Like Plucking Your Eyebrows

 

I recently had minor outpatient surgery that required external stitches. My doctor did a beautiful job sewing up the incision, telling me to come back in two weeks for them to be removed. (There are also internal stitches; those will dissolve over time.)

Yesterday was my return visit for the stitches to come out. The PA examined the incision site, asked me some questions, then gave the nod to the nurse to go ahead, telling me as she left the room to come back in three months. 

The nurse laid out the equipment: a pair of tweezers and a tiny pair of surgical snips. She asked me if I had any questions.

Only one. "How much is this likely to hurt?" 

She laughed and said that the doctor had recently been asked that same question by a young patient, an adolescent girl. The doctor asked her if she knew what it felt like to pluck a hair from her head? Yes. The doctor said that you don't feel that kind of pluck, but this is more like plucking your eyebrows and there is some sensation.

"Like plucking your eyebrows." I burst out laughing and then told the nurse my eyebrow plucking story.

Over 55 years ago, when I was hitting adolescence, my mother and my aunt Ginger sat me down in the kitchen to pluck my eyebrows for the very first time. No self-respecting girl would walk around with her eyebrows meeting up in the middle of her face and it was time to give me a beauty lesson. Ginger had her tweezers ready; Mom had a bowl with a few ice cubes. Mom applied the ice cube to my brow to numb it, Ginger leaned in, tweezed a hair, and...

I shot up and shouted, "STOP IT! DON'T EVER DO THAT TO ME AGAIN!"

What the hell? Women did this to themselves? Voluntarily? 

Ginger and Mom tried to reason with me. I needed to "get used" to it. It didn't hurt "that much." It was just what one did.

I shook my head. Not me. Not then, not later, not ever.

And I never did pluck my eyebrows. I had a razor (this was back in the day when everyone shaved their legs and underarms, so girls got razors early in life—the kind with removable blades that, in retrospect, could be pretty lethal) and I took it to my brow and learned to shave instead of pluck. All these many years later, I still do that.

The nurse started laughing. "Well, if the pain gets too intense, we can call the PA back in and she can give you a local to numb it, but let's try it without so we can skip the needle. I'll take it easy."

And bit by bit, she snipped and carefully pulled the stitches out. There was one that stung, not unlike my distant recollection of my eyebrows episode, but the nurse eased the others out with only a few twinges here and there.

I thanked the nurse and told her she did a great job. She did. 

I walked out to my car, thinking back to that long-ago experience. And I smiled, thankful that I still have never plucked my eyebrows. 

This Week

 This entry will be short.

It has been a long, hard week. My mother—our mother, counting my two brothers—died Sunday after a long, weary, draining (on her, on my father, on all of us) struggle with dementia. 

Add to that a workload, both at Court and in the volunteer arena, that has skyrocketed courtesy of the pandemic. The stories I am hearing range from matter-of-fact to heartbreaking and are only going to get worse as the pandemic and its economic fallout deepen. My two coworkers in the mediation department are also swamped, which is why I held mediation for two and a half hours the morning of my mother's afternoon graveside service. 

I am exhausted. Today in trying to schedule a mediation while on a Zoom meeting with colleagues at Court and at our high school, I stopped and said, "What day is this? What day are we looking at?" One of the participants kindly said, "It's Friday the 4th, April." Thank you.

One small note and then I will close. While working today, I heard a knock at the front door. When I went to look outside, a delivery person was holding a flower arrangement in her hands. "April Nelson?" Yes. She set the container down on the porch and left.

The arrangement was a vase of yellow roses, my mother's favorite flower. My dad had a spray of them on her casket at the service. I knew it had to come from someone who knew my mom well. I was right; it was from a lifelong friend, Mary Lou, whose daughter Cindy has been my friend my entire life.

And that is a wonderful note to end this long week on. 

Dumpster Diving With The Best Of Them

"Did the butter get thrown out too?"

Dad looked pained. "Look in the freezer. It should be in there."

It wasn't.

This is not a tale of butter that mysteriously disappeared. This is instead a story of combining households and generations and lifestyles.

My brother Mark and his wife Jackie are selling their home and moving into my dad's house, the one we moved into in 1970 and in which he continues to live today, first with his shrinking family, then with my mother, and. finally, after she moved into memory care last November, by himself. Mark and Jackie recently hit a financial wall, not of their own doing, that, as they each characterized it, was the straw that broke the camel's back, the camel in this case being their ability to make their mortgage payment and pay their bills and pay for Jackie's medical insurance, as the just announced cut to her hours eliminated her employer-paid health insurance. It was the insurance that was the last straw; given Jackie's health issues, "going without insurance" is not an option. So they made the difficult but solid decision to sell their house while they are on the upside of their mortgage and move into the old home place. (Back in 2018, I interviewed Mark and Jackie about their grocery budget given the money issues and the health issues.) With Dad a month away from turning 86, still in good health but, as he puts it, old, I think we are all, starting with Dad, relieved that he will no longer be living alone.

The house is large; Mark and Jackie will take over the upstairs, all three will share the kitchen and the bathroom. As a major part of that move, both households are downsizing. Jackie, Mark, and a crew of loyal neighbors are deep-cleaning Dad's house for the first time in...ten years? Twenty? Since 1970?

Don't get me wrong. Dad and Mom did not keep a dirty house. But Mom's ability to do housework disappeared years ago due to physical limitations, and Dad's ability to keep up with everything diminished as he aged and as Mom took more and more of his time. You wouldn't walk into the house ever and notice anything much more than dusty shelves and accumulated clutter on the counters and surfaces, but as Mark and Jackie prepare the house for their move, their hard efforts are showing just how much dust and dirt and grime had accumulated over almost 50 years.

So back to the butter. One of the tasks Jackie undertook yesterday was cleaning Dad's refrigerator for the first time in...a long time. Again, nothing was filthy and there was no spoiled food, but..yeah, it was overdue. Jackie scrubbed shelves, she wiped down bottles and containers, and when she found items that were past their pull date, she pulled them.

Note: Jackie's mother, Judy, was an RN. Jackie can and does wash her hands with more attention than most of us ever even think of doing. Judy taught Jackie well about food safety, about keeping surfaces (counters, sinks, refrigerators) clean, about safe food preparation. Those early life lessons have served Jackie and her husband and children well over the years. Those lessons also include paying scrupulous attention to pull dates and "use by" dates.

