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Putting the Pieces Together

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By Lindsey Goldstein

I stood in the shower, warm water cascading over my shoulders and relaxing me enough to cause my eyes to close. My husband and daughter had left the day before to go skiing, leaving me with my toddler son and dog. Suddenly, my eyes snapped open. What if I have a brain aneurysm in the middle of the night and die? What will my son do? He can’t dial a phone to seek help or even get something to eat without assistance. He’d be stuck in this house with a dead mother and a dog. I shook my head. No, no, no. I took a deep breath and refocused.

A few weeks prior, my therapist, whom I will call T, and I spent an entire session discussing my tendency to worry. I told her I can relate to a Shel Silverstein poem I’d read as a child about the “what if’s” crawling into my ear. When the news bombarded me with reminders that this year’s flu epidemic was something to fear, I’d begun the worry discussion with T, telling her I had become compulsive about hand washing, scouring my children’s hands when they walked into the house from school or foregoing play dates if a parent mentioned his/her kid had a sniffle. She listened, then leaned in.

“What would be the worst thing that could happen if one of your children got the flu?” she asked.

“Well, one of them could die,” I’d practically whispered not wanting to tempt fate. She nodded.

“But the chance of that happening is very slim, right?” I had to admit that was true.

Therapy isn’t something I’d ever thought I needed, but several months ago, I told my husband I had decided I wanted to try it. His initial reaction was concern, assuming something was terribly wrong. I assured him that no, there was nothing I could pinpoint, but in general, I just felt an overarching feeling of dissatisfaction. He was hurt to hear this, but I encouraged him to listen and try to understand.

I told him, “It’s not that I hate my life. Not at all. I just feel like my days and weeks blur together, that I do whatever I need to do to get through my days rather than actually enjoy them.” As much as I didn’t want to sound like a cliché, I explained that I felt out of balance, felt a lack of presence in whatever I was doing, and my biggest concern was that I’d wake up one day a very old woman with a million regrets about how I chose to spend my time.

I was reminded of a quandary a friend posed to me: What would you do if someone said you only had ten minutes left to live? I remembered searching for an answer but feeling lost and desperate to come up with anything.

My first session of therapy started awkwardly. I squirmed, unsure of how to begin. So, I just started talking, nervously at first and later with more assertion.

“I just feel as though I’m unsatisfied. That maybe I do a lot of things with my day, but that none of them get enough of my attention. I worry that one day, I will lie on my deathbed and be regretful that I didn’t accomplish anything.” She nodded but didn’t say anything. I kept talking. I told her about my marriage in a nutshell, about my two kids, about my job as a physical therapist, and about my writing hobby. I watched as the minutes ticked by on the clock, very aware that the express train of an hour was whooshing by in what seemed like a minute. She didn’t say much, but the sympathetic expression on her face told me she’d been in my shoes before, that the dissatisfied ground upon which I tread had been traversed by others.

Since the birth of my second child, I’ve opted to treat patients who are not able to leave their homes. The vast majority of my patients are in the final moments of their lives. My favorite part of my job is to hear each patient’s life story, to hear what made them happy, to hear what still makes them happy, and to understand what each person would like to continue to do so long as they have breath in their body.

I wish I could say I’ve met people without regret, but sadly, I haven’t. The overwhelming response I get from these people is to enjoy my youth, my children, my husband, and my body.

Though I’ve thought about their recommendations before, I’ve never dwelled on the fact that everyday obligations and routines sometimes get in the way of what’s really important. Or that sometimes these same obligations get in the way of even thinking about what’s important.

During my second visit, my therapist clearly had been listening because she asked me how I feel when I’m writing. I don’t normally discuss feelings. I tell stories, I make dry jokes, but to actually say how something makes me feel isn’t within my comfort zone.

“When I’m writing, two hours passes by in what seems like two minutes,” I said. It was the best I could muster. She smiled.

“That is an amazing feeling. To be so engrossed by something that you lose track of time.” I agreed. She wondered how I could incorporate more of that into my routine. And so we dissected my inability to say no to work that actually pays (my patients) and commit more time to something that I love. I explained to her that that seemed frivolous, almost irresponsible. That I should be as productive with my time as I can be in order to help support my family. Then I decided to stop arguing and remember why I’d sought her help in the first place.

When I was much younger, I shied away from anything I feared. Following dreams or passions wasn’t in my nature, but rather practical choices were. Then I turned forty.

Friends who were younger asked me what that was like. Some wondered if forty was terrifying. I wasn’t scared but suddenly was very aware of how fleeting my time is. I looked back at the years behind me and the details of so many experiences, of so many relationships with people, of loves and hurt and joy. It was as though they had been placed in a food processor and blended together to make a blurry collage of snapshots of my life.

