The English Geek

Superman is an Adoption Story

Last Friday, Kendell and I went to see the new Superman movie. Now, I should preface my comments with this startling fact: I have never seen a movie about Superman. I've never read a comic book or a novel retelling or anything else Superman related. I do like the song "Kryptonite" by Three Doors Down, and I know the generalities of the story, but I have no serious affinity (nor dislike) for Superman. 

So I went into the movie thinking "a few people on this morning's TV news thought this was good. Let's see if they're right!" 

And I have to say: I loved the first half of the movie. I liked the angles of the shots and the way that the camera shook a little between scenes. I liked Russell Crowe as a moral Kryptonian (I usually like anything Russell Crowe is in); the birth scene and the scene in the birthing chamber gave me chills.

But the scene that made me tear up was the one where Lara says goodbye to Kal-El. She doesn't want to let him go—he is tiny, and she knows she won't see him grow up. But she sends him off, both to try to save her people and to save him. I think she was able to stand fearlessly in the face of her death because she knew: at least she had made that one meaningful sacrifice. She made herself stronger while simultaneously saving her baby (which we could say of many birthmothers, couldn't we?)

That was when I started thinking: Superman isn't really a superhero story. Or, not exclusively. To me, it felt like an adoption narrative. This small baby is sent out into the world with the hope that he will be in better hands with someone else. And, when he is old enough, he starts to wonder: who am I? Who are the people I came from? He needs to know all the stories, not just the memories of his childhood but the things only his birthparents can tell him. For me, his yearning to know his true origin story was the heart of the movie, and when he finally found the consciousness of Jor-El on the alien ship, I teared up again.

The knowing. That unbearable tension dissolving as he learns where he is from. And then the fact that he went back to Jonathan Kent's grave, and to his mother Martha's house. It isn't, I don't think, just one thing—coming from two different families. It isn't either/or. He needs both sets of parents' wisdom and sacrifices to become Superman instead of just another superly-bad villain.

All of which is to say: I loved the first half of the movie. It made me think about what makes us who we are—the old nature/nurture argument, yes, but in a more personal way. What power and influence do I have as a parent and what is simply genetic? How can I be better at teaching my kids how to figure out what their potentials hold? How can I teach them to hope while still living within what is real and possible?

But once the fighting started, the experience changed for me. It wasn't about the internal anymore. True: it was sort of about Clark Kent figuring out how to be the person his potential would allow him, how to sharpen and strengthen and how to know. But it lost its edge and became more about the battling superpowers than anything else. 

And battle scenes are always boring to me

So my review of Superman: Man of Steel is mixed. I loved the first half; I thought the second half was pretty mundane, driven by special effects instead of story. But the first half was good enough that I don't regret paying full price on opening weekend (something we almost never do, especially the full-price thing) to see it.

Also: I loved science-fiction-novelist-extraordinaire Elizabeth Bear's review.

When I Was Friends with Lani

We were friends in ninth grade---ninth grade, when we were just 14, just 15, just beginning to cast off the awkwardness of early adolescence. We met in English class and she introduced me to Danielle Steel's novels. We'd sit in my bedroom listening to whatever music I chose—Alphaville, The Cure, Roxy Music, New Order. We'd sit in her bedroom listening to whatever music she chose— Bronski Beat, The Human League, Joe Jackson, and U2, endless replayed loops of The Unforgettable Fire and War and The Joshua Tree. We went to the mall where we spent innumerable hours looking at earrings. We made and ate snacks (caramel popcorn, chocolate chip cookies, nachos, spaghetti) with the ravenous, guilt-free hunger of teenage girls. We talked about boys. We spied on the boy who lived at the end of her street and she told me secrets about him that his girlfriend, who also lived on their street, had told her. (Secret things I never could imagine happened in real life, only in books.) We laughed together all the time. 

I still remember the tinkling arpeggio of her laughter.

We didn't know, when we were 14 or 15 or even 16, barely. We didn't know that the uncomplicated, bland, and endearing weft of our friendship would soon turn sharp and hard, nor that it would grow into a complicated thing—a rivalry? a pair of antagonists? We didn't know that she'd make choices her mom didn't agree with and that her mom would kick her out of the house, nor that she'd come to live with me for a week before Thanksgiving until my mom, too, couldn't stand it and called her mom to come and get her. (She told her she was ridiculous for kicking her out and that no matter how awful a teenager was she needed to be with her family, especially at Thanksgiving, and now I can imagine my mom chiding her mom but then I was so mad that I literally kicked a hole in my bedroom wall.) We didn't know that our junior year would be a miasma of awfulness, nor that she would move into an apartment with Chris and it would be a series of small disasters, nor that some slight crack would widen into an ugly ending involving lies, craziness, shouting, a masking tape pentagram, and a newly-fledged witch (of the Wiccan variety) who showed up at my door to curse me. (We were, after all, goth girls together). We didn't know that late in the spring, despite our ugly explosion at friendship's end, she'd tell me what was happening behind my back that everyone knew but me.

She didn't know that when she was brave and true enough to tell me that secret, all of my hard feelings dissolved and while we were never friends again and I never understood her crazy and she never understood mine, I forgave her. I forgave her so swiftly it was like running downhill.