Second Note: Dad was not raised by an RN. Neither was I. Dad, in fact, lived his early years without electricity, without running water, without refrigeration. You get the point. I, of course, grew up with electricity, running water, and refrigeration, but believe that food is more durable than what we give it credit for, especially non-perishable items and items kept frozen. I also believe strongly that "use by" dates are, for the most part, something foisted on us by food manufacturers (note my word choice: manufacturers—we eat manufactured food in this country! ) who want us to continually be buying their food items "fresh" (like a can has a "freshness" quality to it). So while Dad and I talked this morning about the butter, he talked about how his family prepared and kept food when he was growing up and how that butter in the freezer would keep 20 years.

So where was the butter? When I quizzed my brother when he and Jackie showed up later, he said "probably in one of those trash bags near the top of the trash container." (We were already outside, near the big trash tote.)

I didn't miss a beat. I popped open the lid, opened the bag closest to the top (the contents of which were still cool), and rummaged around. First up was a never-opened bag of pecan halves. Score! Next were the two pounds of butter, still cold. Score!

Jackie, who was out of the porch cleaning something, called over, laughing. "I can buy you butter, April! And I'm not eating at your house!" I called back, "You can't eat butter anyway, you're lactose intolerant!"

I took my finds inside to show Dad, who grinned. He was happy. Mark, knowing the vast gulf on food that separate me and Jackie, laughed.

When Jackie came back in the house, we both stood in front of the built-in cabinets in which Mom had kept baking items and spices. I looked at her: "You opened this yet?" Jackie shook her head.

We opened the doors. It was a hodgepodge of things: some boxed mixes (Mom was truly a bride of the early 1950s; convenience food was what everyone used and she never really gave up that habit), an empty plastic container, and a somewhat full canister. (I opened that one: powdered sugar.) There was an unopened box of corn starch, an old opened box of baking soda, and an opened container of petrified baking powder. There was a whole drawer of spices, some of which, as I looked closer, probably predated my parents moving into the house 49 years ago.

Oh my.

"Let me just take these all," I said, grabbing some grocery sacks. I dumped the items we knew were past redemption: the petrified baking powder, the old soda. But the rest?

"I'll sort them out when I get home."

We bagged it all. I put the butter and the pecan halves into the bags as well, hugged Dad, and left.

The snazzy Tupperware container is on the left, the Jiffy mix is on the right

When I got home to Warren, I was excited. "Guess what I found! The butter! Guess what else I found! Come look!"

Warren dutifully looked. I then spread my treasures on the table and went through what I had brought home. I kept the powdered sugar, both in the canister (a cool circa 1970 Tupperware model) and an unopened bag of the same. The regular sugar made the cut. I kept the mixes—brownies, lemon bars, pumpkin spice cookies—because I sometimes bake for other occasions where a box mix is not the end of the world. I even kept the Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix, which, until I was well into my teens, constituted the only "cornbread" I really ever ate, with the rare exception of Kentucky cornbread. (I was an adult before I realized the sweet stuff was considered "corncake" and the Kentucky stuff, unsweetened, was truly the cornbread. I still sweeten mine, but not as much as I did in younger days.)

t took me about 15 minutes to sort the spices, opening each one and smelling and tasting them. Nine of them I emptied and recycled the containers. 12 of them I kept.

The pecans? I'm about to start making pesto, and I use pecans in my pesto to thicken it. We just yesterday bought pecan halves at Aldi, where they run .529 cents an ounce, the cheapest in town. That six ounce bag I rescued? $3.17 worth of pecans at that price.

Sweet.

The butter went, of course, in the freezer. I texted Jackie a photo of it.

Fortunately, I am married to a man who gets me and shares my attitude towards food and towards food durability. He even smiled about the Jiffy mix: it's not anything we would ever buy, but what the heck, might as eat it up.

A little dumpster diving goes a long way.

The butter in its new home, our freezer

Where That Fork in the Road Went

Seven years ago, I wrote about mom showing signs of of dementia and our first family conversations with my dad about it.

Seven years ago.

Over the many months since then, my mom's cognitive capacity continued to decline, sometimes in fits and starts, sometimes in steep, rushing leaps, and sometimes in barely perceptible shifts. And through it all, my dad soldiered on, taking care of and looking after the woman he loved, even as the woman he had known for most of his life had all but disappeared.

Not that we were negligent as children. My brothers, my sisters-in-law, my beloved husband, and I all kept tabs on dad, asking him what help he needed, urging him to call upon us. "I can do it for now," he'd reply. "I'll let you know when I need help."

We'd talk to him about bringing in some outside services, even on an occasional basis. Meals On Wheels? Someone to clean house? Anything?

"No, I'm not there yet," dad would reply. "I don't want to upset your mom with bringing in someone, and I can handle it."

And he did handle it—"it" being the myriad of daily tasks and duties to keep the household going, to keep mom oriented, amused, and cared for, to care for himself, the too large house, the oversize yard. He handled it and handled it, despite the enormous toll on his own health, right up until about ten days ago. That was when mom fell getting up in the middle of the night, breaking three ribs. That episode unraveled into a series of squad calls for assistance getting her in and out of bed, trips to the nearby ER, consults with social workers, and long, serious faces on the hospital personnel. It culminated in the day when he went to the bathroom and came out to find her gone, only to go outside and find her on the ground where she had fallen, hitting her face, when in her dementia she had decided to take out the garbage. With squad help, he got her into the house. That night, she woke him, telling him she felt she was dying. We all spent a long hard, day at the ER again, while decisions were made.

We spent the rest of the week with mom in a local rehab/memory unit: understaffed, shabby, institutional, and, unfortunately, full of bad memories for dad from 30 years ago when his own father was in the same place. They treated mom well, but it was not a solution.

And then my brother Mark and his wife Jackie did some research and found a memory care unit in a new, home-like senior facility in their town (20 miles away). Dad went out to tour it with them, then came back to town and announced he was moving mom.

We made the move yesterday, "we" being dad, Mark, Jackie, my other sister-in-law Kate, and I. The facility director was calm and helpful: make it look like home (most of their bedroom suite of the last 60 years went over), let us transport her from there to here, please don't come for the first five or so days. So we spent the morning setting up mom's new room, and then went away. I was at the local facility with Kate when the new director showed up to pick up mom; mom was thrilled to be going for a ride. She said hello to us and kept right on going. She reminded me of a little kid: so eager to have the new experience that she didn't even look back.

Dad is struggling with the decision and holds to the hope that mom will be "better" and he can bring her back home. Mark is worried dad is waffling. I suggested we just let the dust settle and let him voice his fears and wishes without trying to point out that mom is never going to get better and this is best. We are all in chill out mode right now.

