Like An Old Pair of Boots

 There's a saying that a long, contented marriage becomes like a worn, comfortable pair of shoes. My husband and I have been together for over thirty years, give or take a few chaotic years between, and if shoes are the metaphor, I would describe our relationship as a pair of sturdy, able to traverse rough terrain, all-weather boots. I am a verbal, effervescent, energetic dynamo with a sharp, harpy side and patient, steady Dan, has a wit and humorous repartee that has gotten him out of many a years later household project completion or banal argument. I've never thought of him as my “knight in shining armor” but I do think of him as the “saint who saved my soul.” Dan also occasionally restores the gift of sight to any blind kids who pass his way.

Even after thirty years, when I see him walk through our kitchen door my romantic heart sings and my wise heart knows I am a lucky woman. We met in our late twenties, both substitute teaching at a private school in Ojai, California. This six-foot-three, curly blond, short bearded guy wearing a flannel shirt, jeans and rubber boots came walking down the hallway and simply stunned me. I knew...I mean I literally knew, this was it. We introduced ourselves and Dan doesn't know why he did so, but as we wandered together toward the music room, we sat down at the piano and he played me one of his original songs.

Our history together began that idyllic spring with runs through orange groves, hikes through forests and canyons, shared philosophical and literary discussions. Dan had a commitment to spend the summer visiting and working with friends in Chiloquin, Oregon and I came along. It was a summer of finding our love, finding our place together, and finding that we wanted to move to the Pacific Northwest. We packed all we owned in my station wagon and his Chevy van and made the trek to the college town of Eugene, Oregon. Jobless and houseless, we slept under layers of covers in the van, on the floors of friend's living rooms until jobs and duplex were found.

Since then, we have climbed mountains, kayaked rivers and lakes, bought a house and created a lush garden, and raised our daughter. The years have fled like wild fire. Though our relationship began with a big, romantic bang and continues with a deeper, more treasured love, there were the moments and even the years when difficulties and challenges left us hanging over a cliff, not knowing whether we would be able to make the landing together or apart.

It was our seventh year. Call it the seven year itch. We were still renting, still saving our money for our own home. I was going through a mid-thirties panic, wanting to be settled, wanting to have a child. My father had died earlier that year and I was off in my own world grieving his loss. And here is the main insight: in a relationship there is always more than one world, there are actually three: the world of the relationship, the world of the one partner and the world of the other. Sometimes the worlds of each pair become too unconnected and to burst through the bubble of each world can take time and work. Dan was on one side, the side of fearing the immense responsibility of having a child and owning a home. I was on the side of time running out.

We bought our home and then parted, each living our separate lives. Every relationship has pain and ours did for over a year. I thought there would never be a new beginning or a happy ending. I thought as I neared forty my window for having a child was closed. But here's where life's ups and downs, twists and turns, have a way of straightening out if we allow the process to happen. We got together again and sought counseling. We knew we loved each other, but we weren't sure what was getting in our way. So for another few years we worked both individually and together at clearing our path of childhood debris and miscommunications.

During the beginning of our separation I had had our front lawn rototilled up. I laboriously removed and piled each piece of sod and hauled it to the dump. Then with a friend we built two raised beds, and worked at shaping curved mounds of soil to the front and side of these beds. Thus began the creation of a vegetable/flower garden. What I realized months later was that this garden became the symbol of my own transformation. I was digging up past personal and relationship issues I hadn't faced. I was strengthening the single self that got lost in the duo. I was planting the seeds of my own needs, wants and wishes.

Living apart and then working together through counseling on our relationship was the greatest gift we could give one another. This gave us the opportunity to rediscover and redefine what our love meant and to find ways to better communicate that love. After the counseling and the “dating”, we held a celebration of our commitment to one another by having an outdoor wedding with family and friends. We each quietly wrote our vows ahead and shared them for the first time at the ceremony. One of Dan's vows was to have and raise a child with me. A year and a half later, at the age of forty-two, I gave birth to our amazing daughter.

That we made it through the storms, that we landed together at the bottom of the cliff, that we conceived and raised a child, astounds me. That decades later we love and appreciate each other more than ever is a testament to the ability to achieve a solid, lasting marriage. How did we get from romance to deep, resilient passion? We each had to become individually whole before we could become whole as a couple. We each had to not be afraid to state our wants and needs and we each had to be able to listen and clearly understand the wants and needs of the other. Humor helps too. He still makes me laugh. I know I'm lucky. I know Dan is neither a knight nor a saint but here is another big one: Dan aways forgives and always accepts and encourages me to be myself, no matter what. He has taught me so many lessons and I am sure I too have given him a few teaching moments. I can think of no better way to learn and grow than through a loving marriage. We are as comfortable as an old pair of rugged, rubber boots, knowing when the rains come we'll stay warm and dry.

