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thisolddag · 4 years

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Our Family Unplugged For 24 Hours. Here’s What Happened.

Back in September, our thirteen-year-old son finally got his own room. We converted the playroom by dragging in his bed and desk from the room he used to share with his little brother. The new “bedroom” still has bins of Legos and Thomas trains and action figures hidden in drawers, and it’s still painted a cheery bright teal, and he let me keep yesteryear scribbly artwork up, and it doesn’t quite fit his current cool, detached teenager image - but it’s got a TV and it is His Own Personal Space.

From which he hardly ever retreats.

This is the first thing. The fact that we have for all intents and purposes, momentarily “lost” contact with him. It’s normal, I know this - normal to want to burrow away and figure things out in solace, normal for someone who is 13 and looks 16 and is wracked with evolving feelings and changing body. I get it.

But this new room, and this new kid (who is now taller than me) got me missing things. Missing how things used to be before we walked around with devices in our hands. Because the truth is we are - all four us in this house - burrowed away in our own Personal Spaces. Eyes down, time wasted, hours spent scrolling, clicking, forwarding, deleting. Even the ten-year-old who doesn’t have a phone, has an iPad and access to a computer - and so while we still play board games, and eat dinner as a family, watch movies together sometimes - the cold, hard truth is that any leisure time to spare is time spent alone, in some corner, staring down at a screen.

So when I came across Tiffany Shlain’s new book “24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day A Week” it was like a plea, a dare, and an answer all rolled into one. The next day, I called a family meeting.

“We’re going to implement a Tech Shabbat. We are going to unplug for twenty-four hours. No iPhones, no iPads, no computers. ALL of us. We will have a landline, a list of phone numbers to call people if we want, and one TV to share, in the family room.”

The ten year old was excited.

The thirteen year old cried.

He shed actual tears, and his reaction - fear, confusion, desperation, fury - further cemented my decision.

Yesterday was our first unplugged Sunday.

And here are my take-aways.

THINGS THAT WERE SURPRISING

1. Teenagers are resistant and reluctant to use phones for anything other than texting. I had to implore my 13 yr old to pick up the house phone and call his friends (they were supposed to meet up for Superbowl hangout that evening.) “Nobody calls anybody! Nobody leaves voice messages. Nobody checks voicemail!” “They won’t know this number. They won’t pick up.” He was correct on all accounts. I had to call parents and inform them that it was, in fact, our son calling from a landline, that this was no prank. The kids who ended up calling back didn't know to how to greet me. They stammered and hemmed and hawed. The idea that reaching out to a friend did not guarantee a direct connection with said friend, was foreign and stupid and strange. This all blew my mind.

2. The day felt incredibly long and languid. It unfolded slowly. When we get on a device, time is sucked up so quickly. I liken it to being in a casino. Minutes fly by, the whole concept of time is warped, thwarted, eradicated. Many times a day, I take my phone out of my pocket and there I am - Instagram, Facebook, Flipboard, Twitter, Matchington Mansion - and when I slip it back into my pocket, I’m unaware of how much time has passed. An hour? Twenty minutes? I don't register it, and yet, it’s gone in a flash.

3. I didn’t miss the things I thought I would. I didn’t miss social media, I didn't miss news notifications popping up, I didn't even miss the Marco Polos I love exchanging with a group of close friends. I didn’t miss getting emails. I didn’t miss looking around for my phone or “alone time.” I still had my alone time except it was quieter - an aloneness with my thoughts, observing things instead of being distracted by them. I didn’t miss being available and connected to an outside world. When I started wondering about how someone was doing, I picked up the house phone and gave them a ring. I left a message and hoped they’d call back. It felt freeing. It felt authentic. My husband felt the same. However, our oldest son’s biggest worry was missing out. He still got dropped off at his friend’s house for the SuperBowl party (the only kid there without a phone, I'm sure) and he still had loads of fun. In fact, when I called the kid’s house later that night to check up on him, he sounded energetic and happy and even ended the conversation with “I love you, mom.” But later he mentioned experiencing anxiety - feeling like he was missing out on “something important” by not having access to his phone. To him, having his phone nearby means having his friends nearby. Without it, he feels lost, unmoored. That admission made me think about how hard it is for our kids, who have grown up used to being “connected” all the time.

4. Landlines are FUN. My friends called a few times, and I would slightly thrill at the sound of a phone ringing throughout the house, and I’d run downstairs to pick up the receiver in time, smiling. As we talked, one friend commented how it felt like we were sixteen, hanging off our beds, twirling our hair, talking about our crushes.

5. My husband and I worked on a crossword puzzle over coffee and breakfast. I also finished a jigsaw puzzle in one afternoon, which I’d been working on for weeks. I read a lot. My boys lay together on the couch and agreed on what to watch on the one TV we could use. They hung out more than they had in a long, long time. We all felt relaxed. I ended up watching the Superbowl because by 9pm, I was too tired to start another jigsaw puzzle, too tired to read, so what else was there to do? I laid on the couch and learned about fumbles, and touchdowns, and cheered for the Chiefs and I kind of got into it. Who the fuck would have thunk.

THINGS THAT WERE ANNOYING

1. I couldn’t take pictures. That sucked.

2. Traveling was unsettling. When the boys went to SkyZone, I didn't like not being able to get in touch with them. Granted, my sister and her husband and kid were there too, and I called her, but still. I thought about car accidents or something random and awful happening while they were out, and I worried about when they’d get home. That kinda sucked too. It felt like an old yet unfamiliar sensation - not knowing what was going on at every single moment.

3. We couldn't order anything online. We couldn't use GrubHub or DoorDash, or GoogleMaps. We couldn’t just like check the weather with a swipe of one finger. Not having the everyday convenience of being online was a bit of a bother, but we survived. It made me realize that we have gotten lazy about daily tasks, and that part of our brain has BECOME our iPhone.

4. I snacked a lot. Without my calorie counting and fitness apps to log my food intake, I suddenly found myself snacking on junk. I did work out, but eating that day became a sort of time filler, and the feeling reminded me of quitting cigarettes and turning to food. That was unforeseen, and I did not like it.

THINGS THAT WERE PROFOUND

1. All day, we felt like we were together in the same space. We retreated less often. We felt serene, light on our feet. We settled into feeling bored, or lazy, or inspired. We gave each other more attention but somehow felt less encumbered upon. It was really, really lovely and soothing. Putting away our devices felt like going on vacation. When we went to bed, I felt closer to my husband. I felt like we had truly shared the day. And both us were not exactly looking forward to Monday, because it felt like going back to the grind. Already there was a bubble of anxiety in our chests, a feeling of weight on our shoulders. Also, I had 127 emails waiting for me this morning and not a one of them was something that desperately should have been answered yesterday. So there was that realization too. The world won’t fall apart if you check out for one day.

2. Twenty-fours can change you. It is a small amount of time, yet our 24 hours unplugged felt so incredibly substantial and so behavior-altering that it made me pause and realize just how addicted we have become to always being connected to the outside world via technology. It’s fucking bizarre, if you think about it.

3. Unplugging and reaping the benefits will only work when the adults in the house do it too. We already have a Device Free day and have had it for years, but it only applied to the kids. It has never felt as pure, and as important and GOOD, as yesterday, when the rules applied to all of us. Taking electronic away from the kids, while being allowed ourselves because “we didn't grow up with this, so we’re not addicted to it” - is like telling someone to go on a diet and eating cake in front of them all day, because well, you personally don't have an issue with weight. Suddenly, it became clear: to be together, we have to do this together.

Moral of the story: this was a pretty amazing experience, as trivial as it seemed to some. If you are feeling burdened, stressed out, fractured, cranky with your kids, your partner - I highly recommend investing in a landline, writing down phone numbers, picking a weekend day, and trying it out. It will feel new and beautiful, and reassuring somehow. Because while there were moments when obviously we went our own ways, did our own thing, we still felt as one. There were no walls, no apps, no texts getting in the way of figuring out and enjoying the day. We were fully present with each other, with ourselves - aware of time but not panicked or confined by it.

In her book, Tiffany Shlain writes that her family has been unplugging one day a week for ten years now. I don’t know how long we’ll last, but all I know is this - we can’t wait for next Sunday.

#unplugging #24/6 #familytime #rest #technolgy

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thisolddag · 4 years

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They Always Say Good Day

Today I woke up to the sound of my two and a half year old nephew walking downstairs to the room next to our bedroom, to greet his grandmother, his Babcia, my mom.

His voice is so sweet, so small, a voice just finding itself - and it’s an incredibly soothing sound, a reassuring sound, a sound that makes me smile.

There’s a song he’s been singing to himself every day for the whole week he’s been at our house. His little hand taps his little thigh and he stares at pictures of animals and this is what we hear, and what us adults have now been attuned to, and what we sing to each other to be funny.

“When cows get up in the morning, they always say good day, good day.”

It was a nice way to wake up to a new decade.

I told myself I would go downstairs, after reaching for my husband before reaching for my phone (something we’re both working on) and make coffee and write a short blog post. Writing first thing on the first day of 2020 seemed like a good idea.

Oh yes, we live in a time when most people need to weigh in, need to be validated, included, appraised, applauded, and heard online - and it grates on me and I think it’s going to be our downfall - but yes, here I was, fucking blogging at 9:13 in the morning.

That’s part of who we are these days too - hypocrites, well-meaning and otherwise. I’m going to accept it as human flaw. I want flaws to be thing again. I want my kids to be offered the opportunity to make mistakes - with a high chance that their fuck-ups will be documented somehow - and be allowed to evolve, learn, and be forgiven, and to forgive themselves. It’s pressing, this yearning, because I feel like they're growing up in an age when being perfect, infallible humans is a requisite. Kindness is the currency of the day, but forgiveness is often overlooked. So I am going to be far more accepting in general. I’m going to be open to dialogue, and realness, and I’m going to say shit I want to say, truthfully but mindfully, because it’s all in the delivery.

Over the holidays, I strung two sets of twinkly lights in my office. I wrote NOTHING. I got sad that my novel has yet to find a home. I got angry with my sister and that wasn't fun at all, but again, we are full of flaws, and sometimes we are incorrigible. I did not make out with my husband, or touch him enough. I did not cook a single meal. I ate comfort food. I played games with my niece and nephews. I read a little each night. I worked on jigsaw puzzles, and spent time with friends, and every time CNN or any news was on, I gave it a glance, a quick listen, and turned that shit off. I cocooned myself a bit, I barely tweeted or posted, I checked out. I laughed, and went around the house singing “they always say good day, good day.” My sister and I drove to Clifton to buy Polish ham and bread. For an hour, I lay on the rug in my office with my ten-year-old niece drawing daffodils and sunflowers, wetting the tips of our colored pencils to create watercolor effects, and talking a little bit about life. I said a super mean thing to my husband without formally apologizing. The whole family ate a big Italian dinner up in the Bronx, a dinner that ended at ten-thirty pm, and left us all feeling satiated, and tired, and really really happy to be together. I counted the days left before school started with a heavy heart. I counted down to midnight with a small group of lovely people whom I call family. And then I cleaned up and worked on the jigsaw puzzle till 2 in the morning.

Some of this was wonderful, some banal, some disheartening. And I will forever look back on the last week with love, gratitude, and a smidge of regret.

There are no resolutions here. There are only small, clear-eyed desires. Like staying off social media as much as I can. Like eschewing trends. Like traveling someplace new. Selling my novel. Spending meaningful time with family, friends, my children. Moving my body every day. Learning a language, or how to bake something. Not worrying too much. Bullet journaling. Reading. Writing. Letting go of bullshit, but not putting up with it either.

I want smallness, intimacy. I want to take care of mine, by not taking what’s mine for granted.

And when I fuck up, I will learn from it, and forgive myself quicker. A wise friend reminded me, it’s the recovery that is more important than the struggle sometimes.

So here’s to the recovery, to forgiveness, and good days, good days ahead.

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thisolddag · 5 years

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memory is a place.