After I finished up the parent-related tasks yesterday afternoon, I headed down the road to visit Aunt Ginger in her memory unit. Ginger was in good spirits and we had a long chat. She was convinced she had just moved from her apartment a week ago (it was well over a year ago) and was stunned when I said "you've been here for over a year." She talked about her job, one she retired from over 30 years ago and mixed then  ("I retired early, didn't I?") and now ("I'm glad I retired last month. That was getting hard on me.") and then included her friend Esther, who was sitting in lounge with us, in the sweep of those she had worked with for so many years.

Esther didn't mind; she was telling me how her mother had told her this morning that she needed to wear her new jeans. (Esther is in her 80s or 90s as well.)

"And I did, April!," she said, beaming and pointing to her jeans.

Esther was happy. Ginger was happy. I was happy. We were all happy in the memory unit.

Here's hoping my parents' long road to here is likewise lined with happy moments at this time of life.

So You Have To Redo Your Grocery Budget? An Interview With A Couple Who Did Exactly That.

My little brother Mark and my sister-in-law Jackie 

A few years ago, my sister-in-law Jackie learned she was lactose intolerant. That discovery required her to rethink how she approached eating, cooking, and shopping for groceries. Then last fall, her husband (my brother) Mark lost his job. He is now self-employed, but has a significantly reduced income. That required them to again rethink how they approached eating, cooking, and shopping for groceries. We have had lots of conversations and emails about saving money eating, saving money cooking, and saving money while shopping for groceries.

A week ago I received this text from Jackie:

Mark wanted me to tell you that we bought a week's worth of groceries      including toiletries and paper products for $70...Saved $20 between specials and coupons! We are proud of ourselves - getting better...

That was such a great text that after I celebrated with them via text, I asked if they'd be willing to be interviewed for my blog. They agreed. So Sunday after we had them and my parents over for a joint birthday meal (Dad just turned 85, Mom will be 83 later this month), the three of us sat in the living room and talked about their grocery turnaround. (The folks had left and Warren went back to work in his shop.) Mark and Jackie's children are adults and do not live at home; it's a two-person household. They shop primarily at Aldi and at a market near them, Mosier's in Raymond, which has some excellent meat prices. They often answered jointly; I note who is giving an answer when it was person-specific.

So you recently texted me about your shopping trip. Tell me what prompted that text?

We were proud of it. [We know] how little you spend...we never come close. So just sharing the news—it is going in the right direction.

Did you always shop weekly or is that new with the frugal changes?

We always shopped weekly.

How much do you think you spent—ballpark it—on groceries before making these changes?

Over $100 a week easily. Probably more like $125 to $150.  Mark, later in the interview: Probably more like $800 a month.

What are some of the special dietary challenges in your household How does that impact your grocery spending?

Jackie: My stuff is much more expensive. Dairy-free cheese is $5.00 versus a dollar something, for example. And milk: I spend $3.49 for a half-gallon of almond milk. [Note: milk is going for about $1.59 a gallon locally at present.] You just pay substantially more. Dairy-free ice cream? A lot for a little amount! As a result, I find us cooking and eating simpler meals. Heavily processed foods often have dairy in the ingredients, so we don't buy those anymore.

Were there any lifestyle challenges that you had to work around? For example: "there's no time to cook." 

Jackie: The dietary changes [because of the lactose issue] eliminated a lot of challenges in that sense. Mark: We had to change the rules on fruits and veggies. The new rule on fruit is "buy one." Because Jackie would buy a fruit she liked and then buy a bag of apples for me. She doesn't eat them. But I can't eat a whole bag before they go bad. Now we're throwing away less fruit.

Where do your food dollars go? Deconstruct a typical grocery shopping.

Fruit, bread, milk, eggs, chips, coffee [I asked here: Coffee every week? No, monthly], meat. We are trying to cut down so we are only buying meat every other week. And not eating as much of it. Mark: And we bought the marked down ones! [Jackie's mother was an RN and Jackie has very definite opinions about food safety. So she winced on this reply, but gamely said "and we haven't died of anything yet!"] We only have the refrigerator freezer, so there are limits. On paper products: big pack of paper towels, napkins, and large pack of toilet paper. We shop a lot at Aldi, so that keeps the cost down.

This answer led to a tangent on toilet paper. Mark asked me where we bought ours. I said we bought the Aldi 18-pack and told him the price (substantially less than the Charmin they buy). Jackie said "but I like soft paper." I ran upstairs, got a roll of ours, and said "here, take it home and do a test run." The things you can do with family!

What if anything have you eliminated from your diet that would thought you would miss but you don't really?

Excess fruit sometimes. We have a similar rule on veggies: we limit how much we buy if we are buying fresh. 

What about leftovers?

We are not anti-leftover. Mark: I don't like eating the same thing night after night. So we eat it one or  two nights and freeze the rest. That really helps on nights when we are tired and can just heat up something that's already cooked.

What's been the biggest hurdle for you in making these changes? Example: "I really miss gourmet cheese," or, "it's too time-consuming to plan a shopping trip so tight, with coupons and looking for specials." Anything like that? 

Jackie: No, we were used to doing that—coupons—before the budget change. Mark: I miss ice cream. But that's not a budget issue. I won't buy it and keep it because Jackie can't eat it and I don't want to eat it in front of her. Jackie: And it doesn't bother me if you do. Mark: I know, but I'm not going to do it. 

I understand that. Since I got diagnosed with the diabetes, Warren often will pass on having cookies or something after dinner, saying he wants to support me. And I'm just like Jackie: I tell him it won't bother me. And Warren says, "I know. But I want you to know that I care." But what I am hearing is the bigger change to your eating and shopping was the lactose intolerance. Am I hearing that right?

Oh, definitely. The lactose issue was the biggest change. Losing the income just made us hone in even more on what we were buying and eating. We don't do a lot of processed foods at all. Mark: And we stopped buying frozen meals pretty much all together.

What's been the biggest surprise for you?

Putting fridge in the food for a lower price. And looking at it and saying "it's enough." That was a big change in our thinking.  

I know some of these changes were driven because of the income shift. Truth: if your income went back to prior levels, do you think you would continue to shop like this? Why or why not?

Mark: I would hope we would continue to shop the same way as now. The money we'd save [with more income] could go elsewhere. Jackie: We are eating simpler meals. I'm aware that we're getting older and we need to be more aware of what we eat and be more health-conscious. That plays into it, too. 

Sometimes people read blogs about cutting grocery bills and comment "I could never do that." I belong to a Facebook group, No Spending for the Year 2018, and newbies on the site will often be overwhelmed at the thought of making such substantial changes. What words of advice would you have for someone who is looking at a radical grocery makeover, either by choice or because they had a big life event that requires them to make deep budget cuts?

