Sylvia

During the days after Hurricane Helene, when we had no cell service or internet, a technology-starved Sylvia resorted to reading old blogs offline on my Google drive. 

“Will you please write a blog about me?” she asked. “I don’t mind, really. I want you to!”

I stopped blogging about the kids years ago. It seemed one thing to write about their escapades— like smearing poop on the walls or pushing library books off the shelf— when they were toddlers and another to write about their personal struggles as burgeoning adolescents, when anything I wrote publicly was easily accessible to their peers. But I understand Sylvia’s desire to see herself in print. I’m reminded of Jason from The Good Place, as he listens to Eleanor describing every member of their foursome: “What about me? Describe me now!”

At the Meet the Teacher event in August, before the first day of school, one of Sylvia’s teachers gave every parent a colorful post-it note on which to write the one word that best described their kid. When Don and I posted our notes, they were identical. Both had the same single word: cheerful. We laughed, but I was not surprised. Sylvia’s good cheer is legendary. When we went a week with no internet service after Helene, Sylvia took it in stride. “It’s my technology detox!” she said. When I serve a meal that Clayton and Danny pick at, Sylvia digs in. “Hashtag delicious!” she says. When a rainy Saturday gets everyone else down, she snuggles up with a book and a blanket on the porch. “I’ve had the best morning!” 

Sylvia has a knack for finding the silver lining, but that does not mean that she is immune to Pandora’s inadvertent gifts. When her best friend and her mom got tickets to Swift’s Eras tour, Sylvia was green with envy. Still, she still oohed and awed over her friend’s concert dress and gushed over every digitally shared moment of her experience. 

“It’s not fair,” she vented privately. “I liked Taylor Swift first!” 

But Sylvia’s is too attuned to others’ feelings to dampen their experience with her own darkness. Last year, we arranged for Sylvia’s twin brother to skip eighth grade and start high school a year early. This proved a positive change for Danny but left Sylvia to endure a final year of middle school on her own. There are a dozen ways to see the worst in this arrangement, and I know that, at times, Sylvia must feel left behind or left out or both. But Sylvia is heart-warmingly supportive of her twin and chooses to focus on the upside. She will get to go on the eighth grade trip to DC, the chorus trip to Chattanooga, the eighth grade dance. After a lifetime of sharing every important milestone with her twin, she will now experience them on her own. 

Sylvia has a brightness to her. Describing her, I am immediately reduced to metaphor. Sylvia is every warm and shining thing: the sun, a candle, fire. Being in her company is like stepping into a light-filled room. When I am with her, the heaviness of the world lightens, the darkness lifts. At times I worry that this quality might be both her gift and her burden. In a family that struggles with depression, does she feel some unspoken pressure to always be okay? Sylvia is our light— and how we love her for it— but I want her to know that brightness is not her duty. We are blessed that she shares her light with us, but she does not owe it to us. 

Sadly, Sylvia’s optimism and high spirits do not protect her from the baser elements of humanity so often on display in middle school. When Sylvia and her friends were targeted with sexual harassment earlier this year, Sylvia alone took the perpetrators to task. Having come of age in the eighties, I worried that Sylvia might feel some shame in coming forward. Would she simply be told “boys will be boys” and be labeled a snitch or a tattletail? 

But Sylvia’s moral compass is strong; she never second guessed what she knew was the right thing to do, even when it meant reliving the experience in tears in front of administrators and officers. Sylvia was not shamed; it was the boys and their parents who ought to be ashamed. In true Sylvia fashion— and despite her embarrassment and rage— she found the upside in the whole awful mess. 

“It felt so good to get those boys in trouble,” she confided in me. “I felt like I was having my feminist moment.” 

We joke that she is dismantling the patriarchy one middle school idiot at a time. But shouldn’t the patriarchy have been dismantled by now? I couldn’t believe that after all the MeToo discourse of the last few decades, she is being victimized by this kind of harassment. When I said as much to a sympathetic friend, she didn’t share my disbelief. The difference, she wisely observed, is that, post-MeToo, Sylvia is taken seriously. 

Reading this, do not assume that Sylvia evades the darker elements of being human. She faces the same hard questions that confront us all. Am I good enough? Will I find love? Will my future be what I dream of? She worries that she won’t get into college if she’s not great at math, or that high school will offer her no opportunity to experience the kind of love she reads about in her romance novels. She worries that the innocence of her kids’ lives will be threatened by technology and that her own adulthood will be bereft of the joy and magic of her childhood. When she asks me if I still feel the magic (and by this I take her to mean if life still feels exciting and joyful and fun) I feel newly resolved to cast off the heaviness that has overtaken me in middle age.

