You Can't Hurry Love

 

“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.

I Just Can't Wait to Be . . .

 

                                                    Sylvia posing with her script

    On Wednesday evening, as Sylvia and I walk the dogs down a cul-de-sac in a nearby neighborhood, a pick-up truck pulls up to the curb and a surly teenage boy emerges from the house, pulling on his shirt. By the time we have rounded the cul-de-sac and are heading back towards home, the drama has thickened. The boy is now standing in the lee of the truck, facing a morose-looking girl with downcast eyes and clasped hands. Bits and pieces of their conversation float our way.

“I’m not going to tell you everywhere I go . . . I’m just not . . . I’ve never done that for anyone and I’m no t going to do it for you . . .”

His voice goes on and on, but the girl doesn’t say a word. She just stands there wringing her hands and looking like she’s seconds away from bursting into tears. Meanwhile, on the other side of the truck, a woman I presume is her mother is sitting in the driver’s seat, hanging a cigarette out the window and blowing smoke.

In my mind, I’m filling in the pieces, making up their story. I imagine that the girl has spent hours swiping her phone, checking for his texts, before finally roping her mom into driving to his house. The whole scene irks me on so many levels: the dangling cigarette, the girl’s voicelessness, the boy’s belittling tone. He sounds so scornful that I don’t blame the girl for looking like all she wants is for the ground to swallow her up.

Sylvia, on the other hand, is ecstatic.

“I can’t wait to be a teenager!” she says, for the fifth time that day. “It just looks like so much fun!” She is practically skipping down the road. “I’m so glad I came on this walk! I got to see a real teenager fight! Oh, it’s so exciting . . .”

I harumph and raise my eyebrows. Exciting boyfriend drama or not, I wouldn’t wish this on her in a million years.

“Just don’t ever go with a boy who talks to you like that,” I tell her.

Later that evening, the girls and I are watching the music video for “White Horse,” Taylor Swift’s 2008 hit single, which Sylvia has been playing on Alexa at high volume at least six times a day. It’s a pretty sad song: Girl meets boy. Boy betrays girl. Girl realizes that all her dreams of princes on white horses are a load of baloney. Now the girl’s sitting on the floor, crying her eyes out, when Sylvia pipes up again, “Oh, I just can’t wait to be a teenager!” She pauses the video at a close up of Taylor Swift’s face.

“It’s so cartoonish! Look. Even her mascara’s smudged.”

I don’t point out that it undoubtedly took a make-up artist forty minutes to get that mascara smudged just right. I don’t say that the scene she’s watching looks like something on tv because it is something on tv, that every minute has been carefully choreographed.

To be honest, the video has choked me up, which, admittedly, is not all that hard. Still, it hurts like hell to have your heart broken, and there is something of that rawness in the scene, no matter how many holes I could poke in it.

“Oh, I just can’t wait to be a teenager,” Sylvia says again as we watch Taylor Swift cry. “It just looks so fun.”

Dee Dee shrugs, skeptical. “She looks pretty miserable to me.”

Suddenly, I’m imagining my girls grown up, and all the heartache and anguish that they’re in for. I don’t know how I’ll stand it. Now, when the kids are sad, I can usually do something. A diplomatic email to a teacher. A cuddle on the bed. A promise of all the happy things to come. But when real sorrow comes, I’ll be powerless. The thought brings tears to my eyes, and I pull Sylvia to me and hold on tight. She hugs me and pats my back reassuringly.

“Don’t worry,” she tells me. “I’m only eight. There’s still—” She pauses to count on her fingers.

“— five years until I’m a teenager. And even then I won’t be a real teenager yet.”

The next day I go to Clayton’s award ceremony at the intermediate school. Some of the fifth grade girls are as tall as I am; a handful of sixth graders look sixteen. Suddenly, Sylvia’s reassurance from the night before feels a little hollow. My little girls are two years away from this! I try to remind myself that I’ve loved every age so far, each year revealing more and more of who my children are. Clayton is a compassionate, book-loving introvert, who takes his history book onto the trampoline so he can fact-check the battle scenes he reenacts in his imagination while he jumps. Dee Dee is a creative and industrious academic, who’s dying to live on a farm, knitting hats and canning pears.

And Sylvia . . . Well, Sylvia is a pop-singing, lip-gloss wearing eight-year-old who longs to be a teenager. She’s already planning the off-the-shoulder tops she’ll wear, the eight piercing she’ll get. She carries Alexa into our bedroom, so she can sing along to “White Horse” and “Love Story” while watching herself in the full-length mirror.