There is no slowing time down, but by going to therapy week after week, I realized I had gotten into a habit of being half-present in my life, of multi-tasking so I can get everything done in favor of committing myself fully to each moment of my life.

At the last visit I had with T, she probed further into my relationship with my seven-year-old daughter. She and I have very different personalities, but I want to understand her and also have a healthy relationship with her. Her greatest need since we had our son is for me to be affectionate with her. She sees me carry him places or hug him and though I try to give her the same level of affection, she has voiced her feelings that it isn’t enough.

“Mommy, will you lie in bed with me and cuddle?” she has asked on numerous occasions. Normally I put my son to bed, read with my daughter and then try to get her to bed in an effort to preserve one hour of alone time before I too need to go to bed. I told T how many times I’ve used the fact that it’s late and my daughter needs to go to sleep in lieu of cuddling with me. Or if I do sit with her on her bed, my mind goes to everything I still have left to get done in the paltry number of minutes I have before bedtime.

“Do you think you could forego any of the things you have to do at night in order to lie with her and cuddle for five minutes?” T asked me. And then of course, I blushed because I felt like a selfish and terrible mother. “What would happen, for example, if you didn’t get the dishes done at night?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I’d mumbled. Then I’d looked T in the eye and made a heart-wrenching confession. “The real issue is . . . I don’t like to cuddle. With anyone.” I explained how it had been a problem with my husband when we first dated because he enjoyed cuddling, while it made me feel suffocated. I compromised with him a bit, but I know it’s not what he really wanted. I explained to T that as awful as it sounded, I just wanted to be transparently honest. She applauded my honesty. We discussed ways in which I could meet my daughter halfway, to give her what she needs without compromising my comfort. And I believe these suggestions have helped.

As I understand it, there isn’t a finish line in therapy. I won’t cross a line and be handed a medal. But I feel myself unfolding.

Most importantly, I feel myself allowing truths to emerge. I have nothing to hide or lose by telling all to T. And only by admitting the deepest, ugliest, most wounded aspects of myself can I take myself apart and put myself back together.

 

Lindsey Goldstein lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two kids and dog. In addition to writing, she works part-time as a physical therapist. She has published essays in the The New York Times, Modern Love column, in Kveller, and in Parent.co. Lindsey is currently working on her first novel.

 

**NEW CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS**

The founders and editors of The HerStories Project — a writing community for Gen-X women and publisher of four previous anthologies for women — are seeking submissions for a new essay collection.

A Fury of Her Own: Midlife Women on Embracing Anger and Changing the World will examine the reasons for women’s anger at this current moment and celebrate the ways (big and small) they are using their rage to create lasting change.

See full submission details and guidelines here.

**JOIN OUR COMMUNITY FOR MIDLIFE WOMEN WRITERS**

Our new writing community, HerStories Writers, features ongoing mini-courses, live chats and co-writing sessions, weekly writing prompts, and more! Come interact and find support, learn about topics that interest you (personal essay writing, building a platform, balancing writing and life), and get feedback on your work in a community outside of Facebook! Learn more here.

Hearing the Wake-Up Call of Your Creative Life

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by Jennifer L. Hollis

When my friend Kris suggested we take ourselves on a do-it-yourself writer’s retreat, I told her she was a genius. We are both writers in our forties and, like so many people in midlife, everything in our lives is growing: careers, children, those piles of unread library books on the nightstand. She’s a fundraising consultant who has shifted most of her professional work to writing. I’m a writer and music-thanatologist, which means I play harp and sing for people who are dying.

I’ve been around end-of-life care long enough to know that the best place to find happiness is in the here and now, making time for the things, and people, you love. While writing makes me happy in a way that little else does, it is difficult carve out that creative space. As poet Mary Oliver writes, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

It’s easy to promise ourselves we’ll get to our writing later, when the children are in bed or the taxes are done, only to find our to-do lists have no end, and never did.

When Kris and I decided to commit to a weekend writing retreat, I suggested that we go to Martha’s Vineyard, where my husband and I have a house that we use in the summer but is mostly empty in the winter. We talked about dates, and backup dates, and also backups for the backup dates. Once our retreat was on the calendar, we anxiously waited for weather or illness or spouse calendars to force us to cancel. Nothing did, not even my worries about being away from my young son for two nights. My husband planned an exciting weekend complete with a movie and a boat show, and my son hardly noticed as I packed my bag to leave.

