Mom in the Mirror

A moving decision

Sometimes what appears to be a blessing can turn out to be a curse.

At least that's how I felt when faced with a momentous decision that my accommodating husband willingly left in my somewhat shaky hands.

I had lived in North Carolina for almost 15 years, and my husband had lived here almost 25, when we were unexpectedly faced with the opportunity to move to a large city close to the beach. I grew up in Chicago and still missed the urban atmosphere. My husband grew up in a small N.Y. coastal village and still missed the water.

It seemed like an easy choice to make, except that it wasn't.

Not only was I evaluating our future prospects just days after my father's death, which made the idea of any dramatic change terrifying to me, but I was engaged in the process not just for myself, but for my husband and my son, with little input from them other than, "I love you and I'll do whatever you want," and "Disneyland's an hour away, let's go!"

After two visits and tremendous trepidation, I finally decided that finding a new school for my son and a new home and community for my family was too overwhelming while the foundation shifted under my feet. I decided that rather than move immediately, we would stay put until I felt ready to choose a life that felt like it would include some comfort along with new challenges.

And then I was given the gift of time. After unwrapping and savoring it, I realized that standing still was not the solution. I was able to make lists of the pros and cons, gather more information about our options, and eventually reach a second level-headed conclusion: accepting this new job and moving would be ideal for us as long as we could do it on our timetable. I was fortunate to have a future employer who agreed.

Nevertheless, we are in for some frightening moments -- the final hugs from friends who have nurtured and supported us, some for decades; saying goodbye to the home that has trails of our memories embedded in the pine floors; crossing the state line for the last time as a resident and settling in new territory.

This process has reminded me of an essay by Joan Didion that I discovered as a high school student. She was writing about self-respect and described a scene from the old West that exemplified how a self-assured family reacted to its home being invaded by American Indians. She said that people with self-respect go into a situation with their eyes wide open, knowing that Indians (as she referred to them) are a given. In one form or another, she says, they always are.

I have no doubt she is right. And there will, no doubt, be many tear-filled transitions: the first day of school, the first weekend without plans, the first failure that finds me flopping around emotionally because my safety net is gone. But I know I'll create a new safety net, a new life with new plans for myself and my family, a new beginning, because the most important things we take with us will not be packed in the boxes the movers will bring. They are inside us, and they go wherever we do.

This LifeFiles column originally appeared on about 70 TV station websites managed by Internet Broadcasting Systems.

My family's love affair with food

My father recently had heart surgery, and while we were waiting to hear whether he would survive, my family talked nonstop about food.

My sister changed her eating habits and her life in the half-dozen years since she moved away from home. She lost more than 100 pounds over three years and developed an exercise routine that keeps her healthy.

But that afternoon, reunited in a suburban hospital, she was obsessed with getting an egg roll from what used to be her favorite Chinese restaurant. I was determined to eat a confection I could only find in Chicago: a thick, gooey, open-faced apple pancake that is like eating a sweet cloud.

My stepmother was mentally reviewing her collection of Gourmet magazines, cookbooks, and newspaper clippings, trying to uncover the secret to the apple pancake I coveted.

If she had unearthed it, she would no doubt have had the ingredients on hand. She keeps her freezer so well stocked that she literally has to tape it shut for fear the frozen foods will fall on an unsuspecting ice cream seeker.

It was not just my sister, stepmother, and I that were interested in our next meal. My stepbrother -- a professional chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America -- was worrying aloud about when his kitchen gear would arrive from Mexico, where he had opened and then left a restaurant. He had been living without his pots and pans for months and was finding it unbearable.

I don't think food was on the conversational menu because it is a neutral topic, unlikely to elicit the intense emotions we were already anxiously feeling for my father. The fact is, my family could make a living debating whether the best pizza is deep dish or thin crust and where to find the ultimate hot dog.

And I don't think it was just that food was something we all had in common, in spite of our various political and social views.

I believe food is essential not just as sustenance for our survival as a species, but that it is central to American family life.