This is not the kind of eight-year-old I was. At times, I chide myself as a parent. How is that she knows so much about teenagers? Should I have forbidden the youtube videos in which a sassy fifteen-year-old with long nails gives squishy toys makeovers? By letting her listen to Taylor Swift, am I standing idly by while she is indoctrinated into the pop-song world of fairytale romances and picturesquely broken hearts?

That night, Sylvia and I have the evening to ourselves. Don and the other two kids have gone to Alabama to see their grandfather, but Sylvia has an acting class on Saturday that she doesn’t want to miss. When we get home from dinner at the local Mexican joint, I ask her what she wants to do. Play outside? Go for a walk? Read a book?

A few minutes later, Sylvia has changed into her Cinderella dress and we are watching Taylor Swift videos together at the kitchen table while I fold laundry. To be honest, I can see why she likes them. They’re romantic and catchy, with just a hint of country twang. We talk about how “Love Story” is about the romantic fairytale, and “White Horse” is about realizing the fairytale isn’t real life. We pause “You Need to Calm Down” and talk about the line, “Shade never made anyone less gay,” and what that might mean. I put in a request for Sara Bareilles’ “Brave,” because if I could choose a song to be the anthem for my girls’ adolescent years, that song would be it.

“Oh, yeah,” she says, when the music comes on. “I like that one, too.” 

Not Shameless

 A few months ago Janet Geddis, owner of Avid Bookshop in Athens, wrote an eloquent post on facebook about the challenges of running an independent bookstore. Her post was full of insights, but the one that struck me the most was how so often the perception of success can make it even harder to succeed. If a bookstore is not dying, we don’t need to feel guilty when we order on Amazon; it’s okay to browse for hours and purchase nought. That indie bookstore doesn’t need us, we think. See! They’re doing fine!

Now, as a newly published author of the novel Give, I suspect that the same might be true with books.

It is hard to write a book. Harder still, perhaps, to publish one. There seems to be almost unanimous agreement that this is true, and so when a book is written, and a publisher found . . . Wow! You did it! That’s amazing! The book may not even be on the shelves (it is quite possible that it may never be), and yet success, it seems, is already yours.

I do not diminish this. It is an amazing thing to launch a book into the world. I appreciate all the congratulations and the words of praise. I am grateful beyond measure that a manuscript I once thought would go no further than my google drive is now in the hands of readers I have never met and probably never will.

But the story does not end with that success, no matter how genuine it is. Because publishers and bookstores do not exist simply to make aspiring authors’ dreams come true. They are businesses like any other. To publish a book is to enter that world: a world of investment and marketing, royalty reports and sales.

I do not want to do it. I’d much rather sit in the basement with my laptop, writing something new. But I owe it to my publisher, to the handful of bookstores who are trying to sell my book, and to myself, to try. It does not come easily. When I open my computer, I want to write, not navigate to social media to promote . . . Because, oh, I know how it must look! Erica has written a book, and now we will hear of it again and again, ad nauseum. She is doing this event, or that; here’s a link to an interview, a mention, a review . . . It all smells like success, but, oh, it does not feel that way.

I have invested thousands of dollars in my book, and that’s not even counting all the hours I’ve spent. There’s this conference to go to, that event to attend, not to mention the hundreds of advance review copies to purchase and give away, in the hope that a bookseller might choose my book from their toppling stack and deem it worthy enough to try to sell.

I do not regret my investment— not at all. If writing a book is like birthing a child— a metaphor we’ve all heard a hundred times— then launching a book is like sending it off to college. It is an expense, surely, and an effort, but what parent would begrudge their child those? Not me.

And yet, unlike an eighteen-year-old left alone on campus, my freshman book cannot fend for itself. It needs a constant mother: networking, scheduling, building a brand . . . And so, there I am again on facebook, begging for a few warm bodies for an event, an amazon review, a mention to a book-loving friend.

“Shameless self-promotion,” I’ve heard it called, but that could not be farther from the truth, since each time it feels so much like shame. Please, my friends, forgive me all my book-related posts. They are not, in fact, the self-congratulations they might appear. Nor, like the owner of any indie bookstore, am I in this business for the money. I love to write. I want to write. And I’d really love for Give to pay for itself one day, so that this whole book-publishing journey might feel a little less like an expensive hobby and a little more like a legitimate endeavor that I can justify to myself when I have to choose between paid work and time to write.

So, when you see another post about Give that makes you want to puke, forgive me, please. I’m doing the best I can to give my book a chance.