I first met Kris in 2001, when we shared an upstairs apartment in an old two-family house just outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School and she worked for a large nonprofit in downtown Boston. One night I woke up to hear her running up the stairs to my attic bedroom. “Wake up, Jen!” she yelled, “I think the house is on fire!” Panicking, I wondered if I should carry the harp outside with me. What about my boxes of photographs and journals? By the time I pulled on jeans and a sweater none of it seemed important. I ran out empty-handed.

We stood on the sidewalk and watched as smoke billowed out of the downstairs neighbor’s locked screen door. They did not respond to the doorbell and when the fire department arrived we discovered that they had fallen asleep with food on the stove. There was no fire, just a ruined pot. For weeks, the smell of smoke lingered in our apartment, a frightening reminder to us both. There was no fire escape or hanging ladder on the third floor where I slept; if the fire had been real, Kris’s wake-up call would have saved my life.

A few days before our trip, Kris and I met for coffee to map out an agenda of solo writing time, craft discussions, goal-setting and readings. We were both a little too excited about the poster-sized post-in notes I brought along for brainstorming. On Friday morning, we sped down the highway toward the ferry terminal at Woods Hole, and I told her about an idea I’d heard on the “Happier in Hollywood” podcast, advice that movie producer Robert Evans had received. “You learn from success, kid – not failure. If you’ve only touched it once, a term paper, a temp job, hitting a homer, dissect it. Was it timing, focus, homework? Get to the core. Find the whys, the hows. That’s the key.”

As writers, Kris and I had plenty of practice worrying over the steps to failure. But success seemed random and uncontrollable. What would happen if we analyzed the steps we had taken to various successful publications? What would we learn about doing it again?

We arrived on the Vineyard around lunchtime, drove straight to my favorite diner and ordered avocado salsa, eggs, French Toast, and lots of coffee. At the house, I lit a fire in the wood stove and we made a brief timeline for the rest of the afternoon. After a few hours of solo writing, we took a cold walk on the beach at twilight and then came back to the house to make a simple dinner.

For the rest of the weekend, we found an easy rhythm of writing balanced with conversations about craft and goals. I worked for several hours to shrink an unwieldy essay and Kris helped me smooth out the final transitions. She was researching an article about mushrooms, so we stomped around the damp woods behind the house, searching out local specimens. We both thought that we could channel the shared humor and writing advice of our MFA of Two into a podcast, so we signed up for an online class to learn the basics and Kris wrote an introductory bio for show’s future website.

On the morning of our last day, we made a third trip to the diner, just before we had to return to the ferry. The server laughed to find out we were leaving; he thought we were regulars who lived on the island. But we had a life someplace else, and it was time to go back to kindergarten pick-up, lacrosse practice, and our never-ending email inboxes.

Kris had not exactly rescued me from a burning building this time, but she called my attention to something vital to us both: our writing lives and how we are going to live them to their fullest. After all, how do you know if your creative life is on fire unless someone wakes you up and invites you to look at it once in a while? Her idea for a do-it-yourself writer’s retreat cleared out the smoke of my every day routines and helped me set real goals for the coming months. Those three days of giving “time and power” to our creative lives made us both so happy that we have decided to build on our success, and we just put another retreat on the calendar.

 

Jennifer L. Hollis is a writer, music-thanatologist and the author of Music at the End of Life: Easing the Pain and Preparing the Passage. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Progressive, the Christian Century and other publications. She is at work on a book about what she has learned (and refuses to learn) from her work in end-of-life care. Jen has a master of divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where she previously served as an assistant director of admissions. She lives in Somerville, MA with her family. 

 

Should This Friendship End?

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In this month’s column Nina makes an unusual call for the end of a friendship. Do you agree that this friendship is doomed? Nina is always taking anonymous questions here. And catch up on all the other letters Nina has answered here.

end a friendship

Dear Nina,

I’m writing to you because I’m unsure how to move forward from some serious arguments with my childhood friend of ten years. I live a state away from her, and over the years our communication has deteriorated. I find it very hard to be open with her about the events in my life due to the many explosive calls I’ve received from her.

In one instance, she told me that I don’t deserve to be happy before she is happy. Furthermore, all of our discussions have become about her and her struggles. I don’t mind being a support system for her, but whenever we do discuss my life, she’s judgmental and mean-spirited. Therefore, I have limited how much I see her and talk to her, which has angered her to the point where she believes I don’t make her a priority.

The thing is she’s right that I have made her less of a priority, but that’s for reasons other than our disagreements. My life has become very busy with all of the responsibilities I have to juggle as well as a recent family emergency.

