Parenting

Love Rolls Downhill

“Are you going to write about this, Mom?” my daughter Caroline asks me. (She knows I’ve written about her brother.) The question is half tease, half challenge. I can’t tell whether she wants me to write, or not. Maybe she doesn’t know, either. Caroline is 18, and she’s about to begin her freshman year at college. She’s moving across the Atlantic Ocean to spend her fall semester on another continent and another time zone from me. She left Tuesday night, on a red-eye flight. London is five hours ahead of Boston. She’ll be living in my future (literally) instead of in my present. Which seems fitting. The recent months have been an emotional time for us both. Today, when I was getting my hair cut, I heard a stylist say to someone in her chair, “Hasn’t the weather this summer been awful?” And I couldn’t for the life of me […]

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Missing

My mother died 25 years ago yesterday, when she was 62. I realized this fact sometime last night, and it astounded me. First I was astounded because I remembered how, at the time, I thought that she was appropriately old enough when she died after a lengthy illness. (Whatever that means—another thing I now realize is how insolent it sounds to suggest anyone is ever “old enough.”) I thought her life had been long and full, when in fact it ended unfairly soon. At the time (and I cringe to write this now), I thought I was the only one who was young and without parents. And there’s that insolence again. Which leads me to the second astounding thing: My mother has missed most of my life, much more of it than she saw. When I think about my mother I still think like a child. In other words, I

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What We Carry

He’s freighted with two pairs of shoes, extra clothes that didn’t fit in the duffel, three sketchbooks, a camera, drawing pencils, a couple of books, a rent deposit for next fall, and film in a protective lead case. My arms are empty, but I’m carrying an uncontainable mix of baby boy joy; the sweet smells of childhood; and cruddy, exhausting, hilarious teenage agonies freshly capped with some annoyance from this morning, when he insisted he was ready to go when most of what’s now stuffed in those two bags was still roaming the house, itinerant. This he shouted over his shoulder at me as he scurried to retrieve it. Headed down to security, he’s forgotten all that. He doesn’t carry any of that with him, because his head is full of where he’s going, not what’s already behind him. He has 50 pounds strapped to his body, but he steps

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The College Drop-off: Can We Cut the Crying Parents Some Slack?

A story on MSNBC yesterday asked, Has the college sendoff always been so tough? Alongside the piece is a video from the Today show, subtitled, “As NBC’s Kevin Klein reports, when it comes time to say goodbye on campus, it’s the parents who’ve got issues.” I’ve noticed an abundance of these stories lately — including one a few weeks back in the NY Times, Students, Welcome to College; Parents, Go Home — perhaps because my own freshman son is freshly deposited in Baltimore, at the Maryland Institute College of Art. I understand the entertainment value of mocking these hyper-controlling “Velcro parents” who have a hard time letting go. Anecdotes abound of parents out of control — like the mother who camped out in her daughter’s dorm room to help the “transition” to college. Even less kooky stories are popping up: At St. Olaf College in Minnesota, incoming freshmen view a

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A (Sort of) Sentimental Post That I Tried to Make Less So

Yesterday I sat in the stands at my son’s graduation, smack at what would be the face-off line of the covered ice hockey rink, counting the rows of chairs on the floor below and trying to work out which mortarboard was his in a royal blue sea of 440 graduates. All of us parents standing shoulder-to-shoulder were doing the same thing, of course: Each of us seeking out our own kid, each of our hearts swollen within our chests to the point of bursting. (We parents are impossibly foolish, aren’t we? It’s easy to mock this brand of sappy sentimentality -– I want to mock myself right now –- but still you are powerless to resist the thing that makes you so happy, so joyful, so full of love that you are full to the brim, and overflowing, and all your bones are loose and floating in the syrupy liquid

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Parent Bingo

My 17-year-old will be in college next year, and right now he and I are deep in the process of applications and school visits and talks that spring up suddenly at dinner or in the car and begin with, “Maybe I should think about…?” or “Have you considered…?” It’s a process that feels very much how I once heard a writer describe the process of writing: Like feeling your way, a foot or two at a time, along a very long and very dark tunnel; you can’t fathom where it ends up. Sometimes it’s my son who starts the conversation, and sometimes I do. But either way, it’s clear that this is less a new topic than it is a thread of a conversation we’ve been having for many months, and probably years. It’s the same conversation every parent has first with a spouse and then later with the child

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At a Loss for Words

On Thursday, my son finished up his junior year of high school, and today his dad, little sister and I drove him 75 miles to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he’ll spend the next 6 weeks immersed in Art. He’ll spend much of that time muddying his clothes in the ceramics studio, with his hands elbow-deep in clay that turns magical in his two hands — hands that have turned sinewy and strong from all his time at the potter’s wheel. He hugged me and patted my back with those hands when we left to drive back home. He’s gone to summer camps before. But this was the first time that he didn’t push me toward the exit with impatience, counting the seconds before I would stop embarrassing him, or smothering him, or fretting too much, or whatever it is that I do that usually drives him absolutely

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Wii Are Family

In college, I had a friend named Jane. She was the oldest daughter in a family of tennis players, and they all looked like her: tall and willowy, but strong as thoroughbreds, with defined muscles in their long arms and legs; permanently sunburned noses; and an effortless way of moving that was almost heartbreaking to watch. Even when Jane was just swinging her backpack over her shoulder as she sauntered out of class, she had a way of making it look like art. At her Long Island home, her family walked around in track suits and tennis shoes, without the irony that, for example, a track suit would have conveyed on my plump mother. Someone was always going out to play on the courts or coming in from just having played, toting bags and several racquets and fresh cans of balls that smelled excitingly of gassy rubber. They had kitchen

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Punked

When the flight attendant advises that passengers place the oxygen mask over their own faces before assisting those traveling with them, I always interpret this imperative more broadly—that I should take care of my own needs first, whether or not I’m strapped into an airplane seat, 30,000 feet in the air. Day to day, this doesn’t really happen, of course. What with dogs needing kibble and work needing to get done and kids needing an occasional warm embrace or a ride to school… my own needs often wind up in the back seat, shoved in the cushion crevice along with candy wrappers, loose change, old gum. But one thing I do hold sacred: In the morning, I don’t want anyone to bug me before I’ve cleared that first cup of coffee. Around my house, my daughter has learned to steer a wide berth for the 5 or 10 minutes it

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