Lately, I’ve been time traveling. This happens often in mid-September, when I have privately said goodbye to summer, and given myself up to the changing seasons. These days, inching into my forties, time travel is a means of survival, or resistance maybe; a kind of submerging in things I still remember. I wonder - I truly wonder - what will happen to me when I’m 65 and drenched with nostalgia.

What the fuck will happen to a person who doesn’t want to let go of the past, when the future is knocking on their doorstep.

Anyway, time travel is easy.

I am usually in my office, or in the car, or on public transportation. I can be alone or in the company or friends or strangers.

I am carrying a large watermelon in a plastic bag, down Leonard Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, headed toward the apartment we used to live in, that my little sister and her little family now occupy. It is the very end of summer and the bag holding the watermelon cuts into my flesh. I switch hands, and then I switch them again.

I think about the summers I was pregnant carrying these same watermelons, down this same block. I think about the time before I was a mother. I think back to earlier summers, me in Poland, me crushing on a boy named Rafal, me with pimples and big dreams, feeling like a beauty queen for two months out of the year, the visiting girl from America, even though I was not American.

Being in Brooklyn makes me remember so many things.

The memories are crystal clear - the smell of the bułeczki my Babcia smeared with yellow butter, the texture of the frayed towels in her bathroom, the color of the sunsets, the sound of church bells.

One memory leads to another so that in my mind I travel a well-worn path of intricate tunnels and familiar pitstops.

I think I've probably written that sentence before, but I don’t care. There’s no other way to describe it. I remember so much, all the time, and the memories both lift me up, make me feel ageless, and weigh me down. There is heft to them, a sweet kind of burden, but no matter what I do, I cannot stop remembering.

Standing in my kitchen, rinsing the vintage glasses that I ordered on Etsy because they remind me of the ones my grandmother had, I am suddenly in her kitchen. I am listening to her sing, hum, speak to herself.

Waiting for the bus, I am suddenly waiting for the bus in my hometown in Poland; the metallic pungent smell, the crowdedness of it, me holding onto a black strap, wobbly on my feet, listening to a walkman, so happy, and tired in the way teenagers tire because everything is so high stakes.

I see myself from decades ago - standing in a red bus on some decades ago - and if I work harder, if I travel further inside my memory, I can pinpoint the clothes I was wearing: gray tantop, an ill-fitting bra, a denim skirt. I was probably remembering back then too - my adolescent self recalling snippets from when I was a little girl: a party, my gorgeous young grandmother in a black polyester turtleneck, swiping her hair from her forehead. When did I first remember that?

These days, my grandmother is battling Alzheimer’s - but there is little strength to fight it now. In fact, battling is the wrong word. She is dying. I say this quickly and simply, because it is the truth. I am readying myself for it by saying the words. She has long since forgotten our summer mornings, those buttered buns, the way she held my cheek. Maybe forgotten is the wrong word, too. She has been robbed of her memories.

This past weekend was spent with my sisters. I’m sure we talked a ton about our childhoods, our youth, our old apartments, our summers with Babcia. I’m sure we talked a lot about the time we all occupied the same space, and how we long for that again. We walked from one subway to the next, and later to dinner, and it seems like the three of us held hands the whole way, but I know we didn’t. We did stop, at one moment, to hug in the middle of the street. I don't know why. We just did.

Time travel makes me want to be around people who know me best, who know me from before. Being around them makes me feel safe, cocooned, loved. It makes what happened incredibly, beautifully real.

I become a quieter version of myself when I time travel. I say less, I smile to myself. I don't get weepy. Remembering makes me feel free, if that makes sense.

It’s a phase, of course. It will go away soon, when October arrives and there are pumpkins to carve and costumes to pick out for my sons; things that have nothing to do with who I was growing up.

I can’t tell if my nostalgia is the Polish in me, or the writer, or the actor - or this is just who I am, regardless of my origin or career. It does not feel American, that’s for sure. But then again, I don’t know what “American” means anymore. Maybe time travel is also antidote to that - to the current events hurting at me like meteorites.

I worry that what is happening to my Babcia, will one day happen to me. That’s why I write. That’s why I tell my sons my stories, edited for content, toned down, but all too honest. I want them to remember what I once remembered. I want them to read my words, and always hear my voice.

#memories #timetravel #nostalgia #writers #granmother #babcia

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thisolddag · 5 years

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In Defense of Happiness.

Before our trip to Costa Rica, there was a part of me that thought I was dying. I was rattled with pain - real and imagined - my mind overwhelmed, my body tired. I would lie awake, my fingers traveling to spine, or behind my knee, or my collarbone - poking things I was sure were dormant calamities. Is this just getting old, I’d ask my husband. Yes, he assured me. I have creaks too, I have aches. But he was able to name them for what they were - a pinched nerve, a sore muscle, a pulled tendon, a swollen lymph node because of a cold, allergies. My aches had no name. They were constant and they were profound and they were bullshit - and once we landed in Costa Rica, they all went away.

It was magic, on the heels of malady.

In Costa Rica, I shed my skin. I breathed easier. I stared out into the ocean and the waves calmed me.

I was happy because I was surrounded by happiness.

Pure Life was a real thing in Costa Rica, and I saw it and I felt it every day - in nature wild and undisturbed, in the monkeys in trees, in the faces of my children, in the sound of birds, in the Ticos among us, who would not only always smile at us but at each other, calling out their eternal greeting, pura vida pura vida.

Here was place where people checked in with each other, where they helped each other, where they sunk into the moment, feet first. Never was the friendliness ingratiating or phony. It was lived in, it was pure. It was a balm.

Each day, I woke up rested, ready to be happy again. We lounged, we sunbathed, we held hands. I was in love with my husband, truly, deeply. It was a week where somehow the five of us decided to accept one another for who we were and take solace in the fact that we were together. We milked every good mood, every adventure, every bit of laziness.

Before our trip, I felt rifts left and right. Less communicating, more separateness, those wretched devices we are beholden to in our hands, friendships that waxed and waned, and loneliness - which is different than solitude. I finished the final draft of my second novel and sent it off to my agent and sat there biting my cuticles, remembering things like my youth and my first book. Let’s go somewhere, we said. Let’s go somewhere where there is sunshine.

There is such immense privilege in my adult life - there is the option of booking tickets five days out and paying stupid amounts of money to stay at a beautiful hotel, and taking my mom along, why not. I wrestle with this privilege and so I delve back to my childhood, to its poverty and pain, and then some of the guilt recedes.

But then we get to Costa Rica, and we say let’s accept this happiness. We are here because of a great and powerful marriage of luck and hard, relentless work. We are here because we deserve to be happy, and we can be happy on a dollar budget or we can be happy at the Four Seasons. Happiness is a lifetime’s work, a moment’s reward, and it is up for grabs. You let go of tomorrow, you let go of yesterday and that is Pura Vida. It is difficult when one is predisposed to anxiety, or when one is mostly American, or when one falls back on the tortured soul thing. The thing is real, but it need not be everpresent.

Watching my mother in Costa Rica was watching happiness unfold. There she was - napping by the shores of a magnificent peninsula, zipining towards the ocean, shrieking joyously at a thieving monkey, using her walking stick in a thick and muggy transient rainforest - hiking miles and miles, with her knees, her aches - and like the rest of us, she felt no fear - only a quiet, gorgeous contentment, and gratitude.

For six days we were a happy family.

I’m taking back some pura vida to New Jersey, I told my girlfriends.

And I meant it.

I sit here now, awash with memories, wanting to up and leave again; wanderlust, in spades. But I sit here peacefully. There’s excitement once again in the unknown, in what’s to come. I battle ‘what’s to come’ everyday. I worry about future battles, “real” problems again. We have it too good, for it to stay so good. That is my worst fear - and when I was in Costa Rica, that fear went away. My body healed. My mind opened. And I sit here knowing I will have panic attacks again, and I will yell again, and I will lose my fucking patience. But I sit here happily.

You can be a truth seeker, an advocate, intelligent and progressive, charitable, questioning - and you can be happy. In our modern times, when we are inundated with so much terrible information and so much tragedy, horror stories reaching us via Flipboard articles and Twitter and news outlets - it is a mighty fucking feat to just shut it off, turn the valve, and be ok with a trickle and not a flood. It is selfish and in a way, it is our survival. Maybe it is how I survived the first twenty years of my life.

Happiness is a gift, a distraction, a journey. It is private, and yet it’s there to be shared. I will take it, value it, work hard for it. I won’t question it. I won’t apologize for wanting it, or for holding onto it.

On the way back from Costa Rica, we flew through a bad storm. The plane shook, bounced and throttled, and it seemed like the ominous dark clouds were going to swallow us whole. Normally, I would cry and try to hide it from my kids, and grasp my husband’s hand till his skin turned white. Normally, I would think it was the end. This time, I settled into the seat and leaned my head back. I listened to Pink’s latest single Walk Me Home, on repeat. And in my mind I repeated a little mantra. We are together in this. We are together in this. My body didn't quake, as it normally would. I was still, and I stared out the window and found peace, somehow. Somehow, even through a raging storm.

And when we landed, a lightness, and a happiness.

#happiness #puravida #costarica #vacation #familly #togetherness

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thisolddag · 6 years

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My Life as a Bird.

On the morning of my 42nd birthday, my dogs wake me up at half past six. They wake me up with barking - desperate, anticipatory barking. These are not the canine sounds warning of a trespasser, or to signify a need to relieve themselves. No. This particular bark I’ve come to recognize as the woeful ‘cry of the hunter.’ So I get up to let them out - because my husband is away, because the kids are still sleeping and I wish for them to remain sleeping. Because I am forty-two this morning and I had planned on waking up early anyway. So I could lay in bed thinking about life, and thinking about death, and remembering goodbyes, and feeling feelings.

Backstory. There’s a squirrel in our backyard that gets eternally trapped under the treehouse my dad built for the boys. I don't suppose it’s the same fucking squirrel out there daily - because how dumb and sad and Sisyphean - but this is the squirrel my dogs want to eviscerate on some mornings.

This squirrel usually runs up our massive tree, gets a third of the way up and lo and behold, finds there’s an obstacle - the bottom of the treehouse, which winds around the entire circumference. Aside from jumping off and frantically running toward another massive tree - there’s nowhere for this squirrel to go. And so my dogs - rabid in their desire to catch her - run circles as she runs circles and eventually somebody gives up, or makes a miraculous getaway. I’ve seen it happen dozens of times, and on the morning of my 42nd birthday, while waiting for my coffee to brew, it seems I would bear witness to this slightly amusing - yet terribly distressing - scenario yet again.

Side note. We also have a bird’s nest in our backyard. It’s already been occupied by an avian family earlier in the summer - a mom and her five kiddos (that’s for you, Christine.) We took pictures when they hatched. My husband tended to the babies with a watchful eye, setting up thick blankets on the patio table right underneath the nest (which was built behind a light fixture on a beam) lest one of the baby birds had tried to fly and failed, so they’d have something soft to land on. Because that is my husband, in an nutshell. My son had christened the babies (Bob, Sasha, Keith, I forget the rest) and we all kind of got emotionally invested in their journey, and one morning, just like that, they were gone. And we were sad and happy at the same time that they had literally flown the coop.

Recently, the nest became occupied again. Another bird mother and two hatchlings, this time. Maybe more. I forget. For the life of me, I couldn't tell you what these birds are. What type. My husband was very...proud?...that another matriarch had chosen "our” nest. These babies were more outgoing, as I would see them crane their necks all the way from my kitchen window. They seemed eager, and assured. The previous babies just formed a kind of unified sleepy lump and rarely showed their beaky little faces.

Anyway, back to my story.

I get out of bed at six thirty five, and the dogs are on my heels - the smaller and younger one, the one on Prozac, positively dying to get outside. She’s whining and barking and jumping around, and the bigger dog is panting like she’s just run a marathon. They want out. I scan the yard to make sure it’s a squirrel they have spotted and not some innocent baby bunny, and at their signal, I open the doors and release hell, as it were.