Mark: Look and see what you really need to have and get it. Set the other stuff aside—stuff you really don't need. Put it out of your mind. Learn to say "that's enough." And you'll be surprised: it really is enough. Jackie: Keep meals simple. I look at recipes and and not do one because it calls for expensive items and I think "I'm not going to get that much more pleasure out of that!" 

We talked several more minutes about how I buy remaindered apples, peel them, cut them up, and freeze them for future apple pies. Jackie asked whether I had to prep them in any other way, such as putting lemon juice on them. Usually not. If I am doing a lot of apple prep (several pounds at once), I will throw the slices into a bowl of water with lemon juice in it to cut down on how brown they turn, but typically not. And the truth is with apple pie, it doesn't make a difference if the apples turn a little brown in the preparation. By the time I add cinnamon, there's a lot of color change in the final product!

At the end of the interview, we talked about money issues in general (not using credit cards, pay cash or put it off, for example) and just enjoyed being together. Jackie and I walked out to the garden and we picked several tomatoes for her (Mark doesn't eat them). They left our home, after hugs all around, carrying the "test roll" of toilet paper. (Mark to Jackie: "You just used their bathroom and you know that's what they had in there!")

Sometimes it's as simple as a roll of toilet paper.

February Finances

As I have written before, I am continuing to track my monthly grocery/household expenses, as well as eating out expenses. My goal for 2018 is to bring the monthly grocery/household expenses down to $175.00 a month, and to keep the eating out tab as low as possible.

Our groceries/household expenses for February edged up from the January figure. We spent $168.57 on food and $17.49 on household (such as laundry detergent, toilet paper) for a total of $186.06. Some of our grocery expenses were higher due to the circumstances of this month. Warren was juggling Symphony, rehearsals, day to day life, and my being homebound from surgery. That meant more groceries were purchased at Kroger, often quickly at the end of a long day, and less at Aldi.

There is a price differential between the two stores.

Being the math geek I sometimes am, I immediately calculated what we have to hit monthly for the rest of the year to come in at $175.00 per month. The formula would be $345.50 (the money spent to date) plus 10 months at x  divided by 12 months to equal $175.00.

Solve for x. 

And the answer is?

$175.45.

How great is that? I can hit $175.00 a month by spending $175.00 a month from here on out.

Eating out was only slightly lower this month. Warren had a series of rehearsals and a concert out of town early on in February  and spent some money there ($10.00 over 3 days). We took my parents out to lunch for their wedding anniversary, with our share of the meal coming to $14.58 with tip. The monthly total came to $38.11 (counting tips). It would have been under $24.00 but for the anniversary meal and under $14.00 but for the out of town rehearsals and concert. I point that out because out of town rehearsals/concerts are infrequent. The meal out with my parents was slightly different. As my mom's dementia deepens, her comfort level in restaurants decreases. She is happiest now at McDonald's and Bob Evans. Out of concern for mom, we went to Bob Evans, which ranks really, really low on my "let's eat out" list. (Who am I kidding? But for mom, I would not be eating there at all.) With my still not being "out and about" this month, I predict we'll really drop the cost of eating out (which, remember, includes takeout as well).

I am back at work (thanks to my trusty scooter) and have even ventured with Warren into Kroger and Aldi (and Meijer), so we can share more of the grocery shopping once again. I predict we'll hit the $175.00 mark in March without even breaking into a sweat.

March came in like a lion, so it should go out like a lamb. I'm hoping to keep the financial front as meek as a lamb as well.

Heat

It is a cold Saturday morning in Ohio, with the temperatures hovering in the low 20s and the sky gray. Warren is at rehearsal for tomorrow's holiday concerts. We left the house so fast and so early this morning for a community breakfast and last minute orchestra matters that neither of us nudged up the thermostat from its nighttime temperature of 61º.

The thermostat is still on 61º four hours later. I walked home from the concert hall, the 20 minute hike warming me up. Once here, I turned on the oven to bake a batch of biscotti and here I am an hour later, shuttling between the kitchen with the biscotti and the basement, where I am hanging laundry to dry.

As I sit here writing at the table in a cool kitchen and a chillier house, I am reminded of the homes I grew up in. I never lived in a house with central heating until long after I left home.

My lifetime-long friend Cindy and I emailed back and forth earlier this week about heat. She lives in a manufactured house, and there is always a worry about the water pipes running underneath freezing when there is a sudden cold snap. I wrote back that I remembered the first floor kitchen in my childhood house. (My grandparents and Aunt Ginger lived on the first floor; we lived on the second for most of the 14 years I lived there.) The sink was against an outside wall that I am pretty sure was just wallboard over stud frame and outside shingles. When it got really cold, someone would hang a lightbulb under the sink to warm the pipes all night (there may have been a fixture or a plug under there for this purpose; I don't remember). I told Cindy that the kitchen was unheated except for stove/oven activities. I went on to explain that there was no central heating: there were gas stoves (floor stoves) in a few rooms on each floor and that was it. She did not remember that, but I sure did. And when we moved to the house my parents still live in, there was only a coal furnace in the basement and floor grates on the first floor. Any heat beyond that was by virtue of hot air rising. All of us kids had bedrooms on the second floor. To this day, I remember the ice that formed on the inside of my bedroom windows in the dead of winter.

As a result of growing up with no central heating, I learned to prefer sleeping in cold air, a preference that is a great trial for Warren. Because I was a teenager (i.e., old enough to be reliable) when we moved, my dad taught me the basics of operating a coal furnace. I know how to bank a coal fire for the night and how to rekindle it for the morning. I understand how furnace flues work. I also know what it is like to shovel coal and stoke a furnace. (Relax: my parents switched to first oil and then natural gas to heat with, installing central heating. My dad is not shoveling coal at 84.)

As I look back, I realize that growing up without central heating made for family times in the winter that are less frequent in today's lifestyles. Think of the chapter "Winter Night" in Laura Ingall Wilder's book Farmer Boy. The Wilder family (her future husband's family) spent cold nights in the kitchen, where it was warmest, talking, doing needlework or greasing moccasins, eating popcorn, reading the paper aloud. My family likewise gathered in the winter after supper in our living room, near the gas stove, to watch television, read, work on homework, polish shoes, or play. I would sit crosslegged on the floor on Saturday nights while my mother put my hair up in curlers for church the next day. Dad would make popcorn. Even as my older brother and I aged and got moodier, we rarely retreated to a bedroom with a closed door in either house. It would be have been too cold! We needed those doors open for that heat to circulate.

