Category: Thoughts on Life

That Crazy Tree

I’ve been reading The Artist’s Way this past month. This is the sort of book, marketed as “A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self,” that I’d usually avoid. Really, who has the time? Its author, Julia Cameron, claims to have helped countless “blocked artists” discover “a spiritual path to higher creativity.” I bought this book back when I was a legitimate artist, having just completed a photography degree in New York City — but apparently it didn’t work for me back then, because I made it to the third chapter and then quit photography.

I’m not sure why I decided to pick up this book again, since I wouldn’t describe myself as an “artist” — unless by “artist” you mean “someone who started writing a blog about her kids and then got tired of writing about her kids.” Nor would I describe myself as “blocked,” although I’m sure there are some who WISH I’d develop a little writer’s block.

I guess I just hate to have a book in my house that’s partially read. And it’s turned out to be pretty good. My FAVORITE part is when Cameron recommends taking yourself out on a weekly “artist date,” where you go off alone to do something fun and restorative. That seems like a good idea for anybody, artist or no. So, the “artist date” was on my mind when Erick took out all three girls on a recent Saturday morning. I figured I’d give it a try; beats cleaning the house.

I decided to take a hike. I love walking, and looking, and thinking. When the girls are around, I may be able to walk short distances, but I have to watch THEM instead of the scenery, and there’s always too much chatter for me to hear myself think. A nice, quiet hike seemed just the thing for my first artist date.

The problem is, hiking by myself makes me a little nervous; I’m still too much of a city girl. I worry about things like getting killed. And where we live, the options for hiking tend towards two opposing but potentially dangerous scenarios: rugged wilderness trails, or the narrow shoulders of winding roads along which cars drive waaaay too quickly.

But there is one exception: the TAM. TAM stands for “Trail Around Middlebury,” and is a 16-mile loop around Middlebury through conserved land owned by the Middlebury Area Land Trust. I opted to walk a small section of the trail that starts at the Middlebury College golf course and ends close to town. The assurance that retirees with golf clubs would be within shouting distance was enough to make me feel passably secure.

It was a beautiful, sunny late summer day. The section of trail that I walked is mostly wooded, with a few open fields between the trees. It felt secluded and quiet — I passed no more than five other people along the way. Then, in one dappled green stretch of woods, I looked up and spotted this tree:

I know the photo isn’t great — I snapped it with my iPod — but LOOK at that crazy tree! I can’t see the leaves well enough to tell what kind of tree it is, but I think it’s an oak. Oak trees — the ones in my yard, at least — usually grow up straight and strong and tall. Certainly all the trees around this one were growing straight, or else I wouldn’t have noticed it. Something happened to this tree, something was strange enough about its environment that its trunk veered off in one direction, and then abruptly changed course and doubled back upon itself. From the looks of it, this may have happened several times.

And yet, the tree survived. It’s healthy, thriving there in the woods. And isn’t it beautiful? Much more interesting than all the straight arrow trees around it.

There are a couple of points in life — usually around age 18 and 21 — when people make Big Decisions. Decisions about school, work, life partners. We tend to invest these decisions with a sense of great importance; we worry that we’ll make the wrong choice, and then we worry that we did make the wrong choice. By “we,” of course, I mean “me.” I went to college with no idea where to focus my attention, then bopped along through a series of decisions: graduate degree in education, teaching job, graduate degree in studio art, photography freelancer, nonprofit manager, mother. I love what I’m doing right now the best, but whatever you call this life I’ve cobbled together, you can’t call it “employment.” And that’s what tends to matter on paper and at cocktail parties.

When I saw that crazy tree, though, it reminded me of my life — and not just my life, but the lives of so many people I know and love.

So, I decided that when my girls reach the age of Big Decision Making, I’m going to show them the picture of this crazy tree — or take them to see it in person. And I’ll say something like this:

You’re worried about making the wrong choices, and your choices DO matter, but you don’t need to worry so much. Check out this crazy tree. This tree didn’t worry, it just grew towards where the most light was at each stage of its life. It’s okay if you change your mind later, or if you look back and feel like you were all over the place. As long as you’re growing towards the light at each stage of your life, you’ll be okay. And when you stand back to look, it’ll be beautiful.

College Town

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’

-from The Velveteen Rabbit

What happens when you end up living in a college town that’s almost a carbon copy of the town where you spent your own undergraduate years?

I went to Williams College, a small liberal arts school of about 2,000 students in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains. I now live near where my husband teaches: Middlebury College, a small liberals arts school of about 2,000 students in Vermont’s Green Mountains. When he was interviewing for his job, Erick knew that I had some concerns about the deja vu aspect of this move, so he specifically asked his future colleagues how Middlebury differed from Williams. “Oh,” they scoffed, “Williams is out in the middle of nowhere. It’s tiny. Middlebury is much more of a town.”

I found — and still find — this comparison hilarious. It’s like arguing the relative difference between a flea and a gnat. In fact, as of the 2000 census Middlebury’s population was 8,183; Williamstown’s was 8,424. (And please note that those numbers include the  2,000 undergrads who descend on each town for nine months of the year). Both towns are centered around a single main street. It may be true that Middlebury’s main street is slightly longer, with slightly more offerings that Williamstown’s. But I’m living in essentially the same town where I went to college.

