Namaste

I'm standing at a surprise birthday party chatting with a dear friend after the big surprise! moment has occurred. 

"Well, this is an above-average Sunday night," she says, as we juggle plates of cake with our cocktails, giggle at the custom balloons with our pal's face smiling out at us.

"I usually go to yoga on Sunday nights with Annie," I say. "We started going again after Christmas, and now it's been our thing: 5:30 class, and we come home to whatever dinner Jason's made, all glowy and zen for the week ahead. Last week her friend came along with us, and this week she's there right now with two friends --" I pause, mid-realization. "She and I used to go together, a mom-and-Annie thing, and now she's going with her friends; it's a metaphor." I look at my friend with big eyes, and she, one of the most compassionate people I know, looks back. Says nothing. Smiles helplessly.

On a walk with Jason a couple weeks ago, I told him I was probably going to be a little bit sad all the time for at least the next six months. He looked at me sideways, cautiously.

"Could you at least . . . wait until she leaves in August or September to get sad?" he asked.

I thought about it for a second. "I don't think so," I said. "It's already started." It's lurking around the edges of everyday moments. I've started staring at her for longer than necessary when she's doing homework at the dining room table, noticing how the round profile of her cheek is still identical to the curve of her toddler face, smelling her head surreptitiously when I can get close enough to her on her couch (she loves this, as you can imagine). I've gotten sentimental about the stinky socks she leaves on the floor around the house after practice, about the smell of her perfume, about the sound of her footsteps coming up the back stairs before she bursts into the house after a long day. 

Are there still moments, possibly daily, when a skirmish erupts and our voices get louder and louder as we parry and interrupt and raise our eyebrows across the kitchen island? There are.

Are there others, when we end up talking in the hot tub so long our fingers prune, when I happen to be upstairs when she's getting in bed and I scratch her back until she's almost asleep, when she shows me a TikTok she and her friend made and we laugh so much and watch it three times in a row? There are.

Same as it ever was, I know, and if I forget, I can read back through the things I wrote when she was three and had to be carried home from a playdate down the street under one arm, when she was five and heartbroken over the last day of kindergarten, when she baked her first cake or spent the whole day building with Legos or set a school record at the state meet or wrote the sweetest thank-you note to me for helping her with her college essays.

There are days when I'm dazed with gratitude for what we crammed in. I'll see a photo of her, age 10, hiking in the dunes under a resplendent sun, or her, age 13, eating dinner in a Parisian cafe at dusk, or her, playing the piano, or her, reading in bed, or her, chopping vegetables, and I think thank God we did that. Thank goodness those experiences are all tucked inside her, Russian nesting dolls of people and places and stories and skills she can take with her out into the world.

Other days, I feel panicky, start making mental lists (sometimes actual lists!) of books she has to read or documentaries she needs to watch or little bits of knowledge I suddenly worry she won't have when she needs to call on them. Does she know how to check her bank statement? Should I find her a self-defense course? What have we forgotten to teach her?

Sunday afternoon, before the party, I semi-accidentally fell asleep in Annie's bed for twenty minutes. She came in from outside, found me, and, in a rare moment of unforced cuddling, laid down next to me on top of the comforter. 

"Awww," I said, half asleep, cognizant even in my drowsy state that moments like this are rare and about to be rarer.

She held still for a minute, and it was just the sounds of our breathing, in sync, the way it is during class when we begin in child's pose, our mats next to each other. Sometimes I sneak a look to my left and marvel at the strong, lithe, sinewy body, give thanks for the strength and poise and inner knowing she's cultivated over seventeen years of practice in the real world, plus a few dozen classes next to me.

She held still for a minute, and it was just her long, blond hair in my face and my arm slung around her side. Then: "You're going to miss me so much when I'm gone!" She popped up and laughed. "I'm leaving for yoga," she said. "Can one of my friends use your mat?"

Pandemic Spring Deux

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of the date the world as we knew it screeched to a stop, so now we're doing things for the second time around, slightly differently: masks, always; grocery lines, still; family time, all the time. The crocuses are coming up in our yard, and it's St. Patrick's Day again, and I'm thinking about how to celebrate Easter for the second time during this strange season. 