We didn't know that we'd go along in our lives making choices, each of us with one daughter but our lives on different trajectories. We didn't know we'd have all sorts of hard experiences and all sorts of joys, and that every once in awhile the memory of our old friendship would flutter into our thoughts—when I was in Hawaii I thought of her, and when I make caramel popcorn I remember, every time, the first time I made it with her when the caramel bubbled over and burnt on the stove, and when I listen to U2, still, she's at the parameters of my connections.

I didn't know I never would apologize or tell her I'd forgiven her.

Never, now, because we also didn't know she'd be attacked in the winter of her 40th year and that it would prove, six months later, to be her undoing. We didn't know she'd walk right up to the darkness, and then open the door and shove herself through the other side. That all the other horrible things would add up and add up and add up and the sum would be too large to carry. That she would leave by the saddest, loneliest method.

When I found out about her suicide—too late, even, to attend the memorial service—it felt like cutting. The knowledge felt metallic, thin, and sharp. It felt like the beginning of a nose bleed, which sounds odd but undeniable: my junior high best friend's death felt visceral. We haven't been friends for a long time (in fact, I had the equally ridiculous thought that, had we been Facebook friends at least, I could've stopped her) and there was that ugly end but how sad. How sad.

If this friendship had been written in a novel, there would've been a moment. A stray bumping-into of each other, at an airport in Belize, perhaps, in front of the popcorn stand at a movie theater, in a mall we only went to because our daughters needed a strapless bra or some blue tights or, of course, a perfect pair of earrings. In a novel we would've had some way of recognizing each other's regret. Of saying "I'm sorry for how I treated you" even though the details have grown soft and fuzzy.

But life isn't a novel, or if it is it's one of those horrid post-modern contraptions that no one can bear to actually read. I can't say I missed an opportunity to apologize, but I never made one, and now it's too late, and I'm left with that silver sadness and, oddly, with a sort of resolution: figure out who else I never apologized to. And remember that hopeful person I used to be, when I was friends with Lani. Be more adventurous and determined. Live brighter. Learn all the lyrics and sing along, laugh over burnt caramel. Dissolve into the luxurious fact of my life. Of being alive.

And take her with me a little bit.

Written While Listening to the Pretty in Pink Soundtrack

Haley and I are almost birthday twins; her birthday is the day after mine. This gives me a strange opportunity in my life, a way to remind myself of what I was like at her age, whatever that age has been. When she turned, say, twelve, I thought of myself at twelve (my ugly duckling phase, but at least I had braces by then so the popular girls could stop calling me "monkey girl") and compared it to how she was at twelve. It is also a way of measuring my success at mothering: if she was doing better than I was at that age, I felt like I had succeeded a bit.

When she turned 18, she wrote a post on her blog with eighteen facts about herself, to remember what she was like. Reading it made me think: what was I like at 18? If I had put together such a list...I can’t be sure how I would’ve written it. I know what I remember but I can't speak anymore in the voice I had then. At just-18, I was leaving the rebellion of my adolescence behind me. I’d just broken up with a boy who changed my life completely (he influenced the mighty change of heart I had that year in ways he never imagined or intended) and was smack in the middle of the Thing I Don’t Blog About. He and my friend Jennifer were leaving soon; they’d gotten jobs working at the Grand Canyon, but as I already had a job (I was working at WordPerfect then), I didn’t go with them. (Sometimes, looking back, that decision seems like my one lost chance at an adventure. How would my life be different if I had gone?) I liked drinking soda—Pepsi even then, and we’d go at least once a day to the gas station for drinks. When I was mad I’d get in my car (a salvaged Toyota Tercel) and drive as fast as I could with The Cult turned up as loud as I could stand. I hated Chinese food and seafood. I was just learning that I loved my sisters and my mom. I was stretching my financial wings by buying books and I was reading everything by Margaret Atwood that I could find.

I’m not sure what 18-year-old Haley would think of 18-year-old me. From music to clothes to our general life outlook, our barely-adult selves would be so different; I’m not sure she’d see beyond the freakiness. Not because she’s judgmental or shallow—she isn’t—but because it takes a similar weirdness to know that the black clothes and the white-blonde hair and the pissed-off attitude were mostly just armor. You have to have been in the same battles to be able to spot the person hidden under the outward display, and she hasn’t fought in those wars. I did everything I could, in fact, to keep that darkness from conscripting her. No, I don’t think she’d understand who I was at 18 because our adolescences were so different: a measurement I am relieved by. She has had her struggles, but she didn’t get lost in the dark. She’s done all the things that normal high school kids do: chemistry class and field trips and yearbook days, dances and football games and the ACT. She applied for scholarships and earned one.

Tomorrow she’ll graduate.

I didn’t do any of those things. For senior year, Jennifer and I went to the local community college instead of high school. After the fiasco of my junior year, that was the only option I had, but it meant I couldn’t graduate with the class of 1990 because the college schedule was longer than the high school’s. I did go to one horribly awkward formal dance during my sophomore year, but I’m like Iona from Pretty in Pink: living with the side effects of never going to prom. Not that I suffer daily from the things I didn’t do in high school, but it’s sort of like when people talk about TV shows from the 70's and 80's (I watched almost zero TV as a kid): I can’t relate, exactly, to the common experiences of the majority of Americans.