So far, it’s been interesting how little I’m aware of living in a college town. Sure, my husband goes off to work at the college every morning. Sure, I’ll occasionally notice students walking around downtown. Roads and restaurants are busier during special weekends when the students’ families come to town. Many of our friends work for the college in some capacity — but by no means all of them. There’s an unofficial “college pew” at our church where all the students sit together. Our daughters take swim lessons taught by members of the college swim team at the college pool. We’ve even had students from Erick’s senior seminar over to our house.

That sounds like a lot of interaction with the college, but it’s such a vastly different experience from when I actually attended college that I seldom feel any deja vu. As a mother of three, more than a decade out of college myself, I’m in a different world. We’re a 15-minute drive away from campus, and — what with the three young kids — we don’t attend many campus events. Shockingly, the undergraduate population tends not to breakfast at 7 AM, hang out in the children’s room of the public library, frequent the local playgrounds, or eat dinner at 5:30 PM. So we don’t see much of them.

When I do see groups of undergrads going about their college lives, they seem very young, and very loud. Their confidence and energy make me a little nervous. They appear to float on their own potential; most of them haven’t yet felt life’s hard blows that cultivate humility and empathy.

I look and them and think, NOT FOR ANYTHING WOULD I WANT TO BE BACK WHERE YOU ARE.

College was not a particularly happy time for me. As I understand it, many people look back on college as the best years of their lives: years when they forged lasting friendships, joyfully experimented in both the academic and personal arenas, and emerged after four years having found themselves.

For me, college was when I lost myself.

This may come as a shock to some people who knew me during college — perhaps even to most people who knew me then. I put up a very good front, as I’ve done for most of my life, because that’s what good girls do.

When I arrived at Williams, many of my peers seemed to already know who they were and where they were headed. They’d survived the proving ground of high school, and now they were ready to soar off on their talent. Sure, some edges needed to be smoothed, but at a basic level they were who they would be. Maybe it only seemed that way, but over a decade later these college friends and acquaintances still appear to be fundamentally who they were back then.

I was not that undergrad. I came to college looking like I had it all together, having spent the first 18 years of my life being perfect: working hard, getting good grades, going to church, and trying to make everybody happy. High school wasn’t much of a proving ground for me; I more or less breezed through it with a group of like-minded peers.

Problem is, trying to be perfect and make everybody happy for 18 years doesn’t leave much room for becoming a real person. I was 18 years old and I didn’t have a single opinion of my own. Going to church didn’t help me with identity formation, frankly, because if you’re perfect then you completely miss the point of grace. How can you receive forgiveness and love despite your failings if you’ve never actually failed?

No, when I arrived at college, I was more like the description of a crab cake I once saw on a menu: “Just enough binding to hold it together.”

If this were a novel or a movie, what would happen to a protagonist like that? Clearly, they’d have to fail. Something would have to rip apart the binding of their fragile self so that the pieces could be put back together more securely. It’s an old story. It’s The Velveteen Rabbit: the toy bunny needs to be discarded on the trash heap with a broken heart in order to become Real.

And, thankfully, that did happen to me: I made mistakes. The specifics aren’t important. These weren’t major crimes against humanity; they were the kind of mistakes that happen when you wander through four years of college without knowing who you are. But they were major to me, because I wasn’t supposed to make mistakes. And it wasn’t pretty; the ripping apart of my binding that began in college resulted in a three-year post-college morass of depression and anorexia, during which time I distanced myself from friends and family. It wasn’t until I found grace and Erick — almost simultaneously — that my pieces started to come together again.

I missed my college reunion this year (because our California family was visiting) and I’m very sorry that I did. None of this was college’s fault; I still have fun memories, and I made some friends whom I hope to know forever (and whom I wish I saw more often!). I wanted to be at that reunion, because I think that most people who knew me in college didn’t really know me. I’d like to have a chance to get re-introduced.

So, these are the thoughts that enter my mind when I come into contact with undergrads these days. I’m glad for those moments, for living in a town that allows me periodic flashbacks to the lost-est time of my life. I wonder how many of these students — underneath their pulled-together, confident exteriors — are just as much of a mess as I was back then. (For that matter, I wonder how many of my own college peers were just as much of a mess as I was back then? Probably a fair amount).

NOT FOR ANYTHING WOULD I WANT TO BE BACK WHERE YOU ARE, I’d like to tell these undergrads, BUT NOT FOR ANYTHING WOULD I HAVE SKIPPED IT.

Here’s what I would have skipped: My panic and shame at having my perfect front deconstructed. It was that panic and shame that I took out on my body, my family, my friends. And for that, I’ll always be deeply sorry.

So if I were to give advice to any undergrad who, like me, arrives at college as a hollow shell of “perfection,” it would be this: DO NOT PANIC when you discover that you’re not perfect after all. Welcome it as the thing that will make you who you are, as radiation therapy for your soul. But don’t wallow. Show yourself some grace. Gently pick up your pieces and start looking for the tools to put yourself back together again.

