Family Memories

Family.

That's what Thanksgiving has always been about for us. Food is fine, but we haven't always had a turkey. Mostly, it's about spending time with family.

The fact that we had pot roast on the table on Thursday evening, since we were waiting for turkey until Saturday with my mom's family, was completely irrelevant compared to the fact that my little girls were sitting with their grandparents, that my husband was next to my grandmother, and the uncle who lived with us for a while when he was in college was across the table with his wife and son.

My sister and her husband had their Thanksgiving meal with his family, but before they left, Uncle D went outside with Joy and they built a snowman together, followed by a tramp through the fields. Uncle D is my littles' favorite person in the entire world.

Although I think Great-Uncle C might be close in Grace's eyes - she snuggled on his lap most of Thanksgiving Day when we weren't eating, rubbing Shiloh's (the dog) head and sucking her thumb. She was in a state of bliss most of the day.

This photo slays me. Mom peeling carrots; D chopping them; Joy eating blueberries and casting her eyes to heaven in disgust that the adults are not taking her excellent advice on the proper preparation of glazed carrots. Every time any one of us did anything that weekend, a little voice chirped, "I can help!" and a little shadow followed behind. My sister says that when Mom was washing dishes and she (sister) was cooking, Joy stood on a stool between them and directed them with waves of her hands, like a conductor of a symphony orchestra.

This is A, my cousin's youngest boy. He's just a month and a half older than Grace. The kids weren't at all sure what to make of each other at first on Saturday, at GG's, but after playing outside with the bigger boys (Carl, D, and my cousin C), they warmed up to each other. Grace still likes Shiloh the best, but she asked about A all day on Sunday. In this picture, they are reading stories and listening to songs and all three of them humming along. Joy was in her element with two younger ones to boss. Usually we hang out with older kids or babies, so this was great for her.

My memories of Thanksgiving all center around family - grumping about having to sit at the kids' table at Dad's parents', eating caramels and divinity and Mom's AH-MAZING Tollhouse Pie and choking at all the cigarette smoke at Mom's parents'. Somehow, even the smoke, that made my sister and me horribly ill every year, doesn't seem so bad in memory, now. It's all just part of what makes up the family - loud, laughter, and smoke. At Dad's family, it was loud, laughter, and my cousins getting into trouble.

The constant, through every holiday, no matter which family was hosting it? Laughter and love.

And that's what we had this year. That's the heritage my children have been born into. Nothing could make me happier than to see that particular tradition handed down another generation.

I can't wait to see what the second-cousins group photos look like in ten years!

A run of luck

This has just been an exhausting week. It seems like every water-bearing appliance in my house is conspiring against me; the condo board raised their monthly fee by $50; Lulu had a cold, which she kindly passed to me. And then my managers at work asked me today, very nicely, if I would consider working my full 20 hours next week to make deadline, despite the fact that I haven't taken one lick of PTO all year and was really looking forward to it, despite the fact that from Tuesday through Saturday, I am going to be visiting family 200 miles away from my computer.

This afternoon, I pattered around the house in desultory kind of way, folding random sweaters and seeking pairs for tiny, solitary baby socks, blinking past the aura of an impending migraine. Feeling sorry for myself. Allowing a few tears to squeeze past my eyelids and drop down onto my shirtfront.

And then I found it, at the back of a desk drawer: a Christmas present from last year that I had forgotten about, a voucher from J.D. to a local spa. I had planned to use it for some pre-baby beautifying, but then I was put on bed rest and then Lulu was born, and then in the hassle of NICU and swaddlers and leaking boobs, I forgot.

I turned it over in my hands, which were suddenly shaking with hope. Please don't be expired. Please don't be expired.

It hadn't expired. I picked up the phone then and there and called to book myself a massage, a facial, a haircut and manicure. We have a lot of packing to do, a long car ride ahead of us next week, all the tantrums and nursing strikes that go along with being in a strange place, far away from home ahead of us yet...but the week after next, I have some SERIOUS pampering to look forward to.

And there was suddenly a spring in my step that hadn't been there before.

Then my mother called. J.D. and I are driving down in a few days, but she can't wait to see Lu, and wants to drive up this weekend. If I have anything to do this weekend, she'll be willing to watch the baby and give me a few hours for myself.

Suddenly, I see a way out from underneath my mounting workload. Feeling greedy, I asked my mom if she'd be willing to babysit tomorrow night so that I can go to see J.D.'s band play a show downtown.

"Are you serious?" she said. "I'd love to."

The migraine began to lift.

And now I'm cuddled up on the couch with a steaming bowl of pho to help my stuffy nose, and some illegal episodes of Downton Abbey sent to me by a friend queued up on the TiVo.

There's a saying in these here parts: if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes.

There's a saying rattling around in my head after my run of luck: if you don't like your mood, wait half a day.


Because everything just might turn out all right.

