something had happened

I was on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, on September 12, 2001, waiting for the school boat. It was not the place I thought I’d be when I would first hear of the worst tragedy of the young century. Yet there I was, on a combination of a honeymoon and Ian’s field season in Tanzania at Gombe Stream National Park. I was helping shepherd the school kids and chatting with the lead teacher when Kristen, an American photographer living in the park, came striding towards me. She stopped short and broke into my conversation, “Adrienne, something terrible has happened.” In the microsecond between the end of that sentence and her next breath, I clearly thought, “This is when I become a widow.” What else could she possibly be talking about? A researcher must have radioed back to camp that Ian had fallen off a cliff or been bitten by a deadly snake and now I was facing the world alone. When Kristen explained that the day before, the Twin Towers in New York had fallen, my mind simply could not turn in that direction. At that moment, we had no idea how or why the towers were gone and so perplexity morphed into disbelief, which gradually turned to horror as we sat huddled in her house listening to the news over the 12 band radio she had.

We struggled to comprehend what was being described to us in only words. A BBC film crew had left a satellite phone for Kristen’s partner Bill, who was shooting video for them, so I was able to briefly call home to check on my family in New Jersey- my brother who was a junior volunteer firefighter in town, my many friends who lived in the city, my uncle’s brother who was a New York firefighter. The outlandishness of sitting, staring at an African lake flickering with midday sun while listening to my mother describe the fighter jets soaring over my childhood home is one of the indelible images of that time.

I called Ian over the field radio but we decided he should finish his day in the forest. When he came home that night, he and I spoke in hushed tones and half-sentences. “Did you hear that…” “They think over 1,500…” and “It’s the same group who blew up… yeah, in Kenya and Tanzania.” We were headed into town the next day to pick up some important visitors and we discussed whether or not, in this predominantly Muslim region, we should say we were Canadian. Whether we should say anything at all. I wrote in my journal that night, “The carnage must be unimaginable. I am glad to be spared the images.”

The next day we took the boat into town, and stayed at a small hotel with a TV in the lounge. It was the first time Ian and I saw any of the footage of the attacks and we could only stand to watch for a few moments. I was too stunned to cry then and in the weeks following, as our days washed away on the shores of the lake, I was spared many of the iconic images that have come to be associated with Sept. 11th.

By the time we came home to Minnesota in November of that year, the worst had already been seen and seen and seen again by everyone. The media had moved on and so we were able to slide back into life without confronting the horror of the many, many visual reminders of that day of senseless destruction. What that has meant however, is that as each September passes, I grieve afresh at some image I hadn’t seen before. It is a powerful grief and I find I am often embarrassed by it- as if someone could rightly turn to me and say, “You lost so little, what is this noise? This carrying on?”

This tragedy happened now almost a quarter of my lifetime ago. This event will be filed by my children under the category of “historical events in the distant past” along with Pearl Harbor, D-Day and the Vietnam War. But for me it is, with each new unseen image, just as freshly shocking as the moment I first heard the news. And so, to this day, I continue to struggle with this strange, disconnected, disproportionate grief.

Flying solo

Maybe it was when my brother was so sick as a baby and I tried hard to take care of myself. Maybe it was the double curse of being petite with ridiculously curly hair that invited people to think I was helpless. Or maybe it was just some quirk of heredity. But I’ve always had a fierce self-sufficient streak in me. It was as though there was some frenetic circus barker in my head: “Here she is folks! The AMAZING ADRIENNE! Look at how she juggles career and home effortlessly! Watch her take care of EVERYONE around her while never needing a single thing! See there?! She balances two dogs, teaching 125 kids per day, cleaning the bathroom, organizing the closet, caring for her partner, and cooking everything from scratch, WITHOUT DROPPING A SINGLE THING! She’s incredible, folks! She does it ALL!”

The problem was I didn’t. I can’t. No one can. But for a long time I was determined to. The event that consistently tripped my misguided independent streak was Ian’s long trips to Africa during graduate school. They usually lasted 3 months. A quarter of the year I was without a partner, but determined not to let it bother me, as if somehow it shouldn’t.