Don't get me wrong. I like heat. I am grateful I don't have to struggle financially to keep the house warm in the winter. The biscotti is almost done and I will turn up the thermostat so Warren doesn't freeze when he gets home.

But I don't regret the childhood memories of family time in the evening, the wonderful way those stoves would warm mittens before going outside, or even the ice in my bedroom. That other time, those other memories.

Later note: After writing this out by longhand while the biscotti baked, I retreated to my second floor study to type. I confess: it's cold up here. Back to the first floor!

Inch Sixty-Two: Naming Rights

What's in a name?

That, of course, is the question Juliet famously poses during her balcony soliloquy, concluding that a rose by any other name "would smell as sweet."

That may well be (and there are many writers who have disagreed with Shakespeare over the centuries), but I would have given anything to be have given a different moniker than the one my mother saddled me with 59+ years ago. Oh, I have borne it all these years, but not without complaint.

My name came up recently because a friend reading my unfinished manuscript commented immediately that the characters based on real people (such as my children) are called by their real names except for the character based on me. That character is called Hannah.

You bet I'm Hannah in the novel. I wasn't about to write an April into the script.

Growing up, I longed for a normal name. I went to school with Beckys and Teresas and Brendas and Kims and Debbys (not to mention Debbies). I would have gladly gone by Sara or Hannah or Jane. But no, I got April. My mother was apparently at her most lyrical when she chose my name. Heck, I never even acquired a nickname. ("Ape" does not count.)

I never contemplated legally changing my name to something more tolerable. I think I knew, even at my surliest ages, that I did not need yet another battlefield with my mother. I certainly did not want to go through the rest of her life being criticized for such a betrayal.

As I thought about the name issue, I realized I have several friends, all women incidentally, who use either a middle name, nickname, or another name all together. Katrina uses her middle name. Cindy was named Cynthia. Margo, it turns out, adopted as her name her 7th grade French name (spelled, I presume, "Margaux") and gradually erased her birth name. Both of my grandmothers despised their first names and used their middle names, so "Eulalia" became "Clare" (a choice I thoroughly understand) and "Maggie" became "Mabel" (a choice I do not understand at all).

Do women have name image issues, like our body image issues? Do I have a name image issue? Apparently.

When I converted to Judaism several decades ago, I chose a Jewish name for the conversion. Even then I did not choose the name I really loved, which is Tova, but instead chose Chaya. There is a strong custom in European Jewish culture not to name a child after a living relative, and I wanted to save Tova for the daughter I eventually never had.

There's nothing wrong with the name Chaya, but it's not Tova.

Recently, though, I chose to name myself once and for all the name I hear as my name. I had to choose a user name for an account. I am so tired of variants of my name as a user name and equally tired of another name (and its variations) I have been relying on for years. But Tova with some additional characters and words? Mayhap that would work.

There is a passage in the Ray Bradbury short story, "Dark They Were, And Golden-Eyed," where the son of the main character asks to change his name:

"What's wrong with Tim for a name?"

Tim fidgeted. "The other day you called Tim, Tim, Tim. I didn't even hear. I said to myself, That's not my name. I've a new name I want to use."

Mr. Bittering held to the side of the canal, his body cold and his heart pounding slowly. "What is this new name?"

"Linnl. Isn't that a good name? Can I use it? Can I, please?"

Mr. Bittering put his hand to his head...He heard his wife say, "Why not?" He heard himself say, "Yes, you can use it." "Yaaa!" screamed the boy. "I'm Linnl, Linnl!" Racing down the meadowlands, he danced and shouted.

I know just how Linnl felt.

Inch Forty: Furniture

November was a stressed and hectic month in the family. My mother had a long-overdue knee replacement early in the month, and the triple whammy of major surgery, great pain, and dementia took a toll on all of us, but especially my father. While he was relieved of the 24/7 duty of steering my mom through the day, he all the same spent a huge number of hours by her side as without him to interpret the world for her, she is increasingly lost as to day, time, conversations, and events.

One day early in the nursing home stay, my dad and I went room to room in the upstairs of their house looking for a sewing box that is apparently non-existent now. (And where is the button tin, I wonder?) We opened countless dressers and bureaus looking for the safety pins I had hoped to find in the sewing box.

We never found the pins. But we did find drawer after drawer of abandoned projects: plastic canvas and yarns, aging sewing patterns, brightly colored material that may have been meant for a quilt. Dad quietly observed that my mother would never finish these now and I was almost tempted to offer to clear them all away, but wisely kept my mouth shut.

As we finished opening and searching the last drawer, Dad commented that he had an upstairs "full of old furniture." He's right. One room contains a stout bureau, stripped and refinished, that in my childhood had been a battered glossy white with a Roy Rogers decal on the top drawer right between the two pulls. Then there is the bureau at the top of the stairs, with drawers ranging from shallow at the top to deeper at the bottom on the left half, the right side being a door that swings open to reveal a large storage area without shelves or divisions. It is a dark piece and the wood of the door is very thin. When I was young, my mother stored flannel sheets and blankets on the right side.

I always liked that piece of furniture. There would have been a time in my life when I would have loved to have had that piece in my own home for sentimental reasons. But none of the furniture was ever proffered to any of us and it has all set in the empty upstairs for long years.

And now I am of an age and at a place in life when acquiring furniture, even childhood pieces, holds no appeal for me. I want less stuff, not more. I cannot imagine passing these pieces on to my children. In addition to the cost and risk of shipping them west, these pieces hold no emotional weight for Ben or Sam because they didn't grow up with them like I did.

I do not know how much longer my parents will remain in the house. It is a large, old, limestone structure, the second floor and basement out of reach of my mom, the bathroom a tiny, narrow add-on long after the original house was built. When they bought it in 1970, both my parents were in their 30s, with younger children, plenty of energy, and lots of dreams. That was almost 45 years ago. Now it is obvious that the house was not built for an elderly couple, one of whom has mobility problems. Dad has observed more than once that the house and yard (an acre) and outbuildings are increasingly more than he has the time and strength to tackle on a daily basis. Time, especially as my mother's needs grow, will be at an even greater premium than it already is, and the deep reserves of energy and plans my parents both once possessed have long been spent.

And when my parents do leave the house? There'll be an upstairs full of old furniture along with everything else: abandoned crafts and abandoned dreams, old blankets and old photographs, and the faint whisper of memories.

Inch Twenty-Nine: Spilt Milk

Wednesday morning started with the brilliant idea of making the instant pudding first thing in the morning.