And I wonder. What would I have turned out like if I hadn’t crashed and burned? What if I’d continued on the course that I set for myself back when I was ten or eleven: graduated with straight A’s from high school, earned a gymnastics scholarship, lived away from home and had adventures before I got married? It’s hard to tell; the landscape would probably be different (spouse, residence, career maybe), but the location I’m at (mom, wife) is the place I always wanted to arrive. Would going to the prom or walking across a stage for my high school diploma make this place any sweeter? Or would the hollow spots I have, no matter that I love my family and my life, be smaller? The version of myself who didn’t crash and burn—the one who managed a lifetime of being normal—is a shadow I catch in the corner of my eye sometimes. I wonder what that would’ve felt like. But the crashing and burning, no matter how awful, is still dear to me. If I had the chance to go back in time and prevent the crash, I never would. It changed me; it gave me knowledge I couldn’t have achieved through normalcy.

And yet I want nothing more than normalcy for Haley. For all of my kids. It’s a situational irony I can’t resolve: I know the knowledge I gained through darkness and difficulty is immensely important, but not important enough that I want my children to experience the darkness. And Haley turned out pretty normal. Not bland or cookie-cutter or average; she is uniquely herself and she stands out in a crowd. But she isn’t instantly aware of the bolstered nakedness of recovering weirdness. She doesn’t carry the memory of darkness and I confess that despite the weight of it in my heart—despite the necessary salt of it—I hope she never will.

The Eighth Deadly Sin

When I was a kid, nearly every weekend one of the four of us would spend the night at my grandparents’ house. Technically, they were Grandma Florence and Grandpa Fuzz, my mom’s parents, but we never used their names. They were just Grandma and Grandpa. Their little one-bedroom apartment smelled of bacon and coffee and cigarette smoke—never that stale, ashtray-ish smoke smell, but the fresh burning smell that wafts when a new cigarette is lit. Before I knew him, Grandpa was an alcoholic, although by the time I was aware of things like that he had, I believe, stopped drinking or at least gained control of it. Grandma drank quite a bit of tea and one of the things I clearly remember her saying often is "if the worst thing I ever do in my life is drink a little tea, I think I'll have lived a good life." As far as I know, they never went to church. Probably they came to our baptisms, but just because it was a family event and not as a religious one. I never read scriptures with them, or prayed other than over the dinner table, or talked about religion. It could be said, in fact, that they taught me absolutely nothing about religion. 

But I would never presume to let these qualities of theirs, which many might see as faults, make me love them any less.

This is because they taught me something that is more important, possibly, than anything else a person can ever learn: the power of being loved. Because if there is anything I know about my grandparents, it is that they loved me. They loved and adored and cherished me, and not in a fancy, fabulous, isn't-she-perfect sort of way. They loved me for exactly who I am, no more or less. The thought of analyzing or questioning or doubting their love never entered into my head. It was just there, as much a part of the landscape of my life as the mountains, the lake, my backyard, air. It was a softness that always comforted me, even when I wasn't with them, even when I didn't think about it. They loved me, no matter what. 

They loved me, and they showed me by spending time with me. What we did together wasn't amazing. I sat at their yellow kitchen table and listened to them talk to their friends. I'd sit in the chair that was next to the couch in their living room; Grandma would put her feet up on the back of the couch to help her circulation, and we'd both read. I helped her carry laundry to the little laundry room in their complex; it smelled of Pinesol and must and dryer lint and warmth. Sometimes Grandpa, who managed the landscaping, would take me outside with him while he pruned the rosebushes. They'd take me to the drugstore for a hamburger and a milkshake or to Pioneer Park to wade in the ditch. (If you are of a certain age and grew up near Provo you'll know what I mean.)

I know that my relationship with them is filtered through the lens of childhood. I know they were imperfect people because I know we all are. But even after Grandma's clogged carotid artery changed her personality entirely (when I was about ten) and Grandpa passed away (from a stroke, when I was twelve), I never stopped being cushioned by the certainty that they loved me. It is a softness I still carry with me and I still draw strength from. I would be less of a person—less confident and much weaker—without that experience of being loved unconditionally.

But this is not a paean to childhood happiness and security. Instead it is an introduction to a thing I want to say but cannot because it revolves around a story I don't own and so cannot tell. Not just one story, but several I have witnessed lately, with a basic outline like this:  person A prevents someone in their life (person B) from spending time with or developing a deep relationship with someone else (person C) because person C isn't living his or her religion as person A believes they should. Or person B is eliminated altogether, and person A won't have a relationship with person C because person C doesn't ________________ or does such things as ___________.

To my mind, this sort of thing should be the eighth deadly sin: judgement. It implies that people make choices based on their badness or goodness, on their strength or weakness, which isn’t always true. It implies that person A has the right or the knowledge (or perhaps, in their mind, the obligation) to assume why a decision has been made or an action taken by person C. It is the very opposite of charity because it lacks compassion. It also assumes superiority: because person A does____________, she must be a better person than person C, who doesn't.