In a recent segment on the NPR program This American Life called “The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar,” a woman from a family that had suffered tragedy, deceit, and mistaken identity concluded, “If you hate that it happened, then you hate that you are.”

If you hate that it happened, then you hate that YOU ARE.

You should never, EVER, hate that you are.

Living Without Blinds

Because we live in the woods, our yard is very beautiful and our house – particularly during those times of year when all the leaves are on the trees – can get very dark. Probably for both of those reasons, our house was constructed with many windows. We have eight windows on the first floor alone, plus an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows in the Sun Room and five sets of sliding glass doors.

When we moved in, every single one of these windows was covered by blinds.

There were heavy wooden horizontal blinds hung above each window, and vertical blinds to cover the sliding glass doors. It was kind of the previous owners to leave us their window treatments, which were in good shape and had probably been installed with much effort and expense.

One of the first things I did after we moved in was to remove all the blinds from the first-floor windows.

Okay, I didn’t remove the blinds; at the time, I was busy unpacking, painting, nursing a three-month-old, and supervising two rambunctious toddlers. But when my parents, who were helping us move in, asked what I wanted to do about the window treatments, I said, “Take them all down!”

A friend recently lent me a wonderful book of essays by Shauna Niequist called cold tangerines. In an essay titled “basement,” Niequist makes the case that our homes are like mirrors for our selves: the rooms we love the most often contain qualities of who we’d like to be; the rooms we hate the most reflect facets of who we fear we are.

Yes, this is going to be a metaphor for my life. Because it’s like my house knew, even before I did, the kind of life I wanted to lead.

I’ve realized over the course of this year that I want to live a life that’s open, unobstructed: a life without blinds. I’ve spent so much of my life with the blinds drawn, trying to hide parts of myself from the outside world, trying to protect myself. But you know what? It’s a lot of work having to continually raise, lower, and clean those blinds. And they get in the way of my view; it’s hard to see clearly through my blinds to other people, to the beautiful world outside.

Writing has been a major — if not the major — step towards taking down the blinds of my life. This past winter, I started writing (and publishing) more of what I was really thinking and feeling. I admitted that I wasn’t perfect, with perfect kids and a perfect house. I wrote honestly about my faith for the first time ever — something I’d always been terrified to do for fear that people would assume I was going to start judging them or trying to convert them. These were all big steps for me.

I’ve been amazed by the grace with which people have responded. My favorite thing about writing — and life — is that it allows for so many “You, too? Me, too!” moments. Because trying to write as my honest self is very, very scary. It’s scary for the same reasons that some of my family members were horrified that I had no blinds on my first-floor windows: “But people can look right in and see you!” gasped one relative.

Of course, it’s much easier to live without blinds on your house than to live without blinds on your life. My response to “But people can see you!” is: What people? We no longer live in Manhattan or Berkeley; for much of the year, we can barely see our neighbors’ houses through the trees. Somebody would have to go to an awful lot of trouble to look through our windows. And even if they did, So what? They’d see a family, going about our normal, loud, crazy, loving business. We’re not cooking meth in the kitchen or torturing chipmunks in the living room.

It’s much harder to apply that logic to my life.

I’m writing this as a prelude of sorts: within the next couple of days, I’m going to publish one of the most personal things that I’ve ever written.

I’ve written about what happens when you end up living in a college town that’s almost an exact replica of the town where you yourself attended college: the thoughts, memories, and emotions that get dredged up. To leave out this aspect of our move to Vermont would be a major omission.

Don’t get too excited or worried: this is a big deal for me, but that’s because I’ve been living with the blinds drawn for so long. There are no bodies in our basement, no fourth Gong child stashed in our attic, no secret bank account in the Caribbean.

I’m going to publish this piece, and then I’ll probably go back to writing about our mice and bugs and wacky daughters. This blog is about our life, and our life these days is mostly about mice and bugs and wacky daughters. I’ve no interest in starting down a path of gratuitously emotional soul-baring.

You see, as much as I want to live an open life, it’s important to set appropriate limits. I removed all the blinds from our first-floor windows, but I left up all the blinds on our second-floor windows. Not because that’s where we cook the meth or torture chipmunks, but because there are things we do on the second floor — where most of our bedrooms and bathrooms are — that are and never will be anybody else’s business.

So there you have it: my philosophy of life, writing, and home decorating all wrapped up in one little metaphor. It’s a little scary, a little less safe, this life without blinds. But the views are amazing and there’s a lot less upkeep required.

Adding It Up

And then there were three: two smart ones and a lucky one. (The doughnuts were a little post-trauma treat, not a regular occurrence!)

Brinkley killed one of our chickens last week.

Here’s how it happened: For those of you who don’t know, Brinkley is our neighbor’s Golden Retriever, but we’ve “adopted” him to the point that our neighbors looped their electric dog fence around our yard. So Brinkley has the run of our yard, and we love him. Since July, when we first put the chickens outside, Brinkley has shown admirable restraint — he’s been interested in them, but until lately he never made any aggressive moves.