A weekend without Daddy

So J.D. went out of town this weekend. Note to friends and family: please stop getting married in cool faraway places. We are poor, and we have a baby that we can't take on a plane and who views the car as a torturemobile spiriting her toward her doom. Also, I do not like having the full yoke of parenting squarely on my shoulders. If J.D. ever leaves me with primary custody of the kid, I am going to have to join a cult just so that I have someone around to tell me when I am doing something stupid, like letting the baby have a taste of the fake butter goo in my bag of microwave popcorn.

So I went home to spend the weekend with my family. They are v. v. good at telling me when I'm doing something stupid, so I feel safe with them.

We had a busy weekend. We gave Lulu her first taste of solid food (not counting the popcorn goo).

It was funny. While she happily nommed the fake chemical butter sludge, she kind of acted like the organic bananas and carefully expressed breastmilk I fed to her, one fingerfull at a time, were poison of the rankest degree.

Those are tears in her eyes. TEARS for the saddest banana in the world.

After the first rush of crying, she seemed to start to warm up to the whole eating thing. But she didn't seem to enjoy it as much as you would think a baby who rocketed from the first percentile to the 85th percentile in weight in a mere four months would enjoy real, honest-to-goodness food.

My child: defying expectations since March 2011.

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We went to the beach! Because we are contrarians, my family, all of us, we saved our first beach visit of the year and the first of Lulu's entire life for a 60-degree day at the tail end of a rainy weekend in SEPTEMBER. The surf was rough and the beach was deserted, except for some people playing with their dog and a couple posing for engagement pictures.

My dad did his best Richard Nixon impression in his work clothes, walking on the sand in his suit and dress shoes:

I dabbled Lulu's feet in the waves, and watched her brow screw up in confusion as she touched sand for the first time.

I love the beach. I especially love Ocean View. It's a humble bay beach, kind of scrubby, ringed with twisted live oaks, dive bars, and wind-stunted pine trees. Real houses border right onto the sand, where real people live year round. One of those houses, a modest brick rancher, belonged to my great-grandparents, and was the hangout for everybody in the family for forty years. It's long since been sold, but it feels like our house, still, and so the beach still feels like our beach.

I know that in a couple of years, a trip to the beach with Lulu will involve a long hot walk over burning sand with bags and bags of sunscreen and umbrellas and toys and shovels and snacks and water and OH MY GOD IS THAT A SHARK? and WHY CAN'T I SEE YOU ARE YOU DROWNED? and NO, I SAID WE ARE LEAVING AND I MEANT IT GET BACK HERE. Long gone will be the days of baking thoughtlessly in the sun with a stack of magazines and a pack of cigarettes. I know that having kids is going to ruin the beach for me.

So I am glad we got to enjoy it together at least once.

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The weather continued to be beautiful through Monday, and Monday night, I decided that I wanted to get some fresh air as I slept. My mom and aunt came in as I was getting ready for bed and saw the bedroom window wide open, Lulu's portacrib perched right under it.

And this was apparently one of the stupid things that my family is not afraid to tell me I am doing. Because. The crib. Under the window. I was just asking for my child to be stolen away from me in the night. A terrible burglar was going to creep in and take her. They were sure of it. They saw it on America's Most Wanted. There was that woman who killed herself after Nancy Grace accused her of murdering her kid even though she wasn't a suspect? Her baby was stolen out of his crib in front of an open window on a night JUST LIKE TONIGHT.

It really isn't worth arguing statistics with them. Especially not my mom. She lectured me for weeks about taking down a huge heavy mirror over Lulu's crib in our room at home and I sighed and didn't want to, but then I finally did and the next day THERE WAS AN EARTHQUAKE. It was like God reached down his mighty hand and said in my mother's voice, "I TOLD YOU SO." My mother's nagging has now been sanctified by God, and she knows (KNOWS) that she is the only thing standing between my child and certain death.

So I closed the window. And then when she left, I opened it again.

And then I had the kind of really delicious night you have when you sleep in the fresh air and it's all cool and then I woke up at 6 AM and I looked over and there was one perfect beam from the rising sun falling on the crib, illuminating it, and IT WAS EMPTY. Lulu was NOT THERE.

And I freaked out. And I am ashamed to say that most of the freaking was not, oh my GOD, my baby has been kidnapped, so much as it was oh my GOD, my baby has been kidnapped and my mom is going to be so mad at me.

I sat there, doing what I usually do in situations like this. I tried to figure out a way I could blame this on J.D.

But he was in Maine! This was all me. I'd lost my child and now I would have to go on Nancy Grace and kill myself.

I had just taken the first ragged breath of hyperventilation when my aunt came in holding the baby who had apparently been crying in her crib all morning while I slept on, unawares (more evidence that I am a BAD MOTHER). Lulu had a poopy diaper, and my aunt doesn't do poopy diapers, and I was so relieved, and nobody mentioned the WIDE OPEN WINDOW RIGHT THERE and all was well.

All the same, I was glad when J.D. got back yesterday, because now if this happens again, I can blame it on him. And also because I missed him. But mostly because he brought me pretty earrings. From Maine.