Strangely, in order to pretend everything was the same, I would allow drastic changes. The ambient noise in our house deadened as I let go of music and tv (lest it remind me too much of Ian). I carefully folded inward, crafting thoughtful excuses for rejecting most social invitations and avoiding the phone. Whenever anyone asked how I was doing, I would steadfastly reply “Oh, just fine!” even if I had been reduced to tears the night before by a spilled cup of tea. Occasionally, if I was pulled outward by a friend who refused to let me be, I would find myself exhausted by the effort I had to make to appear to be doing “just great”.

As I’ve grown older I’ve been forced to confront how destructive this independent streak can be. It has limited my capacity for true give-AND –take friendships and has occasionally forced me to my knees as I tried to pull further and further back from needing anything from anyone. In learning how to truly care for myself more, I have learned to be less independent. Not just passively accepting advice and help but actively seeking out solutions from other people. Telling people directly what I feel I need and being willing to risk the vulnerability of accepting help. No easy task for the AMAZING ADRIENNE.

Now I find myself facing a month-long separation from Ian again. But this time I have more lives at stake than just my own. I refuse this time to close the door to the world, mostly because I can’t. Too many small fingers and toes will get in the way. So I find myself turning the next month over and over in my mind- what survival strategies do I need? Who can help me with them? I’m practicing the fine art of a graceful acceptance of offers to have us over, entertain us or generally help get us through the time when we have been reduced by one-fourth. It won’t be easy. But this time, I refuse to fly solo. I have nothing to prove. That damn circus man has been fired.

Full Circle

As a child, I idolized my family. My immediate and extended families on both sides seemed like something out of a feel-good movie. Holidays and Sunday dinners were filled with laughter, jokes, stories and plenty of antics. Summers ended with a huge Labor Day party where I ran around with second cousins and stayed up late listening to the easy buzz of grown-up talk punctuated by staccato bursts of raucous laughter (although I could rarely hear the words, somehow I knew each time an adult had told an off-color joke).

The Scrivani side looms particularly large in my childhood memories. We had the Beach House (two microscopic cottages) that served as the nexus of our family during the summer, much as my grandparents’ home did in winter. In my memories, whenever we were together, there was a sense of complete comfort and security and fun. My father and my uncle would periodically perform their Arturo and Roberto routine- two hapless Italian acrobats with dress shirts rolled up and ties around their foreheads.. We would start singing the songs that our whole family knew, we would laugh at inside jokes, we unknowingly worked to construct a beautiful and faintly ridiculous family mythology.

When I heard about other kids whose parents didn’t get along with their relatives, I felt more sorry for them than they probably felt for themselves. How could one survive in this big, bad world without such a secure, warm and wonderful family? How could you celebrate summer without visiting people of whom it took five minutes to recite how you were related to them? (“Go hug cousin Adelaide whose mother was second cousins with your grandfather on his mother’s side”). How could you enjoy Christmas without the recitation of our family’s own Christmas Story?

It was late in high school when I finally began to suspect that we weren’t, in fact, the perfect family. I would catch a strained tone in someone’s voice as they talked on the phone, or notice how some or other aunt or uncle was rarely referred to, or often not included. It was a terrible blow to my sense of the world, but in the steadfast manner of my response to realizations, I simply ignored reality.

College and my twenties were terribly unnerving. As the oldest of the 13 cousins in my father’s family, I watched us grow and begin to figure out who we were. It wasn’t always pretty. There were times when I would sit with a cousin and not know what to say. I felt more comfortable talking to a stranger. Some of us were making bad choices, others were couching their adolescent insecurities in the painful arrogance of youth. Then there was the decline of my grandfather into the haze of dementia. This placed profound strain on the adults and made for fewer reunions and joyful holidays as we watched a confident, strong man become hollowed by a cruel ageing process. There seemed to be deepening fractures in the delicate surface of our family. I began to despair that soon enough, I wouldn’t have a clue who my family was. Cousins would become simply names that I occasionally remembered and the raucous extended family occasions would fade into stories that began, “When I was young…”.