I need not look any further than her example. Sylvia is an expert at making the ordinary occurrences of daily life into occasions for delight: a picture-perfect mug of hot chocolate with whipped cream and sprinkles; a morning spent in pajamas, journaling on the porch; a solo walk in the neighborhood listening to her favorite tunes. She is as content with a day in her room, chatting with her friend and reading a good book, as with an out-of-the-ordinary adventure. And she finds joy in the details that are so easily overlooked: our dog’s shiny lower lip, the scent of my lotion, the comfort in a cup of tea. Sylvia knows how joy is spread; she loves to compliment strangers because she knows how good it feels to receive those unexpected compliments. And why not make someone’s day? 

Last night, Don showed us a video of a young man with OCD at a poetry slam. It was a moving poem of love found and then lost and, predictably, I was reduced to tears. Sylvia lept from the couch to take me in her arms. “It’s okay, Ma,” she said, laughing and compassionate all at once. “It’s okay.” This is my daughter’s gift, to turn towards pain with love, to transform tearful moments into joyful ones. This is her gift to us all.

ESL Class, in Wartime

 Wow-- it's been way over a year since I've posted on this blog. That makes me sad to see, but I also understand why I'm not blogging like I used to. Quite simply, I can't. I used to write openly about parenting and my kids, and I just can't do that anymore. The twins are eleven now, and Clayton, thirteen. They would immediately read whatever I dared to write, and so could all of their friends and classmates. As much as writing about our family helped me to make sense of our lives for so many years, I want to respect my children's privacy.

I miss sharing here, though, so here is my first attempt at changing gears.

I want to share a poem I wrote recently about a poignant moment in the English Language Acquisition class I teach at AB Tech. The college was welcoming a group of refugees from Afghanistan, just as Russia was bombing Kyiv. This is what happened in my class. (Names have been changed.)

ESL Class, in Wartime

When the refugees arrived

from Afghanistan,

the students swiveled their chairs

into a circle

and I wrote in black marker on the board:

“My name is . . ..

I am from . . ..

I like to . . ..”

When it was Natalie’s turn,

she began, “My name is Natalie.

I am from Ukraine.”

“And you like to shopping!” a classmate called out, teasing,

and her husband grinned and nodded,

pleased we knew her so.

But, at Ukraine, Natalie had dropped her face into her hands.

“My country,” she sobbed, “my home.”

The laughter folded into silence;

her husband, grim-faced now, patted her arm.

And I, master of English,

could find no words but apology.

It was Bashira who spoke,

hijab pinned around a face

perfectly made-up, for this,

her first day in English class.

Self-taught by Bollywood films,

she didn’t falter,

cast her comfort out

across this room of bare-headed strangers.

Suffering knows suffering.

Loss is loss.

“It is okay, ma’am,” she said, again and again.

“It is okay, ma’am. We understand.”

No Easy Answers

 

When the kids were small, well-meaning strangers used to stop me in the grocery store.

“Don’t worry, it gets easier,” they would say. Then they’d smile knowingly and add, “Well, maybe it doesn’t, but it’s hard in different ways.”

I’d have one twin on my back and her sister in the infant seat, while Clayton and the other toddler I watched for one challenging year fought over the steering wheel of the little red car attached to the front of the cart.

I’d try to smile, but I didn’t believe them. At that point, I couldn’t even begin to imagine any future parenting challenge that could compare to the herculean effort it took to buy groceries with four kids under three.

I still can’t. And yet.

My kids are twelve, ten, and ten now, and I’m sure that there are parents of teenagers who will shake their heads to read this and insist that the real challenges are yet to come. I have no doubt that they’re right, but that doesn’t help the answers I’m seeking now feel any less murky.

I think that’s the crux of what makes this stage feel so hard: the right thing to do is not as clear as it once was. When Sylvia used to crawl across the floor and grab a fistful of Dee Dee’s hair, I’d pry her fingers open and let her sister loose. But when Sylvia wants to use my phone to text the classmate that Dee Dee’s been texting, and Dee Dee’s mad because the girl is her friend, and Sylvia is righteous because she’s her friend, too, and doesn’t she have just as much right to text her as Dee Dee? Well, the right thing to do is far less clear.

I feel for Dee Dee; I really do. All she wants is a friend of her own, and Sylvia’s unsympathetic righteousness about it is missing the point. But I also understand Sylvia’s reasoning: why should Dee Dee be the only one allowed to text this girl? They’re twins in the same class; a mutual friend or two is inevitable.

I stumble through scenarios like this one on a regular basis. Are those jeans Dee Dee’s if she’s been the only one wearing them for months, but they were originally hand-me-downs for both girls from our neighbors? (Um, I think so?) Do I really tell Dee Dee her hair looks great more often? (Probably, but only because Dee Dee allegedly hates her hair and covers it with a hat any chance she gets.) Why does Dee Dee get to be in Clayton’s room on a Zoom meeting with his friends if Sylvia is banned? (I have no idea. “Clayton! Let Sylvia in!”)