We keep the chicken coop inside a fenced yard. Here’s the weakness: because our yard is so rocky, we can’t sink the fence deeply into the earth to keep predators from digging under it. The fence is chicken wire strung between metal posts, but the chicken wire sits level with the ground. So last week, when Brinkley started digging under the fence and pushing up the wire with his 80 pounds of doggy energy, he won. I’d caught him inside the chicken yard several times, but luckily no harm was done.

Then, last Friday, as I pulled into the driveway with Georgia (the other two girls were in preschool), expecting a quiet, uneventful afternoon, our neighbor from across the street came up the driveway. She was watching Brinkley while his owners were away, and had caught him with one of our white Leghorns in his mouth. She saved the chicken — who was a little slobbery and wobbly and traumatized, but otherwise unhurt — and returned her to the chicken coop. I went to check on the chickens — and found only the lucky Leghorn and one of our Rhode Island Reds inside. That left TWO chickens unaccounted for.

My quiet afternoon turned into a frantic chicken hunt. It’s unclear exactly what happened, but it appears that three of the chickens may have escaped their yard by squeezing under part of the fence that Brinkley had warped with his digging. Once they became totally free-range chickens, they were also fair game for Brinkley. Amazingly, the OTHER Rhode Island Red eventually fluttered down from a tree branch above the chicken yard, where she’d taken shelter during the chicken massacre. As for the other Leghorn, all I found of her was a pile of feathers and a dismembered leg.

I wasn’t totally devastated; it’s pretty rare for a chicken to die of old age. Although I’d have liked to have gotten a few eggs out of this hen before she became Brinkley’s chew toy, chickens don’t usually inspire deep affection. They’re not cuddly creatures; even as chicks, our chickens hated to be held, and now it’s almost impossible to catch them. They’re nervous, flighty creatures whose main interest is food.

But I felt worse than I expected. Those chickens were my responsibility. I was prepared for them to die at some point, but it was still my job to keep them alive as long as possible. If you were looking for someone to pin the blame on in this situation, all evidence pointed straight to: ME. It was hard to be mad at Brinkley; he was just a dog being a dog. And the chickens were just being chickens. But I was the one who’d wanted the chickens to begin with, and I was the one who’d invited our neighbors to include our yard in Brinkley’s fenced run. I’d brought a hunting dog and chickens together, and when the inevitable happened, I had only myself to blame.

“You just keep adding and adding and adding,” my mother said to me during her latest visit. She was concerned after we told her that we were thinking of getting a dog of our own. And she’s right: three children in four years, four chickens, our neighbor’s dog, and now possibly our own dog. I DO have a little problem with adding things to my life. But here’s why: I think it’s almost never bad to add something else to love. Don’t most of us add and add? We form new relationships, get married, have children, acquire pets. Isn’t love the motivation behind all of those things?

I have a hard time saying that I love our chickens. I got them because we go through at least a dozen eggs a week, and because I thought it would be nice for the girls to have some animals around to watch and care for. But I raised them from chicks, I feed them and clean their coop, and I guess that’s a form of love.

Here’s the scaly underbelly of love, though, the thing we try to fool ourselves into forgetting: nothing lives forever. My husband, my children, my chickens, Brinkley, myself — we’re all going to die. When we add things to our lives, we’re adding present-tense love, with the promise of future-tense pain and loss.

So why keep adding at all?

I thought about that while I checked on my lonely Leghorn all that afternoon — a chicken who’d just suffered shock and loss herself, and appeared about as depressed as it’s possible for a chicken to be. I thought about that when Brinkley came running up to me proudly, carrying a mouthful of white feathers. I thought about that when I told my two oldest girls that Brinkley had killed one of their chickens.

Guess what the girls wanted to do after I picked them up from preschool? I am absolutely not making this up: they wanted to go play hide & seek in the cemetery. So we did.

And then I thought: we can live with loss. We can feel the pain and learn from it and work through it and heal. But I cannot, I cannot, live without love. So I will keep adding.

Also, I will reinforce that chicken fence.

Mystery

Because it was highly recommended to me by several respected friends, I’ve finally gotten around to reading Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow. I tend to be suspicious of things that come highly recommended, but this turned out to be a phenomenal book: a beautiful portrait of a man, a community, agriculture, religion, and life in general.

I’m glad I didn’t read it until I moved to Vermont. Berry set Jayber Crow in Port William, a small town in Kentucky during the mid-20th-century, but in many ways he could be describing my own small town in Vermont today. For instance, there’s this sentence about halfway through the book that I probably wouldn’t have noticed until this past year:

“Like, I think, most of the people in Port William, Roy lived too hard up against mystery to be without religion.”

Roy is a very minor character, and this sentence is tossed off in a tangential plotline, but it nearly smacked me with its truth.

The story leaves vague exactly what Wendell Berry meant when he wrote that “Roy lived too hard up against mystery.” He might be talking about agriculture; the character of Roy in Jayber Crow is a farmer. It’s hard to escape mystery when you live in a town where agriculture and nature are still closely intertwined with daily life. I’m not sure how you can watch a chick hatch, or a field of corn push up through the earth, and not feel it in your heart. To be a farmer, it seems, you’ve got to have faith in something — if only that the eggs will hatch and the seeds sown will push up. And to be a farmer, you have to come to some understanding with death; it’s a fact that everything you sow and grow will die eventually, either by your own hand or someone else’s. I’m not a farmer, but I do raise chickens and plants, I live in close proximity to farms and have friends who are farmers — and I’ve been changed by a year of watching these mysterious cycles of life and death unfold.