And on this morning - for whatever reason - I follow them.

They run like CRAZY, straight toward the swing set, but I don't see a squirrel or any other suburban woodland creature. It’s completely muggy this morning, like Vegas or Florida muggy. My phone is in my hand - and I don't know how it got there or why I would take it downstairs, but these are the times we’re living in, I suppose, when the phone is just always in our hands, like an appendage. I notice the bird nest and I amble over. I’ll take a picture of these guys, I think. Show my husband, so he can see I too, am an animal lover.

What happens next, happens fast.

I walk over to the bird nest. I get up close. I see two birds in there, round white belies and looking very fully formed. For a second, I can't tell if it’s two moms. These birds don't look like the skinny necked babies that were there just days ago - but here’s a tidbit - baby birds grow fast. Like super fast. I zoom in and take a picture. And I swear one of the birds is looking straight at the camera, straight at me, perhaps into my soul. I don't want to say a connection has been made, but for a second, I see myself age, seven, landing in America. I fast forward through years of struggle, through escapades, loves lost. I am here now, standing in the lovely backyard behind a lovely home, living a beautiful life, and I am forty-two years old and how the fuck did I manage to get here? All of this, me and the baby bird locking eyes, in about a ten seconds.

And as soon as I put my phone down, she takes off. I startle. She flies above my head. Only she doesn’t get far. She falls to the ground, and just like that, the smallest dog, the dog on Prozac is there, on her, so close that I know my dog is about to eat a baby bird who had felt the universe calling out to her, who had just felt the courage to leave home - this bird will be eaten in front of me, on my forty second birthday.

“Mabel! NO! Mabel, NO!”

I yell, loudly. It’s a desperate plea, a serious command - and oh miracle of miracles just as Mabel’s snout makes contact with feathers - Mabel retreats. Both dogs follow me back into the house, as the bird tries to take off again. She manages a few hops into the hedges behind our cabana, and then she disappears.

I tell the doggies they're such good girls - for not starting my morning off with a literal bloody murder - and the I go back outside. I look for the bird. Her sister is still in the nest. But she is gone. Part of me worries she’s trapped inside bushes and that at some point today, one of my dogs will get her. But I look behind the bushes. I look everywhere. And I don't see anything.

So I choose to believe that this bird, who wanted to show me what a leap of faith looks like, knew herself well enough to know she’d be just fine. That she was ready to fly.

I sit here now, kids still sleeping, and think about my life, and all the moments in it when I leapt, and fell, and yet somehow, survived.

How do birds know that they know how to fly? I have no idea. I won’t even fucking google it. I will keep the memory of this morning in tact, as it is - mysterious, unsettling, and kind of beautiful.

#birthday #birds #nest #leapoffaith

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thisolddag · 6 years

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unmothering.

There’s a line in the novel I’m writing where one of the main characters ruminates on the fact that when a woman becomes a mother all the previous versions of herself cease to exist. Poof, they vanish into thin air - the mother who used to be a child, a teenager, a girlfriend, a delinquent, a scholar, a dreamer, a teacher, a seamstress, a CEO. All people see when they see her is MOTHER. The rest is just curious tidbits, anecdotes from another time, fun little details or memories that don’t really matter anymore. The character finds relief in this - the fact that she has a clear-cut, definite role in life and will no longer have to strive toward impossible goals or ‘make a mark’ or prove herself. Of course, this is 1970s Communist Poland, so it kind of makes sense. It’s a relief, for the young girl - she’s twenty-one when she gives birth - to let go of her past, all her disappointments, all her secret ambitions and whimsical wants.

Honestly, I had a bit of a hard time writing this part, but it felt like the truth.

This morning I told myself all I wanted in the world was to sleep in and spend the day not doing anything for anyone else. I wanted to unmother. I got up at 8:59 - and I suppose anything past 6:30am is considered sleeping in - but still, I felt betrayed by my body. I had imagined waking up at noon and sauntering downstairs to a clean kitchen and the boys quietly reading books or better yet, to an empty house. I think that’s the thing we sometimes don't want to admit - that on Mother’s Day it would be terribly wonderful (selfish, indulgent, bizarre, appropriate) to stop being a mother for a bit. To be alone with your thoughts. To pretend to be another version of who you once were. To say quite happily and matter-of-factly “Just leave me alone.”

I then realized - after I had made myself some coffee and listened to my youngest son read me all the Mother’s Day poems he’d worked on in school just for this morning (you’re the most lovable person in the world, when you lay down with me you really want to unlike other mothers, I'm the luckyest person to know you, everyone thinks you're amazing, fun facts; you wrote a book, you were in a movie, you’re in the PTA) and then retreated to my office, youngest son my heels “it would be an honor to do anything for you today, do you want some tea?” - I realized, that my sons would never know who I used to be before I became their mother. Neither would my fellow mom girlfriends, or the teachers at my kids schools, or anyone on the checkout line at the grocery store.

It’s strange thought, but it doesn’t make me sad, or upset, or mystified. Then I decided that I would work hard to clue my children in. To remind them. I would let them know that mothers are human beings capable of being selfish, desired, confused, emotional, needy, pre-occupied, wild, determined. Why would I do this?

So they would grow up into men who don't expect to be catered to. Men who will understand that a woman doesn't stop being a person when she becomes a mom. It’s as simple and intense as that.

So. I will continue to burrow away in my office and write. And not just when they’re in school. I will continue leaving the dishes in the sink, for days sometimes, because I just don't fucking feel like dealing with messes twenty-four-seven. I will continue going on dates with Patrick, and putting on make-up, and cracking inappropriate jokes, and saying what is on my mind. I will try to lighten up and lighten my load. I will show them my trove of old journals - as they grown into teenagers and young adults - so they can read what it was like to be me when I pined for boys, wished for praise, slept late, made mistakes. I will continue making chore charts, and leaving laundry unfolded, and hanging out with my sisters, and reading books into the night. I will continue to gripe about my period, and tell everyone how tired I am. I will go on auditions, and write blogs, and show off new tattoos, and cry when I’m sad and not feel guilty when I seek out private, personal space in a house that accommodates such longing beautifully.

(Now list all the stuff you do as a mother, the sacrifices! the love! the PTA meetings, school lunches, and the volunteering work, and taking them to doctors appointments and cleaning out the garage, and reading them stories and hugs! cuddles! List some of that shit so the readers won't think you're... - that’s the voice in my head right now but I’m not giving in to it.)

Of course, easier said than done. Truth is it’s very hard to look at my own mother as a girl who once wanted to open her own confectionary store, or who fell for the “wrong guy” or who had lovers, or who cried because she felt alone or scared, or who sits and recalls who she once was. I take care of my mother and I have for years and so there’re layers of deep deep history here - but still when I look at her I see MOTHER first - a mother who triumphed or failed, a mother who was in over her head, a mother, mama, mom.

I have to work very hard to change my perception, to forgive, to see past the wrinkles, the smile. To see the girl, and not the mother.

We can try though. We can try to reveal our selves in ways that will help our kids - our partners - our own mothers - see the parts of us that are complicated and flawed and full of want. To help them remember that we once had a life that had nothing to do with them; we were young once and we dreamed of so much. Those dreams don't die. They change form, they fold up, they ease up, they take a break. They’re on call. But they are still and forever inside of us, in our fiber, in the recesses of memory. Let’s tend them to those dreams a little bit more. As a gift to ourselves.

#mothers #women #our true selves #Mother's Day #selfishness

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thisolddag · 6 years

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under my skin

While the kids were away, I got a tattoo. I took the bus into the city, subway into Brooklyn, all the while imagining the letters on my wrist, on the inside, so that when I glanced down I would always see them, at least a peek, the words full of meanings, in lettering that comes from a Polish school primer, the elementarz which taught me how to write before I ever got to this country. Something for the world to help it figure out something about me.

We were together. I forget the rest.

I wondered about commas and periods, about the usefulness of punctuation. And how any bit of ink on your skin is meaningful, or should be. Even a single dash. Or nothing at all ~ a string of words uninterrupted. A Walt Whitman quote, often paraphrased like so, until the misquote became the truth. The real words come from Leaves of Grass and they start with ‘day after day, night after night, we were together.’ I read it somewhere back in December, and it was like seeing a light in a tunnel. Something bright along the way, just when you need it most. All I care about lately - in these times - is being with people I love, and making meaningful human connection. Also, an inside joke - because I never ‘forget the rest.’ I carry the rest inside me - but this, on my arm, would be a daily reminder. (Remember, carry ~ but don't let it drag you down.)

It felt like spring today. Maybe that’s what did it. The morning started out with sleet, a little snow on its last legs, a measly effort to stick around, like neighbors you invite over who have trouble leaving until they finally get the hint. I decided somewhere around noon that I would go into Greenpoint, on this last day before the kids get back, to see my littlest nephew, and to get inked.

The kids have been gone since Monday. It’s been cold and dreary, and so seeing them in photographs - California sunshine and short sleeves, their cheeks puffy, their brows sweaty - made it better, made the secret happiness of being without them acceptable.

It’s a wonder what a person can do when they momentarily stop being a mom.

My days were busy and lazy all at once. I decided when to work, and when to sit back. Time was mine, a gift slipped into my pocket. I read two whole books. I wrote so much. I tidied up and embarked on spring cleaning even though it was so fucking cold and gray that spring in April seemed like a broken promise. I worked out and ate when I felt like it. Days were endless and then over in a flash. And then, night.

I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed with the TV on, with three books lost in the comforter, with my iPhone and that game where I buy diamonds to furnish rooms that strange people vote on. I slept with a serrated knife next to me on the bedside table. A bowl full of pineapple chunks. A bottle of water. Night was fitful and finicky. I missed my husband next to me, snoring on and off, me telling him to please cut it out please, are you old now, Patrick? On the third night the kids were away, I meandered online and there I discovered a name - Julia Davis. She’d created a show called Camping and I watched it on my phone which was propped against a throw pillow, me on my side, one eye sinking into the matters, useless. Even in a dreamlike state, half awake and angry about it, I binged the episodes, hoping to be that bold and brave in my choices as an artist. At four am I fell asleep, dreaming of cold British seas and people who have noisy sex in outdoor showers.

What else did I do while the kids were gone?

I went to dinner with two friends - one close to me, one standing on the horizon. Friendship is tricky, even at forty-one, and maybe especially. It was nice to talk quickly, intimately, about things women talk about. Neuroses, fears, work, marriage and sex, the despair of niceties, travel. We didn’t talk about our kids - not milestones, or report cards, or time-outs. That part I only realized in hindsight. That we didn’t really go on about our children. I’m glad. You can get to know women without having to know how they mother. It is possible. The waiter appeared at our table ~ can I top you off? - every five minutes, and at first we laughed that he fancied us. But then no, no, we didn't need our waters refilled constantly. Just leave us in peace to discuss cunnilingus and Paris and business ventures. But he was who he was - a quiet little hoverer - and after awhile we just waved him off. Time is precious, when you find time for yourself.

Later, I thought about men ~ and how they don't know how to talk this way - or maybe how they don't want to, or don't think they need to, and that maybe if they knew how to unload, how to dissect feelings, how to verbalize the things that are hard to talk about - maybe if revealing the tender, doubtful parts of themselves was an instinct - the world would be a much different place.

Later, I walked down Bedford Avenue to get my ink. You can just walk into a parlor and say this is what I want, on my body, like this, right now. And in a moment - in a little under thirty minutes - something imaginary becomes permanent. It didn't hurt, but then again this was my eighth one. I stared at my knees, and nodded while the tattoo artist talked about his hometown. He had a drawl and it was soothing.

Tonight is my last night of being alone. So, I write. I think about the noise that will come back tomorrow, how the house will not be quietly pulsing with ticking clocks and echoes and silence, but loud with feet and shouts, and pleas and bargaining. I write and glance down at my arm, and the only word visible, from this angle, at this keyboard as I type is the word together.