The Zoom meetings themselves are another can of worms. In the early months of the pandemic, Clayton used to lie on the living room floor, overcome with boredom. His moods fluctuated wildly and, in his darker moments, I worried about the effects of the social isolation on his mental health and developing brain.

Now, Clayton spends hours a day in his room, messaging and Zooming with his friends and girlfriend. Not only does this mean less conflict with his sisters, but he’s much more cheerful and engaged.

But because I can’t help it, I worry. Isn’t he getting too much screen time? (Aren’t we all?) Why doesn’t he draw pictures like he used to? And how do we stop those messages from his girlfriend from popping up on his screen when he’s trying to do math?

I’ve also felt alone with these questions. Don is typically more laissez faire with the kids’ technology use, and it’s easy to see how tickled he is by Clayton’s new social life. He’s also at work all day. When he sees the kids playing Minecraft in the evening, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal; he hasn’t seen them glued to their devices for the majority of the school day.

When I broach the subject with another mom with kids about the same age, her answer is clear: she locks up her kids’ computers as soon as the school day is over.

“They get way too much screen time as it is,” she says.

She’s right, undeniably, and yet I don’t think the answer for our family can be so black and white. Because, yes, Clayton spends a lot of time hanging out with his friends on Zoom and building his world on Minecraft, but he’s also writing short stories and watching high school Crash Courses on the French Revolution and nuclear fusion. Clearly, not all screen time is created equal. (And here I sit, tapping away at a laptop during my own free time.)

After weeks of passive-aggressive outbursts on my part— “Get off your computers now and go outside!”— Don and I finally had a heart-to-heart and agreed on a self-regulatory plan that we can all agree on. The kids get a set number of hours of extracurricular screen time a week, which they can use only after they’ve had outside time and exercise. They can divvy up the hours as they like, and they’ll keep their own records on a calendar.

My favorite part of the family meeting we had after dinner was the kids’ reactions:

Sylvia: “Oooh, fun! Can you print out the calendars tonight? I’ll feel so professional.”

Dee Dee: “We could put them in picture frames and then write on them with a wet erase marker.”

Me: “Oh, that’s a cool idea.”
Dee Dee (shrugging): “Five minute craft ideas on YouTube. Does looking up recipes online count towards my time?”

Clayton (heading to his room to get on Zoom with his friends): “When are we starting this?”

It’s not a perfect answer. Already I’ve had to bite my tongue when the kids were all Zooming with their friends instead of playing outside on the sunniest afternoon we’ve had in a while. (Well, I bit it for a while, and then I shooed them all outside.) We’re also assuming that they’ll accurately keep track of and report their time, which I know is a leap of faith, but it also makes me happy that I trust my kids to do their best. And, there’s still plenty of gray area.

Clayton and his girlfriend are trying to plan a walk together at the park this weekend, but, after two days of the new rules, he’s already over on his daily average.

“If I just email for a minute to try to make a plan, does that count?”

Probably it should, but Don and I are both too overwhelmed by the cuteness to hold the line.

“Go ahead,” we say, lingering in his bedroom as he opens his laptop. “Where do you think you want to go?”

Because, as a parent, there are so many times I stumble through my lines or don’t know what to say, it’s a relief when the answers are clear. Take last Sunday afternoon. The kids were already wallowing in the Sunday evening blues, and Don and I were focused on all the chores we wanted to knock out before bedtime.

“Momma, do you want to draw with me?”

I never want to draw; it’s just not something that would ever occur to me to do for fun. But, draw with Dee Dee? Of course.

We settled in at the kitchen table while Don washed dishes. Dee Dee had searched for a face on my phone and was sketching it out in pencil. I started a watercolor of a recent hike through brown winter mountains under a turquoise sky. I liked the color of the sky, but the rest of the painting was so far from what I wanted it to look like it that I tossed it aside. Discouraged, I retreated to my comfort zone: watercolor sunsets over triangular mountain peaks, a variation of the same picture I’ve been painting since fifth grade. Just to drive home the point, I added a smudgy brown horse in one corner and penciled in a stick-figure girl on its back. And why not add a rainbow, too?

Dee Dee, despite being an actual ten-year-old girl, has never once, to my knowledge, painted a rainbow. That afternoon, she drew a realistic man’s face, complete with stubbled chin and a contoured nose. (She’s way beyond using two ovals for eyes and a less-than sign for a nose, as I would do.) As we drew and painted, Sylvia played one Taylor swift song after another, singing along while she cruised around us on the hoverboard.

The dryer was full of laundry and the floor needed sweeping, but for one blessed hour, I didn’t think about those things. I focused on blending the orange and red of my sunset, content to be with my daughters as they did two of the very things— singing and drawing— that they’re passionate about and that I can’t do at all. Sylvia played my favorite Swift song, and Dee Dee couldn’t help herself and leaned over to add a face to my painting.

