Happy New Year, Bye Bye 2025, HELLOOOOOO 2026!!

 This is meeeeeeeeee right now. If I've been "truculent...stand-offish,...who cares?"

Cindy's Work Career in Two Characters

The Loyal, True and Brave

I cannot stop thinking about this interpretation of the Civil War era “Battle Cry of Freedom.”

Bon Iver was not really on my radar (except for Justin Timberlake’s SNL impersonation with Maya Rudolph as Beyonce intoning “Oh no! Bon Iver sang himself to sleep!”) (And supposedly Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom features a singer character with the same Wisconsin woodsy vibe) but I knew enough of Justin Vernon’s signature falsetto to identify the band after I heard the opening chords on the news coverage of the Harris/Walz rally in Eau Claire.

And ever since I heard the three-man stripped down version of George Frederick Root’s 1862 marching tune, I’ve been swept up in its quiet power. Recordings of the song by military choirs and the such pound on the one and the three, as strident and white boi as “Uptown Girl,” but here, on this outdoor stage, in the late summer sun and breeze, the tune is slowed and caressed until it grooves.

The vocal swoops from Vernon’s high falsetto into the aching stretch of his head voice, his fist in the air at “the Union forever!“, the rapt faces of the audience, the ALS interpreters at his feet: It’s all so moving, serious and genuine, so gentle and so real, and so so unlike the rabid frenzy and sour artifice of those other rallies, the red hat ones we’ve turned away from now these many years.

The bitter memory of Trump contorting his voice and body into a vicious caricature of a disabled reporter flares once again, along with the anguish of our inability to fight back against this one unnecessary public stabbing, this one cruelty of the thousands by what became the most powerful man in the nation.

No more. We are not going back. We are moving inexorably toward care and justice, with the strength of a massive army, but this time with a conscience and integrity and the mission to protect the most, not the wealthy few.

“We will welcome to our numbers the loyal, true and brave/…and although he may be poor, not a man will be a slave/Shouting the battle cry of freedom”

Cindy's Love Life in Three Clips

Behind the Scenes of "Cindy's Love Life in Three Clips"

1) "He's Cuter in Person" (Circa 1986) 

 What makes this even more delicious is that I ACTUALLY DID A LEPRECHAUN SKIT for the McKenzie Variety Show. I even RESEARCHED the Irish accent!

Looololololoollll I am HOWLING! ON THE FLOOR!

2) "Carrie and Big" (Circa 1987)

And what makes this one even weirder is that the names are the same.

3) "Kaitlyn Gets Her Ears Pierced" (Circa 1991-Present, with Gratitude and Undying Love)

But this one, this one, my dears. This is the good stuff, as dear Robin Williams says in Good Will Hunting.

This is Randy on and me about the couch on Saturday morning, the Masters on TV, the girls safely ensconced and thriving away at school, the cats somewhere about, lunch finishing up in the stove.

I am so so SO grateful. And as Dickens taught me, all of this bliss was made possible by all of the dreck that came before.

My First Ishtar, My Meeting Some Famous Bakers, and My Considering a Serious Drug

So it's Thursday night, a beautiful beautiful spring night, clear and cool and I'm driving to an Ishtar, my first Ishtar, a celebration of community and Islam, to which I have been generously invited by Bushra Amiwala, a former Niles North student, a dear brilliant girl who has grown into an accomplished shining star of a young woman. 

The dress code suggested formal and modest so a burgundy turtleneck covers the neckline of my floor length flowy sienna-patterned dress with long sleeves. 

When Bushra sees my goldenrod scarf over the back of my hair, she will coo "Oh, look at you!" and I will blush with being appreciated for trying.

I also tried to fast, as recommended, but couldn't forgo water. 

Skipping food all day was easy peasy lemon squeeze, but the occasional spot of thirst frightened me with its intensity. Like I was choking, like panic might come soon if I didn't have a swallow of water at hand.

So at the Ishtar, when the gracious hostess, or was it the hilarious comedian emcee Zaid Fouzi?, asked those who had fasted to stand, I stayed in my seat, ever the rule-follower, which now connects to that other new discovery about myself which I am learning more and more of every day. 

(Bushra, it turns out, like so many other brilliant and powerful and charismatic women, also has opened up about her neurodivergence. When our new social studies director invited her to speak to the student tutors at North, Bushra urged us to embrace our differences. She was singing my life with her words with her mic up in front of the student tutors in the Point, our tutoring center, and then when her Powerpoint flipped to her Formula for Success and the expected components of "hard work" and "passion" were multipled by "IMPULSE"(!), I had to jump a bit in my seat, and turn, and give a huge happy smile and thumbs up to the aforementioned new director who had been in A Meeting with me already to year to talk about that very quality of mine.)

(LOLOLOL)

(Laugh break, but now back to our story which is really about something else besides how wonderful the Muslim community dinner was, and how welcoming and beautiful everyone was, and how many former students and parents I ran into, but rather about what happened on the way...)

So BEFORE the Ishtar in Skokie, and AFTER I dropped off in the metal after-hour bins in front of the Skokie Food Pantry the leftover baked goods from EvaDeans the new breakfast/lunch restaurant and bakery in Wilmette run by the son of the guy who runs Bennison's...

But wait, I have to tell you about meeting that very father and son duo at EvaDeans when I went to pick up their day olds (like we used to do in New Orleans, but that was at a factory and we just dumped the trays into shopping bags, while Kristina, the lovely woman behind the counter at EvaDeans loaded up their nice white boxes with the goodies -- probably eight or so full heavy boxes at the end).

The father and son were sitting at the coffee bar towards the back in the peace and quiet of post-closing time and when Kristina told me who they were, I had to go over to thank them and do a little gushing.

"Do you have the bakery that's won all those French awards?" I asked and he demurred something like "yes," although I was grossly oversimplifying the accomplishment, and I launched into a little enthusiastic stanning about how much I selfishly appreciated the new restaurant for Wilmette and how I doubly appreciated the donation of leftovers for the food pantry that would be going into the homes of my students.