(c) 2011

Pandora's Box*

 I'm sitting across from one of my homebound students...I'll call her Clare. She's eleven with pre-teen, dyed pink hair, and a sweet, round face. She is constantly sniffling. She and an older sister have both been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. She is my first student of the day and I meet with her four times a week.

My morning routine includes reading the New York Times online, doing my e-mail and trying to write. These days, I skim the day's headlines or even avoid reading the news altogether. For a liberal, it has been a brutal winter. The gloom of an Oregon sky has been compounded by three wars, Republican depredation of any program designed to help the socially vulnerable, and locally, squeezing of kids into fewer schools and larger classrooms. I wonder when free market, consumer America will wake up and realize we are quickly consuming ourselves and all we need to be holding dear.

Clare is getting out her journal. Her mother is “on the streets.” As Clare once wrote, her mother chose her friends over her family. Clare and her two sisters are being raised by a single father. He's a good man, but the first thing I discovered in my teaching meetings with this eleven year old is she is the one taking care of herself. At first, she'd be just getting up as I walked in the door at 11 a.m. Yes, teens do sleep late. I can't seem to divorce my mothering instincts, however, from my teaching. So I encouraged Clare to get up earlier and have breakfast. This home teaching job, I find, is much more than the imparting of book learning.

I ask Clare to write about her sisters, her grandmother, and, finally about herself and her life. We're inching our way towards describing her mother. Clare has a life-affirming, intrinsic wisdom that unexpectedly blurbs out at me in her simple, thoughtful word choices. She's slow as molasses when I ask her questions about the reading. But her answers belie the richness at the bottom of the vat.

We are reading a favorite of my daughter's at Clare's age, Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons. I chose it because the story centers around a young teen girl whose on a journey to find her having-left-home mother. It's about finding the puzzle pieces of loss.

On this particular morning, my head is swirling with the losses of lives both on domestic and foreign soil. I conclude my dad was right: It is a painful jungle out here in the world. The chapter Clare and I are reading is about Pandora. After discussing how Pandora was given a box she wasn't suppose to open, the assignment is to draw this box.

Clare loves to draw, and eagerly gets out her colored pencils. She reminds me of my once pre-teen daughter, in the way young eyes open to new ways of seeing. Clare sketches a three-dimensional rectangular shape and then streams the contents up and out of this box like escaping rays of sunlight. For, of course, who could resist opening a forbidden gift and Pandora does. All evil is then supposed to flood the earth. Clare's box has pests and cancer, pain and sadness on the rays, but she also has larger ribbons of love and hope. My heavy heart lifts as I watch this precious child shine a light on my day.

This is the essence of Pandora's story. There is greed and cruelty; there is violence and darkness. But here is eleven year old Clare, a motherless child, with a life-term illness. In truth, she is parentless, for she cooks dinner, meets her younger sister at the school bus stop, and fills many other functions one usually sees done by adults. Here in the sharp, steady lines being drawn by her small graceful hands emanates the hope and love. And my hope and love is attached to hers.

My students, my grounded, kind daughter and husband, my friends and the caring strangers I meet make me believe that though we have currently unleashed tremendously irrational, anti-social forces within these United States and abroad upon the beloved earth, we also can find resilient goodness. Thank you Clare for being my gift. You are the present that needs to be opened and nurtured for all to see.

(c) 2011

*In Greek mythology, Pandora (ancient Greek, Πανδώρα, derived from πᾶν "all" and δῶρον "gift", thus "all-gifted", "all-endowed") was the first woman.[1] As Hesiod related it, each god helped create her by giving her unique gifts. Zeus ordered Hephaestus to mold her out of earth as part of the punishment of mankind for Prometheus' theft of the secret of fire, and all the gods joined in offering her "seductive gifts". (Wikipedia entry)

New York New York

 (Inspired by the recent touching J.Crew ad where the head designer Jenna is smiling lovingly at her curly, blond-haired, pink toe-nailed five year old son.)