What Time Does Not Touch

We recently took a family vacation to northern California, where I lived for five years in my twenties. I hadn’t been back since I was pregnant with my firstborn son, now ten, and I was looking forward to revisiting the places I had once called home and reconnecting with old friends. As it happened, even two of my closest friends from my Florida high school were living in California now, so I’d get the chance to see them, too.

I had left the Bay Area for the mountains of North Carolina when I was twenty-nine. Not wanting to drive a U-haul three thousand miles across the country, I’d sold my Cabriolet and bought an ancient Toyota pick-up, with hand-crank windows, no air conditioning, and no power steering. I held a small garage sale on the sidewalk outside my Oakland apartment, then piled what was left of my belongings into the truck.

“It’s like the Grapes of Wrath backwards,” my father laughed when he saw me two days later, at a pit stop in Colorado. He drove to the hardware store for two dozen bungee cords, which he used to reattach the tarp that had flapped loose a mere ten miles outside of Berkeley. Three days later, I drove the last fifty miles through the Smokies in a thunderstorm, peering through the rain-splattered windshield and silently thanking my dad.

When, in the summer of ‘08, I went back to California for my solo “babymoon,” the car rental company offered me a free upgrade to a convertible Sebring. I drove the dusty highways between the Sierra mountains and the Mendocino hills with the top down and the air-conditioning blasting, feeling, despite my growing baby bump, like a slightly rounder version of my youthful, California self.

On that trip, I had crashed at friends’ houses without a second thought, but it is impossible to be so thoughtless now. Wherever my family goes, we easily outnumber our hosts. My kids can devour a box of cereal in one sitting; a five-pound bag of apples is gone within two days. And we would be descending like the ravaging hordes on friends to whom I hadn’t spoken in a decade or more. I wondered if my memory was exaggerating the closeness of our past connection. Was I, to them, more a hazy recollection than a dear old friend?

I tried to recall the person I’d been in 2003, when I’d set out for Asheville in that overloaded truck. A few months earlier, perhaps a little reckless with my looming departure, I had had an ill-advised fling with a non-native speaker of English.

“You’re so shellfish!” he accused me bitterly, when things began, almost immediately, to turn sour.

And he was right; back then I did think only of myself: my desires, my happiness, my inalienable right to make whatever choices I thought best. Now I am the mother of three children, and, on any given day, I can easily fail half a dozen times at putting myself first.

But, despite the transformations that motherhood and middle age have wrought, I still feel essentially the same; the old (or rather, young) Erica Carpenter still rests at my core. Still, as I planned for our California vacation this year, I hesitated. How dear, really, was that Erica to the old friends that I emailed in anticipation of our trip, sheepishly asking if we could stay a few days?

Our first stop was with a friend I had first met at eighteen, when I went to work at a summer camp in northern California. I had just graduated from high school, she from college. Assigned to the same cabin, we spent four weeks together with a bevy of preadolescent girls. It was supposed to be a summer job, but I don’t remember it as work; I was too overjoyed to have met a kindred spirit, too absorbed in my own coming of age.

Time is a funny thing. At eighteen, a friendship forged in four weeks felt as solid and indisputable as bedrock. Even after we parted in August, my loyalty soldiered on; she was my friend, my mentor, my road map to the woman that I wanted to become. Still, I had not seen her in sixteen years; her elder daughter, whom I remembered as a toddler, would be off to college soon. It felt impossible to imagine my friend at the cusp of fifty, a few short years from an empty nest. I remembered her as I always had: shod in hiking boots or Chacos, the way her powerful shoulders would burst from the water as she butterflied across the swimming hole, showing me how.

I soon discovered that I needn’t have tried to imagine her as different than she was. Within minutes of arriving at her farmhouse in the woods, it was clear that she was not. My friend was the same as ever: her stride, her speech, her laugh, the way she drew me out and made me my best self.

So much is said of how much time transforms; this trip taught me how much there is it cannot touch.

Again and again, I learned it. Where were the so-called ravages of time? A decade, at least, had passed, and yet there my dear friends were, unchanged! On my own body, the marks of time are legion: the sunspots and the wrinkles, the poochy stomach and gray hairs. But my friends were as they always were. The way they ate, and moved, and talked— the same!

I have a dear friend in Asheville who, when we met, was already solidly in middle age. At times, hearing some story from her youth, I’ve wished I could have known her then. What was she like at fifteen, or twenty-five? It seems to me now I do know who she must have been: she was as she is, just with different hair and younger skin.