In our most recent argument, I had called her out for meanly phishing for information. What really angered me was how I was trying to tell her how uncomfortable she made me feel; yet she took offense to me calling her out for bullying me and told me she won’t ever give me advice anymore—instead she wishes for me to fall on my ass. Lastly, she told me I shouldn’t play the victim all the time and she shouldn’t have to apologize all the time because she has been through more problems than me.

She revealed to me that she no longer trusts me. However, I have not trusted her in a long time. Overall, I agree I’ve avoided her and made her feel like I’m not in her life. But I have apologized for this. Yet, I don’t like the way she makes me feel. I admit I have not been the perfect friend, but I also feel that she refuses to be accountable for all of the things she’s done and the way she’s talked to me that has made me distance myself from her.

I’m always afraid of hurting her feelings. How do I talk to her? Is it wise for me to take a break from her? Is there a way to for me to get her to realize it’s impossible to open up to her because she makes me feel like I will upset her? I always feel like we are walking on eggshells. I am afraid of losing a friend, but I’m also afraid we can’t move forward. Should we even be friends?

Thanks for any advice,

Not Sure I Can Continue This Friendship

 

Dear Not Sure I Can Continue This Friendship,

The answer to your final question, “Should we even be friends?” is clear to me, though the method to get there will still be difficult.

You and this woman should not be friends. You need more than a break. You need a breakup.

If describing a friendship worth saving, you wouldn’t be using words like explosive calls, mean, bullying, distrust, fall on your ass, and egg shells.

Friendship is certainly work and takes compromise on both sides, but friendship should not be as much work as what you’ve described in your letter. Friendship shouldn’t be half the amount of work as what you’ve described.

If you find yourself saying, This is just too much, that’s because it is. It is too much. It’s too much pain, too much frustration, and too much effort. She should be telling herself the same thing. Because even if she technically started all this drama with the exploding at you on the phone nonsense, you have chosen to stay in the strained relationship, which set up an expectation that she can treat you this way. You wrote a few times about the way she makes you feel, but she’s been given little reason to treat you any differently since you keep allowing her to stay in your life. If someone calls you yelling and you continue to take her calls, she will continue to feel she can yell at you. Period.

I rarely say this concretely that a friendship needs to end because I like to believe there’s hope for people who’ve shared a history, especially from childhood. But in this case, I don’t see any reason to keep putting yourself and your friend through the agony. You’ve both stated a lack of trust. She has blatantly told you she doesn’t wish you well. I can’t find anything worth saving here.

Here’s the bad news: There is no easy way to end a friendship.

I’ve had emotional notes from people who’ve been ghosted, meaning their friends simply disappeared. The readers on the receiving end of a breakup like that wish the friend ending the relationship had written a letter or offered an honest reason in a face-to-face conversation. I’ve also have notes from readers who received such a letter or direct conversation and wish the friend wanting to end the relationship had found a way to fade away gracefully or “ghost” out of the blue. Some people don’t want such a direct goodbye. My point is that there is no “good” way to sever these ties.

From what you’ve described of your friend, a face-to-face conversation sounds like a bad idea as does the phone. (I know she lives out of town, but perhaps a visit had been discussed.) One choice is to write a letter explaining some of what you’ve written to me. You know you haven’t been a perfect friend and you value your shared history, but the need to walk on eggshells has become so difficult that the good memories and good times are now too far in the past. Something along those lines.

Another choice is to continue what you’ve already started, which is to fade away. Maybe you take longer and longer to return calls and texts. Maybe you interact less with her social media accounts than you do now. (Assuming you are interacting with them now.)

You have my sympathy. The task ahead isn’t easy. Although I can’t tell you how to end the friendship, I do feel certain that you should end it.

Wishing you as painless of a break as possible. If that’s possible.

I’m sorry you’re going through this,

Nina

After the Urgency

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By Elizabeth Neumann Fuller

 Every other week, an early morning bell sends me racing from my classroom out to the elementary school parking lot, donning my whistle and zipping up my reflective vest en route. I stride boldly into the white stripes of a crosswalk to face three lanes of cars that stretch the hundred yards of the lot and snake out to block traffic on the road beyond. I shiver, or sweat, depending on the season. And I squint into the sun, not daring to shade my eyes with a hand that is needed to either wave a car on, or make it stop.

 Often, I nod and smile in return to a parent’s friendly wave or good morning greeting. But just as often I have to wag a finger at parents for cutting another car off, or for driving over pylons to change lanes illegally. No doubt they justify these behaviors because they are in a hurry—to get to work, to go grocery shopping, to get an older sibling to middle school.