We were on our second visit to the Big Apple. The first time was with our sixteen year old daughter, whose love for big cities drew us there. Her “coming out” at fourteen also took us across the country for New York City's amazing annual Gay Pride Parade. This colorful and poignant parade brought five hours of visibly courageous lives. From the first beat of the drum, from the first strut of a LGBTQ group, from the first clarion chant, tears washed down my cheeks. We were in the middle of the largest, most cosmopolitan American city where miles of the prestigious 5^th Avenue had been blocked off and the sidewalks were jam packed. . .all in support of my daughter!

Our waving of the rainbow flag was then. Now we were staying at the same Chelsea Hostel, but my husband and I were in New York City as an empty-nest, born-again couple. We wanted this trip to possibly be a second honeymoon, or at least we wanted to attempt to carve out our own adventures. Naturally, we couldn't help missing our daughter and noticing all the same-sex hand holding and romantic overtures. But this only made us broaden our smiles and encouraged us to softly squeeze our own wrinkled hands together.

Walking the newly constructed High Line, attending a play at the intimate Atlantic Theater, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and going to a monthly Moth Story Slam, an Internet Meet Up, twice crowding into a dank underground basement for an Upright Citizens' Brigade improv performance, gave us, we thought, a nice taste of what New York City has to offer. Bowing to the inevitable, we did, however, stroll shoulder to shoulder down the streets of Times Square, marvel at how small the Rockefeller Ice Rink was, and how vastly glorious the Metropolitan Opera was.

We were feeling alive, feeling in love, feeling less shy of the unknown, strange places. Once we had made our decision to fly to New York, I immediately bought tickets to Billy Elliot, the Tony Award-winning Broadway Show of the season. We had loved the movie about a gender bending young boy living in a conservative British town who against his traditionally masculine, coal miner father's beliefs wants to be a ballet dancer.

The small and ornate theater was on a Broadway back street. We got there early and crowded into the lobby with the other waiting theater goers. Last-minute tickets were being sold, drinks at the bar were being sipped and when the doors opened, everyone surged forward. We climbed one set of velvet lined steps, and then another, to enter the affordable balcony. Finding our seats midway in the upper section, it felt like we were sitting in a bird nest on the highest branch of a gigantic tree. I peered down and saw the bright lights of a wide open empty stage. Watching entering patrons filling in the spaces around us, I couldn't help but notice a well-coiffed and elegantly dressed gay couple. One young man put his arm around the other with whisperings of excited anticipation. Black, brown, gay, straight, white, Asian, does it matter what we wear on the outside when we all just want to enjoy the performance?

The curtain rises and a small, rural British town appears. The entire audience becomes mesmerized by the theme, the music and the dancing...especially the dancing of the show's young, brightly talented eleven-year-old star. I know the story, and at first this comfort lulls me into enjoying this musical play from a safe distance. I say safe because it isn't until a scene from the second half that I begin to understand how this show is effecting me.

By the aforementioned scene Billy Elliot has become a dancer, despite the displeasure of his family and the gender biased culture he has grown up in. He knows with body and soul that he must dance to survive, to be his authentic self. He has been preparing with the help of his ballet teacher to audition for a respected dance academy. And this particular scene comes when he has met and triumphed over these obstacles.

The young boy star begins to dance in the middle of a seemingly blank stage. The backdrop is a simple blue hue and a light mist begins rolling in, giving a trance-like dream effect. Within the first few minutes of the boy's solo, there appears a muscular adult male dancer by his side. The dancer is elegantly tall and bare chested. The boy and the man are dancing side by side and across the stage. My thoughts drift to this being a metaphor for the boy's growing up: a dance in tribute to the adult self he will become. Then this adult gently begins to lift the boy as a male dancer would traditionally lift a ballerina. I am shocked to feel a steady stream of tears running down my cheeks. I quickly wipe them away. But as the statuesque male dancer continues to lovingly lift and gently interact with the young Billy Elliot, the tears become unstoppable.

Why am I crying? I feel I have never in my life time seen such beauty, such grace. At sixty, I feel cheated. Haven't I always been led to believe that the marvel of ballet lay in the male sweeping the female ballerina into the air? I try to pat my tears dry, to no avail. This scene of an adult male dancer and a boy child dancer has pierced my core. How I have been limited, I think, by the discriminations and stereotypes! It is as if by society's gender moral judgments I have blinded one eye. The man raises Billy Elliot once more, carrying him high up in the air and then the man is gone. Billy stands alone on the stage. The curtain descends and the applause explodes.

