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.
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.
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.
“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.
We needed Saturday. Cool and sunny, with that particular light that only a spring day can have, it was impossible not to feel our spirits lift. It came at just the right time. We had spent the week beginning our foray into virtual schools. At first, despite the circumstances, it was impossible not to feel excited. Schools were closed!
But it wasn’t long before anxiety began to creep in. Sylvia, in particular, worried how online school would work. Without her teacher guiding her through the lessons, how would she know what to do?
“I’ll be there,” I reassured her. “I’ll help you.” I dubbed our homeschool Mama Witsell’s Academy, and, for a day or two, we had fun imagining all the possibilities of staying home. We could go for hikes and ride bikes, do art projects and learn Spanish. While I made a mental list of all the home projects we could tackle (clean the blinds, organize the craft table, dust the fan blades), Dee Dee wrote down our “specials” schedule: Monday: Art, Tuesday: PE, Wednesday: Dance . . .
But, by the middle of the first day, the snow day excitement of staying home on a school day had already worn off. It turned out the specials teachers had posted their own virtual assignments, and somehow, caught up in the prospect of being home with my kids again, I had forgotten that I had my own job to attend to. After a two-hour Zoom meeting with my colleagues that left me feeling overwhelmed and anxious— how in the world was I going to teach English for three hours a day via videoconferencing to students who struggle to check their email?— designing creative art projects for my kids had completely slipped off the edge of what felt possible. Even our afternoon riding bikes at Biltmore ended in tears, when the handlebars on Sylvia’s new bike came loose and she had to wobble and walk all the way back to the car.
By Friday, we were all feeling a bit demoralized. How could this possibly work? The videos on the kids’ google classrooms weren’t loading. Clayton didn’t have any math assignments. Sylvia was treating her google classroom as her own social media platform (“I’m bored. Is anyone there? Someone please talk to me! Someone? Anyone????”) Don was cussing darkly about not being able to get any work done, while our ancient dog Soca paced the house, neurotically scratching at every door, and I wandered from room to room with my Chromebook, looking for a quiet place to settle for yet another Zoom meeting. All in all, the reality of five people working virtually from home was leaving us all feeling irritable and overwhelmed.
The weekend came at last, as it always does. Chinese take-out and movie night replaced our usual Friday evening out, and although I stopped the movie early so I could get to bed on time, I woke on Saturday morning feeling grumpy and unrested. Soca had scratched at the door at five thirty, waking me from a restless night in which I dreamed constantly of Zoom conferences gone awry. Even before breakfast, the kids began their daily needling, and, with four additional laptops in the house, it seemed there was an open screen everywhere I turned.
Then, at breakfast, Clayton branched out from his usual fraternal taunting. “You’re so hideous,” he usually says to his sisters. But this time:
“Sylvia, you’re a bastard.”
I spun around, eyes wide. “Clayton! What did you say?”
“I said she was a bastard,” he said calmly.
“Clayton! Don’t say that!”
“What?” he asked innocently. “It’s not like it’s a bad word.”
“Yes, it is!”
“No, it isn’t!”
“Clayton, it is!”
He started to look doubtful.
“Really? It is?”
“Yes!”
“It’s a bad word?” He paused, considering. Then he shook his head definitively. “No, it isn’t. Daddy never says it.”
I couldn’t help it; I started giggling. Somehow their father’s prolific cursing had become their barometer for profanity. “Bastard” couldn’t possibly be a bad word if their father never said it. (I’ll have to add it to my repertoire,” Don said later when I told him.)
“Well, it is,” I said, struggling to keep a straight face. “And you shouldn’t say it.”
Clayton, convinced at last, rushed into a string of apologies; despite his near-constant torment of his sisters, he has a strong self-image as a “good kid” which excludes the use of all profanity. But his apologies were light-hearted; he could tell I wasn’t really mad. Even his sisters were smiling, the sting of the taunt obliterated by the novelty of the word.
The levity of that moment set the tone for the day, and what a day it was. While the fog still settled in the neighborhood, we snuggled on the coach under a blanket and finished watching the movie from the night before. Clayton kept piping up: “That’s Frederick Douglas! I know about the Fugitive Slave Law! Oh, we read about the Combahee River Raid yesterday in virtual school!” (Ah, so some learning had occurred while Don was cursing Soca and I was battling with the internal mic.)
It was all uphill from there. The movie ended, the sun came out. Sylvia decided she wanted to be reunited with Sparkle and Rebecca, the baby dolls who had long ago been sent to the attic to wait for the next generation, or for a day just like this one. And, oh, what wonders the attic holds! Down came the baby dolls and their cute little outfits, down came the old board books to read to them and a bag of summer girls’ clothes our neighbors had handed down to us years before. The ladder to the attic stayed down all day. Here were the Easter decorations to put out, and a box of non-fiction books Aunt Cathy had passed along from her kids’ home-schooling days.
It felt, just a little, like Christmas.
“I’m so happy!” Sylvia kept saying. “It’s so good to see Rebecca and Sparkle again!”
She nursed her babies while Dee Dee and I sorted through the clothes: the pink and neon shorts for Sylvia, the blue jean ones for her. Dee Dee tried on outfit after outfit, her eyes glowing with delight at discovering this unexpected arsenal of style— especially with Sylvia distracted by her babies, giving her first dibs.
By ten o’clock, the sky was bright and startlingly blue, and we had all changed into shorts for the first time this year. While the kids rode their bikes and played by the creek, I ripped up a year’s worth of weeds from the garden and turned over the soil. It was the kind of spring day that feels like a promise, when the warm sunshine lures you into putting away all your warm pajamas and you turn off the thermostat and open the doors wide. And it was the kind of Saturday when it feels like the weekend will last forever, and Monday will never come.
