Tulips

Room reveal

 

The bathroom renovation was completed yesterday. I'm a bit shy to show you the reveal, maybe because it’s such a small space that I can’t get a good photo of the entirety of the room. Try to picture those ocean colored tiles in the foreground to be less elongated and more symmetrical. The rear wall in the photo also appears less narrow in real life, and there are some nice bright towels on the wall you can't see. But this is it, a clean new bathroom, one I might walk into somewhere in the Caribbean. I wonder if you can appreciate this without seeing the gloomy grayness of the space before. I'll spare you. 

Next up is our bedroom, where I envision a custom designed and built closet system helping us out with the room's current state of being overrun by too many things, too many of them broken or in need of being purged, and furniture that is way to big for the space. What on earth was I thinking when we moved in twenty-three years ago, and I ordered the furniture pieces to be delivered without taking a single measurement. This feels like the highest hill of all to climb in the slow reclamation of our hard-wearing apartment. We seem to be working at a pace of one project or so a year, which means we probably won't get geared up to undertake the master bedroom till the new year. I might hire a space designer to help us with this one as I feel totally out of my depth. All I know right now is, it will happen. The how isn't so clear yet.

Imposter syndrome, chemistry, and good vibes

I traveled downtown to meet up with my agent for drinks last evening, she of the sylph-like form and impossibly glamorous mien, around whom chunky mortals like me feel, well, let's just say less than socially cool. But I went. I didn't cancel, as I have done twice already this year. And today I am happy to have sucked it up and gone, especially since I am once again looking toward the next job, and my agent may yet be instrumental in said job somehow finding me. 

My daughter says I was "serving lewks" in this picture of me in my carnival jacket and the earrings my husband gave me for my birthday earlier this month. I love those earrings, and sporting them last evening, along with my very loud and colorful over garment, made me feel somehow armored, festive, more able to meet the world of publishing sophisticates and to muster the pretense of being of that company, and not a a visiting imposter, the way I deep down feel.

Today, unrelated to last night's meeting, I have a call about a new book possibility. This one comes to me through my editor on the last book, who said kind words about me to her colleague. The book this other editor wants to talk to me about is one I would love to write. We shall see how everything unfolds. I am trying to be of the mindset that if I pass the chemistry test with a subject at our first meeting, and I am chosen for the project, then it's a book I'm supposed to do, almost as if it's already happened in a parallel realm, which is to say it's ordained. I'm superstitious that way, or maybe it's a close as I get to religion. The truth is, when it comes to signing on for a book, I'm attracted to those people whose energy I can imagine inhabiting for a year, someone I can fall in love with, a mensch of a person, because the collaborative writing process is the most intimate undertaking I've ever experienced in this work I am fortunate to do. Anyway, please wish me luck and good vibes, because I do think it's time for me to start getting serious about how I'll make a living for another year.

Giving Birth

Forgiveness 

by Warsan Shire

 

Baptize me

     now that reconciliation is possible. 

If we're gonna heal, let it be glorious.

One thousand girls raise their arms.

Do you remember being born?

Are you thankful?

Are the hips that cracked

     the deep velvet of your mother

     and her mother

     and her mother?

There is a curse that will be broken.

 

__________

Yesterday was Mother's Day, and I was okay. A year ago, I sat on a high open terrace with my friend Jane, just days before Mother's Day and we agreed to release all expectations of how that day should be. For me, Mother's Day had been silently fraught ever since my very first one, thirty two years ago now, when my husband, usually a man of romantic gestures, failed to observe the day as I had expected he would. He had grown up in an island where on Mother's Day people gave thanks for their mothers in church and didn't get into the Hallmark aspect of the day otherwise. Once he understood my disappointment, he rallied, but if I'm being honest, my disappointment on the only first Mother's Day I would ever have, gave this day a brooding quality I never quite outran, or rose above. 

Outwardly, I kept things light and bright. Even after my own mother died, and the day would pierce me with missing her. I cried softly on waking and then became breezy once I stepped out of bed. Then, last year, Jane and I sat on her terrace with the springtime sun falling around our shoulders, and we dissected all the things women feel but do not say about mothering, and how it all crystallizes on Mother's Day, settling into a tender ache about which we do not speak. And then we just decided that henceforth, Mother's Day would be just another Sunday, merely a Hallmark confection, and we would let go of all expectations of the day, releasing the people unwittingly chained by those expectations, because how could they know about things we never said?

There is true power in two women sipping seltzer under a sun colored sky and just deciding. I know because last year and this one, I felt no angst as the day approached. I happily welcomed my children last year, and this year, when I knew my son would have to work and my daughter would be out of town to attend a friend's wedding, I felt no twinge, because after all, it was just another Sunday. But then my nieces texted me, the two who lived with us for a spell after college before getting launched, the ones we playfully call "the roomies." They wanted to know what I was doing for Mother's Day because they wanted to come over and spend it with me. 

Maybe they were missing their own mothers, but they did come over in the early afternoon, and they stayed till well into the night. We set out a brunch feast of quiche and chicken maple sausages, grapes and strawberries, blueberry muffins and croissants, waffles and jam, and avocado slices, and we made mimosas with the Prosecco and orange juice my husband brought home. We noshed and watched movies, a cheesy rom com (Mother of the Bride) and a diverting comedy caper (Queenpins) and then sat around the kitchen counter and just chatted, and later we put a few pieces into the puzzle on my dining table, and it was lovely—all the more so because I had no expectations whatsoever about what or how the day should be.