This is what I did, when the kids were away.

#tattoos #quiet time #spring #togetherness #mothers #women

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thisolddag · 6 years

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Girls Trip.

Before we left for Vegas, I was worried. A hundred excuses about why this was going to “end badly.” I trudged up and down the stairs, laundry piled in my arms, half-heartedly packing the smallest of carry-on bags. There would be too much drinking. There would be money gambled and lost. My son had an upcoming test and I wouldn’t be home to help him study. What if I got the flu from traveling halfway across the country? What if the kids got the flu while I was gone? Was this trip even necessary? Were we being indulgent?

So that’s how I got in the car to go to the airport. Laden with stupid little fears, and wearing high-heeled boots that were already starting to hurt because I told myself that I was in my forties now and I needed to start traveling ‘in style.’ Why? Who the fuck knows. I do know there were separate texts threads I was not a part of.

Dag is being a party pooper, Dag needs to relax, whatever Dag.

They were right. I needed to relax. In my eyes, there is nothing as mystifying and miraculous as a woman who is able to give into the conviction that everything will be alright. Holding onto this feeling is my holy grail in life. I chase it. I was chasing it then, speeding down the turnpike on a bright Sunday morning, across the George Washington Bridge, while the driver played NPR.

Most of my anxiety dissipated when I saw my little sister at JFK. She’s recently become a mother herself. Her son is probably the most beautiful little thing I’ve ever laid eyes upon. She’s doting and selfless, and will go down in the books as Best Mom Ever. “I’m not wearing any make-up,” she said when she hugged me, and when she hugged me, my worry went slack. Her face was full of emotion and exhaustion, having just experienced the bittersweet ache of having to hug your baby goodbye. And just looking at her, a thought came to me, a thought that surpassed everything. This is important.

Sometimes leaving is important.

The last time we had flown together solo had been a year ago, and I had nothing but warm and fuzzy memories of that trip. Those memories helped. And as I boarded the airplane with my sister and Alice, I could feel a familiar transformation beginning. I was becoming a girl again, a girl with a room of her own. Or at least her own seat, in row 16, by the window, next to a lovely British gal who greeted me with a wide, open smile.

The fight was smooth. I didn’t grip the arm rest. I nodded off, listened to music, read a few magazines. I stared out the window into clouds and then Rockies, and then into a desert, the topography like something from Mars. The further we flew, the more I relaxed. And the more I realized yes, this was necessary.

You can’t wish motherhood toward you, as much as you can’t wish it away. It follows you, a stray dog at your heels, or a shadow, or a sunrise. You bask in its light, become windswept in its gales. It seeps into you, wipes your slate clean, digs in its claws, saves you, weighs you down, carries you. We become mothers and we become someone else’s - fully, a thousand percent, twenty-four seven. At least most of us anyway.

We become drivers in the passenger seat, just like that.

Once we landed - and all at once - I abandoned my traveling buddies and took a tram to vape outside. I had a headache. It was chilly. I had never stepped outside in Vegas to be met with a brisk breeze, or the sight of people wearing coats. It was new, and oddly exciting. Vegas was usually an oven set to broil, but not this time.

In arrivals, we met my other sister - joining us from LA. She had on sequined sneakers, and also, there was a piece of toilet paper hanging from her waistband, which we readily pointed out and laughed about. She was giddy, glowing. “I needed this trip so badly.”

Later that evening Alice’s sister would arrive from Florida - and then there would be five of us. There is safety and strength in numbers, especially when the numbers are celebrating upcoming nuptials, and when the numbers are all girls.

Before we got in the car which would bring us to the Bellagio, I bought a heavy, sexy-looking bottle of coconut vodka at the airpot liquor store. I was caving already. We were here. We were here together, and everything we loved had been left behind. And it was fine.

Over the next two days, amazing things happened.

I lost hundreds of dollars on penny slots, and laughed till it hurt. I napped and ate without counting my Points. I thrived in the company of females, in that warm, buoyant, beguiling company - where talking together was as exciting as watching grown men on a stage take off their clothes and dance for us. (Hashtag Magic Mike.) We talked a lot. About kids, yes - the ones we had, the ones we planned on having, the ones we weren’t sure about. We talked about careers, and weddings, and books, and more trips, more time to ourselves, time together. We talked about how in our own small ways we hated our bodies, as much as we loved ourselves. We talked about shitting our pants and we cried, over cornbread and fried chicken at a Top Chef restaurant.

Alice was in love. Alice was getting married. Alice yelled at a dopey man in a cowboy hat who got in our faces.

Dag was writing a second novel. Dag had a flat stomach. Dag ate a whole bag of English Toffee brittle by herself.

Marika was selling pilots and uploading Insta Stories. Marika was happy. Marika was our mastermind.

Melanie had the best hair. It was red and lustrous and almost unreal. Melanie was planning the rest of her life.

Veronika was a new mom. Veronika sat on the edge of the hotel room bed, pumping breast milk, smiling.

There is nothing as powerful and affirming as women bonding. And how we bond - when the masks drop and the dainty gloves come off - is unrivaled.

Over the next two days, I traveled back to my youth, to the heady feeling of feeling alive, unconquerable, limitless. I visited the ATM machine too many times. I didn’t really call my children, or my husband. I drank White Russians, without really getting drunk. I thought about how the #metoo movement would never change men, but that - more importantly - it had the power to change us. That we were awakening. Learning to say no, to meet a smile with a scowl, to talk louder, to demand, to get up and go, to fight back. We would change. Men were hopeless, even the good ones. Men would never learn to read our minds. But we would learn to speak ours.

On our second night in Vegas, we sat on a velvet couch right by the stage, close to the men who were performing for us. Their bodies were chiseled, sure, but some had zits on their shoulder blades, and strange, bulbous moles we could make out from our seats. Some of them were phoning it in, some of them were beautiful acrobats, and when they sidled up to our hips, they whispered, is it ok, are you ok with this? I had never gone to a strip show before - and I’d arrived with a frown on my face, my legs crossed tightly, my hands folded in my lap like the schoolmarm that I was. But this was a bacheloretty trip, and Marika likes to plan activities, and so there we were. The emcee was a woman, dressed like a lion tamer, black blazer, her body strong and curvy, her voice deep and loud and reassuring. We felt safe having her up there, conducting and being boss. At the end of the show, she rode a giant stuffed unicorn into the sky, and at one point she locked eyes with my little sister and mouthed “Bye, Veronika.” And I don’t know why but it gave me goosebumps.

I didn’t want to say bye. I wanted to stay with them - wandering through casinos and talking and talking and talking - forever.

When we left Vegas, we left reluctantly. Reality was waiting for us, waiting at the door, the door held wide open, urging us to get back inside. We didn’t want to go back. We wanted to keep pumping and dumping, and popping another can of rose, and sliding another ten bucks into a Willy Wonka slot machine, and playing our luck. We wanted to keep hearing everything back home was fine without us.

Now, we are here. We stopped texting everyday. We are back to the grind, to chores, schedules, bedtimes, meltdowns. I miss the feeling of feeling young. I miss my girls. In my mind, our trip is branded forever. Tucked inside, nestled deeply, rooted. And yes, we’ll have weddings to go to, and airplanes to board, and homework to check, and appointments to go on, and babies to calm. We’ll have fights, jobs, scares, conferences, laundry, dishes, garbage, family, diets. We’ll have days when we want to crawl under a blanket. We’ll have peaceful moments of silence. We’ll have grief, rage, love, and monotony.

And we’ll always, always have Vegas in January.

Bye, Veronika. Till next time.

#girlstrip #vegas #women #bonding

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thisolddag · 6 years

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My Time, This Year.

It’s snowing, which makes the California children staying in my house happy. Two adults have gone out on a bagel and coffee run. The dogs are already taking morning naps, and I will probably stay in my pajamas for hours. I will be engaged, and try to get my house in order for our New Year’s Eve soiree, but I will also seek out quiet moments in which nostalgic thoughts will take a hold of me, and I’ll try not to bemoan the end of this holiday season. I’ll also try not to think about taking down a hundred thousand twinkly lights and lugging that shit back up to the attic. The unfinished jigsaw puzzle will probably throw a wrench into things.

My husband got me the most beautiful vanity for Christmas. It’s mirrored and gold, a work of art deco splendor, and I become Joan Crawford or Norma Desmond just by looking at it. Last night, I spent hours going through my old vanity, worn from 11 years of smudges and spills. It was restorative to my soul - to just chuck stuff I have gathered but no longer have any use for. I separated, sorted, and wiped clean. I kept what mattered.

That is my plan for the two thousand eighteen, in general.

WORK ART FRIENDS FAMILY

I wil allocate my time wisely this year. I won't muck about with any of the following; small talk, stupidity, self-loathing, assholes, and artifice. Meaning, more precisely, that I will surround myself with goodness, candor, and passion, and with people who espouse all three.

I will finish writing my follow-up novel - which is already 45,174 words strong. I will spend energy on arts related endeavors and opportunities. I will go to the theatre more. I will read more. I will seek out friends who have proved true, who have shown me not only stalwart loyalty but also unadulterated honesty. I won't stand for bullshit and I will speak my mind. I will connect with family in meaningful ways and I will travel to see them, and I will be more forgiving of their antics and supportive of their dreams. I will start dating my husband again. I will continue improving my body. I’ll tell the truth but be mindful of delivery. I’ll probably delete my Instagram account because I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing it for and life is too short. The iPhone will no longer be my bedfellow. I will try to disengage from the Internet. The dishes will be put away in a timely manner - unless there are more important things to focus on. I will make my bed every morning because I like the symbolism in it. I will vote when the time comes. I will give money to schools, to theaters, and to political organization that are doing the ground work, that have my back. I will support women. I will hold men accountable. I will volunteer for things that matter to me. I will talk to my sons about kindness and conviction. I will hug and hold them a lot. Oh and I’ll shop local.

Seems doable.

Happy New Year. Take time to wipe your slate clean.

#new years #time #intentions

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thisolddag · 6 years

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day off

i haven't been here in a long time i’ve been in Brooklyn i get there in mini vans i sit in the back forehead against cool glass just like in the movies a woman lost in thought, quietly going somewhere i am a scene from a movie, for an hour - depending on traffic puffing on my vape and holding my pee as we head into the battery tunnel which is cool like something forgotten like something i haven't explored the PAs who drive me are in turn chatty and quiet and come from places like Paris and Kansas

i haven't written a single word in weeks i've been in front of cameras or sitting on plastic chairs, or a couch when mark margolis isn't there because the couch is usually only his because amenities! i laugh with fellow clowns i laugh so hard my soul feels like it’s snap pop crackling i feel sexy and like i’m owning everything i speak up when things get testy or tedious - thinking in passing, as i speak, about the girls out there the women out there just now finding their voices coming out of the shadows, hands in front of their bodies like hunting for a light switch in the dark

on days off, or nights returned i’ve been in the basement doing laundry i’ve been awake and thinking really hard i've been time traveling scrolling through old photographs and it makes me wonder does everyone wish to go back to when things like sleep and dreams and falling in love over and over and over again where bottomless possibilities - or is it just me

my son told me he saw a girl yesterday her name is kate - he is sure of that, even though they haven't spoken his face grew still, when he said her name but then it gave into a small mysterious smile when he said her name i turned my face away to give him something that was his to begin with but that he wanted to share with his mother i hid my own smile i could tell, the way he said her name, that his heart was bursting but he didn't know why

and it made me think of young love it made me want to travel all the way back to seventh grade and nicholas d’ambrosio and i shouldn't use real names but maybe that’s not his real name he was the smartest boy in class and his hair was bristly and thick italian hair and i pined for him the only way twelve-year-old girls know how to pine fervently and for longer than was necessary

two more days and then Abe is gone and i go back to the suburbs, full time until the next gig and the next rodeo my kids fare well without me and it makes me wonder should i go off on adventures more often

i want it to snow this winter i want it to get so cold that my fingers burn i want to be sheltered with the fireplaces going i want to make out with my husband

and mostly mostly

i want to keep writing

#writing #acting #winteriscoming #nostalgia

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thisolddag · 7 years

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Advice for Middle School

Dear Eleven-Year-Old.

