Lost and Liking It

When I was 6 years old my family went to Expo 67 in Montreal.  I remember walking over a huge bridge in an enormous crowd of people when I reached up to hold my mother's hand. Grasping her hand, I then looked up at her face -- but it was a stranger's face, and I was holding a stranger's hand. Fear took hold of my entire being as I realized I was lost in a sea of people. I remember the sheer feeling of terror: ALONE IN A GREAT BIG WORLD!

Is this why I hate the idea of being lost to this day?

Except, I think I'm finally getting over it, at age 50, in part, I suppose, because my husband who also served the role of my navigator, is no longer here to take the wheel, read the maps, or guide me along the strange pathways I have to take if I want to keep exploring the world. You see, I love to explore but I've never felt comfortable not knowing just where I am--unless I'm with someone who has greater competence and comfort than me when in strange and unfamiliar places. So what to do when I am the captain of a ship with two children as my passengers and I am committed to showing them, and myself, the world?

Well, first step for me was to get a GPS. I did that a few years ago. And despite the scorn I felt emanating off some of my dearest relations, I knew it would open up passageways for me, ones that would otherwise be blocked by my own fear. Tools! Use them. Everyone doesn't know what you need. GPS saved my scared little travellin' soul. It also allowed me to embark on a 2000 mile road trip with my kids a few years back when my widowhood was new. Liberating. GPS freed me from the irrational fear that I could somehow be lost, and never find my way back.

This year for Spring Break, we headed off on another road trip, same GPS. Me: a little different. At first, just before we left, I felt just slightly down, a little low, a bit sad. Road trips were supposed to be with my husband. Mother, father, two kids. To me, travelling with the hubby and kids is one of the great perks of marriage, especially when your kids become great travel mates who don't wear diapers or go to bed early. So just before we set off, I was feeling a little sorry for my single parent self.

But then, the road beckoned, the GPS (I call her Garmeen) spoke her sweet words to me, Adele sang to us from the CD player as we sang along, and I realized that I don't care nearly as much if I get lost anymore. In fact, I think there may even be a new part of myself yearning to be lost, to not know, to explore a few trails with destinations unknown and untried.

Even my daughter noticed a difference in me when even the GPS kept leading us the wrong way in a city we'd never before visited. "Mom," she said, "You didn't seem to mind this time when we didn't know where we were going. You were laughing and relaxed."

New parts found, old parts lost. I want to go where I've never been.

Help Wanted: Just a LIttle

I am 49 years old yet I had never filled my own car tires with air until today. In fact, I asked my 28 year old niece to accompany me to the gas station before I got on the highway with my kids to go home. I was nervous about my big, bulging back tire and I didn't know how to fill it. I imagined the flat I might get on the road, and how I'd be alone with my kids in the evening on the side of a Chicago highway if it got any worse. She showed me how to do it so that the next time I won't need any help at all. So thanks to her for not making me feel like a big idiot for not knowing how to do something so simple. Something that my husband would have taken care of had he been here.

Something else I don't know how to do? I hate machinery and I have a really hard time pulling the cord that gets the lawnmower started. I also have zero interest in maintaining the lawnmower from year to year, zero interest in shopping for a different kind of lawnmower, and if I never again touch another lawnmower I'll be perfectly happy. I'm in the process of completely eliminating all need of said machinery. Two years ago I took all the grass out of my backyard and replaced it all with low maintenance plants, trees and shrubbery. Front yard grass? Watch out. You're a goner in the next couple of years. Cause get what else I really don't feel like learning how to do? Growing grass in the shade. Just not interested.

I felt a little stupid today watching a bunch of relatives listen to me say that I didn't know how to put air in my tires. But when my niece so kindly offered to help, I looked at my father-in-law and said,

"Well, I do a lot of things all by myself."

Married people get to lean on each other all the time. If you're married (to someone with some degree of competence, initiative, pride, or kindness, not to mention love for you), you can partially eliminate whole categories of activities you have no interest in mastering from plumbing to cooking to planning trips to arranging classes and activities for your children. The social schedule? Your investments? Budgeting? Picking up your own underwear? Playing catch? Finding the leftovers in the fridge? Leave it to your spouse. He or she is good at it anyway. Does Mary need help with her homework. Your turn, babe. I did it last night. Johnny has a soccer game? I'm going out with the girls. Can you do it tonight honey? And, by the way, thanks for putting that chicken on the grill!

When people in a well-functioning marriage lose their spouse, they have to be responsible for so many things all by themselves that they never intended to do all alone, sometimes for years and years. Sometimes for the rest of their lives. Some of those things are very big and profound like dealing with your children's emotional highs and lows,  or guiding and advising them as they grow to adulthood, college selection, planning weddings, or facing frightening health matters or important financial decisions.

Some of the tasks you now have to do on your own are very small like making school lunches, driving your children where they need to go, moving a heavy object, unplugging a toilet, cleaning up a wet basement after a storm, showing up at school or sporting events,

or filling a leaky tire.

When somebody steps up to help with something very small, it's like a vent opening up in a lone self to let out some of the pressure that comes from living life widowed, from living or parenting on your own when you had intended to do it in a pair. This is a long and windy way of saying thank you to my niece for helping me with something small today. Many times small is bigger than you realize.

Wedding Anniversary

I did not mention it aloud

this year.

It was terrifically cold that day.




In our dining room

women played recorders.

Tom juggled.

Alyse had a bad cold.

My parents looked sharp

in their great clothes.

Naomi was pregnant;

so was Shereen,

who organized

some picture taking.

Pat recorded it on video.

Susan chatted, whispered.

Mark observed.

Anna played "Skye Boat Song"

on her new clarinet.

Evan announced time to begin.

A famous Chicago judge

Jewish for my father

declared us married.

The littler ones threw confetti,

Rebecca had a new sister-in-law

married to the identical twin of her husband.



Alan and Linda and Paul were happy

not to know

that in thirteen years

this pair (these pairs)

would be halved.


We spent the next two nights

in a beautiful suite

at The Drake Hotel.

Far below

our warm, elegant room

we watched

little cars, workers,

travel north and south

on snowy Lake Shore Drive.


To the east, reliably so,

great Lake Michigan,

beautiful, huge, dark,

familiar,

unpredictable.

Progress: Measured by a Family Portrait

Over Thanksgiving Weekend, I took my kids and the dog and myself into the city to get a family portrait taken. I wouldn't normally do something like that (kind of not my thing), but I'm not the greatest visual documentarian of our family's existence (that was Ken's job), and the photographer Rick Aguilar was offering the "mini-portrait session" for just $50 so I couldn't resist.

So there we were: the three of us humans.

The three of us. One mother. Two children. Together. Our family. Having our portrait taken. Enjoying ourselves. Laughing. Hugging. Sitting. Standing. Showing it like it is.

A family portrait may be posed, it may be unnatural, and it's absolutely a formal visual document of a point in history of a family's life.

I loved getting that cheesy family portrait taken and I know that three years ago, or two years ago, or one year ago, I was nowhere near ready to admit visually and with a smile on my face: this is what my family looks like now.

I wish more than anything that Ken were still in our family, that we had a mother and father in our portrait, that we had a husband and a wife in the picture. But I am the mother and I am not one of the children of anyone anymore. I haven't been anyone's child since the year 2000. At age 48, I may be a very slow learner, a later developer. But finally, I know it. I can't live in a world made of a wish anymore.

I am single. I am a single mother. This is our family. Nice to meet you.