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.” 

The Game of Life

 

On Friday afternoon, we went to a brewery for what passes, in the social studies department of Enka High, for a baby shower. I drank one beer on an empty stomach and knew I wouldn’t be driving home.

“Your mom’s drunk,” Don told the kids.

“Really, Momma?” they asked curiously. “On one beer? Daddy usually drinks more than that!”

At home, I throw together an impromptu dinner, marveling at how much less of a chore cooking feels when I’m wasted.

Meanwhile, Don’s setting out the new Life board for game night. There are only four little cars, so Don and I are a team. We lose our first job for bringing our cat to work, and our second for snoozing on the first day. We end up as dancers, making 60K every pay day.

The new Life— updated, I presume, for the 21st century— is just as woefully unrealistic as the one I remember from childhood. Dee Dee goes on a trip to Paris and gets fifty thousand from the bank. Seriously? In what alternate universe do you earn money on a vacation in Paris?

Then Sylvia writes a book for forty thousand, and I don’t even try to bite my tongue.

“More like pay forty thousand,” I grumble, thinking of the money I spent this week on advanced review copies of my book, the forty bucks I doled out for an ad-free website, the conference fee I’ll pay if I’m accepted to speak at a booksellers’ conference in the spring. Whoever wrote this game was clearly thinking of Ann Patchett and Barbara Kingsolver, not the likes of me.

I lean my head against the back of the couch and drink water while Don runs the game. He’s counting out a hundred and forty thousand dollars in twenties (and cursing) when Dee Dee ducks under our legs and comes up with the missing stack of 100 K bills and a lost cat toy, both furry with dog hair.

“That’s more like it!” Banker Don is suddenly in a much better mood, and so is the cat.

Before I know it, we are all getting married.

“But you and Daddy already are married,” Sylvia points out. (Yes, but we didn’t make 150 K at our first wedding.)

“I think I’ll be gay,” Dee Dee says cheerfully, picking out another pink peg to join her in her car. At least some things have changed since I last played this game.

“Who do you want to marry, a boy or a girl?” Don asks Clayton. Take that, heteronormativity. Now all they need to do is come up with genderfluid pegs.

An expensive sound system and a thirty thousand dollar swimming pool later, we get to choose whether to have kids. I am still tipsy and shake my head.

“No kids. Not this time. I want to be able to run without peeing my pants.”

“Is that the only thing you don’t like about having kids?” Dee Dee asks me.

“Pretty much,” I say. (That, and matching all the pairs of white socks in the laundry.)

A few minutes later and Sylvia, who is already the mother of a charming pink peg, is having twins. Like Chrissy Teigen, she gets to choose the gender of her offspring.

“I want two girls,” she says.

“Okay,” Don says, handing over the kids, “but that’s a lot of girls.”

“I have one boy,” she protests, pointing at the sole blue peg in her car.

“That’s not a boy!” Clayton points out. “That’s your husband!”

And so it goes. I get the farmhouse I’ve always dreamed of, and an eco house to boot. As we near the end of the game, Clayton starts to panic because he hasn’t bought a house yet, and all the house-buying squares are behind him. Then Don and I get to chose if we’ll sell one of ours.

“Here,” I say to Clayton. “You can buy this one.” I hand him the farmhouse. After all, it’s a lot to keep up with now that we’re old.

Don protests; that is not how the game goes! But— just like in real life— I can’t stand to see my children sad.

“We’re selling it,” I argue. “So why can’t he buy it?”

At last, Don relents and Clayton moves his family in.

“Now I’m the only one without a house!” Sylvia cries. This game is feeling more realistic by the minute. What if Sylvia doesn’t have a place to live? Will she move back in with us? What if . . . ?

My existential anxiety is finally quelled when Dee Dee, compassionate sister that she is, sells one of her houses to Sylvia. Sylvia hardly needs it, however, because on her next turn she reaches the end of the board and gets to retire at Countryside Acres. Even when she cashes in her assets at the end of the game, she refuses to sell her house.

It is the best game night ever. Despite all odds, Don and I keep our jobs as dancers until retirement, and everyone ends up a multimillionaire. My favorite part is when Don asks Alexa to play disco music so that Clayton can show off the dance moves that won him fifty thousand dollars at the disco contest. Soon we are all dancing around the living room. I’m getting down with the broom that I’m using to sweep up all the debris from the drunkenly prepared dinner.

“Look at Momma!” Clayton says. “She’s dancing!” 

What's Wrong?

 “You think I’m too messy, but you don’t think Clayton is too neat!” Dee Dee wails.

This outburst comes at the end of a recurring fight, in which Clayton is infuriated by Dee Dee’s mess and Dee Dee, in turn, is enraged by Clayton lobbing her toys into her room and bossing her to tidy up. Their father, annoyed by their constant bickering, tells Clayton flatly that he is “too neat” and Dee Dee that she is “too messy,” and charges them with finding a way to live together.

Clayton immediately seeks me out in the kitchen.

“I don’t think it’s possible to be too neat. Is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” I think of my Italian roommate, Fabiana, who regularly cleaned the inside of the kitchen drain with a toothbrush and asked me to go outside to brush my hair, lest any fallen strands contaminate the bedroom.

“But am I too neat?” Clayton persists.