I'll keep it with mine

My mother's family--cousins, aunts, uncles, greats--all lives in the same town I (and they) grew up in. My dad's family, however, is scattered across the country, from the East Coast to the West Coast and all in between. When I go home for a visit, I usually see bits and pieces of the large puzzle of my mom's family. I hardly ever get to see dad's all in one place.

But over Labor Day weekend, the stars aligned. My dad's sister came into D.C. from the Pacific Northwest for a work conference. My aunt and uncle, who live an hour out of the city, decided to drive in to see her. Not wanting to feel excluded, their sister, who lives in the Midwest, decided to drive down. Then we all drove down to the beach, where my parents and extended family live, as one big wagon train of folks and fun. So much of my family--mom's side and dad's--all in one place. It was heaven.

The visit was perfectly timed. Not only because the weather was perfect, or that we could all say goodbye to summer together, or that there were no hurricanes or earthquakes, but because, selfishly, I wanted to show off my child at her best. And Lulu is just a peach at this stage of her development. She's little enough still to be squishy and cuddly, a perfect helpless smoosh of baby who just wants to be held and cuddled. But she's old enough now to be fun. She smiles and coos and jabbers and leans over toward people when she likes someone and wants them to hold her up, the first compliment she's ever been able to give. She laughs at everybody's jokes. She's obliging that way. I loved being able to see my family interact with her. And I loved seeing her interact with them.


She was very popular, as you can see.

There were so many wonder moments for me in this weekend visit. Seeing Lulu with her cousin, Kay, who's eleven and the most awesome kid. That was one. They already love each other so much. Kay is an only child, and after the difficult pregnancy I had, there's a very real chance that Lulu might be, too. I worry about that, about her possibly lacking the kind of bond that I have with my own sister. But Kay calls Lulu "Sissy," the way my sister does with me. "She's my sister," is how Kay introduces Lulu to people. "My sister of the heart," she says.
A quick kiss isn't just a kiss, then, you see. It's a sweet little moment between sisters. It's the start of a lifelong friendship.

Seeing Lulu with my Aunt Judy, who is young and cool and who I always have looked up to--I like to think that I was the Lulu to her Kay. She has two great, creative, funny, passionate, super-smart kids, a wicked sense of humor, an adventurous spirit and is pretty much my role model for all things parenting, if not all things in general. I don't get to see her often, and when I do, I want to get her opinion on everything, to talk things over, to study her and learn about how to do the things she's done. During this visit, I found myself watching her with Lulu, watching so intently, to see how to do it, to make sure that I do things the right way.


There was one picture I took, of Lulu and her Mammaw, my mom, that reminded me so much of a picture of me and my own Mammaw, one that is creased and a little worn from being carried to every law school final, so that I could have her smile there with me for support, urging me on.

I love the thought that one day she'll take this picture with her to her first surgery or when she plays for the first time at Carnegie Hall or to clown college for her make-it-or-break-it juggling final. We're setting the bar high for her, obviously.) I know Lulu's not really laying down memories yet, but until she can, I'll keep them for her.

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On our last day in town, we caught up with some old friends--both mine and Lulu's. Mike is my oldest friend in the world--I met him the first day of kindergarten, twenty-six years ago this month. We went all through school together, elementary and middle and high school, where we met Sarah, and Erin, who became Mike's wife. Almost a year ago exactly we all found out that we were having babies, and that we were due exactly one week after another, like stairsteps. Of course life is full of ups and downs, and we ended up, thanks to prematurity and going over due, missing our due dates by a mile. But our kids are still like stairsteps: Lulu was born in March, Erin and Mike's little boy in April, and Sarah's in May, a week or two later than expected. Whenever J.D. and I are in town, we like to catch up with our friends and favorite little fledgling families.


As you can see from the photo, the kids don't seem to take too much notice of each other right now. But I know that they'll be fast friends someday. And I love it so hard, the symmetry of it: my oldest friend's kid being my kid's oldest friend. I love that Lulu has friends, already, even if she doesn't have, you know, fine motor skills and control of her bladder. Friends are far more important than those things, anyway. Right?

By the time we left, Monday evening, I was fighting allergies and sunburn, nursing an ear infection, worrying about work. I was also about ready to kill all of these people I love so dearly, as my sleep-deprived child wailed for the third day straight for her nap and was denied it by all of the people who wanted to play with her and love on her. I just wanted to go home and go to sleep, but we had a four-hour drive ahead of us, made even longer by the myriad stops I knew we would have to take to soothe our screaming infant. My mother and I started World War III as we packed the car over whether or not the baby would succumb to overheating and fry like an egg if I made her wear SOCKS on the long ride home.

"Why the shit do I put up with them?" I asked J.D., as we drove northward, homeward. It was finally quiet--except for Lulu grizzling and the ringing that had started up in my sinus-goop-logged ear. "They're so crazy. They're all insane."

"Yeah," he said. "They are. But they're worth it."

And I didn't say so--it would only encourage him!--but he's right, you know.