Tomorrow you will wake up and start a new adventure. For the first time since you entered school, I will not walk you to its doors. I will instead watch you leave, waving goodbye, as I stand and wonder how it happened so fast. I will want to follow, but I won’t. I will let you go - you, my firstborn son, you, still a ‘little’ kid - but one that is learning to go forth into the world all on his own.

So. I want tell you a few things, to keep in mind. For your first day, but for later too. I’ll try to make it short, because you know me by now. I could go on forever.

1. You will get lost tomorrow. I mean in the hallways, but also in other ways. You will feel overwhelmed, like things are moving too fast. And they will be. It’s a big school. There will be lots of faces to take in. Be careful walking down the stairs.

2. Look your teachers in the eye when you speak to them. Yes. Speak to them. Let them know who you are by the way you smile, the way you hesitate, the way you sit. Sit up. Take notes. Be on time. Take your time.

3. Don’t obsess about the things you don’t have. By which I mean Instagram. Enjoy the things you do have, the things you find joy in sharing, or talking about. Take a look around; yours is a good life, and you know it. Look forward to the future but don’t pine for it.

4. You’ll compare yourself to everyone - old friends, new friends. It can’t be helped. You’ll be overlooked, or praised, you’ll be well-liked or ignored. You will make friends fast. Or you will feel alone. These things will happen every day, every hour; think of a road that winds and winds. There is nothing straight-forward about growing up. You will never get used to the way some people can treat others. Concentrate instead on how you treat them. Be fair. Be kind. Including to yourself. We never stop growing or learning or changing - but who we are inside, that magic little thing called love, the mechanics of our heart - that’s already there. And you have a good heart. Never forget that.

5. Don’t look through people, don’t scan them over and decide you know who they are. Don't make assumptions based on a glance, on clothes, skin color, gender, quietness. You will be drawn to some people and not to others. That’s ok. Not everyone might get your attention, but everyone should get your respect. Also. There will always be a beautiful mystery surrounding crushes. Why some girls but not others? Maybe it will be their shy eyes, or bright smile, or they way they laugh, the way they can articulate their thoughts, the way they write, their determinations, their interests. Who knows. It might start with thinking a girl is ‘cute’ - but it should never end there. There are layers to everyone. Start learning the importance of really getting to know people.

6. Pimples will happen. But they happen even at 40, so you’re in luck because I have lots of creams/remedies and stuff.

7. Don’t be scared to admit your fears. Or your passions. Speak freely but also know that your words have the power to really make an impact. If you hurt someone, acknowledge it. If you are hurt, let someone know. People can’t get better if we ignore their mistakes, our mistakes. Oh, and yes - you will make many mistakes. :)

8. Ask questions when you are unsure. Don’t let doubt or embarrassment keep you from learning new things, even things you are sure everyone else already knows. Grades count, but curiosity counts even more.

9. Deodorant. It’s really important.

10. Always know you can come to me with anything. I might not understand, I might not have the right answer, or the answer you want to hear. I might be distracted, in a “bad mood” - or I might want to keep talking and talking and talking. But I am here for you. I’ve been here since day one. And now, there are things you can keep to yourself - private thoughts, and dreams, and imaginings. Those are yours. Be proud of the person you are right now, and of the person you are becoming. You’re off to a brilliant start.

I love you.

- MAMA.

#middle school #parenting #back to school

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thisolddag · 7 years

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She’ll Be Right.

Six weeks on my own have taken their toll. For the first time in years, I board an airplane without the accompanying belief that I am going to die on it.

In fact, I’m a bit blasé boarding - I still say my three prayers (two in Polish, one in English) I still step onto the plane right foot first - but in general I’m exhausted and feel only relief when the doors finally close. It’s ironic, of course, my newfound air travel nonchalance - as this isn’t going to be just some ordinary flight; this is going to be fourteen hours across the vast and deep and dark Pacific, just the kids and me. If there was a such a thing as an anti-bucket list, just days ago, getting on this particular Boeing 777 would have been at the very top. But there I was - row A, seat 6, listening to the Ashanti/Ja Rule version of Helpless from the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, on repeat - and not shaking with fear that as soon as we took off, or somewhere over that bottomless body of water, or perhaps right at landing, our plane would suddenly and mysteriously plummet to its doom. I feel tired, yes, but not anxious. Not the kind of anxious I’m used to anyway, the fucking hell this is the end terror that grips me whenever the captain turns on the seatbelt sign. I’m ok when we lift off the ground. I’m ok when we reach cruising altitude. I’m ok when I stand up, lean over my seat and check on my boys - each nestled in a futuristic purple pod, one directly behind and in front of me - to see they are totes living the dream with their big screen TVs and their cubby holes galore and their ambient lighting. I sit back down and look out the window into darkness. We are going to be fine. We are going to Australia.

Here are the things I think of when I think of Australia before I get to Australia. Koala bears, that opera house, Steve Irwin, ‘the outback’, manly men, surfing, sharks, dingoes eating babies, Aboriginals, and Muriel’s Wedding. The phrase “Island of Misfits” comes to mind too, but where and how, who knows. Most importantly, I think of how Australia is not a real place, but a faraway land written about in travel articles, and occasionally filmed.

During the flight I listen to audiobooks - soothing and heart-wrenching Hunger and absurdly ridiculous I, Partridge - and watch six episodes of Big Little Lies. I doze, down a single glass of pinot noir, and guiltily resign myself to the perks of business class. Even during the short bouts of turbulence, I remain at ease. The only time my body clenches is halfway into our journey, when the plane shudders and bounces for what seems like a really long time, but the nice flight attendant (my inside voice still insists on stewardess) informs me that’s what always happens when ‘we cross the equator’ and as insane as it sounds, I am satisfied with the answer. I find myself basking. Which is odd, and sort of amazing. At some point, I write out a birthday card for my husband, and among the scribblings is one important, surprisingly life-affirming sentence.

“I don’t believe our story will end in tragedy.”

And it doesn’t. We land thirteen hours and twenty-nine minutes later and disembark safely and soundly, in awe at how, just like that, we have found ourselves on the literal other side of the world. I am glad we didn’t check any luggage, and that even for a two-week trip across the hemisphere, I was able to cram everything we might need into three small carry-ons. I film the boys running toward their father, him swooping them up in his arms, them delirious and overjoyed. My happiness is quiet, like waking up from a dream that didn’t quite make sense.

First things. I’m sitting on a balcony situated on the 19th floor of a tall, white skyscraper. Directly in front of me; the neon marquee of the Kurrawa Surf Club, an ocean, and a blinding sun rise. But the word ‘ocean’ seems lacking, a joke. I need a new word now, something longer, something that can hold the enormity of what it is I’m staring at. Univocean. Or maybe just a single letter. This Pacific is a planet, a floating galaxy; there is no end to its width and depth and length. Surreal is a good word, for everything I am feeling right now. I pull my sweater closer to my skin. It’s chilly, but then again it’s winter down here and in the coming days I will notice, that similar to Angelenos, Australians are quick to don scarves and boots whenever the temperature dips below sixty.

Two days in, and my jet lag has let up a bit; I stir at six am, instead of three. Patrick is sleeping; in an hour he will get up, shower and head to set. The children are on their twin beds, and having read for the requisite twenty minutes, they’re playing a game of dueling kingdoms and luck-of-the-draw survival on their fully charged iPads. I type and stare out intermittently at the rolling waves, which crash and burn, and crest over and over again. The sound of this Sisyphus-like motion is satisfying and calming. To my right I spy the spirals of equally high-reaching buildings - all of them white and whimsical, undulating shapes and strange spirals - buildings with intricate and thoughtful facades that do not mar the horizon, but somehow add to its majesty.

I feel at home in this strange place. It’s a good feeling; a reminder of how thrilling and welcoming the world can still be.

The truth is, anywhere in the world would probably have seemed like a pleasant distraction from the goings-on back in the States. Anywhere in the world would have seemed more beautiful, I’m sure. (For starters, I prefer old buildings and ruins; the sight of a centuries old cathedral or an ancient hut instantly makes me feel better about life in general.) What’s happening back home is ugly. I’m no dummy, however. No matter where one goes, there are moments in history that have been forgotten about, swept under the rug, moments I know nothing about. I’m sure Australia has its fair share of ugly. The Aboriginals weren’t exactly given the red carpet treatment here. They weren’t even regarded as part of the population - as human beings to be counted and recognized - until 1967. (I learn this later on in our trip, thanks to an article in a glossy magazine given out gratis in the Virgin Australia business class lounge, the irony.) I am sure there is ugliness here too, beyond the immaculate sunsets and breathtaking waters, and friendly g’day mate faces. I just don’t feel like looking for it. Not yet, anyway.

The ugliness back home has worn me out. I hate it. I hate when stupidity is lauded as a right, when people wave their idiot flags proudly. It’s disheartening, ridiculous and maddening - and come late June, I am done. A reprieve, or else I will crack. I am done tweeting about it. I am done calling my senators. I am done marching, protesting, wearing pink hats. I am tired of news coverage, tired of Trump, tired of pointing out the hypocrisy. I want to slip away. I want to pretend that ugly, ignorant people will once again have the courtesy to spew their hate behind closed doors, over fences, or at cotillions or whatever, like in the good old days. I want to disengage. I want to leave New Jersey. I want to forget about America. There. I said it.

Which is why when my husband tells me he probably won’t make it home before August, and that we’ll have to fly to him, I don’t panic. I just nod my head and start a list of essentials we’ll need to pack. Australia has a leg up, right from the start but I don’t know yet that I will come to love it so much in so little time.

New things. It seems easier to write about the nuts and bolts of our initial adventuring, without having to search for the appropriate words to describe anything beyond what it feels like to hold a koala bear for a minute. It feels weird.

His name is Cowen and we hold him on Friday afternoon, a few hours after landing. (Thursday was lost as we flew over the equator. There is no trace of Thursday. ) The koala is docile but his claws are sharp, and it freaks me out, but I take him, upon my sons’ joint urging. An arm under it’s rear, the other one wrapped around its torso, tight but not too tight, just like the zoo keeper instructs. No petting. No jerky movements. Just smile for the camera and hold. After Cowen - Cohen, perhaps? - we attempt to feed a bunch of kangaroos - animals which strike me as unfinished, as if God or whomever, had started on them, got to the front paws and was like fuck it, I’m tired, they can hop around like this, good enough. The animals are medium sized, lazying about the wildlife farm we tour, wary looks on their rabbit-like faces, their middle claws extending far beyond the other three, the noncommittal display of an eternal middle finger. Our guide, the owner, raises his eyebrows when my husband introduces me as “Dag, my wife.” Because dag means something different here. It means the dried bits of shit that cling to a sheep buttocks - so from here on out I become “Dagmara, my wife.”

Suffice it to say, the marsupials are a hit with the boys. “Well, our work here is done” I wink, as if seeing koalas and kangaroos was all there was to Australia, because movies, because dumb tourists. To top it off, we buy two boomerangs at the gift shop before we head to set.

We are really here, my husband is real again; I can reach for his hand, I can catch whiffs of his smell. And I can’t see straight.

We take a picture with Dolph Lundgren in front of a trailer. Dolph is tall, and without his Ivan Drago accent, I am slightly thrown. Is it really him? We walk around cavernous stages draped with swaths of blue screen, partaking of the crafty table which do not have loads of shit candy like Twizzlers, or dry pretzels on it, but instead, as in a patisserie, offers freshly baked brownies and fluffy peanut butter sandwiches. We meet Aquaman’s real life children and they are beautiful and quite the conversationalists. I learn quickly that they take Capoeira classes and aren’t allowed on any sort of electronic devices, and my heart twists enviously at that tidbit. I want to be that parent, I think. Suddenly I want to be Lisa Bonet. Aquaman himself looks like a very attractive beast of a man, with a gorgeous face and very thin calves. He’s very sweet but I am way too tired for anything beyond “so nice to meet you.”