And where was Clayton? Almost certainly on Zoom in his room with his friends. We were all ‘in the zone,’ and I was so grateful for this moment, so grateful that when Dee Dee had turned to me with her sad Sunday eyes to ask me if I wanted to draw, the answer had been so easy: “Yes.” 

Renewal

 

Last week felt hard, for no particularly good reason. I felt disconnected with Don, so small annoyances— he came home from Ingles with plastic shopping bags, or got into the bath himself without telling the kids to get ready for bed— irked me even more, making it hard to bridge the gap between us. The ubiquity of the kids’ devices was also getting under my skin; I cringed every time I saw Clayton sitting on the couch with his laptop open on his knees.

“Why don’t you just read a book?” I said, more than once, and even I could hear how peevish I sounded. Clayton is plowing his way through all twenty-two books on the Battle of the Books list, and half the time when he’s on his computer, he’s either researching history or writing fiction. The other half, he’s messaging with his friends, which, when I’m in a better mood, I can see as the social lifeline that it is.

I’m tired of working from home, descending every morning to the frigid office basement, where the space heater I put beside the desk warms either my toes or my fingers but never both. I’m sick of seeing my own face on Zoom, my sagging jowls and wrinkled forehead a constant reminder that I’m not as young as I feel on the inside. I’m also struggling with the end-of-semester blues, when the students with whom I have been spending three hours every day will disappear from my life, no matter how bonded we have become or how many times they promise they’ll stay in touch.

And then there’s the rising number of Covid cases, making me wonder if I am being an irresponsible parent by sending my kids to school, despite the safety measures in place and the fact that they are overjoyed to be there.

Needless to say, by Friday I was in a funk: cool with my husband, annoyed with my kids, disconnected from my colleagues, and disappointed in myself that I couldn’t shake my bad humor. Nothing was wrong exactly, so why did I feel on the verge of tears? I was even tired of my own unhappiness. The Christmas tree was decorated, the advent calendars on the mantle, the kids buzzing with the anticipation of the holidays . . . Our home had turned red and green around me, so why did I feel so blue?

By Friday afternoon, I’d decided I needed to do something to reset my sense of well-being. I told the kids that I wouldn’t be there when they woke up; I told Don he’d need to get up to make them breakfast. I didn’t set an alarm, but I woke the next morning just as the sky was beginning to lighten. I tiptoed around the kitchen, making tea and an egg on toast, praying the kids would stay asleep; it is so much easier to leave a sleeping house.

I chose a hike I had done before, because it required minimal driving and a rigorous climb. As soon as I pulled the car onto the empty shoulder, I felt the familiar elation of solitude rise up in me. And by the time I climbed out of the car into the crisp morning air and shouldered my small pack, I didn’t feel flat anymore: my heart was soaring.

Saturday morning might not have been so perfect. It had rained all Friday night; Saturday morning might have dawned rainy and overcast like so many other winter days. But it didn’t. The storm clouds still hung over the mountains, but the sun was rising in a bright blue sky and the air felt clean as ice.

My heart raced as I climbed steeply to the ridge. All week I’d been reading Anne Patchett as I exercised on the elliptical, and while I was grateful for both— the good book and convenient work-out— this feeling was something else entirely. My body felt made to climb this mountain, my legs strong, my mask-less mouth and nose sucking in the cool, sharp air.

By the time I made it to the ridge, the sun was high above the mountains to the east. On the western side, gray clouds dispersed over peaks powdered with white. Beside the trail, the flat green leaves of rhododendron held tiny snowflakes, and once again, I was struck by a sense of perfection. If I had dawdled for an hour, or stayed to eat my egg sandwich at the kitchen table instead of in the car, or prepared the pancake batter for the kids’ breakfast as I’d felt compelled to do, the snow would have been gone by the time I reached the ridge. But here I was, on the top of a mountain bathed in the brightest sun, the trail before me winding along a snow-dusted ridge.

The words of an old camp song came back to me, and I sang the chorus quietly to myself:

“I can show you morning, on a thousand hills,

And kiss you and give you seven daffodils,

And kiss you and give you seven daffodils.”

Anyone who knows me at all knows I can’t carry a tune to save my life, but there was no one there to hear me on that empty ridgetop, and it had been so long since I felt like singing. 

Oysters

 Last Friday evening, our family got together with some dear friends in their backyard. We ate veggie burgers at a great distance, but our host declined. Somehow in the mountains of North Carolina, her husband had procured fresh oysters; she was saving herself for them, she said.

Sylvia, as adventurous in food as in all things, piped up. “I’d like to try an oyster,” she said.

Shell in hand, she sipped at the juice. “It tastes like the ocean,” she observed pleasantly but couldn’t bring herself to gulp down the slimy thing inside.

