the winter months, likely due to the prevalence of seasonal illness and the increased stress that colder weather places on the immune system.

My grandmother, at 104 years old, enjoyed a sharp mind and relatively good health right up until the end, and had been able to remain in her home thanks to the diligent care of her nearby children. My aunt, at 78 years old, had fought for three years with health issues related to a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, buoyed by the love and support of family, friends, and neighbors. Both women figure prominently in some of my happiest childhood memories. They were warm, loving, incredibly funny, and they showed up: both were still sending my children birthday cards right up until they died. They were also tough: Both were single mothers for a time. In raising a combined seven children to adulthood, my grandmother and my aunt each endured more than their fair share of tragedy.

How do you write about two entire lives? Perhaps the best I can do is to tell you that when her daughter-in-law told her that her beloved Boston Celtics had played well in a recent game, my grandmother – literally on her deathbed and barely conscious – mustered enough strength to gasp out, “Wow….Wow.” And my aunt insisted that the upbeat Beatles song, “When I’m Sixty-Four,” be played as the processional at her funeral.

The circumstances surrounding their deaths were different. My grandmother was my father’s mother; my aunt was my mother’s sister. I was able to say goodbye to my grandmother, but not to my aunt. I was unable to attend my grandmother’s funeral in person, but I took my four oldest children to my aunt’s services.

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

Reflections on the New Year’s Fireworks

For a moment, it looks as if the weather might reshape another holiday celebration.

Like many others across the United States, our family’s Christmas was altered by the collision of a bomb cyclone and polar vortex, which brought gale-force winds and frigid temperatures to our corner of the world and knocked out our power for nearly two days. Thankfully, my parents, who live across town, never lost power. As the sun set on our cold, dark house on Christmas Eve, we packed up all our children, food, and gifts and unleashed Christmas on the grandparents. Sadly, our church never regained power in time for either the Christmas Eve or Christmas Day services; my children felt this loss more keenly than I expected, but we all adjusted. God knows we’ve all gotten used to adjusting since this decade began.

So when it begins raining as dark falls on New Year’s Eve and my already-exhausted children seem increasingly unenthusiastic about carrying on our tradition of attending Middlebury’s annual fireworks display, I prepare to adjust our plans yet again.

As it turns out, the rain slows to a manageable drizzle and we’re able to muster enough momentum to load everyone into the minivan and be driven very slowly by our 15-year-old (who just got her learner’s permit) to the elementary school.

This is where the peculiar magic of small-town fireworks begins.

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

Of Hospitals and Hawks (Faith’s Version)

If you’re celebrating the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas, today is “The Feast of the Holy Innocents.” It’s an odd celebration to place in the midst of a joyous holiday season, reminding us that Jesus’s birth came with some serious collateral damage: the deaths of numerous baby boys, killed by King Herod in a delusional and paranoid power play.

This is what I love about actual Christianity — not the American prosperity gospel version of Christianity that’s too often in the public eye, but the real, Biblical Christianity that parks itself in the midst of unanswered questions like, “How do we rejoice at the birth of one baby sent to begin God’s great rescue plan while also lamenting the senseless deaths of multiple innocent babies?” Christianity deals directly with real life, with the intersection of pain and evil and joy and good and how, to quote Taylor Swift, “Both of these things can be true.”

It seemed like an appropriate day to share one of my favorite pieces that I’ve ever written, which appeared in The Addison Independent on January 14, 2020. That holiday season was our family’s initiation into evil’s random attacks — and re-reading this piece today, I realize that it was just a training ground for what was to come. Because the Independent re-configured its website after the piece was published, it’s hard to find (though you can still find it here.) So I’m re-posting the entire thing below, as my own sort of “Taylor’s Version.”

***

One thing I’ve learned over the past few weeks is that we are able to endure a great deal more than we believe is possible. Life is not a benevolent tutor, handing down lessons one at a time in order of increasing difficulty; instead, life often feels like an opponent in a boxing match landing a punch in your ribs and then throwing a jab to your eye while you’re still catching your breath. The remarkable thing is how many of us remain in the ring. We may be hanging on the ropes, bruised and battered, but we don’t go down.

This is why, when I found the mangled carcasses of two of our chickens (the rooster in the shed, the hen on a snow drift next to the coop) after having just switched places with my husband at the bedside of our ten-week-old son (who was beginning the second week of his second stay at the University of Vermont Medical Center in less than a month) – on the same day that my husband discovered fraudulent charges on our credit card – I simply thought, “Of course: Another predator.”