Most every day of this last year, I've walked like it was my job. Excepting a break in January and February when winter kicked in and I stuck to the spin bike and treadmill in our basement Luxurious Home Gym, I've logged well over 10,000 steps a day, even getting obsessive enough about it to occasionally realize I'm short at 9pm and start doing laps inside my house to reach my goal. I'm on my third pair of Nikes. I've fallen hard for podcasts, and for a couple favorite walking buddies.

This morning was no different. I headed out, the sun slanting through the bare trees, noticed the first spring flowers poking up. Anna Quindlen's voice was in my ears and the geese returned noisily to the lake as I walked around it. There was a Gatorade bottle and a granola bar on a bench, nestled together with a note taped to them that said "Danny." 

I thought about the people I know who are sick right now, the big and little griefs of this year, Annie's college applications, what to cook for dinner. I thought about my faraway friends and how much I want to see them. I gave thanks for the little things that shine a light out of this mess for all of us: vaccinated dinners with my parents, soccer games with masks and elbow bumps, scientists and doctors and teachers and administrators who have crafted a good, hard path forward. I've felt stuck this year -- I'm sure I'm not the only one -- both literally (at home except for a lucky summer up north and one glorious week in a rented house on Anna Maria Island at New Year's) and figuratively, creatively. Like I'm not sure what to do with myself much of the time: walk, read, clean, get groceries, cook dinner, repeat. 

Meanwhile, the sun is returning, getting stronger every day. And I'm hoping for a little more light to see by as we chart a path forward.

Quarantine, Day 47

It's me on the side porch, still in workout clothes from my daily epic walk, grateful for the sunshine, the warmth, and the salad I just ate straight from the bowl while Annie did her math beside me. I am guiltily grateful, though, which is my one of my new normals: guiltily grateful for this Great Pause, for the lazy mornings and my family close and the lack of hustle that this situation has bequeathed. Since we’re healthy, and so far our savings is holding up, this pandemic has meant homemade bread and no alarm clocks and lots of podcasts and family dinner and Office marathons and naps and books and so much time it’s hard to describe. We’re rich with time: to create art, to let cinnamon rolls rise, to start each day with coffee together, to practice yoga for a full hour, to mix a cocktail before a phone call with a friend, to soak in the hot tub on the chilly nights and then come inside to play games and make sweet little peanut butter cups. 

It’s not always – not often – sunshiney side porch, happy hours, laughter, and ease. It’s just as often teenage angst, a family bickering over burps and loud chewing noises and wet towels on the floor and whose turn it is to clean up the cat barf. It’s everyone trying to be in the kitchen at once, it's someone constantly making tea and leaving the honey on the counter, it’s flour on the floor and loud phone-talking and no privacy ever and arguments about nail polish and Boggle words. It's another of my new normals: This is never going to end. We're trying to give grace and second chances, to be gentler with each other. When the wheels come off every 9th day or so, I remind our little quarantine pod that nobody is being their best self right now. Why do you keep saying that, Mom? 

It’s a gnawing anxiety about when normal will return, and what normal will even look like when it does. It’s one grieving a soccer season while still doing her ball work in the front yard, the other missing the buzz of a track meet but still lacing up her shoes every morning. It’s knowing without exactly knowing that we won’t, actually, be getting on a flight to Switzerland in June. It’s wondering when we’ll ever fly again. It’s my heart breaking when I think about the lives lost, the lives scraping by at the margins, the systems and the individuals who are suffering in all the ways we’ve been mostly able to ignore until now. It’s mainlining news first thing in the morning and last thing before bed even though all the podcasts say not to, and it’s the small bits of wisdom that keep popping up in different places, over and over, until I notice them and squirrel them away on a scrap of paper or share them in a conversation with a friend, ten feet apart in her front lawn. 

