Randoms

Another of my daughter's Day One crew, known since first grade as "The Six," got married in June. That's four of them hitched, now. My girl, here with her forever date, was resplendent in red.

I did the magazine's cover story for its "America at 250" special issue. I don't think they could have chosen a better cover subject to illustrate this moment. She dropped some wisdom, too.

Still living the puzzle life over here.

The rest of the photos in this post are from the July Fourth cookout that my daughter's in-laws hold every year. My son in law is born on that day and so is one of his cousins, so it's more a double birthday party than anything else. More and more of our side of the family joins the festivities every year, though my son had to work this year. He picked up a side job doing crowd control at a World Cup watch party at Brooklyn Bridge park, not a bad overtime gig if the crowd stays controlled, which it mostly did.

My beautiful girl, the wide blue sky, and me.

The birthday boy and his mama got the dancing started.

My lovely bonus children. 

Aren't they adorable? I swiped that last photo from one of my nieces' posts on Insta. The beaming couple is weeks away from celebrating their second anniversary. We're headed to Jamaica on July 17 for a family reunion, my mother's side of the family, the offspring of the nine Stiebel siblings, all of them gone now, but hoards of their offspring still kicking. These two plan to to stay a few days longer at an all-inclusive resort on the island to celebrate year two. Love that for them!

Oops, had this in drafts and never pressed publish.

 

Sunday again

Meant to post this on Father's Day, along with a carousel of photos of our dude who abides. That's his resting bitch face, but don't be fooled. He's not fierce, really. He's a boy dad and a girl dad and his boy calls him "Yo Pops" and his girl calls him "Papa Bear," and they both have his number. We'll have been married 40 years this summer, where did the time go? So much love for the man who's done this parent walk with me, beautifully.

It's Friday night at twilight as I write this, a hard hour for me. Since I was a little girl, I get restless, lonely, especially if I’m inside the house as the light starts to fade. I need to be outside at the in-between time, the spacious sky overhead, wide air in every direction. Otherwise I feel as if I in the wrong place, the wrong body, in the wrong time, as if I’m supposed to have done something more with this one precious life but I missed the turn. Tonight I’m thinking I have no friends I can call and say let’s go sit outside and talk or not talk. Everyone is always busy. Or just not up for being spontaneous. And for some reason it doesn’t feel quite the same to go sit outside alone. It’s lonely. I feel the void keenly. 

Another day. Sunday now. I’m done writing and editing for today so now I’m here with myself again. The man is watching World Cup Football in the living room. I’m in the back room contemplating the fact that being a mother to grown children means not calling them when the impulse strikes, knowing they’re out living their lives, as you once did, and you’d just be interrupting their flow. Wait for them to call you. It’s okay to miss them and feel sorry for yourself while you wait, as long as you never guilt them with it, because this is just life as it ever has been. How well I understand my own mother now. 

I read something this morning in a piece titled “How To Be Old” by Roger Rosenblatt in the NY Times. It said never ask others to share your despair. It’s simply not fair. I get that. It’s amorphous and existential anyway, so how do you even explain it? It’s just a state of being that arrived bit by bit as you aged and now it travels with you, a part of you, a melancholic nostalgic yearning for what is past, and will never again be, and how fleeting it was in the end. This is why I am endeavoring not to distract my children from one moment of the days they are living now. How much more despairing I’d be if I didn’t have those days to miss, to yearn for again. I had them once. There is that. 

Melancholic nostalgic yearning. All three together. And somehow not redundant. This is how it feels on Sundays before the light starts to fade. Maybe I’ll go lose myself in another episode of Blue Lights. It's a police procedural set in Belfast, plays on BritBox. I find it riveting.

Wrote this a week ago, while my blog was private. Now it's public again. I can't decide what I'm doing here, it seems.