What is it that does not change? I know myself to be different than I was. I eat better, but sleep less well. I am less selfish, but more anxious. Less ecstatic, perhaps, but more content. I do not doubt my friends could catalog all the ways they, too, have changed. But still I find the truth is this: there is something about us all that does not change, an immutable quiddity that anchors us to ourselves and forever links us to the ones who hold us dear. 

Reflections on Turning 45

“Aren’t you humiliated?” Clayton asks me.

I understand his question. I must look like a trained bear on this little bike, my knees barely clearing the handlebars. Until a couple of weeks ago, this was Clayton’s bike, but, like me, he is much too big for it now. I have given him my own mountain bike to ride on this camping trip to Huntington Beach on the coast of South Carolina, and now Dee Dee is riding Clayton’s old bike.

Except for right now. Right now, I am riding the bike that used to be Clayton’s and is now his sister’s, because I want to go for a bike ride with my son. My own road bike, sadly, is not here, as there was no possible way it was going to fit anywhere in or on our already overloaded van.

But I am not humiliated. In fact, when Clayton asks, I realize that it has not even occurred to me to wonder how I must look to all the people we pass. Suddenly I remember what it was like to be ten-years-old, and twelve, and even twenty, when just existing in the world with other people could so often feel like a test I knew I wasn’t going to pass. Are my clothes right? Not really. Do I fit in? Not quite. Do I look ridiculous on this bicycle that’s much too small for me? Definitely.

I am struck by how wonderful it is to be middle-aged, which is a quite a nice feeling to have a day after my birthday. And this small insight— that it is much easier for me, at forty-five, to ride a miniature bike around a campground without humiliation than it would be for Clayton, at ten— is only the beginning. Because I can’t seem to go camping without writing a blog, here are some of my other reflections on turning forty-five from this week away from home:

1) I can still sleep soundly in a tent! In fact, I have slept better this week than I have in months. When I wake in the middle of the night, as I always do, I notice the silhouettes of the trees against the moonlit sky, and my mind does not reach, as usual, for the same worn-out worries and tired to-do list. When I crawl back into my sleeping bag, the sound of the surf puts me right back to sleep.

2) I can wear the same pilly, stretched-out fleece for five days and not worry that my husband is going to suddenly find me unattractive. That said, I wish I had something else to wear, as this fleece is smeared with soot, egg yolk, and pancake batter, and, wearing it, I can’t help but find myself unappealing. (Are my clothes right? Definitely not.) Unfortunately, in my haste to pack— I got home from Denver only eleven hours before we left for the beach— this is the only warm layer I brought. I scope out the overpriced tourist sweatshirts in the gift shop, but in the end frugality beats out vanity and I’m stuck in the ugly fleece all week. When we go for a walk on the beach in the evening of the coldest day, I wear a skirt around my neck as a scarf. I feel lucky both that I’m old enough not to be mortified by my own outfit and that my kids are young enough that they don’t even notice.

3) I can embarrass my son without meaning to! Somehow, this feels like an important parenting milestone. When we go out to dinner on my birthday, I’m surprised to see that my veggie burger cost nearly fifteen dollars. I ask the confused young waiter about the up-charge on the sweet potato fries, which I’m sure he’d said was only ninety-nine cents.

"It is. Ninety-nine cents. Plus $2.49.”

“So why isn’t that $3.48?” I ask, genuinely puzzled.

“Because it’s ninety-nine cents.”

He blushes and apologizes, while Clayton buries his face in his arms.

“Momma,” he mutters. “Just pay it. Please.”

I do, much to Clayton and the blushing waiter’s relief.

4) After ten and a half years of parenting, I can still screw up pretty badly. Dee Dee is my weakness, easily pushing my buttons with her moodiness and moping. Here we are, camping at the beach under cloudless skies, and yet somehow she can still find a reason to sit around, frowning, or bike off somewhere in a huff. Exasperated, I mutter something to the others about how she is my most challenging child. As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know I’ve screwed up. I make it worse by trying to cover my tracks.

“Don’t you dare tell her I said that,” I tell Clayton and Sylvia.

They shake their heads dutifully, but that evening, during a moment of levity, Clayton can’t help himself.

“Momma said you’re the hardest one,” he says. I pull him to the side and ask him what he’s doing, but even as I storm at him, I know I was the one who set him up.

I go for a walk with Dee Dee and try to explain. I try so hard to make my kids happy, I tell her, that it’s really hard for me when she looks so sad.