It’s what’s saving me right now: yoga teachers who keep sharing their online classes with absolutely everyone, the resilience of my girls, the generous spirit and culinary creativity of a husband who’s suddenly always around, the text threads with dear friends and occasionally their faces on a screen, the way people walking and running are keeping their distance but almost always saying hello and smiling when I meet them on the path, the spontaneous little acts of generosity in our community and our world, the smart scientists thinking so hard to create a way forward for everyone, Kelly Corrigan’s BYOB happy hours, an almond thingy from a friend for no reason, the fresh flowers I add to my cart whenever I brave the system for the Trader Joe’s run, French jazz during family dinner, sunshine, books, hope.

Behind the Scenes

I haven't written about this at all, but since September I've been involved in a unique leadership class in my city, where I get together monthly with thirty-some other local leaders and we learn about the challenges and opportunities in our area from a systems perspective. Each month has a focus (city history, diversity and inclusion, education, health, etc.), and the goal is that by the end of the year, we'll come away with a network of smart, connected people and some good information about the needs of our city, and that we'll each be better equipped to figure out how and where we can make a difference in the future.

All of this to say, I found myself in the passenger seat of a cop car on Thursday night as part of a fascinating shadowing experience before our November class on public safety. I'm not going to try to summarize lessons learned, but I wanted to write down some moments and memories, and this is the best place I can think of to do that. I've changed or abbreviated names and any identifying details.

*****

I've arrived at the station at 6:15 p.m., donned a bullet-proof vest, met Officer W and the K-9 companion B, who barks his head off at me each time I enter and exit "his" squad car, and we're off to our first stop, a house on the west side where a search warrant has already been used to enter a home where someone was dealing drugs. Before we get there, a team has already been inside, served the search warrant, secured the house, arrested the dealer, found most of the drugs -- and, somehow in the chaos, shot and killed a dog that was living in the home.

W and I make small talk on the way there. He's married, a dad, been a cop for 14 years. Calm, good sense of humor, tells me I can literally ask him anything I want for the whole night, stay as long as I want up until his shift is over at 6:30 a.m., stay in the car or get out, whatever. He warns me not to try to touch dog B, who will quite literally try to bite my fingers off if I reach through the screen that divides us from him. I try to act unfazed by this.

Officer W has me wait on the sidewalk with the supervising officer while he takes B inside to sniff out any remaining contraband. I make small talk with him. How long has he been on the force? Twenty-nine years. Where are the people who were inside? In the back of that SUV, handcuffed. Who's that woman across the street, pacing back and forth? The owner of the home, who wasn't there when the search warrant was executed. She's not the dealer, but the people who were dealing were living in her house, and now she'll lose her home. She's section 8, he says, and she knew what was going on. What happened to the dog? He tried to attack the SWAT team. He says he loves dogs, has one at home. In his 29 years on the force, he's only shot a dog once. Hated to do it, but the dog was coming right for him; even the dog's owner agreed it had to be done.

Officer W comes back out, puts B back in the back of the car, says there was a lot of blood in there. Let's go.

*****

We're poking around the southeast side when the next call comes in. It's another drug bust, this one just a mile or two from my house. It's dark now, and Officer W uses his spotlight to find the address, but I see the house with its door off its hinges and all the lights on before I see the house number. We park, get B out and put his harness on, and Officer W tells me to wait on the porch while he searches a car, then heads inside.

The glass from the door frame shattered when the police took the doors off its hinges to enter and it's all over the front porch and the entry. It was a beautiful old door, very much like what's on the front of my 1930s bungalow at home. Inside I can see an older black woman with gray hair in her housedress, sitting on the couch, crying quietly. The house is modest but clean and well-decorated, with candles on the coffee table and houseplants, and it actually looks a lot like my grandparents' house except for the framed pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr. that decorate the living room walls.

One of the SWAT officers, a woman with a mask covering all of her face except her eyes, asks the woman kindly if she has any tissues around. The woman shakes her head no, so the officer returns with a roll of toilet paper, which she sets on the coffee table after offering it to the woman. The old woman continues to cry silently while six or seven officers root through her belongings. They open every drawer, take out each box, look inside the cupboards and under the couch cushions while the dog goes methodically from room to room. The cops chat with each other quietly, jovially while they search and the woman just keeps crying and I stand there feeling helpless (who will fix that door? Will they just leave the broken glass? How can this grandmother possibly be a drug dealer? Why did they break down the door?), feeling like something is vaguely, awfully wrong. I try to silently telepath genuine empathy to the woman as she cries, find myself praying one of the Anne Lamott prayers, Help, Help, until Officer W reappears. I never see the older black man, who's back in the kitchen, but as we drive away W tells me that an undercover officer bought crack from him just yesterday.

