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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Laying the Groundwork: Having seen all of this, I decided to take a back-seat approach to potty training with both our boys. I was in NO hurry to introduce this level of chaos into my life. With no particular timeframe or agenda in mind, I decided I’d slowly introduce the concept of the toilet without much fanfare. It sat in our kitchen for a few weeks. Every time they’d refuse to get a diaper change, I’d go charging after them, yelling as calmly as I could, “If you want to use the potty, then we don’t have to do these diaper changes anymore!” We would occasionally reference the new piece of furniture in the corner of the room. We’d talk about how they were welcome to check it out. I’d ostentatiously say things like, “Ex-cuse me, my body says it’s time to pee.” And then “Boy, that was so quick and easy!”

Getting down and dirty: After a few weeks of the potty-training boy completely ignoring all my laid-back efforts, I’d decide to step things up. They would be told that every night they would sit on the potty before bathtime, with or mostly without anything happening. But every once in a while, we would accidentally hit a moment when they had to pee and they’d discover what it felt like. Things took off from there. Ian and I decided that we felt bribery was perfectly acceptable and so we’d frequently remind the potty training boy that there were M&Ms waiting if he used the potty. Always, all of this was done with no pressure or expectation. If they said no, the discussion was dropped immediately with just a calm “OK” from the parent involved.

Winning the war: All of this gentle breeze finally wore down the mountain. I really do believe that they will potty train when they are ready. You need to encourage them to check in and see they are ready, but it’s a LOT easier than if you force them to be ready when they are not. As for the bribery piece, it will work itself out. We were willing to fork over candy and stickers and prizes for as long as it took. Finally, the bribery fazed itself out because it seems ridiculous to the child to be rewarded for something as “natural” as using the bathroom. We had to tough out a few months of nighttime wettings and occasional accidents but those were just the mistakes one makes when one is learning a new skill.
Prepare yourselves, read up as much as you can, ask everyone you know for advice and then follow your instincts. Remember that diapers are convenient in a lot of ways so don’t be in too much of a hurry to get your child out of them. It’ll happen. The potty train will come for your kid too and when they get on, watch the hell out for the ride.

During Ian’s first research season in Tanzania, an older researcher told him, “The soul arrives at the speed of a camel.” At the time, I thought the phrase was poetic and quaint- but only apropos to that cosmic disconnect one feels when one is far from home. Now that phrase resonates with painful clarity. While we were packing the car, hustling to the airport and shepherding kids and gear through Logan, then Dulles, then Raleigh, our souls were having a last cup of tea in Foxboro. They were meandering across town to peek in on old friends, ambling slowly down the coast to give final long hugs to family spread here and there, having an extra holiday cookie, perhaps taking a nap.

Meanwhile we wait here. Slowly, our hearts will warm to being home. One morning I will wake up and welcome the sight of the trees outside our window, turn over and feel settled. Our souls will have arrived. But not quite yet. Not yet.

I’m not quite sure how this tradition began. I know that my paternal grandfather told the story to my father and his four sisters. I like to think that he got it from his father and that it was a way to connect to his family after a long day at work. But my mom once suggested that it may have had a more utilitarian function: to calm five overexcited children at the craziest time of year. Either way, the tradition continued with my father and now with me. Our family’s Christmas Story had always had the same basic elements: the Scrivani (now Gilby) children are visited by Timothy the elf on Christmas Eve who takes them to the North Pole via moonbeams to visit Santa and his workshops. The elves are all named after spices (except for the year my cousin famously named the elf dressed in red, “Bloodbath”). The children visit with Santa and then have various adventures in the different workshops. Each night ends with “And tomorrow night we’ll find out what happened next…” and the entire story is supposed to finish on Christmas Eve.

I have only a few clear memories of listening to the Christmas Story but I know we listened with rapt attention each night, snuggled against my father on the family couch. I can still feel his voice resonating through his chest and into my head which lay against it. The room is quiet and warm, the lights are dimmed. I know there must be years when I was too old for it but my siblings were not, however I can’t remember ever a time choosing NOT to listen. The workshops varied from year to year and some years my father was so exhausted from working all day that the adventures took an interesting turn as he struggled to stay awake while telling it. Inexplicably one year (one of the years when my father was a New York City garbage man) we took the freight elevator to the third floor to visit Santa. Another year the story kept involving phrases like “And just as the childfrsn wrmn going to shmfhflrflmns…(snore)” But each year my father cheerfully sat down and began the story anew.

I don’t know quite what it is that so captivates me about this story and this tradition. It’s not like the boys are learning something important about the religious meaning of Christmas. It’s not that they are being reminded of charity and selfless giving. Perhaps it’s just the power of storytelling. That a loquacious 6 year old and a rambunctious 2 year old will sit still and (mostly) silent for half an hour as their mother talks is exciting to me. Or maybe it’s just one more enduring connection to my past. Either way, I hope that of all our family holiday traditions, this story most of all is carried along in my sons’ lives to their children and beyond.