Later, the boys and I fall asleep at the ungodly hour of 5pm, and wake up at 4am. We stand on the balcony silently staring out at the roiling ocean. Then we film ourselves trying Vegemite, which tastes like an old scrotum sack, and I actually say that aloud, much to the giddy shock of my boys. “Shhhh, we’re gonna wake Daddy…”

Australia, one day in, is just a feeling. It is not a specific city, nor is it the literal continent - for now, we are ensconced in a suburb of Brisbane, a small stretch of hustle and bustle and beach somewhere on the Gold Coast.

Little things. The Palmolive orange scented hand soap in the bathroom reminds me of Poland; the smell left lingering on my hands sends me reeling toward childhood summers and yet I can’t recall exactly why - did my Babcia have similarly scented shampoo? A dish washing liquid she used? I don’t know, and I don’t care, and I remind myself daily to purchase some to take back to New Jersey with me. (I never do.) We take a day trip. Byron Bay is lovely, and I know Chris Hemsworth lives there, so that’s fun. My husband drives expertly on the left side of the road, pointing out landmarks and oddities, and we spend an hour on the beach, where surfers swim with dolphins in blue water that is cold and transparent.

I have yet to see a church, mosque or synagogue. The only bookstore I spot is in a mall that looks like it fell from the skies in 1999 and stayed that way. It’s dusty, and full of used, out-of-print paperbacks, all floral covers, volumes on doilies and flower arrangements. I purchase a word search book for three bucks.

The breakfasts are delicious; thick bread with a strong crust, yellow butter, slices of rosy ham, fried eggs like they’ve been painted to life. The coffee takes ages to arrive but arrives frothy and creamy and absolutely perfect. The only thing that makes me queasy is the sight of poached eggs arriving at our table - three oval white sacks with sagging skin, like things we’d find washed up on shore or in a bird’s nest. Slimy when in tact, and slimier still when my husband stabs one with a fork - the thick orange yolk oozes out like congealed blood. The word for bathroom is toilet and signs for TOILETS hang everywhere, and it’s truly the only puzzling thing I’ve encountered so far. The public playgrounds are impressive, like things from Dali’s imagination; colorful and bright and full of twisted contraptions and gigantic slides and zip lines and huge swaying nets that hang like UFOs, like things Tarzan swung on.

The people are terrific. I’m sure if I spent an appropriate amount of time with any one of them, they might become annoying or overbearing, but my casual, quick brushes with the natives are reassuring. Waiters, police officers, retail clerks, security guards are so nice and helpful it’s overwhelming. They make innocuous yet meaningful inquires; how are things going? Back in the States, they mean, wink wink, Trump Trump. We are to be pitied now, us poor, duped, stupefied Americans. Everyone is referred to as mate, including my sons. It’s like our pal, I suppose, but sounds far less condescending and much more inclusive when the Aussies say it. They’re thick skinned too, I can tell. Conversely, I think of the opposite when I think of my fellow citizens - our thin, easily bruised egos. Coming from a place filled with people prone to screeching, pining and preening like adolescents, it’s quite a breath of fresh air to be surrounded by fully-formed adults, comfortable and confident in their skin, who smile at you because they mean it, not because it’s required of them.

We try in vain to imitate the accent, each of us failing in our efforts to mimic the musicality, the ease, the lazy, soft vowels. Thirteen is thudeen. The first few times my husband says doday you, I have no idea what he means. He means .AU - as in the end of an email address. To pash means to kiss fervently. An “old feller” is a penis. She’ll be right is my favorite though - the Australian way of implying that whatever is wrong shall right itself with time. Towns have names like Coolangatta and Gympie. It’s all fantastic. Our oldest son says he wants to move here. But here only becomes real when we remember the globe in my office back in New Jersey, and how we traced the path from mainland America all the way across the surface, so far to go, the wobbling tip of my finger taking forever to make its way toward the land down under, the land beyond our imagination. “Can you believe we are actually here?” is a question posed a few times a day. We answer with shaking heads, at a loss for words.

If they could, the boys would not leave the beach, despite my worries they will catch a cold. I stand in the water like a sentinel, watching them hurtle into the waves, trying not to think about their freezing toes, or the articles I’ve read listing the top ten deadliest animals found in Australia like the thumb-nail sized Irukandji jellyfish which can kill grown man. Or the cone snail which has venom one thousand times stronger than morphine and leaves you paralyzed and gasping for life. Or sharks. Helicopters do fly over us, checking for errant fins and such, and my husband has assured me that nets are dropped and secured to keep the jellyfish and bluebottles and stingrays away, but really, what’s it take for a predator to swim over a net? Still, I let the boys carouse. I let them swim, dive, run away from and straight toward the blue-grey waves. I am less panicked about everything.

Things that don’t matter. My period is many days late. Traveling across the international date line will do that to a body. I am walking around crampy, bloated and terribly grumpy. It’s a real problem, and I make no bones about explaining to my sons about what’s happening to me. Mommy is moody because she’s about to bleed from her vagina. I joke to my friend in a text sent at 6am her time, that my period probably came on Thursday, only Thursday never really happened, did it? Under this black cloud, the kids are annoying. They seem glaringly American - loud, insistent, spoiled by the first-rate everything they are experiencing. I am the first to call them out on all of this and the first to recklessly bid 120 dollars on a toad named Gay Freddo just so my kid can take part in ‘racing’ it at a musty boozy-smelling establishment called Iron Bar (this, when we get to the tropics.)

Our first week is spent walking a fine line between total fun and total mom-losing-her-shit. Of not kissing my husband. Of wanting to buy everything, and taste everything, especially the foreign sounding snacks - Koala Carmellos, Curlywurlys, Starburst “Babies.” I wish I was a hard drinker, or even a lightweight one, so I could ‘pep’ it up come evening. Mornings are the best because I wake up ‘here’ all over again, mentally renewing a covenant - enjoy your blessed life, goddamn it. But then my beautiful son wakes up and greets me by asking if he can poop with his iPad and I grit my teeth, “poop with a book!” I think of Aquaman’s daughter, with the hair down to her waist, like a perfect, feral creature who’s never begged to download an app.

I eat too much and don’t brush my teeth enough. I wear the same black, sack-like dress over and over again. I should not have brought three pairs of shoes with me as the only ones I bother with are the cheap flip flops. I don’t care about looking like the wife of a semi-famous actor. Perhaps I should.

We arrive in Cairns - pronounced like cans - at nine pm, on day seven. Cairns is a city in the North Queensland tropics. The airport is small, but just like the one in Brisbane, it is bright, modern, spotless. I am incredibly impressed and dying to shop, but fight the urge. Outside an enormous full moon - like a prop some grip hung - greets me as I squat down to vape, while the boys wait at baggage claim. I take out my camera and zoom in. The balmy, salty air reminds me of Florida. We are here, again, a vacation inside a vacation. We drive an hour north, toward a small tourist spot called Port Douglas (pop. 1278) where ‘the rainforest meets the reef,’ a terrific family getaway, according to many a Trip Advisor testimony.

The drive is difficult, as my husband navigates on a narrow, winding road which is in turn shrouded by immense thick canopies of jungle greenery and then completely exposed to a cliff leading toward a dark, rumbling ocean that we cannot see at this time of night, but can only hear. It’s eerie, a bit like a scene from a horror movie, where any moment something large and mysterious and predatory will jump into the road and slam into our car. My husband drives on, trying to concentrate as I annoy him by asking him why we haven’t planned things in advance and reminding him that he isn’t perfect, you know.

We fight a lot in Port Douglas. The boys fight, and Patrick and I fight. The fights are absurd and revolve around sold out tours and the necessity of guides if we get to Mossman Gorge (we never do), and how ‘crocodile shows’ sound inhumane. We fight about screen time, and where to go to dinner, and about not getting sand everywhere. Reunions are difficult sometimes. When absences become the norm, togetherness takes work. That’s all I want to mention. Bickering does occur in paradise, if you were curious.

Strange things. Every time Hagrid the Crocodile clamps his jaws down on what looks like a decimated broomstick, bits of rope and rag tied to its end, I jump in my seat. When he chomps there’s an echoing sound like a champagne cork popping, only amplified, as if Hagrid is miccd. It’s nerve wracking - and as jolly and engaging as the emcee is, I find myself thinking we shouldn’t be doing this. Crocodiles are mean, and aggressive, and you don’t survive 3 million years on this earth by being the nice guy. They hate each other, the crocs do, or so we are told. You never survive an attack either. You’re a goner, if you dare to swim amongst them. We take a slow boat ride around a lagoon, and watch a dozen of them - with names like Ted and Louie - stealthily follow our boat, sidle up and wait for their bits of raw pink chicken. God, those jaws.

We take pictures, and feel much better a few minutes later as we walk amongst wallabies and roos. I say roo now with utmost confidence, feeling like after a week abroad, I have earned it. At the gift shop we buy t-shirts, a crocodile calling whistle, and a soft, stuffed kangaroo which my oldest son immediately christens Jeremy. I ask my husband if crocodile printed man thongs called “Snappers!” are the perfect gifts for my brothers-in-law. Sadly, he shakes his head no.

Snorkeling in the Low Isles is interesting. We figure 90 minutes to the Great Barrier Reef would make us tired and seasick - suddenly we strike ourselves as amateurs but go with it - and opt for a quick, rollicking jaunt aboard the Reef Sprinter. We pull up to the low reef and immediately a smell hits us hard. Fishy. Rotting. I don the wet suit, get fitted with a prescription lens snorkeling mask (which is very exciting,) slip into the flippers, and I even jump into the water. And then four meaty, massive fish graze my thighs, and I am done. It’s hard work, and breathing is weird, and suddenly I feel claustrophobic, and the smell is overwhelming, and the coral is too close - low tide due to full moon - and I am totally fine swimming back to the boat that brought us out. It’s just as brave to admit your fears, as it is to conquer them, I say being funny, but also meaning it. I spend the remainder of my time sneaking in puffs of my vape and taking pictures of my boys. They’re proud of me anyway. My little guy heads back too, after twenty valiant minutes with his tiny head in the water. I can’t say enough how thrilled I am that both my sons have inherited their father’s joie de vivre and adventuresome spirit. They are usually up for anything. You go right ahead, I tell them, and I’ll stay here and write about it. Later, we race cane toads - don’t ask, or just look up the Iron Bar in Port Douglas - and go back to the hotel, where the boys are reunited with their iPads, and I sit on the deck and listen to annoying British teenagers thrash around in the communal pool, and wonder when my bad mood will lift.

Best things. My period arrives in Sydney, and finally I turn back to my good old self. My good mom self. I am happy. My back doesn’t hurt. My smiles are wide, and last all day long. Sydney is a glorious city. Imagine a turn of the century town, imagine Boston, or New Orleans, or even Paris, and then imagine it fully preserved, allowing modernity to sprout, but not take over. That’s Sydney - where the antiquated bits remain front and center, and the high rises merely loom as shadows. A gorgeous thing, for time to conjoin, to mingle, to not be erased. I can’t get enough. I also can’t pinpoint what this place reminds me of, only the emotions it stirs inside me - nostalgia, happiness, wonder.

On our first night we walk to the Sydney Observatory and stare out in awe at the skyline; the Harbour Bridge twinkling red and green like a Christmas Tree, the opera house way off in the distance like a paper fan on water, a brilliant crimson sunset. Someone is flying a drone. The boys run down the hill and attempt to climb a giant tree straight out of a Roal Dahl book. We could live here, I say stupidly, contentedly, and I kind of mean it. It’s possible to enjoy life, to eek every ounce of magic and wonder from it, without fear or fret. It’s possible to pretend we are a family of well-off nomads, traversing carefree, imagining a life abroad, living only for the sake of experiencing happiness. It’s possible for life to be like from a movie. Thoughts like this are hard to come by for me, and for ten minutes, sitting in the cool grass on a picturesque knoll overlooking a strange, gorgeous city, I allow myself.