*****

A CPS/DFS employee has requested back-up at an apartment complex; the employee is going to try to talk to "mom" about the violent incident between mom and dad earlier in the day that landed both of them -- and their four-year-old daughter -- in the hospital with injuries. We're waiting to meet her in the apartment parking lot and W is telling me there was a homicide here last year, that this is also the place where the woman stabbed her boyfriend to death a few months ago: "Did you hear about that on the news?" I shake my head no, say I don't really watch the news. I can see televisions flickering in each of the apartment windows, and I ask whether it's safe to assume that behind each of these doors is a weapon, and W says yes, probably. He says these are the calls that can take a turn, situations that start out calm but then you're talking about removing a child from the home, or maybe the dad is back in the apartment and still angry that the mom called the cops in the first place, and you never know how things are going to turn out. It's the first and only time I feel afraid that night.

The CPS employee arrives, and we knock on the door for the mom to let us in. She's expecting us, it seems, and I stand around the corner as W ascertains that it's just mom, four-year-old, and one other woman in the apartment. No dad. The CPS worker seems sufficiently comfortable with the situation that she says we can leave, but W says we'll wait outside in case she needs us. We stand outside in the dark and the cold, and he says it's too bad, the cycle of poverty that's happening in these places. He wonders if maybe Michigan should start making assistance contingent on recipients passing a clean drug test, like they do in Florida, and I say that the main problem with that is how many recipients are minor children. He concedes. I say, what do you think the chances of this four-year-old girl are? He says, sadly, slim to none.

*****

We're cruising Eastern and we see a lone woman turn on her heel and walk back toward the shadows as soon as she sees the car. W turns right, turns right again, and circles around to get another look. "We don't usually get much prostitution around here, but . . . " he trails off, and we see her again, standing on the sidewalk, and again she spins around and starts walking in the other direction as soon as she sees our car. W drives straight to her and parks, gets out of the car to start asking her questions.

I get out (B barks his head off at me, as usual, every time he re-remembers I'm in his car) and listen as W quizzes her politely: What's she doing out here? Where's she going? Does she have any ID on her? I feel sorry for the girl. She looks maybe 20, 22, and she says she's just trying to figure out which bus will get her home. She was visiting her family and she worked all day and she can't figure out if the number 4 has already come for the last time or not.

W asks for her name, which she gives, and then for her birthdate, which causes her to hesitate for just a few beats too long. He takes it down, along with her address and phone number, and we get back in the car so he can get on the radio to the dispatcher. "I know she's lying to me, I just don't know why," he says, as he has the dispatch run her information.

"Why would she lie to you about her name?" I ask, clueless law-abiding mom of two who's never so much as been pulled over for speeding. He says most likely there's a warrant for her arrest. A few minutes later, the dispatcher responds: There is a woman of that name living at that address, but the birthdate is off by two years and the last name spelling has two letters transposed. Aha, says W. I knew it. I'm still looking at her, standing bravely in the cold dark night, trying to get home from work while this officer questions her just for walking away. She wasn't doing anything illegal, I think. She's tired. She's afraid. She's just nervous. But then again, she did hesitate strangely before giving her birthdate.

Meanwhile, W asks the dispatch to find out who else lives at that address. "That's her," he says, and writes down another name, which, when he runs it, he finds has three warrants for arrest. My eyes get big. He gets back out of the car, tells her calmly he knows who she really is and she can save herself a charge if she tells him outright. She breaks down, admits her real name, and he cuffs her and neatly puts the contents of her purse on the hood of the car while he waits for another squad car to come take her to jail.