“It’s okay,” she says, surprisingly matter-of-fact. “I know I’m the hard one. I try not to be, but I can’t help it. I just am.”

Clayton is weepy when we return. “I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut.”

I pull him awkwardly onto my lap— he’s pretty much outgrown that, too— and apologize.

“It was really my fault. I should never have said that about Dee Dee. And I shouldn’t have asked you not to tell.”

“I tried not to,” he said earnestly. “But there was just too much pressure.”

I am so lucky that my children forgive me, again and again and again.

5) My favorite things are pretty much the same at forty-five as they were at five, and fifteen, and twenty-five, and . . . I would still rather be camping, running through the woods, or riding a bicycle than pretty much anything else I can think of.

“One day we’ll be able to go for bike rides together,” I tell Dee Dee, imagining us setting off on a twenty-mile ride through Candler when she’s a teenager and has a road bike of her own.

She pedals closer and smiles up at me; Clayton has let me borrow my old mountain bike so I can take a few laps around the campground with his sister.

“Momma, aren’t we doing that right now?” she asks.

Which leads me to my last reflection . . .

6) Kids are very good at keeping you in the present.

“Yes,” I tell her. “Yes, we are.”“Aren’t you humiliated?” Clayton asks me.

I understand his question. I must look like a trained bear on this little bike, my knees barely clearing the handlebars. Until a couple of weeks ago, this was Clayton’s bike, but, like me, he is much too big for it now. I have given him my own mountain bike to ride on this camping trip to Huntington Beach on the coast of South Carolina, and now Dee Dee is riding Clayton’s old bike.

Except for right now. Right now, I am riding the bike that used to be Clayton’s and is now his sister’s, because I want to go for a bike ride with my son. My own road bike, sadly, is not here, as there was no possible way it was going to fit anywhere in or on our already overloaded van.

But I am not humiliated. In fact, when Clayton asks, I realize that it has not even occurred to me to wonder how I must look to all the people we pass. Suddenly I remember what it was like to be ten-years-old, and twelve, and even twenty, when just existing in the world with other people could so often feel like a test I knew I wasn’t going to pass. Are my clothes right? Not really. Do I fit in? Not quite. Do I look ridiculous on this bicycle that’s much too small for me? Definitely.

I am struck by how wonderful it is to be middle-aged, which is a quite a nice feeling to have a day after my birthday. And this small insight— that it is much easier for me, at forty-five, to ride a miniature bike around a campground without humiliation than it would be for Clayton, at ten— is only the beginning. Because I can’t seem to go camping without writing a blog, here are some of my other reflections on turning forty-five from this week away from home:

1) I can still sleep soundly in a tent! In fact, I have slept better this week than I have in months. When I wake in the middle of the night, as I always do, I notice the silhouettes of the trees against the moonlit sky, and my mind does not reach, as usual, for the same worn-out worries and tired to-do list. When I crawl back into my sleeping bag, the sound of the surf puts me right back to sleep.

2) I can wear the same pilly, stretched-out fleece for five days and not worry that my husband is going to suddenly find me unattractive. That said, I wish I had something else to wear, as this fleece is smeared with soot, egg yolk, and pancake batter, and, wearing it, I can’t help but find myself unappealing. (Are my clothes right? Definitely not.) Unfortunately, in my haste to pack— I got home from Denver only eleven hours before we left for the beach— this is the only warm layer I brought. I scope out the overpriced tourist sweatshirts in the gift shop, but in the end frugality beats out vanity and I’m stuck in the ugly fleece all week. When we go for a walk on the beach in the evening of the coldest day, I wear a skirt around my neck as a scarf. I feel lucky both that I’m old enough not to be mortified by my own outfit and that my kids are young enough that they don’t even notice.

3) I can embarrass my son without meaning to! Somehow, this feels like an important parenting milestone. When we go out to dinner on my birthday, I’m surprised to see that my veggie burger cost nearly fifteen dollars. I ask the confused young waiter about the up-charge on the sweet potato fries, which I’m sure he’d said was only ninety-nine cents.

"It is. Ninety-nine cents. Plus $2.49.”

“So why isn’t that $3.48?” I ask, genuinely puzzled.

“Because it’s ninety-nine cents.”

He blushes and apologizes, while Clayton buries his face in his arms.

“Momma,” he mutters. “Just pay it. Please.”

I do, much to Clayton and the blushing waiter’s relief.