When I finished my long sentence, I started backing away to give them back their conversation, but bumped into a chair stacked upside down on the table for floor mopping and didn't even feel embarrassed as I righted it before it fell because the awkwardness was so stock Fan Girl and suited my little cosplay.

(I'll write later about the cosplaying aspect of neurodivergence. Oceana on TikTok alludes to this when she talks about High Masking Girls dressing up and wearing makeup both for ourselves and for the roles we play.)

So there I was, AFTER the bakery and food pantry (I'll be doing this run every Thursday from here on out) and BEFORE the big party in the hotel ballroom, driving in the gorgeous spring light and I had the radio on and I heard an NPR story about Ibogaine.

Have you heard about this drug?

The addiction-destroying results of the trip sound almost too juicy to be true but they're true, they're true! 

Like something out of a novel by Ann Patchett, Westerners have adopted the hallucinogenic from an African root and been carrying out therapeutic trials, first in the 1960's along with psilocybin, and lately, (get this delicious detail), trials are underway in Mexico and in BOATS off the coast of Florida because the treatment has not yet been approved by the FDA.

The ameliorating effects astound me; eliminating life-threatening cravings for cocaine and crack and alcohol with a single dose. 

But it's the hallucinatory trip one must first got through that held my attention -- because as it was described, the visions are hellish, with past traumas and fears and agonies revisited and some, previously out of reach to the unmedicated brain, remembered.

So on this Easter afternoon, post brunch with my handsome husband, safe and content in the knowledge that our two beautiful daughters spent their first Easter away from us, but together at Knox in Mia's cute dorm room, I can think about what first dawned on me upon hearing of this miracle.

I would take that drug.

I would take it, not to beat an addiction, but for the trip to hell itself. 

I would take the pill, feel the pain, go through my worst agonies in person all over again, if it would give me one more moment with Nancy again. 

I want to see Christopher once more, even if he is in pain, as a witness to the crash told me. 

If all I got from the trip was feeling fresh and raw all over again that my mother and father were gone forever and never coming back, I would swallow that capsule with relish.

Who would say no to the offer of a time machine? 

Who chooses the Blue Pill to return back to the status quo instead of the Red, which give you one more chance?

Three Writing Prompts

 The morning after…

The morning after Dianne took me out for my 20th birthday, I woke up on her hard wooden dorm room floor to January sunlight flooding through the high arched glass into my newly 20 year old face. Hungover, 20, deliriously happy, knowing already I would remember that crystal blue sky, knowing I was young, knowing more giggling nights in bars lay ahead, and more lit blue mornings like this one, so unlike and so far from the agony of 19.

Speculative Non-fiction

In my mind I now have a third child. A boy. Spencer? No, Jasper. JASPER. The children in The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew called their friend "Jappy" for short, but our better nickname for our precious little limp guy will be…Jaspy. An apt description from an antique name, as he rasps out our names from his contorted tiny throat, with lisping piping melodic tweets, as he calls us to his side. 

"What's up, little Jaspy? What's up, little guy?" asks my Mia, my little mother, my careloving oldest, her hands at the ready.

He crows at her, his eyes shining.

"Hi Jaspy!" calls Nora, ready for play. She tosses him a soft ball, knowing he will delight in its color arcing across his vision, knowing he will watch it rise and fall, knowing he will be content with only this, and loving him for all he is, just as he is, lying here before us in his big boy crib.

The Interrogative Mood

First of all, WHAT the hell? Second of all, WHAT the bloody hell? WHY? (Or don't I actually, truthfully, know why?) 

Alright then, why NOW? (Don't I kind of know the answer to that one too?)

Okay, then, WHAT were you thinking? (Although I kind of know what you were thinking,) WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

How about HOW? HOW ON EARTH did you think that was a good idea?

How about when? WHEN did you get the idea that that was a good idea? After your third cocktail? After your fifth beer? After you got your dose of liquid courage and lost your dose of better judgment?

How about WHO? As in WHO do you think you are?! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

And how can we forget about WHERE? WHERE DO YOU GET OFF? Where is your mind? Your conscience? Your memory of us and the way we were?  

Neurodiverse Will Hunting

Jesus Christ, I'm recognizing something.

Bear with me and the intense emotions this realization is bringing up, please, dear friends, but my brothers and sisters in this situation with me have suffered immensely and I am only just now this week coming to the understanding of who I am and the powers, both natural and conveyed by protection under human rights and manmade law, I have.

God bless you all who have loved and enjoyed and appreciated me, and I pray you will continue to do so. Now that my commonalities with a particular community and a rightfully protected class (up to 10% of the population, says a recent New York Times article) are dawning on me, so so SO much is slipping into place.

I feel fucking split wide open and the brilliant light pouring out is blinding me while I bathe in its warmth. I weep, I weep.

A million thanks to my dear colleagues with and without training in recognizing exceptionalism who have extended compassion and understanding to me and stuck with me through the last few hellish years. I am fortunate to be blessed with a freaking hot gorgeous whipsmart hubby and two brilliant daughters who seem already in their own ways to surpass their parents in thinking and creativity. This support system kept me going despite the threats and ostracization from the non-comprehending that have prevented much sleep over the last years. To be honest, when the adrenaline strikes me wide awake at five, I have no complaints. I love the energy rush and I love the early morning light.

“You’re like an SNL skit,” said a dear friend. We laughed. I felt so seen. And loved—for exactly who I am. I was sitting with friends around our dining room table, the huge wooden six-footer that Randy and I bought from a Mexican furniture store on Milwaukee Avenue in the 90’s. “Gordita” is the table’s name, for the luscious curves of her fat carved legs. She still bears the Magic Marker traces of Mia and Nora’s artwork — a few years I considered sanding her tabletop anew, but now I treasure these precious marks. Some may see the colorful traces as mars; I do not. Earlier in the conversation, another friend, an internist, mentioned how necessary it is “to be patient with people’s thought processes.” I yelped with recognition. “That’s me!” I squealed. “I have to be more patient with people’s thought processes!”