I suppose that if we were all photocopies of each other—if all family dynamics were identically ideal—religion could be black and white. What is wrong would always be wrong and what is right would always be right. But as none of us fully fit within the ideal (and quite a few of us are so far away from the ideal that we bear only a passing resemblance to it) ambiguity enters. Not every family is made of parents who look at all religious ideas in identical ways. Some families are made of people who have different faiths. Sometimes people's beliefs change. The same experience in a family might cause one person to stop believing in anything at all while it simultaneously deepens the faith of another. Religion, faith, belief: what we have in our hearts is malleable, changing with time, experience, and knowledge, with disappointments and losses as well as happiness. It is unique to individuals and situations.

And if I know anything at all about religion, it is that the only religious experience I am qualified to judge is my own. (If I'm even able to do that.) This is because the motivation behind what might seem to be a sin is quite often not something anyone else knows. For example, one of my close friends very rarely pays tithing, not because she lacks faith to write the check but because every time she does, her husband gets mad at her. Which is worse: not paying tithing, or having an enormous argument with her husband every payday? I know some people would say she should pay it despite the argument and that she is spiritually weak for not doing so; I know others who would say that if she is willing to pay it in the truest part of her heart, and circumstances are stopping her, it is OK that she doesn't. I know which side I  believe, but I can only speak for myself; I don't know what God thinks. But what I do know is that if I thought "I can't be friends with her because she doesn't pay her tithing very often," I would be sinning because I would be judging someone who it is not my place to judge. (Not to mention, my life would be less without her humor, encouragement, and music recommendations.)

Other people's beliefs and their way of living their religion are not the measuring stick I use to determine the type of relationship I want to create. I have many friends whose faith and religious works are much greater and more devout than mine, but I'm not friends with them for that reason (even though it is something I admire about them). Nor do I think they are friends with me despite my religious shortcomings. Instead, we are friends because we get each other. Because we can laugh with and talk to and trust each other. Because we each know the other is in a different place in her spiritual progression—and that is OK. We are friends, in other words, because we love each other unconditionally.

I will readily agree that there are some relationships in my life that I put limits on because of person C's actions. But these aren't because of religious practices but safety and sanity; I limit the relationships because I need to limit the amount of toxicity I'm exposed to. I understand limiting your kids' interaction with their pot-smoking great uncle or with cousin Marge who's been known to drive drunk more than once or even with Aunt Tara who is angry and mean. There are several "person Cs" I know whom I keep on the fringes of my life because their drama is too much to mix up with my own.

But not living up to religious expectations doesn't make a person toxic. Limiting a relationship because person C sometimes drinks iced tea or coffee, goes out to dinner on Sundays, or only goes to sacrament meeting? I know that I am not the strongest, most faithful and spiritually knowledgeable person, but to me that is the opposite of what Christ taught. "As I have loved you, love one another" is the essence of Christianity. Obedience, following the commandments, keeping promises and covenants: all of these are important, but I think it is love that matters most. When we try to love like Christ loved we are working at being Christian. Christ didn't say it was acceptable to sin, but He did die for us because He knew we would anyway. He doesn't limit the relationship He has with us because we are sinners. He continues to love us and to encourage our relationship with Him. He loves us not despite our faults and sins, not because of them, but just for who we are. He loves us, in other words, unconditionally.

What if someone in my young life had said, "Amy, I know you love your grandparents. But your grandpa smokes and your grandma drinks iced tea and they never go to church, so you can only see them on your birthday and at Christmas"? What if someone had judged their religious qualities and decided they were lacking enough that the rest of it—the time, the unremarkable and yet remarkably sweet ordinary experiences, the conversations and the stories and the laughing and the tenderness—didn't compensate? What if I had never been loved in such a way? I cannot describe the desolation that thought gives me. I would be without my life's truest safe place. Not knowing that I was worth being loved for who I am would have done more damage than the coffee or the smoking or the not going to church.

Everyone needs to be loved for who they are. We all need expectations, goals, and achievements, too; of course we can't just sit around loving each other. We have to do: work, struggle, fail, try again. We have to keep trying to do better and to not let our weaknesses become excuses. But to deny or reject love because the person offering it is flawed? How can that be anything other than judgment? How can it do anything other that fracture relationships, damage families, lessen potential? I understand that person A is working from a space of wanting to teach principles and ideals. But what sort of principle is poisoning a relationship built on? And we can't live our lives only interacting with others who think the same thing we do. We are all trying, even those of us who look like we aren't. But offering love and having it rejected, especially by family members: it is a uniquely horrible sort of damaging pain, and it isn't like cancer or Alzheimer's or a car wreck. It is a pain we can avoid giving others, simply by avoiding the eighth deadly sin.

It Goes Like This, the Fourth, The Fifth

I walked into Haley's choir concert late on Wednesday night. Just a few minutes, and late because I'd been to Nathan's choir concert at his junior high right before. The first choir (not Haley's) was singing Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah" and I found myself crying before I could even find a seat.