 I can see them drumming the steering wheel with impatience while they wait in the approach to the drop-off zone. Their hands fly up in frustration when the little girl in the vehicle in front of them struggles to open the back door of an SUV. She pushes her slight weight against it, and it pushes back, like a reverse tug-of-war, until her mom has to take the time to unbuckle, and get out and walk around to assist. I can lip read parents’ curses through their windshields when a little boy hustles out of the car in the drop-off zone, only to lose his grasp on his lunch bag and have his grapes scatter as if hit by a cue ball, and his water bottle roll and then rest under the exact center of his family’s car, where everyone behind them in line must wait while it is retrieved.

Oddly though, for all this impatience, this rush, this PG rated road rage, there is—more often than not—a period in the coveted drop-off zone where time is suspended.

After the urgency to get to the front of the line, to drop their charge and get on with their day, parents will wait for the slam of the car door, and then pause. They will rest a foot heavy on the brake, and swivel in the driver’s seat to watch their child walking away.

They are suddenly reluctant to separate. They crane their necks to keep their child in sight.

They slide the passenger-side window down and lean towards it, waving or blowing a kiss, or yelling a final “Have a good day” or “Remember to eat your snack” or “I love you.” I can see them willing their child to look back before disappearing into the school’s inner sanctum.                       

 I confess that as the teacher on duty, this delay in the drop-off zone has always annoyed me. For twenty years, I have had to do parking lot duty, and I have been in a hurry just like everyone else. I have started my day rushing, to get my own children dressed, to pack their lunches, to grade a few more papers. I have been antsy to get back to my classroom before the final bell rings and the onslaught begins. Before my students burst into the room and jockey for position to tell me that they forgot their homework, or their cat had kittens, or they ran out of lunch money but can they still buy a corndog? So in the parking lot, I wave with extra vigor and a hint of irritation at the drivers causing delay in the drop-off zone. I beckon them to move forward faster. “Keep the line moving,” I mutter. “They’ll be back out here again at 2:30.”

 But then this fall, I myself was the parent in a different drop-off lane. I drove my youngest child to college. We got up in the wee hours, and loaded her school backpack, along with Hefty trash bags full of clothes into my Subaru. We drove six hours down the I-5 to a cinder block dorm set back behind a well-manicured lawn. We found her room, put sheets on her bunk bed, laid a shag rug on the floor, and hung her clothes in the closet. We attended an orientation where we sat apart, then went out to dinner where I asked about her classes. She had registered for a Kafka class, and linear algebra, and there wasn’t much I knew or could say about those subjects.

 When we pulled back up in front of the dorm after dinner, dusk was settling over the front lawn, tingeing it a grayish-green. I kept the engine running at the curb, and we leaned awkwardly into a hug between our bucket seats. As she climbed out of the car and walked away, my foot was like lead on the brake. I thought about how she wouldn’t be waiting outside the Taco Bell for my ride home from high school the next afternoon. How I wouldn’t be studying her face as I drove toward her, discerning how her day had gone from her expression. How I wouldn’t ask, “How was school?” and she wouldn’t shrug and answer, “Fine.”  I craned my neck to watch her walk across the grass, squinting to keep sight of her in the deepening dusk. She turned slightly, and I’m pretty sure she blew me a kiss, before she pulled her key card out of her back pocket and disappeared through the dorm door.

 The next Monday morning, my house was quiet, allowing me plenty of time to read the paper and drink my coffee before work. Back on parking lot duty, I wore my whistle and my neon vest, and waved my hands and wagged my finger. But when parents paused in the drop-off zone to watch their children, I turned to watch them too. I saw the little girls with hair tightly braided and the boys with defiant cowlicks headed into classrooms where they would learn about action verbs, and explorers, and Harriet Tubman, and the planet Mars. They would collaborate with classmates to solve 2-part story problems, and swap celery sticks for Doritos at lunch. And they would emerge at the end of the school day with hair tousled and sweaty from the effort of learning. They would know the product of 9×9, or how to tie their shoes, or how to read a compass rose, or the meaning of the vocabulary word chasm.

They would be that much closer to making their own way in the world. 

Because it happens that fast, under the watch of a teacher, or a lunchroom supervisor, from 8:00-2:30. I can see that now. So I decided that for the time it takes for a child to walk, under the weight of a backpack, from the parking lot to the inside of the school, I will lower my hands and I will let the parents linger.

 

Elizabeth Fuller is a teacher and writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her essays have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The San Francisco Examiner, and other publications. She loves a good coffee shop, and hiking in the East Bay hills.

Mouths of Babes

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By Jennifer Golden

 

Children, especially our own, seem especially competent at guilelessly pointing out our flaws and insecurities. “From the mouths of babes,” is, after all, a proverb for a reason.