But I think agriculture is only part of it: every person has these same mysterious cycles of life and death, joy and grief, weaving in and out of their lives. This is true no matter where you live, but living in a small town makes it easier to see. When there are fewer people to know, you get to know them better. You learn their stories.

Last month, NPR aired an interview with the band The Avett Brothers, during which Seth Avett said, “The older you get…in some ways you’re just biding your time between tragedies.” The mystery that comes with small town life is that you KNOW about the tragedies, and you also get to SEE, close up, people biding their time between the tragedies — and not just biding their time, but LIVING, carrying on. How most people are able to continue with life is a great mystery. Some days, I feel like I’m surrounded by unsung heroes.

Here’s an example:

At our church, we sometimes sing a song called “Glory be to God.” (You can listen to a version of it here). It was a new song for me when we moved to Vermont, and it’s just pure praise. The other Sunday, we sang “Glory be to God” again. Standing where I was, I could see in my peripheral vision people who had recently suffered unimaginable loss, people who were struggling with mental illness, people who had escaped dangerous situations, single parents trying to raise their children through heartache, people who had no idea what their next step in life would be. And ALL THESE PEOPLE stood there, singing “Glory be to God…Forever and ever!”

Talk about mystery; it was almost too much for me — my heart felt like it was in a tug of war between joy and sorrow. What I saw that Sunday was my vision of heaven: not perfect cherubim flitting around playing their harps, but broken, hurting, totally IMperfect people standing up together and singing “Glory be to God.”

Now, here’s the thing: this doesn’t just happen in small towns. It happens everywhere. It was happening in my previous churches, but I didn’t notice it as much because those churches were large, so I didn’t really know people’s stories. Also, the people who went to these churches were mostly young, which meant that they looked like they had it all together, or they hadn’t yet lived enough to accumulate an impressive series of tragedies.

This doesn’t just happen in places of worship, either; you don’t have to go to church (or mosque, or synagogue) to experience this kind of mystery. The  people around us are singing with their lives every day. Maybe, in larger towns, it’s easier to hide your tragedies, keep your story private, and give the appearance of everything being okay. But everything is never okay. Like I said, it’s just that small towns make this easier to see.

I wish that everybody could experience what I did in church that day, that little vision of heaven.  It took living in a small town for me to see the mysterious pain, love, grace, strength, and redemption everywhere, in nature and in people. But we all live “hard up against mystery,” it just might require more attention — eyes and ears and hearts a little more open — to notice it in the suburbs.

According to Wendell Berry, once you’ve lived “hard up against mystery,” it’s hard to avoid religion. Do with that word what you will; I mean it as “faith in something outside yourself.” Whatever it is that keeps chicks hatching, corn sprouting, and people surviving, it’s certainly not me. It’s a mystery — and most of us, I think, are detectives, spending our lives gathering clues, trying to get closer to figuring out whodunnit.

There is a Season

One of our favorite fall views, from the top of the treehouse at Happy Valley Orchard.

We’re sleeping with the quilt on almost every night. In the mornings, we wake to the sound of acorns crashing onto the roof as squirrels busily gather them from the oak tree. The sunlight has turned a deeper gold, and our eyes are peeled for new, colorful patches of foliage. Our second fall in Vermont is beginning.

When our family moved from California to Vermont, everyone assumed that our biggest adjustment would be the weather….

Click here to continue reading this, my latest column for The Addison Independent.

The Second Day

Fiona and Campbell started preschool at the end of August. For Fiona, this was a return to the same preschool, same classroom, and same teacher as last year. Her fellow students, however, were almost entirely new to her. (Because of Fiona’s November birthday, she was placed in the four-year-old class last year; because the cut-off date for kindergarten is September 1, Fiona and a few other classmates will spend another year in the four-year-old class, while most of their peers from last year move on to kindergarten).  For Campbell, starting out in the three-year-old class next door to Fiona, the whole experience was new.

Both of them were hugely excited for the first day of school — but not as excited as I was!

There’s a lot of build-up before the first day of school each year: anticipation, nervousness, new clothes and shoes and supplies. Even I felt a little nervous, although my main priority was just getting the kids out of the house. I hoped and prayed that Fiona would make friends and be happy with her new peer group. I hoped and prayed that Campbell would respect her teachers and be kind to the other students and avoid inappropriately using the word “poo-poo” — at least for the first day.

But, having done the first-day-of-school thing last year, I also knew this: It’s not the first day of school that’s the issue; it’s the SECOND day.

See, the first day, everything is fresh and exciting. There may be jitters, there may be wrenching goodbyes — but in my experience, adrenaline mostly carries everyone through. I’ve been the mom patting myself on the back after the first day of school, proudly relieved that my child had NO PROBLEM saying goodbye.