4) After ten and a half years of parenting, I can still screw up pretty badly. Dee Dee is my weakness, easily pushing my buttons with her moodiness and moping. Here we are, camping at the beach under cloudless skies, and yet somehow she can still find a reason to sit around, frowning, or bike off somewhere in a huff. Exasperated, I mutter something to the others about how she is my most challenging child. As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know I’ve screwed up. I make it worse by trying to cover my tracks.

“Don’t you dare tell her I said that,” I tell Clayton and Sylvia.

They shake their heads dutifully, but that evening, during a moment of levity, Clayton can’t help himself.

“Momma said you’re the hardest one,” he says. I pull him to the side and ask him what he’s doing, but even as I storm at him, I know I was the one who set him up.

I go for a walk with Dee Dee and try to explain. I try so hard to make my kids happy, I tell her, that it’s really hard for me when she looks so sad.

“It’s okay,” she says, surprisingly matter-of-fact. “I know I’m the hard one. I try not to be, but I can’t help it. I just am.”

Clayton is weepy when we return. “I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut.”

I pull him awkwardly onto my lap— he’s pretty much outgrown that, too— and apologize.

“It was really my fault. I should never have said that about Dee Dee. And I shouldn’t have asked you not to tell.”

“I tried not to,” he said earnestly. “But there was just too much pressure.”

I am so lucky that my children forgive me, again and again and again.

5) My favorite things are pretty much the same at forty-five as they were at five, and fifteen, and twenty-five, and . . . I would still rather be camping, running through the woods, or riding a bicycle than pretty much anything else I can think of.

“One day we’ll be able to go for bike rides together,” I tell Dee Dee, imagining us setting off on a twenty-mile ride through Candler when she’s a teenager and has a road bike of her own.

She pedals closer and smiles up at me; Clayton has let me borrow my old mountain bike so I can take a few laps around the campground with his sister.

“Momma, aren’t we doing that right now?” she asks.

Which leads me to my last reflection . . .

6) Kids are very good at keeping you in the present.

“Yes,” I tell her. “Yes, we are.”“Aren’t you humiliated?” Clayton asks me.

I understand his question. I must look like a trained bear on this little bike, my knees barely clearing the handlebars. Until a couple of weeks ago, this was Clayton’s bike, but, like me, he is much too big for it now. I have given him my own mountain bike to ride on this camping trip to Huntington Beach on the coast of South Carolina, and now Dee Dee is riding Clayton’s old bike.

Except for right now. Right now, I am riding the bike that used to be Clayton’s and is now his sister’s, because I want to go for a bike ride with my son. My own road bike, sadly, is not here, as there was no possible way it was going to fit anywhere in or on our already overloaded van.

But I am not humiliated. In fact, when Clayton asks, I realize that it has not even occurred to me to wonder how I must look to all the people we pass. Suddenly I remember what it was like to be ten-years-old, and twelve, and even twenty, when just existing in the world with other people could so often feel like a test I knew I wasn’t going to pass. Are my clothes right? Not really. Do I fit in? Not quite. Do I look ridiculous on this bicycle that’s much too small for me? Definitely.

I am struck by how wonderful it is to be middle-aged, which is a quite a nice feeling to have a day after my birthday. And this small insight— that it is much easier for me, at forty-five, to ride a miniature bike around a campground without humiliation than it would be for Clayton, at ten— is only the beginning. Because I can’t seem to go camping without writing a blog, here are some of my other reflections on turning forty-five from this week away from home:

1) I can still sleep soundly in a tent! In fact, I have slept better this week than I have in months. When I wake in the middle of the night, as I always do, I notice the silhouettes of the trees against the moonlit sky, and my mind does not reach, as usual, for the same worn-out worries and tired to-do list. When I crawl back into my sleeping bag, the sound of the surf puts me right back to sleep.

2) I can wear the same pilly, stretched-out fleece for five days and not worry that my husband is going to suddenly find me unattractive. That said, I wish I had something else to wear, as this fleece is smeared with soot, egg yolk, and pancake batter, and, wearing it, I can’t help but find myself unappealing. (Are my clothes right? Definitely not.) Unfortunately, in my haste to pack— I got home from Denver only eleven hours before we left for the beach— this is the only warm layer I brought. I scope out the overpriced tourist sweatshirts in the gift shop, but in the end frugality beats out vanity and I’m stuck in the ugly fleece all week. When we go for a walk on the beach in the evening of the coldest day, I wear a skirt around my neck as a scarf. I feel lucky both that I’m old enough not to be mortified by my own outfit and that my kids are young enough that they don’t even notice.