A week ago, Ian, the boys and I went on a Scrivani family reunion to Bermuda. My grandmother, with incredible graciousness and financial resources, flew us ALL to a resort to spend five days together. This was not the first family reunion orchestrated by my grandmother but it quickly became particularly meaningful to me. We were in Paradise, yes but more importantly, we cousins were suddenly, finally the adults I remember from my childhood. We stayed up late laughing, yelling, composing questionable poetry, telling off-color stories and stealing midnight rides down the water slide that we were supposed to pay for. I watched my boys get to horse around with and get teased by my cousins, much like I remember my aunts and uncles doing to me. But mostly, I marveled that such a disparate group of people (interests, beliefs, opinions and careers vary wildly in my family) could get together and have so much damn fun. And now, again, I idolize my family. Not because we’re perfect, or even all that cool. But because, against all odds, we can get together and genuinely find joy in being a family.

A year ago today

It was exactly one year ago today that we drove the boys from our hotel to our new home. We had arrived the previous day after a LONG drive from New Jersey and now we were bringing them “home”. We have a picture from that morning of the boys sitting in the low cherry tree in our front yard and Ian and I hope upon hope that we will have high school graduation pictures in front of that very same tree.

In those first few weeks, I relied entirely on our GPS unit “Lulu” to get us around. Unlike our move to Foxboro where Ian had grown up and we both knew our way around, we were on terra incognita and my mental map was blank. It had a few points connected by dots but much like those maps of the ancient world where the coastlines would abruptly vanish, my mental map was insufficient. So as I would drive my pre-set electronically guided routes, I’d try to remember street names and landmarks. I’d try shortcuts- much to Lulu’s annoyance as she would let out a resigned “recalculating”- and sometimes fail miserably.

Finally things began to connect. Lines began to expand and more dots connected and, like a spiderweb, I began to have a network of streets in my mind. Then one day I left Lulu at home and looked a real paper map. Huge parts of my mental map spun and shifted and clicked into place. It was satisfying but there was one more layer I wanted.

Now, after a year, my mental map has filled in even more. I can now look at a street name and picture what the neighborhood looks like. I know if I’m homesick for New Jersey, I can drive down Anderson Avenue into the Duke Forest subdivision and it looks satisfyingly like home. If I need a little taste of New England I can drive out on Erwin road. It is a feeling that settles my mind and makes me feel a little more like I’m home.

Like all things in life

It has almost been a year. A year since we sold our little Massachusetts home, said goodbye to everyone we knew, threw the boys and the dogs into our cars and headed South. I hadn’t focused on that fact until recently. The March weather here (70’s and 80’s and sunny and blooming) was so gloriously bizarre to me that I was happily distracted. But the past week was more like the early spring I know and hate and remember from last year. My nose is cold when I’m out on a morning walk and going outside to play sounds like more fun than it is. The shape of the sun through the budding trees and the promise of spring warmth summon piercing memories of that final frenetic month before we left.

I remember making list after list after list. I remember endless errands, and juggling schedules, and making sure that something necessary wasn’t going to end up buried at the back of a box in the bottom of the moving truck. I remember the small triumphs of coming up with a master plan of how we’d survive our first few days here, finding a good home for things like our crib, realizing that I was, in fact, on top of things rather than hopelessly behind. There were moments of panic and desperation (Sophie deposited the tar-black contents of her stomach on a cream-colored carpet the day before we sold the house) but we had been planning and thinking about this for almost a year, so we’d had time to problem-solve. In fact, we had been planning and thinking for so long that we generated an energy I fed off of for a long time. It was a feeling of powerful accomplishment and I liked it.

That energy kept me from focusing on the fact that we were moving away. I embraced- no- had a strangle-hold on what was ahead of us in order to successfully ignore what we were leaving behind us. We were leaving good friends, taking my grandmother’s great-grandchildren away from her, moving away AGAIN from my baby sister, leaving my in-laws with no family in the area. It was so much to think about that I simply refused to. I tucked that sadness and pain away deeply- so deeply that I am only just finding it again. And like a scab over a wound, I can only stand to pick at the edges.