And then the second day hit.

By the second day, the kids have wised up. It’s not fresh and exciting anymore; instead, they can see past the new clothes and school supplies to the rules, expectations, and social minefield that they’re going to have to navigate EVERY SINGLE DAY. You mean I have to KEEP GOING?!? their eyes seem to say.

I was thinking about this as school began, and I realized that much of what makes life hard has to do with The Second Day. It’s not always literally the second 24-hour day, but it’s the state of mind we face when the newness has worn off. Think about it: You get married, and at first you’re swept along through the wedding and honeymoon, but pretty soon comes that Second Day, when you stare at your partner across the table and think, You mean I have to KEEP GOING?!?

Or, say, you have a baby, and you’re all jazzed up because you survived labor and now you have this cute little munchkin and you’re getting all sorts of attention and your house is stuffed with nifty new baby supplies…but then you come home from the hospital and have to face the Second Day, when nobody cares anymore that you have a new baby (except your parents — they’ll always care), and all your clothes are covered with bodily fluids and that munchkin is STILL waking up every two hours and you think, You mean I have to KEEP GOING?!?

OR maybe you do something really great in your profession/vocation/calling/art: you win an award, or obtain a degree, or invent something new, or create a painting/performance/book/film/play/blog post that people really like. Congratulations! You feel like your existence is finally validated…for about 24 hours. Because then comes that Second Day, when you have to sit at your desk or computer or easel again, and you think, You mean I have to KEEP GOING?!?

OR EVEN, let’s say you move to a small town in Vermont, and everything is new and wonderful. You love your new house, your new friends, the new landscape — your entire new lifestyle. But then the second year rolls around, and suddenly nothing’s quite so new anymore. You’ve seen all these seasons before, done just about everything there is to do at least once. And one dark and freezing winter morning, when you’re heading outside to feed those damn chickens AGAIN, you think, You mean I have to KEEP GOING?!?

Hey, it could definitely happen.

That Second Day is no joke. Based on the examples above, I’d venture that it’s the root cause of many cases of divorce, postpartum depression, and personal and professional burnout. I myself have experienced it plenty. In fact, I abandoned my first profession — teaching — because after four years I just couldn’t face a lifetime of Second Days in the classroom.

I have no tips for avoiding the Second Day phenomenon. It’s an inescapable part of life. Nothing stays new forever; if every day were a FIRST day, life would eventually become hyperactive and exhausting. All I have is this insight: the Second Day is difficult and depressing, but if you persevere through it, that’s when things start to take root and get really interesting. Marriage and parenting will always be HARD WORK — filled with multiple Second Days — but when I think back to my husband on our wedding day, or my kids when they were first born, I realize that I love them now with much more richness and complexity. I wouldn’t go back to that first day for anything.

I suppose the best way to handle Second Days is to anticipate them. I know now that I need to be just as prepared — if not more — to help my kids navigate that second day of school. I need to linger with a few extra hugs and kisses at the door, maybe even slip a little love note or special chocolate treat into their lunch bags. I need to offer encouragement that the most worthwhile thing in life — deep and genuine LOVE: for others, for what you do, for where you live — requires pushing past that Second Day. Perhaps we should all treat ourselves accordingly when we face life’s Second Days. Especially the extra chocolate treat.

So, now I’ve thought this through, and I feel more equipped to tackle those Second Days. But you know what?

I still have to get up tomorrow morning and feed those damn chickens.

Chancy Cows

Badlands Cow in the Road #1, by Jim McKinniss

I never considered that, when I became a parent, a major part of my job description would include fighting death. But it’s true: at its most basic, parenting is about trying to keep your kids alive into adulthood. No easy task, that. Every day I fight to keep my children and myself alive. I know it’s crazy to think that I have any control over death, that it’s something I can “fight.” I know that death is inevitable. But, inasmuch as I can control anything, I want to see my daughters flourish during the time that we all have.

And it’s not just my children and myself; these days I’m also responsible for the lives of three houseplants, numerous garden plants, four chickens, and one monarch caterpillar.

I’m starting to feel like my resume for 2011-12 should read: Anti-Death Warrior. [Anti-Death Warrior is a deceptively glamorous term for a job that, most days, involves managing food on one end and poop on the other. But still.]

I’ve had varying degrees of success in my attempt to keep the living things within my orbit alive and prospering. Thus far, I’ve been most successful with the girls. The garden plants are doing well, although truth be told they receive the least of my efforts. I may have managed to kill one of our houseplants, a gift from my parents with the promise that “It’s IMPOSSIBLE to kill.” It’s not dead yet, but it’s pretty brown around the edges.

And a few weeks ago, it looked like things were really falling apart for the chickens and me.

One of our new chicks started limping for no obvious reason, a development that filled me with the alternating emotions of fear (Could it be a disease that would wipe out the whole flock?), guilt (Was it something I did, or failed to see?), and indecision (Do I take her to a vet? Or just wait and see?).

And then there was me.

You may recall that, about a month ago, I was treated for Lyme disease. It now seems that I didn’t have Lyme disease, after all, but during the last few weeks of August I wished I did. Compared with what I was going through, Lyme disease looked simple, clear-cut, and treatable.