Back in the spring before she started junior high, Haley had to choose whether she'd learn an instrument or singing in the choir for her music option in seventh grade. She wanted to maybe play the flute or the violin, but my gut told me something different. Even though she didn't seem like a particularly strong singer, my gut new she needed to take choir. So I listened to my gut and I insisted she chose choir, even though she was mad at me.

She didn't love it at first. But her junior high (the same one Nathan and Jake go to now) has an amazing choir teacher. She encourages and bolsters and supports. She takes those young people and teaches them how to read music and how to use their voices. There's something powerful in that, I think—in learning to use your voice. It becomes more than just singing. If you know you have a voice then you also start to know you can say what you think.

What I didn't expect from that gut feeling was how Haley would blossom in choir. She discovered that she has a beautiful singing voice. Who knew? She didn't get that from me! The last time I sang in a choir I was in fifth grade and my friend Brittney asked me not to stand by her when we sang because the horribleness of my voice knocked her off her own tune. I mouthed the songs for the rest of the year. Don't get me wrong: I love to sing. If I am in the house or the car by myself, I often have music on and I'm singing along. But I keep the music loud to drown out how terrible my voice is.

But Haley? Her voice is strong. It's strong and confident and lovely. And choir, despite her initial reluctance, became her thing. She earned solos and went to choir festivals and never missed a concert. She tried out for and got into Bella Voce in ninth grade, and when she got to high school (ours is 10-12 grades here), she found another accomplished and amazing choir teacher.

There were some struggles, especially at the end of tenth grade when she didn't make it into the A Capella choir. (This is an enormous choir class; I think there are about 100 kids in it, and they sing the more technically difficult songs.) I didn't understand why and came this close to calling the teacher to protest. But I listened to my gut again, which said that the Con Brio choir she was in would be the right place for her that year. And it was. She learned to accept a loss without making others feel guilty for their accomplishments. In the smaller choir, she shined. She became a leader. And I know, listening to my gut again, that she learned in Con Brio what she needed to know to earn a spot in Chamber choir (you know, the exclusive one that does all the coolest stuff) for her senior year.

So much knowledge and experience over the past six years. No wonder I started crying at the concert, because it wasn't just her last concert. It was my last concert to listen to. No one believes me, but I swear: I can always hear Haley's voice in the choir. Not because she overpowers anyone else. It's subtle. But I can still hear her in the weaving of voices. I have loved coming to listen to her sing. It has been one of my favorite parts of her adolescence: her voice. And while this could be a story about moms listening to their guts, what it's really about for me is a person finding her way. Finding the thing that gives her expression, finding the thing that helps her be unique even within a crowd.

I will miss that beauty.

"Even if Everyone Hates You, Your Mom Always Loves You."

Yesterday at the library, I answered the phone to an urgent voice. "I'm at the bookstore," he said, "and I need to know what to get my mom for Mother's Day." I had a small inward giggle at someone calling the library from the bookstore—they have booksmart people there, too. Also a silent groan and eye roll: it's only 4:30 on the day before Mother's Day, what's the hurry? Still, I asked him some questions about his mom's taste and then made some recommendations (Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake which I recommend to almost every woman older than about 35 or 40; Unbroken, and Frozen in Time as his mom likes nonfiction about history). The urgency was gone when he thanked me.

The very next phone call that came through was my husband. He wasn't at the bookstore (ha!), but his question was fairly similar: Give me some ideas for a Mother's Day gift. 

Another deep sigh.

Mother's Day, like Valentine's Day, is not my favorite thing. From the talks in church about perfect moms (I actually dreamed this morning that I had to speak this morning in church, and my dream talk started out by stating how I wouldn't be talking about perfect moms) to the idea of gifts. I don't know—it all makes me uncomfortable.

I told Kendell not to worry, I wasn't expecting anything and what I really want for Mother's Day is for everyone to be nice to each other. And maybe a picture of me with my kids and no one complains about taking it. I wasn't being passive aggressive; that's really how I feel. But then I found myself writing a Helpful Guide for Husbands Who Don't Know What to Buy: gift cards and little tokens and even grand gestures.

I ran out of time to write it last night.

This morning, Kaleb woke me up at 7:30. He had an envelope for me to open, and four pictures he'd drawn for me. In the envelope were three pennies he'd found, and the pictures were of skeletons and dragons and hard work---he'd written about why he loved me, in his most careful penmanship, and not just a few words. (The quote in my title comes from one of his cards.)

And that, my friends, is Mother's Day in my mind. The sweetness of my child being himself and telling me he loves me. The only thing I really need is that reminder: I love you, Mom.

18 Years Ago

This happened:

 

I became Haley's mom. I was so wildly in love with her! With all of what I was experiencing, the utterly, entirely unbelievable gobsmacking amazingness of an entirely new person just arriving. A new person. How could I grasp what that means, when they handed me the slippery body and at last I got to see her face? Not just someone I met somewhere. But a new human being who never existed before, and whose care was entrusted to me. Me!

I flipped through her baby album last night, after her birthday dinner party, trying to remember exactly how that felt. The exhilarating terror of being a first-time parent. How filled up with certainty I was that I would do everything right. How much I loved every bit of her tiny little self. How filled with anticipation to see what kind of person she was, and also how hesitation grabbed me as well: already I knew she wouldn't be small for long.