For a few months not long ago, my four-year-old took to drawing portrait after portrait of her loved ones—stick-figured, crazy-haired, one giant black eye staring right at you and one slightly smaller eye staring off the page, a demonic Cookie Monster of sorts. And always, always: a purple dog, a red ice cream cone, and a brown blob of poop floating between the person’s legs. I once asked my daughter why she insisted on the poop. “I need to use the brown marker,” she informed me matter-of-factly.

She papered the walls of her room, floor-to-ceiling, with these pictures—an unsettling gallery that will surely be recalled by friends and family should she ever end up on the wrong end of of a 20/20 investigation. And, although each picture looked almost exactly the same as the one on either side, she could tell you at first glance which one was Mommy, which was Daddy, Uncle Matt, a bear, a unicorn, whomever. As long as my portrait had me also looking like Uncle Matt or a bear or a unicorn, I took no offense. I was, like any mom, proud to accept my child’s artwork and display it for all the world to see, future psychological profiling be damned.

Then she got more sophisticated. The poop, mercifully, went away. The images started to have distinct characteristics. “What is that?” I asked one day, pointing to the large, wobbly oval bisecting the trunk of my latest stick-figure likeness.

Her: Those are your hips.

Me (gulping): And what about those little circles sitting on top of the hips?

Her: Those are your boobies.

Me (voice pitched an octave or two above normal): Shouldn’t they go up a little higher, closer to my head?

Her (irritated, as if I’m crazy): No.

My eight-year-old’s artistic abilities are more advanced, but she is nonetheless similarly skilled at innocently highlighting one’s insecurities. This morning, eating breakfast, I noticed my eldest staring intently at my face.

“Did you have stitches? You look like you have a scar here,” she asked, gingerly pointing to the corner of my right eye.

She is stitches-and-scar-obsessed these days, coming off a deep gash in her knee that resulted in a trip to the emergency room and an army of stitches marching like ants across her puckered skin. I see her sometimes, fingering the purple line that now bisects her kneecap. “Will I always have it?” she asks me, but not with trepidation. With hope. I think I understand such wistful attachment. Her body is unleashed, bones stretching seemingly overnight, so that a pair of pants that fit last week don’t cover her knobby ankles today. Her tiny, pearlesque baby teeth have been pushed out by aggressively serrated permanent teeth that shift around in her mouth, searching for a place to settle.

And vaguely, she seems to sense what is just around the corner, a body curving into womanhood, adhering like some ancient mystic to the rhythms of the moon. It must be a confounding state of impermanence, constant flux for which she is just along for the ride. I can understand, then, this affection for something that is enduring and singularly hers.

Or maybe she just thinks it makes her look bad-ass, like a Ninja Warrior.

No, no stitches, I informed my daughter, with a dose of defensiveness her question didn’t really deserve. Fortunately, the Soduku on the back of the cereal box had captured her attention in a way my not-scar failed to do.

Later, just out of the shower, I wipe away a square of mist from the mirror to study my reflection. The crease isn’t hard to miss. It’s not a scar, it’s a Grand Canyon-esque wrinkle. I have always thought of myself as someone who would “grow old gracefully” as the Olay ads of my youth encouraged.

I think I, more than most people my age, understand the great gift of old age, the harsh reality of the alternative. I knew only one grandparent. My father passed away when I was in my early twenties, my roommate died in hers. My son celebrated a single birthday.

I will embrace this wrinkle, I silently command myself. It is a physical badge of honor, a laugh line that marks the joy I have had in my life. I arrange my face into a smile, but the wrinkle is untouched, not activated even a tiny bit by my deranged grin.

Well…I’ve had a lot of sadness, too. I pantomime a frown, then full-on crying. Nothing.

Standing before the mirror, I run through a panoply of emotions: surprise, fear, anger, consternation, befuddlement. The wrinkle is stoic, unstirred. I am, however, deeply impressed by the acrobatic abilities of my eyebrows.

As I turn to leave, a final possibility seizes me…I sandwich my face between my hands, recreating the effects of lying on my side in bed, right cheek smashed against the pillow.  The wrinkle deepens like the San Andreas fault. No, it’s not a laugh line, or a cry line, or any other emotionally-earned line. It’s a pillow smush line.

The foggy mirror has started to clear, revealing a clearer and regrettably more troubling view of the landscape of my body.

Oh, God, I think. I’m getting jowly. Like Churchill, but without a World War to my credit.

I note a stomach gone soft and doughy from carrying three babies, the three skin tags lined up like soldiers at the crease of my arm,  a wiry hair that springs from my chin. (“Are you a billy goat,” my brother exclaimed once, in front of all our friends, as he reached across a table to pluck a rogue whisker.)