“I think this is the best day ever,” Dee Dee said, helping me sprinkle seeds into the coarse soil.
Never mind that by our evening walk, we were shivering in our shorts and the heater was back on. Never mind that Monday did come after all, with all its random worksheets and Zoom meetings, its endlessly loading videos and fatherly expletives. Never mind that Tuesday it rained all day and Wednesday brought a “stay at home” order from the county. Saturday’s promise stayed.
In the girls’ room, four baby dolls cuddle in a miniature Pack-N-Play— “They’re napping,” Sylvia tells me— while the girls host a fashion show with their new clothes. Clayton joins his father in cursing the squirrels who inevitably foil the baffle to eat from the bird feeder (“You bastar—- I'm sorry!”). And, in the wet soil of the garden, my seeds of kale and spinach, arugula and chard, are bursting open and pushing towards the light.
“What is there to look forward to?” Sylvia asks me hopefully the other night as we set out on our nightly walk. It is the first week back at school after Christmas break. For the entire previous month, there has always been something delightful just around the corner: meeting Santa, making the gingerbread house, decorating cookies, seeing the lights at Lake Julian. Now that all the decorations are put away and the relatives have gone home, what is there to look forward to, indeed?
“It’s your dad’s birthday party on Saturday,” I tell her. “And we can finally do the piñata.”
It is not the right thing to say. The piñata was supposed to have been for the twins’ birthday, but the few kids who came to their party had to leave before it could be disemboweled. Tears come to Sylvia’s eyes, remembering.
“Nobody I invited even came to my party.”
My heart sinks; her disappointment is at least partly my fault. The girls hadn’t wanted a huge crowd, so I had suggested that, in addition to some family friends, they each invite only two friends from school. Unfortunately, the girls Sylvia had invited didn’t come.
“It’s because they’re sort-of friends,” she explains to me now. “They’re not real friends.” She pauses, considering. “I don’t have any real friends,” she concludes, beginning to cry.
I hug her close, wanting to contradict her. Of course you have real friends, I want to say. I mean, how couldn’t she? Sylvia is my one extrovert, with her father’s sense of humor. Sylvia wakes up in the morning eager to go to school so she can make people laugh. So how can my funny, kind, social child not have a real friend?
But I bite my tongue. I know what a true friend is, and I also know that there are times in your life when you just don’t have one. To tell her that of course those girls are true friends isn’t right, for what can I know, really, about the nature of her friendships? I can only tell her to be patient, to give it time, that she is doing the right thing by getting involved in the things she enjoys and being kind to everyone.
I tell her that there have been times in my life when I’ve been lonely, times when I’ve longed for a true friend more than anything. And, walking along the wet street in the dark, I sing her Diana Ross’s “You Can’t Hurry Love,” a song I listened to again and again in high school as I washed the dishes after dinner, a song that always brought me comfort in the way it both normalizes loneliness and offers up a cheerful reassurance that it’s not forever.
Singing the familiar lines, I realize, of course, that the song isn’t completely apt. Sylvia hasn’t endured heartache after heartache; she certainly isn’t longing for a pair of tender arms to hold her tight (at least not yet— thank goodness). But it seems, too, that there is something essentially the same about the kind of loneliness Sylvia feels without one true friend and the kind that seeps through the bars of the Supremes’ hit single from the sixties. I want it to be a comfort to Sylvia that she is not alone in her aloneness.
In general, Sylvia is my sanguine, upbeat daughter. For her, the glass is always half-full; she finds the silver lining where she can. After two weeks off at Christmas, when reading logs and division tests loomed their ugly heads, she announced, “I can’t wait to go to school so I can use my new lunchbox!”
And so it especially heart-breaking to me when Sylvia cries. Really cries. Not the cry when her brother has pushed her a little too far, or the cry when I’ve spoken harshly to her and she must run to her room in tears to let me know how wronged she’s been. But when she cries that she has no real friends at school, no one who can be counted on to come to a birthday party and stay until the contents of the piñata lie scattered on the ground— that cry breaks my heart.
Hugging Sylvia to me while the dogs pull at their leashes, I have to learn again— for the gazillionth time— that I am long, long past the days of motherhood when I held infinite power to make my children happy. And that lesson, too, breaks my heart.
I know that there will be times when my children are sad. They will feel wronged or lonely. Someone will disappoint them, or, worse, they will disappoint themselves. I believe the Greek poet Hesiod understood something essential about the human experience when he first told of Pandora opening her box. We have the right, not to happiness, but to its pursuit.
No, I can’t make my children happy. I can’t make Sylvia believe she has a true friend if she doesn’t. I can’t stamp out Clayton’s despair when he makes a less than stellar grade on a big math test, or lift Dee Dee from her darker moods. I can only try to shepherd my children through their griefs and disappointments with as much grace as I can find. I can only tell Sylvia that we love her, that she is not alone.
And, when we get home from our walk, I can play her “You Can’t Hurry Love” on youtube and show her pictures of Diana Ross.
“Oooo,” she says, brightening. “When I’m a teenager, I want a dress like that.” And just like that, Sylvia finds her own way back to joy.
Note to the reader, in case you’re worried about Sylvia:
A few days later, Sylvia was telling me about how she played with another girl on the swings at recess and they had a “nice little chat.”
“It seems to me that you might have real friends at school,” I said tentatively.
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “It seems to me, too.”
Unfortunately, it rained at Daddy’s party so the piñata is still in the basement, waiting for Valentine’s Day.