“Do you like raw oysters, Mama?” she asked me, passing hers off to her father.

I shook my head. It was a simple answer to a simple question, but the memories it triggered were anything but simple, for they were among the best and worst of my childhood.

When I was thirteen years old, my mother handed down to me one of her old t-shirts. It was a blue shirt with “I eat ‘em raw at Jay’s Oyster Bar” printed on the front. All in all, it seemed an unlikely thing for my mother to own, as she preferred her oysters steamed and was never one for slogans or souvenirs. Perhaps that is why she had passed it down to me.

At thirteen, I considered my mother the embodiment of cool. She shopped at the Limited in the mall and wore tight, tapered jeans that I coveted. At the time, her whole closet smelled of Chloe perfume, the scent of which seemed to me the epitome of class. I loved it when my mother came to track meets or Open House nights, for I thought that if the kids at school saw me in her presence, a little of her je ne sais quoi might rub off on me and they would see me in an entirely new way.

My mother was very strict about her wardrobe. We were identical sizes at the time, but I was not allowed to borrow her clothes. Because of this, they assumed an almost mythical power. If I could only wear that Chloe-scented, red button-down shirt with the collar popped just once, I felt sure that my schoolmates would say to themselves, “Wow, we were wrong about Erica. She really is cool, after all.”

And so, when the oyster bar t-shirt was passed into my hands, I was hopeful. I suppose I believed in some transitive property of coolness: My mother was cool. The shirt was my mother’s. So, the shirt must be cool. If a = b and b = c, then a must surely equal c.

You probably know where this is going. The first day that I wore the t-shirt when I dressed out for P.E., I was teased mercilessly. I am sure that my mother was oblivious to the sexual connotation of the slogan or she would never have given me the shirt. Unfortunately, it was not lost on the ruthless eighth grade boys at Greco Junior High, and that was the gist of their ribbing. I did not, at that age, fully understand the jokes they made at my expense— and neither, perhaps, did they— but I understood enough to feel both mortified and betrayed.

The other memory is the one that I shared with my friends around the fire last Friday evening.

Growing up, I did not often get time alone with either of my parents. On the weekends, we kids were mostly left up to our own devices, as long as we played outside and were not underfoot. But once a year, my mother took us each to the mall individually for back-to-school shopping.

As with most things that I associated with my mother, this yearly outing verged on the sacred. We lived in central Florida, where August could be brutally hot and humid, so stepping through the double doors into the air-conditioned department store was like entering another realm. To this day I am notoriously indecisive when buying clothes, and I wonder if the seed was planted in those mall dressing rooms with my mom. She would sit in the corner and watch me patiently as I posed and dithered, basking in the completeness of her attention.

When we needed a break, I would follow her eagerly to Mr. Dunderbak’s. Both now and then, Mr. Dunderbak’s seemed an improbable business to find in that Florida mall. After the bright fluorescent lighting of the department stores, the inside of the German deli was as dark as a cave, the air spiced with the smell of ripe cheese and sausages. Years later, when I read to my kids about Harry Potter entering Diagon Alley through The Leaky Cauldron, it was the feeling of entering the dark and pungent air of Mr. Dunderbak’s that came to mind, that sense that I had passed from the garish, everyday world to somewhere truly special.

My mother and I would sit together at a small table in the tiny shop. I was allowed, on those excursions, to order chocolate milk, and although I drank a nearly identical carton of chocolate milk every day with my school lunch, it never occurred to me to equate the two. The chocolate milk at school was cloying and quotidian; at Mr. Dunderbak’s, it was delicious, classy, European. It was the taste of having my mother to myself.

If my mother could be counted on for predictability, it was my father’s spontaneity that I remember best. Knowing my father, it is no surprise that those moments were often of the gastronomic sort. As a teenager, I spent the most time with my father being shuttled back and forth from the ballet studio across town. On rare occasions, I could convince him to stop for frozen lemonade or Dunkin Donuts on the way home, and those treats are etched into my memory, symbols of my father’s love and generosity.

But my most treasured memory of time alone with my father was at DJ’s Oyster Bar, which sat at the corner of a busy intersection a few miles from our house. Where was the rest of my family the night that my dad and I had dinner there alone? My sister must have already been away at college, my mother and brother probably downtown at the youth orchestra or karate. All I am certain of is that the outing was not planned, for I can still feel the spontaneity of my dad swinging the car off Busch Boulevard into the parking lot, the sudden and wonderful realization that we would not be heading home to heat up leftovers after all.

Inside, we wound our way through the tables and sat at the bar in back, where my dad ordered a bucket of steamed oysters for us to share. The man behind the bar shucked them on the spot. It was a relief to me that we would not be eating them raw; the ribbing I’d endured in junior high was still too fresh. There was a white packet of all-you-can-eat saltines on the bar, and thirty years later, I can still remember vividly the soft, musky flesh of the oysters against the salty crunch of those crackers.