I read once that disappointment is expectation unmet, and that if we release our expectations we will avoid disappointment and could it really be that simple?

__________ 

 

The poem is by the Somali British poet Warsan Shire from her chapbook Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It spoke to me on Mother's Day, but then all Warsan Shire's poetry speaks to me. The photo of her is by Amaal Said.

Love them hard

Gloria and Grace winked at us

We had a great time on Saturday, everything casual and relaxed, just hanging out together from one in the afternoon till almost midnight. I didn't take many pictures, which I think means I was more fully in the moment, but I did take that one of my daughter and me before she left, and I got a couple of pics of my kids and their sweethearts, too. I should have photographed the cake that both my kids made for me, using their Grandma Gloria's recipe. It was beautiful to behold—took me all the way back to my childhood, when there was always a pineapple upside down cake under the cake glass, ready to serve to whoever stopped by. In that picture of me with my daughter I see my mom's face in mine, and my Aunt Grace's likeness is there, too, and how lovely to see both their faces again. Aunt Grace was always the first one to call me on my birthday, even before my mom. I think she and my mom were winking at me in that photo to wish me a good birthday.

Birthday girl in a wildly spinning world

Even though I am back in the tunnel with work, juggling both the book and the next issue of the magazine, I should mark this day. The kids are coming over tomorrow to celebrate my birthday with me. And by kids I mean my two grown ones, their loves, the nieces, and Gabby, who lived with us for the month of April as she did a round of doctors appointments, trying to figure out why her body went haywire on her on the very day in February that she turned thirty.

She and my daughter and a few others of her friends were supposed to fly to Mexico for a milestone birthday getaway. Gabby is famously a world traveler; my daughter went to China and Thailand with her a couple years ago, but this time, they had to cancel. Gabby had been staying with her parents ever since, and came to us in April as her parents had to travel, and none of us felt comfortable with Gabby being on her own. Her symptoms have been random, mysterious, and scary, yet she's maintained such a robust spirit. She is a therapist, and teleworked from our home most afternoons into the late evening, since most people do therapy at the end of the workday. But last week her doctor advised her to take some disability leave, as sitting up in a chair for hours on end was aggravating her back pain. She's on the mend, I hope, thanks to a couple of iron infusions she had. I love this girl. She's been in our lives a long time. She and my daughter went to the same lower and middle school, and she also lived with us for two summers, before eighth and ninth grades, when she and my daughter attended the same scholar program.

This time around, she and I had such a great time binge watching TV shows that were absorbingly good (Apples Never Fall, Hacks) and deliciously bad (The Traitors, both the American and the British versions). Now that her parents are back from their travels, she is back with them in the Bronx. I do miss her company. While she was here, I worked at the dining table while she watched seasons of Ru Paul's Drag Race in the background, and I could concentrate fully while still feeling a part of the human world. She felt like a daughter, really, her energy generous and warm. She can stay here anytime. 

I am very much looking forward to seeing my son tomorrow. He arrived home from New Mexico tonight, after spending the week at bomb school with some of his fellow firefighters—yes, you read that right, bomb school. He called me for my birthday from the airport earlier, and assured me that the department does not have a bomb squad, and does not intend to send them to go and defuse bombs after a week of study. "It takes years of intensive training to be able to do that," he said, "but they want us to be able to recognize situations in which bombs might be at play and have some sense of how best to protect people." His wife, my daughter, and I all exhaled. 

My husband is making many flavors of scones tomorrow and my daughter is making me a pineapple upside down cake using my mother's recipe, and we are going to have a Survivor watch party in anticipation of the May 22 finale. We'll nosh and sip mimosas and just basically have a laid back family day. Then on Sunday, it's back to work, as the first pass pages of the book I've been working on all year are due back to the publisher on Monday.

There was much else I wanted to write about this week, but I didn't really have time. But why did a thousand police officers storm Columbia's campus on Tuesday night after students occupied one of the administrative buildings. Isn’t taking over university buildings what student protesters have always done? Wasn't this how Columbia students helped compel the end of the Vietnam War in the late sixties? When I was a student there in the seventies and eighties, we marched to end apartheid in South Africa. Now, on a growing number of university campuses across the country they’re setting up encampments and occupying buildings to end the war in Gaza. 

This was the scene outside Columbia three nights ago just a few blocks from my house. I was scared for the students, because there's no telling what happens when so many cops get involved. Students were roughed up, some were concussed, and hundreds were arrested. And one officer's gun accidentally discharged in their midst but no one was hit. I'm thankful it wasn't worse than that, but Columbia's president made a terrible and unwarranted call in bringing in police. The protesters weren’t violent, so why escalate? Don’t be misled by outside agitators saying and doing God-awful things to smear this peace movement. I’m choosing to keep my eyes on the courage and idealism of the students, who still manage to believe we have the power to heal this hurting world.

Oh, and this also happened, my choir had our spring concert and we sounded great! Hard to avoid making a joyful noise with sixty-five voices exhuberantly raised in song! Our closing number, a Sound of Music medley, was the hit of the show.

Look at that—I wrote a whole meandering post. I miss you, friends. I'll be back around soon.