Reading the literature and learning from the Tiktoks this week has been a rollercoaster experience, to say the least. My sisters in this sorority have been discriminated against, misunderstood, sexually abused (it’s a thing! who knew!? you can look it up! Jesus!), and many also have reached the heights of success. Hilary Clinton looks very different to me now. So does Beyonce.

I’m tired now so I’ll wrap this post up but, damn. Damn. I understand so much about my past now, and I am so fucking excited about tomorrow.

IlliNOISE!!

 Illinois at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, a story told through dance and Sufjan Stevens’s immortal music from the album of the same name, is a BANGER.

“Did you know someone in the show?” asked the woman who sat behind me after the last of the audience’s wild applause and affirmative shouts had died away.

I laughed and said no (even though Ahmad Simmons had blown me a kiss during curtain calls), I just loved this album and hadn’t she had it on repeat when it came out?

She may have been referring to my shoulders shaking with sobs I muffled with my hands during “Casimir Pulaski Day” or maybe the way I chanted along with “I made a LOT OF MISTAKES” or perhaps my calls of “BRAVA” after Rachel Lockhart tore down the stage in “Jacksonville.”

Regardless, if the producers are billing this as a dance/CONCERT hybrid and if the players insist on bringing such brilliance, then you better bet they’re gonna get some pretty passionate responses.

But our audience emotions weren’t all jubilant — after the John Wayne Gacy song faded away, with its excruciating lyrics “Oh, the dead/Twenty-seven people/Even more, they were boys/With their cars, summer jobs/Oh my god” still resonating, the entire packed room sat in stunned silence. It was only after the first notes of the next song broke the spell that we exploded into cheers.

I'm grabbing strangers on the way out, asking for a hug, sobbing with joy, babbling about the goodness of it all, and when we hit the lobby, there's one more thrill through the floor to ceiling windows -- the sight of our glorious city and resplendent lake spread out before us in the afternoon light. The crowds on Broadway who flock to this show will never have this unique Illinois experience.

“I’m still vibrating,” said the man in the lobby who witnessed my selfie with Dario, and I know he is not alone.

Here's the New Yorker review, and the

Three Rituals for Two Daughters and Their Mother

 

I needed a ritual. More than a hug goodbye in the dorm vestibule. Better than a sob as we drove away. 

The girls had chosen hundred year old Illinois schools: Nora, the enormous state flagship where her maternal grandmother matriculated; Mia, a tiny private liberal arts school in a tiny town near the Iowa border. 

Mia's return to college has the feeling of another small and hard won victory. She made lemonade out of her unplanned gap year by serving as the assistant director at a local youth and special needs adult service program in Glencoe.

And now they were going away, Nora in mid August, Mia a month later. An empty nest, all at once, and I needed a commemoration, a cultural practice to guide me in and through the moment. I'll always be their mother, but from now on I would be a long distance mom, phoning it in so to speak, sending my love instead of spending and spreading it in the home we shared. 

Where does my help come from? I lift my eyes to women who have kept my feet steady on the path. Sharon Olds has a poem about the return of her older children, all asleep in a hotel suite, and dear Sinead O'Conner also gives me mother wisdom in her lyric "Three Babies." 

I'd been humming Sinead's propulsive dirge for days, ever since she left us, too soon, too soon. I kept her songs on repeat while I tackled cleaning out the garage on one of those precious long last summer days. I only knew a few of the words. The most important words, actually, "The face of you/The smell of you" and what expression could better bear the intensity of deep and instinctual and primeval Mother Love? 

But there is another story in her song, buried beneath her obscuring keening --- with the phrases "I'm like a wild horse" comes the clue and the "I know they will be returned to me" falls with a devastating weight. I translate into the gut wrench of "DCFS."

But despite Sinead's pain (or perhaps because of it), she left me and all of us so so many gifts. One of them is this: With the girls leaving, I can interpret her poem for myself, set myself in her anguish and also the prevailing hope of another tearful reunion.

Mia joined me in the garage to help me sweep up the broken pots and untangling the mismatched Christmas lights. We spelled each other, taking turns tossing and sorting. I'm trying to keep as much as I can from the waste stream ("What if nothing is waste?" was the mind blowing slogan on the side of the garbage truck) while my dear girl is exercising her new found skill to let go and let goodness. I take her broken shards from a kiln failure out of the trash and sprinkle them in the gravel of the passthrough to the alley. Organics get dumped into another back corner of the garden, behind the overgrown mint and autumn clematis. And there, tucked away and undisturbed, was the dead baby rabbit. Unbloodied and whole, his eye still shiny but still. He could have been resting. I gasped and called for Mia, who like me, cooed with pathos at the pitiful sight. Flies were starting to gather on his fur so I suggested a burial. We'd recently uncovered the big metal shovel in the tool pile. 

"Yes!" said Mia and told me about a Youtube video she'd seen that taught her the spot where an animal is buried may lay bare for a while: "The earth's process of grief" she called it, while later the fertilizing will kick in and nourish away. 

I dug a shallow hole next to where he lay, handed the shovel over and Mia gently slid him in. 

"Let's say a few words," I suggested, swept up in the play rite, and "Thank you, Rabbit, for delighting us when you played in the yard, even though you ate my hostas and the coneflowers" 

Mia covered him with the loose dirt and my ceremony took care of itself. Thank you, little baby, goodbye, goodbye.

I will always be their mother, near or far, and Bernadette's continual mother of me endures, not through any supernatural intervention, but through my inheritance: the blood and bone and DNA and laugh and nose and eyes and flank and smile and love of children and their education and growth. And the sacrifices I have made and will make. 

Thank you, Universe, for sending all the things as I need them. Even if I get impatient, often, waiting.

*****

Nora had also joined me in the garage the first day I stared the dusty, cobwebby task, but not voluntarily. Earlier that day I was standing alone, looking at the two kayaks resting on the dead-leaf-strewn floor and knowing from experience that by myself, I could lift the end of each one into the looped strap hanging from the rafters, then slide down to the other end and finagle it into the other loop to store it overhead. But I wasn't feeling it this time. 