I keep looking at my face in that photo—the happy exhaustion, yes, but right in the eyes. At the pure, sweet surety I felt then. I was so much younger and had so many things to learn. I was certain I would make none of my mother’s mistakes, but I would learn that I would still go on to make my own. I imagined that we would always agree, me and this beautiful, perfect creature, because how could we not? My heart was full of adoration. I had to learn that she is a strong individual and sometimes we would clash, and that would hurt but eventually we’d figure it out. I thought motherhood would be, if not exactly easy, something I could absolutely and completely do correctly, simply because I wanted to. The sheer strength of my wanting to be a good mother would be enough to make me a good mother. I had to learn that wanting is one thing, but succeeding is something entirely different, and that the very sharpness and strength of loving her would make the mistakes hurt even more.

But I didn’t know any of that yet, just like I didn’t know yet how to nurse or to change a diaper in the dark or to comfort the inconsolable. This was my first step in being a mother, and I thought I knew what my next ones would be. I had my future mapped out. I’d have two boys and another girl sometime within the next seven or eight years or so, close enough that they’d all grow up together, spread out enough that I could savor each of their babyhoods. I’d eventually be a stay-at-home mom, and parenting would sweeten and strengthen my marriage. Somewhere in all of that I would write novels, of course, but my main focus would be taking care of my kids. I had the vision of blissfulness that I was certain would be given to me because all of these were good things. (It didn’t quite turn out like that.)

Life has taught me quite a bit in the 18 years of Haley’s life.

I’m not quite sure why I feel so blue right now. She turned out to be entirely herself: funny, smart, sarcastic, creative. Who knew she would have such a beautiful voice, such a quick wit, such determined independence? We have had 18 years of laughing, talking, reading, and living together. She’s healed old wounds in me just by living a normal life. Despite my many mistakes, she is going to be fine. She is strong, which is what I always hoped for. I love her so much and am more proud of her than I can say.

But there’s still that tug: the mistakes. The arguments, the times I disappointed her or the things I regret saying. The alienation that adolescence inevitably brings. There’ve been times when I have felt absolutely wrong for her, as if she picked the wrong mother, as if she would be happier with someone far more fabulous than I. Looking back, it is easy to see what my mistakes were, and the ones I regret the most are the things I didn’t savor enough, the time I didn’t take, the kindness I didn’t share. In motherhood as in life, sometimes there is no way to know what you need to know at the beginning other than going through the process of learning it, by which time it is too late.

I thought that my goal to be a great mom would make me be a great mom. Would make it easy. I thought that because I loved her with that fierce, enduring emotion that it would never be really hard. And it wasn’t, of course—wasn't hard to continue loving her like that. But getting it right? That was never easy. Perhaps if there were only the two of you in the world. But there is also always life to live. Life that is messy and full of unexpected detours, life that rarely takes you where you think you’re going. Loving her, and wanting to be the kind of mom she needed, wasn’t always enough to make me able to actually be what she needed. And if I didn’t love her, I guess that wouldn’t matter so much to me.

But I can’t change the yesterdays. I can’t tell the Amy in that old photograph that she should savor more, and be more brave and less selfish, and share more of herself. I know now what I needed to know then, but I can’t toss the knowledge back through time because I could only learn it by living. So all I can do is look forward, and take what I know with me, and hope it will be enough that she and I can continue on, building a relationship. Because that hasn’t changed, from the person I was to the person I am now. I still love her, I still want to be a great mom, and while our relationship will continue to change as she strides out into the world, I still want to be close to her.

My Best Friend's Birthday

 

Almost 25 years ago, I competed in what would be my last gymnastics meet. I'd been thinking about quitting for six months or so; a combination of guilt (it's not a cheap sport), fear, rebellion, exhaustion, bitterness over always being the gym's token Poor Girl, the overwhelming need to feel like a normal teenager, gymnastics politics (you have no idea, the politics in a gym!) drove me to it.

 

So my mom said "If you're going to be a loser and a quitter, if you're going to let the bastards get you down and give up on all of your dreams that you've worked toward for the past ten years of your life, be prepared to gain ten pounds and then go find yourself a job." Actually she only said "Go find a job" but I bet she was thinking the rest. (Who wouldn't?)

 

So after school was over, I found myself a job. Friday, June 10, 1988, I went in for my interview at NICE corporation, which was a telemarketing company that had just gotten a big contract with Citibank and was hiring like mad. Nearly all of my gothy friends were applying there, so I did too. Before the interview, I sat in a room next to a redheaded girl. I desperately wanted to strike up a conversation because she seemed to exude niceness but even in those days (OK, especially in those days) I was more than a little bit shy. So I sat by her in silence. I noticed she had her social security card in her lap, so I decided to get mine out of my (maroon corduroy) wallet and memorize the number. She went in to her interview first, and then she was gone when I came out.

 

But then a curious thing happened later that evening. Actually, a fair number of curious and amazing and fantastic and seemingly-life-changing things happened later that night. (Oh! Friday nights of adolescence! Was anything more tinged with anticipation and adrenyline and the sheer, outrageous exuberance of what-might-happen?) Most of it involved a specific boy, but for part of the night I was, along with a different friend who knew her, in the car of the redhead from the interview. (My memory of why I was in her car is gone.) When I got out of her car, I left my wallet (yes! with my social security card in it! but, alas, probably not more than five dollars), and then we met up later on the weekend so I could get it back.