Did I like them? I remember that I loved them. But what I loved most was my father’s enthusiasm as we tucked in, seated side by side at the bar, while the oysters in the bucket dwindled to nothing. My father loved those oysters, and I loved sharing in the immensity— the intimacy— of his enjoyment.

I have never eaten oysters since, as if I’ve known that they would never taste so good again. 

Great and Terrible

 

My family spent last weekend at Myrtle Beach. With its towering beachfront hotels and blocks of souvenir shops and attractions, Myrtle Beach is not exactly my vacation destination of choice. But the thousands of hotel rooms mean cheap lodging in the off-season, and we have had a fall weekend getaway there a handful of times over the years.

This year, after six months of pandemic-living, we were all especially eager for the trip. “It will be great to have a change of scene,” I told a friend. “And some family time.” Then I laughed, because one of the biggest challenges of the pandemic has been that “family time” is pretty much all we ever have. But family time at the beach is a far cry from the quotidian routine of online work and school, and we spent an amazing weekend building sandcastles, swimming, reading, and generally kicking back. My kids even talked me into riding the Sky Wheel, an oceanfront ferris wheel that is the second highest in the country, then giggled as I clutched their hands and swore.

On Sunday afternoon, sitting on our balcony overlooking the ocean from fourteen stories up, my husband hit the nail on the head. “Myrtle Beach is just like this hotel,” he said. “Great and terrible at the same time.”

It was easy to see what made it great. After the hotel lost our original reservation and I spent an hour on the phone as they tried to track it down, we were given a complimentary upgrade to the beachfront suite. We went to sleep to the sound of the waves, and, in the morning, the ocean was only steps away. The kids loved the heated pools that they had all to themselves, and the miniature golf course, with its caves and cliffs and Peter Pan storyline, was one of the best we’d ever played.

The terrible part was more subtle, but it was a blight on an otherwise wonderful stay. A take-out breakfast was included with our room, to be eaten at dispersed outdoor tables or taken back to the room. The breakfast itself was fine: fruit and granola, eggs and grits. But I was dismayed by the amount of waste each meal generated. The hot meal was served in a styrofoam container, the cold sides in a separate plastic one. Not only was the cutlery single-use plastic, but it came wrapped individually in plastic film. And then there were the plastic packages of hot sauce and ketchup, the plastic lids for the drinks, the plastic coffee stirrers, the plastic bags you could use to carry everything back to your room. And all this at a hotel just steps away from an ocean that by 2050 could hold more plastic garbage than fish.

Did I eat the breakfast? Shamefully, I did. Knowing that breakfast would be provided, I had not brought breakfast food to cook in our small kitchenette, and I did not want to spend part of my short vacation hunting down a grocery store in Myrtle Beach. I ate it, but I was ashamed. Ashamed, because, like so many Americans, I was willing to put my own convenience ahead of my values. Ashamed that I would choose to drink a cup of coffee or use a plastic fork, knowing that both would endure for centuries or more. Yes, it was shameful, but it was also infuriating. Whether I chose to eat that breakfast or not, an obscene amount of plastic waste was being generated every morning by countless other hotel guests.

I am sickened that even now, half a century after the first Earth Day, this is still the choice we as consumers face in states like North Carolina that have not made any attempt to regulate plastic waste. As an individual, trying to eliminate unnecessary single-use plastics takes constant vigilance. Sit down in a restaurant with a child under ten and without fail their water will come in a disposable cup, complete with plastic lid and straw. Back when we still went out to eat, I had to train myself to say, the moment the server appeared, that we did not want Styrofoam or straws. With Covid restrictions now eliminating dine-in options in many places, more restaurants than ever are serving food in disposable packaging with single-use cutlery.

I know in some states things are slowly changing. Maine has banned polystyrene containers and California and Hawaii, plastic bags. New York City, among other localities, has prohibited plastic straws. But in North Carolina, sadly, there seems to be little awareness of this critical issue, which can make resisting disposable plastics feel lonely, futile, and even embarrassing. I don’t want my kids to look away when the first thing out of my mouth at a restaurant is “We’re trying to reduce our plastic waste, so no Styrofoam or plastic, please.” I wish they were growing up in a world in which serving single-use plastics was the thing that drew attention, instead of being the one person out of a hundred (or more) refusing them.

After my poor choices last weekend, I have renewed my personal vow to refuse single-use plastic and Styrofoam. I will never again travel without reusable silverware packs for us all. But I also recognize that institutionalized changes have to be implemented if real progress is to be made. Yes, my family can stop buying an occasional ice-cream treat at Sonic because it is served in a Styrofoam cup (and yes, I already wrote a letter to Sonic begging them to reconsider their packaging), but that won’t make a dent in the thousands of pounds of non-biodegradable garbage they generate each year. When my family refuses to use plastic straws, that’s a meaningful choice, but it can seem futile when every other cup in a restaurant holds one.