Nora was finishing her breakfast in the kitchen. She was leaving in a less than a week. 

"I need your help."

"Let Mia do it." Mia's recycled canvases for the plein air landscape workshop she's leading tomorrow are littered across the living room floor, half gessoed and prepped. 

"Mia is working for her work," I reply, frustration mounting.

"Ask Dad!" Nora insists.

"He's working." Randy glances away from his screen set up on the dining room table to give me a "Don't get me involved" look.

Nora heads upstairs and my chest tightens up.

"Nora!"

"Don't yell at me," still ascending. "I won't help you if you yell at me."

And that power move snaps my last nerve. I pound up the stairs behind her, up to her now locked bedroom door.

I call, "You have to do your share! You have responsibilities since you live here. If you say no, I'm going to say no next time you ask for the car!" 

It's a petty fight. I'm tired and sad and so tired. They are leaving. When will they leave? How badly will I miss them?

Randy and I don't punish, we don't deny, and I don't really think of the car as belonging to any one of us. But I'd already lost my cool and when Nora pleads through the closed door, "Don't yell at me! I can't stand it when you yell!" I call out my parting shot. "I AM NOT YELLING. I AM TALKING LOUD ENOUGH SO YOU CAN HEAR ME THROUGH THE DOOR."

I knew I was playing the villain but she was the one not helping me. I go back to the garage, take a breath and lift one end of the blue kayak. 

"Blue Bayou" is the name I've given her, inspired by a paddle that Mia and I took down the Chicago River last week. The red boat is the punny "Cinnamon Bark" and wouldn't it be pretty if we had their names painted in script on their bows?

If I hook the t-shaped plastic handle of Blue Bayou's tether strap into one of the loops hanging from the ceiling, the prow will stay suspended so I can get the point of the stern into the opposite loop. Then I can go back to the front end and lift. It takes a few tries, I can't see the loop and my grip is awkward. I've dropped the boat a couple times doing this solo. 

I've got her up and secure when Nora appears in the doorway.

"Oh honey," I say, "I'm sorry..."

"Don't you fucking apologize," she says and bursts into tears. I'm shocked. She's taller than I am now. She goes out with her friends to restaurants and a couple of times to dance clubs and once a waiter told her and two of her friends that the family next to them (well, actually, the dad of the family) had bought them dinner. It's like that old chestnut image I had drawn on the chalkboard during summer school in June to illustrate the vocab word "ambiguous." A vase or two faces? Was the dad a creep or a caring stranger? Both? Was I a monster or did she overreact? Both? Is she a child or a teen or a college freshman or a young woman or all of the above?

"Okay, okay," I acquiesce. 

I might be right but she's in real tears. And she is here, helping me. She holds up the red stern and I slip the bow into place. It's so much easier with her than without her.

"Thank you, honey" and she leaves and I worry for the next couple of days at the strength of her emotion. There's so much she has only hinted at, so much friend and boy drama. And she was leaving very soon. 

*****

One more ritual. 

Nora had launched, beautifully to my proud eyes. Mia had a few more days here at home, finishing up her job and her dog-sitting, packing and recycling so much of the extra t-shirts and craft supplies from her stuffed closet. 

I'd offered my cousin Sally and her hubby Erik a ride home after their return from a month in Denmark. Mia loves them both and wanted to return to a weekend in Saugatuck, but the packing boxes that Nora filled so easily remained unfilled in the chaos of Mia's room. 

She stayed home with Randy, I drove Sally and Erik back to Michigan, and I would be back by Monday to drive to Mia's school. Yes, yes, it was Mia's last weekend with us. And I still needed to take this road trip I had been looking forward to.

Sally and I chattered so furiously on the ride that I missed three exits. Exits I'd taken dozens of times, lol. The next day we hiked the Crow's Nest Trail along the crest of the Baldhead dune, past the Oxbow art colony, out to the overlook with the Lake Michigan spread before us. Sally's hiking group is a fast-moving, fast-talking one but I kept up and loved the conversation about the mansions on the river and their eccentric denizens. 

A couple of hours later I was on the way home, but our morning hike had not been quite enough beauty of this gorgeous summer day. I dallied in farmland before hitting the highway, picked some apples, a pint of raspberries and a box full of nectarines at Crane's Upick (not to be confused with Crane's Orchards across the street, lol), then re-found a goat farm I'd taken the girls to years ago. 

The farm's cheese shop resides under the trees in a tiny shack between the gravel parking lot and the goat pasture. All was quiet. Was there cheese today? Were they closed? I opened the door to the shop and found a loud crowd of shoppers vying for the French herb chevre and cow's milk "Poet's Tomme." 

I laughed and said to a couple nearby, "I thought I was in the middle of nowhere!" 

"So did everyone else!" and we laughed together.

 The last time I was here with my little lovey girls, I asked Mia to hold the camera and I vamped in front of the wire fence in front of a sow. It's a little shtick of mine -- I've va va voomed in Mexico in front of a herd of coatis raiding a row of garbage cans. This time around, without my little giggling audience, it's not quite so fun.

An hour or so later, I was part way back to Chicagoland, but still jonesing for more soaking up of the day.

I pulled off the highway at New Buffalo and made my way to the beach. "FULL" said the parking lot sign but I turned in anyway, counting on the late afternoon nap exodus, and found a spot, no problem. More challenging was the line into the one women's bathroom so I made a fool of myself contorting into my tight striped two piece swimsuit underneath my sundress. 

Crowds and crowds on the boardwalk, on the sand, in the waves. I walked on and on along the waterline, smiling at the babies and toddlers, grooving to the drifting gusts of music from clusters of lawnchairs. Found a spot almost to the edge of the public beach, where the sign says "All Long Haired Freaky People Need Not Apply PRIVATE PROPERTY." Dumped my stuff next to a group of collegey kids and entered the surf. The sensation was delicious -- the water was only a few degrees cooler than the air. But the waves, the waves, the lift of the waves, that was what I played with. Floating and sculling with those old water ballet tricks I learned at Girl Scout camp, I locked my knees straight and lifted my pointed ballet feet up out of the water, wiggled my toes and splashed forward into a somersault. 