 

And then we actually talked to each other.

 

And then, on the following Monday or Tuesday, we started our new jobs—and, miracles, I was in the same training group as the redhead from the interview.

 

And that is the story of how I became friends with my longest-ever friend, Chris.

 

Right now, I am reading a book called Help, Thanks, Wow, by Anne Lamott, so I've been thinking about prayer, its nature and how it influences our lives. In that time of my life, I wasn't big on praying. (Nor religion, for that matter, especially not its restraints.) I never prayed for this type of person to come into my life, and that is what I love about or friendship's origin story: she was the answer to a prayer I didn't know to utter.

 

Because despite the idea I had—that quitting gymnastics would solve all my problems, and that doing things normal teenagers do would help me feel normal—and the blooming expectation that everything was about to turn out marvelously for me, everything was not about to go well in my life. Nearly nothing went well, in fact, during the next two years. Chris entered my life just at the beginning of what would be a this strange amalgam of heady, naughty, fun, rebellious, miserable, ecstatic, excrutiating, thrilling and humiliating time. It was a textured, intricate sort of darkness—and she was always light for me, even though she was also in her own black places.

 

We lived in different towns and went do different high schools, so maybe that is why we could make a friendship like we did, free from the definition of social or financial status, popularity, or history. But it was also because we just understood each other. We did nearly everything together, so she knows all my adolescent stories. She could tell you why the sight of a train caboose makes me hear the opening sounds of "Love Bites" and what the S Words were and the entire significance of J. We saw concerts together and went to parties and did a lot of things we shouldn't have. We sat in the bedroom downstairs in my house, with a green and white gingham quilt, and shivered while we talked. She shared her amazing red pants with me. She taught me how to use an ATM and how to scrunch my hair; we learned together by necessity how to drive a 5-speed up the canyon. She made the good parts better and the dark parts bearable.

But not only that. Chris was my trailblazer in courage. She was brave and independent and progressive. She didn't have parents to help her (for a few weeks she lived with us), but she found her way anyway, and she didn't let the significance of her trials become an excuse for giving up. She persevered.

I am so, so lucky to call her my friend.

 

Today is her birthday (yes, we are almost birthday twins!) and I just wanted to throw this out into the universe: even though we don't see each other as often as we like, she is one of my life's great blessings and I know I can still find my path with her light. I would be much less of a person without her.

Stocking the Shelves

Over the past week, I've had three startlingly personal comments said to me at work. The first was from a man who looks like a cross between Merida's father Angus from the movie Brave and Lisbeth's social worker from Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. Maybe because I have helped him before (by recommending some lesser-read but still good fantasy and science fiction titles), he felt totally comfortable commenting on my new black-and-grey floral-print pants. "If you were trying to draw attention to your legs," he said, "you're doing a great job." 

Yes, a little more Dragon Tattoo-ish than I'd like.

Another patron admired my boots. Like...gushed for a couple of minutes. And then she said "My husband thinks that girls in Dr. Martens are hot."

Ummmm. I'm not sure I qualify for the "girl" department anymore, and I, well, I just don't know what to say to that.

Then there was the patron who approached me while I was putting out some books on the New Book display. "I think you should know that I think you are really pretty," she said, "but you also look sad." I wanted to think that was something nice and thoughtful—but it still felt awkward. Maybe because "pretty/sad" is totally not how I dressed that day. Or maybe because I was crouched down to access the very bottom shelf and I was worrying that my shirt might've slid up over the top of my jeans and I was possibly exposing that lovely stretch of back fat that's right over one's butt? I don't know.

Overly personal comments: not my favorite part of working with the public.

One thing I do love about my job, though, is stocking the display shelves. Display shelves (or sometimes tables) hold books that librarians have picked out, the ones we think you'll really like. Usually there is a theme to the display shelves. In my library, for example, we have displays for historical fiction, speculative fiction, gentle reads, science, history, art, and the ever-popular "You Wrote a Book About What?" shelf. There are display shelves for new fiction and non fiction, and each of the librarians has his or her own display shelf.

Filling up the display shelves is one of my favorite parts of my job. Partly it's sort of an ego rush: I still, nearly five years later, get a little happy shiver when I see someone pick up a book from my display. It's an act of faith in a person, when you stop to think about it, trusting them enough to spend all that time with a book they recommend. I only put out books that I really, really liked on my display, and I try to remember the more obscure or slightly odd things I've loved. Like The Changeling of Finnistuath, a book I read when I was teaching—back when my awesome boots were brand new!—and have been haunted by ever since. (Kate Horsley, why haven't you written a new novel in so long? I'd read it, especially if it were set in ancient Celtic times.) Collections of essays. Strong, accessible poetry books. Even a few graphic novels. Of course, lots of Atwood and Hoffman and Kingsolver and LeGuin.