Let me explain. We have my parents over for supper one night a week, giving Dad a break from the almost constant care he provides for Mom. A staple at every meal is instant sugar-free pudding, a dessert that my dad, who is diabetic, can eat and one that my mom absolutely loves. I will not eat the stuff, but I am more than willing to provide an easy finish to the meal, one that Mom treats as a delightful discovery each week.

I mix the pudding in the blender, then pour it into individual serving cups. Not counting cleanup, we are talking about a couple of minutes of work. Thinking I'd get a jump on the late afternoon supper, I thought I'd prepare the pudding in the morning while the oatmeal cooked.

Two cups of milk, get ready to add the mix, WHY IS THERE MILK RUNNING ACROSS THE COUNTER?!

A swipe of my left hand saved the milk from cascading onto the kitchen floor. My right hand grabbed the blender and dumped it into the sink.

Two cups of milk down the drain, literally and figuratively.

It turns out that whoever reassembled the blender last put the rubber ring on the wrong side of the blade. No seal, lots of mess.

After wiping up the milk, then rinsing and reassembling the blender, we went ahead and ate breakfast, the oatmeal being long done. I stewed over the mishap while we ate. Lost time, lost milk, a mess to clean up, so much for planning ahead, and on and on. I even brooded over the fact that I don't even like this blender, it being an inexpensive (read "lightweight plastic") replacement for the heavier glass blender I used to have. (A blender that I shattered into a million pieces when I dropped it on the concrete basement floor several years ago, which caused me to reflect on why I even thought it was a great idea to move the blender to the basement to begin with.)

Then Joyce Yates, my son Ben's fifth grade teacher, popped into my head.

"Don't cry over spilt milk."

Joyce taught her students that maxim to give her students a quick way to move on from their mistakes. It was a handy lesson and a useful tool for a group of 10 and 11 year olds. Ben took it to heart enough that he quoted it back to me when I was stressed out over a mess I had made.

"Don't cry over spilt milk, Mom."

Joyce was right. That long-ago Ben was right. I stopped brooding, finished my breakfast, reassembled the blender, made the pudding, and moved on. Still not my favorite blender, still not how I planned on starting the day. But the pudding was done and I wasn't wasting more of my day crying over spilt milk.

And Mom's joy at supper when I brought the pudding out was unmistakable. "Oh, this is so good!" she exclaimed, digging her spoon in with glee.

And it was.

Inch Six: Cake

Warren and I have birthdays eight days apart tin April. For the last several years, I have baked Warren a birthday cake from scratch, always the same recipe. The cake of the day is found in my battered 1990 Fannie Farmer Cookbook (13th edition), page 570. In Fannie Farmer, it is called "Lady Baltimore cake,"as its origins may have been in a tearoom of the same name in Charleston, South Carolina. A true Lady Baltimore cake has a center filling of chopped pecans, figs, and dates. I use the recipe only for the creamy white layers of cake it turns out.

When Warren's birthday rolled around earlier this month, I again turned to the Lady Baltimore recipe and soon had two eight inch pans in the oven. I joined them together with the Seven-Minute Frosting (a boiled frosting) found on page 602. Feeling particularly plush, I slathered the cake heavily, finishing off the top with a decorative swirl. Proud of my handiwork, I put a photo of it on Facebook.

A week before Warren's birthday, I had put a photo of a long-ago birthday of my own. (I have written about the scene before in this blog.) A Facebook friend saw the photo and commented: "Your family sure does like cake. Is that the same family recipe you just made for your hubby?"

I burst out laughing when I read that comment. Oh, no, no, no. To my knowledge, my mother has never baked a cake from scratch my entire lifetime. I'm not sure if she ever has during her entire lifetime, even though you would think somewhere growing up she might have tried one. A very young bride in the 1950s, Mom thoroughly embraced modern conveniences in the kitchen, especially boxed mixes of all kinds. Even the icing came out of a box. (You mixed the contents with hot water "until smooth.") She was very much in step with her friends, with many other housewives across the country, and with her era.

It is only in looking back that I finally realize why Mom was no help the year I took 4-H Cooking and had to bake a scratch cake for judging. That morning, I must have baked four or five cakes before one turned out decent enough to take. Mom stood by while I struggled but could offer no insight: this was totally alien territory to her.

I spent a good part of my youth, starting at a very, very early age, rejecting the paths my mother kept pointing out for me. She was a good seamstress and sewed many of my clothes. In contrast, I refused to learn and am still a poor sewer with severely limited skills. After her children were mostly grown, Mom did needlepoint and plastic canvas crafts. I didn't and don't. She wanted desperately for me to pierce my ears in 8th grade; to this day, I still do not have holes in my ears. If she was for it, I was against it, and vice versa.

So small wonder that when my interest in baking awoke, I baked with a vengeance. Lemon tarts, breads, pies, cookies, cakes—all from scratch, all step by step. Baking was something that came easily to me and that I could do without interference or competition from my mother. And to her credit, Mom has never suggested, even when asked, that she taught me anything about baking. Despite the wrangling we have done over the years, baking is one arena she ceded without protest.

One of the treasures in this house is the 1947 edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, the forerunner to the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. It was a wedding gift to Warren's parents when they married in 1948. Ellen often made notations in the margin of this cookbook as to the strength and weakness of a recipe. The recipe for what is now the Lady Baltimore cake is called "white or snow cake" in the 1947 volume. There is no marginalia on this recipe and I suspect Ellen never tried this particular recipe, although her notes indicate she tried plenty of other scratch cake recipes.

Ellen died ten years ago on Warren's birthday. She never got to see us as a couple and she and I never had the pleasure of baking together. She would have been very happy with our marriage. And I like to think she would have enjoyed being around when I baked, especially for Warren's birthday. I see her at the table, both Ellen and I holding our breaths as I cut into the cake and serve up the first slice for the birthday boy.

Further Down the Road

Saturday was cold and gray and at times rainy and sleety. I spent much of the morning standing outside at the fire station watching firefighter candidates undergo agility testing. (I sit on our city's civil service commission and we are encouraged to watch the testing procedures.) I meant to stop only briefly. I stayed for over two hours, mesmerized by the intensity of the morning. The candidates are put through a variety of tests, from climbing an extended aerial ladder to finding their way by rope through a blackout room.

The most compelling segment for me was the timed shuttle run, where the candidate had to run 50 yards (each way) from the starting point to the relay point, pick up a different object each time (five total), and carry it back to the start. The last object was a small water hose (with the water pressure on) and nozzle, to be pulled from the relay point to the starting line.