The water and me, playing. Mother Michigan lifting me up in her arms and then swinging me down. Wave crest and trough, over and over, in a dancing game. 

I didn't want to leave. I didn't want to leave the water. I didn't want to leave the moment. 

I tried to pull myself out, leave the weightlessness, drag my heavy body back onto the strand. No luck -- I dove back in. 

"Oh!" I said, probably out loud.

Here's what I came here for -- the revelation. This in-between moment and this in-between place, is "liminal space" what they call it nowadays? 

There was another moment, long (and yet not long) ago, when I didn't want to leave the water (Jesus, the connection between these two bookends makes me flush) -- The night the contractions began and I took refuge beneath the warm tap water in our big white clawfoot tub. 

Randy and I were living in a bank building on California Avenue in Chicago and he slept on while I breathed through the contractions, closed my eyes and practiced the giving in, the giving up, the limpness and heaviness that carries a laboring mother through the waves of pain.

I didn't want to leave the tub, but when the pain started to overwhelm me, I had to wake Randy. He was all action, go go GO, excited and happy, ready to drive to Northwestern. I, on the other hand, only wanted to go back to the tub. I slipped into my internal work; managing the pain took everything from me. The water was my relief -- when Randy urged me to step out and dry off, the whole world became rock hard and gravity increased me ten thousand pounds. 

Palmer jokes to this day about how he thought we were all ready to go, then turned around and found me back in the tub. 

Finally, I gave in. I left the water, stepped into clothes he had found and walked out of our home. No checking for keys, alarm, lights, luggage, wallet, nothing. Just walked away from my old life.

And twenty years later, here I was in the water again. But this time the pain of leaving was facing a world without my girls in my daily life. Being the mother from far away instead of holding them in my arms, seeing their beautiful faces close to mine.

And yet. And yet.

Here's the secret that shhhhhh (mothers who love and sacrifice are not really supposed to feel...) DROP DEAD EXCITED. I AM THRILLED. (shhhhhhh!)

Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron's 2001 blockbuster film Y Tu Mama Tambien (And Your Mother Too), Oscar nominated for Best Original Screenplay, hides a profound mediation about friendship, love, lust, and mortality within the framework of a roadtrip sex romp: Two randy teen boys go with an older woman to the beach.

The film closes with a bang, but gives us an even more devastating penultimate scene in the moments before.

Watch, watch, watch the entire film, please. Then relish in a magically designed moment of silence broken by the percussion of water on our ear drums as Julia dives beneath the waves and emerges baptized. 

The narrator tells us, "She stayed behind to begin her exploration of the local coves. The last thing she told Tenoch and Julio was: 'Life is like the surf, so give yourself away like the sea.'"

Harm

 

 

Years ago, before either of us had children or spouses, I slept with an old friend. The morning after, we went out to breakfast in Ravenswood. We were bleary with lack of sleep and the coffee tasted good.

He would call me once a few days later, with gentle consideration, to check in. He was teaching film in Texas, he had only been in Chicago for a weekend shoot, and we both knew that our one night was spurred by little emotion more than curiosity and nostalgia for our graduate school days. We would exchange nothing more than Christmas cards in the ensuing years, but I appreciated the kind gesture, and the closure, of that phone call. 

But that morning after, in the red vinyl booth of the diner, he flashed his charming blue eyes at me and called me the most dangerous thing in his life of late.

"Me? Dangerous? Oh, I'm harmless," I laughed and I truly felt that way with this friend, as edgy as our friend talk had always been and as adventurous as our gymnastics were the night before. 

He had nothing to worry about with me. I knew, and I might even have shared with him, that I was capable of romantic obsession and desperate dramatics in the name of love and longing. Not so here. His curly red locks did remind me of the perennial object of my heart, but I felt a hollowness here that would somehow avoid being damaging, probably from his careful courtesy, and that one kind, short, final phone call.

****

Last week the therapist said "You know, Cindy, you can't avoid it," when I trotted out that old canard "I don't want to hurt anybody," and I nodded, ever the agreeable student, switching gears to supply an example, "Yeah, like 'want to go to lunch?' 'Oh, I'm sorry, I can't' and you can hurt someone's feelings without meaning to."

But the therapist is also touching on something deeper: Being a mother -- or a wife -- or a teacher, friend, any meaningful relationship really -- brings with it the risk of imbalance in the power and tenderness and measurement of love. 

"Do I love them more than they love me?" The question can hurt you or you can take pride and comfort in your larger heart. 

Or you can go a little crazy (see "Obsession" and "Dramatics" above).

****

The bleary breakfast memory of my friend calling me dangerous came up when I re-read two Sharon Olds poems this morning: "Looking at Them Asleep" and "Sleep Suite." The two are companion pieces, a mother watching her resting children, first when they are small, and in the later poem, when the son and daughter are "nearly-grown," "in a little hotel suite."

Olds' eye is so sharp, her words so precise, the moment so tender, that mothers will gasp with recognition. Do we all watch them sleep, take a moment to forgive them in their unconsciousness and vulnerability?

So grateful I am for the communion with a mother poet who sings my life with the words "I roam in the half dark, getting ready for bed. I stalk my happiness. I'm like someone from the past allowed to come back, I am with our beloveds, they are dreaming, safe."

But there is another phrase that strikes deep within me as she describes the power and safety of this scene, this place: "it is broken, the killership of my family, it is stopped within me, the complex gear that translated its motion."

Olds came from a family of brutality, her father not only alcoholic, but Calvinistically abusive to his children and his wife, who was not able to protect her children from his wrath.

I too have a "killership," a legacy of caring adults who kill in accidents, who hurt without intention, who leave devastation in their wake. I fear at times that it lives within my genes. 