But I also like stocking the other shelves (except for the Gentle Reads one...as I'm not generally a reader of cozy novels nor highly concerned that my books be squeaky-clean, I have a persistent worry, finding Gentle books, that I'm unwittingly corrupting some poor old woman with swear words and naughty bits). Not all the books I put on these shelves are books I've read. Most often, they're books I want to read. (As my current "want to read" list is hovering at about 87 titles, this is a deep resource.) Spreading the books I want to read throughout the library is curiously pleasant. It stills that very old and persistent need to take home every book I find and love. I might not be able to read the books I put on the Social Sciences display shelf today, including The Ragged Edge of the World (about how society encroaches on wilderness), The Winter of our Disconnect (about a family who disconnected from almost everything requiring electricity for a year), The Good Daughter (about the writer Jasmin Darznik, who uncovers her mother's secrets after finding a wedding photograph of her—with a man not Jasmin's father), or The Other Wes Moore (about two men who are named Wes Moore and how different their lives are), but I want to, and it makes me feel like an itch has been scratched, knowing that at least someone else will read them.

"People say life is the thing, but I prefer reading." Someone named Logan Pearsall Smith said that, and sometimes I completely agree with him. I'm not always immersed in a book as in—I'm sitting down and reading something. But I'm always reading something, immersed in the story which I've paused by putting down the book while I live my life. And I do have other interests as well; as much as I love books, I think my life would be less rich without things like, you know, the people I love, and running and hiking and taking pictures and thinking and writing. Then again, that desire to be reading something is always there—and it's more bearable if I know that someone, somewhere in my town, is reading something I recommended. 

What have you read lately that I should recommend to someone else?

Back Yard

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in our backyard. I'd be out there for hours practicing as much of my bars routine as I could on the swing set. I'd play with our dog Brittney or with one of the cats. Before Dad put the fence up, I'd wander around the corn field behind our property, watching morning glories to see if I could spot them opening or closing. (The farmer who owned the field did not like my wanderings, and I was afraid of him, but I liked that cool, dirty, peaceful wandering too much to let fear stop me.) Or I'd move my favorite chair (a rocking lawn chair with bright green floral canvas upholstery) into my favorite spot on our shady patio, the west corner by the peach tree, and read all afternoon.

Sometimes Becky would come outside with me, but in my clearest memories, I am alone—except I can hear the kids who live on the other side of the field. I was happy in my little backyard paradise, but I was also lonely. It's strange: I talked to Kendell just this weekend, when we went out to dinner, about that lonely kid, and how I can't really say she's just who I used to be since I feel like she's still here; then I found myself thinking about her again this Easter Sunday, when we sat on the patio together, eating dinner.

By "we" I mean a lot of people: my kids and husband, my sisters, my mom, my brothers-in-law, two of my nieces and one of their husbands. The little kids were playing in the grass, laughing and chasing and pushing the babies on the swing. While we ate dinner, I made sure to sit in my favorite spot on the patio, which I still love even though the peach tree and the chaise are gone. I especially love it on spring afternoons and evenings, when the sun hits the back of your head so you are both in shade and sunlight at the same time. It has long been a place of solace for me, that spot in the backyard. Perhaps even a holy place, sometimes.

I ate last because I was avoiding the first rush at the food, and then I took some photos of Haley with her boyfriend Adam who came to the party but had to leave early. When I came back to my food, all the grown ups and the teenagers had gathered around the table, and as I ate we started talking. Random stuff at first, and then something hard my sister is experiencing, and then, somehow, to our teenage exploits. As we talked and laughed, I found myself sitting back. Not talking, almost not listening to the stories. Just settling myself; just letting that specific moment sink into my bones so I could keep it, somehow, forever. Between my sister and my daughter. All of us laughing. Sharing sorrow and wisdom.

I always love my family. But in that hour of talking, laughing, crying a little, eating a bit, I loved them so much. Enough that I didn't mind my old ghosts being brought up (Yes, I did sluff an entire semester of high school my junior year), which sometimes bothers me. I loved them and I wanted to keep that feeling. I thought of my dad, who one day—perhaps a spring afternoon like this one, lovely and warm with just a slight breeze to keep the edge off, and the mountains still snowy and the grass turning green—stopped pruning the honey locust in the backyard and left his saw in the crotch; it's still there, every year swallowed a little bit more by living tree. I thought about last year and how I thought it would be the last year we did this, and how I am glad we had one more, just so we could have that moment. I thought about our strangeness and our wrong choices and the paths we've taken. I thought about all the things I hoped for myself and the things I still hope my children obtain.

I thought about that lonely girl I used to be.

I cannot say the loneliness is cured. But in that moment—it was gone. I held the memory of my childhood self in the cup of my mind and wished I could tell her, somehow: not always. There will be people you can't imagine yet who will love you.

There were Easter eggs this year, colored by my kids who were all, even Kaleb, slightly disinterested. There was a lovely service at church. I made my favorite cake; we had Easter baskets and chocolate and even Peeps. The kids hunted for eggs. But that time on the patio: that was Easter to me, the best Easter thing, better even than my favorite caramel-filled chocolate eggs. The sense of time folding which can happen in the places we felt something intensely, as if the emotion left an echo you can still feel years later. That old loneliness whispered to me, but I could whisper back to it something more comforting.