We never did put a name to our son’s predator, but it was assumed to be a virus. He’d been admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at UVM for “acute respiratory failure with hypoxia.” This started as what appeared to be a mild cold – gloopy eyes, lethargy, no fever, lack of appetite. The lack of appetite was our biggest concern, since a week earlier he’d been admitted to UVM after being diagnosed at a routine appointment with “failure to thrive.” Thankfully, our son had another routine checkup the day after his cold-like symptoms began, so I planned to consult his doctor then.

At that checkup, our doctor examined our son and got very serious.

“He needs to be seen at the hospital,” she said, her voice trembling.

“Okay. Should I drive him up to UVM?” I asked, having just been through this drill.

Her response is burned into my memory: “You don’t have time.”

It turned out that our son’s mystery virus was causing sepsis and apnea; in other words, he was having episodes during which he stopped breathing.

There is a moment, right after crisis strikes, when you freeze. You stare at the bloody piles of feathers and think, “Where do I start?” You hand your baby over to the EMTs and wonder, “Who needs to know first? Who can watch the girls? What do I need to cancel?”

Somehow, you don’t go down. You secure the surviving chickens in the coop and grab a shovel and a trash bag. You call your husband on speakerphone while following the ambulance to the hospital, and give your son’s health history in a calm, steady voice to the ER doctors who are running tubes and wires into his little body.

I’d never spent much time in hospitals until recently, and I was surprised at how they bolster this calm, steady, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other approach to crisis. Hospitals are their own world, with their own language and culture. Learning the language – speaking of intubation and extubation, pulse-ox, cc’s, ng tubes, and vitals – was how I first learned to normalize a horribly abnormal situation.

And hospitals are so quiet. These are places where the very worst happens — and I spent three weeks along corridors where the very worst was happening to children — yet never once did I see anybody break down. There were no tears, raised voices, or cries in the night, just the beep of monitors, hushed whispers, and the swish of the floor buffer. The closest I came to breaking down was when I stood by my son’s bedside that first night in the PICU. He was sedated, his lips taped in a fish-pucker around a breathing tube; a feeding tube ran through one nostril, an IV delivered fluids into his arm while a backup IV protruded from a vein in his head. Tears welled up in my eyes; as I brushed them away his nurse watched, puzzled.

“Oh,” she said, “I guess it’s hard to see him like this, isn’t it? We see them like this all the time, so we’re used to it.”

Hospitals make it hard to feel sorry for yourself.

Our poultry predator turned out to be a hawk. The day after I discovered the two dead chickens, I startled him off the body of a third. He flew out of our shed and perched on a tree nearby.

“Hey!,” I shouted, stomping after him through the snow, “Cut it out! Leave our chickens alone!”

He didn’t make eye contact; he stared straight ahead, impassive and unimpressed, before winging off across our field.

If the virus that infected our son had eyes, it wouldn’t have made eye contact, either. Predators are like that: It’s nothing personal, they’re just doing what they must to survive. If it’s your chickens or your child in their path, they swoop. After two weeks of testing, we were told that our son’s repeated hospitalizations boiled down to “bad luck.”

Hawks present a unique challenge, because they strike from the air. Had our predator been a coyote or a weasel, I would’ve known what to do: Keep the chickens fenced in their yard with the electric fence turned on for a week or so, until the predator gives up. But fences mean nothing to a hawk. The immediate solution was to confine the chickens to their coop all day, transforming them from “free range” to “no range.”

In many ways, having a hospitalized child is easy. Life shrinks down to the barest essentials: your child in the hospital and your children at home. Everything else drifts away. During my son’s time in the hospital, the world was ending: missile strikes, assassinations, impeachments, planes dropping from the sky, wildfires flaring from the earth. None of these things was my problem.

Gradually, my son shed the wires and tubes that had tethered him to monitors and bags; he became a free range baby once more, and we returned home.

Home is more complicated than the hospital. How do you protect a baby’s fragile health from all of the predatory germs circling constantly? How do you rebuild a family after weeks of stress and separation?

We can’t lock our chickens in the coop forever. My husband bought shiny disks to hang on the shed, and a fake owl. He installed netting over the top of the chicken yard. These safety measures might work, or they might not. I am certain that I’ll shovel up chicken corpses again – if not thanks to this predator, then to another.

Tonight there are parents who sit watching their child’s pulse ox pleth, while nurses arrive at regular intervals to take vitals. But for tonight, at least, I am holding our baby in my arms next to our woodstove, and I am watching him breathe.