*****

No sooner has W put away his notepad than another call comes in, a request for B's tracking abilities on the west side, where five people stole a car, took it for a Dukes-of-Hazard joyride, crashed it after being pursued, and all made a run for it when the car came to a stop. "You have your seatbelt on?" W asks, and when I say yes he guns it down Burton, sirens on and lights flashing, and we start going so fast once we get on 131 that at one point I'm smiling in spite of myself. (It's fun.)

When we get to the scene, there's a purple car with a front so twisted and wrecked, all the doors wide open, police officers milling around waiting for B to come sniff out what he can.

"People really do that?" I ask, as W puts B's harness on, "People really run from the scene? I thought that was just in the movies," I say. "All the time," says W. In fact, it happens one more time that night.

*****

Amazingly, that is not all I witnessed over the course of one evening riding shotgun with Officer W. I'm leaving out the second "driver-made-a-run-for-it" abandoned car, two routine traffic stops (he lets both drivers go with warnings), and a multi-car stakeout to look for three attempted burglars (as far as I know, no luck finding them). Around 2 a.m. I tell W I've seen more than I ever imagined and I'm ready to head home to bed. He drives me back to my car, where I remove my bullet-proof vest, shake his hand, and thank him -- but not before we've talked candidly about the new police chief, what it's like to live with a K9 dog at home, the pros and cons of dashboard cameras and voice recorders, whether or not the average citizen should carry a gun or keep one in their home, where to get good coffee, and which of our kids are the biggest pains to wake up and get off to school in the morning.

I drive home marveling at the things happening behind the scenes in the mid-sized Midwestern town I call home on a regular Thursday night in October. I drive home with the strong sense that W is one of the good guys, but that even if most of them are one of the good guys, they're ultimately engaged in a nightly losing battle of Whack-a-Mole: seize the drugs from this house, sure, and then watch the same dealer pop up two blocks over a few months later; hope the CPS worker trying to resolve an abusive situation can protect a four-year-old girl, but know the accident of her birth makes a bright future pretty unlikely; maybe get lucky and track the drivers of that stolen purple car, but know someone else is going to steal another car tomorrow night. I don't know how they do it. I also don't know what it feels like to be the old woman crying on her couch as her home is searched so casually, or to be the 22-year-old woman arrested on a street corner for three outstanding warrants, or the four-year-old girl whose parents hurt her during their fight. And I definitely don't know what the long-term, sustainable, system-wide solutions are for any of these people or their problems. But I'm grateful for the glimpse into this world, and to Officer W for keeping me safe last Thursday night.

Read Elsewhere: Overwhelmed

From the book Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols:

Too many of us live overwhelmed -- suffocated by work, personal conflicts, the intrusion of technology and media. Trying to do everything, we end up stressed about almost anything. We check our voice mail at midnight, our e-mail at dawn, and spend the time in between bouncing from website to website, viral video to viral video. Perpetually exhausted, we make bad decisions at work, at home, on the playing field, and behind the wheel. We get flabby because we decide we don't have the time to take care of ourselves, a decision ratified by the fact that those "extra" hours are filled with e-mailing, doing reports, attending meetings, updating systems to stay current, repairing what's broken. We're constantly trying to quit one habit just to start another. We say the wrong things to people we love, and love the wrong things because expediency and proximity make it easier to embrace what's passing right in front of us. We make excuses about making excuses, but we still can't seem to stop the avalanche. All of this has a significant economic cost as "stress and its related comorbid diseases are responsible for a large proportion of disability worldwide."

Read Elsewhere: Anna Quindlen

From Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen:

"Sometimes I tell my children - well, actually, frequently I tell my children - that the single most important decision they will make is not where to live, or what to do for a living, it's who they will marry. Part of this is the grandchild factor; I want mine to have two great parents if at all possible. But part is because the span of their years will be so marked by the life they build, day by day, in tandem with another."

On Not Eating Corned Beef and Cabbage

We've been quietly going to another church since January. People, I know, switch churches all the time for all kinds of reasons. But we'd been going to the same Catholic church since we moved here in late 2006: both girls in Sunday School, me volunteering, Jason cantoring, a fair amount of familiar faces. And Jason and I have been going to a Catholic church in one form or another since we were married, after a few months of struggling to figure out how, exactly, we were going to meld our different ideas about God and communion and worship into something that would work for our entire future family. He grew up Catholic, I didn't, and a bunch of factors (some more legitimate than others) swayed us to choose his tradition.