One of my favorite things to do at the beach is to go for long walks along the shore. I love watching how much everybody loves the ocean: the teenagers in their bikinis, the toddlers in their sun hats, the elderly couples with their dogs. But while most people are looking for shells, I can’t help scanning the sand for what I know I’ll find: plastic lids, plastic straws, plastic bags, plastic cigarette butts. By the time we reach the garbage can by the boardwalk that leads back to the hotel, my hands are full. 

Happiness in the Time of Covid

 

“Going through puberty during a pandemic is pretty tough,” Clayton said to me matter-of-factly as we walked along the pedestrian lane of the new bridge that connects Topsail Island with the mainland.

After months of Covid-19 disappointments (a cancelled school trip to Atlanta, a cancelled camping trip to Edisto Island, a cancelled visit to Florida to see his grandparents, a cancelled, a cancelled, a cancelled . . .) we were finally on vacation in a rented condo on the North Carolina coast. The kids had been cautiously looking forward to this week for months, albeit with one ear peeled for the news that this trip, too, would fall through.

It has been a tough three months by any measure. On the national scale, there’s been a mismanaged pandemic, a crumpled economy, police brutality, political protests— all while our country has a narcissistic, racist, and inept leader at the helm. Unfolding against the backdrop of these national and global tragedies, our family has had its share of troubles of a much more personal sort.

Days after our governor’s first “stay-at-home” order, we discovered that four-fifths of our family was infested with lice. (Ah, Don said, the advantages of being bald.) We were, at that point, lice virgins, and so reacted with all the panic and over-kill that is typical of the first infestation. We cut Clayton’s hair to within a quarter inch from his scalp; the girls both got undercuts, trendy looks with the additional advantage of reducing the volume of hair to nitpick by a third. After a full day of washing bedding, our washing machine finally gave up the ghost. Don and I tied bandanas around our faces (remember that time when you didn’t own a face mask?) and marched into the appliance section of Home Depot like bandits. Delivery was ten days out, but our generous neighbors offered their machine.

“Are you even allowed to go over there?” Clayton asked nervously, voicing my own anxiety about breaking the “stay-at-home” rules.

But unless we wanted to wash our clothes in the bathtub, we didn’t have much choice.

“It’s an essential service,” I reassured us both, balancing a bottle of hand sanitizer on top of the overflowing laundry basket.

If going through lice during the lockdown meant more free hours for nitpicking on the back deck, it also contributed to my sense of unease and isolation. I wanted to ask the school nurse if those white specks on Sylvia’s scalp were dandruff or nits; I wanted a trusted friend to comb through my own hair and reassure me that Donald wasn’t missing anything. Mostly, I wanted our lives— upended in so many ways— to feel normal again.

But lice and a broken washing machine, no matter how stressful they felt, were mere inconveniences. Just as the whole country was shuttering its windows and closing its doors, our beloved dog, Soča, was dying. He had been suffering from dementia for months; now his body was giving up, too. We sadly scheduled a euthanasia home visit for the following day, but his back legs collapsed that afternoon and we had to rush him to the emergency clinic, not wanting him to suffer through the night.

So yes, there was no doubt the quarantine had been a challenging time for all of us. And yet I had a feeling that none of this was what Clayton was referring to when he said that things were tough. After all, at that moment we were walking far above the intercoastal waterway, the reeds and water below us glowing amber in the setting sun. And even though it was impossible not to imagine the slim strip of island disappearing to sea level rise or to worry about the pandemic’s trajectory when so many vacationers around us had clearly given up on social distancing, still the external landscape in that moment seemed pretty bright. Here we were, on vacation, our sun-kissed faces glowing, our salty hair blowing in the ocean breeze.

I turned to Clayton in concern. Navigating the ups and downs of puberty during a time when the whole world was topsy-turvey and ill-at-ease— that did sound tough.

“I’m sorry you’re having a rough time,” I said, laying my hand on his shoulder.

He shrugged. “It’s not that I’m sad,” he said. “It’s just that I can remember a time when I felt happy all the time, and it’s not like that now.”

I nodded, although I wasn’t sure that was true; Clayton has always had a complex emotional life. He struggles with anxiety and compulsion, and I certainly can’t remember a time when he was unceasingly happy. But still I take his words for what they are: an attempt to communicate his inner turmoil, this new and unfamiliar roiling of his moods. I understand. The external challenges of adolescence— and who can forget the gauntlet that is junior high, the scathing judgments of peers like battle axes on all sides?— pale in comparison to how one feels on the inside: confused, moody, unloved and unlovable.