Olds offers me forgiveness and hope and endurance, of course, the pattern of harm "broken" and "stopped" by a moment of peace and rest, a moment of many that leads down the new path, where children grow up and all is well. 

Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, Mia and Nora and Randy, for breaking the patterns of the past and walking with me toward something better, something far more safe. 

 

“Baby”

Randy and I drove Nora to Champaign last week to move into her dorm. It was time. She'd wrapped up her work at the fancy pizza place, she'd sifted and selected and packed her stuff, she'd had a fancy dinner in Chicago with her big sister, her friends were already off to their own schools. 

From me, she had been pulling away for some time. I knew that her irritation was developmentally appropriate. It still hurt, but I knew that we could all look forward to some peace when she was safe at school. And all these words fail because there is no expressing how wondrous she is to me, as much so as when she first arrived in that Evanston hospital room.

The day of, there were some tears when she hugged her big sister goodbye on the sidewalk, but I had a Zoom scheduled during the ride down so Randy and Nora talked quietly in the front seat while I went to a work call. Nora did the driving through the cornfields. 

Her dorm is a bland four story mid-century, retro-fitted with window air conditioning units. When I saw the signs welcoming students to the Global Crossroads Living and Learning Community and saw the beautiful student names on the dorm room doors, I had to smile at the beautiful place she had landed, but it wouldn't be until Nora's second day that she texted how suprised she was and how much she loved being in a super diverse dorm and how welcoming everyone was. She would send a pic of a map with pins where all the kids hailed from, with lots in India and China and one in Madagascar and northern Canada and California. 

But that day, during drop-off day, her eyes were full of her new empty room, its closet, its possibilities. We only needed one trip up with the wood cart, easy-peasy. I whipped out the Clorex wipes and started on the top of the air conditioner and the desk until Nora asked me to please just stop, she couldn't right now. We were all happy to have an excuse to leave her tiny space and drive down the street to the cute coffee shop I had found during our first visit in the spring. I chatted up a friendly professor in the line, we ate our sandwiches, then drove by the mini-Target in the business strip near campus for conditioner.

We would circle around looking for parking, but once we were driving back in the direction of Nora's dorm, we bailed on the shopping trip. 

There was only one thing left for us to do. 

"I can get the conditioner by myself later," said my dear tiny daughter, my five foot seven cheerleader, my supporter of the cheer pyramid, my base, my lifter of small flyers, my love, my youngest grown to honorable womanhood, my wise young woman of our creation, my child, my baby. 

We passed the Sigma Nu house on the way back. "Oh, they're the big partiers," I warned. "Stay away from the Sigmas!" There's a tiny block of green woods between her dorm and the quads. She may walk here, under these trees, on her way to Black History 1619-present or Gender and Sexuality in Greco-Roman Antiquity. 

Back at the dorm, Randy and I got out of the car with Nora, but there was no more parent work that needed to be done in her room. 

We decided to say goodbye in the front hall, we hugged and took pictures, and she was walking away, and she closed the door to the halls behind her, and I couldn't see her anymore, and my body started heaving. Randy and I walked outside without talking and sobs convulsed in my gut and moved up to my hard chest and out my choking throat. 

The grief was beyond my control and so was my body which couldn't move toward the car but had to stumble over to a place beneath her window, down on the sidewalk beside the giant cottonwood tree where I searched above for the window holding my baby. 

I wasn't sure which room was hers. I texted her a note to come to the window. She did, but first she snapped a pic of my wandering on the sidewalk, a glimpse of a woman on the brink of a new life. Like her, but also not.

She came to the window and waved at me. I waved back and it was all I needed. Now I could go.

Big Plans

By my second reading of Jonathan Frantzen's The Corrections, my impressions of most of the family complication fell away and the last line remained foremost in my mind: "She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life." What an amazing sentence.

Time is the answer to everything, isn't it? "Had we but world enough and time..." says Andrew Marvell to his "coy" mistress who may be buying time, rather than biding it.

From Futurity magazine, via my principal, here's "Study Debunks Myth of the Fast Learner." What if I'm only now learning what most of you learned as children? What if I never learn what you know so deeply, you can barely express it? No, says Futurity, you're not behind. You just think you are.

What if we actually know the truth so deep down in our bones that it goes without saying: Love is the answer. Truth is the daughter of time. Practice kindness and compassion and joy in all things. The struggle is real. Black lives matter. Each breath is a precious gift. Focus on your breath and make your exhale longer than your inhale.

Nora is leaving and Mia is making noise about following her out of the nest.

Winter Village Dream/ June, 2022

"Do you like the snow?" I asked the child with me.


"I like magic snow!"


"Magic snow? What's that?" And as he described the scene to me, the images rolled out before my eyes.


"Magic snow is when it snows for piles and piles and then they sweep it up, shovel off the road and paths and put all that snow wherever they can, in the yards and off to the side." Now I saw more white falling down, this time in fluffy weightless wisps, and the boy said, "That's magic snow!" The second downfall, he meant, just when you can't imagine where you can put any more.


We kept walking down the lane, me pointing out the cabins and huts made of logs. As I cooed at one rustic house, someone said, "It is what it is" and I recognized the place.


We were there. My sister's house. She did not look at me much while I stayed with her, I did not know if I was welcome, but neither did she ask me to leave either. I pet her blond toddler, who then wandered off. She spent time in her bathroom, sitting on the tile floor, looking into a bright mirrored light for the anti-darkness exposure.


I tried to compliment the things she had, to ask questions and engage her, but when I inquired about the tracks next to the house, the train arrived and it was three burnt out and rusted school buses shackled together on the track, screeching and falling with the engine-less propulsion of a roller coaster, turning a gut-wrenching corner next the house, then falling at a sickening angle down the twist of track, revealing the gaping hole in the side of a bus where anyone inside would need to hang on for life to not fall out.

Therapeutic Crafting

Last night at the Board Meeting, I ran into a librarian I respect and love. 

"You can't retire!" I said as we bumped forearms, that familiar COVID gesture that I won't stop using because handshakes? Ick. 

"Oh, yes, I can!" she laughed.  Her hair is a chic cloud of silver.