The new church isn't Catholic.

I love the new church so much I could almost cry just thinking about it.

*****

You know how some people make a very big deal out of eating corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day? Well, maybe you don't, but I do, because I live with one. Jason has little - if any - Irish blood in his background, but he loves to buy a giant corned beef sometime mid-March, get his hands on a can of cabbage or two, and boil up a big, stinky Irish dinner for the holiday, even if he's the only person in our family who will eat it. He genuinely loves the taste, and he's adopted the tradition as his own. There's something joyful and meaningful to him about celebrating the holiday that way. He likes to have a few guys over, carve the beef into slices for reubens, and watch March Madness basketball. He likes the way the meal reminds him that spring is just around the corner. He likes how it smells and how it tastes.

In other, more Irish parts of the country, I imagine there are whole Irish families who annually celebrate in much the same way. It's part of their culture, and their grandmother or dad has been cooking this meal on March 17 for as long as they can remember. There are probably people in those families who don't necessarily love the taste of the beef or the smell of the cabbage, but they look forward to the holiday because of the tradition it represents and because it's a tie to their heritage. They eat the dinner. And even if the specific food is not their favorite, they likely enjoy the familiar celebration.

*****

The Catholic Church had become like corned beef and cabbage to me. After over a decade of practicing the faith, it had never come to feel familiar. I had never been able to embrace the tradition it represents or connect with its culture. In addition, I had not been able to embrace it as an outsider, either; I don't genuinely like how it tastes and smells, it's not joyful or meaningful to me, and I wouldn't want to adopt it as my own.

Here's the thing: because I didn't genuinely enjoy it, and because I wasn't connecting with it out of familiar tradition, I had stopped eating it at all. I'd forgotten that there was a time in my life when I looked forward to going to church, when I genuinely enjoyed the traditions and connections, when I left church feeling like I'd been gathered around the table at my grandparents' house and was going back out to the world, fortified for the week and reminded of how loved I was. So I didn't want to go, ever, at all, period.

*****

I have plenty of friends and family who find joy and meaning in the Catholic church, either because they genuinely appreciate the doctrine and worship style or because it's been a big part of their cultural and familial tradition for years. It's their home, or it's their adopted home, and they find joy and meaning and delicious sustenance there, and I am so very happy for them about that. But as our girls grew older and as Jason and I thought more about the messages we want them to hear and see, the Catholic church wasn't working for us.

So a few months ago we went to not-a-Catholic church again for the first time in ages. We've been going pretty regularly. And we never leave without a deep sense of gratitude that we spent an hour there. I remember the first time we were there for communion and the minister gave a little spiel that went something like, We don't presume you to be Christian in a certain way; it is simply our hope to be Christian to you. And that means that absolutely everyone is welcome here, and that anyone with any shred of belief is welcome to join us around this table, and I could have wept on the spot with relief. The rules and dogma and doctrinal scoldings at our old church left me feeling resentful, beaten down, and defeated. The Catholic church, when asked, "What are you sure of?" replies: "Everything. Fall in line." But here - here! right in our city - was a church that, when asked the same question, replies: Barely anything. But come figure it out with us.

Don't get me wrong; I like rules: speed limits, bedtimes, ask-to-be-excused-before-you-leave-the-table, pay your taxes, wait in line, be a good neighbor. But when it comes to God, I've long gone on record as being a little suspicious of anyone who seems to be too sure about anything. It is a MYSTERY. Who among us can really know much for sure beyond the Greatest Commandment (Love God) and the second, "like unto it," (Love one another)? Why raise our girls in a church where they, no matter how holy or wise or effective a leader, can't lead because of their gender? Why endure doctrinal scoldings during sermons about things that we never agreed with in the first place? Why remain a part of a church that wants to silence dissension, keep people away from the table, and offer communion based on a set of narrow parameters?

From now on, we'll be over here, eating at a table that nourishes us, celebrating the hol(y)days in a way that makes better sense to us, creating our own little family traditions.