But it’s a strange, self-inflicted wound and I’m still finding ways to heal it. Ian and I were in the awful position of having to choose- the support and help of an extended loving family OR a cohesive, relaxed nuclear family. With Ian’s job and his colleagues so far from where we could afford to live, we had a fractured family life in a house that seemed like it was shrinking by the moment (not to mention sinking and falling apart). I was growing tired of it and when the opportunity came to change that situation, I jumped at it. Now we live in a home that fits us, with a fast-growing network of friends and neighbors who all live close and welcomed us into their lives with surprising ease. Yet it came at a cost.

We no longer get to do an easy Sunday dinner with Ian’s parents or a quick weekend trip to see my folks. The boys have strong bonds with their grandparents but we are losing out on the casual flow of family life that happens when you live close to them. So my fond memories of growing up around cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents are foreign to my kids.

And that’s the stone I carry in my heart now. As the earth warms and I am embraced again by the gorgeous perfume of a North Carolina spring, I gather the energy to keep putting down roots. But those roots have come at a small price. Like all things in life.

Abandoning Motherhood

Early March is a challenging time. Each year around this time my soul gets restless. I have a particularly sharp memory from my freshman year of college, looking out a geology lab window onto the pale sunshine and bare trees. I was struck by a forceful need to leave. Go somewhere, anywhere, but not stay stuck there in the stale and dried out remains of my winter term. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to go south to the warmth. I just suddenly needed to feel like I was moving forward in my life- out on the road. I got as far as calling a car rental company and when I found out that I’d have maxed out my rinky-dink credit card limit within two hours, I gave up and sunk back into the torpor of late winter.

This year the restlessness snuck up on me. I almost always attribute it to cabin fever but since we’ve been outside every day and the trees are budding, that is not an acceptable excuse. Instead, I’ve been humming with a nervous energy that’s expressed itself in rearranging the mantelpiece decorations (again) and figuring out how to make curtains for the kitchen without a sewing machine (fabric glue and a good pair of scissors). But with each completed project, instead of a sense of accomplishment would come a desperate feeling of “What’s next?”

So when I caught an article online yesterday about the book Hiroshima in the Morning and the author who apparently “walked away from motherhood”, I was left breathless. I was only able to read a short section of the article (interrupted 11 times by demands to play trains) and then later read the brief excerpt from the intro to her book (interrupted another 6 times to get food and drink for my apparently starving child) but it haunted me all day. I imagine that the mommy websites and chat rooms were lit up last night. I can hear the self-righteous howls of mothers excoriating Reiko Rizzuto for leaving her husband and kids to go to Japan for six months. I can envision female talk show hosts (many of whom probably spend minimal time with their own kids) castigating this woman for her selfish choices. Even the title of the piece was telling- “Abandoning Motherhood”.

After reading the piece, I was left with only a question, would I have made a different choice in her shoes?

I hope it is clear to everyone who knows me how much I love my kids. I adore the puffy, warm, early morning snuggles and sweet puppy breath of our three year old. I revel in the dramatic hugs and movie star kisses I get from my six year old in brash defiance of the kindergarten belief that moms are gross. I adore eavesdropping on them playing together, reading them stories, watching them get excited about pretty much everything including broccoli. I am tremendously proud of who they are becoming and I would commit an act of homicide rather than allow some other woman the honor of mothering them. Equally, I love my husband for a thousand reasons. Foremost among them is his modesty, which prevents me from enumerating here the myriad reasons why I want to grow old with him and no one else.

So what would ever, EVER drive me to make a decision to leave them? Nothing. I hope.

Having only read the briefest of excerpts, I don’t know all of the reasons Reiko Rizzuto “abandoned motherhood”. I’d like to believe that her marriage was broken already, or that she’s somehow entirely self-absorbed or otherwise profoundly dysfunctional. I want to believe that she’s so unlike me that I won’t be able to relate to her or her decisions at all. But I have a feeling that she’s just human. And like all humans, she’s had to make some tough choices.