"Do you have plans for next year?"

"I'm going to take a year and just make things!"

I laughed too, with joy and affirmation at her plan and called out that it sounded like a dream. And maybe limitless creation is my dream, now that I think of it, although I know I'm such a multi-tasker (cough, short-attention-spanned dabbler) that a year of free time would probably mean an avalanche of new opened and re-opened projects. 

But I did finish one this weekend, a quick craft that I found on TikTok, melting wax to stick three fingertips in, then closing the fingers together to form three joined wax cuplets that resemble a small flower blossom. 

I lit three scented candles, then waited for a pool of liquid to form. We have a candle drawer in the kitchen for birthdays and stinky onion moments, and a yellow birthday cake taper caught my eye. The scented candles were all white so I lit and dripped the thin yellow one over the Paddywax metal box to mix in a little color. The resulting mix was a pale green I loved, even more so for its little dash of complicating soot. 

The first dipping in the melted liquid was an intense sensation and the cups took a few long minutes to harden and turn opaque. I sped up the process by plunging the tips of my fingers in ice water, but no matter the temp, I wasn't able to adhere the cups together -- the wax was too thin -- but I managed to produce a few tiny individual blossoms. I pierced them with the tips of a branch left over from a flower arrangement and the result was ethereal, delicate and fragrant.

Truisms

 When presented with incomplete information, we leap to conclusions.

We are always presented with incomplete information.

 

Family is everything. Family is culture, nurture, nature, determinism, education, everything.

And we strike our own way.

I saw Baccaria in the hall yesterday and offered her one of my Starbusts. Yes, she did want one and she asked without preamble, "Ms. Fey, do you want to be Black?" 

We talk like that. We've known each other for the four years since she was a freshman. She is Melroy's cousin and she was selling pins with a photo of Child's gentle face before his funeral in December.    

"Well, um, when I was in college, my idol was that singer, she was Black and wore a gardenia in her hair, Billie Holiday! And I wanted to be her...but my friends..."

Baccaria laughed, as she does, not merrily, but a laugh nonetheless.

"Oh, Ms. Fey." And she sighed, as she does. 

I don't blame her. I don't understand her fully, but I know a bit about her. A tiny tiny bit. A surface scratch.

"Ms. Fey, you couldn't be Black. You're not strong enough." She was kind enough to soften the truism with "Ms. Fey, you're my favorite," but we both knew she was right.

These Boys Will Break Your Heart, Again

I'm still reeling from the news of the shooting death of Child, a boy I've known for four years ever since he was fourteen in freshman English class. 

And thinking about Child, and feeling the pain, still growing, and the anger, perhaps misplaced, and the confusion, maybe from the newness of the grief, brings me back to the moment before Thanksgiving when I learned about Greg.

That is his real name, Greg, because he's not a child whose privacy and family I need to protect. And how I loved that his last name rhymed with mine when we partnered up. And how we did partner!

As high school friends, as brass players in band, as carpooling to and from school, as Rocky Horror fans, as Forensics Team officers at our high school Center High in Kansas City. In the National Forensic League we were lowly officers, something like the office of "Publicity" which basically meant that we planned the end of the year hotel ballroom banquet and we got a day off school to attend a coveted "leadership conference" in a(nother) bland hotel ballroom, but we relished the title. We partnered as a terrible Duet Acting team at one of those NFL competitions (some mild riff on The Three Bears, perhaps), and as prom dates. We made the team of Fey and Day. Like it was meant to be.

I remember a hundred stories over the six years of junior high and high school, as we got closer, and even though I had a low level crush over those years and even though we hooked up a bit towards the end (isn't it always a sign of the end?) Greg was primarily a Friend, the dearest of Friends. I pray that is how he remembered me.

I hope he remembered us well, not just the two of us, but "us" as in all the friend and club groups we overlapped with and danced through, swapping partners and allegiances and not all his friends and girlfriends were mine too but that was okay. He had Spanish club; I had French. 

It's the laughing that I can't forget -- near hysterics in a booth at Winstead's on the Plaza, in his car, in the stands at football games for pep band, under the stage for pit band for the different three musicals, in the cemetery where we sneaked in at night with four other friends, at McDonald's where our dear friend Lori worked, at the Punk Dance with Diane, at the Royals baseball stadium, at the secret lake we found down State Line.

Once we left for college, he faded away after a few letters. Someone said he had a girlfriend. I wondered was it me? when I had time to think about him, but I was busy too, swept up in a new school to transfer to sophomore year, a new state, new friends, a rush of quick years and much change. 

So when I saw in the memorials on Facebook that so many other friends loved him too, felt as close and as grateful for his warmth and love, and also related the separation, I knew it wasn't just me. He married not long after college and so many of us didn't even know. 

I wondered if it was a religious thing -- had he converted? Did our drinking and making out in his brother's attic scare him off? But no, the pics of his apparently happy years were relaxed and comforting -- travels with his wife and daughter, beer steins in Germany, sunny summer lakeside tables, the piazza in Venice. 

I'm at peace. A bit surprised that I'm not more sad, because we really were close.

We were sitting on the front step of Uncle Phil and Aunt Ruth's house, a concrete step where we never sat, but that was okay. I didn't see it coming when the topic turned to Prom and I said Tonya and I were going to hang out and watch movies so when he asked, "Do you want to go?" I heard it as a general inquiry and sang out, "Yes! Of course I want to go!" and the turn of his face and his expression as he said, "No, I meant with me," was one I'll never forget.

Oy Vey, These Boys Break Your Heart

 Oh, Child. 

I got the news this morning. Four children shot in at a gas station. 

(I need to change his name. I am changing his name. When the "17 year old male" in the headline is a boy you knew, that you taught, that you greeted in the hallways at school, that your friend told "be safe" on the last day of break before Thanksgiving, when you know his sister, when his friends are still here in school with you, the headline "17 year old boy killed in shooting" is not a headline, is not a news item, is not an abstraction. It's real as hell. I have changed his name to Child.) 