The diplomatic answer would be no answer, or a noncommittal shrug. After all, Don and I are supposed to be a united front. But I can’t help valuing Clayton’s sense of order and our shared appreciation of a tidy house.

“Am I?”

I shake my head wordlessly, not realizing that Dee Dee is watching me like a hawk. She buries her face in her hands.

“You don’t think Clayton is too neat, but you think I’m too messy,” she cries through her fingers.

“I never said that!” I backpedal desperately. “You’re just different! I love how creative you are, all the crafts you—”

“But you still think I’m too messy!”

I remember when the kids were very little, and I’d be pushing the twins in the double stroller with two-year-old Clayton on my back. The diaper bag would be packed as if for an apocalypse, my shirt stained with breastmilk, my shoulders knotted as tree branches under the perpetual pressure of the Ergo straps. Seeing me, moms with older kids would nod sympathetically.

“Don't worry, it gets easier—” they would begin, before shaking their heads and giving an apologetic shrug. “Actually, I'm not sure if it does.”

I would smile and nod amiably, but secretly, I wondered. How could it not get easier? Maybe they just felt guilty that they were out of the trenches, while I was still clambering over barbed wire and dodging mines in No Man’s Land. Or maybe mothering young children is a bit like childbirth; we know that it is laborious and painful without being able to remember, precisely, what that pain and labor felt like.

Now that my kids are older, I can almost understand what those moms meant. I would never dare say that to a new mom, though, as there are certain things— certain important things— that do get a great deal easier. After all, you do eventually sleep through the night (barring a senile dog who scratches at the bedroom door, not remembering that he just went out an hour ago). Meals never cease to be a daily chore, but at least now putting food on the table is the extent of your responsibility; you are no longer charged with both putting it on the table and spackling it between your offspring’s toothless gums.

But while the physical labor of childrearing has undeniably lessened, I am finding it harder and harder these days to navigate the emotional map of living with three emotionally complex youngsters. If it’s not “You think I’m too messy,” it’s tears because “You’re mad at me,” or a gloomy moodiness that has no discernable cause at all.

Because, let’s face it, humans are complicated, emotional creatures. With five of these creatures living in the same shared space, our moods and emotions are bound to bump up against each other. They are also hopelessly intertwined.

After one lengthy conversation about why Clayton can’t be as nice to Dee Dee as he is to Sylvia, he confesses, “I love Dee Dee, but I just worry that she’s better than me.” There is no amount of heart-to-heart discussions about multiple intelligences and different individual strengths that can quell this fear, that can rip out this awful, gnarled nugget of “I cannot measure up.” I know, because I’ve been chipping away at mine for decades, and I can still feel it in there if I press hard enough.

Nor can I take from Dee Dee the persistent longing that seems lodged in her soul. Dee Dee just yearns. She yearns for understanding and praise and compassion. She yearns for a best friend, a cat, a place of her own. Mostly, she yearns to escape the limitations of her eight-year-old self. She wants her crafts to turn out exactly as they look in her mind’s eye. She wants to stop wallowing in the uncertainty of her future and just be a teacher already, a baker, a chemist, a writer. She wants to have done with the murkiness of childhood and get started on her life’s work. And because she can’t, because she’s stuck, for now, in the life of a child, she gets started on the next best thing, which inevitably involves a hot glue gun, some clothespins, and a little mess.

Sylvia has always been my laid-back child, my go-with-the-flow, happy-go-lucky girl. But I am slowly learning that beneath this easy-going surface, she has her own emotional depths and potholes, and they are all the more surprising because I stumble into them unexpectedly. With Dee Dee, a harsh word will bring an immediate torrent of tears, as if a floodgate has been opened for the sole purpose of letting you know just how miserable she is. (If she is sent to her room, she simply ups the volume on her sobs, lest you forget that she is wounded and misunderstood.) Sylvia, on the other hand, licks her wounds in private. I will find her in her bed after a quiet half hour, dismayed to find that she has been crying all that time because she thought I was mad about a less-than-perfect grade on a progress report, or some slight reprimand that she took unexpectedly to heart.

My father once said— of being chair of the engineering department— that he spent most of his days “putting out fires.” I find that that it is a good metaphor for motherhood, too. Between the rinsing out of lunch boxes and the matching of dozens of little white socks, I am often caught up in a whirlwind of consoling, encouraging, mediating, and sympathizing. Sometimes I find myself thinking longingly of the time when my children's grief was less complicated and could be assuaged with a handful of baby cheese puffs, a quick nurse, or a few refrains of "Twinkle Twinkle."

And while I find the old adage mostly true, that a mother can never be happy if her children are sad, it seems that, in my home at least, the inverse is equally true. If I slump in my chair with an exhausted sigh, or groan out loud about some frustration— the plumber still hasn’t called me back, or the washing machine is leaking again— my children immediately want to know what's wrong. Clayton, especially, constantly monitors my moods.

"Momma, are you happy?" he will ask, mostly when he suspects I'm not.

And even if I'm grumpy or tired or annoyed with the plumber, I always nod and tell him that I am. And it's true. Because I find that happiness is like the overstuffed diaper bag of old. All the frustrations and discontent and melancholy and regret can somehow be crammed inside that big, old bag of happy.

"Yes, I'm happy," I assure him. "Are you?"