There are more brown people is Sydney, more Asians, more tourists speaking Dutch or German or Portuguese, and in some street corners, as we head toward the aquarium, I even spy tattered sleeping bags which house the homeless. The line to get into Sea Life is long and winding and I am glad my kids will have to wait. I worry that always skipping ahead, or often flying business, or staying in five-star hotels is ruining them somehow - that they won’t know how to deal with real life, that soon they’ll take our good fortune for granted because it will cease to become out-of-the-ordinary and become banal. Which is why at every stop, I regale them with stories of my poor-immigrant beginnings. There was no Fast Pass when I was a kid, my husband quips. I sat in the back of the plane back when people were allowed to smoke, I point out, nine hours to Poland with only a book and my head aching from the fumes, imagine it. I want them to really imagine it, and later, when it takes us thirty minutes to get on the rickety Wild Mouse roller coaster at Luna Park, I am glad, and decide to get on too, even though I hate that shit.

Everywhere we go, the rooftops of old buildings boast edifices with historic dates inscribed into the original brick. On the sidewalks are stone slabs fitted into the pavement which tell short, amazing stories: “17 well-behaved convicts where made night watchmen here.” These reminders of the city’s history are beautiful, and I wish my adopted New York City showed the same pride and care. My husband explains that NYC is on a small island and in an effort to expand and make room, the city had to eradicate whatever stood in the way. It couldn’t bloom sideways or into suburbs - there are no suburbs, no outer city limits, unless you count Hoboken et al. Still, I wish Americans in general, held a higher regard for their architecture, and their roots.

The Langham Hotel on Kent Street is accented in pink. A creamy pink old-timey cab sits out front, the bathroom wallpaper is pink, and the pens bedside are pink and gold and so lovely that I slip one into my purse. When you walk into the lobby, you are taken aback by how immaculate every surface is, and by the floral scent in the air. This place smells like a bathtub, my seven-year-old announces and I know what he means. Like a bathtub full of rose petals. We could be in a Jane Austen novel, if Jane Austen had taken up the hospitality service. Everything is warm - from the silky sheets to the velvet floor length drapery - and opulent - from the extraordinary chandeliers in the lobby to the the enormous purple orchids arranged on many a marble tabletop. I’d live here too, if I was not a real person who went to sleep without wiping off her make-up, or who snuck vanilla nougat at 1am while reading a book about a recluse, or who grew up in the Glenwood Housing Projects and never forgot her past. I imagine my mother here, my sisters. I imagine my father, who would probably nit pick and point out discrepancies, because my father is a person who does not know how to trust beautiful things.

At a chemist’s my son pleads with me to buy him a pair of yellow sloughing shower gloves. These, along with a glitter filled rainbow-colored baton, are to make up his regalia. He is “The Wisher” now, and for the rest of our stay in Sydney he walks around wearing the gloves and gripping his baton, asking us to make wishes, which will, on an eighty percent guarantee, come true. I wish for a smooth flight back to Newark, and for my 41st year on earth to be the best one yet. The rare Pokemon my older son wishes for comes to fruition a few blocks later, much to his joy and to The Wisher’s complete shock. We walk around The Rocks, a neighborhood full of chocolate shops and galleries, making more and more wishes, until at the Museum of Contemporary Art we are told the baton must be cloaked. Instead, I bury it in my purse, and we roam around, not hiding our disdain for some of the more abstract artwork like blank white canvases, or a dried sculpture of an electrical plug. During security check at the airport, the wishing baton is left behind in a bin. I am unreasonably sad about it.

Things we talk about. Manners. Money. School. Food. Animals. Dreams. We find dream dictionaries online and look up flying, teeth crumbling, falling into holes with cousins, when a friend pushes the girl you have a crush on over a cliff. We wonder why dreams happen, we dissect the inner workings of our varied brains, while Bill, our driver pretends not to listen. He tells us about the beaches here, and what to watch out for. He tells us that Brad Pitt made him try the Batman free fall ride at Movie World. We talk about love, and what country we’d move to for a year if we had to, if we had a choice. We talk about how boring New Jersey will seem, and what we’ll do to occupy the remains of our summer once we are back home. We play endless rounds of Would You Rather - would you rather have penises growing our of your ears or a butthole on your chin? (Because, lest we forget I am in the company of three basic males.) We talk about our favorite things so far (snorkeling, the amusement park, seeing a wallaby with a baby in its pouch) and what we want to do before we depart. We talk about how we will not climb Harbour Bridge, because Kass doesn’t meet the age requirement and because well, mommy doesn’t want to die in Sydney. Mostly, we talk about how goddamn lucky we are.

The last things. Back in Brisbane, or Broadbeach, or Gold Coast - I still don’t know what to call it - we don’t fall asleep till very late. Our jet lag is gone now, no traces left. Instead we have trouble falling asleep and trouble waking up at a decent hour. I finish the book I bought at a wonderful bookstore I finally stumbled upon in the other mall, and having relayed the plot as I learned it to my sons, they are now eager to hear how it ends. I tell them, and we are all three, just a wee bit disappointed. It is eleven pm, and I start on another book, short stories about the indigenous and minority Australian experience. My husband puts in loads of laundry, and watches a rugby game on TV. Tomorrow is our last day and we have no major plans aside a final frolic in the ocean, a trip to the mall to purchase some local sports jerseys and more books. Maybe we’ll go to the movies. I have strange dreams about cutting off all my hair. We walk up at ten am, groggy, and quiet. We don’t want to go home just yet.

I am sitting on the balcony again. It’s hard to believe two weeks have gone by. It’s hard to believe our real life is waiting for us, and that in twenty-four hours we will be reunited with the dogs and guinea pigs, back in all the ennui and humidity the East Coast has to offer. Already we are making plans for more trips. There will be six weeks of summer left when we get back. This makes us happy. I look across the way warily, squinting to make out the familiar figures of my three boys, my companions on this journey. I love them more than I did when we started this trip, and perhaps that is the best outcome of any vacation.

There is nobody in the water but them - it must be truly cold today. The waves are no joke. Every time a child screams I stop and cock my head to ascertain if the echoing sound - of panic? joy? - is familiar to me. For a minute I worry that the something awful I briefly contemplated two weeks ago, will happen today, now, as I write this. A jellyfish sting. A rip tide. A shark. I sip my orange juice and remind myself about that sentence I jotted down in my husband’s birthday card, about how our story won’t end tragically. Our story will end quietly, naturally, after many adventures, many idle hours full of love, tiffs, and laughter. It will end when it is supposed to end, and I will have nothing to do with it. For now, I stare out at the mighty Pacific, and smile, my mind already humming with newly formed memories. I smile knowing that wherever we are, or wherever we end up next, as long as we are together - she’ll be right.

#australia #vacation #summer #nostalgia #travel #sydney

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thisolddag · 7 years

Text

Is 11 the New 13?

Newsflash. It’s not.

Last night, my sons went to an old-fashioned baseball game at the local college. They went with a group of eight kids, ranging from ages seven to eleven, chaperoned by their awesome principal. I allowed my older son to take his new iPhone - which he’d had gotten the day before - with the explicit instructions that he was not to take it out of his pocket unless he felt it vibrating - I might text him to make sure all was well. That’s what we got it for anyway - aside for his terrific grades and his ‘graduating’ from elementary school - it was for communicating with us as we loosen the reins. He happily agreed to my baseball game rule. My son knows how I feel about the iPhone. He knows it’s to be used as a tool to help him become more independent in the real world and not as a way to immerse and isolate himself in a cyber one. “We will use it for good.” Researching school projects? Playing fun games as a way to unwind? FaceTimeing with Daddy or with family out-of-state? Taking cool photos to chronicle memories? Check, check, check. But it will not be used to suck time, or to comment on strangers’ comments, or to post said pics. Most importantly, social media will be off limits.

He got it.

Maybe he got it because I left no room for negotiation.

Our home computer is linked to his new iPhone. I was on it, writing, while he was at the game, when I noticed a slew of texts coming in from the fifth grade class thread he’s on. Just silly, dumb tweeny messages that a few boys were sending on a Thursday night. After a while I noticed my son joined in, with a single reply. “At a Jackal’s game.” I frowned. I told myself he must’ve felt the phone buzzing and checked to see if it was me. Fine. That was all fine. And then I noticed the immediate response from one of his friends. “The Jackals suck!”

And then the texts kept coming.

“Boring!” “That field is trash!” “BORING BORING BORING”

With each incoming text, my stomach dropped. What was this? This instinct to knock something down so fast? Was it innocent ‘trash-talk’? Or was I looking at future trolls in the making?

I’m proud to say that my son did not further engage - aside from sending a short video and a pic of him and the team mascot, as he was leaving the ballpark. Which we later discussed - how he could’ve sent that photo when he got home. How he should have sent it then. How we aren’t gonna start bending the rules so early on in the game. How you have to be in the experience as it’s happening & not worry about posting the experience. Etc etc. But for the most part, he had passed his first test. The test to resist.

HERE’S THE DEAL

Unlike dabbling in drugs, drinking, smoking, sex, or any other urges teenagers are drawn to, which have been around for ages - social media is a whole new thing we have to contend with as parents. There is no hindsight or personal experience to fall back on. And we have no idea how it will affect our young children.

I got my first BlackBerry at the tender age of 30. There are days when, as a 40-year-old, all the Internet chatter, all the Instagram comments, the Twitter feed vitriol, get to me, trip me up, make me doubt myself, and fill me with frustration and anger. I can’t imagine being so young and having to deal with all that. During childhood, the extent of my social life was delegated to whispery phone calls in my room until my father shouted for me to hang up. Or hanging out with a bunch of friends outside my apartment building, until my mother yelled through the window for me to get my butt home. My burgeoning confidence had nothing to do with the amount of “followers” I had, or how many “likes” I received. And the bullies in my life had to insult me to my face and were not allowed the luxury of doing it anonymously from the comfort of their little device.

I’ve heard parents say - in our quaint, progressive town - that they can’t keep up, that it’s kids these days, that it’s just the way it is. I don’t buy it. We have to be as invested as we say we are - especially when it comes to this stuff. How can we be supportive, even coddling, how can we be round-the-clock cheerleaders and advocates for our children’s well-being - and not bother to check their text history, or their google searches, and not bother to put restrictions on their devices? Not doing so sends a dangerous mixed-message. I will fold your laundry, and help you with your homework and buy you clothes you want, and get you anything you need because you are still small and innocent - but when you’re on that phone, you’re on your own.

WHAT IS THAT?

I tell my son - perhaps you’ve earned the right to have a device, but earning the right to have privacy is a whole other deal. He knows I go through his phone every day, and he has no problems with it. I am not taking away anything from him by being privy to his online goings-on. In fact, I am keeping him safe. He has to earn my trust, and he has to keep earning it.

Do chores, be a good example for your younger brother, be kind, be accepting of others, study hard, show respect, read, don’t be afraid to ask questions, be confident in your passions and your convictions, know how to say no, know how to go without, how to wait - and then we can talk about private accounts. But only when you’re thirteen. :)

I highly doubt that the parents who allow their ten or eleven year old child unfettered access to the Internet, would allow them to smoke pot, watch porn, have a beer or go on an unchaperoned date, or even walk to town without a phone in their pocket. The smart phone in our child’s hand holds the whole world. And at 10, 11, 12 - our children are not ready for the whole world. They’re simply not. Until our children are old enough to navigate the real world, they must be supervised when in the cyber one.