He was in our freshman class. "I just think how could we have done more for him?" said his teacher, my colleague, and it's not a rhetorical question this time. I have been thinking about this all the time, I have been thinking about this particular child.

And what happened in the class we all had together. The two white women and the woman of color. The black and brown boys and girls. The white girl who is also one of those four children.

I need trauma informed teaching skills. I need "a culture of dignity" skills because I am PISSED right now, I've moved on from stunned and I need to maintain the dignity of that white woman in the room and not shame and blame. Because I need to keep remembering effectiveness and longevity. 

I need perspective right now and I don't have it.

I'm PISSED.

Summer School 2021: A Rock, an Apple, a Box, and a Stick

 

There was an earthquake. And a tornado. Literally. Not to worry, the natural disasters were outside classtime -- most of the kids I asked said they were sleeping during the afternoon when the 3.something quake hit and I WAS TOO, lol, napping or maybe rising or sinking into my siesta when I felt something like a heavy bookcase falling over downstairs. Or maybe a loaded truck hitting a bump on the street outside. 

"Nora..." I thought as I sank back into sleep. The song we used to sing was "Crash, bang, crash-bang-boom, something's going on in Nora's room."

The only sign of the tremor were two little chotchkes knocked over on the windowsill that sits over the kitchen sink -- the chotchkes didn't break, they didn't even fall far -- the faucet caught them, I righted the little ceramic Russian girl and the waving cat and they went on with their business.

The tornado warning, on the other hand, was at bedtime and we bored of the basement ten minutes after we descended, twenty minutes before the warning was over. Such is life. Hurry up and wait. Boredom levied by crisis.

Our genuine excitement was of another kind, of the family kind that I used to write about with detail and fervor and only a twinge of wondering how posterity would look at our little foursome's capers. Now the girls are older teens, one technically an adult, so I must be more circumscript for us all. So...

I'll focus on the classroom. 

The room itself was double-sized this time, two rooms that could be separated by an accordioning divider but that we left wide and open, to give us all room to play and wander and get away if needed. And my roster had HALF the kids of the last summer school stint, only ten or so in one class of juniors and the same in a class of freshmxn. 

No kids taking the classes for "enrichment" this time...they were all here for Credit Recovery, that is, students who had Incompletes or Audits or Failures or Drops or whatever the many reasons for not passing Freshmxn English or the junior class American Literature and Composition and U.S. History, which we pronounce as "Alcush." 

Add double pay to the double prep and the double room and the halved roster AND halve the time too...two hours for each class. No problem for me. I got this.

"Focus on the skills," said my boss. My sophomore-teaching colleague advised, "I'd like them to come into my class being able to write a solid paragraph."

And so that's what we did. Punctuation, capitalization and number-writing rules. Letter-writing format and tone. The parts of speech, (well, the ones I deemed most important, that is, the verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives and conjunctions. I hate adverbs. I can tell you more about that later. And prepositions? We can skip those this time around. And interjections? HEY, they're my favorites, but WOW, that's all I needed to say.)

Skills and more skills: Facts vs Opinions, General vs. Specific, Claims Vs. Evidence. Clauses and phrases, complete sentences vs. run-ons and fragments. (And with a few students who used fragments with beauty, style and purpose, I was able to point and identify their good work and encourage them to keep on truckin'.)

And building paragraphs and using a chain of cause and effect when building a logical story or argument, which as the Famous Book says, everything is, right? 

(Note to self: Ask dear colleague Christine to teach me more about "avoiding commentary in the warrant" as some of her students have said...)

So I am content with my work with their writing skills in the limited time we had. Reading, writing and argument from EACH and EVERY child every day is my goal and I know I didn't make it but we will keep pushing.

Here were some of the highlights...and the lowlights that came at the very end because pride goeth before a fall. 

THE DE-TRACKED CLASSROOM OF SUMMER SCHOOL IS ALREADY DIFFERENTIATED. 

MY LIBERATION IS TIED UP WITH MY STUDENTS' LIBERATION. I thanked them at the end for their patience with me and asked them to consider how the kids I teach later, the little ones who are children now but will be freshmxn and juniors soon, will benefit from this training ground. THE STUDENTS before me were my teachers and I hope I have the grace and wisdom to keep reflecting on what they told me.

"Give a fish a man, and he'll eat for a week" said the witty ones, the ones who chose the front row, the so-called "smart" ones, no less or more intelligent than any other children in the room. But oh, they were my little colleagues, so much like me, nerdy, word-players, rule-followers. It was the back of the room kids...and the middle of the room kids who had much to teach me.

The Stick.  I chose the film Minari to use as the primary text of the course with both my freshmxn and juniors. Subtitles are a beautiful thing...it ensures that every line of poetry of the script is right in front of the kids and me. "Minari is a gift that keeps on giving," I said over and over to any teacher friend who asked about summer school. An amazing and endlessly rich text that offered more and more depth the more we watched and re-watched. The kids ate it up...and laughed at the pee jokes and gasped at the surprises and argued over the mom's desires for a better life and brought up their own families' experiences that were similar to that of the Yi family...

...and I DIDN'T HAVE TO DO A THING. All I had to do was play and pause periodically. I MAY NEVER DO A FILM "STUDY GUIDE" AGAIN! What is the friggin' point of making the kids stop and write answers to simple comprehension questions? To assess their understanding? Um...can we do that orally?

The kids DID write about the film in Canvas discussions and in Claim-Context-Evidence-Warrant paragraphs, just not WHILE we were watching. I don't want them to take their eyes off the screen. I don't want them to be distracted by "Work" they "Should" be doing instead of being swept up in the experience. It was a beautiful thing.

But the stick...in Minari, recurring images of sticks creates a motif illuminating themes of yearning and resilience. The father consults a dowser to find water on his farm. He uses another stick for discipline...with surprisingly hilarious results. 

The Stick, along with the Box and the Rock, are the classic toys, the original toys, right?

Note: ...I'm a gonna publish this and I'm a gonna go lay down.

 To be continued