I am, it seems, slowly ceding parts of my body to the passage of time.

My bravado withers. I reach under the sink for the free-gift Clinique bag filled with free-gift moisturizing creams of varying shapes, sizes, and potencies. I select a tiny glass tub of “Moisture Surge” and apply it more than generously to the wrinkle and its brethren, all of whom have churlishly carved themselves into my face sometime while I wasn’t looking in the past eight years.

A knock on the door stops me just as I am circling the drain of self pity.

“Mommy?” calls a tiny voice from the other side.

“Whaaaattt?” I answer in the breathy growl my kids are no doubt used to hearing when they disturb me in the bathroom.

“I want to show you something.”

I throw open the door, my face glistening like a madman’s under a desperate sheen of Clinique-branded hope. My daughter is holding an orange piece of construction paper, another drawing scrawled in crayon on the back.

“It’s you!” she cries with glee. And there I am: one huge, gaping black eye, one slightly smaller, googly eye. A mohawk of orange hair, hands that look like catchers’ mitts. But no poop and—here I breathe a sigh of relief—no boobies.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she sings as she twirls round and round, holding the picture to her chest. Then she stops suddenly, walks over and wraps her arms around my leg. “A beautiful picture of my beautiful mommy.”

I feel her curled around me, cheek pressed into my soft belly. Can you believe that you once lived in my tummy? I have whispered to her time and again, watching the wonder bloom in her eyes. My body grew you.

I think of her birth, laughing and crying as I pushed her into this world, the doctors and nurses laughing and crying, too, for they knew that I had buried my son not eight months before. This child, the one I never thought I’d have, this great gift bestowed on me during the darkest hour of my life, she thinks I am beautiful. I will choose to believe her…From the mouths of babes, after all.

But I’m holding on to that moisturizer.

+++

 

Jennifer Golden is a mother of two daughters and a late son. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Scary Mommy, and The Best Women’s Travel Writing, among others. Find more of Jennifer’s writing on mommibomb.com.

Talking to Friends About Money

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This month’s topic is MONEY MONEY MONEY. Does it bother you when friends ask what you spent on something? Does it bother you when a friend avoids answering a financial question? Please read the situation described in the letter below and help Nina guide this month’s letter writer past all the awkwardness.

Nina is always accepting anonymous questions here. See the questions she’s already covered, here.

hertake nina badzin

 

Dear Nina,

I would love some advice about navigating the subject of money among friends for the midlife set, whether those friends have more OR less, to minimize awkwardness on both sides.

Here’s what prompts my request. The other day a neighbor (someone we’re fairly close with, e.g. we help each other with dog walking needs, vacation mail, etc.) was asking me about a recent stay we had in a local beach community. We’d rented a house for the week and she asked, “Do you mind if I ask if it was expensive?” That was her exact phrasing, not “Do you mind if I ask how much it costs?”

Now, I happen to know from previous conversations a hint of her financial situation that we are in a much, much stronger financial position than she is right now. Which is to say, to *her* I knew this would be expensive, and, like any vacation travel, there are ways to do it cheaper. I also knew that the pricing is available online if she were to ever ask where we stayed, so I didn’t want to lie either. My answer to her was “Well, I don’t like characterizing anything as expensive or not because I think that’s relative, but it cost $XXX.” And, as I expected, her eyes widened. And then I felt guilty, finding myself qualifying my response with things like “but this is the only vacation we take . . . we rented a bigger house so we could have more privacy . . . etc.” I guess I felt I had to justify the amount we spent to make it sound less…fancy? After she left I felt badly, almost guilty.

I know never to assume anyone’s financial status, and yet these kinds of things come up once in a while, on either side of the coin, for all of us. And when socializing in mixed financial circles it can get awkward. For me, what I want to minimize most is resentment or any whiff of “showing off” or “missing out” for anyone. Like if we go out with a group of friends . . . sometimes some are happy splitting the bill evenly, and others you can sense it’s not what they wanted to do. Or how for many of us, family size (big or small) directly impacts ability to pay in some situations. You get the gist. Any pointers for our midlife generation who have things like college, parent care, mortgages, retirement plans, etc. that we all might be better or less equipped to finance than our peers? How do we talk about these things honestly without hurt feelings?

Thank you!

Need Help With The Money Talk

Dear Need Help With The Money Talk,

First, I’m taking the “midlife” angle out of the question because awkwardness about money is an ageless concern. Second, I want to assure you that you’re not alone in finding this subject tricky.