3) I can embarrass my son without meaning to! Somehow, this feels like an important parenting milestone. When we go out to dinner on my birthday, I’m surprised to see that my veggie burger cost nearly fifteen dollars. I ask the confused young waiter about the up-charge on the sweet potato fries, which I’m sure he’d said was only ninety-nine cents.

"It is. Ninety-nine cents. Plus $2.49.”

“So why isn’t that $3.48?” I ask, genuinely puzzled.

“Because it’s ninety-nine cents.”

He blushes and apologizes, while Clayton buries his face in his arms.

“Momma,” he mutters. “Just pay it. Please.”

I do, much to Clayton and the blushing waiter’s relief.

4) After ten and a half years of parenting, I can still screw up pretty badly. Dee Dee is my weakness, easily pushing my buttons with her moodiness and moping. Here we are, camping at the beach under cloudless skies, and yet somehow she can still find a reason to sit around, frowning, or bike off somewhere in a huff. Exasperated, I mutter something to the others about how she is my most challenging child. As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know I’ve screwed up. I make it worse by trying to cover my tracks.

“Don’t you dare tell her I said that,” I tell Clayton and Sylvia.

They shake their heads dutifully, but that evening, during a moment of levity, Clayton can’t help himself.

“Momma said you’re the hardest one,” he says. I pull him to the side and ask him what he’s doing, but even as I storm at him, I know I was the one who set him up.

I go for a walk with Dee Dee and try to explain. I try so hard to make my kids happy, I tell her, that it’s really hard for me when she looks so sad.

“It’s okay,” she says, surprisingly matter-of-fact. “I know I’m the hard one. I try not to be, but I can’t help it. I just am.”

Clayton is weepy when we return. “I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut.”

I pull him awkwardly onto my lap— he’s pretty much outgrown that, too— and apologize.

“It was really my fault. I should never have said that about Dee Dee. And I shouldn’t have asked you not to tell.”

“I tried not to,” he said earnestly. “But there was just too much pressure.”

I am so lucky that my children forgive me, again and again and again.

5) My favorite things are pretty much the same at forty-five as they were at five, and fifteen, and twenty-five, and . . . I would still rather be camping, running through the woods, or riding a bicycle than pretty much anything else I can think of.

“One day we’ll be able to go for bike rides together,” I tell Dee Dee, imagining us setting off on a twenty-mile ride through Candler when she’s a teenager and has a road bike of her own.

She pedals closer and smiles up at me; Clayton has let me borrow my old mountain bike so I can take a few laps around the campground with his sister.

“Momma, aren’t we doing that right now?” she asks.

Which leads me to my last reflection . . .

6) Kids are very good at keeping you in the present.

“Yes,” I tell her. “Yes, we are.” 

Clayton's Bully

 A few years ago, whenever we would read a book in which some kid was getting picked on, Clayton would stop the story to say proudly, “There are no bullies at my school.” Despite the “friend” who stomped on his beloved Calico Critters during an ill-advised playdate, Clayton’s elementary school experience has been remarkably conflict-free.

Until now.

Last week, Clayton came in from playing outside in tears. A neighborhood kid— a first grader— had called him names and hit him with a stick, trying to provoke him into a fight. When Clayton tried to go inside, the kid began harassing our dogs through the fence.

“He made Socă growl,” Clayton told me through his tears.

I was shocked. Socă is part basenji, a barkless breed of dog, and has probably barked fewer than a dozen times in his twelve-year-old life. If this kid had made Socă growl, he must really have been messing with him.

Clayton, too, I had never seen so mad.

“I just wanted to hit him!” he said, sobbing. “Why was he being so mean?”

I had no idea. Why would a first grader be picking on Clayton? I went over to the neighbor’s house to find out. As his father and I talked to him, the kid said nothing. He just stood there, staring at me with enormous brown eyes.

“Did Clayton do something to you?” I asked him.

He shook his head wordlessly. I couldn’t believe that it was this cute little boy that had made Clayton cry.

“This is Clayton’s mom,” the dad said to him. “And next time she’s going to call the police and they’re going to take you to jail and I’m not going to get you out.”

Two days later, the kid struck again, this time on the bus. Now Clayton was a “cry-baby” for telling me what had happened. He hit Clayton repeatedly on the head, again trying to provoke him into a fight.

This time, I called the school. I talked with the school counselor, who sighed when I said the kid’s name. She said he was lucky he hadn’t picked on someone less gentle than Clayton. The kid got an assigned seat on the bus, and for a few days, there were no further incidents. Cautiously, Clayton went back to playing outside, but I noticed that he mostly stuck to the backyard, avoiding the street and the creek. When the kid was out on his bicycle, Clayton ducked behind a tree or came inside.