As I learned, it is not the weight of the hose that is the killer, but the frictional drag on the line across that distance of pavement. I watched candidates who had sailed through earlier parts of the test (including the timed run three times up and down two flights of stairs loaded with gear in under two minutes) all but grind to a stop on the last leg of the shuttle run. They would be down to the last ten yards, the last five yards, and have to gut it out inch by inch to make it to the finish line.

One candidate fell to his knees, then rolled onto his side just a few feet short as the clock ticked down. Firefighters and candidates alike were shouting encouragement: "Get up! You're almost there! Dig it out! Dig it out!" He couldn't. When the tester called time, the candidate struggled to his feet, made it to the grass, and then fell to the ground again. He pounded the earth in frustration, planting his face in the grass and looking for all the world like a ballplayer on the losing team just after the last buzzer in the final NCAA basketball tournament.

His anguish at falling short was acute.

When a candidate washes out at the agility test, there are no "do overs." The candidate is done. Before one leaves, however, the Chief meets with that candidate for an exit interview. John Donahue, our Fire Chief, is superb and I suspect he does no small amount of counseling to help the candidate come to grips with the failure. Certainly this one, by the time he left, had a calmer look on his face and gave the Chief earnest thanks. The anguish may have still been there, but for now it was tempered.

Cold finally drove me away. After picking up Warren at the office, we came home to spend the rest of the day doing home-based things: instruments (Warren), laundry (me).

The anguish of the young candidate stuck with me all day. The situation with my mother, who is showing increasing signs of significant cognitive impairment, is moving to what I am calling "the next stage." Other people outside the smallest family circle are starting to notice things are amiss. Dad is starting to look haggard. Over the last several days, I've had lengthy phone and email conversations with two of my brothers regarding where we are now at. Dad has finally acknowledged that he is wearing down. We are looking into support groups. These conversations are necessary but draining, and I hang up or log off from them worn down myself. They are fraught with the possibility of misunderstandings even when we are all on the same page, because we are all filtering the story through our own relationship with our parents.

And then there is the mourning that I am doing and suspect my brothers and dad are too. It is hard to watch mom disappear. Add to that the complicated relationship I have had with my mother--a relationship I will not be able to go back to and finish smoothing out--and I worry that I am not up to the challenge of being a good enough daughter.

It is enough to make me fall to my knees and pound my frustration into the earth.

By Saturday night, I was tired and anxious and my chest was tight. So I turned to food--not to eat, although I did that too--but to make, to cook, to bake. Supper was a container of ropa vieja I found in the freezer (wisely set aside weeks ago by the Suzy Homemaker I sometimes internally harbor) that was just the right size for supper for the two of us. The house was scented with the pickling spices from the candied dills I made that afternoon, laced through with the cinnamon of the sauteed apples I'd prepared for homemade apple dumplings. Warren brought in a bucket of wood scraps for the fireplace and late into the evening we ate warm apple dumplings and watched the flames churn.

By happenstance, I am reading right now Making Piece, by Beth M. Howard. It is a memoir of "love, loss, and pie." (You know why I am reading it: pie.) I will not review it here, other than to say it is a keeper. But as I read it last night by the light of the fire, I realized that what I had been tasting all day was loss.

While the last of the apple dumpling dissolved on my tongue, I thought back to the candidate who had washed out that morning at the agility tests. His anguish was real and immediate. His grief was right there on display for everyone to see. But by the time he left, the Chief accompanying him out and sending him off with a hearty "Good luck," the candidate had regained his equilibrium. He waved at the firefighters and candidates who wished him well, and headed for home.

When I think about what we are facing as a family with mom, I feel not unlike that candidate. The clock has run. We don't get a "do over." It is time to come up off my knees, it is time to head further down the road.

A Fork in the Road

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Yogi Berra

The summer was a long road through concerts, through visits from Sam and trips with David, through Amy moving in. It wound through medical procedures sprinkled liberally on the older tier of the family. It rolled on through private times and public times.

The road rolled on into fall.  The medical matters are winding down. Symphony seasons have opened, first in Mansfield and then here in Delaware. Indianapolis and the percussion convention are just ahead, as is New York again for the orchestra conference. Halloween is just past, more holidays are in the offing.

The road indeed goes ever on, but we have come to a fork.

Over the last several months, my mother has been changing, slowly but surely. Her once frequent phone calls have now all but stopped. After a lifetime of dominating any conversation, she more often than not is quiet. When she pulls up short too many times in a conversation, stymied as to what comes next, she covers with “I’m brain dead” and makes a joke. She asks the same question within a few minutes of first asking it. And when those rare phone calls do come and she repeats the same story for the second time within minutes of the first telling, I afterwards hang up the phone quietly and just stand for a minute, gazing out into the backyard.

Some of us – “us” being me, my sister-in-law, and two of my three brothers – started comparing notes many months ago. Because Mom had major surgery earlier this summer, none of us said much more or raised the issue with Dad while they were preoccupied.

But we were watching all the same.

Recently, my youngest brother Mark and I, after weeks of comparing notes and concerns and fears, agreed it was time to say something to dad. With the backing of our spouses, we came up with a plan to meet at mom and dad’s when Mark and I could both be there.

Mark arrived first to work on his car; he phoned me to let me know he was en route. I arrived a little later to look for canning jars stored overhead in the garage. Dad, already out in the garage talking to Mark as we hoped he would be, climbed up with me to help get the jars down the stairs. After we both were back down the stairs, I asked, as casually as my suddenly uncertain voice would allow, about mom’s upcoming visit with her family physician. 

Mark shot me an appreciative look as dad answered. I then asked the hitherto unasked question.

“Dad, is mom all right?”

Mark stopped working. Dad looked at me. He hesitated in replying, and I took the pause to jump.

“I’m asking because we are noticing things.”

Dad cut right to the chase, which is his style. “You mean her memory? Yes, there are problems.”

The tension sagged out of the air. We all talked then, throwing our worries and notes one by one onto a growing stack. Dad listed the changes that he lives with now, both small and big changes of which we weren’t aware.  She has stopped reading books, which saddened me. She still works crossword puzzles, but more and more she asks my dad for help on the clues. Dad, a notoriously poor speller, barked a short, rueful laugh at this turn of events. 

The pile of worries and observations grew larger. It was painfully clear that mom is showing increasing signs of what the medical world calls “cognitive impairment.” It was painfully obvious that dad was relieved that he didn’t have to break the news to us.

Finally someone, Dad perhaps, said the word out loud.

Alzheimer’s.

Mom hates that word. Mom is terrified of that word. She much prefers “dementia,” which she thinks of as a different, less severe illness than Alzheimer’s.