How confusing it must be, not to know if he feels lonely and isolated because of puberty or because he hasn’t seen a friend in months? Is he irritable because his body and brain are going through unprecedented changes, or because he’s been cooped up at home with his annoying sisters for far too long? During all his emotional ups and downs of these past few months, I’d blamed the pandemic; we were all feeling out-of-sorts and alone. But Clayton, as usual, had hit the nail on the head: puberty during a pandemic was tough.

Clayton’s moods, whether induced by the pandemic or by puberty— have me thinking a lot about happiness. Under normal circumstances, I try to help my children lead a healthy, rich life. I make them pancakes for breakfast on the weekends. I take them biking, or hiking, or to the river to swim. But I also aspire towards what I once heard a friend describe as “benign neglect”: a parenting style that provides boundaries and limits, but also gives kids the freedom to grow and learn independently. And although sometimes, when one or the other is in tears, refusing to be consoled, I can’t help wishing they were babies again, when I could offer perfect contentment with a good, long nurse, for the most part I have resigned myself to the fact that they will have troubles and conflicts and sorrows that I just can’t solve.

And yet, in the first months of the pandemic, I found myself feeling a new responsibility for my children’s happiness. After all, with schools closed and all activities cancelled, wasn’t our family all they had? When our annual trip to the beach for spring break was cancelled, I planned a backpacking trip instead. When that was cancelled, too, because the National Forest closed just as we were driving to the trailhead, we watched movies, camped out in the yard, baked an Easter bunny cake. When their spirits drooped, I came home from the grocery store with forbidden items that made them gawk at me in surprise: What had happened to their mother? Cans of Pringles and Kit Kat bars seemed like small lifeboats indeed in the tidal wave of Covid disappointments my kids were experiencing, but I was grasping at straws (and mixing metaphors). If my children couldn’t perform in Peter Pan, or go on their school trips, or visit their grandfather to celebrate his eightieth birthday, at least they could eat the occasional bag of Doritos or box of Lucky Charms.

In addition to the slew of disappointments we continued to face, there was the added challenge of five people living, day-in and day-out, in the same space, all while trying to do work and school. In the context of the quarantine, it became even more apparent how much our individual pursuits of happiness rubbed up against each other in often challenging ways. How could the kids be happy if their dad was cussing about needing a quiet place to work? How could I be happy if the kids were at each other’s throats?

Clayton is happiest when the house is in order, every book and plate in its place and the floor swept and mopped. But for Dee Dee, true bliss is throwing herself wholeheartedly into her art, not sparing one iota of creative energy on monitoring whether she’s left a scrap of fabric on the floor or paint streaks on the kitchen table. Both end up feeling that their efforts are underappreciated, their values maligned.

And even when no outright conflict is playing out, there’s still that tricky problem of moods. I think most moms can relate to that old adage that a mother is only as happy as her least happy child. When Clayton’s glum, I certainly never feel like singing Zippity-do-dah. But with Clayton, overly-empathic soul that he is, the opposite is also true. He monitors my moods like a hawk, honing in on any slight slump in energy or moment of irritability.

“Momma, are you happy?” he’ll ask me, looking over from where he’s tirelessly sweeping the floor. And because we’re all together almost all the time, there’s little room for private moods. I almost miss the old days, when I would drive to work feeling, perhaps, a little down or anxious, and sometimes a bit lonely, too, because no one knew that I was sad. Now my moods are closely monitored at all times, as if my cheerfulness on any given day is the barometer for my whole family’s happiness.

A person’s happiness, I’ve read, is largely fixed; supposedly it changes little even with events or circumstances you’d think would ratchet it up or down: winning the lottery, for example, or losing a limb. Perhaps the same is true of a pandemic; despite the anxiety, uncertainty and loss, we are fortunate to be about the same amount of happy as we were before.

In Sylvia’s case, that’s pretty darn happy. Not only is she content in the everyday moments of her life, she seems to live in a perpetual state of excitement about what’s next. There’s just so much she’s looking forward to: dying her hair purple, being old enough to babysit, becoming a teenager, a pediatric nurse, a mom. She’s done the math, calculating that she’ll probably live eleven times the years she’s already been alive. She’s only one eleventh done! “I’m so happy,” she told me recently at bedtime. “My life just seems so long!”

A year ago, this blog would probably have ended there, with that cute, uplifting quote from a girl who has a lot to teach me about being sanguine. But not this year. Not now. Now it’s impossible for me to write that line without reflecting on the light it shines both on my own white privilege and that of my kids. As a white mother of white children, I don’t have to fear— as so many black and Latinx moms do— that my children’s lives will be cut short because of an encounter with police gone wrong. I can listen to my daughter predict her life into her ninety-ninth year and I don’t have to worry about all the ways systemic racism might rob her of it before she gets there. To live free of that terrible anxiety is my privilege, when it should be— must be— any mother’s right.