I am not afraid to say no. I am not afraid to say because I said so. Sometimes that’s all you get when you’re 11 and you’re still trying to figure out who you are, how you’re perceived, what impact you have, or when you cry because you lose a game of Clash of Clans. And it’s ok if you cry. You’re still learning how to articulate your feelings, learning how to deal with being a kid. And we talk. We talk all the time, about many things I would not have dreamed of talking about with my parents at this age. But he knows I am there for him - I will try to answer any questions he has, as age-appropriately and as honestly as I can. There’s a certain innocence that I’m trying to nurture here. My son is a sweet boy at heart and I want to keep it that way for as long as possible. But that means there’s a job I have to do. Because it is a job - a duty, as much as it is a right - to raise my son to be a decent human being. With or without a phone in his pocket.

This morning, as I was working up an emotional sweat relaying the baseball game anecdote to my friend, she turned to me with a kind smile and said “It’s only day three…Pace yourself, Dag.” She’s right. In the fall comes middle school and who knows what middle school will bring to the table. It’s like saying I’m a good driver - but there are other drivers on the road. A crash can happen, even when you’re doing everything you should be. That’s life.

Parenting is taking a leap of faith every single day. The rules we set forth and the boundaries we place on our children are done so in the hopes that its’ all for their good. That one day they’ll understand the thought process behind our reasoning. Until that day comes, I’m prepared to put up a fight. I will fight for the right to protect my child while allowing him certain responsibilities and rewards that will carve the road toward his independence.

It’s a delicate dance, and a complicated one, and I’m sure there will be days where I will epically fall flat on my ass. But I will get up, and dust myself off, and keep at it. For my own sake. And most especially, for his.

#social media #parenting #boundaries #sons

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thisolddag · 7 years

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What other way to tell you how much I admire and value your thoughts than to tell you that you speak so many of my truths, in ways that I never could! I am inspired to share my stories when I read your posts, but I struggle with sharing on the internet because I am single, & a romantic, & want to meet organically. I've struggled with being on social media for years because of this. Do you think being on Twitter & Tumblr while falling in love would have made a difference in your relationship?

I do, actually. That's a provocative and thoughtful question. When I met my now-husband, he was a stranger to me and i was one to him. I only recognized facets of who he was by way of what shone through onscreen, and what memories I had of him from college days - and that was a mere glimpse. It was a lovely, intimate beginning, the way these things should happen. Cocooned together as you fall in love, no outsiders peeking in. Two people revealing snippets, slivers of personality & history. I think it can still happen that way. You can choose to show who you are online but doesn't guarantee sometime will "bite." And no matter what you reveal online it's still just a shadow, a small part, an intro...so don't give up hope...

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thisolddag · 7 years

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I finished your book last week and I miss these women. I saw that you plan in writing a prequel with all the Polish history and stories you weren't able to include in your first book. Do you ever think of writing a sequel or a blog post on what happened to these characters we came to care about? I hope they found themselves and started living happy, wonderful lives and kept their friendship alive. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to your second book. Thank you for sharing your gift!

I'm working on a prequel of sorts now. 1970s Poland. A love story. Thank you for your kind kind words ❤

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thisolddag · 7 years

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The Space Between Us

When we get out of the car, winter hits me. The smell of it is the same like when I was five, and sixteen - the only two times I can remember, but it’s a smell that is inside me like muscle, or an organ, a smell that sends me reeling while I stay rooted in the same spot, staring out toward the Swiętokrzyskie mountains and a gray, open sky. Of course there’s no real word to describe this winter - crisp, smoky, nostalgia. There is no single word; it is every word that takes me back to the beginning of the crystallization of my memory, our memories.

“Do you remember this smell?” I ask my younger sister, who is already shivering only one minute outside, and ten hours into our getaway.

She shakes her head.”It’s cold as fuck though.”

M was only two when we left so how could she remember? I watch her walk toward the roadside WC, my other younger sister waddling behind her, pregnant and tired, but like the two of us - so excited to be here again.

I wait for them to pee, vaping hungrily, looking out across the empty parking lot at three bright receptacle bins - green, blue, yellow. Poland’s recycling? I think, smiling warily. I snap a picture, find the right filter, and Instagram it immediately. It’s a Sunday. I close my eyes. I breathe. The air. The smell. We are here, the three of us. A getaway. A getaway from what? From husbands, children, work, Brooklyn, Jersey, Los Angeles. From our fairy tale lives, like M will repeat a few days from now.

I warn my sisters that our grandmother’s nursing home is not fancy. Fancy isn’t in the arsenal. I warn them she will not remember us; she hadn’t remembered me, her self-professed favorite, last August when I came with the boys. I warn them that the smell on the second floor will hit them like a fucking brick. It’s clean, sure. Yes, it’s clean. But the smell is a sour smell, of people sick and dying, and windows shut, and antiquated plumbing. Like shit and resignation.

We talk about Babcia, as we unpack in the hotel room. Should we go see her now? Should we eat pierogi first? Or wait for our dad? Our father lives here too. He’s come back looking for his old life. We grab our coats - eyes dehydrated, itching, the skin on pregnant V’s hands cracking, tiny bloody fissures on her knuckles. It’s four pm but time means nothing because we chased the sun across the Atlantic for eight hours - or maybe we ran from it. I don’t know. I know nothing. I am reduced to memories of a place that quivers and pulsates with my childhood, our childhood. The words “remember when” will be repeated a hundred thousand time in the next seven days. We will slowly forget our kids, we will never find enough sleep. We will laugh until our stomachs cramp. We will fall asleep to the sounds of an American stand-up comic, emanating from M’s iPad.

We will laugh as our eyelids get heavy. We will cry even more.

My sisters and I had friends growing up; American friends, sometimes other Polish immigrant friends. We had lots of friends, and sometimes they were best bosom buddies. But no one knew us like we knew one another. No one understood where we had come from, what we’d escaped, or how far away we longed to run. There was no space between us. The only slim distance was in the way we formed our own memories, and told our own stories, to those who were willing to listen. There was no breaking us, even as we broke individually, bit by bit, sometimes together, sometimes alone. It was not until I moved into my first apartment with M, leaving V behind, that distance started setting. It was not until M moved away to California to follow a boy and her dreams, that distance became a fact, and for me - the enemy.

Growing up, we spent our summers in a small, boring and beautiful city called Kielce. (I can hear M now - “Beautiful?! Come on, Dag!“) Every summer, for years and years. Boarding planes together, without mama and tata, waiting for bags marked with frayed fluorescent colored ribbons. Driving toward those mountains, willing those three hours from Warsaw to go by in a flash, staring at cows and ancient men walking along the road, in slanted brown berets, even in the heat of July. Weeks spent eating pork cutlets and sweet carrot soufflés, weeks falling in love, getting into trouble, listening to Babcia’s stories, staring down onto Toporowskiego Street from her limestone balcony. I wrote a novel about some of it once. The main character was a more poetic version of me, but there were no sisters. I knew, even in thinly veiled fiction, I could not touch their stories. I respected the space between us.

Last week, we deplaned in the airport that is now modern and renamed Chopin International. We’ve been back of course, as adults, with our own burgeoning families in tow, sightseeing and exploring. But it’s been almost two decades since those summers, when it was only us.

Our Babcia is eighty-six now, and in the throes of Alzheimer’s. Last week, she did not remember my sisters or me. But that did not stop her from reaching out her hands - hands that felt as soft, unreal and light as if they’d been fashioned from some threadbare fabric, fingers like feathers settling on our cheeks. I should know you, you are my family, but I don’t remember you, Babcia said, fear in her eyes. But we remember you, that’s what matters, is what we answered, because what was there to say? “We used to spend the summers at your apartment, you made us kanapeczki, we slept on the futon in the little room.” She listened as if we were spinning magical tales, feeding her snippets of a life that was fading fast from the recesses of her tired, confused mind. V had brought a plush teddy bear, as a gift, and Babcia reacted like a child. He will sleep with me, be my companion, and he will never leave my side. But what color is he? What is this color? We told her he was yellow, or amber, or beige, but none of those words sufficed. She couldn’t name the color she wanted to find. We wept, all at once, in small bursts of snot and tears. We didn’t want her to see us cry. But we cried anyway.

We saw my dad too, who lives like the madman of Shiloh, things upon things, disarray that comforts him. We visited a family member who is in the last stages of addiction. Don’t look at me, he said, when he opened the door, but we looked, shock on our faces, at him who we had known forever, who had suddenly and irreparably aged a hundred years. We cried again, rummaging through familiar drawers to take something back to the nursing home for Babcia, to take something back to the States, souvenirs of another lifetime. Porcelain tea cups from all those summers of twilight herbatka, and pictures, and a blue plastic tumbler that held long-grained rice for more than forty years, a staple in the kitchen from our youth. A memory of Babcia spilling the contents and letting me play, as if the kitchen floor were a sandbox, the rice cool in my hands, and coated with dust. So take it, just take it, my sister whispered, crying, quick with her hands, and slipped it into her bookbag. It was surreal, standing in that home that Babcia would never see again, that was now a mausoleum, a place unrecognizable, filled with cigarette smoke so bad that V had to flee.

Everywhere we went was bleak and gray, and strange, and still, it was some kind of wonderful. Everything was a denouement. Everything was so incredibly complicated. Everything was the end of the road. It was a goodbye trip. Goodbye to our beginning, to the memories we shared, to old bedroom walls and wizened faces. It was our feet touching down onto dry, dark earth. But despite that, and despite help that didn’t end up helping, and cash twisted into palms, and constant rain and jet lag that did not let up for a single goddamn minute - we walked together happily. We walked side by side. Two mothers now, and one about to become one. Three sisters, like a real life Chekhov play, with all its sentimentality and sad smiles. On our father’s pleading, we met with a young filmmaker at a pierogi cafe - yes, there are such things in our homeland - who was enthralled (her word) by our ‘story.’ Your father, his politics, his journey, you three girl from this town, living such a life now. She wants to make a documentary about us, and though we were flattered, I sat with my chin in my hand, reluctant to share us. We’ll be in touch, I said, because I could tell she was kind and earnest. But my heart tightened at the thought of our life in somebody else’s hands.

Every day, we’d leave Babcia’s side and those nurses who glanced our way with quizzical smiles, raised eyebrows, who we’d showered with doughnuts, and pleas, and autographed pictures of my husband, as requested - and we promised to come back. We’d leave cramped, neatly furnished apartments of friends and family, we’d leave pothole ridden streets, and small hotel rooms, and we’d think the same thing. A fairy tale life was waiting for us, and how easy it would be to forget this.

How impossible it would be to forget this.

“I’m gonna have to write about it,” I told my sisters, “to help me process.” Process; an American verb. In places like Kielce, there is no room for such extravagance.

But there is too much to write. In Warsaw, the rain fell harder but we felt lighter. The city was brimming with life, and sparkling skies and it brought us comfort. We shopped, and ate, in copious amounts. The food brought us memories, the good kind. In Warsaw, we allowed ourselves to breathe again. It was easier to reconcile with what we have - money, security, happiness, freedom, possibilities - with what we had once - nothing but tattered, battered, tangled dreams. I will not share details of our particular struggle - because everyone struggles, and because I am not ready to disclose, something that is not only mine, but what belongs to both of them, just as much.

Now, I sit in my office, back in America, and I miss the hell out of my sisters. Our trip is already another memory; something we dreamed up and somehow made come true. I think about the space we once occupied, and how beautiful it had been to be back there again, and how hard. I think about our story, and how it has a clear beginning, a winding long winded middle, and yet, there is no end, and there never will be one. I think about Babcia. I think about a day in August, circa 1991, a heat wave, packing pork chops on powdery white buns, and one towel each, and walking around the murky reservoir toward Tęcza, the local pool. And how later, the walk back to Babcia’s was always better, when we were tanned, and smelled like chlorine, and the sun wasn’t setting just yet but was already worn out, and how the trees shaded us, and how we didn’t say much to one another, how we walked with a gaggle of age appropriate friends, separately, a good distance between us, but always, always our heads craning back to make sure were all still there, together, the three of us.

#sisters #Poland #summers #memory #space #distance #journey

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