The peace was short-lived. Two days later, Clayton was playing outside when the bully approached and began to insult him.

The bully: “You have ugly shoes.”

Clayton: “You have an ugly face.”

The bully: “Why don’t you want to fight?”

Clayton: “Because it’s violent.”
The bully: “What’s ‘violent’?”

Finally, the kid— unable to define violence but with a clear understanding of the concept— pushed Clayton. Clayton pushed him back, and the boy fell off his bike and onto the pavement. When Clayton went up the driveway, trying to get away from him, the kid picked up a loose piece of cement and threw it at him.

Recounting the fight, Clayton was beside himself with fury.

“Shouldn’t we call 911?” he asked desperately.

I shook my head, trying to hide a smile.

If not not the police, what about the school? Clayton longed for the involvement of some higher authority, someone who could mete out the retribution this kid deserved. He was guilty of trespassing, damaging property, assault. How could he just get away with it all?

But worse even then his rage was the awful self-hatred it opened up in him.

“I hate myself!” he kept saying all afternoon, breaking down in tears again and again.

“But why?” I asked, trying to console him. “You’re amazing.”

But Clayton had understood something about the kid, perhaps something about the very nature of violence.

“He wouldn’t do this to me if I was different,” he said. “He wouldn’t do it if I were more like Alex, or more like Jose.”

I couldn’t deny it, and yet it broke my heart. Not only had my gentle, kind-hearted son been singled out and picked on, but he had been made to despise the very things about himself that I loved so much. And no matter how much I affirmed to Clayton that he was the better person for having those qualities, it didn’t change the truth the way he saw it: that this kid had sensed in Clayton an easy target and nothing Clayton did or said would change that.

The only silver lining was that Clayton’s friends at school had rallied around him. Whoever fights with Clayton fights with us, they’d said. Clayton had told them how the kid had threatened him: “I’m going to hit you with this stick!”

“So then you say, “I’m going to hit you with this hand,” his friend had instructed. Clayton broke into a grin, remembering. “But it’s always easier to think of what to say afterwards.”

That evening, Don went over to the kids’ house to talk to his father again, the piece of cement the kid had thrown stuffed in his jacket pocket.

The father just shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know what to do with him,” he said. He repeated the empty threat about the police, except now the police were already at our house, waiting to take the kid to jail.

“What he really needs,” the dad said to Don, “is to get punched in the face.”

That night, Don taught Clayton how to punch. How to make a fist. How to aim for his nose. How to use his body to put force behind the blow.

“The next time he says something to you,” he told Clayton, “you punch him in the face. That’s all it’s going to take.”

Clayton glanced at me, his eyes wide. Really? I understood his disbelief. It was hard to imagine him punching anyone— except for maybe his sister. And in the face?

“What about the stomach?” I suggested, imagining a broken nose and blood.

“The face,” Don insisted. “This needs to stop.” He drew the kid’s face on his palm, and Clayton practiced slugging it until his fists were sore.

The crazy thing is that so many people— men at least— seem to have a story like this. My brother does. So does my father and my husband. It’s as if, in the world of the street and the playground, all the axioms we’ve taught our kids since toddlerhood— use your words, don’t hit, control your body— go out the window. Instead of conflict resolution techniques, we’re practicing punches in the living room.

I watch as something seems to harden in Clayton. He goes to school the next morning pumped on adrenalin, ready for the fight that will— supposedly— end all fights. He seems suddenly older, less of a little boy.

Is this the making of manhood? The rites of passage that turn our sweet little boys into, if not men exactly, something much closer? My feelings about it are a jumble of contradictions. Is a punch to the face really the answer? I’d like to say no. I’d rather be scheduling a joint session with the school counselor, a visit to the “conflict corner.” But neither do I want my son cowed into hiding behind trees, too scared to defend himself. There is a fine line between non-violence and spinelessness.

It has rained all week, so no one is playing outside. Clayton is disappointed; he is ready to get it over with, and so am I. I am hesitant to leave Clayton alone at the house when I take Dee Dee to her guitar lesson, worried that I won’t be here when it all goes down.

“Don’t worry, Momma,” Clayton tells me. “I’ll be fine.”

“But you’ll probably be upset,” I say.

He nods, matter-of-fact. “Yeah. But I'll just wait to cry until I come inside.”