I use Facebook occasionally to get a feel for which friendship topics piling up in my “HerTake” inbox will interest readers. When I brought up a more general version of your question, the post attracted more conversation than any other I’d attempted in four years of writing this column. Do I say that because everyone who responded agreed that friends shouldn’t ask what things cost or whether they’re expensive? No. I say it because the comments varied widely:

“It’s tacky to ask what someone spent.”

“It doesn’t matter if someone asks. Friends should be able to talk about it openly.”

“We can look anything up these days so no reason to be private.”

“It’s nobody’s business.”

Yikes! What to do?

Many agreed they didn’t mind discussing what things cost as long as they felt the person asking wasn’t judging the answer. There was also consensus, which doesn’t make it scientific, but I’m mentioning it anyway, that women over-explain and apologize for their purchases more than men do. “It was a deal.” “It was a gift.” “I bought it at a resale shop.” You reacted this way, too when your friend’s eyes got wide at the price of your beach vacation. There was also agreement that context matters. If someone is looking for a similar deal on a similar item, that is entirely different from outright nosiness.

One Facebook friend, Kate, summarized the issue well: “I do think it can be awkward when there are differences in economics among friends. But then, the truth is the truth, and neither bragging about it nor lying about spending money seems to be a modern approach. If someone resents a person for how much they spend on something, whatever it is, well then that’s on the resent-er. We must all be able to be ourselves among friends!”

I agree with Kate’s point, especially the part about being ourselves. And you’re right, too, that we can never count someone else’s dollars. Maybe one person cares about the car she drives more than going on a certain kind of a vacation. Maybe another friend is spending her extra money on childcare during the week, which means she can’t afford to go out as much on the weekend. Maybe another friend seemingly has everything—new clothes all the time, a new car every few years, fancy vacations, three kids in private colleges—but she’s in debt. Maybe another friend never seems to stress about money, but she panics privately about saving for retirement, helping her parents, or dealing with medical bills.

And as you said, what’s expensive to one person may not be to another. I would just stick to the facts. It’s presumptuous anyway to think you know how anyone will react to the information you provide. And as Kate said, the reaction is on the other person, not on you.

That said, I think there is still nuance to every situation involving money and it all depends on the relationship. But even with my closest friends, I’d find it unusual for anyone to expect me to provide exact numbers on hotels, clothes, or anything for that matter.

Now to be fair, my view comes directly from my childhood as evidenced by my mother’s reaction. “Because your grandmother was a stickler for manners and appropriate behavior in various situations, I learned at a young age it is gauche to discuss money in a social situation. This means you never ask someone what they paid for something, and you do not volunteer the cost of things you purchased. Clearly there are nuances to this rule. For example, you might tell a friend you hired a great computer person. Obviously your friend will want to know what the computer expert charges. That is a different question from asking what you paid for your vacation. The latter is an intrusive question and no one else’s business.”

(I enjoyed my mom’s use of the word gauche.)

I wish I could give you one specific rule to follow, but my mom is right that helping a friend make sure she’s not overpaying (or underpaying) for a service is quite different from providing dollar amounts about more personal purchases. And as my mom says, “There are some topics that are fine to talk about with some friends and other issues to avoid.” It depends on the relationship.

In the case with your neighbor, I might have said, “We stayed at [name of place], but the prices depend on the availability or deals going on. Take a look.” This removes any opinion on your part about what she can afford and helps you avoid feeling defensive about how you spend your money. You’re not lying about where you stayed, but the exact price you paid for the place is truly not her business. Sure, she will see a ballpark of what you spent, but that will happen on her own time, which means you don’t have to get into an uncomfortable conversation about it. Perhaps this type of approach will help you the next time she asks a similar question. Does that mean you should never reveal the price of something? No. Like I said, nuance.

The question you asked at the end about the bill at the restaurant is a good one, too. But the idea that you can sense some of your friends didn’t want to split the bill. . . I don’t know. I think you put too much pressure on yourself to know others’ financial issues and desires. You’re obviously a sensitive and caring friend, but you can’t single-handedly eliminate these uncomfortable moments. These fellow adults can speak up. Someone who does not want to split should ask the server from the get-go for separate checks. Sure, it would be a considerate gesture to offer to ask the server for separate checks yourself if you spent significantly more, but for a typical meal where people spent around the same amount, I think it’s fine to assume you’re all splitting unless the person who doesn’t want to says otherwise.

I know this doesn’t cover every instance, but hopefully reading about the topic here (and in the comments below) will help you see you’re not alone and also encourages you to give yourself a break from having to mitigate everyone else’s money issues. That’s not your responsibility!

Best of luck,

Nina