My family's love affair with food was in some ways typical. My mother, father and sister have been overweight off and on over the years. They have, but almost never at the same time, found success with diets and then rebounded back to their round shapes. I apparently inherited the metabolism of someone farther up the family tree who is, in spite of what she eats, effortlessly thin, the root of some serious sibling rivalry.

My father worked long hours, my mother socialized endlessly, and my sister and I were eight years apart, so the bunch of us rarely shared a meal around the same table, but we did come to love some of the same foods, many of them ethnic -- a brunch of bagels, cream cheese, lox and smoked whitefish -- some specific to our family, like my dad's barbequed chicken, cooked and consumed poolside.

Special occasions provided the palate with extra incentive to reunite with far-flung cousins and other kin. My aunt's sweet potato casserole and turkey were unlike any I've had since, making Thanksgiving my favorite holiday.

And in spite of the numerous ways I've distinguished myself from her over the years, I cannot watch a movie without extra butter on my popcorn, just like my mom.

But moving away from home presented culinary challenges. There were so many foods I loved but never learned to cook, and so many hometown haunts that did not have franchises in the places I have lived since.

Over time, I learned to love new foods (shrimp and grits, catfish, my mother-in-law's fried chicken), and to be more experimental. But nothing will ever replace the comfort I feel eating creamy mashed potatoes.

My father survived to eat breakfast the next morning and to prove Shakespeare got it backwards. It is food that is the music of life. Play on.

This LifeFiles column originally appeared on about 70 TV station websites managed by Internet Broadcasting Systems.

Losing parents part of finding yourself

It is the morning of my son's kindergarten graduation and I've just discovered that he can tie his shoes by himself.

I ask who taught him to do that (he had previously developed a very creative solution on his own, but never did the cross, loop, pull method before). He says, "I just figured it out. It's bunny ears."

It dawns on me that this entire first year of school has been about Colter learning to be independent of us, his parents. He has come to accept his teachers as authority figures and his peers as purveyors of fact and fiction. And for us, it has been about accepting that we will not be his only influences. We can only hope to be among the primary ones.

Colter is not just learning things that I didn't teach him. He's learning things I didn't even know he knew and things that I never learned. I heard at a PTA meeting a few weeks ago that some sixth- and seventh-graders at my son's school took the SAT for practice and scored higher than their parents did when they were 11th-graders.

I don't think kids these days are necessarily smarter than we were at their age, they're just developing a different set of skills than we did, and they're getting an earlier start, particularly at being independent.

So much of growing up is about finding yourself and loosing the shackles of who other people think you are. And so much of that process for me was tied up in losing my parents.

My mother became lost to me before I even knew her, really. When I was 6 months old, my older brother died as a result of playing with matches. My mother never really recovered, and proceeded to live a surreal sort of swinging single life, with pharmaceutical assistance.

When I turned 13, I moved in with my father (my parents had divorced years before), and I loved basking in the attention he showered on me. I had found a home, at last, and I was even willing to share it with my new stepmother a few years later, since she could give me the nightly dinners and heaping helpings of nurturing I missed as a youngster.

For years, I lived in relation to my newly-formed nuclear family, until I created a family of my own. Not long after I had finally found myself as an adult, wife and mother, my father was diagnosed with Parkinson's and then dementia, and I started to lose him, too.

The losses have been gradual, and occasionally we find each other again -- my mother with a birthday call for my son; my father with a memory of some football game we watched together -- but whatever the painful quirks of my personal circumstances, the process, I now believe, is inevitable.

We must lose our parents in order to find ourselves.

As a result of this certainty, I worry constantly about becoming lost to my son, either through emotional or physical distance, death or some other force of nature. At the same time, I live with the knowledge that some day, by choice, Colter will leave home and turn the child's game of hide and seek into a new form of intimacy.

He will become someone I do not know in the interest of becoming who he thinks he has always been. And I will choose to seek out my son and allow him to hide at the same time, making sure he always knows where to find me.

This LifeFiles column originally appeared on about 70 TV station websites managed by Internet Broadcasting Systems.