In trying to understand my intense responses to the article, I realized I had to put mothering in a context in which it made sense that people make different choices about it. Rather than forcing motherhood up onto a precarious pedestal, I needed it to be real. In so many ways, motherhood- indeed parenthood- is a career. There are moments of genuine joy but many aspects are mind-numbingly boring. Like any career, it’s hard to completely leave it behind at the end of the day, and like much the medical profession, people’s lives and mental health depend on your competency.

What is so uniquely hard is that there is so little true time off. Moreover, one can change a regular career without being crucified. Try that with parenthood. The fact is that parenting demands a level of selflessness that I’m not always sure I’m capable of. I need to have time to myself to think and right now, there is precious little. Once the boys are old enough, I will be going back to work full time and so there will be even less. Although I am endlessly awed by my kids, I do not wish to be forced to gaze adoringly at them all day, nor do I wish to have to cater to them like a slave, forever having my needs consumed by theirs. I will say it now: I do not find Playdoh and finger painting intellectually stimulating.

And yet. Abandon it? No.

Perhaps what may have prevented her, and others, from giving up entirely would have been a simple vacation. Just as most jobs allow for time away, parents need to speak up for some time off as well. And embrace it. And not feel guilty about it. Parenting doesn’t have to be all consuming. It’s not an all or nothing deal. I suspect a little honesty and self-awareness goes a long way towards preventing the tragedy of wrecking people’s lives either by having children when you don’t want to or worse, leaving them after they arrive.
So maybe that’s what I need. I need to refocus that restlessness I feel- not to run off to Japan on a fellowship but to be honest that I need a few days break so that I can come home and be better at my job than I was before. Because for me, this is the most important job of my life. And I want to do it well.

A Misspent life no more.

After reading and rejecting the well-worn list of resolutions: yell less, eat more fruit, exercise, communicate better, I happened upon a resolution that I am determined to carry through in 2011. I am going to have a more cluttered home.

Some of you that have known me since childhood are already laughing. I can hear it. You know that I’m the one who comes over and reorganizes YOUR junk drawer; I’m the one that stops in the middle of a conversation to straighten a book on the coffee table. This resolution is going to be impossible to keep.

Others of you who were colleagues of mine when I taught high school are having the opposite reaction. Well, no shit, you’re saying. I saw your desk in your classroom. The one you periodically completely disappeared behind when you sat down. I remember the  piles, you’re saying, the tall Shel Silverstein-esque stacks of paper and post-its and napkins and drawings and essays and half-used calendar pages. How could you NOT keep this resolution?!

Well, yes, I say. All of this might be true. But here’s the thing. This past fall I expended extraordinary amounts of nervous energy obsessively cleaning up and then periodically giving up. I justified it by a variety of sad and transparent excuses: “if I’m not working outside the home at least I can do a good job inside”, “I deserve a serene space at the end of the day”, “this is a grown-up house, it’s time to be grown-ups” and, my all time favorite, “don’t be so damn lazy, just clean up”. Somehow, in the back of my mind, I felt that if I just finally got everything cleaned up all at once, then it would stay cleaned up and then I could get on with important things like life. However, expending all of this energy on cleaning up meant I was NOT spending it on creative or social endeavors. And that was starting to wear on me. Oddly, I kept blaming the messy house rather than blaming the faulty logic. This was not only ridiculous but suspiciously close to insanity. I’m not going down the road to insanity. I refuse.

So to counterbalance this, I would periodically completely give up and the house would rapidly turn into a hovel. I hated this too. It was exhausting. I had to find a balance but I couldn’t. Finally I realized that some of the people I love and admire the most have homes that are cluttered. Not dirty, not “Hoarders” worthy, but you can tell some good living is going on in those spaces. And I feel relaxed, engaged, and alive in their homes. I want that for my home too. I want people to come in and feel as though they can kick back and relax without worrying that they are messing up the throw pillows or that I’m going to be vacuuming under their feet.

My mom recently quoted this line to me: “A clean house is the sign of a misspent life.” How determined I am to embrace this notion. So for this year, bring on the legos, the heaps of shoes, and the crayon bits. Bring on the paint cups, the misplaced socks, the scraps of drawing paper, the matchbox cars, the piles of books, the balls of knitting, the magazines. Bring on life.