It has been nearly a year since this last New York City trip and I am only now putting my emotions from that Billy Elliot Broadway performance into words. Strange places give us unexpected emotional insights. I was tossed up and out of the balcony box that evening, when the comfortable gave way to something new and authentic and breathtaking! What more can I see with my two preciously given eyes? I thank my beautiful Queer daughter and the loving LGBTQ people I have met, for the gift of a wider vision.

(c)2011

From the Back Seat

(We helped our daughter buy her first used car this week. Yikes! To honor this transition I am posting this essay which I published in December 2005.)

As I sat in the back seat, I vowed I would not become a backseat driver. My husband sat up front next to our daughter. He is obviously the better teacher and driver, I told myself. Besides, I couldn't trust whether my calmer, letting-go mothering instincts, or my yikes-she's-growing-up stomach churning would win out. Our 15 ½ -year old daughter was now behind the wheel of our car and driving us to west Eugene's Sweet Life Cafe for the first time.

“Do you think she's ready to back out of the driveway?” I muttered. Dan was instructing her to stop at the sidewalk first and then again before the street. She pulled back slightly too fast and didn't stop until after the sidewalk.

“Don't you think she should slow down?” I was admonished for my backseat comments and we hadn't even made it to the street yet. She eased her way out into the street and I tried to stop my words, but they just kept coming.

“I know you see Nina's truck.” She confidently straightened the wheel as she narrowly slid beside the small blue pickup.

There was a car coming behind us now and our daughter deliberately put it into drive and slowly proceeded down the road. Before we started, I had told her to never worry about what the other drivers might think about her slow and careful driving. I also shared what my father had shared with me as a teenager: “Always drive like the other driver is going to do something stupid or wrong.” I took a deep breath. I can do this, I reminded myself. I can sit here quietly and let her father handle this.

We drove down our quiet street. No panic here. She was doing fine. She had to turn left and then

right, driving for a few blocks on one of our busier streets. I held the car door armrest.

We were back on a quiet street and she was driving too fast. I mentioned how I seldom rode in the

back seat and it seemed faster than in the front seat. My daughter countered with how it seemed

faster when you were in the driver's seat. But she didn't slow down.

Dan had her move down to a crawl when we saw a pedestrian and a bicyclist. A yield sign was on the corner and Dan didn't have her stop. OK, I couldn't hold my tongue. I had to mention that while learning to drive I thought our daughter should stop at the yield signs. You never knew what might be up ahead. I continued to hold the door armrest, a bit tighter this time.

Dan had our daughter park near our neighborhood playground. Neither of us were ready for her to maneuver the car into one of the cafe's tight parking spots. She stopped as she slightly hit the tire against the curb's edge. But she straightened, set the brake, pulled out the keys and smiled a broad grin.

We praised her as I walked with wobbling legs the rest of the way. What might have seemed like an ordinary dessert was made to be a special celebration by our daughter's first-time destination driving. She and I, and she and her dad, had been practicing at our local fairgrounds parking lot. This was her first real on-the-road-driving experience.

At the cafe, I looked across the table and saw my daughter, this young woman, staring back at me. She is already two inches taller and far more mature than I ever was at her age. Full of sugar now, we strolled back to the car and our daughter used the fob to open the doors. I took my dutiful place in the back seat. We were going to the fairgrounds and, of course, I couldn't help commenting on how we were going to get there without traversing those “busy” streets. Dan had it under control. I sat with my hand on the door handle as if I thought I could make a quick exit when the needed time came.

But then, as our daughter drove us further down the street, it hit me. Was I not only holding onto the handle but holding too tightly onto my daughter as well? When I told her to slow down her driving, was I really telling her to slow down her growing-up process?

She drove on and made it safely to the fairgrounds. I sighed and let go of the armrest. Was I being overprotective? Did I fear relinquishing her to those busy streets?

She was driving with confidence in this confined space and made her way to a small bridge that crosses over to the outer parking lot. We were heading to the smaller neighborhood streets just beyond the fairgrounds. I took some more deep breaths. I can do this, I told myself. If we just take these driving lessons at a gradual pace; if she and her parents don't rush the learning, but embrace the gaining of competence step by step.

Being a parent, watching one's child grow from her first cherished steps on the ground to her first time behind the wheel in this motorized vehicle, is nothing short of a whirlwind miracle. Can I no longer hold her hand? Am I relegated to the back seat? I sat up straighter. I let go of the door handle. Then I leaned forward and quietly told my daughter, “You're doing an amazing job.”

(c) 2005