I’ll spare you all the medical details, except to say that a second round of blood tests for my Lyme-like symptoms — joint pain, headaches, fatigue — revealed elevated muscle enzymes, suggesting that my muscles were inflamed, possibly to the point of breakdown. In an instant, I found myself in medical hell: during the course of ONE WEEK, I went back and forth from the hospital for FOUR separate rounds of bloodwork and a brain MRI. I received daily voicemail updates from my doctor, including reassuring statements like, “By the way, I’m very concerned.” I alternately hugged my girls too tightly and snapped at them. I teared up at the smallest things, like Fiona saying, “Mommy, this winter I’m planning to make a HUGE snowman!” And I learned that sometimes, the more medical attention you receive, the sicker you feel.

My medical drama happened during the SAME week that our chick started limping. Everything was crashing.

I’d like to tell you that I handled all of this like a rooster in a sack: by getting still and quiet, meditative and contemplative. But I handled it more like a stressed hen: flapping and fighting and squawking. I cried so hard in that space-age, clanging MRI tube when the Coldplay song “Fix You” was piped in over the speakers from my iPod, that the technician came over the intercom to ask if I’d fallen asleep: “We’re getting some motion in the pictures.” I was furious at God for what was, in my humble opinion, his terrible timing: I have young kids, Erick’s semester was about to start, and this put a stop — either temporary or permanent — to various plans we’d been making. I was terrified that the tests results would turn up something truly awful, but I was also terrified that they’d turn up nothing; that all this drama and trauma would leave us just as stupefied as we were now, that I’d be achy and exhausted forever with no clear reason. I wanted a reason, I wanted a treatment, and I wanted a NAME.

I also spent inordinate amounts of time out by the chicken coop, watching our limping chick and wondering what I should do. “Why is Mommy always with the chickens?” Fiona complained to Erick when she came downstairs one morning to find that I was out at the coop again.

Then, that same week — the week of the limping chicken and my elevated enzymes — I just happened to read an article in the June 25 issue of The New Yorker by Jill Lepore, about Barack Obama’s family history. It turns out that when Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, was a young man, he was supposed to go with some friends to the movies. His grandmother kept him at home, and his friends’ car swerved to avoid a cow on the road and crashed into a tanker truck, killing all passengers. Lepore concludes: “Every family has a chancy cow or two roaming the meadows of its past.”

It’s a beautiful thought, but that week it struck me as a massive understatement. No, I thought to myself, it’s more like every PERSON has a HERD of chancy cows roaming the meadows of their life. By “chancy cows,” I mean things that could have happened but didn’t — or things that DID happen but might not have — due to something that seemed insignificant at the time. Like a cow in the road, or a grandmother’s decision.

Even right smack in the middle of that crappiest of crappy weeks, I could see chancy cows all over the place.

For instance, the reason I was being sent to the hospital for repeated lab tests, instead of sitting at home wondering why my knees were still hurting after I’d finished the antibiotics for Lyme, is that we just happen to live next door to a doctor — an experienced diagnostician whose practice is closed to new patients. And we just happen to be seeing a lot of this doctor lately, because he happens to have a Golden Retriever puppy named Brinkley whom our girls have adopted, so the doctor often has to trek through the woods to our yard, to retrieve his Retriever. The other week, when this doctor came to take Brinkley home, Erick just happened to mention that I was being treated for Lyme. “Well,” said the doctor, “you need additional tests. Call my office and I’ll fit you in.”

See? Chancy cows everywhere. And if it sounds like I’m saying that a Golden Retriever puppy might just be an agent of God, it’s because I am. Chancy cows are like God’s fingerprints; they reassure me, even when everything seems to be crashing at the worst possible time, that I’m part of a larger story that’s still unfolding. There’s a reason why we all love those movies in which seemingly random, disparate plotlines turn out to be connected at the end; I think it’s because we know, deep inside, that these movies are a lot like life.

Where life and movies diverge, of course, is that movies usually have neatly tied-up endings. Life, not so much.

Later that week, Fiona called to me one morning: “Mommy? I think that chick’s walking just fine now.” And she was right; I can’t explain what made our chick limp to begin with, or how it got better, but out of nowhere it made a full recovery.

On the other hand, our monarch caterpillar spun a gorgeous sparkly green chrysalis, and then never hatched. This happens — the monarch dies in utero — and it’s been happening a lot more lately now that farmers are spraying their crops with NPV, which is a deadly virus for caterpillars.

And me? After a clean MRI but continuing funky bloodwork, my doctor referred me to a neurologist up in Burlington. Last week I drove an hour in order to have little needles stuck into my muscles, and to be told that it’s still unclear what’s going on. I have no answers, just orders for MORE bloodwork and another MRI.

Driving back from Burlington, through the cow fields (seriously!), I decided I didn’t care anymore about finding a name for what ails me. I’m tired of doctors and tests, and I’m satisfied that whatever’s going on, it’s nothing life-threatening. I’ll do this next round of tests to humor my doctor, and then I’m going to stop and accept that my “new normal” may include some aches and fatigue.