Dementia, Alzheimer’s, senility.

The words all mean more or less the same thing: our family is at a fork in the road. And when you come to that particular fork, you take it. You have no choice. Mom has turned down a twisty fork that goes way over that way while the rest of us are still on the other path over here. We can still see each other and talk and laugh together, but looking up ahead, we know that at some point her path will diverge more steeply from ours and while we will always be able to see her on her path, she will no longer see us on ours.

In 1994, former President Ronald Reagan released a written statement that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He did so in the hope that others might be encouraged to seek early intervention and diagnosis, writing “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life.”

We are all journeying into the sunset of our lives. My dad does not pretend at 78 that his sunset is not most likely right around the corner. I know that my sunset will very likely come far earlier for me than if I had not been diagnosed with an incurable cancer.

And my mother? I fervently hope she is walking along, marveling at the brilliant golds and reds in the west, happily unaware of the gathering shadows of the oncoming night.

*************************

Postscript

I have had this piece written for several weeks, and delayed posting it until now. It has tugged at my conscience, it has pulled hard at my heart. My mother's cognitive impairment is a very difficult topic because it is so personal and so immediate. What finally made me decide to post it was my saying out loud, as I thought through the post for the nth time, "what is my motive?" 

My motive? To know that I am not alone. To know that we are not alone. 

I wrote this in mid-September and am posting it now in November. Some things are unchanged, especially mom’s continuing decline. What has changed is that we are now speaking aloud to each other about what is happening, at least to one another.  

No one mentions it to mom. (For those of you who know my mother, I would ask that you not feel you need to break the news to her.) I don’t know which of us will undertake that task. Dad recently tried to and she became so distraught that he quickly backtracked and calmed her down. 

It does not surprise me that he cannot bring himself to break her heart. My father has spent 59 years being protective of my mother. It seems that he is growing even more so as she slips away. He has spent his whole adult life calming her fears, giving her reassurance, being there for her. 

It does not surprise me that he will go along with her on the road for as long as possible. He will make the path as smooth as possible; he will stoop to clear away any debris.

Dad will hold mom's hand for as long as he is able.

My dear friend Katrina wrote me a long letter about what we are facing, having gone through it herself in her family. It was thoughtful and heartfelt, so much so that I copied the lines and sent them on to Mark so he and his wife could read them. She closed her comments with this: Finally, enjoy your Mom as much as you can for as long as you can. There will be glimmers of gains and lots of puddles. Only God knows the timing and we all have to live with that.

Enjoy your Mom as much as you can for as long as you can.   


We plan on it.

Juvenilia III: College Poems

More of my early poetry that escaped the Great Shredding is contained in a small notebook of poems I gave my mother for Christmas, 1975. Both my mother and her mother, my beloved Grandma Skatzes, wrote poetry, so I put together a small selection of poems by each of us for my mom's present that year.

I wrote in the introduction: Three generations of women and all of them found it necessary at some time to pick up a pen and make sense of their world through the written word. No one of them writes with the same style as the other two, but the similarities, the same blood in each of them, are evident. For this reason, the authors are listed as Skatzes, Skatzes Nelson, and finally Nelson, to show the progression through the decades. Maybe someday it will be extended to a fourth generation.

I am including two poems, one today and one tomorrow, from Three Generations: An Anthology.

**********

Wonder Bread

During the season, they were pushing football,   
    Each loaf of bread concealing a cardboard faced player:
    Cockcroft and Gries.
Smiling patiently, we extracted them and set them aside for youngest sibling.

But now, Christmas and all its tinsel brings a change.
No more hulking heroes these
But instead a game,
    Wondrous and childish:
    Mazes and secret circles to erase for answers.

Michel sees this newest toy and,
    Forgetful of his sixteen years,
Picks it up in eagerness. Catching my eye,
He lays it down with a self-conscious shrug.
"Hunh" says he.

Each of us, from our lordly adult heights,
Keeps a watch over the cards,
Waiting for the other to turn so we can race ourselves
    To the magic and secret circles of childhood.

Dancing with Mom

Mom stopped by to drop off some coupons the other day. “I know you don’t use coupons usually,” she said as she proffered them, “but I thought you’d use these.” She went on to tell me that she’d just come from having lab work and needed to get home to eat. I invited her in for a chat and some crackers.

That’s how far we have come as mother and daughter. There were decades in my life when we would have chatted at the door, me never opening it wide enough to let her in, or, if I was at her house, I never would have lighted long enough to warm the chair seat. Even when I was there, I wasn’t there. We were never estranged, but we were not all that close either.

Mom was very young when she married, eloping with my dad the winter of her senior year in high school. She never regretted it; she and my dad are still going strong after 56 years together. All the same, marrying and starting a family that young meant giving up other things, including being a carefree teenager. By the time I came along three years later, she’d already had two children, one of whom died in infancy, and life was moving fast.

There is no doubt I puzzled my mother. She wanted a girly girl and she got me. Her frustration shows in her entries in my baby book: “April shoved aside her doll to crawl after her brother’s cars and trucks.” “April hates dresses and prefers pants.”

As I grew older and more headstrong, the battles became more pitched. I didn’t want to learn to sew (mom was very good at it). I didn’t want my ears pierced (she pierced hers instead). I once asked a boy I was crazy about (and am now married to) on a casual date and she went ballistic: didn’t I know he was supposed to ask me? (Apparently not. Neither did he.)

And I wanted to go to college.

That last was probably our biggest hurdle. Her opposition started when I was in first grade and culminated my senior year in her throwing the acceptance letter at me from across the room, saying “I hope you’re happy.” The sound of the letter hitting the floor at my feet was the sound of my leaving: leaving my hometown, leaving my friends, leaving my roots, leaving mom.

For a long time afterwards, I kept my distance, even after I moved back to my hometown many years later. Nice to see you, mom, gotta go.

What brought us back together, in the end, was not the passage of time or my having children and finally “understanding” her or anything else predictable. What bridged the gap was being my being diagnosed with an incurable cancer five years ago and realizing in that instance that life really was too short and the present really was too achingly precious to hold mom at bay forever. And while I am not grateful for the cancer, I am grateful that I learned that lesson before it was too late.

When I was a high school student about to go to my first prom, my dad taught me how to box step. As my mom and I have reengaged, reconnected, reworked, and renegotiated the mother/daughter relationship, it is not unlike learning the box step so many years ago. One step forward, one step sideways, one step back, one step sideways, and then back forward again. Sometimes mom and I are out of step and sometimes the rhythm makes no sense, but at least we are finally dancing.