I’m okay with all of that. I may not have answers, but I know I’m not in a free fall — there are two many chancy cows wandering around for that. Who knows? Looking back, this whole episode may turn out to have been just another chancy cow.

The Birthday Dilemma: To Party, or Not To Party?

Campbell’s big birthday gift: a lion costume.

Campbell turned three last month, and we threw her a party. More accurately, she had THREE parties: an early extended-family celebration orchestrated by her grandparents when we were in Maine, a family day with presents and cake on her actual birthday, and a small party with friends. We come from a family, on both sides, that likes to celebrate.

Campbell and her cake at her family party.

And celebrations are right and good. But what I’m concerned with here is what I’ll call the “Friend Party:” the party that involves a theme, balloons on the mailbox, matching cups and plates and napkins, activities or entertainment for the children who attend, and goodie bags on the way out.

We’ve never made a big deal of our girls’ first birthdays, since they clearly won’t remember the event — and also because, at one year old, they don’t have any friends to speak of. (At that age, friendships are arranged along the lines of: I like your mom, so we’re going to prop our babies up and pretend that they’re friends so that we can hang out together.)  However, we’ve done some version of a Friend Party for each of our girls starting with their second birthdays. Not big-deal parties, mind you: we’ve never hired entertainment, I make the cake myself, and we try to stick to the rule of inviting as many friends as the child is turning in years (two for the second birthday, three for the third, etc.) — although that rule becomes almost impossible once school starts.

Campbell’s Friend Party was fairly low-key. We successfully limited the guest list to three children. It had a lion theme, but I got all the trimmings at the Dollar Store and made the cake myself. The kids decorated toilet-paper-roll binoculars, went on a little “safari” for plastic animals around our yard, played “Pin the Mane on the Lion,” ate cake, and splashed in the wading pool.

Campbell and cake #2, at her Friend Party.

It was a LOT of work. I was EXHAUSTED. We had a 2:1 child to adult ratio, and still the party seemed always to be on the verge of disaster: Brinkley (our adopted dog) running over and jumping in the wading pool, lemonade spills, goodie bags that fell apart, fights over who got which cupcake.

The goodie bags….

Did Campbell have a good time? I guess. When questioned as to whether she had fun, she said, “Yeah,” and went on about her business. I’m not sure that she actually shrugged when she said it, but that was the implication.

Will Campbell remember her third birthday party in 30 years? Almost certainly not, if Erick and I are any indication. After Campbell’s party, as we sat our wrecked bodies on the couch to debrief, Erick pointed out that both of our mothers had probably put a lot of time and effort into Friend Parties for US. From old photos, I know this to be true. Do Erick and I remember a single  childhood birthday party? Not a one.

I’m starting to think that Friend Parties don’t provide a very good return on investment.

I’m starting to think that Friend Parties are more for the parents than for our children: I felt like a GREAT mother while I was spending hours decorating the cake and the house. (And no parent wants “lack of adequate birthday celebrations” to be added to the list of reasons our children end up in therapy in 20 years).

In short, I’m starting to think that Friend Parties are not a very good idea, and I’m trying to find a way to stop throwing them — or at least, to stop throwing them for EVERY child, EVERY year.

In fact, it’s recently come to my attention, through conversations with family and friends, that many — if not MOST — parents do not throw each of their children a Friend Party for every birthday. I don’t know why I never got this memo, but I sincerely wish that somebody had told me this before Fiona turned two. What do I know? I grew up an only child; EVERY year was a Friend Party year.

The problem is, now I’m locked in to throwing Friend Parties for each of my children from the ages of two to five, because that’s what we did for Fiona. Isn’t it a rule of parenting that what you do for one child, you pretty much have to do for all the others? I don’t want Campbell and Georgia telling their therapists that we loved Fiona more, because she got the most Friend Parties.

So, here is my resolution, and you can hold me to it: I’m going to keep any Friend Parties as small and simple as possible, and after age five, my girls will be told that since they are more “grown up,” they can now have “Big Girl Birthday Parties” involving a special family celebration and perhaps a tea party or movie date with up to two friends.

Friend Parties are NOT at all a bad thing, and I’m sure many mothers throw them every year for every child without feeling the least bit frazzled. But for us, it’s time to downsize. When the amount of pleasure my children take in a party isn’t outweighing the amount of blood, sweat and tears I’ve put into planning the party, something’s got to give.

And really, aren’t birthday parties supposed to be about love? About celebrating the special life of a loved one? If I’m sending my girls — and myself — the message that love always has to come with balloons and streamers and matching paper products and goodie bags, I’m just setting them up for disillusionment. I’m setting them up to become like me: the me who was crushed our first Easter as a married couple because Erick didn’t get me a gift or a card. Who expects gifts and cards on Easter beyond childhood?!? you may ask. I did.

In the immortal words of Leonard Cohen: Love is not a victory march. It’s a cold and it’s a broken “Hallelujah.” It’s a silly luxury to ruminate so much about birthday parties. But it just may be that birthday parties are as good a place as any to begin preparing my girls for the world, by teaching them to accept love in smaller ways.